Donna Landry

The Gift Horse Who Refuses to Be Gifted

Ottoman Multispecies Storytelling? Perhaps a Fable?

It matters which worlds world worlds and which stories tell stories. . . . It matters to be for some worlds and not others.

— Donna Haraway, ‘Cosmopolitical Critters: Preface for Cosmopolitan Animals’, in Cosmopolitan Animals, edited by Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney, and Charlotte Sleigh (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), vii-xiv (vii).

[O]ne cannot be anti-racist without being an ecologist today, and vice versa. . . . I choose to concentrate on Islamophobia because it is a variant of what remains the most important form of racism pervading the world: the Western/white racism rooted in slavery and colonialism.

— Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 2-3.

This paper contributes to the project of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded network, ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’, led by Kaori Nagai of the University of Kent. I understand fables in the sense that Laura Brown employs the term when analysing the ‘cultural fable’, that phenomenon which ‘can be said to tell a story whose protagonist is an emanation of contemporary experience and whose action reflects an imaginative negotiation with that experience’, such that it manifests a profound ‘engagement’ with the ‘historical moment’: ‘Through this engagement, the cultural fable can tell a story that seems to grasp the processes of history with a peculiar discernment, or to represent the contradictions of such processes with a striking clarity.’[1] Brown claims that ‘In employing the idea of the fable, I have sought to emphasize the collectivity of this imaginative phenomenon, its cultural potency, and its formal dynamism’.[2] The fable, more than any other form of writing, entertains the agency and voice of the nonhuman, the other-than-human, even the counterhuman, in Brown’s most recent formulation.[3] In fables, animals speak. So also might ‘things’ – objects such as coins and carriages – and weather and natural disasters. When these other-than-human agents act and convey their power, they disrupt and ‘disturb’ the human, even oppose it.[4] At the very least, they bring about a crisis in human business as usual. These disruptive events and other-than-human entities or agents may figure in fictions. But they may also occur in nonfictional contexts, as events in history that happened, that in turn give rise to representations by which we come to know of them. The fable may not always be a fiction.

Like the camel as analysed by Onur Inal in ‘One-Humped History’, the horse is an ‘important history-shaping actor’ in the Ottoman realm and beyond, one of the nonhuman animals who ‘lived through and witnessed the same history as humans’, and ‘[t]ogether with other imperial actors,’ ‘shaped the empire’s history in profound ways, and were in turn shaped by it’. [5] Interspecies histories reveal a great deal more than a history of a species itself, as Harriet Ritvo has shown:

The qualities embodied by (or associated with) certain animals . . . linked them metaphorically or metonymically with issues of great or contentious concern in the human arena. Such connections were powerful, whether or not they were explicit or even manifest to those who made them. The interpretive process that they initiated ran in both directions; once a resonance had been detected or established, it tended reciprocally to determine what people said about the animals in question and even what they did with them. [6]

The discipline of animal histories, or of animals in history and making history, lays the ground work for interpreting eye-witness accounts. Animals speaking, of necessity recorded and reported by human interlocutors, generate the fabular. The fable is the genre that gives voice to nonhumans. Given that this is the case, might not the fable enable us to enter into another species’s subjectivity? Jeanne Dubino, following Laura Brown, has suggested that the fable ‘is its own distinctive form of vitality’, allowing something of other species to come across, thus countering the human.[7]

How might we most productively read Evliya Çelebi’s account of the wondrous ‘Arab thoroughbred spectacle’ or ‘The wondrous küheylan spectacle’ (‘Temâşâ-y› garîbe-i küheylân’) that transpired during the Ottomans’ 1665 diplomatic mission to Vienna? How might an animal’s agency have operated in a specific environment, bringing about a crisis, not in the natural world, but in the ‘naturalcultural’ one, in Donna Haraway’s terms? [8]

If we follow Ghassan Hage’s suggestion that Islamophobia is a form of racism that is particularly intimately connected with the global environmental crisis, then attempting to unlearn Islamophobia might be a good idea.[9] And one might begin to learn to do that by attempting to inhabit an Ottoman point of view, courtesy of Evliya Çelebi (1611-c. 1687), who is as good an informant as any. His Seyahatname (‘Book of Travels’) may well be ‘the longest and most ambitious travel account by any writer in any language’; it is certainly a ‘key text for all aspects of the Ottoman Empire at the time of its greatest extension in the seventeenth century’.[10] Through Evliya’s text we may glimpse a seventeenth-century Ottoman sensibility, or what Evliya’s principal English translator and interpreter Robert Dankoff calls an ‘Ottoman mentality’.[11]

