Abstract
How and why did large‐format almanac prints—a relatively understudied form of media that reached its apogee under Louis XIV—amalgamate the battle against Calvinism and Islam in the 1680s? Combining visual and textual analysis, this article suggests that royal image makers linked Muslims and Protestants to defend the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and manifest the French king's religious zeal and imperial ambition while distracting from the ahdname (capitulations) granted by the Ottoman sultan that precluded France from joining a Catholic alliance to fight the “Turkish menace.” The article also considers the differential risks of promoting Louis XIV's Islamophobic image among constituencies in Europe and around the Mediterranean.
Comment et pourquoi les almanachs de grand format—une forme de média relativement peu étudiée qui a atteint son apogée sous Louis XIV—ont‐ils amalgamé les luttes contre le calvinisme et l'islam dans les années 1680 ? En combinant des analyses visuelles et textuelles, cet essai suggère que les promoteurs royaux associèrent les musulmans et les protestants pour défendre la révocation de l'Edit de Nantes et manifester le zèle religieux et les ambitions impériales du roi de France. Cette manœuvre détournait également l'attention du public des ahdname (capitulations) accordés par le sultan ottoman qui empêchaient la France de rejoindre une alliance catholique pour combattre la « menace turque ». Néanmoins, comme le montre cet article, la diffusion d'images et d'idées islamophobes s'est parfois retournée contre Louis XIV et les intérêts français en Europe et autour de la Méditerranée.
On January 25, 1683, Louis XIV and his chief minister, Jean‐Baptiste Colbert, signed a declaration that “Mahometans and idolators who wish to convert may only be instructed in the Catholic religion.” Expressing hope that French subjects of the “Religion Prétenduë Reformée” would finally “return to the bosom of the church,” it also voiced concern that in the past “a few” of “the considerable number of people of every nation and faith who land in our kingdom” had embraced the “false doctrine” of Calvinism. To avert any future corruption, it banned ministers and secular leaders from hosting non‐Christian migrants in their “temples or assemblies”—on pain of a large fine and the permanent loss of their pulpits.1
This piece of legislation was more than symbolic. As confirmed by Huguenot baptisms celebrated from Montauban to London, winning Muslim (and pagan) souls had persisted as an aspect of confessional competition during the second half of the seventeenth century.2 And the decree's timing is certainly notable. On the one hand, it appeared at a moment when the abusive quartering of royal troops (dragonnades), among other oppressive measures, was driving thousands of French Calvinists into conversion and exile. On the other hand, it appeared just months before Louis XIV—constrained by a set of agreements (ahdnames) with the Ottoman Empire known across Europe as “capitulations”—would decline Pope Innocent XI's request to join a defensive Holy League against the forces of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha then marching toward the Habsburg capital of Vienna.3
Generations of historians have speculated about a connection between French foreign and domestic policies. Is it possible that backlash over the crown's 1683 decision to abandon Vienna to a Muslim siege played a role in the decision to step up the persecution of Huguenots that culminated in the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes? This article does not answer that question; that is, it does not take a position on whether making Reformed Christianity all but illegal in France was “partly a public relations operation” meant to placate the papacy and validate Louis XIV's title, Rex Christianissimus (Most Christian King), which had been discredited by association with “Turks.”4 Instead, by analyzing a trio of illustrated wall almanacs for the years 1686, 1687, and 1688, it highlights an underappreciated approach deployed to defend the monarch's Catholic leadership: amalgamating the fight against Calvinism and Islam. The subjugation and conversion of actual Muslims, and their representation in a range of media, including almanacs, were means of justifying the Revocation that historians have in large part overlooked.5
Combining word and image in theatrical set pieces, religious allegory, and selective reportage, these composite creations, or “iconotexts,” did more than communicate opposition to the French Reformation and counter pan‐European critiques of Franco‐Ottoman amity. They also tried to universalize the crown's religious and imperial claims.6 Despite some risk that easily transportable posters filled with disturbing pictures of dead bodies, defiled texts, and defeated spiritual leaders might generate further hostility to France internationally, almanac creators of the 1680s twinned Muhammad and Calvin to cast Louis XIV as a holy warrior and committed evangelizer—not just in France but to the four corners of the earth.
