4 - Asiatic despots, in Turkey or elsewhere?

Summary

In the later Middle Ages, the nearest major non-European, Asiatic power to Europe was Turkey. Since the fourteenth century her armies had been attacking existing European and Christian space, including Byzantium and the Balkans. Much earlier Europe had been invaded by Islam (the ‘Moors’) from North Africa, in Spain, advancing into Sicily and into the Mediterranean generally. The Moors and the Turks had become the epitome of the non-European forces ranged against the continent and they were typically seen as despotic in character, as lacking the Christian virtues and marked by cruelty and barbarism: they were Muslim.

In European eyes, Turkey was generally seen even by intellectuals as a despotism, especially after the seventeenth century. In The Prince, Machiavelli described the subjects of the Porte as being ruled by one master, and as consisting of his slaves or servants. Some years later the French author, Bodin, contrasted European monarchies with Asian despotisms unrestricted in their dominion, a situation never to be tolerated in Europe. Others saw the critical difference between east and west as due to the absence of a hereditary nobility or as the result of the lack of private property in Turkey, both seen at the time as instruments for protecting man and his earthly goods. The French philosopher Montesquieu believed that under eastern systems assets were always liable to confiscation; that insecurity was the epitome of Oriental despotism, opposed in principle to European feudalism, where a man's property was safe.