Ottoman History Podcast - Spies of the Sultan

Episode Date: September 25, 2017

Episode 334 with Emrah Safa Gürkan hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Along with new maritime networks, information stiched together the empires of the early modern period. One component of the growing networks of information in the increasingly connected space of the Mediterranean world was espionage. As we learn in our latest conversation with Emrah Safa Gürkan about his new book Sultanın Casusları (Spies of the Sultan), the Ottoman Empire was both party and subject to the fascinating exploits of early modern spies. In this episode, we learn about the lives of Ottoman spies profiled in Gürkan's book, and we consider how the transformation of espionage in the Mediterranean relates to the development of early modern empires. « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. Today we're welcoming back onto the program a special guest, Emre Safa Gürkan. Emre, welcome back. Hi, Chris. Emre Safa Gürkan is Associate Professor or Doent Doctor at Yirmi Dokuzmağız University, May 29th University in Istanbul, where he has a position in the Political Science and International Studies Department. Perhaps more importantly for our audience, he is also one of the original creators of this podcast. years that we've been in business now will recognize his voice for many episodes about subjects such as corsairs and pirates in the mediterranean renegades people going across the muslim christian divide and various other subjects as well as many interviews he conducted both in english and in turkish and one in spanish actually and one yes that didn't get and who could forget

the one episode we did in spanish with osuirre de Mandujano and all the various moments that Emre has enjoyed on the podcast. He is now emeritus, a less frequent guest than he used to be. So we're very excited to have him on to talk about a new book that he's published. The title in Turkish is Sultanın Yasusları, The Spies of the Sultan. And this episode is for the English speaking audience out there that won't have the chance to read this really fine and detailed archival work in Turkish. And indeed, what we'll be talking about in this episode is the subject of spies and espionage in the Mediterranean during the early modern period with a focus on the Ottoman Empire. Now, this Turkish

book, which has just come out from Kronik Kitap in Turkey, is actually based on a section of your dissertation that was published in English, finished at Georgetown University in 2012. In 2012, and hopefully to be published, to be transformed into a book very soon, if I can actually get that done in the future. There's only one part of it,

so it was about espionage in general with a focus on Ottoman, three examples, the Ottomans, the Venetians, and the Habsburgs who at that time ruled Italy, Spain, the Benelux countries and part of Austria. So these two big empires and Venice. So it was just a general thing, but for a Turkish audience, I thought if I'm going to write something in Turkish, it should have been stuff that I would not be able to include in an English book. So that's why I just get that one chapter out of it and made it a 300 page book.

That's what it is, basically. Right. In sort of our overtime conversation that you'll find only on our website, ademhistorypodcast.com, we'll talk to Emre about the nitty gritty of sort of expanding that piece of the dissertation into a book and specifically in writing it for a Turkish language audience. And indeed, Sultanın Cüsüsleri or Spies of the Sultan is sort of like one of the only major works we have on espionage in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period at this time. Yeah, it is true. I mean, it is strange for such an interesting subject. I mean, it is strange for such an interesting subject. Nothing had ever been written on the subject,

neither by the Ottomans here in Turkey nor anybody else abroad who actually had the chance to see other archives. Nobody had written anything else. Yeah, it is fascinating. After reading the book, I realized just how important and central espionage was to certain aspects of politics in the early modern Mediterranean. And perhaps there are various reasons why maybe the topic hadn't been broached, either because the sources require a special approach, or there might be an assumption that sources are difficult to find by virtue of the fact that espionage is secret. But also, I think that historians of the

present, and certainly broad readership of the present, may have certain preconceptions about what espionage really is that sort of shape how we address the topic. And maybe that's where we can start our conversation. Because I think, you know, the image of modern espionage that comes out of popular fiction and film is certainly an exciting one, very much in the vein of James Bond. But in your book, the picture we get is a little bit different. We certainly have various intrigues and familiar spy-like situations. Well, my book is like, if you go with the film metaphors, it's not like Godfather, it's like Sopranos. We have to demystify the perfection.

If you really think of an organization or the methods based on people who never makes mistakes everything goes smooth we eventually fall to uh the trap of uh teleology or trap of right conspiracy theories but when you look at the 16th century it's definitely even if you really look at the serious studies of the 19th or 20th century uh espionage in the first or second world you'll see a lot of mistakes are made. Generally, agents are clumsy people. The organization lacks any coherence or it's not a world in which everything goes perfectly smooth.

It's like, you know, like in a Mission Impossible or James Bond type of situation. I wish it was. I wish it were because it would have been much more interesting to study. But what I did want to aim with this book is to demystify this image of a perfect spy. Right, and so part of this demystification is, as you said, showing the spies to be human and fallible, not super spies, so to speak, but very much regular historical actors acting in a particular context,

bringing out that messiness of the process. But also to highlight that rarely was espionage in the early modern Mediterranean carried out by quote-unquote professional spies in the sense of people trained solely for the job of espionage for whom that's like basically the only thing they do one thing most people don't understand even some historians of the modern period is that when you talk about early modern medieval ages you talk about early modern or medieval ages, you talk about certain concepts within brackets like capital,

state. Professional is one of them. And professional is really rare to find. Prime ministers are not professionals. Most bureaucrats are not professionals. We're talking about a household. We're talking about a state in the making. So if you go to medieval era and you go to a sultan or a king, you'll see there are few

