English Dragomans and Oriental Secretaries:
The Early Nineteenth Century Origins of the Anglicization of the British
Drogmanat in Constantinople - G.R. Berridge - Diplomacy and Statecraft,
volume 14, Dec. 2003, number 4, Frank Cass Journal, London
This article begins with a brief account of the role of the dragomans in Constantinople and the evolution of the drogmanat in the British embassy up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It then argues that the push for an infusion of ‘natural-born’ Englishmen into this institution at this point came chiefly from the Levant Company and not, as sometimes supposed, from the diplomatic service or the Foreign Office. The upshot was a drogmanat infused with English Levantines and watched over by a British-born oriental secretary. The article concludes with a postscript on the developments up to the end of the nineteenth century.
The native dragomans, or interpreters, of the British embassy in Constantinople - like those of the other embassies - were indispensable to its work. This was because after the early years (the embassy was established in 1583), no ambassador appears to have spoken Turkish or found it easy to quickly pick up the manner of conducting business at the Porte.1 However, they were also indispensable because they were relied on for much more than merely ‘interpreting’. They were commonly employed as messange-bearers, negotiators of routine and not so routine matters,2 and - in the case of the most senior - as advisers as well. They also served as intelligence gatherers, not least because the Levant Company, which financed the embassy until the early nineteenth century, refused to give ambassadors a secret service allowance. Together with the secretaries - perhaps more so - they also provided institutional memory and continuity of procedure to the embassy.
There had, of course, always been misgivings about the timidity and loyalty of the native dragomans, who remained slaves of the Ottoman sultan. However, these misgivings were generally kept in check until the early nineteenth century, and it is not difficult to understand why. For one thing, more experienced ambassadors appreciated that by softening the language of self-important and short-tempered envoys, the dragomans often performed a valuable service.3 Others developed a great respect for their dragomans, especially those whose families had served the embassy for generations and had much to lose by disloyalty. And, in any case, it was rare for an ambassador to be totally dependent upon his dragomans. Most of them had alternative lines of communication to both the Porte and the Seraglio that could be used instead of, or as a check on, the dragomans in particularly sensitive matters; this was essential when the Turks themselves did not trust the dragomans.4 From time to time these alternative lines of communication included the chief dragoman of the Porte, with whom the Porte, with whom ambassadors sometimes had at least one language in common;5 embassy doctors;6 and a secretary of the embassy, or even a treasurer, who had sufficiently good Turkish to do some of the work that would normally be done by a dragoman.7 Finally, to the extent that ambassadors seemed dependent nevertheless on their native dragomans, this fact alone was usually sufficient to preserve inertia on the issue of reform. Who else could do the job? An attempt to replace native dragomans with natives of Britain had failed when tried in 1640s.8 Why, then, was a new attempt to launch the Anglicization of the British embassy drogmanat9 made in the early nineteenth century (which by the end of the century had proved successful), and what shape did this take?
In the following attempt to answer these questions, attention will be directed in particular to the role of the Levant Company. This had financed the embassy since it was first established and retained great influence in its affairs until 1825 but its contribution to Anglicization has been overlooked both by the historian of the British dragomans and, more surprisingly, the historian of the Levant Company.10 Also overlooked has been the contribution of Robert Liston, the experienced diplomat who had been ambassador in Constantinople in the period 1794-95 and served in that post again from 1812 until his final retirement from the diplomatic service in 1820.11 As a result, Liston’s ideas and example will also receive special attention. First, however, what was the position of the drogmanat at the beginning of the century?
The Drogmanat at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
From it s beginnings in the late sixteenth century, the English embassy had employed a substantial body of dragomans, traditionally Christian ‘Franks’ of mainly Italian origin born in Pera. As the system became established, attached to this body were younger men learning the craft who were known as giovani di lingua or later as student interpreters or junior dragomans. In the interests of economy, the Levant Company laid down a maximum of three dragomans and three giovani.12 However, it found it difficult to enforce this formula because ambassadors nearly always seemed to feel the need for more.13 The embassy chaplain sometimes needed a dragoman as well, though in that event he employed one at his own expense.14 Enjoying new prosperity and under pressure of increased work in the embassy, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the company appears to have increased the approved formula to four dragomans and four giovani di lingua and by the early 1820s to five plus five.15 They were ranked ‘first dragoman’, ‘second dragoman’, and so on, in terms of seniority, and salaried accordingly. The first dragoman, subsequently known as the ‘confidential’ or ‘political’ dragoman, handled the most sensitive business and usually had a free run of the embassy’s archives.
By the end of the French revolutionary wars, therefore, the drogmanat was a sizeable establishment. At this juncture it also became one which was more responsive to the political needs of the ambassador. Moved by the much greater importance assumed by Turkey in European diplomacy at this time, in 1804 the British government had taken over from the Levant Company responsibility for paying the salary of the ambassador. Henceforth the ambassador was to surrender his commercial duties to a consul-general, although, after a period of uncertainty on this point, it had been agreed that he would remain ‘supreme chief’ of the embassy. Among other things, this meant company acknowledgement of the authority of the ambassador to allocate the number of dragomans as between political and commercial work as he saw fit, which provided a welcome relief from this recent tug of war with the merchants over their services. Furthermore, in 1814 the Levant Company began to inform newly appointed giovani di lingua that they could not, as before, ‘look to seniority alone for progressive rank or separate functions’ but would be ‘employed at the pleasure of their superiors according to their respective qualifications’. And shortly after his arrival as ambassador in 1821, Lord Strangford, impatient with the sensitivity of his predecessor to the feelings of the established dragomans, took this one step further and made his fifth dragoman his ‘political dragoman’. Afraid of testing their loyalty too severely or even of losing them altogether, all ambassadors at this period were keen supporters of greatly increasing the payments to their interpreters, the purchasing power of which had recently been severely depressed. Ambassadorial praise of their virtues was thus at this point more audible than worries over their vices.
Levant Company Agitation for English Student Interpreters
Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century reform sentiment began to strengthen. Some of this may have had its origins, as has been claimed, with the young Stratford Canning, who was exceptional among heads of mission of this period in his generalized dislike of the dragomans - not to mention Turkey in general. However, Stratford had many other things on his mind at that time and there is no evidence that he waged any sustained campaign against them. It is also probably fair to say that he held the Pisanis in high regard, and was fulsome in his praise of the dragomans (the third, Francis Chabert, in particular) in running ‘to snatch the public property from the flames’, when fire seriously threatened the embassy buildings in May 1810. In fact, it seems likely that pressure from the Levant Company for reform of the dragoman system was initially more important than any agitation in the embassy or the Foreign Office.
