Montagu and Ottomans Inoculation

Historical narratives, like the imperial chronicles, have been dominated by men where either women remain absent, or appear in marginal references unless they are the subject matter themselves and seemingly liable to objectification.  In their own times, several women had been travelling to distant lands though, proportionately, left fewer writings for posterity. Amongst some notable names we read about include known queens and scholars such as Queen Sheba of Yemen/Ethiopia (tenth century BC), Queen Cleopatra (69-30BC), Rabia Basri (731-801), Fatima al-Fihri (800-880) Gulbadan Begum (1523-1603) and Nawab Sikandar Jahan Begum (1817-1868). Colonialism enabled fair number of European women to visit and write about non-European communities. In cases of the Ottomans, Safawids, Mughals, East Asians and Africans these literary, religious and biographical writings offer ample evidence of interaction across the cultural boundaries. Women like Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), who explored and mapped Syria and Mesopotamia, Freya Stark (1893-1993), who travelled within and wrote about the Middle East and Afghanistan, and Alexandrine Tinne (1835-1869), who was the first European women to cross the Sahara, socialised with Muslims in their own ways playing vital roles in contemporary developments while stipulating a multi-layered bonhomie. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), English writer and poet, is amongst the earliest European women to engage with Muslims. Her travels across the three continents, encounters with the Turks in the Balkans, Adrianople, Constantinople and further south contextualise her mostly positive views of Muslims. She was born in Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire soon after 

the English Civil War, the Great Fire of London and the widespread fatalities caused by the plague, particularly in London. The first child of Evelyn Pierrepont, the Duke of Hull-Upon-Kingston, (d. 1726) who was to become Lord Dorchester, and Mary Fielding (d. 1692), Mary Montagu was the eldest among three siblings who was raised by her paternal grandmother until she was nine. Following her mother’s death when she was just four, she spent the next few years in Wiltshire with grandmother, but was not happy though she tried to compensate that by reading avariciously. Taken into her father’s care and not enamoured of her governess, she turned to learning Latin and writing poetry— largely the male domains— and by 1695 had already written a short novel and two collections of poetry. Moving between Wiltshire and Nottinghamshire, Montagu refused to marry Clotworthy Skeffington, her father’s choice for a suitor, and instead opted for eloping with Edward Wortley Montagu and married this aristocrat-entrepreneur in 1712 in Salisbury. In 1713, Montagu gave birth to a son, moved to London, and soon became a socialite known for her beauty, sense of independence, literary genius and sociability. Her circles included King George I, the Hanoverian king of England, Lady Walpole, Lord and Lady Hervey, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough,  Mary Astell, John Gay, Abbe Antonio Conti and Alexander Pope. In 1715, Mary Montagu contracted smallpox but survived though the epidemic did leave its scars without diminishing her physical charms, self-confidence and social mobility. The following year, her husband was appointed as the British Ambassador to Constantinople and she accompanied him to the Near East passing through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Serbia before reaching Adrianople and then the Ottoman metropolis. While still in Constantinople, she gave birth to a daughter in January 1718 and returned to London later in the year, following inoculation of her son. 

She is the first Englishwoman with an experience of living in a Muslim society and writing about it while applying her literary skills. One of her commentators considers these few months of her life to be quite special: ‘it is highly ironic that out of her long and colourful life, the years best known are the ones she recorded in the Embassy Letters, written over a brief period that was lived in foreign parts, far removed from the society and milieu of which she was such a brilliant and celebrated representative”.  

