Liberalism, the Enlightenment, and other Turkish imports
Seeking the common ancestor of Ottomanism and Westernism.
In 1605, an Englishman named Lewis Pickering was convicted of writing a satirical poem about the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Star Chamber ruled that criticism of the church was criticism of the state, and that such criticism was generally illegal, no matter whether the criticism was true. It wasn’t a capital offense, but you might lose your freedom or your ears. This concept of “seditious or blasphemous libel” was, of course, itself illegal to criticize.
So in 1609, when William Biddulph published a book about his travels to the East, he was very careful. He prefaced it with a long disclaimer about how he was only describing other countries to show how great England was by comparison.
And who knoweth what good may redound unto others, by reading of this discourse of other Countries? For hereby all men may see how God hath blessed our Country above others, and be stirred up to thankfulness.
Hereby subjects may learn to love, honor, and obey their good and gracious King, when they shall read of the tyrannous government of other Countries, and of the merciful government of theirs.
And so on. He closes the book similarly:
This misery abroad will make us love our own Country the better when we come thither. And that is the best lesson which I have learned in my travels, Mundi contemptum, that is, The contempt of the world.
By this device did Biddulph keep his book unburnt and his ears attached. The beginning and the end were entirely free of sedition. It was a bit in the middle that helped spark a revolution.
The Business of the Turks
Biddulph’s travels were in his official capacity as a clergyman. The Levant Company, which the crown had granted an exclusive charter to trade with the Ottoman Empire, employed chaplains in their branch offices at Constantinople1 (the political capital) and Aleppo (the nexus of trade). Biddulph was assigned to Aleppo, but spent some time in both.
Contrary to his book’s supposed purpose, the section on Constantinople is full of praise for various Ottoman innovations. The Turks, he writes, are obsessed with this drink they call coffa, “a black kind of drink made of a kind of Pulse like Peas, called Coava; which being ground in the mill, and boiled in water, they drink it as hot as they can suffer it.” This strange drink improves digestion, he says, and “driveth away drowsiness.” “Coffa houses” are a great place to very slowly drink one cup while chatting. He’s also a fan of the cool, sweet drink they call sherbet, and of their filtered water…although tragically, it seems like both took a while to actually make it to England.
The high level of innovation in nonalcoholic drinks is probably due to Islam, which forbids alcohol. Islam had also led to another innovation, even dearer to Biddulph’s heart: freedom of religion. So long as he didn’t preach against Islam, just for Christianity, he and his flock were legally protected. According to Islamic doctrine, he accurately reports, Christians and Jews are considered righteous. Dhimmi laws, as well as the more uniquely Ottoman millet system, granted them autonomy and special privileges (and a special tax, just for them.)
Of course, Biddulph is very emphatically not comparing this system favorably with his homeland’s. No, it’s those other Christian countries who could learn a thing or two.
And herein I hold it better for Merchants and other Christians to sojourn and to use trade and traffic amongst Turks then Papists; for, the Turk giveth liberty of conscience to all men, and liketh well of every man that is forward and zealous in his own religion. But among the Papists no man can buy and sell, unless he bear the marks of the beast as S. John foretold, Revelation 13. 17.
That’s definitely not talking about England. England hadn’t been Papist for like fifty years. Sure, a lot of their anti-blasphemy laws date from the Catholic Queen Mary, but we’re not talking about that, no sir.
It was legal to criticize English culture, though, so he openly contrasts Muslim tolerance with English factionalism.
In Aleppo as I have walked in the streets, both Turks, and Moors, and other Nations, would very reverently salute me after the manner of their Country: yea their very soldiers, as I have walked in the fields, with many other of our Nation, without a Janissary to guard us, though they have been many hundreds together, yet have they not offered either me or any of my company wrong.
Yea in all my ten year’s travels, I never received, neither was offered wrong by any Nation but mine own Countrymen, and by them chiefly whom it chiefly concerned to protect me from wrongs…
The Ottomans take this tolerance a bit too far, says Biddulph, even extending it to the greedy, child-sacrificing Jews and the shiftless, thieving Bedouins. But overall it’s a strength, not a weakness: he calls it one of the “four bulwarks” of Muslim Empire. By providing clearly-defined rules for how to treat minorities, they were able to attract international trade while maintaining a distinct cultural identity.
Two Subversive Imports
These stories from Biddulph (and a handful of other travelers) had two major destabilizing effects on the power of crown and church. One of them was the introduction of coffee houses, which spread rapidly through the cities the way coffee houses do. Coffee houses, like taverns and pubs, were egalitarian spaces allowing people from different walks of life to socialize. Unlike in taverns and pubs, patrons got more lucid the longer they spent there, meaning they could talk science, trade, and politics. Historians often draw a straight line from coffee to the Enlightenment and the rise of the bourgeoisie.
And then, of course, there’s that weird “freedom of religion” thing the Ottomans had going on. It was demonstrably working for them. They’d ruled for hundreds of years and would rule for hundreds more. So why was the Star Chamber so scared of a little irreverent poetry?
It didn’t take long for someone to articulate the subtext. In 1614, Leonard Busher, a brave man of whom little is known, became the first recorded Englishman to openly call for religious freedom in print. He seems to have gotten away with it, perhaps in part because he described his book as a reprint of a formal petition made to King James and Parliament. That made it government business over approved channels, and therefore arguably exempt from sedition laws. Still, he was taking a terrible risk.
