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An Ottoman Winter in Toulon
he unholy alliance between France and the Ottoman Empire in 1530 caused great concern but had little military success. The Franco-Ottoman alliance, formed in the 1530s between the king of France, François I, and the Turkish ruler of the Ottoman Empire, Kanuni Sultan Süleiman (‘the Magnificent’), was arguably the first diplomatic alliance between a Christian state and a Muslim empire.
In the spring of 1543 the Ottoman fleet, under the command of Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa and accompanied by Polin, sailed west from Istanbul, reaching Antibes in southern France three months later. Despite these efforts there were still difficulties: in 2012 Arabic graffiti dating from the 16th century was found in a Toulon house, alongside images of ships, which suggested that supplies were not guaranteed for the Ottoman troops: ‘Need for fresh food!’ A few years after Barbarossa’s departure in March 1544, the Toulon city consul commissioned a painting, depicting the Ottoman fleet in the harbour, which hung in the town hall until 1789 when it was lost during the Revolution.
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