Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 JEMH 9,1-2Also available online www.brill.nl

ORIENTAL DESPOTISM AND EUROPEAN ORIENTALISM:BOTERO TO MONTESQUIEU

JOAN-PAU RUBISLondon School of Economics and Political Science

A

The issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is farfrom simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to dis-tinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizationsof the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neitherfundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientic and technological progress, but polit-ical and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fan-tasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, becauseboth the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessingthe way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to theEnlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme thatblinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling toolfor interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a commonintellectual purpose despite important dierences of opinion in Europe about the natureof royal power.

True and legitimate Government is necessarily limited . . . the observance of laws,the preservation of liberty and the love of ones country are the fertile sources ofall great things and of all ne actions.

Diderot, Encyclopdie

Oriental Despotism as a European Fantasy

Few examples within the history of ideas seem as likely to t withinthe controversial orientalist thesis popular in post-colonial historiog-raphy as the concept of oriental despotism, especially as it was famouslyformulated by Montesquieu (albeit ultimately on the basis of Aristotle)as central to the political thought of the Enlightenment. The historicalinuence of the concept which Montesquieu crystallized in the Esprit des lois needs little argument, since (as Franco Venturi showed) it waswidely discussed within the Enlightenment, and, for example, cast itsshadow upon the early justication and criticism of the British conquest

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1 F. Venturi, Oriental Despotism, Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 133-42.2 Alain Grossrichard, The Sultans Court: European Fantasies of the East (London, 1998).3 Voltaire, Dialogues between A B C (1769), conversation On Hobbes, Grotius

and Montesquieu, in Political Writings, ed. David Williams (Cambridge, 1994), 97.4 For a recent, balanced summary of the modern debate on orientalism, see A. Mace,

Orientalism (London, 2002), and for an informed re-assessment, J.J. Clarke, OrientalEnlightenment (London, 1997). I have expressed my own perspective in J.P. Rubis, Traveland Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge,2000).

of India.1 The case for treating the European image of Asian despo-tism as a pure fantasy, made by writers like Alain Grossrichard in hisStructure du srail (1979), is plausible enough, as it is rooted in contem-porary sources.2 As he notes, it was Voltaire who, reacting againstMontesquieu, wrote of despotic governments that it is quite wrong thatsuch a government exists and, it seems too, quite wrong to think thatit could ever exist, placing the issue of ctionalization at the heart ofthe criticism of European images of Asia.3 However, recent discussionsof orientalism, supported by an increasing body of historically-informedscholarship (contrasting with the largely ideological emphasis of the orig-inal debate), have made it clear that the issue of how European imagesof the East were formed, used, and contested is far form simple. WhilstVoltaire would seem to justify, at least in part, the critical emphasis oflater writers like Edward Said (whose Foucaultian perspective appearsin retrospect to be rather Voltaireian), in fact, I would argue, the his-tory of the concept of oriental despotism is still in need of reassessment.4

For the sake of clarity, the orientalist thesis can be broken downinto two propositions, which I will illustrate with reference to our case:

First, and above all, orientalism is a pseudo-science. European dis-courses about the East, and especially those concerned with suchsweeping concepts as oriental despotism, did not respond to a desireto understand Eastern realities. They were mainly concerned withEuropean issues and debates. For example, one may argue that it wasmainly because the monarchy of France under Louis XIV was seen asa threat to the liberty of its subjects and its neighbours that absolutemonarchy became a system of despotism in the writings of Huguenotmigrs and other critics of arbitrary power in the late 1680s and 1690s(the actual noun despotism was coined by Pierre Bayle at the turnof the eighteenth century, although the use of the adjective despoticto describe a particular kind of government had been widespread inthe seventeenth century). For a writer like Montesquieu, then, heir tothe internal opposition to the regime of Louis XIV after the disastrous

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5 For an intelligent discussion of Montesquieus disappointment with Venice and theidea of aristocratic republics, see D.W. Carrithers, Not So Virtuous Republics: Montesquieu,Venice and the Theory of Aristocratic Republicanism, Journal of the History of Ideas 52(1991): 245-68.

War of Spanish Succession, to elaborate the concept of oriental despo-tism served a purpose within a purely domestic context: it allowed himto claim that a monarchy could only be benecial and honorable if itwas kept within the constitutional limits of the European tradition. Thegure of the oriental despot was in fact necessary in order to persuadeMontesquieus readers into accepting his attempt to resuscitate a kindof mixed monarchy for France, in an age when an aristocratic or demo-cratic republic (Montesquieu believed) was no longer possible.5 Followingthis logic, it was also largely to defend the monarchy of Louis XIV thatVoltaire reacted against Montesquieus concept, not merely by insistingthat the kingdom of France was unlike the Ottoman empire (whichMontesquieu would have in principle granted), but more radicallyandcovering all possibilitiesthat neither France nor the Ottoman statecould ever be described as despotisms, because that kind of politicalsystem did not exist. In other words, this was a European debate aboutmonarchy in which the East was only present rhetorically.

Second, orientalism is also about the way negative representationsof others serve political agendas. The representation of the East asdespotic (or, alternatively, of small tribes elsewhere in the world asprimitive and savage) was not innocent: it supported claims ofEuropean superiority and eventually dominion. Thus, historically, ithelped support colonial imperialism, like the idea that since the Mughalemperor was a despot, and since there was no private property inIndia, the English East India Company could legitimately seek to takeover (by treaty and by some use of force) the revenues of Bengal. Theconcept of oriental despotism is especially relevant in that it allowedEuropeans to proclaim their superiority against the most powerful andimpressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East,Persia, India, and above all China, on grounds which were neither fun-damentally religious nor linked to sheer scientic and technologicalprogress, but political and moral. In other words, it allowed Europeansto create new claims to superiority in a terrain in which Eastern civi-lizations, especially China as witnessed from Marco Polo to the Jesuitmissionaries of the seventeenth century, had previously appealed toEuropean ideals of power, prosperity, order, and justice.

Obviously, these two propositions about orientalism are problematic.

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To begin with, they seem contradictory: if the European writer wasmainly concerned with interpreting European realities, like the consti-tution of France, he could hardly ne-tune the rhetoric or the politicalscience which were useful for the promotion of empire. Were Europeanimages of the East such as the idea of despotic regimes orientalistbecause of an underlying imperialist impulse, or because they were moreconcerned with European debates than with Asian realities? A colonialadministrator in British India might of course echo Montesquieus analy-sis of Asian despotism, but Montesquieu was not himself concerned withEuropean conquests in India. To solve this dichotomy, we would needto argue that whilst the denigration of the East could simultaneouslyserve an immediate intellectual agenda in Europe, and in a separatecontext legitimize a colonial policy, the crucial point is that it was essen-tially a European fantasy.

Was it, however, a fantasy? I do not believe that we can as histori-ans skip the issue, however uncomfortable. The pervasiveness of theidea of despotic rule, its appearance in a variety of contexts, suggestsa profound logic which must respond to more than the sheer continu-ity of Aristotles or any other writers inuence. At one level, there wasan early-modern intellectual context which made the concept highly relevant. Hence the starting point must be recognizing the remarkableconsensus in Europe about the desirability that monarchical power bekept within legal limits, even if there was a great deal of disagreementas to which precisely those limits should be. From this perspective, moreimportant than the history of a particular vocabulary about despo-tism is the uses to which the concept was put to, in a variety of con-texts; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fundamental concernwith setting limits to royal power often appears under the guise of crit-icism of tyrannical or absolute monarchical power (variations invocabulary may of course involve subtle alterations in meaning whichdeserve attention). A wider issue is the extent to which European con-cerns about the nature of monarchy were actually aected by observa-tion of non-European cultures, and by colonial experiences. This, inturn, requires exploring the relationship between the arguments of polit-ical writers and the sources, theoretical and empirical, that they used.In the case of Montesquieu, for example, the seventeenth-century travelwriters who largely informed his thoughtwriters like Franois Bernierare no less relevant than Aristotle or Bodin.

It will be my argument in this article that uncovering the history ofthe idea of despotism, and its application to Asian monarchies, requires

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6 R. Koebners classic article, Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 275-302, can stand as an exam-ple of an eort of historical reconstruction which, while in many ways still fundamen-tal, by focusing on political writers and their use of the concept of despotism, leavesquite a few gaps. The same can be said of Melvin Richters otherwise excellent article,Despotism, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973), 2:1-18. Neither looked at travelliterature, neglecting gures like Botero and Bernier, who are central to my story. Fora fuller perspective, however, see Jrgen Osterhammel, Die Entzaubrung Asiens. Europa unddie asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Mnich, 1998), 271-309.