Mary Montagu is best known for her letters. As the wife of the British ambassador she had the rare experience of working with higher echelons of the Ottoman sultanate, she might have been the only Westerner to have a close relationship with the royal family besides interacting with elite Ottoman women—otherwise an inaccessible area for Western men. It is largely owing to these direct encounters during an era of recurrent pestilences such as smallpox that she tried to espouse the case for inoculation back in Britain. She challenged the long held taboos on domesticity and conformity; and has left us five volumes of extensive writings with her letters in particular covering a wide range of topics other than her first-hand reportage on the Ottoman culture. A self-confident person, Montagu survived smallpox, which, for a while left its scars on her face, yet refused to circumvent her public profile and creative pursuits. Her independent mindedness, evident from her relationship with Alexander Pope, Lord Hervey and Abbe Conti, would not allow her make compromises, expected of women of her times. Her wedding with Edward Wortley Montagu -  the scion of a moneyed family - was not a love marriage but was partly meant to escape an arranged matrimony, which was the norm in contemporary English upper classes. Not enamoured of such arrangements, she noted: ‘people in my way are sold like slaves: and I cannot tell what price my master will put on me’. Her brother, William, was also forced to marry while quite young to a teenage Rachel Baynton. Following his death at 20 of smallpox, his 18-year old window had to look after her two children. Montagu has prophesied this mismatch and was determined not to go a similar fate. In England, considerations such as pedigree, land, money and dowry often determined match making, where women, in particular, did not enjoy much choice with the decisions often left to fathers. In contrast, Montagu found Ottoman women, unlike the usual stereotypes, more independent, and despite the veil or such homebound role, they often maintained their own autonomy in several matters. 

Montagu corresponded with her male friends during her marriage without hiding her relationship or glossing over it; instead, she chose to live in France and Italy pursuing an independent life, not much in vogue during that period. Some admiring men, including Alexander Pope, felt unreciprocated by Montagu and turned quite hostile in their writings, though she would not allow false expectations unless she herself felt a modicum of intimacy. As borne out by her letters to Pope, she liked and respected the poet but never let him entertain any special romantic attachment though the former felt a bitter sense of betrayal. She was appreciative of his mentoring and it was on his persuasion that her familiar portrait in an Ottoman dress was commissioned but then she knew eminent intellectuals such as Voltaire, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and William Congrave who, in their own ways, acknowledged her credentials as an independent and creative soul. Montagu had her due share of idiosyncrasies, and often bluntly blurted out her opinions, which might have bordered on sheer arrogance, or even racism. For instance, during her visit to Carthage, she wrote disparaging remarks about African women and described her own  granddaughter as ugly. Her observations about Austrian women were equally harsh as were the remarks about profligacy among their German counterparts. At one stage, she had advocated the abolition of parliament with all the powers returning to a sovereign king. 

Mary Montagu’s convey, including the provisions of twenty liveries, a chaplain and other paraphernalia, took off for the Continent in August 1716, preferring to take a land route to firm up relations with the Austrian monarchy. In Vienna, a triumphalist ambience prevailed following Prince Eugene’s decisive victory over the Ottomans at Peterwardein (Novi Sad) in July 1716. The Ottoman troops, led by the Grand Vizier, Damat Ali, had been defeated by a combination of Austrian, Serb, Hungarian, Croat and Venetian soldiers who fought under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire. Only 50,000 of Janissaries, Sepoys and Tartars from 120,000-strong army escaped the battlefield by the Danube while Damat Ali was himself killed in action, thus making this battle a turning point for Osmanlis led by Sultan Ahmed III (1673-1730). The late Grand Vizier was an important member of the royal family since he had married Fatima, one of the several daughters of the Ottoman Sultan. Lady Montagu was to meet Fatima subsequently in Adrianople and was quite taken in by her beauty, wisdom and resolution.  The Wortleys witnessed extensive celebrations in Vienna given their two-month stay and partying in the capital before they took off for Belgrade via Prague, Dresden and Leipzig. In Budapest, she witnessed the scars from the recent battles besides the ongoing civil war between the Catholics and Protestants until they travelled through Serbia, where, unlike Austria and Hungary, she noticed widespread poverty. She personally witnessed the battleground of Peterwardein where 30,000 Turkish dead had been Janissaries, and many other sepoys had been taken as prisoners. In her letter to Alexander Pope from Belgrade on 12 February 1717, she noted: ‘no attempt was made to bury the dead….The marks of that Glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being stew’d with the Skulls and Carcases of unbury’d Men, Horses and Camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled humane bodys, and reflect on the Injustice of War, that makes murther not only necessary but meritorious’.  