Large‐Format Almanacs as Historical Sources
Almanac murals remain a relatively understudied feature of the royal image making that proliferated during Louis XIV's personal rule (1660–1715).7 Measuring about two by three feet and printed in annual runs of up to two thousand, they were produced from a pair of copperplate engravings: the top one usually contained a main scene, and the bottom one always included a blank space for the upcoming year's calendar, the margins most often filled with vignettes depicting notable events from previous months. As such, they marked sacred and secular time, reminding viewers when to fulfill duties to the Catholic Church and why to revere France's Catholic king. City bookshops may have sold the almanacs for the price of a theater ticket, and in defiance of royal interdictions, itinerant haberdashers may have peddled them along with forbidden books throughout the French countryside.8 Their large size, wide availability, and low price suited them for wall hangings in taverns, workshops, and perhaps even classrooms, providing affordable decoration and useful information for Parisian and provincial consumers. Some evidence suggests that they also made diplomatic gifts and appealed to collectors inside and outside the kingdom.9
Since almanacs are ephemeral, meant to be replaced every December, many examples have doubtless been lost, but the 750 single‐sheet types still extant were almost all published in Paris from outposts along the Left Bank's Rue Saint Jacques, an epicenter of printing since the Middle Ages.10 A few credit individual, well‐known artists, but most are unsigned and seem to represent team efforts that repeat themes and recycle motifs to glorify the king. That is why scholars generally believe that designers must have been applying at least loose guidelines from the court, along with self‐imposed standards of propriety.11 Yet even if almanac prints should be regarded at least in part as top‐down “royal” creations, they are rich historical sources for studying, among many other topics, material culture, foreign embassies, political protocol, the fabrication of kingship, and the framing of Muslims in Louis XIV's France.12
To the extent that any of these three almanacs has been analyzed previously, it has been to illustrate how Catholics and Protestants expressed confessional rivalry by deploying shared stereotypes about Muhammad and the nature of Islam.13 Accusing a Christian enemy of being more despotic or degenerate, or else less godly or civilized, than a “Turk” was a common trope in both Catholic and Protestant polemic across time and space.14 Here, by contrast, examined together, the almanacs help illuminate a promotional strategy particular to 1680s France, one first identified fifty years ago by the literature scholar Guy Turbet‐Delof. “The dual concern of Louis XIV's propaganda,” he wrote, was “to make clear that the king is just as attached to the ‘triumph of [fleur de] lis over crescent’ as he is to that of Catholicism over Protestantism.” In his view, the French bombardments of Algiers and Tripoli that coincided with the crown's harassment of Huguenots functioned as “alibis to prove . . . anti‐Muslim zeal.”15 Repatriating Christian captives from North Africa while exploiting esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks) and condemned Calvinists on an expanded fleet of Mediterranean galleys, subjecting “infidels” and “heretics” to Catholic indoctrination, and celebrating conversions of rowers and other non‐Catholics across the kingdom all provided opportunities for disseminating the message that “crusade justifies persecution.” They also upheld the politically expedient idea that a domestic battle against Reformed Christianity was part of a global battle against religious heterodoxy in all its forms.16
Post‐Revocation almanacs compress these and other allusions to Louis XIV's religious antipathies within a single frame. To address anger about France staying on the sidelines during key European land and sea battles against the Ottoman Empire, they also resort to the technique of “fake news,” exaggerating the participation of France's king and his subjects as auxiliaries in the clash between Crescent and Cross.17 Unfortunately for the French crown, marshaling Muslims and Huguenots to boost Louis XIV's credentials as a devoted Catholic monarch rather than a Protestant‐hating tyrant or an Ottoman‐loving despot was a strategy that could backfire.
1686: Heresy Destroyed
The design of the almanac mural for the year 1686 (fig. 1) was likely finalized within days or weeks of the Revocation. Its subject, according to the sign on a central dais, is “The triumph of the church over Calvin and Mahomet.” Divided into quadrants, the top half belongs to the realm of allegory, the bottom reportage; one side addresses Islam, the other Reformed Christianity. An array of women and one man bearing ceremonial objects and representing Catholic faith, love, wisdom, and counsel survey the action from the uppermost level. Just below, on the left, a female figure personifying religion—with a crucifix in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other—strikes down the “false prophet” and “rich merchant” who, a legend explains, spread his religion through “the force of arms” to satisfy his own greed and lust. Toward the edge, four Muslims cower in terror; further down, two turbaned men hide their heads in shame (fig. 2). Described as “Turks in despair seeing themselves vanquished by Christians,” they hold both a banner detailing “heresies” contained in the Qur'an and an oval battle scene of future Venetian doge Francesco Morosini recapturing Koroni (Corone) during the First Morean War, a conflict France helped neither fight nor finance but for which this complex imagery takes partial credit.18
On the opposite side of the print, another female figure wields a monstrance for exhibiting the Eucharist. Personifying truth, she tramples the French Protestant reformer and his famous book, here retitled Institutes of Blasphemy.19 Her winged companion is the archangel Saint Michael, gripping a fleur‐de‐lis sword and shield for the defense of France. He stands before the coat of arms of England, acknowledging the recent succession of James II, a Catholic convert, to the English throne. Beneath this tableau, dense blocks of text explicate Calvin's numerous theological errors and impugn him for “moral turpitude,” and two Huguenot women repent. The first weeps as she reads articles of Catholic faith. The second forswears her previous beliefs and expresses gratitude to “Louis who removed us from this misery.” Underfoot lies a blank mask labeled “fraud.”