In 1804 the Levant Company had agreed to continue to pay the salaries of all the embassy staff other than the ambassador. This included the dragomans involved exclusively in political work, and it continued to pay them all until its demise in 1825. It also knew that it would probably need the dragomans more than ever after 1804. This was because the change in the position of the ambassador introduced in that year had given him ample excuse to wash his hands of its affairs, and a consul-general, as the company well knew, could carry nothing like the same authority at the Porte. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that it began to agitate for reform of the dragomans when it began to suspect that ‘want of zeal’ on their part was responsible for recent embassy failures to secure redress of commercial grievances at the Porte. Responding to the request for further salary increases made on their behalf by Liston in 1814, the company told the consul-general, Isaac Morier, that while the past accomplishments of the dragomans were not in doubt, if they were to be paid by results they could not expect much more now. ‘We really cannot longer conceal our mortification at their continual defeats’, it concluded. Four years later, in 1819, it expressed in even stronger terms it lack of faith in the dragomans - and Liston himself. Complaining directly to the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, of serious breaches in the capitulations by the Turks recently, the company secretary, George Liddell, charged that this was a consequence of
our too ready acquiescence in repeated previous encroachments, and by too mild a conduct on the part of the Ambassador ... [If] any new instructions be sent to HM Ambassador the might be effectively seconded by an official note of similar import addressed to the Turkish resident here [London]: At least the feeling of His Majesty’s Government would thereby be more certainly conveyed to the Porte than through the doubtful medium of a dragoman, who may not choose or who may not dare to deliver it with all its original energy.
The reform tendency had in fact begun visibly to stir into life in 1810, though its first steps were slow and faltering. In March of that year, in announcing the new salaries and embassy establishments, the Levant Company drew the attention of the consul-general to the fact that it had increased the salaries for the giovani di lingua even beyond the original increase proposed. It had done this, he was told, ‘with a view to induce young men of respectable connections to enter our service’. It also asked him ‘particularly to notice what effect has been produced by the increased allowances’. What the company had in mind began to become clearer when George Wood, who was British-born but not so young (he had served Lord Elgin as an interpreter in Egypt), was appointed a giovani di lingua in the following year. The company secretary told Morier on that occasion that ‘It would give singular satisfaction to the Company to have frequent opportunities of employing our countrymen in that department’.
It is hardly surprising therefore that the company should have taken up this matter with more energy in the same letter of June 1814 in which it blamed the dragomans for its recent failures at the Porte. Ask the ambassador, it directed its consul-general, ‘to favour us with a plan for supplying the class of giovani di lingua with our young countrymen, and we will strenuously endeavour to carry it into immediate execution. We know’, it added, ‘that His Excellency concurs in our opinion of the expediency of this measure’. This was probably true but Liston did not seem to share the company’s sense of urgency. Certainly, only a few months before it made its request, the ambassador had told Morier that it would be wrong - as the first dragoman had recently suggested - to increase the strength of the giovani di lingua to six and fill it immediately with recruits from the usual source. This would ‘shut the door against our young countrymen’, he observed. On the other hand, he had prefaced this with a qualification: ‘though this [plan] may not be immediately carried into execution, it may be resorted to at some future period’. This was not the conclusion of an enthusiastic reformer. Nevertheless, towards the end of 1814, having given as his reason for delay his uncertainty as to what the company could afford, Liston provided it with his preliminary answers. These were copied to the Foreign Office and reward careful scrutiny.
Liston’s Response: A Mixed Establishment
Having rehearsed the usual arguments against the dragomans and saying that at least some of them should be ‘native Englishmen’, Liston proceeded to outline his draft plan. This was well informed by knowledge of what the other powers did to train their own nationals as dragomans, and was influenced in particular by the example of France.34
Since the English dragomans would need perfect Turkish, they would have to be sent out ‘at the age of 10 or 12 perhaps, or of 15 at the latest’. The work entailed much drudgery and would have to be regarded as a profession for life, so children from well-favoured families would have to be ruled out- they would ge much better positions at home. Instead, the right sort of material might come ‘perhaps from some of our charitable instutions’. (The ambassador appears to have had in mind orphanages and poor houses.) The German mission at the Porte, said Liston, boarded its own trainees with Armenian families (who, unlike the Greeks, favoured Turkish as their first language) and employed masters to give them regular lessons. The French had a proper academy with about 12 students in it at the time, though some were destined to be consuls and agents at ‘interior stations’, as well as dragomans. Preferring the less health - and morals - threatening French solution but surmising that the company would jib at its cost, Liston proceeded to recommend a compromise. This, he suggested, might be a ‘small house ... in the immediate neighbourhood of the British Palace’ with a ‘respectable family’ placed in it ‘on the condition of receiving two or three young men as boarders’. However, Liston emphasised that ‘with a view to perfect their education, to refresh their patriotism, perhaps even to preserve their native language, it would be essential that they should return and spend a year or two in their own country’. It was partly because this would be expensive and because it was an experiment, he said, that he recommended only a small number of students. But there was another reason:
it does not strike me [Liston continued] that we ought entirely to overthrow the present system and to confine the service strictly to British subjects. The establishment contains individuals of great merit - and besides, there may be cases where a native of England might perhaps unseasonably think himself called upon to uphold the firmness of our national character, and where the pliability and mild deportment of the class of men from whom our present interpreters are selected might secure a point of importance to the nation.
Nevertheless, he had come out for a mixed establishment, even if this meant only one British dragoman, ‘for the existence of even one Dragoman perfectly qualified would be an object of real importance to all our interests in this country’.
Liston ended this letter to the Levant Company by saying that he had avoided ‘for the present entering into very particular detail’, though he assured them that he stood ready to answer any of their questions. He also informed Castlereagh that he would write to him later on the subject at greater length. Whether he ever did submit a more detailed plan, however, seems very unlikely. He had provided a sketch of ideas that he probably realized were not what the Levant Company had hoped for, either in terms of the social background of the boys or the cost of their education. As a result, he may well have calculated that fleshing out these ideas would be a waste of time. He was already in his seventies and no doubt looking forward to his retirement. In any case, as we shall see, he had already put into action a version of his own ideas and would shortly take a further step to implement it. In any event, over a year later, in April 1816, the company told its consul-general, with only thinly concealed frustration, that it was still waiting for ‘the advantage of Mr Liston’s cooperation’ in this matter. In the meantime, it continued, since ‘the present plan of employing natives is not to be wholly abandoned’, it agreed to take the first dragoman’s grandson into the service. Nevertheless, the company’s agitation had already left its mark, though the first real evidence of this was more the creation of the new post of ‘oriental secretary’ than the appointment of Englishmen to the ancient post of dragoman.
First Steps towards Anglicization
At some point in the period when Lord Wellesley was foreign secretary, that is, from December 1809 until March 1812, it was decided to send out to the embassy an Englishman to be trained for the post of ‘Principal Interpreter’. Terrick Hamilton, 31 years old and the fourth and youngest son of the vicar of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, was the first sent out with this end in view. However, the thinking behind the creation of this post is best seen in a letter sent in May 1817 by Liston to Wellesley’s more organized successor, Lord Castlereagh. This recommended one of his own protégés as the ‘eventual successor’ to Hamilton, who was reportedly not an outstanding interpreter.