Encounters with the Ottomans

Mary Montagu’s memorable encounter of civilisational nature with a Muslim Turk happened in Belgrade where the Wortleys stayed in the private residence of Achmed Bey who also housed their large ambassadorial guard for several weeks. More like a count, as she wrote to Pope, Bey’s father had been a senior official who ensured for his son 

the most polite eastern learning, being perfectly skilled in Arabic and Persian languages, and is an extraordinary scribe, which they call effendi. This accomplishment makes way to the greatest preferments, but he has had the good sense to prefer an easy, quiet, secure life to all the dangerous honour of the Porte. He sups with us every night, and drinks wine very freely. You cannot imagine how much he is delighted with the liberty of conversing with me. He has explained to me many pieces of the Arabian poetry which, I observed, are in numbers not unlike ours, generally alternate verse, and of a very musical sound. Their expressions of love are very passionate and lively

It appears that Achmed Bey was discussing ghazal, the genre of romantic poetry where each couplet is rhymed with the preceding one and self-sufficient in its contents very unlike the normative poem. Continuing in her letter to the English poet, Montagu further noted: 

Lady Montagu’s proverbial big moment arrived when she went to visit the household of the Grand Vizier, accompanied by two ladies, a guide and a Greek translator, followed by a spontaneous visit to another household where her host, Fatima, made a lasting mark on her.  Without mentioning her royal genealogy, Montagu waxes lyrical of Fatima’s beauty as it further underlines her views about the Ottoman women and their health - away from the usual representations of oppressed weaklings.  Once settled in Pera, she adorned the Turkish yasmak (veil) which helped English ambassadress in her mobility in bazaars, mosques, shrines and other places of cultural interest. While wearing Ottoman costume, she even ventured to see Aya Sofia though she had to seek prior permission to visit the premises given its history as well as sensitivity. She was quite impressed by its dome of 113-foot diameter, built on arches and supported by gigantic marble pillars, whereas the inner space featured two galleries along with the resting place of the Emperor Constantine. She thought Suleiman’s Mosque as the perfect symbol of architectural synthesis and aesthetics. And believed Valide Mosque to be the largest among all the mosques in the city, which made her proud as ait was commissioned by a woman - the mother of Sultan Mohammed IV. In her letter to Lady Bristol on this preeminent mosque, Montagu opined: ‘between friends, St Paul’s Church would make a pitiful figure near it, as any of our squares would be near the Atmeydan, or Place of Horses’.  She was all praise for Sultan Achmed’s Mosque and accused some Greeks for sharing negative views with other Westerners in the City. 

She also visited some hans and monasteries which did not impress her given their ordinariness. In one case, she visit a monastery (tekke) to see the whirling dervishes. In the same letter to Lady Bristol, she described the various rituals unique to the dervishes—all the way from their plain clothes, conical hats to body movements that began with the Quranic recitation by their leader to shift into rhythmic dance: 

In a similar letter to Abbe Conti, the Venetian scholar and a friend of Isaac Newton, Montagu offered extensive details, among other subjects, on the architectural aspects of the Ottoman mosques. She provided interesting searchlight on Sultan Selim’s Mosque in Adrianople, a marvel created by the famous architect, Mimar Senan (1489-1588), himself buried near Sulemaniya Mosque and Tombs in Istanbul. She visited the mosque in her Turkish habit and was ‘officiously’ well received by the caretaker who took her around to see the premises. Passing through the first court with four doors and innermost with three, she saw herself ‘surrounded with cloisters with the marble pillars of the Ionic order, finely polished and of very lively colours, the whole pavement being white marble’. She noticed the roof built in the design of a large dome with several cupolas, and the four marble fountains for decorative purposes. Marvelling at the immensely high dome, she found it to be the ‘noblest building I ever saw’.  She noticed two rows of marble galleries anchored on pillars and balustrades with the main floor covered by Persian carpets. She felt these details more enticing than the Catholic churches with their ‘tawdry images and pictures’ and looking like ‘toyshops’. One wonders whether these observations about Catholic churches are out of exuberance, or a considered opinion by an Anglican! She wondered about the glazed walls, and on a closer examination found the veneer to be made of ‘japan china’, though in fact, these are well-known Iznik ceramic tiles. Behind the mosque, she noticed a charity centre housing several dervishes whose simple attires and conical woollen hats gave them a unique appearance. She found them absorbed in their rituals but offered no further details. They might have been whirling dervishes from the Mvelvi order of Maulana Rumi of Konya, or disciples of some other Sufi order. 