To situate this Ottoman moment consider that Ottoman and other Eastern fables became a European sensation in the decades following Evliya’s time.[12] When Alexander Pope published in 1713 what was probably the first essay in English against cruelty to animals, he observed how ‘Every one knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind’.[13] Feeling for fellow creatures was imaginatively coupled with the Ottoman empire in early eighteenth-century England and in Europe more broadly. By the nineteenth century, European audiences, and no doubt many Ottoman readers also, regarded animal stories naturalistically, empirically, or as children’s literature, or as anthropologically interesting, or as folklore, with increasingly imperialist overtones, as Kaori Nagai reveals in her study of imperial beast fables in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[14] The early eighteenth-century, during the heyday of the Levant Company, was more open imaginatively to Ottoman cultural otherness than would be the case later on, when the East India Company came to dominate Britain’s overseas trade. Beginning with the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and ending in the French and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), there arose new British nationalist and imperialist sentiments, accompanied by a triumphalist assumption of cultural superiority to the Eastern empires that had earlier been so admired and imitated.

Like other Islamic travel texts, Evliya’s seeks, among other things, to catalogue the ‘marvels and wonders’ of the created world. As Robert Dankoff observes, throughout Evliya’s Seyahatname, ‘a favorite category is “marvels and wonders” (“acayib u garayib”)’,[15] typified by Zakariyya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities [‘Marvels’] of Existence. As glossed by Persis Berlekamp, a ‘wonder’ for Qazwini and others is any phenomenon that provokes the ‘bewilderment a person feels because of his inability to understand the cause of a thing’, while a ‘marvel’ or ‘oddity’ (or, according to Travis Zadeh, a ‘rarity’ or ‘curiosity’[16]) is any wondrous phenomenon that ‘occurs rarely and is contrary to what is commonly known, witnessed, and written about’.[17] Therefore, though the two terms are very close in meaning and not easily separable, we might understand a marvel (or oddity or rarity) as belonging to ‘a particularly strange and rare subset of wonders’.[18] Real historical events and ethnographic and natural-history reporting may all partake of these conventions of Islamic storytelling. However fantastical the portrayed events may seem, through them we are invited to reflect upon the created world as exceeding commonplace human understanding.

Yeliz Özay in ‘Evliyâ Çelebi’nin acayip ve garip dünyası’ [‘Evliya Çelebi’s World of Marvels and Wonders’], characterizes Evliya’s Seyahatname as exemplifying Walter Benjamin’s representation of the storyteller.[19] Evliya conforms to Walter Benjamin’s definition of the storyteller’s art as keeping:

a story free from explanation as one recounts it . . . The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connections among the events are not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks’.[20]

This amplitude of possibility of meaning, and a certain ethical openness that leaves it up to readers or audiences to interpret as they will, mean that Evliya’s nonfictional, eye-witness or locally recorded stories often resonate with the Oriental fables so popular with European audiences. What is most characteristic of the fable, which Srinivas Aravamudan has felicitously described as ‘the narrative principle of fable’, is that the manner of the story’s unfolding ‘radically changes the outcome and destabilizes the possibility of any moral takeaway’.[21]

We may discover through Evliya otherwise unrecorded or irrecoverable evidence from the seventeenth century in Anatolia and well beyond. As Alan Mikhail shows in his Critical Inquiry article ‘What the World Says: The Ottoman Empire, Interspecies Rape, and the Climate in the Little Ice Age’, Evliya’s recounting of the episode entitled ‘The Girl Who Gave Birth to an Elephant’ reveals environmental crisis, demographic disruption, human-animal entanglements, cross-species violations, and the various corruptions and failures of Ottoman governance. I suggest that Evliya’s recorded testimony by an Anatolian village girl could be understood as a ‘fable’ of ‘global environmental crisis’ in its specific Anatolian and Ottoman forms during the middle of the seventeenth century.[22] ‘Beyond the confines of Ottoman history’, Mikhail writes, ‘this story of a woman, her rape, and her elephant child connects the literatures of environmental history, natural history, women’s history, and the histories of sexuality in ways that show how people both experienced and interpreted the environmental calamities of the Little Ice Age as a species crisis’.[23] So while proposing that Mikhail’s exposition reveals Evliya’s story of the elephant birth to be fable-like in its testimony to the agency of the other-than-human, I would like to read a further episode from Evliya in the spirit of Mikhail’s reading.