It appears to be essential to the public interest [began Liston] that there should be permanently attached to the embassy at Constantinople a person well acquainted with the oriental languages, and perfectly master of the Turkish, whose assistance may render the ambassador in some degree independent of the common class of interpreters, natives of the country. He ought to to be a natural-born subject of his Majesty, to have had a good education, and to have imbibed the English ideas and English principles.
In this letter we see te post of oriental secretary emerging more clearly than in Hamilton’s appointment in 1812 or in Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ of 1814. Hamilton had been conceived as a dragoman - the first or political dragoman but a dragoman nevertheless, with all the drudgery of translation and frequent attendance at the Porte and elsewhere that this occupation invariably demanded. In 1814, there was a clear hint of the new post in Liston’s argument that on British dragoman was infinitely better than none and in his somewhat discouraging intimation that this might be all that was possible - but he had spoken of dragomans nevertheless. By 1817, however, the ambassador had moved on. He did not use the term ‘dragoman’ in connection with the post for which he wanted a natural-born British linguist; in fact, he did not apply a title to it at all. What he did say was that the occupant of the post should be separate from and, by clear implication, above ‘the common class of interpreters’. This was further underlined by the candidate Liston had in mind.
In 1812 Liston had taken out with him to Constantinoplea ‘youth’ called Robert Liston Elliot, with whose family the ambassador had close connections going back many years, as might readily be deduced from the name by which the boy had been christened. As he told the foreign secretary in May 1817, Elliot was ‘of respectable connections, well disposed, with a turn for languages, and at so early a period of life that he acquired the Turkish accent in perfection’. He had subsequently sent him home to complete his education and his father had despatched him to the University of Cambridge. Except that he was not a product of one of England’s ‘charitable institutions’, young Elliot’s early career was a carbon copy of the blueprint presented in Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ to the Levant Company of 1814. But the social difference was crucial. Someone from Elliot’s background could not be a mere dragoman. Liston asked Castlereagh to post him to the embassy as a paid attaché, a rank which, under pressure of increased diplomatic business, was introduced at precisely this juncture in all of Britain’s embassies and - only a few years’ later - in many of its other missions.
The foreign secretary readily fell in with Liston’s suggestion, in the course of his reply referring now to Hamilton as the ‘oriental secretary’. The allowance of Elliot, who was in effect the first ‘oriental attaché’ at the British embassy, though the title was not formally introduced until the 1840s, was to commence in July 1817; and the ambassador was to oversee his studies. When Hamilton was promoted to secretary to embassy in 1820, Eliot duly took his place as oriental secretary. His instructions were to continue his studies of Eastern languages but by no means overlook the procedures of the Ottoman court and courts of justice and ‘learn the principles upon which their commercial transactions are conducted’. He was to ‘so far associate with the dragomans of the Levant Company’ and to learn how to deal with the Ottoman authorities should it be necessary for him, from time to time, to perform the functions of ‘confidential interpreter’. And he should generally be available to assist, when required, the ambassador ‘in transacting the public business of the embassy’. Elliot turned out to be more successful and, despite an appeal from his father, was not permitted leave of absence until relations with Turkey were broken in 1828. Nevertheless, he no more replaced the first dragoman than did Terrick Hamilton, even after Bartholomew Pisani’s replacement, Francis Chabert, fell under strong suspicion of serious disloyalty.
The post of oriental secretary was a clever attempt to overcome the problems with the attempt to Anglicize the drogmanat by the method of appointing English boys as giovani di lingua - problems with Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ of 1814 had in reality made quite clear...
There had been initial progress in Anglicizing the drogmanat itself by the time the Levant Company handed responsibility for it to the government in 1825, though this was largely because it was ‘Anglicization’ of a special kind. There was certainly a natural-born English dragomans in the embassy, George Wood. Moreover, though nominally only fifth dragoman, under the more flexible system insisted by Lord Strangford, Wood had served ably as confidential dragoman and would have been reinstated in this position by Palmerston had he not died in 1834. However, though two of four new students appointed in the early 1820s - Richard Wood (the son of the fifth dragoman) and Henry Simmons - were regarded as ‘English by blood and feeling’,50 they both appear to have been born in the Levant. They were, in other words, ‘Levantines’, in the broad, non-pejorative sense attached to that term in the first half of the nineteenth century - Europeans born and resident in the Levant. Nevertheless, this gave them the obvious advantages - which came to be so prized by Stratford Canning - of fluency in Turkish as well as intimate knowledge of the country.
Conclusion
It seems clear, then, that the main push for an infusion of natural-born Englishmen into the drogmanat of the British Embassy in Constantinople in the early nineteenth century came from the Levant Company and not, as sometimes supposed, from the diplomatic service of the Foreign Office. Conscious of the cost, difficulties of recruitment, and uncertainty of success of Anglicization, the reaction of the Foreign Office itself was cautious. In the event, it concluded that a marriage between the desirable and the practical could issue only in a drogmanat infused with English Levantines and watched over by a British-born oriental secretary - which is what, in the first half of the century, the embassy enjoyed.
But a mixed establishment of this kind could not be expected to be perfect, and on his return to the embassy in 1826 Stratford Canning was greeted with alarming news. This was that Francis Chabert, first dragoman since the retirement of Bartholomew Pisani in 1824 and the man he had praised so highly for his behaviour in the fire of 1810, ws strongly suspected of betraying the secrets of the embassy to the Prussian envoy, Baron Miltitz. The Chabert affair gave another push to the drive to Anglicization but it was not until the early 1840s that a serious experiment with English student interpreters was made, and this was deemed a failure. Much later and as an important part of the effort to strengthen and tightenup the consular service in the Levant, a modest academy of British-born student dragomans similar to that recommended by Robert Liston was established at Ortakeui in the suburbs of Constantinople in 1877. This was much more successful. It is, however, a nice irony that the last two chief dragomans at the British Embassy in Constantinople, though born and educated in Britain, were both Catholics from the south of Ireland, Gerald Fitzmaurice and Andrew Ryan. And of the former, Aubrey Herbert, earlier an honorary attaché at the embassy, wrote in 1913 that he ‘loathes ... England’.
University of Leicester
NOTES
1. G.F. Abbott, Under the Turk at Constantinople: A Record of Sir John Finch’s Embassy, 1674-1681 (London: Macmillan, 1920), p.46.
2. Seventeenth-century Levant Company instructions specifically permitted the ambassador to leave to his dragomans the seeking redress at the Porte of all but the most serious grievances of English factors. See, for example, Instructions to Sir William Hussey (1690-91), SP105/45.
3. This understanding was an interesting feature of Robert Liston’s thinking about the future of the dragomans, discussed below. See also A. Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution: Collected Essays, Volume One, ed. E. Ingram (London: Cass, 1993), pp.162, 164-5, 174, 282-3.
