A Mirror or an Imitation of Power: Areas of Influence emphasized by the Prussian King Frederick the Great in his Letters to the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

One of the practices of international diplomacy in the early modern pe-riod was enumerating the localities ruled and/or claimed by the rulers in the letters sent to other states in order to point out that the exercise of power relies on God’s grace (divine right). This practice, which finds its reflex in many languages, was widely used from the 15th century until the 19th century by both Christian and Muslim states. This article examines the question of whether the Ottoman-Prussian diplomatic relations, which became tenser in the second half of the 18th century, reflected this practice in relevant diplomatic documents. To consider this, five letters of Frederick the Great, who made the Prussian state one of the great powers of Europe, addressed to the Sublime Porte between 1758 and 1762 in Latin, which includ-ed the above practice as a continuation of its historical course have been analyzed. Moreover, the localities enumerated in the letters are compared in terms of area and population using the demographic data of the Ottoman Empire and contemporary German sources on historical geography.