Painting (watercolour). Folio 122 from an album showing Turkish costume. Black horse led (yedek) in state harness. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Evliya’s Story: ‘Temâşâ‑y› garîbe‑i küheylân’

Let us set the scene for the episode Evliya entitles ‘Wondrous Arab Thoroughbred’, or ‘Küheylân’, ‘Spectacle’, ‘Temâşâ‑y› garîbe‑i küheylân’.[24] Vienna in Volume 7 is the most extensively described Western European city in the Seyahatname. [25] Evliya is amongst the entourage of 299 people and 269 horses accompanying the envoy, Kara Mehmed Paşa, to ratify the 1665 peace treaty of Vasvar establishing friendly relations with the Habsburgs after the Ottoman defeat at the battle of the River Raab (St. Gotthard).[26] One of the most telling signs of the non-European Ottoman difference spectacularized in Vienna is that Ottoman horses show a marked preference for their own side, for Ottoman Muslim grooms and horsemen. According to contemporary accounts, this was not an illogical or irrational preference. Remember Alexander Pope’s equating humane treatment of animals with ‘the Turks’. Some cross-cultural contexts on horsemanship are relevant here. In support of Pope’s view about Turkish kindness to animals, we should note that the Habsburg ambassador to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), Ogier de Busbecq, had reported how different the Ottoman treatment of horses was from standard practice in Europe, and his views were widely known, remembered more than a hundred years later by John Evelyn in 1684. Busbecq claimed:

There is no Creature so gentle as a Turkish Horse, nor more respectful to his Master, or the Groom that dresses him. The reason is, because they treat their horses with great Lenity. . . [T]hey frequently sleek them down with their Hands, and never use any Cudgel to bang their Sides, but in case of great Necessity. That makes their Horses great Lovers of Mankind; and they are so far from kicking, wincing, or growing untractable by this gentle usage, that you shall hardly find a masterless Horse among them. [27]

In London in 1684 when John Evelyn saw horses captured at the siege of Vienna he remembered Busbeq and reported that they were:

[B]eautifull & proportion’d to admiration, spiritous & prowd . . . with all this so gentle & tractable, as called to mind what I remember Busbequius speakes of them; to the reproch of our Groomes in Europ who bring them up so churlishly, as makes our horse most of them to retaine so many ill habits.[28]

I have written elsewhere of how such a theory of horsemanship models a theory of governance, and how in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England horsemanship discourse mapped onto a discourse of ‘comparative imperialisms’, in which the potential superiority of the Ottoman system was borne out by the superiority of the horses themselves when they were imported into Great Britain.[29] If kind leniency as opposed to brutality distinguished the Ottoman regime from the Habsburg one, then Ottoman horses were right to prefer the former, thereby bearing witness to Ottoman superiority.

However, this equine Ottoman partisanship becomes a diplomatic issue.

Two pedigreed Arab thoroughbreds are to be presented to the Habsburgs as gifts.[30] One of the horses seems to disappear from the text without comment (did it go quietly?). The gift horse referred to as ‘the famous küheylân named Tureyfi’, after his celebrated Arabian strain (Tureyfi adlı ünlü küheylan), sees the black hat-wearing infidel Austrian grooms, siyah şapkalı kafirler, to whom he is to be handed over, and promptly rebels. He rebels because there are to be no properly dressed Muslim grooms in his future: Müslüman kıyafetinde adam yok. He is having none of it. Rearing and striking out, he kills at least six stablemen, destroying two of their (unbelieving) heads with his forelegs before trampling members of the crowd in Palace Square, moving like lightning, şimşek gibi.

