Anna Contadini and Claire Norton,eds,The Renaissance and the Ottoman World

Reviewed by: Brian Jeffrey Maxson, East Tennessee State University, USA

The Renaissance and the Ottoman World offers 13 topical essays on exchanges across traditional east/west, Christian/Islamic boundaries between 1400 and 1700. The range of the book is impressive, covering material culture, music, intellectual exchanges, art, cartography, historiography, textiles, and other issues. The book’s focus on exchanges has resulted in many of the contributions being more descriptive than analytical, but this approach makes the central case presented in the book quite well: in any number of areas, the Mediterranean seems to have been linked not just by ‘trade routes’, but also ‘cultural and intellectual networks’ (xv). For many, the Ottoman Empire was a part of Europe rather than a true other.

The book is divided into four sections. The first section looks at contexts shared between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe. Claire Norton’s essay opens the book with a general overview of how connections between the Ottomans and the rest of Europe dismantle old dichotomies such as ‘east’ and ‘west’. She argues for a new historiography that appreciates the ‘diffusion and difference’ (20) of areas around the Mediterranean Sea. Anna Contadini looks at the geographical origin and then exchange of Arabic books, textiles, and metal works, as well as their incorporation into various uses in Christian Europe, irrespective of an object’s original Islamic function or Ottoman place of origin. Palmira Brummett re-examines the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 as an historical turning point, using maps to show the continuity in interpretations of Ottoman space in the years before and after the battle. The book then turns, in Section II, to four essays focused on more specific works of cultural production. Deborah Howard charts the role of travel literature in conveying information about the geographical east, particularly the changes brought about by the introduction of print. Caroline Campbell presents new information for dating and attributing the ‘Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus’, a well-known painting in the Louvre that has hitherto defied a convincing interpretation. Similar detective work is done by Sonja Brentjes, who convincingly assesses the differing sources behind Giacomo Gastaldi’s earlier and later maps of Anatolia. Owen Wright’s contribution shows the lack of influence of or even real interest by Ottomans in Western music, or early-modern Western musicians in Ottoman traditions.

The book’s second half continues the theme of connections by looking at the spheres of material culture as well as intellectual trends and influences. In Section III, ‘Renaissance Thought’, Zweder von Martels examines three different views of Islam and the rulers of Turkey by Christian thinkers: Pope Pius II’s unsent letter to the Sultan Mehmed (1461/62); Augerius Busbequius’s diplomatic letters from roughly a hundred years later; and the approach of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey’s attempts to join European Union. Asaph Ben-Tov looks at protestant views of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century, showing a change from viewing them as remnants of antiquity to a new, distinct group of people. Jean Boden is shown by Noel Malcolm to have held quite positive opinions, both explicit and implicit, regarding the Ottoman system of rule and the Islamic religion. The book’s final section has three essays on further connections between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe. Alison Ohta describes the influence of Mamluk and then Ottoman designs on Italian, particularly Venetian, book binding. Suraiya Faroqhi provides details on the production, export and consumption of Ottoman textiles in the West, which was a much bigger business than surviving examples would suggest, at least until the mid-seventeenth century. Anna Akasoy’s essay concludes the book by demonstrating how several different Latin writers – especially the fifteenth-century figures Pius II, George Amirutzes and George of Trebizond – viewed the philosophical learning and interests of the Ottoman sultan.

As a whole this is a thought-provoking, wide-ranging book that convincingly argues that the Ottoman Empire participated as an accepted player in European affairs during the early modern period. Future studies will no doubt continue to add to many of the authors’ observations. At times the essays seem so intent on tracing the interconnectivity of the Islamic and Christian worlds that readers may ponder if the numerous examples brought forth are evidence for prolific exchange and cultural integration, or surviving examples of rarer phenomena – still interesting in their own right, but perhaps having less wide-reaching significance than might first appear. The book’s essays are varied on this point, with several making strong statements on the reach of their subject, while others are less clear. Regardless of this quibble, the book will be a starting point for future studies on the connections and place of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It leaves no doubt that a dichotomy between East and West simply did not exist in the late medieval and early modern worlds, and makes a strong move in the direction of a historiography that includes the Ottomans as one entity – albeit a unique one – among the many actors that made up pre-modern Europe.