Spies for the Sultan: Ottoman Intelligence in the Great Rivalry with Spain

The Bishop of Heraclea, an Orthodox clergyman who played a key role in 16th century European politics, approached the Habsburgs with an intriguing proposition to sow discord in the Ottoman Empire and enable the Austrian-Spanish imperial family to expand their empire into the Balkans. The Spanish Emperor Charles V could join forces with the Persian Shah Tahmasp and reach out to the son of Sultan Suleiman I, Prince Selim, to form an alliance to take on his brother Prince Mustafa. There was a widespread belief that with the death of Suleiman, there would be a struggle for power, in which Mustafa would likely win. Backing Selim would ensure a period of prolonged chaos and the European power could profit off that. While the exact identity of the bishop is not known, it most likely refers to the metropolitan Bishop of Thessaloniki, Macharius Chiensis. Chiensis was active in a number of areas, despite being a member of the Orthodox Christian Church, he was planning to attend the Council of Trent (1545-63), where the Catholic Church was working out how to respond to the rise of Protestantism.

Unbeknown to his Christian brethren at the time, Chiensis was in fact an Ottoman spy who was using his attendance of the council and plotting to take down Mustafa as a cover to gather intelligence for Istanbul. Chiensis was not the only one, many Christian clergymen were secretly in the service of the Sultan across Europe. This fascinating world of premodern espionage is explored in Emrah Safa Gurkan’s book Spies for the Sultan: Ottoman Intelligence In The Great Rivalry with Spain, originally published in Turkish in 2016 and now available in English with translations from Jonathan M Ross and Idil Karacadag.

Gurkan argues that the Ottomans did not have a single institution responsible for intelligence gathering, rather through its patronage network different regional governors across from the empire took on the tasks of organising spy networks on behalf of the Sublime Porte. Spies would be recruited from a variety of backgrounds including the clergy, and those posing as Christian clergymen, merchants, soldiers, sailors and others. The intelligence gathered was impressive, ‘Using a variety of sources, ranging from provincial authorities to vassal states, from foreign diplomats to captured soldiers, and from agents in the field to corsairs on reconnaissance missions, they succeeded in sifting accurate information from false information and employing their limited resources based on the intelligence that they received. More impressively, they did so in a timely fashion…major political and military events reached the Ottoman capital as quickly as it did Venice, allowing Ottoman decision-makers to assess the situation and respond in time.’  The decentralised nature of intelligence gathering produced its own dynamics, ‘Competition between different interest groups turned intelligence into a political football, and it was not too long before a struggle over intelligence broke out among the Ottoman grandees.’  While this led to information and disinformation being weaponised by different factions, this system did have its pluses, ‘The biggest advantage to emerge from outsourcing intelligence-gathering to third parties was that it enabled Ottoman intelligence to draw on information from a wider geographical domain and from a bigger pool of information.’

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The complexity of the espionage world in the early modern period demonstrates the interconnected nature of the Mediterranean. Muslims, Christians and Jews moved between European and Ottoman worlds, they traded, befriended, influenced and even spied on each other. While the Ottomans had a vast network of spies, their enemies, chiefly the Habsburgs, also had their intelligence gathering capabilities too. Istanbul was full of spies working on behalf of the Spanish, the Ottomans tried to counter their efforts too. Ottoman spies caught in Europe could face a variety of fates, as the book outlines, it was generally better to be a Muslim-born spy who only pretended to be a Christian than to be a Christian who converted to Islam and then caught spying. If it was discovered that someone was born Christian, the Spanish would hand them over to the inquisition, where they would have apostasy charges. So, the life of a spy in the 17th century often hung in the balance.

Spies for the Sultan is an enthralling read that offers us a glimpse through the looking glass of the Ottoman intelligence network. The 17th century saw the beginnings of a new age of spying brought about by the emergence of state bureaucracy, institutions and technological changes, which enabled the volume of information to increase and travel quickly. While intelligence works differently today, the early stirrings of the world of espionage that exist today, can be seen as having some of its origins in this period. Emrah Gurkan tells the story well in an easy to read and fun to comprehend kind of way.