The violent action of the horse is conveyed in religio-political language, suggesting a violation of the horse’s own religious and political boundaries. A sacrilege is being committed.[31]

This is an Ottoman horse, Evliya emphasises, sent by divine decree, Osmanlı’dan . . . bir at Allah’ın emriyle. ‘This poor Arab thoroughbred horse’, a humble being (like the Sufi dervish Evliya himself) (bu fakir küheylan at), has brought about an episode of mass injury now legendary in Vienna and beyond, across non-Ottoman lands: ‘There were so many kafirs injured it is still a legend in kafiristan’ (O kadar kafir yaralanmıştır ki hala kafiristanda destandır).

We will return to this point about the story being a legend in Europe later.

Commanded by the envoy, ‘”Hey, grab that horse”’ (Bre şu atı tutun”’), one of the Ottoman grooms tries to soothe the horse, whose stable name we learn is Ceyhun. The groom calls, ‘“Come my Ceyhun come”’ (‘“Gel Ceyhunum gel”’). (The horse’s stable name refers to the Central Asian river Jayhun, the Amu Darya or Oxus of antiquity, traditionally the border between Iran and Turan.) The groom’s gentle tone exhibits what we might call Ottoman horse-tact or interspecies leniency in action. Ceyhun responds by neighing and coming to the groom obediently, with bloody tears (kanlı yaşlar) in his eyes. We have independent corroboration of Evliya’s story from the Ottomans’ interpreter Franz von Mesgnien-Meninski (1620-1698), who confirms that ‘the Turks said that their gift horse wept.’[32]

Then comes the moment when Evliya steps in, tries to intervene on behalf of the horse. The narration slides from the groom speaking to Evliya speaking (‘I said’; dedim), and the horse’s history is recounted by Evliya to remind Kara Mehmed that he is a gazi horse, a war horse who has been ridden by the Ottoman sultan: ‘“Sultanım bu at bir gazi attır ve bizzat Osmanoğlu padişahı binmiştir.”’ Fearing for the horse’s life after this killing spree – what future treatment could the horse expect after this beginning? (Sonunda bu atı kafirler öldürürler) – Evliya suggests it would be better to give a different horse: ‘“Bu atı alıp yerine başka at verin” dedim’. This suggestion elicits from Kara Mehmed the command to wait and see: ‘“Hele görelim” diye aldırış etmedi’.

By waiting and seeing, Evliya witnesses more havoc and death. The second attempt to present the gift is no more successful than the first. The neighing (kişneyip) horse, breaking free of all restraints, killing seven more kafirs and wounding their seven horses, dashes from the Palace Square like a thunderbolt (yıldırım gibi) to erupt into the Çerkez Meydanı, the Circassian Square, the site of the martyrdom of a Çerkez cavalryman and his mount during Sultan Süleyman’s 1529 siege of Vienna.[33] There, neighing bravely a few more times, Ceyhun dies, delivering up his spirit (ruhunu teslim etmiştir) and falling to the ground. The grooms bury Ceyhun next to the fallen Circassian’s horse – another martyr in a martyrs’ square. Needless to say, this spectacle astonishes all the spectators, making a deep impression not only upon ‘Bütün Islam askeri’, all the Muslim soldiery, but on all the people of Vienna, ‘Ve bütün halk’.

The story offers us a corporeal, animal experience for us to think about as we will. In Benjamin’s terms, this is a story inviting our interpretation, rich in amplitude, rather than having the psychological (and social and political) connections forced upon us as would be the case with ‘information’. In this respect, Benjamin’s storyteller obeys Aravamudan’s ‘narrative principle of fable’, whereby the story’s ‘permutation radically changes the outcome and destabilizes the possibility of any moral takeaway’.[34]

Ethologically speaking, Evliya’s gift horse acts like a horse, exhibiting the species’s main responses to threats, both fight and flight. We might read ‘in to each other’,[35] following John Hartigan, the disciplines of ethology and ethnography.[36] In ethological terms, the horse behaves as a horse is likely to do when threatened by unfamiliar circumstances and by people who are strangers to him. The spectacular violence that results – so many deaths, human and equine, the protagonist himself dying at the end – may sound exaggerated for maximal effect. But Evliya says he is offering eye-witness testimony of what happened, and that the story is so remarkable that it has become a legend in kafiristan.