4. A. Kurat (ed.), The Despatches of Sir Robert Sutton, Ambassador in Constantinople (1710-1714), Camden Third Series, vol. 78 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1953), pp. 8-9, 50.
5. During Liston’s first embasy (1794-95), ambassador and chief dragoman had two languages in common, both could speak Hebrew as well as Greek, Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, p.79.
6. A. Kurat (ed.), The Despatches of Sir Robert Sutton, Ambassador in Constantinople (1710-1714), p.50.
7. Paul Rycaut and Dudley North, (treasurer) in the seventeenth century, and David Morier in the early nineteenth, for example. On Rycaut, see S. Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1678 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p.31. On North, see Richard Grassby, The English Gentelman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp.130, 191, and esp. 195; and Abbott, Under the Turk in Constantinople, pp.62-3. Morrier’s family was originally Huguenot but had been long settled in the Levant; his father, Isaac, the Levant Company’s first consul-general, was a naturalized Englishman and his mother was Dutch. Born in Smyrna, David was educated at Harrow School and entered the diplomatic service in 1804. Subsequently he became a close friend as well as secretary to Stratford Canning during his first tour as head of a mission - see Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), pp.71, 73, and his entry on Morier in the Dictionary of National Biography; Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, pp. 111-12, 182; and Canning’s praise of Morier in his valedictory despatch to Castlereagh of 3 July 1812, FO78/77.
8. ‘The education of Greek boys at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, with a view of their subsequent employement as dragomans, proved equally disappointing at the end of the century’, Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey, pp. 108-9. See also Phyllis S. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965), pp.74-5.
9. That is, the dragoman’s section of the embassy. The English term was ‘dragomanat’ but the French ‘drogmanat’ was often preferred, not least, no doubt, because it trips off the tongue more readily.
10. In A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935; repr. by Cass: London, 1964) [hereafter HLC], A.C. Wood gives much attention to the embassy but deals rather superficially with the dragomans. The weakness of Allan Cunningham’s treatment in ch.1 of Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century: Collected Essays Volume Two, de. E. Ingram (London: Cass, 1993), is that it ignores completely the records of the Levant Company.
11. Liston’s diplomatic career, which had taken him amongst other cities, to Munich, Ratisbon, Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm, Washington, and the Hague, is detailed in the Dictionary of National Biography. When he died in 1836 he was described by one journal as ‘the father of the diplomatic body throughout Europe’.
12. In HLC (p.227), Wood incorrectly states that ‘there were four dragomen’ at Constantinople ‘from at least as early as 1650’, citing as his source the court book of the Levant Company covering that year. It is true that the wording of the minutes on which he drew is misleading. These minutes, which are of a meeting held on 12 February 1650 (old style), contain a statement of the salaries to be paid to the dragomans. These are listed as ‘the Chiefe’, ‘the Second’, ‘the Third’ and ‘the young Druggerman’. However, it is obvious that ‘the young Druggerman’ was a giovani di lingua and not a full dragoman. Only six days earlier, the Levant Company had written to the ambassador (Bendysh), saying ‘We shall further mind your Lordship that whereas by your Articles with us you are limited to 3 Druggermen only, we observe more of them are employed by you at our expense; which we expect to be eased of’, Co. to Bendysh, 6 FEB. 1650 (old style), SP105/112. In fact, in the second half of the seventeenth century, company instructions to the ambassador generally drew explicit attention to the three plus three formula. For example, Company Instructions to Chandos (1680, Trumbull (1687), Hussey (1690), Paget (1692), and Sutton (1701 - ‘The usual number of our Druggermen at Constantinople being three’), all in SP105/145. Of course, Wood might have countered that he was referring to the actual as opposed to the company’s preferred number but even so his claim - which suggests a fixed and approved figure - is misleading. In any case, while four might well turn out to have been fairly close to the real average, it was sometimes mor and sometimes less.
13. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II, p.75; Levant Co. to Bendysh, 6 Feb. 1650 (old style), SP105/112. In advancing this case for a larger drogmanat in the early nineteenth century, Bartholomew Pisani, the first dragoman, himself drew attention to this: ‘By the ancient records of the Company it appears that there were, at times, no less than nine officers in their service on pay at Constantinople’, Pisani to Isaac Morier (consul-general), 10 Feb. 1814, SP105/134.
14. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II, p.76.
15. The Levant Company’s records, which are incomplete, do not provide the whole answer to this, though the Constantinople Treasurer’s account books for 1804-16 are very helpful. In 1804 and 1806 (the first years available) these show that he had four dragomans and four students in his books. And Castlereagh’s ‘Memorandum of Salaries directed to be paid to the Dragomans in the service of the Levant Company at Constantinople’ (Castlereagh to Liston, 7 March 1812, FO78/79) officially confirmed the new, ideal four plus four formula. Subsequently, the Treasurer’s account books reveal the following numbers actually on his books for the last quarter of each of these years: 1812 (4 plus 3), 1813 (4 plus 3), 1814 (5 plus 3), 1815 (5 plus 2), and 1816 (5 plus 2); see SP105/205 and SP105/206. For the establishment in 1825 and 1827, see FO78/157 (folio 61) and FO366/569 (folio 169) respectively.
34.The Capuchin fathers in Constantinople had been training the children of Levantine families to serve in this capacity for the French embassy since 1629. In 1669, in the time of Colbert, their school received official endorsement and thereafter the training of the jeunes de langues was deliberately modelled on the Venetian school for giovani di lingua established in Constantinople a century earlier. Ideally, six ten-year-olds were sent out from France for training at three-year intervals, the programme being funded by the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles. In 1721 the scheme was modified, the students first being trained in Paris and not sent out to Constantinople until they were 15 or 16. During the Revolution the Capuchins were replaced by lay teachers and the school in Constantinople was placed directly under the control of the Foreign Ministry. However, at the end of the eighteenth century greater emphasis began to be given to training in Paris and it is ironic that, just as Liston was directing attention to the French school in Constantinople as a model of sorts for the British, this school was itself in decline, Jean-Michel Casa, Le Palais de France à Istanbul: Un demi-millénaire d’alliance entre la Turquie et la France (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), p.66.
50. Cunningham, Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century, p.9, esp. n.16. Simmons has been barely noticed by earlier historians, probably because he appears to have been unremarkable. Nevertheless, there was a British merchant family of this name in Constantinople at this time and it is reasonable to assume to he came from it. In 1856 Stratford Canning referred to him as ‘an Englishman’, Canning to Clarendon, 3 June 1856, FO366/569. On Richard Wood, see Cunningham’s introduction to The Early Correspondence of Richard Wood. Richard’s appointment was facilitated by the resolve of his father to give him an ‘English education’, Liddell to Cartwright, 1 July 1824, SP105/125. Since, according to Cunningham, he had already had ‘several years schooling in Exeter’ before 1823 (The Early Correspondence, p.4), this was presumably a reference to a British university education. In the event, he appears not to have enjoyed one.
