About the Book
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when
Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through
these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. Useful Enemies shows how the concept of 'oriental despotism' began as an attempt to turn the tables on a very positive analysis of Ottoman state power, and how, as it developed, it interacted with Western debates about monarchy and government. Noel Malcolm also shows how a negative portrayal of
Islam as a religion devised for political purposes was assimilated by radical writers, who extended the criticism to all religions, including Christianity itself.Examining the works of
many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Noel Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war. Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics. These Eastern enemies
were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which contributed significantly to the development of Western political thought.
Table of Contents:
Preface
1: The Fall of Constantinople, the Turks, and the Humanists
2: Views of Islam: standard assumptions
3: Habsburgs and Ottomans: 'Europe' and the conflict of empires
4: Protestantism, Calvinoturcism, and Turcopapalism
5: Alliances with the infidel
6: The new paradigm
7: Machiavelli and Reason of State
8: Campanella
9: Despotism I: the origins
10: Analyses of Ottoman strength and weakness
11: Justifications of warfare, and plans for war and peace
12: Islam as a political religion
13: Critical and radical uses of Islam I: Vanini to Toland
14: Critical and radical uses of Islam II: Bayle to Voltaire
15: Despotism II: seventeenth-century theories
16: Despotism III: Montesquieu
Conclusion
List of manuscripts
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Noel Malcolm read History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as Fellow of Gonville and Caius Colleege, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of the Spectator, and then chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001
and, since 2002, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He has published books and
articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a particular emphasis on Hobbes), and the history and culture of the Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.
Review :
Noel Malcolm has provided a masterpiece in the history of ideas...
The author is one of the great scholars of our time ... Malcolm has here uncovered an entirely new field of inquiry, ranging from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, and embracing many less familiar but fascinating thinkers en route...
A timely look at how the perceived threat of Islam shaped early modern Europe... This is a potentially polarising topic, ripe for ill-informed claims and tendentious commentary. Malcolm is one of the handful of people capable of taking it on with scholarly rigour and clarity... Anyone who wants to understand how we got to where we are today should read this book.
[A] wise and beautifully judged book...
With its breadth and perspicacity, this book will be the standard history for decades to come.
Useful Enemies is an exhaustive study of such uses of the Ottomans and Islam in early modern European political writing.
Noel Malcolm's impressive inquiry ... is remarkable for its insight, order and clarity of exposition.
Useful Enemies offers a balanced and nuanced view on how and why the Westerners perceived the otherness and how, over time, different authors and different testimonies about the Ottomans intertwined one with another in a construction of a complicate 'image'... This book also may be seen as an invitation for scholars to think about how the Ottomans were perceived in Eastern Europe.
Noel Malcolm's brilliant study ... a wealth of scholarship drawing on primary sources in many languages ... The book's importance is thus not only to do with its nuanced account of the varieties of western European responses to Islam - though this is valuable enough...
Learned and fascinating account...
[A] richly research and commendably lucid new book ... As with all Malcolm's work, the power of the underlying scholarship in Useful Enemies - the archives visited, the languages mastered - is deeply impressive. Perhaps still more impressive, however, is the way Malcolm has organised and shaped his material into a subtle, many-faceted exposition that is always clear and never feels forced or sophisticated...
An indispensable guide to that encounter that combines deep learning, refined historical judgment, and an elegant authorial voice. Malcolm describes his book as "a study of Western political thinking about Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period," roughly 1450 to 1750. But the book offers much more than that.
Useful Enemies provides a model for how a book that articulates its core objective with judicious precision can open a window, simultaneously, onto a landscape of intellectual cross-fertilization.
... impressive inquiry, which is remarkable for its insight, order and clarity of exposition... , strongly grounded on philological and historical inquiry.
Noel Malcolm displays an overwhelming erudition and vast linguistic abilities which underline why Useful Enemies will be a mandatory reference book for any scholar who, from now on, intends to study the interactions between the Ottomans and the Christian world. This book also may be seen as an invitation for scholars to think about how the Ottomans were perceived in Eastern Europe.