7 In this respect, I must disagree with Patricia Springborgs contention that theoriesof oriental despotism grew up out of a profound ignorance about oriental states aswell as certain racist attitudes inherited from Aristotle (Western Republicanism and theOriental Prince [Austin, TX, 1992], 3). Not only was the use of the concept often basedon fresh attempts to interpret observed political realities, but it also had little to do withracial theories.

going beyond a mere analysis of European political thought and assess-ing also how dierent kinds of sources, empirical and theoretical, mayhave related to dierent kinds of aims. Discussing the extent to whichoriental despotism was anything other than a European fantasy in par-ticular requires tackling the relation between the history of politicalthought, on the one hand, and the history of travel writing, on theother.6 My argument will be that whilst it is true that much of whatwas written about the despotism of oriental monarchies was ill-informedand caught within an intra-European debate, and whilst much was alsoopen to political manipulation, there is more to the story than that. Iwill contend, rst, that Europeans were often genuinely concerned withunderstanding the East, for practical and for intellectual reasons; sec-ond, that they developed largely empirical methods to do so, and thatthe intense interaction between direct observation and conceptual devel-opment is the key to the emergence of an early-modern discourse onnon-Europeans; third, and as a consequence, that concepts such as theone of oriental despotism were not mental schemes that blindedEuropeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather, compellingtools for interpreting the information gathered about the Orient. Thusthe point is not that the Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Chinese statesdescribed by Europeans in this period were despotisms, but rather thatit made sense to dene them as such, that the denition was not always,nor even primarily, arbitrary.7 As a corollary, what is most importantabout the concept is not the exact formulation given by Montesquieuor any other writer, but rather the existence of a contemporary debate.

My plan here is to elucidate not so much how Europeans in the Eastformed their primary views of Asian regimes as to examine the interaction

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8 Hence the growth in importance of the concept of despotism is related to how con-cepts of monarchy, sovereignty, republicanism, and the mixed constitution changed fromthe sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

between the role of such travelers descriptions and the debate aboutdespotism in Europe. I will begin with a brief discussion of key denitionsof despotism, from Aristotle to Montesquieu, seeking to clarify whatseems central to the concept, and identifying shades of meaning andvariations according the changing concerns of dierent authors, espe-cially in relation to the crucial debate about the limits of royal powerin the monarchy of France. In eect, the ground for dening orientaldespotism shifted throughout the early modern period and accompa-nied the evolution of European debates (in a variety of contexts) aboutwhich were the best political regimes.8 I shall afterwards discuss theapplication of the concept to Asian monarchies in particular, deter-mining the relationship between empirical sources and European polit-ical concerns through a number of distinct moments in the crucialperiod of crystallization of the concept between 1580 and 1750. It wasthe Counter Reformation armchair cosmographer Giovanni Botero, Ishall argue, who in the light of a wide variety of Renaissance travelaccounts, made the crucial move of generalizing the Aristotelian con-cept of an Asian type of regime to the new realities encountered byEuropeans in the sixteenth century. It then took a number of educatedtravel writers like Franois Bernier, whose highly inuential account ofMughal India deserves close attention, to develop a sophisticated analy-sis of oriental monarchies on the basis of the fundamental oppositionbetween Asian and European regimes. When Montesquieu made hiscase on strictly theoretical grounds, he was bringing to fruition this pre-vious literature in the new circumstances of the relative decline of theabsolutist France of Louis XIV and his successors against the mixed (orrepublican) monarchy of post-1688 Britain. Not only was his approachdependent on the existence of a considerable body of travel literature,which supported, and even inspired, his arguments, but, as I will sug-gest in a nal section discussing the colonial aftermath to Montesquieusformulation, opposition to his conclusions often also took the form offurther empirical, orientalist research, such as that conducted byAnquetil-Duperron. As a matter of fact, the issue of orientalism, denedas a self-interested (even if perhaps unconscious) misrepresentation, wasrecognized as a problem within the Enlightenment. I shall conclude byarguing that to the extent that there was a process of ctionalization

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9 Aristotle, Politics, 1285a 17-24, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, 1988), 74.

from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, it was one that required the con-course not only of political speculators, but also of intelligent observersand critical historians, and that, in eect, the history of the concept ofdespotism can only be written by taking account of this empirical dimen-sion. That the concept was highly appealing to those most intimatelyconcerned to understand political dierences between Europe and Asiacan be shown by considering by way of epilogue the willingness of someeighteenth-century oriental observers to attack it.

The Denition of Despotic Government from Aristotle to the Enlightenment

Aristotles denition (and, possibly, invention) of despotism as a pecu-liar form of monarchy is of course crucial to the history of the con-cept. Not only did he distinguish despotism from mere tyranny, but alsolocated it within an oriental (Persian) tradition in opposition to GreekEuropean norms, on the basis of the peculiar nature of the peoples ofAsia:

There is another sort of monarchy, not uncommon among foreigners, which nearlyresembles tyranny, but is both legal and hereditary. For foreigners, being moreservile in temperament than Hellenes, and Asians than Europeans, do not rebelagainst a despotic government. Such kingships have the nature of tyrannies becausethe people are by nature slaves, but there is no danger of their being overthrown,for they are hereditary and legal.9

This denes despotism as a legal, hereditary regime which otherwisehas the characteristics of a tyranny, given that the power of the kingis absolute and the subjects are like slaves. It is unlike a tyranny in thatit does not involve illegal rule over involuntary subjects (thus Aristotlesdespot can rely on his own people to form a guard and does not needto rely on foreign mercenaries). Despite the many transformations thatthe concept will undergo, the crucial pointstill apparent in Montesquieusclassic analysisis that despotism is systematic, not circumstantial astyranny can be: tyranny (in a strict sense of the word) relates to ruleagainst the law, or abuse of power, and implies the corruption of a sys-tem by a particular ruler who, against the will of his subjects, puts hisown interests and passions above the pursuit of the common good (evenif this ruler might cynically justify arbitrary rule in the name of thecommon good). Despotism, by contrast, indicates an established system

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10 The primary issue here was political organization, not race, as Patricia Springborganachronistically claims (Western Republicanism, 3 and chp. 2). Springborgs attempt torelate this supposed racism to a latent Greek-European anti-semitism originating inAristotle is particularly bizarre. For Aristotle, the prime example of an Asian monarchywas the Persian Empire, whose elites were not semiticnor did he ever suggest thatall natural slaves were of semitic origin.

11 William of Malmesbury, History of the Kings of England, book IV, 360, as edited byJ. Stevenson in Church Historians of England (London, 1854) 3:309. Similarly, Williamsversion of the speech of pope Urban launching the crusade at Clermont argues thatAsians are more reective but lack courage, whilst northerners are courageous but lackprudence. Only the Francs living in a temperate zone, combine the two (ibid., 296).

of arbitrary rule, legal insofar as laws do exist, often accepted by thepeople at large as legitimate, which relates to the nature of the peopleand often the climate, and which, in the more elaborate analysis ofwriters like Montesquieu, aects (usually negatively) the civilization andeconomy of a kingdom or empire. In other words, the despot is notperverting a system of rule, but simply acts as he is supposed to giventhe servile nature of the people.

Although writers from Aristotle to Montesquieu were primarily think-ing of oriental examples, in the literature of the early modern perioddespotism was not necessarily oriental, nor of course Muslim: it couldbe African or American, gentile and even Christian (as in Russia andEthiopia). Nonetheless, the tradition of attributing to Asians, unlikeEuropeans, a servile nature, seems to have been pervasive, especiallyamongst classically-inspired writers: Aristotles perception, for example,was echoed by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, Machiavelliin the sixteenth, and Montesquieu in the eighteenth. It was thus a con-cept associated intimately with the identity of Europe as having a dis-tinct political tradition, which naturalistic arguments based on climate,when employed, only reinforced, by implying some kind of inevitabil-ity.10 Thus, as the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury wrotec.1120 when discussing the rst crusade:

The Persian sultan [of the Seljuc dynasty], a title equivalent to Augustus amongthe Romans, is commander of all the Saracens, and of the whole East. I imaginethat this empire has continued for so long and still increases because the peopleare unwarlike, and being decient in active blood, know not how to cast o slav-ery when once admitted. . . . But the western nations, bold and erce, disdain long-continued subjugation to any people whatever, often delivering themselves of servitudeand imposing it on others.11

The emphasis on a distinctive European tradition of politics is alsoapparent in Machiavellis analysis of monarchical regimes in The Prince.

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12 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge, 1988),chp. 4, 15.

13 In this passage Machiavelli did not imply that there was anything negative aboutthe Ottoman model of centralized authority, but elsewhere he derided oriental rulers asdestructive of civilization. In the Discorsi (2:2) to be enslaved to a prince is less harshthan to be enslaved to a foreign republic, since (unlike a rival community) the conqueringprince will not want to destroy you unless he is a barbarian prince who lays waste thecountryside and civilized life [tutte le civilit degli uomini], as oriental princes do.

14 Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 1:16.

