Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:32:24.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An Eighteenth-Century Turkish Intelligence Report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Percy Kemp
Percy Kemp
Affiliation:
College De France
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Man has always sought to acquire information regarding his enemies, rivals, even allies, in order to understand their motivations, predict their actions, and behave according to the best of his own interests. In the Bible, we are told that Yahveh ordered Moses to send spies to the land of Canaan. Sun-Tzu's treatise on war, written five centuries B.C., comprises a chapter on intelligence. Leo VI's Taktika insist upon the importance of intelligence, while the Thousand and One Nights contains numerous accounts of Byzantine intelligence operations. Thanks to his spy-networks, the Mongol ruler Subotaï was well aware of conditions prevailing in Christian Europe. Moctezuma's spies kept him well informed as to the strength and whereabouts of the Spanish invaders. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth l's chancellor, had set up a formidable intelligence service. As Hobbes put it, “spies are no less important to the sovereign than rays of light to the human soul for the discernment of visible objects.”

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , November 1984 , pp. 497 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Numbers 13:2.Google Scholar

2 The Art of War, XIII.Google Scholar

3 Dagron, Gilbert, “Les peuples étrangers dans Ie Stratégikon de Maurice ci les Taktika de Léon VI,” Collège de France Seminar (1981–1982).Google Scholar

4 E.g., the old Byzantine female spy in 'Umar an-Nu'mân's tale.Google Scholar

5 Prawdin, Michael, The Mongol Empire, quoted by Harry Ransom, “Intelligence and Counterintelligence,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica.Google Scholar

6 Todorov, Tzvetan, La conquâte de l'Amérique (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 76.Google Scholar

7 Ransom, Encyclopaedia Britannica.Google Scholar

8 The Citizen, XIII, 6.Google Scholar

9 Todorov, La conquête, p. 78.Google Scholar

10 As quoted by Todorov, La conquête.Google Scholar

11 Todorov, La conquete, p. 75.Google Scholar

12 Top Kapi Saray Library, Bagdad Köşk MS. 288 in 25 fol., ed. and tr. Shaw, Stanford J. under the title of Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth century: the Nizâmnâme-i Misir of Cezzâr Ahmed Pasha (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1964).Google Scholar According to Shaw, the Nizâmnâme was written by Jazzâr Pasha and submitted to the Porte in July 1785, shortly before the Turkish military campaign against the Mamluk Beys of Egypt. In his review of Shaw's work, Uriel Heyd demonstrates, however, and quite conclusively, that the Nizâmnâme must have been written by Jazzâr Pasha and submitted to the Porte in 1768–1769, shortly after Jazzâr had fallen out with his master 'Alī Bey of Egypt, early in September 1768, and fled to Istanbul (see Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1963, p. 188).Google Scholar

13 Heyd, Uriel, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Golkap (1950; rpt. 1979).Google Scholar

14 Shaw, Ottoman Egypt, p. 8.Google Scholar

15 Cf. Michel Foucault's introductory chapter to his Archaeology of Knowledge.Google Scholar

16 Such an evaluation would, in this case, be difficult to make in view of the fact that our knowledge of conditions prevailing in eighteenth-century Egypt is rather sketchy.Google Scholar

17 Nizâmnâme, p. 9 (all references are to Stanford Shaw's edition and translation).Google Scholar

18 Nizâmnâme, p. 12.Google Scholar

19 Nizâmnâme, p. 51.Google Scholar

20 One of the larger cannons used by the Ottomans (cf. Nizâmnâme, p. 10, n. 1).Google Scholar

21 Nizâmnâme, p. 37.Google Scholar

22 Nizâmnâme, p. 23. See also pp. 24, 26, and 34.Google Scholar

23 Nizâmnâme, p. 38.Google Scholar

24 Nizâmnâme, p. 12.Google Scholar

25 Nizâmnâme, p. 13.Google Scholar

26 Nizâmnâme, p. 13.Google Scholar

27 Nizâmnâme, p. 50.Google Scholar

28 Nizâmnâme, p. 13.Google Scholar

29 Nizâmnâme, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

30 Nizâmnâme, p. 10.Google Scholar

31 Nizâmnâme, p. 14.Google Scholar

32 Nizâmnâme, p. 51.Google Scholar

33 Nizâmnâme, p. 13.Google Scholar

34 Nizâmnâme, pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

35 An evaluative study of the fiscal and socio-economic data put forward by the Nizâmnâme lies beyond the limited scope of the present work. Short of such a study, a simple enumeration of the said data seems superfluous.Google Scholar

36 See quote from Heyd, p. 499 this article.Google Scholar

37 For a corpus relating to eighteenth-century Egypt, see Holt, P., ed., Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968),Google Scholar and Raymond, A., Artisans et comfierçants au Caire au XVIIIe siécle. vol. I (Damascus: Institut Francais de Damas, 1973).Google Scholar