University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Feb 2022)
COURTING THE PORTE: EARLY ANGLO-OTTOMAN DIPLOMACY
Abstract
This paper has two parts: some initial observations about how some historians mistake the nature of Ottoman diplomacy are followed by a discussion of four contemporary reports of how, in 1599, Henry Lello was received by Sultan Mehmed III to become Queen Elizabeth’s “orator” to the Ottoman court. These accounts indicate how Europeans resident in Istanbul in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were well aware that the Ottoman court and state practiced a highly elaborated diplomatic protocol, one that followed different principles from those obtaining among the Italian city states and elsewhere in Western Europe.