Other illustrated calendars released the same year by different publishers employ similar motifs to celebrate the “destruction of heresy” even if they eschew a depiction of Muhammad. The unknown artist who rendered him here—possibly the print seller and printmaker Pierre Landry—dresses the founder of Islam like an Ottoman soldier or North African corsair in a seventeenth‐century costume album, only with an uncommonly large bejeweled and feathered turban. A crying Calvin is identifiable by his long beard, Geneva gown, clerical collar and ear‐flapped scholar's cap. The prophet is positioned parallel to the ground like a typical defeated enemy. More upright but with hands helplessly raised, the reformer is feminized to resemble a swooning Esther or Virgin Mary, witness to religious oppression he cannot directly oppose.20
1687: Unbelievers Damned
An almanac print for 1687 (fig. 3) also couples Muhammad and Calvin. In a visual adaptation of the “dialogue of the dead” genre, it thrusts the pair into hell to be embraced by a euphoric Satan and heckled by angry followers.21 On the top left stands an unidentified Turk alongside Abdurrahman Abdi, the last Ottoman pasha of Buda, killed in action by Habsburg forces in Hungary. Furious to find himself in the underworld rather than in paradise enjoying “the pleasures your Alcoran promises,” according to the printed dialogue, he brandishes a curved sword against the “Impostor Mahomet” while pinching the belly of the prophet—elsewhere reviled as sexually insatiable—and stamping on Islam's sacred text. On the top right loom two figures labeled with the canine epithet Barbet. These are Waldensians (Vaudois), who had supposedly made common cause with the “Seducer Calvin” only to be persecuted in the Piedmont by Louis XIV's cousin, Victor Amadeus II, duc de Savoy.22 Here, holding out a copy of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and enraged at having believed its “damnable errors,” they yank at the reformer's forked beard, which points toward a fiendish tail of ambiguous origin, and threaten him with a club. This diorama shows disrespect toward the leaders of two religions but depicts only one with features proximate to the devil's and shows only one desecration of a holy text, perhaps suggesting to viewers that whatever the greater of the two heresies, Islam may be the one easier for the Gallican Church to destroy.
The almanac's bottom half similarly combines fact with fantasy by incarnating those powers in the midst of retaking Ottoman lands in southern and central Europe. Here men in regional costume—Ragusan, Moldovan, “Imperialist” (Holy Roman), Transylvanian, Pole, Muscovite, Venetian, Slav, Greek—carve up an Islamic crescent adorned with numbered sketches of fallen towns identified in a corresponding legend. In the background, on an empty plain, two lone Turks peer at the moon through a telescope and observe, “It is waning.” Lest the significance be lost, projections of conquered Buda and Nafplio (Greece) appear on hanging curtains, and verse pasted below explains: “This Crescent of the proud Ottomans who by expansion thought [it] was waxing into a Full Moon now sees itself snipped” and its more potent enemies “sparing nothing to get a piece.”
Shackled to the calendar itself are two sets of figures whose visual depiction and actual exploitation on Louis XIV's galleys once again connect the defeat of Muslims and Protestants and, at least indirectly, bring the almanac's subject around to France (fig. 4), for “rebellious Waldensians put on the chain”—that is, condemned to the oar—would, in fact, row alongside both Huguenots caught fleeing the kingdom and “esclaves turcs taken during the assault on Buda.” Even as French scouts were buying such captives on Malta and in different Italian ports, the crown was plotting to incentivize wine merchants trailing the Venetian army to transport more slaves to Marseille and preparing an undercover scout for a procurement mission to several Habsburg cities.23 When a new recruit like “Ussain from Buda, son of Mahamet” disembarked in Marseille, naval clerks assigned him a number and a galley and then recorded his name, parentage, and physical description in a special register.24 By decade's end the number of rowers with origins across the Ottoman Empire and Morocco would surpass two thousand and the number of Huguenots sentenced for heresy would swell to six hundred as the number of vessels in the oared fleet pushed past forty—an achievement commemorated by a royal medal announcing France's “command of the Mediterranean Sea.”25
This almanac mural represented Franz Ertinger's first foray into the genre. A German engraver later known for illustrating the government‐backed Mercure galant, Ertinger had moved from Antwerp to Paris in 1685 and, given his background, may have been especially attuned to a ribald tradition of anti‐Protestant propaganda, as well as to wartime outpourings of anti‐Ottoman writing and imagery throughout the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire. His design does stand out from most broadside calendars that survive for the year 1687 in eschewing a primary focus on the 1686 embassy from Siam (Thailand), which generated a media frenzy in France.26 Yet even those almanacs seemingly more concerned with depicting exotic dignitaries lavishing gifts on the French king in the Hall of Mirrors, as Ashley Bruckbauer observes, continued to reference dead pashas, Turkish prisoners, or Christian captives freed from Tunis and to express commitment to making Catholics both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, an almanac devoted to the taking of Buda draws a parallel between captured Turks genuflecting before Leopold I and Siamese visitors bowing down to Louis XIV, thus placing the French king on par with the Holy Roman Emperor.27
