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~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
Orthodox and less frequently, Protestant churches formed the backdrop of the policies that different Christian states pursued towards the Ottoman sultan. Thus, when the Orthodox patriarch Cyrillos Lucaris became a Calvinist in the late 1620s/1029–39, he was supported by the Dutch and English ambassadors, both Protestants, while encountering sharp opposition from the French envoy, who saw Catholic interests in danger.59 However, these rivalries did not always prevent Christians from both western and south-eastern Europe from seeing themselves as belonging to one and the same religion, and this sentiment was especially strong when they were confronted with a Muslim ruler. During the second half of the sixteenth and the beginning years of the seventeenth century, this sentiment, such as it was, was more often shared between certain Catholics and Orthodox, than between Catholics and Protestants. This was due partly to reasons of dogma and partly to the fact that, with the exception of warfare between Muscovy and Poland, Catholic and Orthodox rulers had not in the recent past had much occasion for armed conflict. Religious communalities between Christians, so it was often assumed, might induce Orthodox subjects to rise against their Muslim overlords whenever the presence of a strong ‘western’ army or navy would make this a viable option. While this assumption was frequently made by advisors to various Christian rulers, at least where the sixteenth century was concerned, there was in fact plenty of evidence to the contrary. For such uprisings were really rather rare, and occurred with some frequency only if there were established native Christian rulers to lead them; this condition existed in Moldavia and Walachia until 1716/ 1028–9. Or in other cases, such rebellions occurred in poor and outlying regions such as Montenegro, where an Ottoman army could only be sent at great expense, a move that the authorities in Istanbul might well consider as ‘not worth the trouble’. All this was in principle well known to many contemporaries but, especially in times of war, such knowledge did not prevent the emergence of personages who claimed that they could bring about an anti-Ottoman rebellion.60 Projects involving the subversion of Ottoman Christians were entertained at European courts of the early modern period with some frequency because the relevant rulers, often including ostensible allies of the sultan, assumed the Ottoman Empire to be much less stable as a state than we today, with the benefit of hindsight, know it to have been. Thus for example the financial, economic and political crisis of the late sixteenth century was viewed by many European authors as an indication that the Ottoman Empire had started to ‘decline’, and would ‘fall’ in the near future. In such an eventuality, many states of western and southern Europe had hopes of territorial acquisitions; in this sense, ‘dividing up the Ottoman Empire’ was not entirely an invention of nineteenth-century diplomats.61 But as long as the Empire did remain in existence, these self-same rulers, with the French king an obvious example, might have no particular objection to forming political alliances with the Ottoman sultans.62 These expectations and assumptions permeate many European archival sources dealing with the history of the sultanic domains. Since these materials