professionals around right around this ruler in the 16th century we have the first steps of professionals but they're few in number and not definitely in espionage so this is a century if you go to 14th century you will find no professions at all 16th century there are certain efforts in the path of professionalization or standardization they will eventually fail and we will have to wait until the first world war to see a professionalized caterer of spies in the Ottoman Empire anywhere in the world anywhere in the world even for professional diplomats you'll have to wait the end of the 19th century okay maybe in the late 18th century or the early 19th century you have stuff but

really for a diplomat school for stuff like that you will have to wait yeah these are these are these come only very late and even then we have we have to leave a lot of room for improvement a lot of room for rookie mistakes and you you will see in the 16th century people people, most spies are chosen. The basic characteristics of a spy is basically his untrustability, unreliability. They talk too much. They lie too much. They're often caught. And they have no training. I mean, even soldiers most of the time have no training.

One of the big things that the Ottomans managed was to train a couple of thousand soldiers in a central army, which are the genocides or the kapokul, not bigger than the genocides, at most 10,000 people. And that was a big achievement, the biggest achievement. So we wouldn't expect them

to create some sort of spy school. Obviously, within the military, there are people who are specialized in reconnaissance missions or exploring certain areas. but most of the time what you require in a spa is a certain cv that comes with life like you have to be born on the other side of the frontier you have to have the necessary linguistic or cultural skills that will

allow you to operate on the other side of the frontier just because you're born on that side or you have your family around or you have traveled too much or just because you're a merchant or you're a pilgrim or you're a soldier of fortune or you're a corsair. And the state will not give you money to go study those things or to learn those things. You have to do it on your own way. I mean, you've pointed to something that we've talked about in many of our conversations in the podcast, which is that during the early modern period, you kind of have to disaggregate the Ottoman state itself. And that sort of the fiction of a monolithic totality, an entity called the state during the Ottoman period is part of the problem. So once we've turned the state on its head and looked at the households and competing interests that exist within the state, then spies, these kind of liminal figures, offer a natural window for exploring it further. Even today, there are rivalries between the institutions.

And most of the time, we have these spy scandals because institutions from the same camp expose each other. So they're rivaling institutions. If you look at the history of the French Secret Service, you'll see some of them are close to left some of them close to right so sometimes they expose each other in order to as a part of this institutional rivalry so similar rivalry exists even between the pashas or the different interest groups that use their own espionage network it was totally fine i mean even today it happens i mean yeah thank god it doesn't happen in the united states or turkey at all but it does unfortunately happen some other countries throughout the world yes so let's move into our discussion a little further before we talk about the spies let's set

the political stage of the early modern mediterranean we know the ottomans are big players but for our audience who is mainly focused on the ottoman empire in the modern middle east who are some of the other major players that the Ottomans are engaged with? We have the Ottoman Empire, so basically controlling the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the Balkans. We have on the other side a conglomeration of different kingdoms under one dynasty, which we call the Habsburgs, and most Ottomans think that the Habsburgs own only Austria.

No, they also own the major branch also on Spain, all the possessions of Spainain in america and later portugal after 1580 and also italy and most parts of italy some parts in france belgium netherlands so this is a huge conglomeration of feudal enclaves kingdom duchies that came together in one hand as the charles v and later his son philip ii So while these two empires were in rivalry, we have another really important power, a small merchant republic called Venice, who as a city in itself was a center of information because they have all these trade relations

with especially the Levant, all these different portions of the Eastern Mediterranean. So we have France allied with the Ottomans, we have the Safavids, and we have this imperial rivalry that made all these central governments, basically Madrid or Naples or Istanbul, invest so much money in an emerging craft of espionage

at a time when information becomes a commodity for not only central government but also for the tourists. Because it's an age in which we have the printing press developing. We have the handwritten newspapers, before the newspapers, which we have the printing press developing we have the handwritten newspapers before the newspapers which we call a vizit it's like four sheet handwritten newspapers that the scribes used to produce and distribute and we have all these intensification of trade or communication systems and epistolary networks people start writing so we have a high demand on the side of the state and also on the side of civilians for fresh information and we have a lot of a number of scoundrels who wanted to sell information

whatever information they fabricated they laid their hands on in order to make money i would have been one of them if i lived in the 19th century would have would have loved to get all this money by basically writing a couple of letters and just you know putting them in in style for basic stuff yeah well i can imagine you'd be good at it though we're very happy to have you within the ranks of the historians so i just want to recap what you said you you mentioned imperial rivalry and of course the imperial rivalry talking about is the ottomans and the habsburgs but then within the mediterranean within the haburg realm, you actually have a number of centers of political power that are each sort of separate nodes in these espionage networks, as I understand it.

Yeah. Within the Ottoman Empire, which encompasses the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean during this time, are there also different centers, different nodes of espionage with competing interests? Or does the Ottoman state operate... No, it's not united at all. First of all, for pragmatic reasons, you have espionage in the frontier and espionage in the center. And espionage in the frontier will ask for war more than the center.