It turns out that such imagery conflating Ottomans, Huguenots, and Siamese was not just aspirational. As well as mass abjurations of French Calvinists, the months after the Revocation saw a sharp uptick in the number of Muslim oarsmen baptized at the Marseille cathedral.28 With Louis XIV having committed to spend whatever it took to turn his galleys into vehicles of evangelization, these rowers had been catechized not only by chaplains from Saint Vincent de Paul's Congrégation de la Mission—who in the long run had somewhat less success pushing condemned Huguenots toward Catholicism—but also by a multilingual Armenian missionary from the Propaganda Fide in Rome whose salary was paid by the crown.29 Palace periodicals, court diarists, and local priests likewise recorded a crop of Catholic conversions from Islam in Paris, Versailles, and various aristocratic domains. Some involved women and children “saved” from Ottoman battlefields, leading the Mercure galant to gloat: “At the same time that the king is driving heresy from his kingdom, and many of those infected with it are retreating to foreign lands, Divine Providence has ordained that Turks come to [France] to become Christians and take their place.”30
Although missionary hopes that the king of Siam, Phra Narai, would convert never materialized, a few of his male subjects did accept baptism at the French capital with noble godparents in attendance. The following year, reported the Gazette de France, the parish church of Versailles even celebrated a double baptism—of a Thai student of hydraulics and a “young Turk”—in the name of king and queen.31 The late 1680s, better known for Protestant persecution and promulgation of the Code Noir, which required that West Africans enslaved in France's Caribbean colonies “be baptized and instructed in the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith,” were also when royal agents abducted more than three dozen Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and brought them to Marseille. Chiefs of a people dubbed “The Little Turk of New France” by a Jesuit advocating a new holy war in North America, these Indigenous galley slaves were forced to attend Mass with actual Turks—or at least North Africans and others subsumed into that administrative category—judged sufficiently “docile” to learn the doctrine of the Catholic Church.32 Emblematic enemy of Christendom yet, in the Ottoman case, ally of France, Muslims remained the prime referent for all nonbelievers requiring conquest of body and soul.
1688: Catholics Allied
The Triumph of Religion by the Zeal of Christian Princes for the year 1688 (fig. 5) takes a different approach to recasting France's monarch from Ottoman friend to foe. Rather than feature an imaginary scene with historical figures, the designer of this almanac print, engraved by Pierre Le Pautre and published by Jean van der Bruggen, imagines living Catholic rulers in curtained boxes watching allegorical action performed on a central stage. Seated highest and closest to the viewer and directly across from his implied counterpart, the pope, is Louis XIV. With flowing curls, fleur‐de‐lis robe, and well‐turned ankle, he is also joined by the emperor, the Venetian doge, the kings of England, and the dukes of Savoy, Bavaria, and Lorraine in supposed alliance against the double scourge of Islam and Protestantism. A splayed Turk clutching a broken sword and a dead one divested of his armor provide visual metonyms not only for the sultan and his armies but also for Muhammad. Bare‐chested and bare‐skulled except for a topknot, the more prominent of these overpowered Muslims sprawls across a scroll labeled “Calvin,” shorthand for the Institutes. A bare foot resting on the Qur'an and a hand grasping a forked‐tongued serpent seem to belong to Calvin himself, just visible beneath a crush of mythological creatures and the wheels of a large chariot (fig. 6). For the hooded woman at the helm holding instruments of the Passion and a chalice of Christ's blood, these heretics and their heretical writings are interchangeable. Reformer or prophet, Ottomans or Huguenots, holy book or theological treatise, all had surrendered to the one true faith.
The rest of the composition, comprising laurel‐framed cartouches, medal designs, trophies of arms, and explanatory streamers, likewise extols all the Catholic principals for battling Muslims and Protestants. It celebrates imperial wins in cities now located within Hungary and Croatia, along with Venetian ones inside present‐day Montenegro and Greece. It highlights Ottoman flags and prisoners being paraded before the Venetian senate and the English king's pledge of obedience to the pope. It admires German regiments in formation and rejoices in Waldensians slaughtered by the duke of Savoy “with assistance from French troops.” Still, the composition as a whole draws attention to the contributions of France's king above all others, in part by suggesting unlikely equivalences and issuing grand proclamations. Paired rondels, for instance, compare funding the Turkish Wars and backing the Siamese mission, quelling Quietism in Rome and quashing Calvinism in France, while a large banner misleadingly credits Louis XIV for having laid the groundwork for all these feats. “Thanks to the peace you have brought, a reunited Christendom avenges the Ottoman Emperor and renders the church victorious,” it addresses him directly, then announces to “the greatest of mortals” that “the finest achievement of your life is to have restored the altar's glory.” Within a few months French armies would invade the Palatinate and set off the Nine Years’ War.
