This richly-illustrated volume brings together studies on a variety of cross-cultural interactions that took place in the Mediterranean region during the Renaissance. The focus is primarily on Venice and the Italian states, but also ranges more widely, away from that sea. In her framing chapter, historian Claire Norton reminds us of the common Graeco-Byzantine heritage of Mediterranean societies, and surveys the body of evidence we already possess that indicates how anachronistic is the mode of enquiry that unreflexively posits separate, and opposed, Muslim and Christian worlds. She writes that a new research model is long overdue, one that enables exploration of how similar cultural, economic, political and military developments were received within a shared geopolitical space.
Norton's co-editor, art historian Anna Contadini, views the artefacts that came west within the context of their production and consumption and, to the limited extent possible, their reception. She suggests we think of the Mediterranean as a ‘patchwork of cultural centres’, and proposes that there was ‘an eclectic sharing of features and. . .significant local variations’ in the goods she considers. Warning against casual ascription of meaning to artefacts apparently produced by ‘the other’, Contadini argues that cross-fertilisation of design renders origin incidental, and certain attribution virtually impossible. She thereby distances herself from ‘traditional art-historical scholarship’ and its obsession with provenance. The starting-point of her enquiry—the familiar rock crystals of Fatimid times—belies the originality of her contribution, which then moves on to a variety of objects brought west from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, including rugs, textiles, and metalwork.
Textiles are the subject of Suraiya Faroqhi's paper. While, as Contadini also discusses, finished silk and velvet exports from Bursa to Italian centres declined by the late 1400s, and were exported instead to Eastern Europe, the raw silk trade remained buoyant. Building on her earlier, seminal article on mohair, Faroqhi turns again to the market in this flourishing, luxury product, the lustrous cloth woven from the fleece of the Angora (Ankara) goat. Called sof in Ottoman sources, zambelloti in Italian, and zamlot in German, its production was described in detail by Hans Dernschwam, who accompanied the Habsburg ambassador Busbecq to Istanbul and into Anatolia in the mid-1550s. Faroqhi writes of the dangers that awaited merchants as they travelled—plunder on land or sea, or official exactions—yet these alone cannot account for the few examples of mohair that have survived until today. She proposes that the easy acceptance of eastern artefacts in the west during the Renaissance that Contadini also remarks upon, may be evidence of a chink in the ‘otherisation’ that was part and parcel of humanism, although her use of the problematic term ‘multiculturalism’ needs more explanation than she gives here.
Alison Ohta employs the labels Mamluk, Ottoman and Renaissance in relation to the book-bindings she studies, and considers how Italian binders embraced eastern styles and techniques of decoration but not the structural features or complexity of pattern of their models. The earliest painter to include an ‘Islamic-type’ binding was Mantegna, in his San Zeno altarpiece of the 1450s. Extant artefacts include dated Italian manuscripts bound in Mamluk bindings, which could have served as models for change in domestic production after 1500. Albeit the number of Italian Renaissance bindings drawing inspiration from eastern examples was limited, Ohta observes that the eastern origins of certain decorative elements were detectable on bindings elsewhere into the sixteenth century.
Books themselves straddle the categories of material and intangible goods, the first in regard to their physicality—partly evidenced in their bindings—and the second on account of their content. Summarising her previous work on the topic, Deborah Howard's essay on books as transmitters of culture addresses the second of these qualities. She discusses merchant handbooks, portolans, pilgrim guides and travel accounts that contained practical written and visual information about the eastern places western (Venetian) travellers and merchants might visit, and also offered hints to assist him/her as they travelled, either in person or from the comfort of their armchair.
Maps likewise bridge the material and the intangible. The contributions by Palmira Brummett and Sonja Brentjes both concentrate on maps of the Ottoman lands, but adopt rather different approaches. Brummett's ‘The Lepanto Paradigm Revisited. . .’ promises a revisionist view, while Brentjes applies detective work to ascertain the sources of placenames on the mid-sixteeth-century maps of the famous Venetian mapmaker, Giacomo Gastaldi. Brummett examines how the outcome of the battle of Lepanto was viewed by Europeans as they tried to comprehend their foe. She seeks to complicate the issue by considering the many and varied portrayals of the Ottomans that shaped perceptions, then and now. As she writes: ‘We have rationalised these two historiographic frameworks [of fear/conversation] by separating them, pointing to exceptional individuals, or arguing. . .that economic imperative tends to trump religious zeal’. Reaffirming Norton's appeal for a new research model, she insists that we must integrate the various parallel tracks of history—imperial, commercial, intellectual and the rest—if we are to understand how the Europeans ‘knew’ the Ottomans during the Renaissance.