That's obvious. Nobody will write you from Buddha, say everything is peaceful down there because people in the Buddha would want fight. But even more importantly, there are different pashas with different agendas so when they brought their own information on the in front of the divan they most of the time manipulate and there's a good story on which i wrote a separate article called fooling the sultan but also it's

in the book in which we see a number of corsairs headed by uluç ali who were brought here from algiers okay and who were given pause in the imperial navy and the arsenal when they wanted to reignite a war between the madrid and naples on the one hand and istanbul on the other in order to make the sultan send out a huge fleet the sultan rejects saying look we got a war going on since 1577 in the iran front with the suffrage so we don't have enough money to spend on the navy this means all these corsairs will have will be reduced to 20 30 galleys here and what they could do was to transport shipment to the eastern front from the splat sea nobody's interested in that because if you go to mediterranean you will have too much too go to Mediterranean, you will have too much,

too many ships, which means you will have too much positions for yourself and also for your slaves. And mind you, the leader of this quote-unquote Mediterranean faction had 3,000 slaves. So you have to feed them. But if there's a war, if there's a huge fleet,

then you would, 600 of them, according to the document that I had found, 600 of them would be incorporated into the state. So they would be given money and that money would go to him. So everybody has something at stake. So these are the hawks of the Ottoman Empire. So what they do is to fabricate information. So they all provide fake intelligence in order to provoke the sultan to fight the Habsburgs.

So they are exaggerating the military preparations in Barcelona, Naples, and stuff like that. When this was not enough, they even produced a mise-en-scene, a theatrical act, in order to fool the Ottomans. In one day, in one of these inspections, there's this Greek priest showing up and crying, you know, with cries in his eyes and saying a story in which he was attacked with other Turks by the Maltese corsairs somewhere in the Aegean coast. So everybody got enslaved. And the Maltese corsairs, who are basically the nemesis of the Ottoman corsairs,

asked about Uluç Ali, the Kabudan-ı Derya, the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman Empire. And when they learned he's at Black Sea carrying victuals for the army, and they laughed and they liked it so much. And they said, we're going to have too much spoils now that Uluç Ali is out of the picture. And then the story goes on. The Greek priest runs away, comes to the Tarsana and cries and laments the situation.

And Uluç Ali acts really cool dismisses him but his man takes him to after this mise en scene after this jet jet wreck act is over they took him to uh the grand vizier and the grand vizier listens to the same story in which the grand you know his decision not to open a Mediterranean front is basically criticized severely so they put him in the falaka they just beat the guy and he confessed he has never been on a galley he was paid

by the Ottoman Grand Admiral to create such a story so that in order to create a scandal that would push the other viziers into spending money into declaring war against the Habsburgs and this comes at a time when the Ottomans and the Habsburgs were And this comes at a time when the Aramis and the Habsburgs were negotiating a ceasefire that would end the six-decade-old war

between these two empires. And when this became known publicly, nobody did anything to Uluç Ali, not even reprimand him. What they did was to promise a large fleet for the next year, sultan personally so what we get from this story is that one such things are very yeah acceptable in the game of politics right second proxy conflicts second if you invite corsairs if you just promise them and it is

responsible to find them somewhere to attack yeah establishment accepts the fact that these guys come from algiers where they they were getting so much booty and so much plunder from attacking the so much booty so much plunder yes that's yeah so much so we can put that on a loop with a with a beat for like the music of this podcast anyway so much so much plunder from attacking the western corsair west western coast so you invite them to stumble and you don't find you can't find any spoils or like any jobs or any opportunity

because 20 years later another Grand Vizier will complain about the situation that we cannot get Corsairs back to Istanbul because now they won't want to come

20 years later because having realized in Alger they can make much more money. So you see stuff like that in which they produce false witnesses, false information, philosophical scenes, shows us that we do not talk about one state and a state interest

that the political scientists like so much, talking about unitary state. And there's a lot of discussion for the 21st century in today's historiography about whether states are unitary and the realism school of thought actually defend that. It's a kind of a BS when it comes to the 16th century Ottoman Empire. Yeah, and we see two dynamics there. We see on one hand something that might be found in other studies of borderlands across time, which is that local actors, while often we think of local communities as victims sort of borderland conflict between different states. You also see them as actors participating in some of the intrigues that could even fuel or escalate conflicts.

But on the other hand, we see those people also being deployed as proxies, so to speak, for internal political conflicts within the empire by different major figures who have their own interests uh so it's really a complex picture of how everything comes together about patronage like so-called never wanted to fight the venetians okay and when he wanted what he wanted was to fight in the croatian front because all the so-called clan had power you know had people there but a cyprus expedition he would gain nothing but his rivals would be the commander in chief so he didn't want that war and if the water war is inevitable at least it could have been in the part where his own creatures his own yeah party members so to speak had something to gain from it so the same thing with the mediterranean faction or the corsairs they want a war in the mediterranean they they can't care less if Tebris fell because they won't have

nothing to gain from it and that's why the information you have to provide should be exactly along these lines so the Hoffsburgs

are preparing too much and there's a military build up somewhere weapons of mass destruction yeah exactly like that actually

if you're an oil guy you want war not in Kosovo, but in Iraq. You don't make a big fuss about North Korea, but that might be your biggest problem. Well, so another thing that one notices here is that, of course, we know that during the early modern period, as you've pointed out even today, the lines between diplomacy, espionage, trade, piracy, corso, the activity of corsairs, which is another issue, privateering, these boundaries are blurred. And I guess certainly the practice of espionage in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period

falls short of being properly institutionalized, although we do see early modern states working and trying to have more coordinated efforts uh at espionage so uh what do you make of this dynamic to summarize first 16th century the central governments are embryonic from the patrimony from the household from the fans and crowd or whatever you say entourage of a guy with a sword, it is turning into a state. Not in the Weberian sense, slowly, okay? Yeah. Mind you, the guy who circumcised the sultan later became a grand vizier.