Note: 2- The theme of the new dragoman training is covered in an article in the culture magazine issue 16 entitled ‘Dragoboys of Ortaköy’.
This article begins with a brief account of the role of the dragomans in Constantinople and the evolution of the drogmanat in the British embassy up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It then argues that the push for an infusion of ‘natural-born’ Englishmen into this institution at this point came chiefly from the Levant Company and not, as sometimes supposed, from the diplomatic service or the Foreign Office. The upshot was a drogmanat infused with English Levantines and watched over by a British-born oriental secretary. The article concludes with a postscript on the developments up to the end of the nineteenth century.
The native dragomans, or interpreters, of the British embassy in Constantinople - like those of the other embassies - were indispensable to its work. This was because after the early years (the embassy was established in 1583), no ambassador appears to have spoken Turkish or found it easy to quickly pick up the manner of conducting business at the Porte.1 However, they were also indispensable because they were relied on for much more than merely ‘interpreting’. They were commonly employed as messange-bearers, negotiators of routine and not so routine matters,2 and - in the case of the most senior - as advisers as well. They also served as intelligence gatherers, not least because the Levant Company, which financed the embassy until the early nineteenth century, refused to give ambassadors a secret service allowance. Together with the secretaries - perhaps more so - they also provided institutional memory and continuity of procedure to the embassy.
There had, of course, always been misgivings about the timidity and loyalty of the native dragomans, who remained slaves of the Ottoman sultan. However, these misgivings were generally kept in check until the early nineteenth century, and it is not difficult to understand why. For one thing, more experienced ambassadors appreciated that by softening the language of self-important and short-tempered envoys, the dragomans often performed a valuable service.3 Others developed a great respect for their dragomans, especially those whose families had served the embassy for generations and had much to lose by disloyalty. And, in any case, it was rare for an ambassador to be totally dependent upon his dragomans. Most of them had alternative lines of communication to both the Porte and the Seraglio that could be used instead of, or as a check on, the dragomans in particularly sensitive matters; this was essential when the Turks themselves did not trust the dragomans.4 From time to time these alternative lines of communication included the chief dragoman of the Porte, with whom the Porte, with whom ambassadors sometimes had at least one language in common;5 embassy doctors;6 and a secretary of the embassy, or even a treasurer, who had sufficiently good Turkish to do some of the work that would normally be done by a dragoman.7 Finally, to the extent that ambassadors seemed dependent nevertheless on their native dragomans, this fact alone was usually sufficient to preserve inertia on the issue of reform. Who else could do the job? An attempt to replace native dragomans with natives of Britain had failed when tried in 1640s.8 Why, then, was a new attempt to launch the Anglicization of the British embassy drogmanat9 made in the early nineteenth century (which by the end of the century had proved successful), and what shape did this take?
In the following attempt to answer these questions, attention will be directed in particular to the role of the Levant Company. This had financed the embassy since it was first established and retained great influence in its affairs until 1825 but its contribution to Anglicization has been overlooked both by the historian of the British dragomans and, more surprisingly, the historian of the Levant Company.10 Also overlooked has been the contribution of Robert Liston, the experienced diplomat who had been ambassador in Constantinople in the period 1794-95 and served in that post again from 1812 until his final retirement from the diplomatic service in 1820.11 As a result, Liston’s ideas and example will also receive special attention. First, however, what was the position of the drogmanat at the beginning of the century?
The Drogmanat at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
From it s beginnings in the late sixteenth century, the English embassy had employed a substantial body of dragomans, traditionally Christian ‘Franks’ of mainly Italian origin born in Pera. As the system became established, attached to this body were younger men learning the craft who were known as giovani di lingua or later as student interpreters or junior dragomans. In the interests of economy, the Levant Company laid down a maximum of three dragomans and three giovani.12 However, it found it difficult to enforce this formula because ambassadors nearly always seemed to feel the need for more.13 The embassy chaplain sometimes needed a dragoman as well, though in that event he employed one at his own expense.14 Enjoying new prosperity and under pressure of increased work in the embassy, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the company appears to have increased the approved formula to four dragomans and four giovani di lingua and by the early 1820s to five plus five.15 They were ranked ‘first dragoman’, ‘second dragoman’, and so on, in terms of seniority, and salaried accordingly. The first dragoman, subsequently known as the ‘confidential’ or ‘political’ dragoman, handled the most sensitive business and usually had a free run of the embassy’s archives.
By the end of the French revolutionary wars, therefore, the drogmanat was a sizeable establishment. At this juncture it also became one which was more responsive to the political needs of the ambassador. Moved by the much greater importance assumed by Turkey in European diplomacy at this time, in 1804 the British government had taken over from the Levant Company responsibility for paying the salary of the ambassador. Henceforth the ambassador was to surrender his commercial duties to a consul-general, although, after a period of uncertainty on this point, it had been agreed that he would remain ‘supreme chief’ of the embassy. Among other things, this meant company acknowledgement of the authority of the ambassador to allocate the number of dragomans as between political and commercial work as he saw fit, which provided a welcome relief from this recent tug of war with the merchants over their services. Furthermore, in 1814 the Levant Company began to inform newly appointed giovani di lingua that they could not, as before, ‘look to seniority alone for progressive rank or separate functions’ but would be ‘employed at the pleasure of their superiors according to their respective qualifications’. And shortly after his arrival as ambassador in 1821, Lord Strangford, impatient with the sensitivity of his predecessor to the feelings of the established dragomans, took this one step further and made his fifth dragoman his ‘political dragoman’. Afraid of testing their loyalty too severely or even of losing them altogether, all ambassadors at this period were keen supporters of greatly increasing the payments to their interpreters, the purchasing power of which had recently been severely depressed. Ambassadorial praise of their virtues was thus at this point more audible than worries over their vices.
Levant Company Agitation for English Student Interpreters
Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century reform sentiment began to strengthen. Some of this may have had its origins, as has been claimed, with the young Stratford Canning, who was exceptional among heads of mission of this period in his generalized dislike of the dragomans - not to mention Turkey in general. However, Stratford had many other things on his mind at that time and there is no evidence that he waged any sustained campaign against them. It is also probably fair to say that he held the Pisanis in high regard, and was fulsome in his praise of the dragomans (the third, Francis Chabert, in particular) in running ‘to snatch the public property from the flames’, when fire seriously threatened the embassy buildings in May 1810. In fact, it seems likely that pressure from the Levant Company for reform of the dragoman system was initially more important than any agitation in the embassy or the Foreign Office.
