Nathan Michalewicz is an Assistant Professor of History at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He specializes in and teaches the history of early modern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman Empire. He received his Ph.D. in history in 2020 from George Mason University. He is currently revising his book manuscript, France’s Greatest Ally: The Ottoman Empire in French Foreign Policy during the Sixteenth Century, for publication. The Journal of the Western Society for French History and Sixteenth Century Studies have published his research. Nathan is also working on a digital monograph, “Mapping French Diplomacy,” that maps all the letters from French rulers to international correspondents from 1494 to 1715.
He focuses his research on Christian-Muslim interactions and early modern diplomacy. He is interested in how France (and by extension, Europe) constructed its diplomatic geography. France’s Greatest Ally investigates how the French situated the Ottoman Empire into that geography in both theory and practice and how the French and Ottomans interacted with one another on a personal and state level. France’s Greatest Ally argues that the Ottoman Empire was a fundamental diplomatic partner for France. It remained so throughout the sixteenth century. And French kings included it in every foreign policy initiative from the beginning of the alliance in the 1530s until 1610. Mapping French Diplomacy builds off this research, expanding the realm of French foreign policy. It seeks to demonstrate the expansive nature of French foreign policy. It argues that France engaged in a truly multi-continental diplomacy far beyond Northwestern Europe, which forms the nucleus of most interpretations of early modern European diplomacy.
Digital History is also a major component of Nathan’s research and teaching. His digital research focuses on spatial history and its presentation on the web. He is a full-stack web developer, working in JavaScript with tools such as Node.js, React.js, Deck.GL, and Leaflet.js. He also teaches digital public history, textual analysis, and databases for the humanities.
Current Book Manuscript
Nathan’s current book manuscript is France’s Greatest Ally: The Ottoman Empire in French Foreign Policy during the Sixteenth Century is the priority of my research agenda. It explores the Franco-Ottoman alliance during the sixteenth century and its place within France’s broader foreign policy prerogatives. This book argues that Franco-Ottoman military and diplomatic cooperation was a central aspect of French foreign policy to counter Spain’s growing power. Historians have traditionally envisioned French foreign policy constricting significantly from the 1560s to the 1620s due to a series of religious civil wars. France’s Greatest Ally demonstrates that when the Ottoman Empire was included in France’s foreign policy machinations, continuity rather than constriction characterized France’s foreign policy, and the Ottoman Empire was an integral part of it.
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. It discusses the logistics and infrastructure France constructed to maintain constant diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. It explores the social relationships between Frenchmen and Ottomans that fostered continuing the alliance. It investigates the military and political cooperation that those diplomacy interactions produced. The French court and its diplomats treated the Islamic Ottoman Empire as a prominent member of its geopolitical community.
Digital Monograph
Nathan is also at work on a digital monograph, Mapping French Diplomacy. This project is a born-digital work that analyzes France’s diplomatic geography from 1494 to 1715. by mapping all the letters from French rulers to foreign correspondents. The project uses interactive technologies such as leaflet.js maps (along with other visualization technologies) in collaboration with a narrative analysis to represent France’s changing diplomatic priorities.
One of the primary arguments of Mapping French Diplomacy is that the region comprising France’s core diplomatic partners was truly multi-continental. The project will also act as a tool for researchers, providing a database of all the letters from French rulers to foreign recipients that is searchable through the interactive mapping environment. Mapping French Diplomacy operates differently than a traditional database such as The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe in which you must query the data through a form system. With this project, all the data is presented on the map at the beginning and is visible. The reader uses filtering tools to remove data from the map. In this way, the interface operates much more like a dashboard than a database.
Articles
He is currently working on three articles. The first, “Mapping French Embassies in the Sixteenth Century,” uses geo-spatial and network analysis to evaluate the development and core regions of French diplomacy during the sixteenth century through the locations and durations of French resident ambassadors. It suggests that the locations of French embassies demonstrate the centrality of a Euro-Mediterranean axis from England through the Netherlands to Italy through to the Ottoman Empire as the core of French diplomatic interests. The two other articles are in the beginning stages of work. “French Diplomats and the Defense of the Franco-Ottoman Alliance,” explores the role of French diplomats role in constructing a robust justification of France’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, French apologists actively involved in the alliance established defensive tropes that spread widely to the point that well-known authors such as Jean Bodin, Jacque-Auguste de Thou, and Pierre de Bourdeille de Brantôme perpetuated them in works that treated the Ottomans as a structural part of Europe’s geopolitical community. The third article, “A Game of Crowns: Imperial Consolidation and Dynastic Rivalries in the Euro-Mediterranean (1480-1580),” argues that the history of sixteenth-century Europe, North Africa, and Anatolia (or the Euro-Mediterranean) was entangled in a common geopolitical experience that shaped their social, political, and cultural histories. The consolidation of the Valois, Habsburg, and Ottoman dynasties between 1480 and 1580 set the three regions into an intertangled rivalry, that none of the inhabitants of the Euro-Mediterranean world could escape. A final article, “Ottoman Diplomats in French during the Sixteenth Century,” analyzes the presence of Ottoman diplomats in France throughout the sixteenth century, arguing that they were regularly present in the country. Their presence contributed to French elites and even average French people increasingly acclimating to the Ottoman Empire as a normal part of the European system.
Second Book Project
Nathan’s second print monograph will shift my focus from politics and diplomacy to the social world of the French community in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. This project will analyze the social history of the growing French presence in the Ottoman lands while the political alliance slowly deteriorated to the point of official hostilities in the 1660s. Historians have generally emphasized the confessional segregation of Christian Europeans from Ottoman Muslims. This outcome has been the product of early modern archives—emphasizing official state-related correspondence—that have obscured these relationships from the record. By reading the available letters and ledgers carefully, and at times against the grain, this project will demonstrate that cross-confessional social networks were ubiquitous. It presents the Mediterranean as an entangled socio-political world despite a plethora of religious and political barriers.
Published Works:
“Friends, Enemies, and Diplomacy in Constantinople: The French Embassy of Jacques de Germigny (1579-1584),” The Sixteenth Century Journal 53, no. 4 (2022), 989-1020. https://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ5304005
“François de Beaucaire de Péguillon and the Ottoman Empire: Perceptions of a Sixteenth-Century Militant Bishop,” The Journal of the Western Society for French History 40 (2012). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0040.002