Can you think of that now? This is, the household of the sultan and the state are that much, okay? Yeah. And all these, you know, big important nobles, we have Leve, K much okay yeah and all these you know big important nobles uh we have leve couche and all the daily needs of louis the 14th were taken care of by these ministers around him i mean by these big nobles not ministers you see the the person of the king or the sultan okay are still the state yeah so But there are certain professional bureaucratization. This is what is important.

The embryonic state comes into play. And espionage might be a little bit of a part of that. More in certain states, such as Venice, which was a republic in which you have a high level of institutionalization

because you don't have a ruler, you don't have a household. And Madrid tries certain institutions because they had to, because they are a conglomerate of different legal entities which we call the kings and duchies the Ottomans didn't have to do that much

so it doesn't mean that the Ottomans didn't have a system they had a system but they just didn't put them under one institution which left us a paper trail from which we can study those things and that is why

we had to wait until 2017 or 2012 for a book that writes something a little bit analytical about

the Ottoman espionage because if you go to the archives before the 19th century you will find very few and in Spain you will find

next to nothing about details of the Ottoman espionage you will see okay there's a spy and and information came and won. And it's part of a larger ledger of the decisions taken in the Dima. So it's indirectly recorded that there is certain... So most of the few articles that was written,

only with the exception of Gabor Agostin's article, and he was my advisor, so he actually was the guy who started all this but then you know passed the buck on to me all the articles

used to say the Ottomans sent the conclusion was the Ottomans used spies like this is I mean you don't need

this is truism you don't need to say that obviously an empire 6th century all used spies there is no I mean there is no rocket science

obviously but the more interesting point in your opinion is that the spy networks were by by design diffuse much like power was diffused and just because it was diffused doesn't mean it wasn't effective for the goals of those involved i can say i can make the same statement for diplomacy as well just because the other didn't have permanent ambassadors abroad doesn't make them less efficient in diplomacy

this crazy obsession with institutionalization can have merit for 19th and 20th century but it's teleological nobody in the

16th century said oh look this thing is oral or this thing is not written so we will okay there is

this other system that is all institutionalized so it's more efficient this is not the case and will okay there is this other system that is all institutionalized so it's more efficient this is not the case and I have and I can say the Ottoman espionage

can be proven to be more efficient than at least the Spanish espionage for many other reasons the institutionalization can give you advantage but that was

one of the one of the one of the things that you will look at when you look at efficiency something that is really hard to understand by the way there is this look at when you look at efficiency. Something that is really hard to understand, by the way. There is this argument in intelligence studies

that efficiency in intelligence is really hard to... Sometimes you get right intelligence, but you don't act upon it, just like the French in the Second World War. They got all the information, the right information about the Nazis. They just didn't take it into account. And sometimes you get the wrong intelligence, but last minute something changes. They just didn't take it into account. And sometimes you get the wrong intelligence, but last minute something changes.

Sometimes it's impossible for you to know. And most of the time, you don't have enough paper trail to evaluate that. But what we can say, and what I tried to, let's say, what I tried to do was to try to understand how fast information traveled into the Ottoman Empire. And we had other numbers for Venice. And my conclusion was that, one, the Ottomans got wind of the recent developments in Europe

and in the Mediterranean in a timely manner when compared to Venice. Second, all the contemporaries think and speak very highly of the Ottoman espionage. And third, I have put together some really interesting spy stories that should have explained to us how complex these operations can be. And most of the time, when you concentrate on the spy, you talk of the spy, not the Secret Service,

because they most of the time work more than one or two. It was one of the big surprises that never happened because they most of the time work more than one or two it was one of the big surprises that never happened to me with the corsairs because of course it doesn't work for five states it's not possible yeah but let's say you memorize and it's become they become your friends i mean i know over 100 spies in person their families and stuff like that i don't like they're like people i know i used to put my name they're like characters in your life no my facebook friends pictures on them so that every spy has somebody attached to attached to uh you know to visualize better

most of them appear over and over again like when i went to venice yeah after smankas spain oh there was three four key guys apparently if they pass from venice they make different offers or sabotage projects or uh different uh or suicides they offer the services of their own information or they go to you go to genoa you see the same guy you go to florence you see the you you see the same guy i haven't gone but if you go to Vienna, probably you'll see the same guy, if he ever passes, even remotely from that. So they're like rock stars. Wherever they go, they leave a trail of scandals

and all these crazy projects that the central governments in the 6th century were so eager to spend money on. And we're going eager to spend money on and we're going to hear more details about some of these spies that emma knows oh so well uh right after our music break before we take that break i want to ask real quick emma you're talking about a lot of guys uh what was the role of women in espionage was there a place for women to oh yeah transmit uh secret information and this kind of stuff it seems like

that would be the case yep yep yep they're important but they're not like i mean the lack of mobility kind of precludes them from being like spies in action but they can be great informants right in a very genderly segregated world they can still put middlemen in order to i mean they're easily bought with clothes and stuff like that extremely i mean i don't want to play into the yeah but most of the time yes do you have example like that yeah safia sultan always sold information for a piece of cloth but the cloth was the most important thing around that time not not like did not like the sweater you're wearing i mean the silk clothes and stuff like that that was the way you accumulate wealth i mean it's not like you get jewelry or like a