Here the humanist writer did not go back to Aristotles concept ofdespotism, but maintained the basic distinction between a regime wheresubjects are free, and another where they are the kings slaves:

All principalities known to history have been ruled in one of two ways: either byone ruler, who is helped to govern the kingdom by others who are in reality hisservants, acting as ministers through his grace and favour; or else by a ruler andbarons who hold the rank by hereditary right. . . . In states governed by a rulerand his servants, the ruler has more authority, because throughout the countrythere is no one else who is recognized as a lord. . . . Contemporary examples ofthese two types of government are the Turkish sultan and the king of France. Thewhole Turkish kingdom is governed by one ruler, the others all being his ser-vants . . . but the king of France is placed amidst a great number of hereditarylords. . . .12

Machiavellis distinction, which was aimed at explaining why it wasmore dicult to conquer an administrative monarchy of the Turkishtype, but easier to hold once conquered, contrasted France, the mostprominent heir of a pre-Roman tradition of European liberty, with theOttoman state as the modern archetype of an Asian monarchy (a typewhich also included ancient Persia).13 Elsewhere Machiavelli made itclear that what made the French kingdom secure and stable was thesubjection of royal power to public laws.14 Machiavellis focus on Franceand the Ottoman empire as modern archetypes inaugurated a highlyinuential tradition, and indeed the importance of the realities of thesetwo states in shaping the debate must be acknowledged, not only onempirical grounds, but also lest we assume that their peculiar institu-tions and trajectories can really stand as normative for Europe andAsia.

In fact, one important observation here is the existence of varyingemphases in the interpretation of the French model of monarchicalregime from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The France ofdivided loyalties and legal constitutionalism described by Machiavelli iscloser to the mixed feudal monarchy described (rather idealistically)by his contemporary Claude de Seyssel, than to the absolutist regime

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15 The dierence between the assessments of royal power in France by the EnglishFortescue and the Savoyard Seyssel, the latter far more optimistic, can be related toFortescues rejection of the idea of princely power in the Roman law tradition of theBartolist school (albeit Seyssel, like many early modern constitutionalist writers, soughtto moderate the regalist aspects of this tradition by integrating feudal law and human-ist republican themes around the idea of a mixed constitution). Arguably, Fortescuesposition was, unlike Seyssels, immune to the Bodinian turn towards absolutism.

16 The distinction can be traced back to the dominium politicum et regale of John Fortescuein the fteenth century. For a classic discussion see H. Koenigsberger, Dominium regaleor dominium politicum et regale: Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe, inPoliticians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern History (London, 1986).

17 Melvin Richter oers a vigorous defence of the relation between Montesquieusidea of despotism and his concern for the French monarchy in his MontesquieusComparative Analysis of Europe and Asia: Intended and Unintended Consequences, inLEurope de Montesquieu. Actes du Colloque de Gnes, 1993 (Naples-Oxford), 329-48.

identied by an alternative tradition of commentators, from John Fortescuein the 1470s, though Franois Hotman in the 1570s, to both critics andadmirers of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century.15 In part theissue is assessing the impact of an actual historical evolution. There canindeed still today be much debate as to the extent to which the polit-ical system in France was transformed throughout this period, so thatby 1700 one might be tempted to dismiss Machiavellis description ofthe independence of the lords of France, and their ability to commandtheir own following, as belonging to the past. While French kings tra-ditionally claimed the right to legislate, and in some cases also to tax,without any formal constraints, what is perhaps more decisive is thatthroughout the period the power of independent lords, if not formallydestroyed, was certainly domesticated, episodes like the religious warsand the Fronde notwithstanding. By 1700, therefore, the rhetorical oppo-sition between a mixed monarchy in England and an absolute rule inFrance, both within Europe, would have become more signicant thanthe opposition between France and the Ottomans.16 It is in this con-text that oriental monarchies could emerge as relevant models of despoticregimes distinct from both England and France, but closer to Francethan to England, given the relative lack of formal constraints on thepower of the French king. As we shall see, it is precisely this fear ofFrance becoming despotic through the neglect of the old aristocraticparliamentarian and legalistic middle order which lies behind Montes-quieus analysis of oriental despotism. The France of Louis XV shouldlean towards the English modelor its own Gallo-Germanic feudalpastrather than towards the deceptively powerful (but in reality frag-ile) models of the East.17

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It is clear that two dierent categories (not mutually exclusive) comeinto play in this European idea of ancient liberty, on the one hand theexistence of legal and institutional constraints on royal power, on theother the existence of an aristocratic order of independent lords. Bothwere already present in Machiavellis idealized account of the kingdomof France, but the precise terms of the analysisand in particular thenature of legal constraints to royal actionchanged from author toauthor. There was perhaps a general shift from a feudal-constitutionalemphasis apparent in many sixteenth-century writers, in which the tra-ditional power of the aristocratic orderlegal and institutionalis whatkeeps European subjects (especially aristocratic subjects) free from despo-tism, to the republican-constitutional emphasis of seventeenth- and eight-eenth-century writers, in which legal constraints on royal action areincreasingly referred to a dynamic pursuit of the common good throughthe (at least partly) independent action of parliamentary and judicialbodies. What is fundamental is that there was a basic continuity in thetradition of distinguishing European monarchies as upholding civil lib-erty, in contrast with the slavish condition of oriental peoples. That is,whilst European writers would debate intensely amongst themselves theextent to which political liberty was needed to uphold civil liberty withina monarchy, and thus which precise constraints should apply to the ruleof a monarch, they tended to agree (to the extent that they consideredthe issue) that there was a negative model of despotic rule located out-side Europe which should in all cases be seen as less desirable, if notentirely inappropriate.

Jean Bodins inuential analysis, constructed around a powerful andmaximalist defence of absolute sovereignty (and thus royal power) inthe France of the wars of religion, stands as a perfect example of thereluctance of humanist lawyers with varying agendas to assimilateEuropean claims to absolute rule to Asian models. In many ways Bodinsdiscussion represents a shift away from the views expressed by Machiavelli,in that an absolute monarchy with centralized sovereign power is in hisaccount not only legitimate but, indeed, European, being perfectly rep-resented by France. In his eagerness to protect the state from rebellioustendencies, which he perceived as self-destructive, Bodin had decidedto question the whole idea of a mixed type of government defended byconstitutionalist writers like Franois Hotman, seeking to prove insteadthat sovereignty could not be other than absolute and undivided. Forthis reason, his defence of royal power could potentially erode the dis-tinction between European regimes and despotic regimes. However,

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18 Bodin, Six livres de la Rpublique, Book 2, chapter 2, On Despotic Government. Ihave used the standard French edition of 1579 (Lyons), 189-91, in which Bodin incor-porated changes introduced in the editions of 1577 and 1578 to his 1576 original. Analtogether new version was produced by Bodin in Latin in 1586.

interestingly, Bodin also opposes his absolute European monarch to whatamounts to a new formulation of the Asian type, a monarchie seigneurialebased on conquest and servitude for which Turkey is, again, the obvi-ous modern example (although Christian Muscovy is also included).That is, despite Bodins own defence of absolute sovereignty, a princi-ple he sees as shared by all monarchies, the distinction between theEuropean and Oriental (or African) models remains rhetorically neces-sary. It relates not to the sovereign powers of the king, but to the waythese are exercised in dierent countries according to historical tradi-tion and circumstance:

A royal, or legitimate, monarchy, is that in which the subjects obey the laws ofthe monarch, and the monarch the laws of nature, granting his subjects their nat-ural liberty and private property. A despotic [seigneuriale] monarchy is that in whichthe prince is lord of all goods and all persons by virtue of conquest and good war,governing his subjects as a father rules his slaves. A tyrannical monarchy is thatin which the monarch, contemptuous of the laws of nature, abuses a free peopleand treats them like slaves, appropriating their goods as his own.18

In a remarkable show of conceptual ingenuity, Bodin makes monar-chie seigneuriale peculiar to countries where either conquests are recentor the servile condition of people traditional, or both. This type of rulerhas not subjects, but slaves (unlike a tyrant, who treats free subjects asslaves). Bodin eectively retains the core of the Aristotelian distinctionbut challenges the Machiavellian analysis by suggesting that you canactually be a free subject under a bureaucratic, centralized, non-feudalmonarchy, provided the absolutely sovereign king costumarily and will-ingly respects private property and natural liberty. Thus Bodin managesto totally separate civil liberty, based on natural law, from political lib-erty, based on constitutional theories he rejects. The oddity here is ofcourse that natural law and the European tradition of civil libertybecome assimilated.

The attacks on absolutism and defence of an aristocratic middle orderby post-Bodinian constitutionalist writers tended to oppose Bodinsabsolute sovereignty and thus, when relevant, his reduced denition ofdespotism (one which, on the other hand, was taken up by Hobbes).There were of course throughout the seventeenth century attempts tobuild moderate royalist, anti-despotic positions on the basis of Bodins

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19 This rather paradoxical middle position is best represented by writers who arguedfor a limited, contractual monarchy without subscribing to the classical ideal of a mixedconstitution, seeking to preserve instead the idea that sovereignty was indivisible. ThisBodinian (or Hobbesian) constitutionalism emerged, for example, in the writings ofPufendorf, against the dominant tradition of political Aristotelianism in the German-speaking world.