Talking Back
Not surprisingly, neither French Protestants nor their supporters accepted such portraits of Louis XIV without comment. First‐person accounts by Huguenot fugitives—several condemned to the royal galleys, one carried off to Algiers—followed tradition in insisting that missionaries of the French king were as barbaric as any Muslim or, conversely, argued that enslaved Turks could be more kind, generous, and pious than any papist. Yet even though Calvinist forçats pour la foi (convicts for the faith) sometimes aligned themselves with non‐Catholic oarsmen for philosophical and pragmatic reasons, they could not countenance the dishonor of having “Turks” inter their brethren in burial grounds set aside for “infidels.”33 While royal censorship made it impossible to publish direct critiques of the monarchy inside French borders, from outside the kingdom anonymous pamphlets with titles like The Be‐turbaned Court of France decried the French monarch's cruelty to Reformed Christians and ridiculed his Islamophobic persona. “The whole world knows that France is allied with the Turks,” thundered one passage. Far from spearheading efforts to drive the Ottoman Empire out of Europe, the text suggested, Louis XIV was in the midst of depopulating his own realm and tearing down Protestant temples “to make them into mosques” that venerated “Mahomet and his Alcoran.” It continued, “Behold the French and very Christian religion, a far cry from that of which they crow.”34
A satirical poster attributed to the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe made a similar argument about the king's betrayal of Christians in favor of Muslims by depicting a bare‐bottomed Louis XIV in a sun‐emblazoned turban, precariously perched on a massive globe.35 A satirical medal made in Germany showed him prostrating himself before the Algerian dey, the Latin title Gallia Supplex (France is suppliant) inverting that of the royal original, which had commemorated France's victory over “pirates” from North Africa.36 A satirical ballad and a satirical tract published in England vilified the “Most Christian King” as the “Most Christian Turk.”37 Although Louis XIV himself was reportedly amused by some of these parodies and even added “insolent medals” to his own collection, other members of his court were less nonchalant, finding them “injurious to government, and prejudicial to the truth of history” or else worrying that in Protestant Europe gruesome pictures of tormented Huguenots were being “used to animate the common people.”38
No Muslims answered French visual claims with analogous imagery. That is not because they inhabited closed‐off spheres. News circulated between Europe and Islamic lands via voluntary and involuntary migrants, diplomats, merchants, and other intermediaries.39 Meanwhile, as Junko Thérèse Takeda shows in her contribution to this forum, Louis XIV had an array of would‐be mediators and appointed agents on the ground from Meknes to Isfahan working with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success to further the king's missionary ambitions, commercial agenda, and political standing against Catholic and Protestant adversaries without getting on the wrong side of Sunni or Shia authorities. For instance, during his training in Aleppo to become a court translator like his father, and a decade before accompanying a series of French admirals during assaults on Algiers and Tripoli, François Pétis de La Croix authored an Arabic‐language pamphlet aimed at urban elites in major Ottoman cities.40 It was intended to refute Dutch anti‐Ludovician aspersions and highlight the “heroic deeds” of France's Catholic king: nemesis of “the cursed Calvin, may God forsake him until Judgment Day.”41 Once renegotiated capitulations in 1673 ratified France's status as guardian of Christian holy places and protector of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, royal representatives pushed even harder to further the strategic and symbolic priorities of Louis XIV. That meant, among other efforts, trying to sway Eastern Christians toward Latin‐rite Catholicism and promoting the cult of Louis IX, or Saint Louis, the king's canonized ancestor who died on crusade outside Tunis and became the patron saint of French chapels around the world.42
Ottoman and Moroccan subjects laboring on the royal galleys may not have produced visual rebuttals, but they did object in writing to being made pawns in an anti‐Muslim campaign on behalf of Louis XIV. Indeed, despite French attempts at censorship—plus a 1681 order forbidding ship captains in Marseille from transporting “letters emanating from enslaved Turks”—complaints about physical mistreatment, illegal detention, improper burial, and involuntary conversion did make it across the Mediterranean.43 While only a few intercepted originals survive, most from the eighteenth century, extensive diplomatic correspondence attests to their number and influence in earlier decades. In a memoir proposing himself for a translator post, the polyglot jack‐of‐all‐trades Laurent d'Arvieux—best known today as Molière's source for the “Turkish scene” in Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670)—describes having read through “eight hundred Turkish, Arabic and Mauritanian letters” sent to Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli in the 1680s. In his recollection, he had scrapped a large portion of them, whether because they “expressed false ideas about the glory and power of His Majesty” or because they seemed too hostile to Islam. The correspondence from Muslim galley slaves, he insisted, “would exaggerate the [level of] scorn we have here for their religion and for their prophet, the insults to which they were subjected, [and] the inhumanity with which their brothers were buried after dying from all sorts of miseries and cruelties.”44 In other words, Arvieux had used his linguistic abilities and best judgment to suppress reception in North Africa of some aspects of the very message that royal almanacs from 1686, 1687, and 1688 had attempted to spread in France and beyond.