What then are we to make of this story? I submit that it should be understood as an instance of multispecies storytelling, in which the Ottoman delegation, both human and equine, comment on this proposed diplomatic gift exchange. Tureyfi/Ceyhun speaks with both vocal and corporeal, kinesthetic language. He speaks of his fear of the ‘black hat- wearing’ Austrians, fear that quickly turns to antagonism. The Muslim/nonMuslim sartorial difference signifies: these are an unfamiliar kind of human being. No cudgels are mentioned by Evliya, but we have Busbecq’s authoritative testimony that cudgels would be at the ready in Vienna to subdue an unruly or rebellious horse. The horse’s terror and lashing out are therefore justified. The horse reads the cross-cultural exchange accurately in ways that the Ottoman envoy Kara Mehmed, hoping for the best – ‘Wait and see!’ – does not.

When it looks to the horse as though the Ottoman-human semiotics to which he is accustomed will no longer be forthcoming, Tureyfi/Ceyhun is at a loss. He is a victim of Habsburg-Ottoman cultural difference.

When called by name in the voice of kind leniency, Ceyhun comes obediently to the Ottoman side. He calls out in turn to the groom, speaks of his distress, even his grief at being given away to these foreigners. ‘Bloody tears’ are an Ottoman trope for otherwise inexpressible emotion.

One thing we can say about this story is that the Ottoman delegation has itself become a foreign spectacle in Habsburg space. And that horses are an integral part of that spectacular Ottomanness.

From the horses’ perspective, this is both a good thing and a bad thing. There may be kind leniency in horse-human relations as an ideal in Ottoman culture. But there are also instrumentalism and commodification and opportunism involved. We might be tempted to go further and read this story as political allegory. The küheylân spectacle implies that diplomacy, gift exchange, and hospitality cannot totally displace the memory of previous warfare. Behaving as a horse well might, flight or fight being the species’s operative responses, he defends himself when being handed over to strangers who do not seem likely to treat him in the manner to which he has been accustomed. In this respect Tureyfi/Ceyhun has come as close to speaking a political truth as he could. It is as if the horse’s actions re-enacted Sultan Süleyman’s besieging of the city in 1529. Ceyhun has acted out what Evliya and the mission of 1665 cannot say: there remains unfinished business between the Ottomans and Habsburgs.

The horse’s terror and lashing out are therefore justified. The horse reads the cross-cultural exchange accurately in ways that the Ottoman envoy Kara Mehmed, hoping for the best – ‘Wait and see!’ – does not.

If we follow John Hartigan and read with both ethological and ethnographic lenses, a rich instance of intercultural interspecies literacy, and illiteracy, emerges. As Hartigan proposes:

[I]f recent theorizing on animal cultures is to advance, it will need to attend to the more variable, diverse, and contingent aspects of social behavior: exactly what is meant by “cultural.” I characterize my approach here as a “species-local” account of horse sociality, formulated through an ethnographic attention to how horses responded to disruptive and unsettling situations. . . . [I]f “animal culture” is to have any real bearing as a concept guiding observations of animal behavior it must be in positing or at least considering . . . that individuals have imbibed and are well aware of the “global pattern,” that is, their culture.[37]

Might Evliya’s story be regarded as a ‘species-local’ account, in which in responding to a disruptive and unsettling situation, a horse exhibits that he has certainly ‘imbibed’ and is ‘well aware’ of the ‘global pattern’ into which he fits, that is, ‘his culture’?

Evliya also displays the artistry of Benjamin’s storyteller – who recounts marvelous and wondrous things without telling us what to think about them – ‘the narrative principle of fable’, according to Aravamudan.

Might we then be able to read this story as an Ottoman ‘cultural fable’ in the way that Laura Brown intends? It is significant that the horse’s actions have become ‘a legend in kafiristan’. Here surely is ‘a fable of the nonhuman being’, in Brown’s terms, that structures ‘the encounter with cultural difference’ as a ‘spectacle of cultural contact’.[38] The Ottoman diplomatic party, present for signing a peace treaty, become a spectacle themselves through their horse’s actions. It is surely significant also that horses are represented by Evliya both as intrinsic to human Ottoman identity-formation and as Ottoman-identified cultural agents in themselves.

To return to the epigraphs with which we began:

Countering Islamophobia, as counselled by a horse, who reminds us of the preferability of kind leniency over brute force, and of the possibility that some nonEuropean ways of doing things may be superior to European ones, is a small gesture in response to Ghassan Hage’s call for anti-racist environment action.

