Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung. Volume 72 (4), 437–454 (2019) DOI: 10.1556/062.2019.72.4.4 0001-6446 © 2019 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest HİLE Ü HUD’A: DECEPTION, DISSIMULATION AND MANIPULATION OF INFORMATION IN 16TH-CENTURY OTTOMAN EMPIRE EMRAH SAFA GÜRKAN Department of Political Science and International Relations Elmalikent Cad. No: 4 34764 Ümraniye Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: emrahsafagurkan@gmail.com This paper engages in methods of deception, dissimulation and manipulation that the Ottoman Em- pire employed in the 16th century. It demonstrates how the Ottomans misled their enemies in realms of diplomacy and warfare by feeding them with tailored information. They did not only success- fully hide the target of their military preparations from enemy spies and foreign ambassadors, but also resorted to disinformation in order to manipulate diplomatic negotiations. Moreover, Ottoman commanders employed a number of tricks and ruses in order to gain the upper hand on the battle- field. Key words: information-gathering, intelligence, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, disinformation, decep- tion, dissimulation, espionage, decision-making. 1. Introduction Due to the logistical and communicational difficulties of the time, early modern deci- sion-makers were forced to operate with imprecise information, open to manipulation and often misleading. Accurate information was a precious commodity in short supply for which governments were always ready to spend fortunes. In fact, the 16th century witnessed the first experimentation with institutionalised secret services (Preto 1994; Sola 2005; Carnicer and Marcos 2005; Ribera 2007; Gürkan 2012; Varriale 2014; Iordanou 2019), only with mediocre results, however. Manipulated and fabri- cated information often carried the day, resulting in poor decisions with serious mili- tary and political consequences. While 16th-century secret services were struggling with acquiring and trans- mitting accurate intelligence in a timely fashion, decision-makers in capitals and com- manders on battlefields sought to get the upper hand in the war of information by trying