FRENCH MILITARY RECONNAISSANCE IN THE OTTOMAN

1
FRENCH MILITARY RECONNAISSANCE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (18th & 19th
CENTURIES) AS A SOURCE FOR OUR KNOWLEDGE OF ANCIENT MONUMENTS.
##Put Lafitte Clave's stuff together, or draw attention to it??
Introduction
The nations of Europe have derived strength and security from the general improvement of human
reason, and the cultivation of the arts of peace and war; in the meantime, the spirit of mkilitary
enterprise has declined among the Turks; the vigorous age of their monarchy is past; and the
weakness of their empire has been exposed to their enemies, and parts of it have been invaded, or
wrested from them
1
France had the strongest trade interests in the Levant - from the Balkans and Greece, through Syria,
Egypt and Tripolitania to Algeria and Tunisia - of all European powers during the 17th and 18th
centuries
2
, and used her navy and her military readiness and reconnaissances in order to protect
them. An ally of the Ottoman Empire since 1535, French trade with that immense empire was some
50% of all her maritime trade. By the French Revolution, only Spain and America were more
important markets for her, and half the trade between Europe and the Empire was in the hands of
France
3
. Like other European powers, France wished to maintain the integrity of the ottoman
Empire because it was not in her interests to see it divided. France's premier position was
maintained by a varied mixture of diplomacy
4
, agreements - the capitulations - and the threat of
force; and the Ottoman Empire was a useful weapon against Russia and Austria. With Napoleon's
invasion of Egypt in 1798 that threat became a reality, subdued by the ignominious retreat and then
enhanced by the designs on the rest of Europe which unhinged the balance of power and presented
Turkey and the Balkans as a likely theatre of conflict between France and Russia. What is more,
Napoleon's actions, frequently contradictory and against traditional French loyalties, achieved the
otherwise difficult task of throwing Russia, long the Ottoman Empire's enemy, into alliance with
her
5
. The Levant, in other words, was to become in the 19th century the target of the expanding
empires of Britain (Egypt) and France (Algeria and Tunisia), whilst the long-brewing conflict with
Russia came to a head in the Crimea.
During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Ottoman military and technological skills declined, forcing
her to employ temporary consultants from the West for such tasks as cannon-founding, fortress-
building, the production of gunpowder and the training of troops in modern warfare and the use of
modern small arms. Thus 15 artillery experts were in the budget for 1527
6
; the French Ambassador
1
Rev. Robert Walpole, Memoirs relating to European and Asiatic Turkey, edited from manuscript journals, London
1817. Preliminary discourse on The Causes of the Weakness and Decline of the Turkish Monarchy, p.1.
2
P. Masson, Histoire du commerce francais dans le Levant au XVIIe siecle, Paris 1896; ibidem, Histoire du commerce
francais dans le Levant au XVIIIe siecle, Paris 1911;
3
P. Mansel, Constantinople: city of the world's desire, 1453-1925, London 1995, p. 114;
4
cf. A. Vandal, Les voyages du Marquis de Nointel (1670-1680), Paris 1900, pp.1-21: "Louis XIV et l'Orient";
5
V. J. Puryear, Napoleon and the Dardanelles, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1951, passim.
6
R. Murphey, "The Ottoman attitude towards the adoption of Western technology", in J-L Bacque-Grammont & P.
Dumont editors, Contributions a l'histoire economique et sociale de l'Empire ottoman, Louvain 1983, pp.287-298.

2
himself trained Ottoman artillery for the Russian War of 1548-50, and established naval operations
against Spain in 1551-5
7
; French embassies offered aid in the 17th century, and the Embassy of
Mehmed Efendi to France in 1720-21 included military manoeuvres as well as the study of
fortification models
8
; and the series of military reverses the Ottoman Empire suffered in the 18th
century occasioned new efforts at military reform and modernisation, such as Russian, prussian and
British military missions in 1834 - too late, since her defeats triggered the Eastern Question,
namely the long agony fo the dismemberment of the Empire which concluded with the Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923
9
.