Brummett turns to maps as one medium that ‘breaches the historiographic boundaries between the histories of war and the histories of knowledge’, and shows that the predominant modes of representation during the 16th century were either timeless, or responsive to news of recent conflict. By the turn of the 17th century, however, Ottoman sovereignty was becoming explicitly recognised on maps, which often had a portrait-medallion of a placid-looking sultan stamped upon them. In Brummett's reading of this type of artefact, the Ottomans are seen as different but, post-Lepanto, it was acknowledged that they were here to stay and their sultan was viewed as one monarch among many.
Brentjes devotes her contribution to Gastaldi's maps of Anatolia. She covers ground explicated in her 2010 contribution to Science between Europe and Asia. . . (eds Günergün and Raina) where she also turned to Gastaldi. Brentjes finds that in his first map, of 1548, the placenames are predominantly drawn from Ptolemiac sources, supplemented by other ancient and contemporary western names, while in his 1564 map and its close copies of 1566 and 1570, his representation of the landmass is structured mainly according to the names of early Ottoman-era territories and peoples. Whereas Brentjes interprets this shift in nomenclature as evidence of Gastaldi's thirst for transmitting new knowledge and the resulting product as a shared Venetian-Ottoman cultural space, Brummett construes matters differently. She discerns no indication of Ottoman presence or sovereignty on the body of the 1564 map and its 1566 successor, and states that although the ‘caption’ (legend?) on the former refers to the ‘patria’ of the ‘Signori Turchi’ and to what she translates as the ‘House of Osman’, reference to the Ottomans has disappeared from the legend of the 1566 version. Unfortunately the reader must resort to the web in order to find images (barely) legible enough to scrutinise these findings, and even then the legends prove impenetrable.
Brentjes compares the placenames used by Gastaldi in 1564 and after with those found in Venetian sources of the time. There may be cause for disagreement with some of her equivalences: Alidivli is surely the Dulkadirid ruler Alaüddevle, rather than ‘Ala’ul-Din; Durgutoli is likely Durguteli, the south-central Anatolian domains of the Turgutlu clan. Brentjes finds Gastaldi's transliteration of Turkish toponyms much superior to that of his contemporaries, and concludes that he must have used oral sources as well as written. She writes that while European texts on the Ottoman lands retained anachronistic nomenclature, maps were the prime means of transmission of new geographical knowledge. Regretably, she does not systematically add modern placenames to her tabulations of the place-names in her sources.
Brentjes detective work is matched by that of Caroline Campbell who, thanks to cleaning of the Louvre's famous painting, the Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus, is able to suggest new context and attribution for the work. The recent discovery upon it of the date 1511 prompts her to reconsider the evidence that scholars have put forward in support of a variety of theses. She proposes that the Reception is a souvenir of the eventful consular posting of Pietro Zen who was embroiled in 1509–11 in military-political machinations that saw him and the Venetian merchants in Mamluk lands placed in chains at the Sultan's court in Cairo. Zen returned home to Venice in early 1513, and Campbell argues on the basis of contemporary written sources and visual material that the painting was made thereafter. The date of 1511 thus commemorates the ‘Zen affair’, and she submits that the canvas was painted by ‘a moderately talented artist who probably never left Italy’, and may have been a member of the workshop of a follower of Bellini.
Turning to intangible cultural artefacts, Owen Wright's aptly-entitled article, ‘Turning a Deaf Ear’, describes the mutually indifferent worlds of eastern and western music. Instruments adopted from Arab societies in the southwest Mediterranean in the medieval period might be domesticated to the extent that their origins were forgotten, but when western travellers described music they heard in Ottoman lands, they usually concluded with denigratory remarks. The Ottomans similarly felt they had nothing to learn from others. Wright's research shows that there was no meeting of the theoretical traditions underlying the respective musics, the exception being the martial strains of the Janissary bands that exercised profound influence upon European music.
The final four contributions concern intellectual currents. Noel Malcolm writes of the ever-growing amount of eyewitness information available to those interested in Ottoman state and society who were thus enabled to analyse its various aspects. The topics that most impressed contemporaries were military discipline, the administration of justice, equality and meritocracy, welfare, and religious toleration—Malcolm's use of ‘toleration’ rather than the nebulous but all too ubiquitous ‘tolerance’ is to be welcomed. The French thinker Jean Bodin (d.1596) utilised writings about the Ottomans in his theorising, to the extent that the workings of the sultan's state became an integral component of his political-philosophical model. Malcolm discusses Bodin's thinking on Ottoman rule, and also his view of Islam as it emerges from his Colloquium. . ., in which ‘representatives’ of seven religious or philosophical persuasions dispute. Ottoman government and Islamic religion, Bodin seems to be saying, was the arrangement most likely to promote harmony. Malcolm's contribution echoes Brummett's and Brentjes’ conclusions, that dispassionate enquiry characterised certain areas of contact by the turn of the seventeenth century.
