page_title: Franco-Ottoman alliance
section_title: Ottoman embassies
hierarchical_section_title: Franco-Ottoman alliance / Continuation / Continued support from Louis XV to the Revolution / Ottoman embassies
context_page_description: The Franco-Ottoman alliance, also Franco-Turkish alliance, was an alliance established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Suleiman the Magnificent. The strategic and sometimes tactical alliance was one of the most important foreign alliances of France, and was particularly influential during the Italian Wars. The Franco-Ottoman military alliance is said to have reached its peak around 1553 during the reign Henry II of France.
  The alliance was exceptional, as the first non-ideological alliance between a Christian and Muslim state, and caused a scandal in the Christian world. Carl Jacob Burckhardt called it "the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent". It lasted intermittently for more than two and a half centuries, until the Napoleonic campaign in Ottoman Egypt, in 1798–1801.
context_section_description: In the early 18th century, the Ottoman ruler Ahmed III (1703–1730) endeavoured to send an embassy to France in order to formally establish France as a strategic ally against the common Russian and Austrian enemy. In 1720, Mehmed Efendi was assigned as Ottoman ambassador to Louis XV and sent to Paris. His embassy of eleven months was notable for being the first ever foreign representation of a permanent nature for the Ottoman Empire. During 1721–22, he visited France on an extensive fact-finding mission, with the objective of gathering information for the modernization of the Ottoman Empire. On his return to the Ottoman capital, Mehmed Çelebi presented his contacts, experiences and observations to the Sultan in the form of a book, a Sefâretnâme. Another embassy, led by Mehmed Said Efendi would visit France in 1742.
caption: French ambassador Charles Gravier de Vergennes in Ottoman dress, painted by Antoine de Favray, 1766, Pera Museum, Istanbul.
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