France and the Levant/Chapter 2
II. The Alliance of France and Turkey
A new chapter in the history of France and of Europe opens with Francis I, who boldly broke with the traditional hostility to Islam and summoned the infidel to aid him in his struggle with a Christian rival. On his accession he expressed his desire to unite all Christian Princes against the Turks, and he joined the League formed by Pope Leo X in 1517, despatching a naval force against the African corsairs. But his defeat and capture at Pavia in 1525 effected his conversion, and led to the first alliance between the ruler of a great Christian State and the Turk. Since all Europe was on the side of the Emperor, the King turned to the Turks, whose armies could attack his rival from the Hungarian plains and whose fleets swept unchallenged through the Mediterranean. Sultan Suleiman was almost as eager for an alliance as the captive monarch, for the Turks lived under the perpetual menace of a combination of Christian Powers. To detach from this potential coalition the Most Christian King and the nation which had inspired the Crusades was to insure his dominions in Europe and to render possible their extension. The theoretical unity of Christendom vanished when France substituted the policy of interest for the policy of principle, and when the dream of delivering the Eastern Christians from the infidel was replaced by the ambition to dominate Europe.
While Francis was a prisoner in Madrid, his mother sent an envoy to the Sultan imploring intervention on behalf of her son. The envoy and his suite, who carried rich presents, were murdered in Bosnia; but at the end of the same year (1525) another envoy arrived in Constantinople and began negotiations, which eventually led to a treaty signed in 1536. The original has not been preserved, but its outlines may be recovered from the pact of 1553 which renewed it. In return for handsome payment the Sultan engaged to send a fleet to the western Mediterranean to cooperate with the navy of France. The vessels of the Emperor Charles and his allies captured by the Ottoman Fleet should belong to the Sultan, the conquered towns should be given up to plunder by the Turks and their inhabitants become their prisoners and slaves, the towns themselves, with their munitions of war, falling to the King of France.
When the "Most Christian King" had made his decision, he determined to extract all possible profit from the new alliance. The Turk was expected not only to furnish military aid, but to grant commercial privileges and to improve the position of his Christian subjects. The results of the alliance, however, proved disappointing to Francis, whose policy appeared sacrilegious to the Catholic sentiment of France. The antagonism of Christendom weakened the King's arm, and he declined cooperation on land; but Turkish corsairs ravaged the coasts of the Mediterranean, and in 1541 Toulon welcomed Turkish galleys rowed by thousands of Christian slaves. In 1553 the allies agreed to take Corsica as an armed base for an attack on Spain; but Turkish methods of waging war outraged French opinion, and the enterprise was abandoned. The Turks lost faith in the sincerity of France; and in 1557 the French Ambassador reported that he could not convince the Sultan or his Ministers that the alliance was or ever had been advantageous to Turkey. Henceforth, though France and Turkey remained enemies of the Habsburgs, they no longer cooperated in the attack, and France took no part in the battle of Lepanto (1571). The destruction of the Turkish navy rendered a Turkish alliance less attractive; and the religious zeal of the Counter-Reformation, which burned nowhere more fiercely than in France, forbade close association with Islam. The substitution of the Bourbons for the Valois broke another link in the chain; and the Grand Design of Henry IV proposed to secure the equilibrium of Europe at the expense of the Turk. Within half a century of the battle of Pavia the political association between France and Turkey was at an end; and French policy, when it gave a thought to the Eastern Question, reverted to the earlier principle of the defence of Christendom.
The second element in the transaction between Francis and Suleiman was the promise of commercial monopoly. By the pact of 1536 all nations desiring to trade with the Turks were compelled to transport their goods under the French flag. This privilege was especially onerous for the Venetians, who had long maintained an active trade with Turkey and possessed an imposing mercantile marine. The French monopoly could not survive the political association with Turkey; and in 1581 the Venetians were specifically exempted from its observance. The Levant Company was founded in 1581; and, despite French protests, British vessels were allowed to trade under their own flag. A third breach in the monopoly occurred soon after, when the Dutch obtained a similar privilege; and in the eighteenth century Austria, Russia, Sweden and Spain concluded commercial treaties on the same lines. Thus, despite a good deal of trade between Marseilles and the Syrian coast, above all with Sidon, the port of Damascus, the French monopoly gradually crumbled to pieces, leaving France little but a titular primacy in the commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean.
While the military and commercial fruits of the cynical pact of Francis and Suleiman proved disappointing, the privileges secured in the domain of law and religion were more enduring. The Letters Patent granted to France in 1536, confirmed in 1569, 1581, 1597, 1604, 1607 and 1673, and commonly known as the Capitulations, secured to France a position of uncontested influence throughout the Turkish Empire. The right to appoint resident consuls who should be the sole judges in commercial and criminal proceedings between French subjects; the right to demand the assistance of Turkish officials in the execution of the consuls' decrees; the right of French subjects to have their dragoman present at the hearing of any charge against them; the right of appeal to the Sultan or the Grand Vizier against the decision of any subordinate official; the freedom of French subjects from responsibility to the Turkish Government for any but personal debts; immunity from slavery; freedom from compulsory service, civil or military; the right of French subjects dying in Turkey to devise their property by will—such was the charter granted to France and enjoyed by her exclusively for half a century. The Capitulations were renewed by successive Sultans till 1740, when the Sultan declared that for the future they should be regarded as a contract binding on both parties for ever.
Among the rights granted by the Capitulations was that of free Christian worship; and the Catholic monks found an excuse for the Turkish alliance in the privileges thus secured to the Church. As the political and commercial primacy of France crumbled away, the Sultans granted compensation in a field which involved but little sacrifice of their power and gave lively satisfaction to their ancient ally. While in politics and commerce France had worked for herself alone, in the religious sphere the toleration of Christians and Christian worship which she had secured was shared by the priests, monks, and pilgrims of other countries. The protection of Christians of all nationalities was never conferred on France specifically by any treaty; but it came to be accepted not only by Turkey but by all the Christian Powers, including the Papacy. Little by little the Catholic clergy of the races conquered by the Turk escaped from the yoke of their territorial sovereign to participate in the privileges of the "Franks"; and the tutelage of France was extended from the clergy to their flocks. Soon the Orthodox Christians sheltered under the protection of France; for the Turkish invasion had submerged all countries of Orthodox faith except Russia, who in the sixteenth century was too weak to protect her co-religionists beyond her own borders. Thus France became the representative throughout the Levant not only of Catholicism but of Christianity in all its forms.