In 1804 the Levant Company had agreed to continue to pay the salaries of all the embassy staff other than the ambassador. This included the dragomans involved exclusively in political work, and it continued to pay them all until its demise in 1825. It also knew that it would probably need the dragomans more than ever after 1804. This was because the change in the position of the ambassador introduced in that year had given him ample excuse to wash his hands of its affairs, and a consul-general, as the company well knew, could carry nothing like the same authority at the Porte. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that it began to agitate for reform of the dragomans when it began to suspect that ‘want of zeal’ on their part was responsible for recent embassy failures to secure redress of commercial grievances at the Porte. Responding to the request for further salary increases made on their behalf by Liston in 1814, the company told the consul-general, Isaac Morier, that while the past accomplishments of the dragomans were not in doubt, if they were to be paid by results they could not expect much more now. ‘We really cannot longer conceal our mortification at their continual defeats’, it concluded. Four years later, in 1819, it expressed in even stronger terms it lack of faith in the dragomans - and Liston himself. Complaining directly to the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, of serious breaches in the capitulations by the Turks recently, the company secretary, George Liddell, charged that this was a consequence of
our too ready acquiescence in repeated previous encroachments, and by too mild a conduct on the part of the Ambassador ... [If] any new instructions be sent to HM Ambassador the might be effectively seconded by an official note of similar import addressed to the Turkish resident here [London]: At least the feeling of His Majesty’s Government would thereby be more certainly conveyed to the Porte than through the doubtful medium of a dragoman, who may not choose or who may not dare to deliver it with all its original energy.
The reform tendency had in fact begun visibly to stir into life in 1810, though its first steps were slow and faltering. In March of that year, in announcing the new salaries and embassy establishments, the Levant Company drew the attention of the consul-general to the fact that it had increased the salaries for the giovani di lingua even beyond the original increase proposed. It had done this, he was told, ‘with a view to induce young men of respectable connections to enter our service’. It also asked him ‘particularly to notice what effect has been produced by the increased allowances’. What the company had in mind began to become clearer when George Wood, who was British-born but not so young (he had served Lord Elgin as an interpreter in Egypt), was appointed a giovani di lingua in the following year. The company secretary told Morier on that occasion that ‘It would give singular satisfaction to the Company to have frequent opportunities of employing our countrymen in that department’.
It is hardly surprising therefore that the company should have taken up this matter with more energy in the same letter of June 1814 in which it blamed the dragomans for its recent failures at the Porte. Ask the ambassador, it directed its consul-general, ‘to favour us with a plan for supplying the class of giovani di lingua with our young countrymen, and we will strenuously endeavour to carry it into immediate execution. We know’, it added, ‘that His Excellency concurs in our opinion of the expediency of this measure’. This was probably true but Liston did not seem to share the company’s sense of urgency. Certainly, only a few months before it made its request, the ambassador had told Morier that it would be wrong - as the first dragoman had recently suggested - to increase the strength of the giovani di lingua to six and fill it immediately with recruits from the usual source. This would ‘shut the door against our young countrymen’, he observed. On the other hand, he had prefaced this with a qualification: ‘though this [plan] may not be immediately carried into execution, it may be resorted to at some future period’. This was not the conclusion of an enthusiastic reformer. Nevertheless, towards the end of 1814, having given as his reason for delay his uncertainty as to what the company could afford, Liston provided it with his preliminary answers. These were copied to the Foreign Office and reward careful scrutiny.
Liston’s Response: A Mixed Establishment
Having rehearsed the usual arguments against the dragomans and saying that at least some of them should be ‘native Englishmen’, Liston proceeded to outline his draft plan. This was well informed by knowledge of what the other powers did to train their own nationals as dragomans, and was influenced in particular by the example of France.34
Since the English dragomans would need perfect Turkish, they would have to be sent out ‘at the age of 10 or 12 perhaps, or of 15 at the latest’. The work entailed much drudgery and would have to be regarded as a profession for life, so children from well-favoured families would have to be ruled out- they would ge much better positions at home. Instead, the right sort of material might come ‘perhaps from some of our charitable instutions’. (The ambassador appears to have had in mind orphanages and poor houses.) The German mission at the Porte, said Liston, boarded its own trainees with Armenian families (who, unlike the Greeks, favoured Turkish as their first language) and employed masters to give them regular lessons. The French had a proper academy with about 12 students in it at the time, though some were destined to be consuls and agents at ‘interior stations’, as well as dragomans. Preferring the less health - and morals - threatening French solution but surmising that the company would jib at its cost, Liston proceeded to recommend a compromise. This, he suggested, might be a ‘small house ... in the immediate neighbourhood of the British Palace’ with a ‘respectable family’ placed in it ‘on the condition of receiving two or three young men as boarders’. However, Liston emphasised that ‘with a view to perfect their education, to refresh their patriotism, perhaps even to preserve their native language, it would be essential that they should return and spend a year or two in their own country’. It was partly because this would be expensive and because it was an experiment, he said, that he recommended only a small number of students. But there was another reason:
it does not strike me [Liston continued] that we ought entirely to overthrow the present system and to confine the service strictly to British subjects. The establishment contains individuals of great merit - and besides, there may be cases where a native of England might perhaps unseasonably think himself called upon to uphold the firmness of our national character, and where the pliability and mild deportment of the class of men from whom our present interpreters are selected might secure a point of importance to the nation.
Nevertheless, he had come out for a mixed establishment, even if this meant only one British dragoman, ‘for the existence of even one Dragoman perfectly qualified would be an object of real importance to all our interests in this country’.
Liston ended this letter to the Levant Company by saying that he had avoided ‘for the present entering into very particular detail’, though he assured them that he stood ready to answer any of their questions. He also informed Castlereagh that he would write to him later on the subject at greater length. Whether he ever did submit a more detailed plan, however, seems very unlikely. He had provided a sketch of ideas that he probably realized were not what the Levant Company had hoped for, either in terms of the social background of the boys or the cost of their education. As a result, he may well have calculated that fleshing out these ideas would be a waste of time. He was already in his seventies and no doubt looking forward to his retirement. In any case, as we shall see, he had already put into action a version of his own ideas and would shortly take a further step to implement it. In any event, over a year later, in April 1816, the company told its consul-general, with only thinly concealed frustration, that it was still waiting for ‘the advantage of Mr Liston’s cooperation’ in this matter. In the meantime, it continued, since ‘the present plan of employing natives is not to be wholly abandoned’, it agreed to take the first dragoman’s grandson into the service. Nevertheless, the company’s agitation had already left its mark, though the first real evidence of this was more the creation of the new post of ‘oriental secretary’ than the appointment of Englishmen to the ancient post of dragoman.
First Steps towards Anglicization
At some point in the period when Lord Wellesley was foreign secretary, that is, from December 1809 until March 1812, it was decided to send out to the embassy an Englishman to be trained for the post of ‘Principal Interpreter’. Terrick Hamilton, 31 years old and the fourth and youngest son of the vicar of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, was the first sent out with this end in view. However, the thinking behind the creation of this post is best seen in a letter sent in May 1817 by Liston to Wellesley’s more organized successor, Lord Castlereagh. This recommended one of his own protégés as the ‘eventual successor’ to Hamilton, who was reportedly not an outstanding interpreter.