20 The Spirit of the Laws, ed. A. Colher, B. Miller, and H. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 59.21 The aw of the absolute monarchas variously dened by Bodin, Hobbes, or

Filmerwas that he assumed exclusively both the legislative and executive powers, deny-ing subjects any genuine instance of appeal: such a man, however intitled Czar, orGrand Signior, or how you please, is as much in the state of nature with all under hisdominion as he is with the rest of mankind (Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett [Cambridge, 1988], 326). Despite the vagueness of his references, which mustbe attributed to his desire to construct a universal (not oriental) concept of absolutistgovernment, Locke was not indierent to historical example. He was an assiduous readerof travel accounts and used the case of Ceylon, as described by Robert Knox in his1681 relation, to illustrate the misconception that absolute rule had any good eects.

optimisitc defence of civil liberty as an expression of natural law (wemight include Pierre Gassendi and Samuel Pufendorf in this category),but they tended to remain ambiguous on the crucial point of where theultimate power of the state was.19 For Montesquieu, the most rigorousand decisive of Bodins opponents, it was important to emphasize thatcivil liberty could only be guaranteed if there was some degree of polit-ical liberty, since a monarch could always become a despot, and notmany laws are needed for timid, ignorant, beaten-down people.20 EarlierJohn Locke, following a geometric rather than an empirical histori-cal method, had even been more radical, since in his opinion anyabsolute ruler who was not subject to an independent system of lawswas not truly legitimate. He and his subjects lived in a state of nature,but worse, and despotical power (hence dened in a reduced man-ner) was the arbitrary power to take mens livesin eect through war,albeit in the guise of political authority. Only a properly constitutedcivil society could safeguard lives and property.21 By totally denying thelegitimacy of any absolute monarchy and its capacity for legislation,Locke departed from the Aristotelian tradition, later taken up byMontesquieu, of conferring in principle an equivalent status to non-European monarchic traditions, even if only to praise the moderate sys-tems of Europe as superior. Rather than follow Locke, in his analysisof despotism Montesquieu was heir to the contemporary French tradi-tion of anti-absolutist writers represented by Michel Le Vassors Les soupirsde la France esclave (1689-1690) and the thinkers of the regency duringthe minority of Louis XV, a tradition which in some cases had assimilated

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22 While many of these anti-absolutist writers directly followed the sixteenth-centuryhumanist strategies of Franois Hotman (centered around the idea of an ancient mixedconstitution), against whom Bodin had written, others who contributed to the climate ofopinion against the excesses of Louis XIV after the 1680snotably Pierre Bayle, andalso Franois Bernier as interpreter of Gassendipreferred the stability of a law-abid-ing absolute monarchy capable of guaranteeing a degree of intellectual and religiousfreedom to the civil strife that either the idea of a mixed type of government or theprinciple of popular sovereignty and the right to resist (including tyrannicide) were believedto encourage. A crucial inspiration to a more radical opposition to the monarchy ofLouis XIV as despotic came of course from the example of the English revolution of1688. However, let us also note that while Lockes second treatise had an importantcareer in its French version of 1691, produced by the Huguenot exile David Mazel, itcame to conrm and strengthen, rather than create, the French tradition of oppositionto royal absolutism. For example, Michel Le Vassors Soupirs of 1689-1690 was writtenand published independently from Locke, and in fact the English edition preceded therst edition of Lockes treatises in 1690.

23 The Spirit of the Laws, 63.

a moderate interpretation of Bodins paternalistic royalism (writers likeBernier and Bayle exemplify this tendency), but which took a more rad-ical turn towards the defence of religious and political freedom afterLouis XIV revoked the edict of Nantes in 1685 and made his bid forEuropean hegemony, reviving the spectre of a universal monarchy.22 Inthis tradition, despotism was primarily non-European and somewhatlegitimate, and the point of these writers was to warn of the dangerthat a French monarch might lean too dangerously in the same direc-tion, with fatal consequences, sinceas Montesquieu put ita moder-ate government is a masterpiece of legislation that chance rarely producesand prudence is rarely allowed to produce.23 Hence in Montesquieusmature, systematic treatment, political liberty was dened as the mod-eration of power through the separation of legislative, executive, andjudicial functions, so that the French Monarchy, with an independentjudiciary, stood mid-way between the English exampleperfectly gearedtowards the preservation of political libertyand Asian oneswhere allpowers are confused.

It is important to note that, unlike Montesquieu, neither Machiavellinor Bodin actually used the word despotism; in fact, even the adjec-tival form, despotic, only returned to regular use in the late sixteenthcentury. For example, the vernacular expression employed by Bodin todescribe the Turkish model, monarchie seigneuriale, had been coined bythe humanist Louis Le Roy when producing a French version of AristotlesPolitics, while English and Dutch writers in the early seventeenth cen-tury would translate despotic (already current in Italian) as absolute,using absolute to describe a systematic (rather than circumstantial)

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24 Roman writers abandoned the Greek concept of despotism, but retained that oftyranny, which they needed soon enough to describe some of their own emperors. Theloss of liberty deplored by rst- and second-century writers like Lucan and Tacitus didnot lead to an elaboration of the Aristotelian analysis of despotism (Koebner, Despotand Despotism 278). These writers had not forgotten that, unlike Asian peoples, theywere meant to be, as masters of the world, freehence for Tacitus Roman debasementwas morally reprehensible because it was essentially improper.

25 Hobbes, however, seeking to dene the authority of the state as unassailable bycitizens once constituted, also created his own minimalist denition of a despotic typeof monarchy, one which like Bodins emphasized conquest but was otherwise not to bedistinguished from any other monarchical regime.

tyranny. And yet, as R. Koebner showed in his erudite study of thehistory of the concept of despotism, there had been an occasionalmedieval use of the Greek word, with expressions like monarchia despoticaor despoticus principatus employed by Aristotles earlier translators. Indeed,as scholastic writers like Marsilius of Padua oered their own constitu-tional theories of government, they found it useful to nd authoritativeconrmation that unbridled monarchical power, not subject to the rep-resentative legislative body, leads to despotic rule. However, humanistwriters like Leonardo Bruni were disinclined to reproduce Greek con-cepts, often preferring Latin equivalents like dominatio. In fact, interest-ingly, Roman authors had neglected to develop the Aristotelian idea ofan Asian type of monarchy.24 Thus the pervasiveness of the assumptionthat Eastern peoples were naturally (usually by reason of their climate)more servile than Europeans did not always correspond to an explicituse of Aristotles concept of despotism. When the actual concept re-emerged in the seventeenth century as occasionally applicable to Europeanmonarchies, it was mainly to denounce absolute monarchical rule.25

What is remarkable is the extent to which writers with dierent agen-das found it desirable to return to the fundamental idea of an Asianmodel distinct from the European according to the themes of libertyand slavery. This continuity, I would like to suggest, did not reect amere recurrence of Aristotles text, which was in fact read selectively,but rather responded to the actual evidence of non-European systemsof monarchical government. That is, in order to explain the importanceof the Asian model we need to turn away from the mere analysis ofthe domestic agendas of European political writers and seek to explainthe impact of actual perceptions of the Ottoman, Muscovite, and otherstates.

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26 The Piedmontese Giovanni Botero (c.1544-1617) entered the Society of Jesus at ayoung age (1559) and was ordained priest, but was compelled to leave in 1579 afterrepeatedly failing to be professed in the Societys fourth vow (which would have madehim a full Jesuit), or be sent to the Eastern missions. His superiors thought that he wastoo proud and more inclined to human wisdom than to the divine. He was never-theless protected by the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, and later successivelyserved Duke Carlo Emanuele of Savoy (he was his agent and spy in France in 1585)and Cardinal Federico Borromeo, whose secretary and counselor he became after 1586.It was in Rome and under Federico Borromeo that Botero in the following decade com-posed his key works.

27 Botero therefore stands as an important precedent for Montesquieu, somethingwhich previous historians of the concept of despotism have failed to consider.