you know valentine's day present and you start talking it's just that was the thing that you get in if because you can have a you can open a bank account right if you have money you need some commodity okay so clot was one of them but most of the time yes they send them rich clothes or presents or stuff especially the ambassadors and in exchange they got information information so you have even a one unprecedented one-on-one conversation you cannot see an ottoman high high class ottoman lady christian or muslim let alone anybody from the palace. When the Domenico, the Jewish doctor, had to treat as a patient the wife of Rustem, the best they could do is to show just one centimeter square of her skin

so that he could get a pulse. And when the Grand Vizier Holt heard about that, he was very upset. So in a world that much segregated between the genders right one of the bylaws the Venetian ambassador

had a one-on-one conversation behind the curtain right with an Ottoman sultana and took information

from him so that's really I don't want to obviously maybe for the for normal reader who believes that Mimar Sinan was in love with Mihrimah Sultan or who watch these TV shows,

it's not that interesting. But for somebody who knows the 16th century society, Christian or Muslim, they're extremely veiled. You can see them, especially if they belong to higher society. And this hidden christian diplomat actually managed to have one-on-one conversation even though not so social but still yeah and i

mean this is something that actually came out from sort of a different angle in our conversation with nina aragon about the sonic environment of the palace and how women even when they were not seen because they were in a different room or were not necessarily parties in conversations, could hear and even sometimes speak from behind the various barriers that were there and indeed contribute to decision making and all of that and meetings that are going on in the palace. It's interesting the way you described it through this gender segregated lens. We can see how merchants would be effective conveyors and indeed purveyors of information

in the sort of maritime Mediterranean arena. But just the same, if you want access to information behind the walls of the household, of course, getting in contact with a prominent woman in the palace. And some are Venetian. You know, maybe your neighbor from Venice.

Or in the case of the Maghrib. They fit the description of those who crossed the boundaries. Some of them are Christian. In the case of Maghrib, all these sultanas, they are doing secret depraxing Christianity. I mean, treating some of these religious priests who fell into captivity in Algiers,

they treat them so well because they're still Christians and they're forced to convert to Islam. Not in Istanbul, but it is also a possibility. Okay, so these guys

still believe because, you know, as women, they are, by marriage, forced to convert. They didn't choose that.

Sometimes they can, but in those cases, so they may still have sympathy for their lost religion, forsaken religion. Right. It plays the stereotypes about spies with their dual

loyalties and competing loyalties, but nonetheless, as you've said, having a foot on the other side of the boundary, whatever that boundary may be, is really critical to the conducting of espionage. Loyalty is also a very tricky concept. Where do you get your loyalty?

From school, okay? You get the loyalty from the media. You learn that you're Turk or you're American. From all these media, in plural, school is a medium, and media are different mediums, that we didn't have in the 16th century right so you have the household a mosque yeah unless you got a mosque i mean you know about dean and devlet and

stuff like that but it's not like i mean it's not like you you see the flag and cry and or this is pre-nationalist era so you have to be pushing the pushing the brakes when you talk about any concept that makes sense yeah that's something we've talked about in some of our other a nationalist era so you have to be pushing pushing the brakes when you talk about any concept that makes sense yeah that's something we've talked about in some of our other conversations how this is the one thing that every early modernist and medievalist talk over and over again we like that a lot we're different okay you guys have different concepts and we're special that's the way of uh you know self-glorification in a way all right well we still got lots more to cover we're going to take a quick music break and then be right back with Amr Asafa Gurkan you know, self-glorification. All right. Well, we still got lots more to cover.

We're going to take a quick music break and then be right back with Amr Asafa Gurkhan talking about his new book, Sultan Ninja Suslara, Spies of the Sultan. Stay tuned. okay welcome back chris greaton here with emra safa gurkan talking about spies in the ottoman empire and the early modern mediterranean emma just before the break you said that you know over a hundred spies

intimately, and you know their families, you know their life details, and you've followed them all around the world. So to give our audience a more granular picture of what espionage in the early modern Mediterranean looked like, why don't you tell us about one of your favorite spies and the story surrounding them? Well, I have a lot of really favorite, but one that I always say, I always talk about him, you know, in all other interviews I made before. But I just can't, you know, this is a guy only one year of his life we know and he's got, he created so many problems. It was quite a year. Yeah, that was quite a year. This is a guy from southern France.

He calls himself Baron de Lafage, but we don't know who he is. We know he's in Istanbul in 1592 or 90, I don't remember the date, it's in the book. So in the chapter three, I talked about 10, I gave 10 stories of Ottoman spies.

If we, you know, in the Hofstra Convinciation case, we had many more people, but in the Artemis, it's really hard to track them down, actually. So this guy is from southern France. He's in Istanbul. He's working for the Artemis,

but also for the English ambassador. And after that, we see him taking an Italian tour. First, he goes to Rome. He talks to the cardinal, and he speaks in front of the College of Cardinals and he gets a patent from them, a letter of recommendation type of thing.

He gets their money. He gets their letter of recommendation. And when he returns to Istanbul, he's going to show them to people marking the credibility of the cardinals who believe this story. Then we see him in Florence, okay, doing some dealing, the details of which we do not know,

but probably he's also selling projects, you know, silly projects, or offering his services for money. So he somehow fooled the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the French ambassador in Florence. And then we see this guy in Venice pulling a number of tricks. First of all, he goes to the Habsburg ambassador, offering his service to the spy,

and the Habsburg ambassador, Francisco de Vega, is an important guy because he will be the key guy of Habsburg espionage 10 years later. And around that time, he really likes spies, but he's also a very intelligent guy. So he understands there's something wrong with the guy. So he politely rejects.