It appears to be essential to the public interest [began Liston] that there should be permanently attached to the embassy at Constantinople a person well acquainted with the oriental languages, and perfectly master of the Turkish, whose assistance may render the ambassador in some degree independent of the common class of interpreters, natives of the country. He ought to to be a natural-born subject of his Majesty, to have had a good education, and to have imbibed the English ideas and English principles.
In this letter we see te post of oriental secretary emerging more clearly than in Hamilton’s appointment in 1812 or in Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ of 1814. Hamilton had been conceived as a dragoman - the first or political dragoman but a dragoman nevertheless, with all the drudgery of translation and frequent attendance at the Porte and elsewhere that this occupation invariably demanded. In 1814, there was a clear hint of the new post in Liston’s argument that on British dragoman was infinitely better than none and in his somewhat discouraging intimation that this might be all that was possible - but he had spoken of dragomans nevertheless. By 1817, however, the ambassador had moved on. He did not use the term ‘dragoman’ in connection with the post for which he wanted a natural-born British linguist; in fact, he did not apply a title to it at all. What he did say was that the occupant of the post should be separate from and, by clear implication, above ‘the common class of interpreters’. This was further underlined by the candidate Liston had in mind.
In 1812 Liston had taken out with him to Constantinoplea ‘youth’ called Robert Liston Elliot, with whose family the ambassador had close connections going back many years, as might readily be deduced from the name by which the boy had been christened. As he told the foreign secretary in May 1817, Elliot was ‘of respectable connections, well disposed, with a turn for languages, and at so early a period of life that he acquired the Turkish accent in perfection’. He had subsequently sent him home to complete his education and his father had despatched him to the University of Cambridge. Except that he was not a product of one of England’s ‘charitable institutions’, young Elliot’s early career was a carbon copy of the blueprint presented in Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ to the Levant Company of 1814. But the social difference was crucial. Someone from Elliot’s background could not be a mere dragoman. Liston asked Castlereagh to post him to the embassy as a paid attaché, a rank which, under pressure of increased diplomatic business, was introduced at precisely this juncture in all of Britain’s embassies and - only a few years’ later - in many of its other missions.
The foreign secretary readily fell in with Liston’s suggestion, in the course of his reply referring now to Hamilton as the ‘oriental secretary’. The allowance of Elliot, who was in effect the first ‘oriental attaché’ at the British embassy, though the title was not formally introduced until the 1840s, was to commence in July 1817; and the ambassador was to oversee his studies. When Hamilton was promoted to secretary to embassy in 1820, Eliot duly took his place as oriental secretary. His instructions were to continue his studies of Eastern languages but by no means overlook the procedures of the Ottoman court and courts of justice and ‘learn the principles upon which their commercial transactions are conducted’. He was to ‘so far associate with the dragomans of the Levant Company’ and to learn how to deal with the Ottoman authorities should it be necessary for him, from time to time, to perform the functions of ‘confidential interpreter’. And he should generally be available to assist, when required, the ambassador ‘in transacting the public business of the embassy’. Elliot turned out to be more successful and, despite an appeal from his father, was not permitted leave of absence until relations with Turkey were broken in 1828. Nevertheless, he no more replaced the first dragoman than did Terrick Hamilton, even after Bartholomew Pisani’s replacement, Francis Chabert, fell under strong suspicion of serious disloyalty.
The post of oriental secretary was a clever attempt to overcome the problems with the attempt to Anglicize the drogmanat by the method of appointing English boys as giovani di lingua - problems with Liston’s ‘preliminary answers’ of 1814 had in reality made quite clear...
There had been initial progress in Anglicizing the drogmanat itself by the time the Levant Company handed responsibility for it to the government in 1825, though this was largely because it was ‘Anglicization’ of a special kind. There was certainly a natural-born English dragomans in the embassy, George Wood. Moreover, though nominally only fifth dragoman, under the more flexible system insisted by Lord Strangford, Wood had served ably as confidential dragoman and would have been reinstated in this position by Palmerston had he not died in 1834. However, though two of four new students appointed in the early 1820s - Richard Wood (the son of the fifth dragoman) and Henry Simmons - were regarded as ‘English by blood and feeling’,50 they both appear to have been born in the Levant. They were, in other words, ‘Levantines’, in the broad, non-pejorative sense attached to that term in the first half of the nineteenth century - Europeans born and resident in the Levant. Nevertheless, this gave them the obvious advantages - which came to be so prized by Stratford Canning - of fluency in Turkish as well as intimate knowledge of the country.
Conclusion
It seems clear, then, that the main push for an infusion of natural-born Englishmen into the drogmanat of the British Embassy in Constantinople in the early nineteenth century came from the Levant Company and not, as sometimes supposed, from the diplomatic service of the Foreign Office. Conscious of the cost, difficulties of recruitment, and uncertainty of success of Anglicization, the reaction of the Foreign Office itself was cautious. In the event, it concluded that a marriage between the desirable and the practical could issue only in a drogmanat infused with English Levantines and watched over by a British-born oriental secretary - which is what, in the first half of the century, the embassy enjoyed.
But a mixed establishment of this kind could not be expected to be perfect, and on his return to the embassy in 1826 Stratford Canning was greeted with alarming news. This was that Francis Chabert, first dragoman since the retirement of Bartholomew Pisani in 1824 and the man he had praised so highly for his behaviour in the fire of 1810, ws strongly suspected of betraying the secrets of the embassy to the Prussian envoy, Baron Miltitz. The Chabert affair gave another push to the drive to Anglicization but it was not until the early 1840s that a serious experiment with English student interpreters was made, and this was deemed a failure. Much later and as an important part of the effort to strengthen and tightenup the consular service in the Levant, a modest academy of British-born student dragomans similar to that recommended by Robert Liston was established at Ortakeui in the suburbs of Constantinople in 1877. This was much more successful. It is, however, a nice irony that the last two chief dragomans at the British Embassy in Constantinople, though born and educated in Britain, were both Catholics from the south of Ireland, Gerald Fitzmaurice and Andrew Ryan. And of the former, Aubrey Herbert, earlier an honorary attaché at the embassy, wrote in 1913 that he ‘loathes ... England’.
University of Leicester
NOTES
1. G.F. Abbott, Under the Turk at Constantinople: A Record of Sir John Finch’s Embassy, 1674-1681 (London: Macmillan, 1920), p.46.
2. Seventeenth-century Levant Company instructions specifically permitted the ambassador to leave to his dragomans the seeking redress at the Porte of all but the most serious grievances of English factors. See, for example, Instructions to Sir William Hussey (1690-91), SP105/45.
3. This understanding was an interesting feature of Robert Liston’s thinking about the future of the dragomans, discussed below. See also A. Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution: Collected Essays, Volume One, ed. E. Ingram (London: Cass, 1993), pp.162, 164-5, 174, 282-3.
4. A. Kurat (ed.), The Despatches of Sir Robert Sutton, Ambassador in Constantinople (1710-1714), Camden Third Series, vol. 78 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1953), pp. 8-9, 50.