Busher leans heavily on the Ottomans.
I read that a Bishop of Rome would have constrained a Turkish Emperor to the Christian faith, unto whom the Emperor answered, I believe that Christ was an excellent Prophet, but he did never (so far as I understand) command that men should with the power of weapons be constrained to believe his law; and verily, I also do force no man to believe Mahomets law. Also I read that Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople, and yet are peaceable, though so contrary the one to the other. If this be so, how much more ought Christians not to force one another to Religion? And how much more ought Christians to tolerate Christians, when as the Turks do tolerate them? Shall we be less merciful than the Turks? Or shall we learn the Turks to persecute Christians?
There’s a lot of debate over how to mark the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. Starting points range from Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” in 1637 to the beginning of the fall of the French monarchy with the death of Louis XIV in 1715. I think it’d be reasonable to say it starts right here. Busher articulates a key insight, one that made a powerful impression on, among others, King James himself: we should seek truth only using systems that are predisposed to find it. You could convert people to anything by the sword. You could enshrine any ideology through censorship. Since most of the world is wrong, these methods will tend more to promote the wrong than the right.
It is not only unmerciful, but unnatural and abominable, yea, monstrous for one Christian to vex and destroy another for difference and questions of Religion, and though tares have overgrown the wheat, yet Christ will have them let alone till harvest; lest while you go about to pluck up the tares, you pluck up also the wheat with them, as your predecessors have done, who thought they had gathered up the tares and burned them; but you see now that they have burned the wheat instead of tares.
That’s the golden rule of intellectual liberalism, right there. Look at other countries, and at our own past, where oppressive systems prevent the spread of what we now know to be true. Now, ask yourself, what are the odds that I’m the only exception?
He also, more or less in passing, gives the golden rule of economic liberalism.
Because thereby great benefit and commodity will redound both to your Majesty and to all your subjects within your Highness’s dominions by the great commerce, in trade and traffic both of Jews and all people, which now for want of liberty of conscience, are forced and driven elsewhere: and also from the revenues and livings which we and our Clergy do possess, and from the Courts and offices we hold and keep great profit and commodity will redound, both to your Highness, and to all your kingdoms; we say, more profit and commodity than we or any man is able to express.
Just get out of people’s way. Welcome immigrants, don’t interfere with trade, don’t purge people from government positions over thoughtcrime, and you will become richer than anyone can imagine.
We generally call John Locke, who was not yet born, the father of liberalism. Busher anticipates some of his most important work here. In Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, he has paragraphs that read like they were copied from Busher’s petition, translated into Latin, then translated back into English. Which might be close to what happened.
That the thing may be made clearer by an example, let us suppose two churches—the one of Arminians, the other of Calvinists—residing in the city of Constantinople. Will anyone say that either of these churches has right to deprive the members of the other of their estates and liberty (as we see practised elsewhere) because of their differing from it in some doctrines and ceremonies, whilst the Turks, in the meanwhile, silently stand by and laugh to see with what inhuman cruelty Christians thus rage against Christians? But if one of these churches hath this power of treating the other ill, I ask which of them it is to whom that power belongs, and by what right? It will be answered, undoubtedly, that it is the orthodox church which has the right of authority over the erroneous or heretical. This is, in great and specious words, to say just nothing at all. For every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical. For whatsoever any church believes, it believes to be true and the contrary unto those things it pronounce; to be error. So that the controversy between these churches about the truth of their doctrines and the purity of their worship is on both sides equal; nor is there any judge, either at Constantinople or elsewhere upon earth, by whose sentence it can be determined.
Locke didn’t just have Busher’s word on Turkish tolerance. He studied under Edward Pococke at Oxford. Pococke, too, had once been the Levant Company chaplain assigned to Aleppo.
For more on the Ottoman Empire, check out
and his blog and book recommendations.Outlandish Claims
I’ve never explained the title of my blog, other than on the about page, and nobody reads those. It’s motivated by the evolution of the word “outlandish,” which used to simply mean “foreign,” and a little bit by the evolution of the word “claim,” which once could refer to the boundaries of the land you claimed as your own. An “outlandish claim” is therefore a little bit of territory in one place, claimed by another.
Outlandish claims are ridiculously powerful. True to the modern use of the phrase, they often sound fake. The Turks have a magical drink that makes you smarter, they serve cold treats in the middle of the desert, and their water somehow tastes better and weighs less than ours. Get real.
That’s where to go when you’re looking for world-changing ideas. Foreign empires. The weird people from one discipline trying to colonize another. Old and forgotten concepts, reimagined. The alien memes hardy enough to make the leap might just be hardy enough to take over.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of this truism, every so often, because we rarely bother to record the pedigree of an idea in any detail. The founders of Starbucks didn’t need to know a thing about Constantinople. If the founders of the United States knew their ideas were inspired by dhimmi and millet, they prudently kept it to themselves. But they probably didn’t know.
Today, with a world at once more fragmented and more interconnected than ever before, these riches are everywhere. Let in the strange, and claim your inheritance.
The English stubbornly insisted on calling the city “Constantinople” even though the new management had rebranded it.