IntroductionMisunderstandings are the medium in which the noncommunicable is communicated. --Theodor Adorno, Prisms It is the spring of 2013, the Rijksmuseum is still closed for renovation, but I am in Amsterdam to see a cache of paintings of Ottoman life by the French-Flemish artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. The curator in charge of the Calkoen collection has generously been standing by as I work painting by painting in the museum stores. On my final day she has kindly made an appointment for me to go to the office of the museum''s director to see one final painting. To my surprise, he is there. He walks over and greets me warmly, and the three of us stand back to look at the enormous View of Istanbul from the Dutch Embassy at Pera (ca. 1720-37), which is bolted to the wall opposite his desk (Plate 1). It is a labored, confused painting.

Time passes. In so many words, the director indicates that he will be happy not to look at this painting when he moves to his new office. Since I have occasioned reflection upon a daily irritant, I suddenly feel compelled to speak about this picture that I have only just seen, about why I am here. By any standards, Vanmour''s monumental landscape is a remarkably clumsy picture. Something about the task of representing Istanbul on this scale proved to be beyond his means. The stone balcony in the foreground is perhaps the most discomfiting element of the painting: the tiles and stones defy any coherent sense of perspective and these spatial deformations are only exacerbated when we attempt to make sense of the roofs and houses beyond. Furthermore, the figures are not terribly well integrated. The central group of Europeans discoursing about what lies before them seems to come from an entirely different representational economy than the laborer on the left and the man with the horse on the right.

These figures appear to be directly out of contemporary costume albums, and there is no apparent rationale for their presence here except as signs of exoticism. One could say something similar about the smoking figure seated on the balustrade--unlike the Europeans whose gestures connect them to the scene, he could be anywhere in the Ottoman dominions. But these disjunctions between the figures and their relative distance from one another are revealing because they demonstrate a failure to successfully devise a pictorial solution for intercultural relations. The very thing that unsettles this picture--its dubious command of the foreground elements--points to that which unsettles any European artist''s practice in this space. How can the descriptive techniques of Dutch and French painting (Vanmour was trained in these traditions), and the sociability that they imply, be modified to adequately render the artist''s and the viewer''s situation. I use the word "situation" advisedly because one of the thrilling things about this picture is the degree to which the image gains confidence the farther one moves into the landscape and away from the city. In other words, the evocative treatment of the mountains and the Bosphorus in the background highlights the aesthetic struggle to represent the urban world of Istanbul. That the primary elements that gave order to the Western aesthetic tradition--perspective and ocular description--are vexed by what would seem to be the simple task of rendering this balcony gives a very clear sense of the degree to which Vanmour and other cultural practitioners were forced to reimagine their practice.

We could suggest that hybridizing the representational economies of landscape and the costume painting into the same picture has generated a spatial deformation, a kind of representational disturbance that actually captures the vexed relationship between European and Ottoman subjects in this represented space. Europeans and Ottomans had a great deal of mediated social intercourse in the capital, but devising a genre capable of capturing this extraordinary ordinariness called into question the way that social relations were represented. Time and again in this book we will encounter examples of this kind of representational discord. My objective is to track these disturbances as they surface in order reflect upon what they indicate about intercultural sociability and about mediation itself. My contention is that these representational disturbances, or vexed mediations, offer auspicious sites for considering social relations beyond fantasies of the selfsame: they are historical gifts for a time when the urgency of speaking, living, and being with others demands a fierce reckoning with Europe''s own preconceptions of discursive legitimacy. Such an exercise poses significant challenges for historical narration and conceptual organization. Rather than offering a grand narrative of European-Ottoman relations or a rigid conceptual framework to organize the archive, I have chosen to explore a series of intimate encounters, some of which have large geopolitical ramifications, using the tools of microhistory and cultural analysis. Thus, the overall effect is far more constellatory than cumulative.

Every chapter of this book follows the fortunes of notable European--primarily British, Dutch, and French--diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. These ambassadors were charged not only with representing their respective states at the Ottoman court, but also with maintaining vital trade relations in the Mediterranean. At times I look at their activities in great detail, because their complex mediatory role forces us to think carefully about intercultural communication itself, both in its intimate performance and in its geopolitical significance. That said, every chapter of this book also attends to extremely important aesthetic representations of the Ottoman Empire produced by or under the aegis of these same diplomats. The European embassies in Pera were multifarious social spaces in which artists and writers engaged with the foreign world around them. Engagement in this sense has to do with how genres and forms of representation were deployed and modified to take stock of the spaces and subjects under Ottoman rule. As I work through a very mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and even architecture, I argue that the repository of European representations of Ottoman culture constitutes a valuable resource not only for Ottoman cultural history but also for media archaeology in the eighteenth century. One of the primary theses of this book is that engagement and the later disengagement with the Ottoman world forced symptomatic alterations and deformations in European genres and media.

By closely analyzing these deformations and modifications it is possible to scale out to larger claims, first, about intercultural communication and sociability and, second, about recurrent patterns of national and imperial exchange. In its most provocative moments, this book argues that understanding European modernity requires an engagement with the Ottoman Empire. These are large claims, especially since many of the materials I am analyzing here have either been marginalized in mainstream eighteenth-century studies, or they have only ever been handled in an illustrative fashion. Some of the texts, paintings, and engravings that I deal with have appeared in essays and books as somewhat transparent representations of social practices--this is especially the case of the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. One of my primary objectives in this book is to radically complicate the relationship between these representations and that which they represent. There is a referential relationship between the images and texts I consider and the subjects they represent, but that relationship is tempered as much by European practices and expectations as it is by any challenges posed by the referent. Yet those challenges are manifest. Engaging the Ottoman world involves combined acts of translation, mediation, and invention such that these representations often draw attention to their own vexed status.

And that vexation is only complicated further by the changing political desires vis-à-vis the Ottoman state. The eight chapters that make up this book intermittently work very close to the evidence and draw back for the long view, a tactic employed by many of the representations I consider. What this means is that the book itself is faced with a challenging balancing act between historical narration and cultural analysis. It is my strong belief that achieving this balance is crucial for understanding the importance of the interface between European and Ottoman culture in this period for we will be encountering far more similarities than conventional wisdom and much scholarship has led us to believe. In the ensuing sections of this Introduction I sketch out three primary propositions that weave their way through all of the chapters: (1) careful attention to formal problematics and generic change allows us to discern important social and cultural tensions in this mediated archive; (2) scrutiny of spatial and temporal itineraries reveals a complex relation to Europe''s past that haunts many of my primary observers'' present experiences in Ottoman lands; and (3) matters of affect and power are crucial for understanding both formal deformation and historical consciousness in these works because they are so thoroughly entwined with wartime. Formal disturbances and collisions often point to competing temporal itineraries that ultimately leave an affective imprint of deep historical significance. As these formal, historical, and affective concerns coalesce, I think we can discern crucial developments both in the formation of "Europe" as a concept and in the representation of the Ottoman Empire. In many ways, Europeans representing Ottoman.