Popes Pius II, contemporary of Mehmed II, and Benedict XVI, make appearances in two of the remaining studies. Pius’ letter of 1461 in which he recommended to the Sultan that he convert to Christianity is discussed by both Zwender von Martels and Anna Akasoy—the letter remained unsent, and was probably not intended to reach its addressee. von Martels focuses on three critical historical moments: first, the time that the letter was written when, from the point of view of the Pope and his fellows, unity of religion appeared to be the key to a peaceful world; second, the years of Busbecq's embassy in the 1550s, when respect for international law seemed to this diplomat to be conducive to stability; and, thirdly, the near-present, when the penultimate Pope's infamous, Regensburg speech quoting Manuel II Palaiologos’ adverse comments on Islam indicated that a more productive basis for co-existence was needed—such as, suggests von Martels, Turkey's respect for human rights as advocated by the Vatican's then secretary of state. von Martels might, on reflection, want to retract his introductory, framing, statement that Turkey is poised to join the European Union.
In her enquiry into the role of Mehmed II in intellectual contacts between the Ottomans and the west, Akasoy considers Pius’ overtures to the Sultan alongside those of his contemporaries, the scholars George Amirutzes, who was at Mehmed's court, and George of Trebizond, who visited Istanbul and was the only one of the three to have addressed Mehmed directly. Some earlier thinkers, she writes, had seen the recognition of reason in both the Arab and Aristotelean philosophical traditions as the vital constituent of the Christian missionary effort; using this approach, they avoided basing their arguments on authorities irrelevant to Muslims. Pius, however, opted for a more aggressive approach, highlighting the philosophical contradictions inherent in the Sultan's faith and the consistent truth of his own. George of Trebizond also asserted the truth of Christian doctrine, while George Amirutzes, from his position of proximity to Mehmed, posited Aristotelean principles as the common ground where the two religions might meet.
Although the term ‘Christian’ occurs frequently in this collection—indicating the difficulty of jettisoning the dichotomous vocabulary that all too easily structures our thinking about cultural interaction—the version practised by the majority of Christians within Ottoman domains is barely in view. Asaph Ben-Tov looks at the interest displayed by German Lutherans in Byzantine writings and the fate of Greeks and their Church, and how their attitudes evolved during the later 16th century, and probes these matters more deeply in his book, Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity. Initially lacking knowledge of the contemporary state of the Church, some Protestants saw themselves as sharing most of its beliefs and practices and, with equally slim acquaintance with Byzantine history, proposed the fall of Constantinople as the end of Antiquity. In a swipe at a corrupt papacy, Hans Dernschwam, whom we have mentioned earlier, idealised the Greek Church at mid-century as the foundation of the Protestant, but once he became familiar with it, characterised it as akin to popery. By the 1570s, travellers’ accounts offered more information about the Church's current state—among the curious was the eminent scholar Martin Crusius (d.1607), who communicated with his Greek peers and amassed sources on political and eccelesiastical history since 1453 that became more widely available once translated into Latin. Crusius thought the parlous state of the Church could be ascribed to ‘Turkish servitude’ and, akin to Lutherans earlier in the century, he and his fellows considered the fall of Constantinople to be the end of an era. Ottoman Greeks of their own day they saw as only tenuously connected to the world of learning inhabited by their Byzantine forebears.
This brief summary of the essays in the volume under review cannot do justice to the depth of research and the intricacy of argumentation of the contributors. As Claire Norton points out, Ottomanists have for some time considered the history they write to be an integral part of the wider narrative of ‘European’ history, while specialists in the Renaissance have been slower to realise the significance of influences that swept in from the east. On the evidence of this collection, the imbalance is being redressed, and the outlines of a new model of enquiry are perceptible. Broadly speaking, the scholars represented here address the topic of cultural interaction by looking at how eastern goods and ideas found a place in western settings. A voice much-cited in Norton's chapter is that of Gülru Necipoğlu, who was present at the 2006 Warburg Institute-SOAS conference where this book had its origins, and has long reminded us that inspiration flows both ways. Necipoğlu's conference presentation looked, inter alia, at the adaptation of western artistic idioms at the court of Mehmed II. Unfortunately, it has been published elsewhere (Muqarnas 29 (2012)), depriving the volume of a view of the east as a receiving rather than a giving culture during the Renaissance.
Let a word of criticism not mar an enthusiastic review. Ashgate has become a major publisher of books on Ottoman-related topics at a time when the field is expanding, to the benefit of all concerned. But spell-checks cannot substitute for professional copy-editing. ‘Ex-patriot’ (for expatriate, pp.5,6; according to Wikipedia, the Ex-patriot Act was a proposed US law of 2012) is comical; others are misleading, such as Bayazid I for Bayazid II (p.102); some are meaningless, such as the use of ‘evinced’ (p.231); and yet others are misspellings, such as ‘provenience’ for ‘provenance’ (p.235). Maybe it is time to reintroduce errata slips or, better still, human copy-editors into the process.
