Following on from the previous week's general introduction, this first introduction attempts to analyze the nature of the first contacts between the Ottomans and Europe, while emphasizing that this was not, strictly speaking, a real discovery, since the Ottomans had, from the outset, been in contact with a Western world that was first Italian, then increasingly French. The real difference in the 18th century lay in a marked shift in the balance of power between the two parties: while the Ottomans had been losing their grip since the end of the 17th century, their Western interlocutors were becoming increasingly powerful and often arrogant. This new situation is forcing the Ottomans to review their policy towards a West that is increasingly invasive and threatening, but also increasingly attractive and tempting through its successes.
However, before going on to examine the first contacts of a new kind between the Ottomans and the West, and taking up the promise made the previous week to tackle certain problems of method by means of specific cases, the lecture takes a little methodological detour around the highly unusual case of "the color of Franchet d'Espèrey's white horse". Indeed, all the historical literature from the 1950s to the present insists on the white dress of his horse to prove that the French general, by investing the Ottoman capital in this way in 1919, was staging a riposte to Mehmed II's conquest of the city in 1453. Yet contemporary photographs clearly show that this horse was not white, but bay. A trivial, even trivial detail, but one that allows us to examine two fundamental questions in history. Firstly, the problem of the manipulation of sources - generally for political or ideological ends - and the weakness of the discipline in the face of this disinformation, due to a lack of rigor and systematic examination of sources. The second and more important question concerns the meaning of this distortion: far from being innocent, it reflects the frustration felt by the city's Muslim population at the sight of the occupying forces and, above all, the enthusiasm of the non-Muslim communities. So it's not so much correcting a factual error that counts, as understanding and contextualizing the reasons behind it.