Despotic Government in Renaissance Cosmography and Travel Writing

The inuence of travel writing on European political thought hasoften been neglected, even though the evidence suggests that images ofsavages as natural men, on the one hand, and of oriental rulers asdespots, on the other, evolved largely out of the literature producedby actual exotic encounters. One crucial moment for the emergence ofthe image of the oriental despot was clearly the late sixteenth century,in the writings of the inuential Catholic cosmographer and formerJesuit Giovanni Botero.26 However, not only has his role been under-appreciated (Koebner does not even mention him, jumping from Bodinto Hobbes), but to the extent that Boteros contribution has been rec-ognized by writers like Lucette Valensi, his reliance on a wide-rangingcollection of empirical descriptions has also been neglected. In reality,as I shall illustrate, Boteros use of various sixteenth-century travelaccounts was comparative, going well beyond the traditional focus onthe Turkish example. It superseded Bodins approach not only by itsuse of the actual word despotico (which his English and French trans-lators would render as absolute), but also by an analysis of the themeof the rulers unconstrained access to private property, which writers ofthe second half of the seventeenth century would make central to thediscussion of the ills of despotism.27 In this section I will argue thatBoteros cosmographical synthesis, in part inspired by his concern withreason of state, was central in the development of a concept of despoticgovernment informed by the fresh empirical accounts of the sixteenthcentury. I will illustrate how the particulars of a number of non-Europeanmonarchiesespecially Ottoman, South Indian, Mughal, and Russiancontributed to a more complex image of despotism in its causes and inits eects, generating a tension between a general denition and a vari-

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28 The political emphasis of the Relationi, combined with the impact of the Ragion diStato (1589), helps understand Boteros eventual move (after 1599) to the service of asecular albeit Catholic prince, the Duke of Savoy. The Relationi are discussed in FedericoChabod, Giovanni Botero ( Rome, 1934), reprinted in Scritti sul rinascimento (Torino,1967), 271-558, esp. 326-51; D.F. Lach, Asia, 2:235-49; J.P. Rubis, New Worlds andRenaissance Ethnology, History and Anthropology 4 (1993): 157-97, esp. 178-81. In a stim-ulating recent article, John Headley emphasizes the universalizing principles, classicaland Catholic Christian, which shaped Boteros Relationi as an imperialistic geography:Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Boteros Assignment, Western Universa-lism, and the Civilizing Process, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1119-55.

29 Delle relationi universali, part II (Rome, 1592), 174-5. The whole description is worthquoting as example of what distinguished non-despotic regimes: This peoples govern-ment is the most regal and political amongst the Muslims: on the contrary, there isnowhere else amongst them where this sort of government ourishes. Because all oth-ers almost extinguish the nobility and rely on the work of slaves, and kill their broth-ers, or blind them; but amongst the Persians the nobility is highly esteemed. . . . Theyprofess knighthood and gentility, enjoy music and literature . . . all of which the Turks

ety of cases. Considering in some more detail the primary accounts forthe example of Muscovy, I will also explore the reasons why empiricaltravel writers of the end of the sixteenth century, despite the religiousand political dierences that separated them within Europe, increasinglyconcurred in a general opposition between European and non-Europeanmonarchies.

The wide-ranging nature of Boteros analysis is related to the pur-pose of his Relationi Universali (Rome, 1591-1596), an ambitious surveyof the world which considered, in distinct sections, the geography, polit-ical economy, and religion of each major country, as known to late-six-teenth century European observers. The work was a commission fromcardinal Federico Borromeo to describe the state in which the Christianreligion nds itself in the world today, and it was Boteros originalcontribution to make a full geographical and political-economic surveyof the world the necessary preparation for a description of all its reli-gions, justied by (but perhaps also transcending the nature of ) the uni-versalist pretensions of the Roman see.28 Thus the second and mostinuential part of the Relationi (Rome, 1592) undertook an analysis ofthe system of rule and power of the major states of Europe, Africa, andAsia. It was here that Botero articulated a concept of despotic gov-ernment ( governo despotico), which applied to examples as varied as Turkey,Muscovy, Christian Ethiopia, Mughal India, Vijayanagara, Siam, andChina (but, curiously, not Safavid Persia, whose government is consid-ered the most regal and political amongst the Muslims, at a timewhen it was seen by Catholic powers as a potential ally against theOttomans).29 This striking list suggests that for Botero the use of the

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despise. In Persia trade and the manual arts also ourish, and, to conclude, they aremuch more political and genteel than the Turks. Boteros idealized account of thePersian regime would to some extent be challenged a few decades later by educatedtravelers like Pietro della Valle or Jean Chardin.

30 Botero did not wish to denigrate Asia generally: rather the contrary, it was themost noble part of the world, the origin of civilization and of course (not irrelevanteither) the location of sacred history (Relationi, II, 105-6). However, Europe was politi-cally and technologically superior, more homogeneously civilized, and geographicallyplaced to control the rest of the world through navigation (Relationi, I, 1590, 1-2; II,1591, 13-14). In other words, while Europeans were clearly not alone in being civilized,they displayed a unique capacity for creating a civilizing empire across the oceans, andthis made them the providential agents of Christian universalism. See Headley, Geographyand Empire, 1141-44.

Aristotelian concept was a useful tool for classifying a number of exist-ing monarchies primarily according to their principles of governmentas expressed in historical practice. The comparative use of evidence, infact, helped Botero rene the Aristotelian model of despotic govern-ment. Thus his underlying thesis was that a fundamental dierencebetween Europe and Asia could be related to natural conditions: whilstthe size and climate of Asia favored great empires, the geographical set-ting in Europe encouraged diversity and divisions, which, when com-bined with the skills and characters of its peoples, gave Europeans theirsuperior strength.30 In this way Botero came to articulate the idea (latertaken up by many other writers) that the great empires of Asia, despitetheir inated militarism, were weaker than the smaller and apparentlydivided European nations, and that a crucial mark of this oriental fragilitywas the prevalence of a system of despotic rule ( governo despotico), whichworked against the interests of society and the economy. While hisdescription of each case carried dierent emphases, Botero made it clearthat the majority of oriental princes shared a number of distinguish-ing traits, generally dened as the excessive, counter-productive con-centration of authority and revenues. Thus despotism emerged as ananalytical concept with a wide range of applicability, with a core denitionof power without limitations, and various examples of how the lack ofsome of these structural limitations (religious, legal, constitutional, edu-cational, economic, and geographical) conditioned the aims and eectsof each regime.

There was some ambiguity concerning the role of religion in thisconstruct, since Boteros just monarchies tended to coincide withRoman Catholic ones, but the link between despotism and religiousdeviations (heresy, indelity, or the paganism of the gentiles) was notestablished in any concrete sense, beyond the general idea that despotic

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31 Il governo della China ha del despotico assai, conciosia che non in tutta laChina altro signore che il re, ne sanno che cosa sia conte, marchese o duca, ne vi ealtro a cui si paghi tributo o gabella. Il re conferisce tutti i magistrati e la nobilitstessa . . . onde egli non solamente ubbidito come re, ma quasi adorato come dio . . .il che avilisce grandemente gli animi de i popoli, e li rende schiavi, anzi che sudditi delloro prencipe (Relationi, II, 1592, 126-27). And yet this despotism seeks peace and jus-tice: regno regolato di tal maniera che non ha altra mira che la pace e la conser-vatione dello stato, e per questo vi orisce la giustitia, madre della quiete, e la politica,maestra delle leggi, e lindustria, glioula della pace; e non regno n dominio, anticon moderno, meglio regolato di questo. This praise was totally exceptional, as else-where Botero had written that la pi parte dei prencipi orientali, perch non hannoper ne n la pace n la giustitia, ma la vittoria e la potenza, rivolgono tutte le lorofacolt allintertenimento della militia, e di altro non si curano . . . (Ibid., 148). The sur-prising conclusion is that gentile China, however exceptionally, was a just despotism.

32 Relationi, II, 1592, 221-22. The expression aatto despotico suggests the existence ofdegrees of despotism.

governments often sought to maximize the power of the state withoutcaring to benet their subjects. There could even be a notable excep-tion to this supposed lack of concern for peace and justice, as China,strikingly, stood as a benevolent manifestation of despotism.31 In real-ity, more decisive than the predictable assumption that true religiongenuine Christianityunderlay just government was the idea that despoticregimes were recognizable for their lack of respect for private propertyand civil liberty. Unlimited control of the persons of his subjects andtheir goods is what made a king also a despot.

The Ottoman regime was perhaps the despotic regime par excellence:

Ottoman government is completely despotic [aatto despotico], for the Grand Turkis so absolute a master of all things within the bounds of his dominion, that theinhabitants are called his slaves, not his subjects; no man is his own master, norof the house where he lives or the land he cultivates . . . and there is no singleperson, however important, whose life is safe, or who can feel secure about hisstation, since all depends on the discretion of the Grand Lord. . . .32

It follows that the common people are not allowed to bear arms, thearmy relies on renegade slavesthe famous janissariesfor its elitecorps, local governors steal and conscate from their sujects, the peo-ple are overly exploited, the land suers from depopulation, and com-merce is in the hands of foreigners. Only the system of timars, whichmakes it possible to maintain the large Turkish cavalry cheaply, seemsto meet with Boteros admiration.

Interestingly, this negative view of the Ottoman system, which (withvariations) would become commonplace amongst European travelers inthe rst decades of the seventeenth century, was not really dominant

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33 Augerius Gislenius Busbequius, Legationis Turcicae Epistolae Quator, ed. Zweder vonMartels (Hilversum, 1994), in particular the third letter, p. 178. In English, see Ogier deBusbecq, Turkish Letters, ed. and trans. Edward S. Forster (Oxford, 1927). Busbecq wasambassador to the Ottoman court on behalf of Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I in 1555-1562, although the letters, published in the 1580s, were rhetorically elaborated after hisreturn. There is a growing literature on the image of the Turks in sixteenth-centuryEurope. See especially the classic work by Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in FrenchHistory, Thought and Literature 1520-1660 (Paris, 1938).

