‘Le monde est un logement d'étrangers’: François Savary de Brèves (1560–1628), diplomatic agent in the early modern Mediterranean

Abstract

François Savary de Brèves (1560–1628) served as French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1592 to 1606 and, together with his earlier attachment to the French embassy, spent close to two decades in the Ottoman capital. It was the longest sojourn of any French ambassador since the French entered into formal diplomatic relations with the Ottomans in 1535. Despite scholars crediting his term as a watershed moment in Ottoman-French relations, a complete study on him remains to be published. Savary de Brèves also established the first press in Paris for printing in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, just one component of a broader vision of oriental studies in early modern France whose motivations have remained ambiguous for scholars to-date. Examining his diplomatic career and oriental studies project within the context of a complex cross-cultural, multi-lingual Mediterranean at the turn of the seventeenth century, this study argues Savary de Brèves represents a new kind of agent who was instrumental in redefining European attitudes towards the Ottomans, in fields including diplomacy, language and oriental studies, in response to pragmatic geopolitical realities. This study has implications for the way we think about diplomacy, language-learning, oriental studies and the Mediterranean in the early modern period, particularly in the often-overlooked period of the early seventeenth century. The study draws on a variety of sources produced by Savary de Brèves, including diplomatic correspondence, Ottoman legal and administrative sources, the travel account of his journey to Tunis and Algiers, and his writings about the Ottomans in his later years.