And then we see this guy having convinced three or five, I don't remember, a couple of youth offering to take them to Istanbul. Okay? So that they could learn Turkish and stuff like that.

But then they realize what he's doing is actually smuggling them into the Ottoman Empire. Traff actually smuggling them trafficking them yeah trafficking them for slaves so franco de vega in collaboration with the avian national authorities impedes him prevents him from doing that so then he actually leaves when he leaves he takes a boat okay he takes a merchant he steps merchant galleon the captain of which he actually fools again he takes his money over telling that i'm gonna buy you some uh horses from the ottoman empire the trading of which is forbidden basically so he takes the money and he actually ruins the guy who lost all his money then he comes to istanbul whatever precious information he has the name of the guys who's working for the spanish in istanbul so he basically destroyed the entire

information gathering network allowing putting all these critical figures for hafizik secret service in istanbul into jail luckily for it for madrid and Naples and the entire Christian world perhaps, he will die a couple of months later in a plague. But I cannot think what he is capable of doing if he actually survived

or what he might have done and I might not have found in the archives or his activities might have gone unrecorded. Still, this is the most efficient spy that I have ever...

I mean, the biggest scoundrel ever that I have ever encountered. He's really, you know, he's quite a character. Unfortunately, we know only one year of his life. But what does that story tell us beyond... That story tells us how easily they move, first of all. He's from southern France, which is a Protestant. So he's working for the English government, okay but then he appears in rome and talking to college of cardinals as a protestant so how how do you do that then you get a patent okay and everybody is willing to so he's

an armenian agent he's a he's a he's an english agent and he travels so easily okay and nobody touches him and in the end apparently they trust him so much that they gave away the names of these spies that were working for them for madrid or maybe for florence as well yeah so uh the the that story tells us that how how easy they move and how easy how difficult it is to track them down because most of the time consider the fact that they may not use the same name yeah okay and another i mean if you look at similar stories you also get to know that it's a very the 16th century is a very small world most of the time people run into each other like two people

from where the lid can run into each other in istanbul and most spies are compromised like that he's a let's say he's a guy from naples and he pretends not to be a spy that he encountered in the street of Istanbul, another guy from Naples, and they know each other. So he said, oh, look, this guy is not who he claims is. And then he gets arrested. So it's a very, it's a world in which the same guys always, you know, hang around the same spots city center ports public squares in a number of

10-15 port cities so it's really a tiny fraction of the overall geography of these empires only a few people

move and those who move they do the same thing they know each other and they come across

each other it's kind of like being an Ottoman historian that's what I was gonna say it is actually true. You end up running into people in the weirdest places, but of course

we operate in small circuits. Because you always hang around in the archives or a couple of places where you can party in an economic way. So especially, it was really wherever you go, it's really easy to come across people who does similar stuff.

But was there something like that on that level, where there's actually any sort of collective identity of spies? No, no, no. I mean, for it to be an identity, they would have to say it. Right. But I mean, where everyone kind of knows they're in the know and all purveyors of information, so to speak. Well, all the purveyors of information are also merchants.

Yeah. They're also, once in a while, it's like all the merchants are also corsairs in a way. Yeah. You see, I mean, if you move, you have to do this job. If you don't give information and you move, they come and ask you anyways for free. So let's say a new ship comes to the port. Authorities come and ask you, what's up in istanbul what's up in naples what's up what's up in avlonia so they ask you these sort of so you it's not like they're specialized certain people are and there are

certain people who speak for a number of informants and spies the the ring leader the spy masters yeah we have to write down who who has to put in, because most spies are in alphabet, they don't know how to write, okay? And, or informants, so there's a couple of guys that are specialized because they knew how to write and how to put them in ciphers or how to put them in, how to write with invisible ink and how to put them in, how to write with invisible ink,

and how to post them, what kind of method to use in order for the courier, in order to make sure that the courier not get caught. So there are a number of specialists like that, and most of the time they are diplomats themselves. But in this case, in Istanbul, where Spain didn't have a dip ambassador it was spies who actually took care of this business but most spies were also because they never paid you

enough yeah they had to have a job to make a living so spying on the side also also to legitimize yeah what do you do most of them pilgrims especially christian pilgrims who go around but also the animals use them orthodox who go to the council of trend and orthodox an orthodox archbishop the archbishop of thessalonica who went to the council of trend with the pretense that he wanted to have some input on the orthodox side turned out to be an artemis spy actually so the artemis also use these religious guys because they are they can travel freely and monasteries are big supply for runaway slaves because you got a monastery they take care of you the atoms don't want to enter that much they hide you okay they were in accessible places so most people use monasteries pilgrims religious guys travelers diplomats who by the nature of

their profession travel a lot also provide provide information. Why not? Even today, I mean, those people who travel a lot, I mean, provide, provide information for government. Look at the, look at the Americans who ended up in the,

Richard Fryer. He's a serious scholar who ended up in there and provided information for the American government. Because if you, and he is, he's one of the most serious guys

for ancient Iranian history. And he says in his own... He talks with all these intellectuals. He's an American. In the 1950s, he came here. And he has access to all these intellectuals and politicians. Who are his friends? Other people in the embassy.