By 1685 authorities in Marseille knew from experience that intelligence circulated by Muslim galley slaves could be dangerous, threatening Christian counterparts held across North Africa and members of French overseas trading communities with physical retaliation, monetary fines, and other penalties. Such reports, substantiated or not, could even trigger war. In part because the government of the Ottoman Empire had largely renounced responsibility for the piracy committed by inhabitants of its westernmost provinces, which by the second half of the seventeenth century functioned as quasi‐autonomous city‐states, France had established independent diplomatic relations with Ottoman Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli and with the kingdom of Morocco.45 Still, though bilateral treaties made provision for exchanging captives, the crown was loath to relinquish able‐bodied Muslim rowers on whom galleys physically and symbolically relied, and used subterfuge to avoid compliance. When the dey of Algiers was tipped off in 1681 that some of his enslaved subjects promised freedom had instead been sent on a naval campaign, he unleashed his corsairs against French targets at sea. The resulting conflicts—one of them memorialized in a deceptively exultant wall almanac for 1683—saw hundreds of Frenchmen captured, French commerce damaged, and France's consul executed at the mouth of cannon.46
Thus, even as two royal decrees aimed at coercing baptism among Huguenots and West Africans were in development on both sides of the Atlantic, officials on the Mediterranean rushed to discredit a rumor about a Tunisian girl compelled to become a Catholic in France.47 Once again, it seemed, the life of a French consul was at stake. When a Tripolitan oarsman from the galley Patronne was summoned to put his name to a statement addressed to the dey of Tunis, the use of violence for generating politically useful testimony from esclaves turcs was already well established. It is no wonder, then, that Agy (hajj) Abdallah swore, “Never have I seen or heard about the consul or anyone else bringing girls from Tunis or anywhere to Marseille or making a single Turk Christian by force.”48 Presumably composed or at least signed under duress, his letter gestures toward the delicate balance Louis XIV's promoters sought to strike—in boasting about the subjugation (and conversion) of Muslims to one constituency and concealing it from another.
Conclusion
Noel Malcolm describes Muslims as “useful enemies” who helped early modern Europeans evaluate the positives and negatives of their own political structures, social practices, and cultural assumptions while identifying the boundaries and meaning of heresy.49 Muslims in late seventeenth‐century France, in fact, often played multiple roles—in print and in person. It was partly because Ottoman sultans had so long served as useful allies for French kings in maintaining profitable Mediterranean trade and in curtailing the power of Habsburg Spain that Louis XIV refused to join the Holy League. And it was partly the ongoing relationship between France and the Ottoman Empire that gave so many artists, missionaries, diplomats, and others in Louis XIV's orbit an opening for exploiting Turkish soldiers, North African corsairs, Catholic catechumens, and esclaves turcs—as well as the Prophet Muhammad—to burnish the monarch's image further tarnished by the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
In the 1680s, in wall almanacs and aboard royal galleys, the coupling of subjugated Muslims and Protestants manifested Louis XIV's religious zeal as well as his ambitions for Mediterranean and global dominion. Still, some differences in the treatment and representation of non‐Catholics may reflect the incommensurability in the political power wielded by members of the two groups, and the degree of identification French Catholics felt with Huguenots. That is, however risky it was to royal interests to put denigrated and defeated Muslims on display, it was riskier to portray the terror that the “Most Christian King” was inflicting on his Reformed subjects.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the editors of FHS and the anonymous reviewers for their clarifying comments. She is also grateful to Elizabeth Casteen, Ian Coller, Ethan Katz, Meredith Martin, Natividad Planas, Elliot Posner, Junko Thérèse Takeda, and the Faculty Writing Group sponsored by Case Western Reserve University's Baker‐Nord Center for the Humanities.
Notes
Déclaration du roy.
E.g., La Rochelle, Mar. 2, 1655: “Mustapha . . . natif d'Alger” (Archives Départementales de la Charente‐Maritime, E40); London, May 2, 1658: a “Turke” christened Armand Adrian (Espagne, Joyfull Convert); Montauban, Feb. 29, 1660: Amet Maroque (from Morocco) renamed Michel (cited in [Rey‐Lescure], “Conversion d'un Turc”). Recent discussions of Huguenots evangelizing Muslims include Tingle, “Conversion of Infidels and Heretics”; Dieleman, “‘Toutefois et quand il aura plû à Dieu’”; and Léchot, Luther et Mahomet, 252–60.
Veinstein, “Les capitulations franco‐ottomanes”; White, Piracy and Law, pt. 2. In “Le second siège de Vienne” Jean Bérenger debunks theories that Louis XIV orchestrated the Ottoman offensive.
Quoting Linden, “Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.” See, e.g., Wolf, Louis XIV, 390, 394; Labrousse, La Révocation de l'Edit de Nantes, 180–81; and Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France, 138, 158.
Martin and Weiss, “‘Turks’ on Display,” 104–6, and Martin and Weiss, Sun King at Sea, 102–7, 137–44, together reproduce and discuss all three almanac prints, but this is the first article to bring them into conversation with one another.
On Alain Mantandon's and Peter Wagner's notion of “iconotexts” as applied to earlier seventeenth‐century French prints, see Sandberg, Warrior Pursuits.
The leading expert on Louis XIV–era wall almanacs is Maxime Préaud. Unfortunately, I could not consult his newest compilation, Louis le Grand, la terreur et l'admiration de l'univers, while preparing this article.
Préaud surmises the price of 6 sols from a verse on a 1679 almanac (Les effets du soleil, 11–13). Claude Marin Saugrain reproduces an August 1686 edict (Code, 56).