5. During Liston’s first embasy (1794-95), ambassador and chief dragoman had two languages in common, both could speak Hebrew as well as Greek, Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, p.79.
6. A. Kurat (ed.), The Despatches of Sir Robert Sutton, Ambassador in Constantinople (1710-1714), p.50.
7. Paul Rycaut and Dudley North, (treasurer) in the seventeenth century, and David Morier in the early nineteenth, for example. On Rycaut, see S. Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1678 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p.31. On North, see Richard Grassby, The English Gentelman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp.130, 191, and esp. 195; and Abbott, Under the Turk in Constantinople, pp.62-3. Morrier’s family was originally Huguenot but had been long settled in the Levant; his father, Isaac, the Levant Company’s first consul-general, was a naturalized Englishman and his mother was Dutch. Born in Smyrna, David was educated at Harrow School and entered the diplomatic service in 1804. Subsequently he became a close friend as well as secretary to Stratford Canning during his first tour as head of a mission - see Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), pp.71, 73, and his entry on Morier in the Dictionary of National Biography; Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, pp. 111-12, 182; and Canning’s praise of Morier in his valedictory despatch to Castlereagh of 3 July 1812, FO78/77.
8. ‘The education of Greek boys at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, with a view of their subsequent employement as dragomans, proved equally disappointing at the end of the century’, Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey, pp. 108-9. See also Phyllis S. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965), pp.74-5.
9. That is, the dragoman’s section of the embassy. The English term was ‘dragomanat’ but the French ‘drogmanat’ was often preferred, not least, no doubt, because it trips off the tongue more readily.
10. In A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935; repr. by Cass: London, 1964) [hereafter HLC], A.C. Wood gives much attention to the embassy but deals rather superficially with the dragomans. The weakness of Allan Cunningham’s treatment in ch.1 of Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century: Collected Essays Volume Two, de. E. Ingram (London: Cass, 1993), is that it ignores completely the records of the Levant Company.
11. Liston’s diplomatic career, which had taken him amongst other cities, to Munich, Ratisbon, Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm, Washington, and the Hague, is detailed in the Dictionary of National Biography. When he died in 1836 he was described by one journal as ‘the father of the diplomatic body throughout Europe’.
12. In HLC (p.227), Wood incorrectly states that ‘there were four dragomen’ at Constantinople ‘from at least as early as 1650’, citing as his source the court book of the Levant Company covering that year. It is true that the wording of the minutes on which he drew is misleading. These minutes, which are of a meeting held on 12 February 1650 (old style), contain a statement of the salaries to be paid to the dragomans. These are listed as ‘the Chiefe’, ‘the Second’, ‘the Third’ and ‘the young Druggerman’. However, it is obvious that ‘the young Druggerman’ was a giovani di lingua and not a full dragoman. Only six days earlier, the Levant Company had written to the ambassador (Bendysh), saying ‘We shall further mind your Lordship that whereas by your Articles with us you are limited to 3 Druggermen only, we observe more of them are employed by you at our expense; which we expect to be eased of’, Co. to Bendysh, 6 FEB. 1650 (old style), SP105/112. In fact, in the second half of the seventeenth century, company instructions to the ambassador generally drew explicit attention to the three plus three formula. For example, Company Instructions to Chandos (1680, Trumbull (1687), Hussey (1690), Paget (1692), and Sutton (1701 - ‘The usual number of our Druggermen at Constantinople being three’), all in SP105/145. Of course, Wood might have countered that he was referring to the actual as opposed to the company’s preferred number but even so his claim - which suggests a fixed and approved figure - is misleading. In any case, while four might well turn out to have been fairly close to the real average, it was sometimes mor and sometimes less.
13. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II, p.75; Levant Co. to Bendysh, 6 Feb. 1650 (old style), SP105/112. In advancing this case for a larger drogmanat in the early nineteenth century, Bartholomew Pisani, the first dragoman, himself drew attention to this: ‘By the ancient records of the Company it appears that there were, at times, no less than nine officers in their service on pay at Constantinople’, Pisani to Isaac Morier (consul-general), 10 Feb. 1814, SP105/134.
14. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II, p.76.
15. The Levant Company’s records, which are incomplete, do not provide the whole answer to this, though the Constantinople Treasurer’s account books for 1804-16 are very helpful. In 1804 and 1806 (the first years available) these show that he had four dragomans and four students in his books. And Castlereagh’s ‘Memorandum of Salaries directed to be paid to the Dragomans in the service of the Levant Company at Constantinople’ (Castlereagh to Liston, 7 March 1812, FO78/79) officially confirmed the new, ideal four plus four formula. Subsequently, the Treasurer’s account books reveal the following numbers actually on his books for the last quarter of each of these years: 1812 (4 plus 3), 1813 (4 plus 3), 1814 (5 plus 3), 1815 (5 plus 2), and 1816 (5 plus 2); see SP105/205 and SP105/206. For the establishment in 1825 and 1827, see FO78/157 (folio 61) and FO366/569 (folio 169) respectively.
34.The Capuchin fathers in Constantinople had been training the children of Levantine families to serve in this capacity for the French embassy since 1629. In 1669, in the time of Colbert, their school received official endorsement and thereafter the training of the jeunes de langues was deliberately modelled on the Venetian school for giovani di lingua established in Constantinople a century earlier. Ideally, six ten-year-olds were sent out from France for training at three-year intervals, the programme being funded by the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles. In 1721 the scheme was modified, the students first being trained in Paris and not sent out to Constantinople until they were 15 or 16. During the Revolution the Capuchins were replaced by lay teachers and the school in Constantinople was placed directly under the control of the Foreign Ministry. However, at the end of the eighteenth century greater emphasis began to be given to training in Paris and it is ironic that, just as Liston was directing attention to the French school in Constantinople as a model of sorts for the British, this school was itself in decline, Jean-Michel Casa, Le Palais de France à Istanbul: Un demi-millénaire d’alliance entre la Turquie et la France (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), p.66.
50. Cunningham, Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century, p.9, esp. n.16. Simmons has been barely noticed by earlier historians, probably because he appears to have been unremarkable. Nevertheless, there was a British merchant family of this name in Constantinople at this time and it is reasonable to assume to he came from it. In 1856 Stratford Canning referred to him as ‘an Englishman’, Canning to Clarendon, 3 June 1856, FO366/569. On Richard Wood, see Cunningham’s introduction to The Early Correspondence of Richard Wood. Richard’s appointment was facilitated by the resolve of his father to give him an ‘English education’, Liddell to Cartwright, 1 July 1824, SP105/125. Since, according to Cunningham, he had already had ‘several years schooling in Exeter’ before 1823 (The Early Correspondence, p.4), this was presumably a reference to a British university education. In the event, he appears not to have enjoyed one.
Note: 2- The theme of the new dragoman training is covered in an article in the culture magazine issue 16 entitled ‘Dragoboys of Ortaköy’.