Obviously, he's going to exchange that information. Unless you're a really uptight guy. And he actually did that. So he's kind of a spy. So even today, I don't want to put the you're a really uptight guy. And he actually did that. So it's kind of spy. Okay. So even today, I don't want to put the label spy on all the Ottomanists. Yeah. Well, don't worry.

You wouldn't be the first one to do it, by the way. But that's by the nature of thing. Okay. Yeah. Because you socialize with people and stuff like that. So most of the time, and especially if you're a ransom agent, like a trader who actually is ransoming the transfer of money between the families of the slaves and the owners of the slaves.

Okay, so you, okay, whom do you see? You see the kings and the dukes and the viceroys on the one side as the guys who are paying for that money or the rich guys. On the other side, you get the sultan or, you know, the pashas. So, you know both sides. Why not

make a couple of money on the side i would have done it like if i had the second time emra has uh volunteered himself as a spy on this podcast another trait another trait that we have in common spies talk a lot you cannot imagine how many spies in the history of espionage got exposed because they're talking too much you know how the leader of the french resistance got caught by the nazis do you know why because his aide-de-camp used to call him monsieur le general all the time they couldn't convince the guy not to tell this guy whose identity was supposed to be that's that simple he couldn't just do it right and i mean that's simple and then you have all these

conspiracy theories in which everything or like you have the idea of 24 or csi new york or jamie spawn everything is so but that's what i wanted to ask you because you you're demystifying the spies we already talked about your favorite spy a really talented spy but like tell us about the the the opposite the the incompetent examples, but one is the cousin, Livio Celesto, who got caught three times, and he is the nephew of the Ottoman Grand Admiral,

Hassan Veneziano. I don't know what he did, but getting caught three times requires a lot of talent. And the second guy, there's this guy, Luis de Portillo. He's writing from Ragusa,

and he's reselling legendary stories 30 years old, like the fight in the Divan. The Pashas took blade against each other. This happened in the 1530s, but not in the 1530s. So all these old stories. He created this guy who works in the Imperial Divan,

the relative of his. And when they realized that it's not true, the Ragussans, who were an Ottoman vassal, but a Catholic vassal. So they were caught up between a rock and a hard place rock being Madrid and a hard place

being Istanbul yeah so they don't like spies that much so the Ragusons actually cut his cut his ears and put him in a galley

for life which means he's gonna row without ears I don't know you can you can row without ears no big deal

but he won't have ears not really an issue yeah and he will have really bad teeth because he'll row I don't know. You can row without ears, no big deal. But he won't have ears. Yeah, not really an issue. Yeah, and he will have really bad teeth because he rowers lack of vitamin C. You know the name of it? Scurvy. Yeah, scurvy. So he's going to have bad teeth and no ears

and he has to row in the galleys. That is the worst spy that I have ever encountered. Nobody asked me that question. So I just answered on top of my head. Maybe I can find the worst spy that i have ever encountered that nobody asked me that question maybe so i just answered on top of my head maybe i can find the worst spy because they're really bad spies well when you find a worst spy let us know we'll bring you back on the podcast to talk about it but i do want to finish with uh you know sort of one of the major um important findings i guess in your book at least for me and i think for a lot of people who flip through it, is these encoded communications. We talked about the technologies

of communication, the technologies of espionage in terms of, you know, special inks and whatnot. And you have all these documents that are written in code that require, you know, special tools to understand what they say. And of course, that's espionage par excellence, right? Yeah. Deceptive communication. But when I saw it, as someone who works in the Ottoman archives or any sort of state archive from the 19th and 20th century,

I was immediately reminded of encoded telegrams, which of course are also meant to be sort of encrypted, difficult to read for those who are not supposed to be reading it, but are very much part of standard state communication during the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire conducts so much of its business over these encoded telegrams that are part and parcel of the Ottoman bureaucracy. And so I want to conclude this interview, and we'll have more in the bonus session for our listeners who can't get enough of Amritsar for Gurkhan.

I want to conclude... How can they? Yes, of course. I want to conclude by asking, what does the history of early modern espionage in the Ottoman Empire, and more broadly, the history of information during that time,

say to the later development of the modern state and the information state specifically. First of all, we don't know how much, we don't know what Ottomans with these ciphers. First of all, most Ottoman, this is an argument by Nikola Vatan, but most Ottoman correspondence was made orally.

What brought this cryptography and steganography was the existence of resident diplomats which means that an english guy has to write two three letters every month to be sent to london okay so somebody can catch it but if you are you can if you're writing from istanbul to buddha you can you might as well as messenger without fear that anybody's gonna intercept yeah so you don't have and there's an interesting story. So called the one day, you know, someone's the Venetian ambassador says,

look, we are getting your couriers illegally, by the way, we're robbing them and we find your letter. They're all written in code. We are friends. Why do you do that? And he pressured him. And he said, what he said that, look, you don't need to do that because you have your own,

whenever you want to send a message, you send a messenger and you have, you're nothing to fear because you're one big chunk of empire but i can't do that somebody else and so the ottomans confront them about yeah so call you said don't write because we're going to steal your correspondence and they say well you have an oral uh encryption the best encryption of all is silent yeah you can do yeah and also that's why you look at the 16th century you can see some documents

like what the ambassador used to carry a couple of it's very formulaic and according to this is an argument

that was made for the first time by Nikola Vatan in which they are like passports everything will be said by the ambassador it's not like the detailed

it doesn't give any detail of what the ambassador is here to say the ambassador knows about it it's just it's just like the I- it doesn't give any detail of what the ambassador is here to say. The ambassador knows about it. It's just like the I-94 that we used to show to the custom authorities when entering the U.S. It shows that you are the ambassador. It's a letter of recommendation. It's a passport.