Préaud offers contrasting assessments of almanacs, as meant for a clientele “surtout populaire” or for “the bourgeoisie rather than the lower classes” (Les effets du soleil, 12; “Printmaking under Louis XIV,” 13). Sophie Tonolo lists possible sites of display (“L'allégorie,” 49). Audrey Adamczak notes the status of almanacs as diplomatic presents (“Les almanachs gravés,” 67); Ferdinand Pouy points to one collection held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France compiled in Germany (Recherches sur les almanachs, 18–19).
Tonolo provides a recent count (“L'allégorie,” 49); Préaud mentions almanacs printed and sold in Lyon (Les effets du soleil, 16).
Ideas about possible court involvement include monetary subvention (Weigert, “Les almanachs royaux,” 25), oversight by a royal institution like the Petite Académie (Préaud in Fuhring et al., Kingdom of Images, 55), circulation of artistic models (Tonolo, “L'allégorie,” 52), and inspiration from official periodicals, such as the Gazette de France or the Mercure galant (Gillet, “Soumettre. Conquérir. Railler,” 252). According to Samantha Happé, an additional consideration must have been the marketplace (“Almanacs Illustrating Extraordinary Embassies,” 167–68). A dissenting voice (Adamczak, “Les almanachs gravés,” 69) suggests that almanacs did stray from “la politique de Louis XIV” in celebrating Habsburg victories over Ottomans.
Burke, Fabrication.
On this tendency from different perspectives, see Doumergue, Maillart‐Gosse, and Demole, Iconographie calvinienne, 178–80; Préaud, Les effets du soleil, 25; and Arkoun, Histoire de l'islam, 406, 440–41. John Tolan also observes how Catholics and Protestants sometimes weaponized Islam as “closer to true Christianity than other deviant forms” (Faces of Muhammad, 101–3). Vanessa Selbach, by contrast, finds in one almanac print an example of French Catholic aversion to representing Protestant persecution too realistically and a corresponding preference for allegory (Selbach, “Religion,” 206–7).
Within a large literature, see Léchot, Luther et Mahomet; and Dimmock, Mythologies.
Turbet‐Delof, “Racine et les protestants,” 22.
Turbet‐Delof, “Racine et les protestants,” 22. Turbet‐Delof's La presse périodique and other publications identify manifestations of this strategy in French periodicals.
On the contemporaneous uses of purposeful disinformation in the Mercure galant, see Steinberger, “‘Fake News.’”
According to the legend, the Venetians executed three hundred Jews and two thousand Turks before routing the rest of the garrison and the pasha.
I.e., Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in Latin as Institutio christianae religionis (1536) and in French as Institution de la religion chrestienne (1541).
See, e.g., La destruction de l'heresie par la piété et le zele de Louis le Grand . . . (1686), which depicts a young female “truth” unmasking heresy, figured as an elderly Medusa with sagging breasts, and a kneeling Calvin resting his hand on his text, dubbed the “Huguenot Bible.” Thanks to Elizabeth Casteen for noticing Calvin's feminized posture in the Landry almanac and relating it to depictions of Esther and Mary.
Note the parallel scenario imagined for the recently deceased Colbert, disappointed to learn of Vienna's salvation, in the Dutch‐printed Entretien dans le royaume des tenebres: Sur les affaires du temps, entre Mahomet et Mr. Colbert . . . (Cologne, 1683).
Per Matthew Dimmock, polemics impugning Muhammad as an impostor became more common in seventeenth‐century England by way of France (Mythologies, 170–82), but as Tolan points out (crediting Ruth Stawarz‐Luginbuehl), their origins lay in the late Middle Ages (Faces of Muhammad, 66, 109, 278n21).
Archives Nationales (hereafter AN), Marine B6 8, B6 18–20, B7 59.
Service Historique de la Défense, Toulon 10106 bis, identifies 3353 on the Victoire as “aged twenty‐two years, of good size and strong, fat face having a birthmark [?] under his right eye and black hair.” Sent by the French consul in Livorno aboard a merchant vessel from Marseille, he had arrived on December 23, 1686, and, according to marginalia, died in a Saint Malo hospital on June 17, 1697.
Martin and Weiss, Sun King at Sea, 29–31. Samuel Mours tracks the numbers of Huguenot fugitives condemned to the galleys as 155 (1686), 176 (1687), 73 (1688), 196 (1689), with the figure climbing in the early eighteenth century before diminishing over the following decades (“Note sur les galériens protestants,” 178n1).
Martin, “Mirror Reflections”; Happé, “Almanacs Illustrating Extraordinary Embassies.”
E.g., La prise de Bude (1687) and L'audience donnée par le roy aux ambassadeurs du roy de Siam à Versailles . . . (1687), whose bottom half celebrates Catholic missions to the Indies, the defeat of Protestants in Savoy, and the distribution of books and pensions to “nouveaux convertis” (Protestants reconciled to Catholicism), as noted in Bruckbauer, “Ambassadors and Missionaries, Converts and Infidels.”
The number of esclaves turcs baptized in Marseille jumped from seven in 1685 to twenty‐five in 1686, according to Xambo, “‘Vuyder la ville,’” 298.
