The Sultan's Hydra: Ottoman Espionage In The Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Relying on documentation from Ottoman, Spanish, Venetian and Florentine archives, this article delineates the characteristics of Ottoman espionage in the sixteenth-century. It argues that Ottoman information gathering was different from its contemporaries, namely the Venetian and the Habsburg secret services, in two aspects. First, it was not institutionalized, but rather personal, in harmony with the empire's patrimonial nature. Second of all, this lack of institutionalization meant that the central control over espionage was limited and the provincial authorities were given a free hand to develop their own information gathering mechanisms that operated in independence and with little interference from the centre, which was more concerned with the results produced rather than the agents and the methods employed. In spite of this decentralized and non-institutionalized nature, however, as this article will seek to show, the Ottoman secret service did not lag behind its contemporaries in laying its hands on confidential information in a timely fashion and keeping imperial authorities abreast of information even from faraway lands.

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