That's why the Ottomans didn't have to use that. But I know certain spies writing from Italy, didn't have to use that but I know certain spies writing from Italy okay had to use that but this kind of cryptography

ciphers and invisible inks were developed for diplomacy not for espionage because spies don't write as much as diplomats

but if you're a diplomat in six different capitals it means that every month you'll have like 20-30 letters each like five, six pages long. So this kind of information has to be, and these couriers are very imperfect business.

They go from animal lands. Of course you have to develop that. As we know also in the Renaissance world, all these big polyglots of the Renaissance world were deep into this mathematical thing, things and ciphers, okay, from Alberti to all these important people

of humanism and Renaissance. So, part of their ideas were implemented, but also cipher had to be by Venice

and Madrid and some of the scribes, a part of the scribes are developed, are specialized in cryptography and they developed a huge,, a part of the scribes are developed, are specialized in cryptography, and they developed a huge, a complex system of ciphers that change every six months, a year, and stuff like that.

Most of them, the spies did not follow them, I believe. I'm not sure, but I believe they can follow them to the fullest extent, especially if you're a spy. And Istanbul was a special case because these are the spies without a spy master as a diplomat. These are the spies operating in a place where they don't have, where their owner, not owner, where their employer didn't have a diplomat. But if Venetians, for instance, that was a different thing Venetian spies were given information to the bylaw the Venetian ambassador here then he puts everything as far

everything in the in one you know melting pot and that was diplomatic correspondence in the Spanish case we have the spies

correspondence as well in which you see all these diverging stuff but the Ottomans we do not know I mean because 16th century Ottoman

in this late 18th century we have a lot of encrypted stuff. As early as late 18th, we can find. But in the 16th century, you can't find anything. We do not know how they use, how they use cryptology, what kind of ciphers we have. There's just one article that defines

four or five different types of ciphers that could be used in Arabic, but these are old and classical forms. I don't know what kind of different responses the Europeans think, whether they have developed a response from within something that is applicable to their own alphabet. Well, that still leaves the question of the relationship of this early modern espionage to the emergence of a modern state that really is all about information, whether it's documentation of its populace or communication across long distances, or of course, obtaining information about the other, about enemies and trade partners in these things. When you look at examples like France, for instance, or Colbert France, what he basically did was to collect

all the information possible. And Philip II did the similar. And the Ottomans used to do it in an economic sense with these stock readers and stuff. But you look at the Colbert example, which is basically who solidified

the emerging central government of France, was that he got all this information from all these provinces put them in different almanacs different books and he created this library which was a treasure trove of information uh as a result of which we can talk about a central state who knows about it when you know a lot you can interfere a lot the ottoman case uh the ottomans were like much more oral and much more it wasn't the case with the 6th century Ottoman Empire it wasn't the case with the 6th century France either but which that kind of

understanding of codifying classifying creating an information state is something very new that the Venetians had always done because they're a republic and the French may be the first to do it in the continental Europe only as late as the mid-70th century. So it's a little bit early to look at for something like that. The Ottomans didn't have it. But you see a relationship between the organization.

The Venetians are a republic, so they're not a monarchy per se with a kind of patrimonial system. The guy in charge of espionage changes every six months. You have to have a system. So you need institutional knowledge. And that's why their archives have always been so.

They always have an archive that everybody could use, like every senator. It's an empire ruled by magistrates. It's a republic. A republic is not me. They're not only elected people. They're lawmen. Not lawmen like shooting people.

They're like legal people. Lawyers and most of them educated in law okay it's not like today's which you can yeah you know get elected no matter your background most of the time these guys were yeah interested in those educating those stuff so they create a system and in our overtime session we'll talk more about that and those archives not just the ottoman archives, but specifically the European archives that might prove so fascinating. Most of the research, especially the operational research, comes from European archives. Yeah, yeah. And we'll talk about that in the overtime session.

But in terms of this interview, Emre, we're going to leave it at that. We've covered so much ground. We've talked about, well, how great of a spy you would be, how bad some spies were, how ingenious others were. And we've seen a really messy and interesting picture of early modern espionage in the Mediterranean. It's always a lot of fun to have you on the program. You know, for the listeners who enjoy having Emmer on the program, leave a comment on Facebook, let him know that you want him back. Like we said, he's emeritus. He's still kicking around. He's still got his microphones. We just got to get him back on the beat with the interviews. Thanks a lot, Emrah. Thanks, Chris. It was nice to be back. We also find a link where you can look up Emre's new book, Sultanınca Susları, out from Kronik Kitap.

It's in Turkish. It will only cost you 24 lira to pick it up. If you buy online, it's even cheaper. And if you buy online, it's even cheaper. Not going to break the bank, but it's a nice, meaty piece of research. You also find our bonus conversation on the website. And if you want to find out about future episodes and stay in touch with our audience of over 30,000 followers on Facebook, just follow us there on our Facebook

page where we're always posting our latest content. That's all for this episode. Thank you for tuning in and join us next time in another episode of Out of In History Podcast. ¶¶ ¶¶ Thank you. you