Charles Marie François Olier, marquis de Nointel

Charles-Marie-François Olier, marquis de Nointel (1635—1685), a councillor to the Parlement de Paris, was the French ambassador to the Ottoman court, 1670 to 1679, charged from the first with renegotiating the Capitulations under which French merchants and others did business within the Ottoman Empire.

Nointel, born and bred in Paris, came of a family of the noblesse de robe that was originally from Picardy. His father Édouard Olier, secretary to the King and councillor of the Parlement, had obtained a marquisate for his lands at Nointel near Clermont in the Beauvaisis. His wife, whom he had married in 1634, was Catherine Mallon, a relative of the seigneurs of Bercy. Charles-François, the future ambassador was the eldest of four sons. At a young age he accompanied P.-E. de Coulanges on a memorable grand tour in 1658 through the courts of Germany and Turin and to Venice and Rome, assembling a cabinet of drawings and antiquities on his limited resources.

Returned to France, he was made a councillor to the Parlement of Paris. His charming manners and agreeable personality won the interest of Arnould de Pomponne, through whom he reached the circle of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the Paris salons, where he developed the gallant, unattached reputation of an honnête homme, a sympathetic audience, a splendid host, a patron to the depletion of his limited fortune.

His appointment as ambassador, after a successful campaign by his friends, combined political and commercial expectations. The embassy was to reopen strained relations with the Porte, which hung by a thread, without compromising in the least detail the grandeur of Louis XIV of France. For the Christians living under the Sultan's rule, and above all the Latin institutions, hospices, chapels, and the like, France wished to be declared official protector in an explicit article in renewed Capitulations. For the commerce of France he was urged to get the customs duties lowered from 5 to 3%, in line with those paid by the English and the Dutch, and to open the commerce of the Red Sea to France, for which enterprise he was accompanied by a director of the newly founded Compagnie du Levant, a prominent merchant of Marseille, Augustin Magy.

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