The setting for this paper is therefore an Empire in gradual decline faced by increasingly
industrialised European powers seeking markets for their products, and willing to use their armies
and navies as an arm of commerce. In what was a Mediterranean (and, indeed, Europe-wide) game
of chess, with ever-moving alliances, the French Ministry of War attempted to keep up-to-date on
Ottoman military and navalcapabilities by studying the strengths and weaknesses of the Ottoman
Empire, by mapping possible invasion routes, and by recording the reports on defences and
weapons composed by officers lent to the Turks. In 1783 and 1784, for example, engineers,
artillery officers and sappers arrived in Turkey, to train officers, found cannon, and build
fortifications, within a School of Military Engineering
10
. Many such officers were well-educated,
and intensely interested in the antiquities they came across, not only because of a classical
education, but also because such antiquities (roads, forts, cisterns, aqueducts) might well be needed
in the event of invasion, as proved to be the case when they invaded Algeria in 1830
11
. Since their
reports often write at great length on such matters, the Ministry was clearly of the same mind. We
shall examine below some examples of the reports generated during this mission.
Such reconnaissance reports are valuable today because they are often the only record of many
antiquities since destroyed, or of the more pristine states of monuments since become dilapidated.
Through them we can gain a much fuller picture both of the “antique landscape” of the Ottoman
Empire than is available from most 18thC or 19thC travel writers or (later) archaeologists, and of
how the Ottomans continued in many instances to use a “military landscape” bequeathed to them
by Rome and Byzantium. To take as an introductory example the most basic of all, namely roads:
Western Europe was giving great attention to transport questions in the 18th century, even to the
extent of investigating building roads on the Roman model. That such Roman-style construction
was an unattainable ideal because too expensive, is reflected partly in the recourse to canal-
building. But in the Ottoman Empire, roads were especially important, nothing equivalent having
replaced what the Romans had built well over a millennium beforehand. To locate and use such
surviving roads was therefore essential for any army. Their lack was a cause for lament, as in an
1807 Itinerary from Spalato to Constantinople
12
: Du reste les chemins sont tel, qu'on pouvoit dire
qu'il n'y en a point et qu'il y en a partout…
7
D. M. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk: a pattern of alliances 1350-1700, Liverpool 1951, pp. 124, 127.
8
F. M. Gocek, East encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century, New York 1987, pp.58, 86.
9
R. Mantran, "Les debuts de la Question d'Orient (1774-1839)", in R. Mantran editor, Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman,
Paris 1989, pp.421-458.
10
L. Pingaud, Choiseul-Gouffier, la France en Orient sous Louis XVI, Paris 1877, pp. 95ff; cited in Masson, Histoire
du commerce francais dans le Levant au XVIIIe siecle, p.275;
11
M. Greenhalgh, "The new centurions: French reliance on the Roman past during the conquest of Algeria", War &
Society 16.1, May 1998, pp.1-28.
12
Genie, Article 14: Turquie, Carton II, 1786-1838.

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Apart from the general watching interest they had in an Empire which occupied a substantial
proportion of the Mediterranean coastline, three specific factors throw into relief the attention the
French gave to the often venerable fortifications of the Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans, through
present-day Turkey, and round into Syria and as far west as Algeria. The first was the need to
assess the military strength of the Empire, especially the likely access-routes plan through the
Dardanelles or the Balkans, or perhaps through Syria; and, given the power of Russia, to assess her
defensibility from the North and East as well. The second was the lack of a true fortress-building
tradition on the part of the Turks: they had often been happy either to mend and update Roman and
Byzantine constructions, and to employ Europeans to build fortresses for them; likewise their
frequent use of artillery of monstrous size was mitigated by a tendency not to maintain it well. This
leads to the third factor, namely the employment of French officers to train their troops, as they
were to do German officers in this century. In the 18th century, the French sometimes served as
adjuncts to the Turkish military, helping with artillery training, and also with surveys of military
installations. These, of course, also found their way into the archives of the French Ministere de la
Guerre. Advisors were withdrawn when Austria declared was on the Ottoman Empire in 1788. This
meant that an observant officer corps, often very interested in the Classics, could travel the country
and report back to France with written reconnaissances The acceptance by the French Ministry of
War of “archaeological asides” in large quantities in the reports they received is a reflection not
only of how the fabric of Antiquity was still in use in the Ottoman Empire, but also of how the
practican and the antiquarian are often indissolubly mixed in the reports the offers sent. The very
size of the Ottoman Empire therefore dictated the spread of French interests in war materiel and
fortifications from the Greek Islands and the Balkans to the Black Sea, and from Eastern Turkey
down intoSyria - and hence the range of Greek and Roman antiquities of which the French were to
offer accounts.
