The English Capitulation of 1580: A Review Article

Abstract

The late Professor Paul Wittek (1894–1978) had an oddly ambivalent attitude towards England. From 1940 until his death he left London only rarely, for short visits to the continent, where (we understood) he would declare that England was the only place to live; but once back across the Channel he would, in conversation and in his seminars, resume his criticisms, ranging from the British Government's unwisdom in promoting the dismantlement of the AustroHungarian and the Ottoman Empires to the irrationalities of the English language. The first research which he undertook after coming to (what was to be) his adopted country was the critical study of seventeen Turkish documents, dating from 1553 to 1594, preserved, in English or Latin translation, in the two editions (1589/1590 and 1598–1600) of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations … of the English Nation. In 1940 he found in the Bodleian Library some original Turkish documents belonging to this early stage of Anglo-Turkish relations, and over the next wartime years prepared a monograph covering the period 1553–1588, that is, from the isolated ‘safeconduct or priviledge’ granted by Siileyman in Aleppo to Anthony Jenkinson to the return from Istanbul of the first resident ambassador William Harborne.