34 Valensi, Venice and the Sublime Porte: The Birth of the Despot (Ithaca and London, 1993).For a wider background to Venetian attitudes, see Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence,1975).

35 For the Ottoman myth of a golden age under Sleyman, and seventeenth-cen-tury attempts to react to political crisis by returning to it, see also Christine Woodhead,Perspectives on Sleyman, in Sleyman the Magnicent and His Age: The Ottoman Empire inthe Early-Modern World, ed. M. Kunt and C. Woodhead (Harlow, 1995).

36 Whether the diculties in the workings of Ottoman government perceived by manyforeign observers and deplored by some at home from the end of the sixteenth centurycan really be considered a structural crisisthe beginnings of a very long decline whichwould extend into the eighteenth centuryis controversial. What seems clear, however,is that the analysis of the regime as despotic accompanied that perception.

in the sixteenth century, when observers tended to emphasize the strengthsof the Turkish sultan and his extraordinary power, often (as in the Latinletters by the imperial ambassador and humanist Ogier Ghislain deBusbecq, full of admiration for Ottoman military virtues) in order todenounce the rivalries and lack of discipline of the Christian princes.33

As Lucette Valensi has argued with reference to the remarkably regu-lar series of reports written by Venetian ambassadors, the emergenceof the negative views to which the concept of despotism will give expres-sion coincides with a gradual shift of power from the Ottomans toEurope.34 More to the point (given how gradual that shift of power was,even after Lepanto), she insists that the increasing tendency to describethe Ottoman monarchy as a tyrannical system after the 1570s relatesto actual diculties within the political system (a pessimistic judgementwhich, interestingly, Ottoman observers themselves shared).35 What hadbeen admired in earlier accounts was order, discipline, and leadership:what was now deplored was injustice, corruption, and weakness. Theconcept of tyrannywith its connotation of illegitimacywas thus appliednot because the principles of government had changed, but because thesystem was no longer perceived to be working.36

Valensi notes the agreement of Boteros analysis of the Ottoman stateas despotic with the change of perspective amongst the Venetian observers,but she fails to clarify whether the republics ambassadors inspired Botero, or were themselves inuenced by his systematic and comparative

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37 For example, the inuential report by the ambassador Lorenzo Bernardo (1592) isthe one closest to Boteros kind of analysis, describing a government based on the Sultanswill (hence the trouble when he is weak and ignorant), sustained by means of oppres-sive tyranny over both the people and the nobility, and made powerful by the qualityof the army and the vast resources at its disposal. See E. Albri, Relazioni degli ambasci-atori veneziani al senato durante il secolo decimosesto (Florence, 1844), 2:362-66. No directinuence between his account and Boteros can be read either way. On the other hand,we are certainly talking about the same cultural milieu, one in which Aristotles Politicswould be very familiar.

38 Valensi, Birth, 77, speaks of tyrannical and despotic as synonymous concepts,interchangeable throughout the seventeenth century. While it is true that the two areoften combined by the same writers, I believe that there is an important dierencebetween a monarchy comparable to those in Europe that has gone awry and one which,because it is in fact not like European monarchies, is bound to have gone awry.

39 Besides the numerous Italian editions, foreign translations and adaptations madeBoteros workand especially the second partinuential all over Europe at the turnof the seventeenth century: there were versions in Latin (1596), German (1596), English(1601, with numerous later editions), Spanish (two versions in 1603 and 1605), and Polish(1609). There was no direct French translation, but the popular work by Pierre dAvity,Les estats, empires et principautez du monde (Paris, 1614, and many later editions and trans-lations) was in reality largely based on Boteros Relationi, although without acknowl-edgement. In particular, dAvity followed Botero closely in the description of orientalregimes, translating governo despotico for gouvernement absolu.

formulation.37 Whilst the use of the word despotic is extremely rarein the Venetian reports of the sixteenth century (Valensi only nds oneexample, from an anonymous report possibly dating from c.1580), it istrue that tyranny had come to depict a degenerate monarchical sys-tem not dissimilar to the despotism that Botero would soon write about.And yet I would insist that the force of Boteros formulation is new: heis clearly suggesting that this is Aristotles special type of monarchy, notmerely a monarchy like those in Europe, which happens to have degen-erated into tyranny, but a well-established and thus legitimate if alto-gether undesirable alternative system.38 Botero is also writing as if thiskind of monarchy, whether successful or in crisis, is to be expected out-side Europe. It was, moreover, only after the Relationi universali had madean impact in Europe that the description of the Ottoman state as a sys-tem of despotism became generalized.39

It seems sensible to conclude that when conceptualizing the Ottomanstate and other oriental regimes Botero must have been more inuencedby Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Bodin, all of whom he had read, thanby the Venetian accounts or other descriptions he used. This is not,however, to deny the inuence of primary accounts in shaping Boteroswork: the Relationi universali as a genre took initial inspiration from them,and indeed followed similar categories of analysis to those employed by

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40 The issue is raised by W.G.L. Randles, Peuples sauvages et tats despotiques:la pertinence, au XVI sicle, de la grille aristotlicienne pour classer les nouvelles socitsrvles par les dcouvertes en Brsil, en Afrique et en Asie, Mare Liberum 3 (1991):299-307. For a preliminary and still unsurpassed study of Boteros use of his sources,see F. Chabod, Giovanni Botero, 377-430: Le fonti delle Relazioni universali e ilmetodo di Botero. Chabod concludes that Botero followed closely a wide range of writ-ten sources, often obtaining the most recent accounts, but he worked too quickly andmade many small errors. He lacked a consistent method capable of fullling his organicvision of the world (pp. 424-30). For the following I also rely on my own analysis ofthe example of Vijayanagara in Travel and Ethnology, 294-300.

the Venetian ambassadors, like ricchezze, governo, forze, principi connanti,etc. It could be said that Botero brought together two strands, theo-retical and empirical, into an unprecedented level of interaction. Thequestion remains whether the armchair cosmographer did violence tothe observations of his travelers when applying a general idea of despo-tism to a variety of non-European states. From an analysis of Boterosuse of primary descriptions, I would argue that the cosmographer didnot arbitrarily impose a pre-existing Aristotelian concept of despoticAsian monarchy on all oriental regimes, but rather relied on thedescriptions themselves, and some genuine comparisons, to determinewhether a particular state should be classied as despotic.40 That is,while the descriptions he used rarely included the notion of despoticgovernment, as I will show below they contained sucient elements toallow Botero to dene each state one way or the other without doingobvious violence to the information contained in his sources. To a largeextent, we might conclude, his concept of despotism was not merelyAristotles legal tyranny: it was shaped by the actual examples that hewas considering, as described by previous travel writers and historians.

Let us consider, to begin with, the way despotic government couldbe seen to be applicable to a variety of examples. It is not impossiblethat his analysis of the Ottoman regimethe non-European state six-teenth-century European commentators were most concerned withhelped shape Boteros approach to other oriental monarchies by buildingvariations of one central theme. However, it is far from certain thatthis example alone determined his approach. In the 1580s, at about thesame time when (as we have seen) perceptions of the Ottoman empireacquired an anti-despotic tinge, the Muscovy of Ivan IV also emergedin a number of European descriptions as a regime with all the traits ofa despotism. It was in fact the Russian regime which inspired Boteroto oer his most powerful denition of despotism: The Great Duke ofMuscovy rules his peoples more despotically than any other known

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41 Botero, Relationi, II, 1592, 74.42 Ibid. Possevino gave a variant version of this, saying: I heard from a prominent

man that Muhammed, one of the councillors of Suleiman, the father of the presentSultan of Turkey, had once said that the king of Poland was undertaking a dicult taskin attacking Muscovy, because the Sultan and the Prince of Muscovy were the onlyrulers in their world who kept their peoples under strict control, and this made themexceedingly powerful. SeeThe Moscovia of Antonio Possevino S.J., ed. Hugh F. Graham(Pittsburgh, 1977), 30. Interestingly, the Elizabethan ambassador Giles Fletcher, totallyindependently, reached the same verdict of the rule of Ivan IV: The manner of theirgovernment is much after the Turkish fashion, which they seem to imitate as near asthe country and reach of their capacities in political aairs will give them leave to do.See Giles Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, ed. Albert J. Schmidt (Ithaca NY, 1966), 30.

43 The rst edition (in Latin) was printed in Vilnius in 1586, but Botero could haveused one of the two editions that appeared in Kln and Antwerp in 1587. The trans-lation into Italian of 1592 came too late for Boteros Relationi. A more distant sourcefor Botero, but of great importance, was the commentaries of his journeys to Muscovyby the imperial (Austrian) ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein, published in 1549,translated into Italian in 1550, and probably known to Botero through Ramusios inclu-sion in the second edition of his collection (1574).