If we agree with Donna Haraway that ‘It matters which worlds world worlds and which stories tell stories. . . . It matters to be for some worlds and not others’, Evliya’s ‘Wondrous Arab Thoroughbred’ or ‘Wondrous Küheylân’ ‘Spectacle’ shows us that stories from the Ottoman world can be worth paying attention to.

Endnotes

[1] Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3.

[2] Brown, Fables of Modernity, 2.

[3] Brown, The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023).

[4] Jonathan Lamb argues in The Things Things Say that ‘the thing’ has no truck with the human, and that things are to be understood as ‘purely’ things in themselves, ‘solitary, superficial, and self-evident’ even as they ‘disturb’ the literary texts in which they figure; The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), xii, xi; quoted in Brown, Counterhuman, 47-48. Brown goes so far as to employ oppositional language for the agency of things, but she also retains an interest in the ‘efficacious’ effects of the thing as ‘”vitally”’ engaged with the human, as in Jane Bennett’s formulation: ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory 32 (2004): 348; Brown, Counterhuman, 48.

[5] Onur Inal, ‘One-Humped History: The Camel as Historical Actor in the Late Ottoman Empire’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 53: 1 (2020): 1–16; (1,2).

[6] Harriet Ritvo, ‘Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient Britons’, Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 1-22; (1-2).

[7] Jeanne Dubino, ‘Emailed Remarks’, 1 February 2024, following Laura Brown’s ‘Counterhuman’ lecture, 29 January 2024, Fables Workshop 2 (online),’Fabulous Species/ Human-Animal Relationships’.

[8] For ‘naturecultures’, a term that marks the mutually constitutive properties of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, see Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25.

[9] Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 2-3. Unusually, Hage employs the analogy of horsemanship to illustrate his argument about the assimilation entailed by multiculturalism: ‘If multiculturalism is deployed to teach multicultural horses how to be mounted by those who wish to “enjoy” their culture, assimilation is the technique deployed to “break them” before such a training. . . . Those who are polemically inclined should note that I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad policy . . .’ (42).

[10] Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, ‘Introduction’, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, translated by Dankoff and Kim (London: Eland, 2010), xi-xxix; this passage xi.

[11] Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2004).

[12] See Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2-4, 129-30, and Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 343-359.

[13] [Alexander Pope], The Guardian, No. 61, Thursday, May 21, 1713, 2 vols. (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1714), I: 256-261.

[14] Kaori Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2020), 7-75.

[15] Dankoff, Ottoman Mentality, 196.

[16] Travis Zadeh, Wonders and Rarities: The Marvellous Book that Travelled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2023), 5-6.

[17] Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 23.

[18] Berlekamp, 23.

[19] Yeliz Özay, ‘Evliyâ Çelebi’nin acayip ve garip dünyası’ [‘Evliya Çelebi’s World of Marvels and Wonders’], Ph.D. thesis, Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 2012.

[20] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ [1936] in Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. and trans. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 148.

[21] Aravamudan, 137.

[22] Alan Mikhail, ‘What the World Says: The Ottoman Empire, Interspecies Rape, and the Climate in the Little Ice Age’, Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 1 (Autumn 2022), 55-76.

[23] Mikhail, 61.

[24] Yeliz Özay translates Evliya’ title for the episode as ‘The Strange Spectacle of Küheylan’ in her article ‘Evliyâ Çelebi’s Strange and Wondrous Europe’, Cahiers Balkaniques [Online] 41 (2013), 61-69. (https://doi.org/10.4000/ceb.3975 Accessed 26/02/2024). That there is often slippage in translations of the terms for ‘marvels’ and ‘wonders’ is evidenced by Özay’s entitling the episode simply a ‘strange spectacle’, not specifying the term for ‘wonder’ (garayib), and the slight difference in resonance between the English title of Özay’s article and the French one: ‘Evliyâ Çelebi’s Strange and Wondrous Europe’/‘Le monde étrange et mervaillieux d’Evliyâ Çelebi’. The French term mervaillieux could be translated in English as either ‘wondrous’ or ‘marvellous’, while recalling the latter more closely.

[25] Dankoff and Kim, Ottoman Traveller, 218.