Montqgu’s views are in sharp contrast to the then prevailing view of the Ottoman empire in England, best represented in The General Historie of the Turkes (1603) by Richard Knolles. It is considered the earliest work in English on the Ottomans.  Knolles, highlighting the contemporary Christian view of world history, sought a divine scheme behind the rise of the Turks. Unlike the past Latin works, this pioneer English volume showed Turks as superstitious infidels, who were able to exploit the weaknesses of the contemporary Christians. It underwent several printings and left its enduring imprints on parallel images of the Ottomans, rooted in the Renaissance era. 

Ambassador Wortley was recalled to London after completing only a year in Constantinople largely because of his sympathetic attitude towards Ottoman stance vis-à-vis the Austrians and because of subversion nuances from the British Ambassador in Vienna, Abraham Stanyan. Stanyan conspired to have Wortley removed and successfully convinced the foreign office that Wortley’s  terms for peace between Constantinople and Vienna were unacceptable. The Admiralty deputed a ship to bring the Wortleys back and thus ended this sojourn rather too quickly with Montagu feeling quite mellow. In January 1718, she gave birth to a girl while on 18 March, their four-year old son, Edward Wortley Montagu was inoculated in Constantinople. The journey  back-home journey began in 6 June 1718. By that time, Montagu had already learnt the language and knew several members and families from amongst the Ottoman elite, as she noted in a letter to Conti in May of the same year: ‘I have not been yet a full year here and am on the point of removing; such is my rambling destiny. This will surprise you, and can surprise anybody so much as myself”. The Wortleys, now four in number, left Constantinople on The Preston and while passing through the Dardanelles, visited historic sites such as Abydos, Sigeum, Kadikoy and Troy. 

It was from here that Montagu sent an exhaustive letter to Conti commenting on the historical places well known in Homer’s writings besides their linkages with the Perso-Greek wars in ancient era. Given Conti’s interest in classics and Montagu’s own penchant for Greek mythology, she visited the promontory of Sigeum, where as per mythological narratives, Achilles had been buried ‘and where Alexander ran naked round his tomb in his honour’. Ambassador Wortley picked up a marble slab from the site, which on his return, he donated to Trinity College, his alma mater in Cambridge, where it presently lodges in the entrance. Following a voyage around Sicily and a short visit to a heavily fortified Malta, their ship landed at Tunis, where the local British consul, Richard Lawrence, took a curious Montagu on a nocturnal visit of the ruins of Carthage. It was a Ramadan night with full moon, she was enchanted by the spectacle especially when she, like local people, munched on melons, figs and dates. She returned from her exploratory tour only at daybreak and did not seem to like the treeless vistas featuring a sandy desert and her encounters with the natives. In the letter to the Venetian intellectual, while describing the features of the local inhabitants, she bordered on sheer racism: ‘We saw under the trees in many places companies of the country people eating, singing and dancing to their wild music. They are not quite black, but all mulattoes, and the most frightful creatures they can appear in a human figure’. During the day, she saw some urban women who, despite covered in veil from head to toes, were ‘mixed with a breed of renegades, are said to be …fair and handsome’. However, when she went out to see some more Roman ruins now used as granaries, a few peasant women flocked to see her: ‘Their posture in sitting, the colour of their skin, their lank black hair falling on each side their faces, their features and the shape of their limbs differ so little from their own country people, the baboons, ‘tis hard to fancy them a distinct race, and I could not help thinking here had been some ancient alliances between them’. 

Ottoman Inoculation

During Montague’s lifetime, two epidemics, plague and smallpox, were prevalent. Almost every community suffered with millions losing their lives.. Called ‘the speckled monster’, smallpox was the deadliest on earth, eventually claiming more people than the Black Death. One in four infected person would die with the rest inflicted with life-long and deep-pitted scars. Montagu herself had been a sufferer of smallpox and, as mentioned, lost her twenty-year old brother to smallpox. Like plague, smallpox was a periodic visitor, and generated considerable discussion about possible treatment or preventive cures. 