44 For Herberstein, those people prefer servitude to freedom (Ramusio, Navigazionie viaggi, 6 vols (Torino, 1978-86), ed. M. Milanesi, 3:775). However, this statement doesnot relate to any systematic analysis of the Russian political system. Possevino was moresubtle: One would assume that the Muscovites were a people born more to slaverythan achievement were it not for the fact that most of them fully realize the nature oftheir servitude and know that if they should ee the country their children should bekilled on the spot and all their property would be immediately conscated. They havegrown accustomed to this sort of life from childhood and it has become second nature,as it were, for them to praise the prince extravagantly. . . . (Moscovia, 11). However, it was Botero who organized observations like this to describe a coherent system of

prince, given that he can dispose with absolute discretion of the per-sons and the goods of all his subjects.41 In this context, the compari-son with the Turkish regime emerged as a commonplace which Easternrulers could themselves employ: hence, The vizir Mehemet used to saythat the Turkish and Muscovite princes were the only ones who wereabsolute lords of their dominions.42 For his treatment of Russia, Boterowas largely inuenced by a recent account by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino,papal ambassador and missionary to the court of Ivan IV in 1581-1582,who in his Moscovia (1586) had described the extravagant deferenceshown to the Tsar by his terried subjects and observed that the princeformally declares himself to be the residuary legate of all the land inhis country and everything upon it.43 However, here again Boterosaccount, when introducing his neo-Aristotelian (and Bodinian) analysisof Muscovy as a model of oriental despotism opposed to a regal andpolitical system of rule, had gone beyond summarizing his sources, orasserting the servile nature of the Russians.44

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despotism. In this respect I disagree with the judgement of Federico Chabod, who inhis analysis of Boteros use of travel accounts and chronicles concluded that for his polit-ical-economic analysis of Muscovy (in part II of the Relationi ) Boteros reliance on the Jesuits account was direct and continuous, and indeed that his work was a meretranslation-summary of Possevino, with almost no original thoughts (Chabod, 392-96).

45 Rubis, Travel and Ethnology, 288-98.46 Ibid., 269-270.

Boteros creative use of primary descriptions can also be illustratedwith the case of the South Indian kingdom of Narsinga (Vijayanagara),since it is quite possible to trace back Boteros account to his readingof the third decade of the Portuguese Historian Joo de Barros (1563),whose key primary source can be in turn identied as the chroniclewritten by the horse trader Ferno Nunes (c.1531).45 From Nunes toBotero we can discern a process of elaboration which, in some impor-tant ways, implies a process of orientalization. For Nunes, the kingof Vijayanagara was an impressive ruler, able to raise huge armies, whoshared the revenues of the kingdom with his captains. The captainswere obliged to keep a number of elephants, cavalry, and troops accord-ing to the size of their holdings (in a system reminiscent of the better-known jagirs of the Mughal empire) and in addition paid half of theirrents to the king. The peasants, on the other hand, paid an enormousproportion of their produce to their overlords, who treated them tyran-nically by European standards. It was in relation to the peasants, ratherthan in relation to the nobility, that this system was deplored by thePortuguese trader, although he also noted that the king was obliged tokeep a close watch on his captains and could, at his discretion, dis-possess them. In fact, according to Nunes (who for his dynastic historyfollowed native sources as well as his personal observations of variousyears in the Indian capital), the kings of Vijayanagara were perceivedas tyrants, or not, according to their personal morality and political skill,rather than by the rules of their political system.46 He did not use theconcept of despotism. By contrast, Botero, who found in Barros an ele-gant summary of Nuness analysis, emphatically chose to describe thegovernment of Vijayanagara as a despotism, with the king as absolutelord of all the resources of his dominions ( padrone de i fondi del suo stato),a system of monopolies which he shared with his captains at the expenseof the people, who were left with nothing but the eort. This was onlythe starting point for a more ambitious speculation concerning the wayoriental princes cared not for peace and justice, but only for war andpower, leading to a comparison with the kingdom of France to show

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47 Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, ed. V.A. Smith, 55 (from the History of the GreatRebellion in the States of the Great Mogol ).

48 In the case of the African Christian kingdom of Abyssinia or Prester John, forwhich Botero could rely on the Ramusios Italian version (Venice, 1550) of the exten-sive account written by the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvares (Lisbon, 1540), it is also

the hidden advantages of proper monarchical, hence limited, rule. Theking of France, by being less absolute (that is, by being subject to legallimits), secures a better distribution of wealth, so that his peasants aremuch better o. He is therefore able to rely on taxing the wealth ofhis subjects for his needs without endangering the prosperity of the king-dom (remarkably, Botero attempts to quantify this dierential). In otherwords, and despite appearences to the contrary, in relative terms thekings of France are more powerful than oriental despots.

The hollowness of the might of the oriental despot can be illustratedwith Boteros discussion of the Mughal empire in North India. He beginsby observing that oriental, and meridional, princes are able to com-mand much larger (but not better) armies than European rulers, notonly because they can concentrate all the resources of the state on main-taining the military establishment, but also because they do not care toarm, feed, and provision their armies properly as is done in Europe.This situation is then related to the fact that all these princes aretyrants: they treat all their subjects as slaves and rely on fear, ratherthan love, to maintain their power. Therefore, the military elitesfromthe janisssaries of the Ottoman state to the nayars of Malabarareallowed to abuse the population, who can never be trusted to aid theirruler (a ruler whom they must hate) without coercion. A similar analy-sis of Mughal military power would be taken up by Franois Bernierin the following century, when he argued that 25,000 French veteransled by one of Louis XIVs generals would with their superior disciplineand morale easily defeat the disorderly mass of a Mughal army of hun-dreds of thousands, who marched with the irregularity of a herd ofanimals and were so easy to throw into confusion once engaged.47

To sum up, Boteros development of the idea of despotism as ananalytical tool was the result of reading creatively, and through anAristotelian (and Bodinian) lens, a number of sixteenth-century empiri-cal accounts, which in a number of casesespecially in descriptions ofTurkey, Russia, and Indiaalready contained elements that supporteda fundamental opposition between European and non-European politi-cal regimes.48 The most important consequence of Boteros analysis was

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notable that while Botero followed his source quite closely when describing the absolutepower of the king to give and take lands from his lords at his discretion, and the unen-terprising character of the inhabitants due to the arbitrary exactions they suered fromthe great men, he created a totally new impression when selecting points like these (oftenmade in passing by Alvares) out of a mass of observations in order to dene the regimeas a kind of despotism, with both rich and poor treated more like slaves than sub-jects. Compare Alvares in Ramusio, Navigazioni (ed. M. Milanesi), 2:81-385 to Botero,Relationi, II, 194. For a careful modern discussion of land tenure in the kingdom ofEthiopia, including the principle that tribute was explained because the king was ulti-mate owner of all the land of the country and from him stemmed the right to occupy,own and use it see Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia,from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago, 2000), 11.

49 Boteros position on this issue seems to be traditional monarchical, but perhaps alsoBodinian (he is not explicit).

that non-European barbarism came to be primarily determined by nei-ther race nor religion, but by the relation between civility and politics.Indeed, in his writings one of the key themes that dened oriental despo-tism in the following centuries had clearly emerged: the lack of civilliberty and, in particular, of rights to property. His discussion of polit-ical liberty, concerning the participation of the aristocracy and peoplein the political process, was more tenuous.49 What must perhaps beemphasized at this point is that in the context of the new culturaldynamic created by the growth of travel writing in the Renaissance,the northern-Italian Catholic cosmographer was not alone in using freshaccounts of oriental states to raise these themes. For instance, and toreturn to the Russian example, the English civil lawyer and ambassadorGiles Fletcher reached a very similar assessment of the Muscovy of IvanIV in the 1580s, totally independently from the Possevino-Botero con-struction. Thus, in his account of his 1588-9 embassy to restore Englishtrading rights (published in 1591, and soon controversial):

The state and form of this government is plain tyrannical, as applying all to thebehoof of the prince, and that after a most open and barbarous manner . . . aswell as for the keeping of the nobility and commons in an underproportion andfar uneven balance in their several degrees, as also in their impositions and exac-tions, wherein they exceed all just measure without any regard of nobility or peo-plefor that it giveth the nobility a kind of injust and unmeasured liberty tocommand and exact upon the commons and baser sort of people. . . . The greatoppression over the poor commons maketh them to have no courage in followingtheir trades, for that the more they have, the more danger they are in, not onlyof their goods but of their lives also. And if they have anything, they conceal itall they can. . . . This maketh the people, though otherwise hardened to bear anytoil, to give themselves much to idleness and drinking, as passing for no more thanfrom hand to mouth. And hereof cometh that the commodities of Russia . . . aswax, tallow, hides, ax, hemp etc. grow and go abroad in far less plenty than they

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50 Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, 30, 66-67. Soon after publication in 1591, thebook was denounced by the Muscovy Company as undiplomatic for a number of pas-sages, including Fletchers negative views about Russian government, and Lord Burghleywas pleased to suppress it. Richard Hakluyt was also sceptical about the books publi-cation and eventually included an expurgated edition in his Principal Navigations of 1598-1600. It is not impossible that in this reaction the Elizabethan regime was more concernedwith keeping alive amongst investors the hopes then placed on the Muscovy trade thanwith the perhaps far-fetched idea that the book would reach the ears of Ivan IV andcause fatal oence.