The Intellectual Background for Reconnaissances Travel and the Mapping of France
It is important to bear in mind the scholarly context for such reconnaissances, which are predicated
upon assumptions about military endeavour and horizons which have since faded. The 18th & 19th
centuries regarded scholarship and treasure-hunting as appropriate activities for their military,
blessed by the ancients. Alexander took scholars with him on campaign, to write accounts of his
campaigns as well as to study the art and architecture which their master might wish to imitate;
Napoleon did likewise in Egypt, and started a modest Egyptomania back in France. The Romans
had collected trophies of their conquests; so did the French. Royal vessels took antiquities from
Syria and Libya to ornament Versailles; and much of Britain's antiquarian loot was conveyed by the
Royal Navy. Europe was transfixed by the vision of ancient Greece, and tended (often unfairly) to
see Islam as the ignorant destroyer of classical remains. Choiseuil-Gouffier, French Ambassador to
the Sublime Porte, was more an archaeologist than a diplomat, and in 1765 actually exhorted
Catherine the Great of Russia to create an hellenic state on the ruins of Turkey, allied to Russia - to
rescue part of classical civilisation, in other words, from what he considered the tyranny of the
Turk
13
. This idea bore some fruit, since her second grandson of 1779 was baptised Constantine -
not far from a deliberate vow to recapture Constantinople for Christianity and Russia, the more so
13
P. Masson, Histoire du commerce francais dans le Levant au XVIIIe siecle, Paris 1911, p. 274;

4
since talks were held with Joseph II of Austria in 1780 with this end in view, the annexation of the
Crimea in 1783 and the loss to Russia of some Black Sea forts in 1792 being part of the process.
Part of Choiseul-Gouffier's idea of an hellenic state also came to pass, when the Greek War of
Independence (1821-30, with some Russian intervention) led to the birth of the Greek state on the
ruins of part of the Ottoman Empire, and the destruction of the Ottoman Fleet by Britain, France
and Russia at Navarino in 1827.
For men such as Choiseul-Gouffier, the classical past was much more immediate than the Middle
Ages or Renaissance, and with more impressive monuments. With the development of civilian
travel in the 18th century, usually for architectural or archaeological investigation, the military
could join skills with civilians in making high-quality reconnaissances, and considered themselves
adequately prepared only when armed with the appropriate ancient authors (whose works, they
believed, could offer important information about strategy, battles and monuments) and the modern
travellers who frequently offered commentaries on the ancient authors as well as on what they
actually saw on their travels. Napoleon took this enthusiasm for the past slightly to extremes on the
Expedition de l'Egypte. Not only was a complete set of copies of dispatches, Orders of the Day, etc
kept so that the history of the campaign could the more easily be written, but books were sent out to
him in Cairo
14
, amongst them the complete works of Voltaire and Winckelmann, various military
memoires, Gosselin's Geographie des Grecs, and La Gardette's Ruines de Paestum, presumably
because this was the closest information that could be found to Egyptian architecture. But these
were mere afterthoughts, for Bonaparte took a library of no fewer than 560 works (not volumes),
following a shopping expedition costing over 192,000 livres
15
. The works included the
Encyclopedie (1,980 livres), the complete Memoires de l'Academie des Sciences (1,650l), the
Memoires de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (480l), Choiseuil Gouffier's enormously
popular Voyage Pittoresque de la Grece, and the Voyages of Captain Cook. The seven parts of the
Choix des costumes des peuples de l'Antiquite might well have offered some background on Egypt
- but could the nine in-folio volumes of the prints of Piranesi have been for anything other than the
paragone between what the Romans had achieved and what he, Bonaparte, would accomplish?
That such big spending on books bore fruit is evident from the monumental Description de l'Egypte
which is in a mammer of speaking France's true monument to her invasion of Egypt. And the spirit
it inculcated is reflected in the works produced by Bonaparte's officers. Chef d'Escadran Schaouani
is a good example, producing a large quantity of notebooks
16
of what he saw in Egypt and further
West, taken during reconnaissances, some with the help of the Ingenieurs-Geographes of the
Army. These included not only familiar Egyptian antiquities, but also Roman forts the
measurements of which he gave, perhaps because he thought they might be used to house troops for
defence.He complains in bad French of his lack of instruments, interpreter, pencils, pens, or chinese
ink, and the slog of folloowing the marching troops for nine to twelve hours every day, frappe a
chaque pas par de nouveaux objets qui commandaient l'attention; les haltes etaient a peine un
moment de repos…But then, as we learn from the biographical notes he gives us
17
, he was probably
well over 50, having started his drawing of antique ruins in 1746.
