Crusade or cooperation? Savary de Brèves’s treatises on the Ottoman Empire

Oddy, Niall (2019). Crusade or cooperation? Savary de Brèves’s treatises on the Ottoman Empire. The Seventeenth Century, 34(2) pp. 143–157.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2018.1469428

Abstract

This article examines two treatises by François Savary de Brèves, French ambassador to Constantinople (1589-1605) and to the Holy See (1608-14), one promoting a crusade against the Ottoman Empire and the other championing the Franco-Ottoman alliance. By closely reading these ostensibly paradoxical texts, which were published in the same volume, I argue that de Brèves’s true intent was to advocate cooperation between France and the Ottoman Empire as a long-term foreign policy objective. This article draws attention to the significant roles played in the political, diplomatic and intellectual worlds of early-seventeenth-century France by Savary de Brèves, a largely forgotten figure. It highlights the ambivalent image of the Ottomans in early modern Europe and contributes to recent scholarship on the interactions between the Islamic East and Christian West.

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