Seignelay to Charles‐Gaspard‐Guillaume de Vintimille du Luc, bishop of Marseille, Versailles, Feb. 23, 1685, AN, Marine B6 17, fol. 54. Thomas Herabied was sent to Marseille by the Vatican as censor over the Armenian printing press, a project approved by Louis XIV as part of an effort to draw silk merchants to the city. On Herabied's run‐in with royal authorities and role as confessor to galley slaves and Armenian Catholics, see Aslanian, Early Modernity and Mobility, 208–14. In 1686, as an incentive for conversion, Christianized Turks (Turcs faits chrestiens) began receiving daily alms. See naval minister Jean‐Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, to galley intendant Michel Bégon, Versailles, Feb. 20, 1686, AN, Marine B6 18, fols. 63r–66r.
Mercure galant 1 (1686): 118–19.
Gazette de France (1687): 256.
McShea, Apostles of Empire, 89; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 145–49; Seignelay to Lazarist chaplain Yves Lorance, Versailles, Sept. 17, 1688, AN, Marine B6 20, fol. 165v.
An August 25, 1686, letter from Huguenot galley slave and former conseiller du roi Louis de Marolles circulated in manuscript before appearing posthumously in Jacquelot, Histoire des souffrances, 62, 139–41. The Montauban minister Isaac Brassard recounted his 1687–88 Algerian captivity in a manuscript reproduced in Klarer, Barbary Captives, chap. 7. Several accounts by condemned Huguenots describe esclaves turcs acting as couriers to smuggle correspondence and money onto the galleys.
LBDEDE, La cour de France turbanisée, 40–41. In a similar vein is Les soupirs de la France esclave . . . (Amsterdam, 1689), sometimes attributed to Pierre Jurieu and Michel Le Vassor.
Meredith McNeil Hale discusses Romeyn de Hooghe's 1689 print Les monarches tombants (Birth of Modern Political Satire, chap. 3).
On official and satirical medals struck in different metals, see Martin and Weiss, Sun King at Sea, 109–11.
In impugning Louis XIV this way, the English and Dutch may have been following Catholic Continental example. Roughly contemporaneous with an anonymous ca. 1688 print, England's Memorial, which refers to “the Church of England, almost over throwne by the infernal councel of the Most Christian Turk” (aka Louis XIV), quoted in Boitel, L'image noire, is The Great Bastad (sic) from 1689: “They call me now, Most Christian Turk / Tho’ Turks they do abhor me.” The Most Christian Turk was published the next year. For a reported 1683 use of the phrase among northern Italians, see Marshall, “Mediterranean Connection,” 160.
Médailles, preface; Claude de Mesmes, comte d'Avaux, to Louis XIV, The Hague, Jan. 31, 1686, cited in Linden, Experiencing Exile, 225.
Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities; Hershenzon, Captive Sea.
On François Pétis de La Croix the Younger, see Sebag, “Sur deux orientalistes français du XVIIe siècle”; and Hossain, “Employment and Training.”
By contrast with Nabil Matar (“Protestant Reformation through Arab Eyes,” 803), Rosanne Baars and Josephine van den Bent (“Discrediting the Dutch,” 189, 192 and n45, 195) argue that Protestantism was not the pamphlet's main focus and point out that the Arabic phrase used to describe Calvin derives from curses directed against medieval crusaders.
Martin and Weiss, Sun King at Sea, 102–4; Armstrong, Holy Land, chap. 4.
Fournier, Inventaire, 266.
[Laurent d'Arvieux], “Mémoire pour établir dans la Marine des mers du Levant un secrétaire interprète du roy et professeur des langues orientales,” 1694, AN, Affaires Etrangères, BIII 235, fol. 50v. References to intercepted letters likewise appear in Arvieux, Mémoires du Chevalier d'Arvieux, 5:296, 350 and n4. On Arvieux, see, most recently, Cohen, “Career in Tongues.”
White, Piracy and Law, 169–71.
Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, chap. 4; Martin and Weiss, “Tale of Two Guns”; Martin and Weiss, Sun King at Sea, 97–99.
Former consul Etienne Ducoudray‐Plastrier to the Marseille Chambre of Commerce, Tunis, Jan. 21, 1685, Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie Métropolitaine Aix‐Marseille‐Provence J1412; consul Claude Lemaire to Seignelay, Tunis, Jan. 22, 1685, AN, Affaires Etrangères BI 1125; Seignelay to Provence intendant Thomas‐Alexandre de Morant, Versailles, Mar. 21, 1685, AN, Marine B6 17, fols. 82v–83r.
Colbert to galley intendant Jean‐Baptiste Brodart, Saint‐Germain‐en‐Laye, Mar. 31, 1682, AN, Marine B6 14, fol. 92r; copy of a translated letter from Agy Abdallah, slave on the Patronne, to Ahmed Chelebi, dey of Tunis, Marseille, Feb. 1685, Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie Métropolitaine Aix‐Marseille‐Provence, G50.
Malcolm, Useful Enemies.