51 Ibid., 34. By contrast, and unlike later writers, Boteros idea of regal governmentwas not very specic on the constitutional front. In particular, in his Reason of State (1589)he neither took a Bodinian or an anti-Bodinian line concerning the nature of sover-eignty and the powers of parliamentary bodies. His concern was limited to proposing aconservative reason of state by which the pursuit of dominion and empire could bemade compatible with both justice and prudence.

were wont to do, because the people, being oppressed and spoiled of their get-tings, are discouraged from their labors.50

It is remarkable the way Fletcher links the liberty of the nobility to thewell-being and rights of the common peoplean argument which inEurope would become the key to the controversial claim by defendersof mixed constitutions that aristocratic liberties were the basis for repub-lican freedom. For Fletcher, who in this sense clearly goes beyond theBoterian denition of regal and political government, what is crucialis the nature of parliament: for to propound bills what every man thin-keth good for the public benet, as the manner in England, the RusParliament [the Sobor] alloweth no such custom nor liberty to subjects.51

Despite this novel emphasis on political liberty, Fletchers agreementwith many of Boteros themes is equally remarkable. This suggests thatthe most important historical factor to consider in the re-emergence oforiental despotism as a key political concept is not the genius of anysingle writer (like Botero) in putting together new observations with clas-sical theories to give the Greek concept a new life. Rather, we shouldconsider the structural tension felt in various parts of Europe betweenthe actual observations of an unprecedented number of travelers engagedin detailed empirical descriptions, and the revived concern and contro-versy about the possible benets of mixed constitutions, or other formsof legal constraints on monarchical power, against the supposed neces-sity of an absolute sovereign authority. Aristotles distinctions could bea helpful aid for this debate but did not pre-determine its existence. Inthis light, Botero and Fletcher seem to stand at the two ends, conser-vative and radical, of a common European position. Throughout thedramatic seventeenth century, as the debate on the limits of royal and

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52 It might be useful to clarify here that Montesquieu did not argue that all moder-ate monarchies enjoyed true political liberty: moderate monarchies limited royal powerthrough a combination of judicial and aristocratic institutions, but to the extent that theywere genuine monarchies, they were ultimately vulnerable to the fact that the king con-trolled both the executive and the legislative functions. His point was that political lib-erty could only truly ourish when the power to legislate was placed in the hands ofan independent senate or parliament, and that otherwise civil liberty was always underthe threat of despotism.

53 In a new European political imagination which cut across the confessional divideof the Latin Church, a seventeenth-century vision exemplied, for example, in the inge-nious plan by Henry IV and his minister Sully for articially creating a system of bal-ance of powers at the expense of the Habsburgs, Russia belonged, with Turkey, to Asia:it was a barbarous country not truly t to be included as an equal power withinChristendom. See E. Hale, ed., The Great Design of Henry IV (Boston, 1909), 21.

state power grew in Europe, often reecting the varying fortunes ofabsolutist and parliamentarian regimes, political thinkers moved betweenthe Bodinian position of emphasizing civil liberty as the mark of allconstitutional monarchies (as opposed to conquest states), to, more rad-ically, arguing that political liberty was no less crucial to any success-ful regime. The English revolution and Montesquieu eventually settledthe argument in the latter form, but not (as we shall see) without fur-ther contributions by travel writers.52

The radical Protestant parliamentarian Fletcher and the Catholicmonarchist and Jesuit cleric Possevino represent dramatically oppositereligious and ideological strands in the history of sixteenth-century Europe,and given the many underlying rivalries in the 1580s, had they failedto miss each other by seven years in the Muscovy of Ivan IV, theywould probably have sought to harm each others mission (Fletcher wasas ardent an anti-papist as Possevino was keen to persecute heresy).However, at the same time they shared a humanist education and cameto broadly similar conclusions about the unpolished, barbarous, andhighly undesirable nature of Russias political regime.53 Fletcher andPossevino also represent two manifestations of an increasingly impor-tant late Renaissance phenomenon, the emergence of the educated trav-eler as philosophical observer of foreign peoples and their customs,religions, and politics.

The Philosophical Traveler and the Analysis of Oriental Monarchies: Berniers India

Few travelers of the seventeenth century represented better than theFrench doctor Franois Bernier (1620-1688) the critical spirit of theindependent lay observer. As a personal disciple of Gassendi, and in

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54 Berniers contribution to the popularization of Gassendism and his related philo-sophical activities (he was both an anti-Aristotelian and an anti-Cartesian) are discussedby Sylvia Murr in her important article, Bernier et Gassendi: une liation dviation-niste? in Gassendi et lEurope 1592-1792, ed. S. Murr (Paris, 1997), and in the specialissue (ed. Murr) of Corpus: revue de philosophie 20-21 (1992), dedicated to Bernier et lesgassendistes. See also Thomas M. Lennon in The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legaciesof Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), esp. 78-87.

55 Bernier presented his reason to travel quite simply as le dsir de voir le monde,and his itinerary from Egypt to India seemed rather random, but neither his contem-poraries nor himself were ignorant of his philosophical pretensions. As fellow-travelerMonsr. de Monceaux [des Maizeaux] put it in 1670 when sending a copy to the sec-retary of the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg, who thus became Berniers rst Englishtranslator, never a traveller went from home more capable to observe, nor has writ-ten with more knowledge, candour and integrity. He was, indeed, of a mould I wishall travellers were made of. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, ed. V.A. Smith (London,1914), xlix-li.

56 That is, Berniers scepticism about Hindu superstition is clearly linked to hisadherence to the new rationalist philosophies and science (in his case Copernican-Galileanas well as atomist-Epicurean) and implies a potential criticism of Christianity (or at leastsome elements of Christianity) as an expression of crdulit enfantine. See also PeterBurke, The Philosopher as Traveller: Berniers Orient, in Voyages and Visions: Towardsa Cultural History of Travel, ed. J. Elsner and J.P. Rubis (London, 1999), 124-37, esp.135. Nicholas Dew discusses Berniers letter in relation to two distinct contexts of knowl-edge production, Mughal and French, in his The Pursuit of Oriental Learning inLouis XIVs France, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1999, chp. 3.

fact his key popularizer, he was closely acquainted with the new post-sceptical, rationalist philosophies of the mid-seventeenth century.54 Theintellectual legacy of Gassendis neo-Epicurean atomism, combined witha classical training evident in the elegant and measured composition ofhis historical works, allowed Bernier to transform his travels to the Eastinto the occasion for a genuinely original interpretation of Mughal India.Guided by his philosophical empiricism to trust his own senses over theliterary tradition, and with a great capacity for synthesis and compari-son, he went well beyond the sheer display of antiquarian curiosity thatcharacterized similar educated travelers of his generation.55 Bernierswritings on India dealt with a variety of subjects, but it was his dis-cussion of gentile religion in a letter to Jean Chapelain (a well-con-nected Gassendist, and one of his key patrons), and his discussion ofthe political system of India in a letter addressed to Colbert, ministerof Louis XIV, which were most inuential, in part because in bothinstances Berniers arguments were construed to reect upon Europeanreligion and politics. In the letter to Chapelain, he subjected the gen-tile religion of India to a modern, anti-clerical critique, which led toa universalist attack against superstition.56 In the letter to Colbert hedeveloped the idea of oriental despotism with a detailed analysis of the

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57 Berniers analysis of religion as superstition may have also inuenced Voltaire,another of his readers. See Murr, Bernier et Gassendi, 80.

58 On Berniers discussion of the Mughal rgime, see Sylvia Murr, La politique auMogol selon Bernier: appareil conceptuel, rhtorique stratgique, philosophie morale,in De la royaut ltat. Anthropologie et historie du politique dans le monde indien, ed. J. Pouchepadassand H. Stern (Paris, 1991), 239-311.

59 Franois Bernier, Nouvelle division de la terre par les dierentes especes ou racesdhommes qui lhabitent, envoye par un fameux voyageur M.lAbb de la Chambre,Journal des Savans 12 (1684): 148-55. This is discussed by Siep Stuurman, FranoisBernier and the Invention of Racial Classication, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000):1-19. Stuurman presents Berniers racialism as partaking in a double intellectual tran-sition: from sacred history to natural history and from the ungoverned taxonomies ofRenaissance cosmography to the systematic spirit of classication that originated withBacon and Descartes. This perhaps overestimates Berniers argument against Biblicalhistory, as he does nothing to challenge it (his racial division makes no historical claims,and elsewhere Bernier is thoroughly monogenist). On