14
B6-83: Expedition de l'Egypte: Copies ordonnes par le Premier Consul pour servir a l'histoire des Campagnes
d'Egypte et de Syrie, 1798-1801. Cf chapter I for the books despatched.
15
6B-80, Toise des depenses faites la le Citoyen Caffarelli, General de brigade du Genie d'apres les ordres du General
en Chef Buonaparte, sur les fonds assures par le Ministre de la Guerre, pour l'expedition de la Mediterannee, An 6.
16
B6-79: Memoires et documents divers sur l'Egypte provenant du Chef d'Escadron Schouani, 1798.
17
B6-79, Egypte: Notes particuliers et observations de … Schouani.

5
Such high-quality preparation evidently became a tradition, surviving the fall of Napoleon, for he
was not the only officer to read the works of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in
Africa. Captain Delambe, writing from Bone, where he was in charge from January 1833 to
November 1839, reported
18
on 29 March 1836 to the commanding General on a booklet published
by the Academie, entitled L'Histoire de l'Afrique Septentrionelle. He has read it with interest,
because all his leisure moments have been devoted to this same topic, discovering les noms actuels
de la plus grande partie des ruines romaines qui sont repandues de toutes parties par le sol, noms
qui peuvent et doivent servir a retrouver les noms primitifs. Such work has had a practical outcome,
allowing him to correct many errors on the map of Colonel Lapie WHAT DATE? - and he has
evidently learned Arabic so as to be able to converse with the locals. Thus we find the instructions
19
given to two Ingenieurs Geographes who were to accompany M. Michaud to the Orient in 1830.
They should learn the language, read earlier travellers and ancient historians; and since Michaud's
research was the Crusades, they were ordered d’entreprendre d’autres explorations destinees a
perfectionner la geographie encore si peu connu de l’Asie Mineure centrale, de la Syrie et de
l’Arabie petree; ces contrees qui ont ete le theatre de si grands evenements depuis l’existence des
anciens empires jusqu’a nos jours. But why such solicitude for battles long ago? Because it was
realised that here (just as in Algeria), crusader fortresses and their predecessors and successors still
offered formidable obstacles to modern armies. Indeed, scholarship could be served at the same
time as military reconnaissance, as is clearly implied by their further instructions: faire connaitre,
comme chose fort importante, les positions militaires bonnes a occuper pour la defense du pays. Ce
serait le cas de comparer ici ce qu’on sait des marches et des operations militaires des anciens
avec les dispositions qu’il conviendrait de faire a prfesent, en egard aux formes du terrain, ainsi
qu’a la tactique et aux armes modernes. In fact, from the military point of view, this is a
thoroughly modern reconnaissance, using the Crusades as a convenient skeleton, since the
landscape, natural resources, fortifications and hence strategy have not changed. This same
symbiosis between what the Romans did, and what the French would do in their footsteps, is a
perpetual theme in their conquest of Algeria.
But if Napoleon provided the picture of the complete soldier-scholar, what formal training was
offered for officers to undertake reconnaissances? The only general instructions that appear to have
survived are from 1828
20
, but these might echo what was expected in the previous century.
Reconnaissances should include a careful note of les especes et les qualites des materiaux qu'on
peut trouver sur les lieux pour la construction, tels que pierres, bois, metaux, etc. Details of what to
put on sketch-maps are also given: Les maisons, ponts en pierre et toutes les constructions en
maconnerie seront mis au trait et laves en rouge - carte rouge, one might say, for including
antiquities which, in many locations, were the only masonry constructions existing. Reports should
conclude with a chapter of considerations militaires, that is, une relation des evenements militaires
anciens et recens don’t le terrain leve ou les environs aura ete le theatre. A defaut d'evenenens
militaires, on rappellera ce que l'histoire du pays pourrait offrir d'interressant.
18
3M541, Depot de la Guerre: Algerie 1830-1836.
19
MR1619 Turquie 1619/33: Instruction pour les deux officiers du Corps royal des Ingenieurs geographes destines a
accompagner M. Michaud, membre de l’Academie Francaise, dans son voyage en Orient, 1830.
20
MR1978/4, Comie Consultatif du Corps Royal: Extrait de l'Instruction pour l'execution des reconnaissances
Militaires don’t les Officiers du Corps Royal d'Etat Major doivent etre charges, 1828.