[26] A contemporary document attests to Evliya’s presence in Vienna in 1665. See Karl Teply, ‘Evliyā Çelebi in Wien’, Der Islam 52 (1975): 125-31 and Nuran Tezcan, ‘Documentary Traces of Evliyâ Çelebi’, in Evliyâ Çelebi: Studies and Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of his Birth, edited by Nuran Tezcan, Semih Tezcan, and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul: Işbank Culture Production, 2012), 43-55.

[27] Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Travels into Turkey . . . Translated from the Original Latin of the Learned A. G. Busbequius (London: J. Robinson and W. Payne, 1744), 131-32.

[28] John Evelyn, Kalendarium 1673-1689: The Diary of John Evelyn, E. S. deBeer, ed., 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 4: 398-99.

[29] Donna Landry, Noble Brutes, How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 130-36; Landry, ‘English Brutes, Eastern Enlightenment’, in a special issue, ‘Animal, All Too Animal’, edited by Lucinda Cole, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52: 1 (Spring 2011): 11-30.

[30] My thanks to Sinan Akıllı for his invaluable help with translation. For the original text, see Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, edited by Yücel Dağlı, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Robert Dankoff, 10 volumes (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1996-2007), volume 7 (2003): 112-113 [mss 66a-66b] and the ‘everyday Turkish version’, Günümüz Türkçesiyle Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi , edited by Yücel Dağlı, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Robert Dankoff, 10 volumes; this volume translated by Seyit Ali Kahraman (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2010), volume 7, part 1: 257-258 [mss 66a-66b]. Internal quotations here are from the ‘everyday Turkish’ version for accessibility.

[31] On the possibility of animals having a sense of the sacred, see Caroline Rooney, ’Animal Religion and Cosmonautical Allegories’ in Cosmopolitan Animals, edited by Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney, and Charlotte Sleigh (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 58-71.

[32] Claudia Römer, ‘Legends about Vienna in the Seyahatnâme and their Austrian Counterpart’, in Evliyâ Çelebi: Studies and Essays, Tezcan, Tezcan, and Dankoff (eds.), 290-95; this passage 294.

[33] Today In Vienna a statue of the Circassian cavalryman, the ‘Çerkez Dayı’ (‘Circassian uncle’), and his horse can still be seen on a palace wall; Römer, ‘Legends’, in Evliyâ Çelebi: Studies and Essays, Tezcan, Tezcan, and Dankoff (eds.), 293-94, Fig. 2.

[34] Aravamudan, 137.

[35] For reading ‘in to’ one another, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘More on Power/Knowledge’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 25-51: ‘I will suggest . . . that it might be useful to give the proper names of Foucault and Derrida in to each other, although such a move would not be endorsed by either’ (25).

[36] John Hartigan Jr., Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

[37] Hartigan, 253, 260.

[38] Brown writes: ‘The many figurative lines of connection between our cohort of nonhuman beings and the non-European human beings who had become vividly present to European experience in the eighteenth century suggest that the fable of the nonhuman being served as a powerful and common resource for structuring the encounter with cultural difference; Fables, 262. Evliya’s story combines elements of both ‘the fable of the nonhuman’ and the fable of the culturally-other human who embodies a ‘spectacle of cultural contact’ in Brown’s Chapter 5: ‘Spectacles of Cultural Contact: The Fable of the Native Prince’.

Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. She has published widely on horse-human relationships in history, travel, Anglo-Ottoman and East-West relations, historical reenactment as a mode and practice of research, gender, queerness, imperialism, slavery, race, colonialism, Orientalism, and the politics and aesthetics of the countryside. She investigates historically and cross-culturally, and whenever possible with a multidisciplinary lens. Her book Noble Brutes explored how blood horses imported from the Ottoman Empire revolutionised British equestrian culture, inspiring Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels and George Stubbs’s sporting art. Donna’s current projects include a monograph on the battle of Waterloo from the perspective of the horses, and a co-authored book, with Gerald MacLean, on exploration, natural history, and Ottoman culture, following the Ottoman explorer and ‘long rider’ Evliya Çelebi (1611-c.1687). With Ercihan Dilari, Caroline Finkel, and Gerald MacLean, Donna was a founding member of the Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way, a project of historical re-enactment, leading to the establishment of an UNESCO cultural route, The Evliya Çelebi Way. Her participation was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.