While residing in Constantinople, Montagu had been asked about these pandemics and their hazards for visitors like her and, given the specific images about the Ottomans, some of her friends worried about her health. As she explained in a letter written in April 1718 to Sarah Chiswell, a few neighbours and even their own cook in Adrianople caught smallpox but Montagu did not know it until after their recovery. She thought that the Ottoman people took plague in their own stride but to ward off smallpox they depended on inoculation conducted by traditional women mendicants. She saw many people escaping death since grafting smallpox infection into their veins would successfully trigger a stronger response from immune system disallowing infection to germinate itself.  While reassuring Chiswell of her own safety and of some other Europeans under the English protection, she informed her of such an operation and its healing properties: 

According to Montagu, the Greeks usually preferred to have grafts on their foreheads in the shape of a cross but would often end up with lifetime scars whereas other people would have them on legs or arms. Following this operation, everybody will go back to their normal routine until a week later when they would catch fever keeping them bedridden for a few days. Their recovery happened quickly though the cuts on their bodies would take time to heal and there was reportedly no example of any one that has died in it, and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of the experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it if I knew anyone of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind. 

However, she was not hopeful of support for inoculation back in England. 

In letters to her husband, while he was in Adrianople paying his farewell visit to the Court, Montagu informed him of their son’s inoculation on 18 March 1718, and speedy recovery. On 23 March, she told her spouse of the younger Montagu “at this time singing and playing and very impatient for supper…I cannot engraft the girl: her nurse has not had the smallpox’. Following this rather brief letter giving more space to financial matters than to children’s health, Montagu wrote another to her husband a week later, which ironically, had only a single opening line on their son, as she noted: “Your son is as well as can be expected, and I hope past all manner of danger’.  Given the nature of their marital relationship, the letters reads dryly and are formulated in a rather impersonal way. Even a major family matter such as the inoculation of their son or reference to their newly-born daughter is quite cursory

On her return to England, Montagu tried to persuade her social circles and royalty on following the Ottoman practice, at least among the younger people but faced fierce resistance including rebukes from priests and scientists. But she never gave up. Her Italian friend, Conti, had already left London but she immersed herself in buying books and writing down her travel experiences, originally reflected in her letters. A smitten Pope encouraged Montagu in her literary pursuits besides commissioning Godfrey Kneller to make her portrait wearing a modified Turkish habit in London. Amidst growing estrangement with Pope leading to more acrimonious outbursts from the poet, Montagu became intensely engaged in the contemporary debate on smallpox already polarised between those who advocated prevention versus those who focused on its treatment. In an unusual warm winter of 1721, epidemic returned to England with the fear of contagion totally freezing socialisation amongst the upper classes. Montagu asked Charles Maitland, the former embassy doctor now working in Hereford, to inoculate her daughter. Given the contemporary criticism, he involved three other physicians in the process and, until younger Mary’s total recovery, several people kept visiting her. Maitland’s successful procedures in front of his critical colleagues were enough to persuade several other opinion makers though it was difficult to convince the royal family. Caroline, the Princess of Wales, supported Montagu. But her father-in-law, King George I, asked for a prior experimental testing on some proverbial guinea pigs,. Accordingly, six inmates—three men and three women—from Newgate prison were engrafted with infected fluids and within a few days, all of them felt normal. The King was still not satisfied and would not allow his grandchildren to be inoculated. So another experiment on eleven orphans took place with similar positive results. Consequently, Princess Caroline’s daughters were inoculated on 17 April 1721, making the practice more acceptable within the society though the controversy in print media continued for some time with Mary Montagu contributing pieces under a pseudonym. It was a generation later that Edward Jenner (1749-1823) familiarised the method of injecting cowpox instead of more dangerous smallpox into human body—a process that came to be known as vaccination.

Eventually, the Wortleys moved to the country during an epidemical phase. By then, Montagu tell us, people with prior inoculation were, more or less, out of danger unlike those who had not been ‘engrafted’. 

Like many of her contemporaries, Mary Montagu personified some idiosyncrasies of her times and class, yet the fact remains that her innovative ideas, her defiant and views about the Ottoman societies especially their women, literary and cultural aesthetics and certainly the Ottoman way of preventing smallpox, earned her a unique position, which went against the given norms of the time. Her untraditional life style, relationship with literary figures while keeping her own autonomy and her role in accepting and advocating inoculation put her centuries ahead of her time. As a symbol of several Enlightenment ideas, she saw Muslim society without any preordained biases, irreverent to praise or fear. Montagu stood prominently in her own league as a feminist whose inspirations grew from a substantial and unique encounter with Muslim society.