Download PDF | Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science), by Eric R R Dursteler (Author), 2008.
310 Pages
Acknowledgments
The research and writing of this book have consumed more than half of my adult life. Over the years many individuals and institutions have contributed significantly to its completion. While my name alone appears on the title page, and any errors are of course mine, I would like to recognize those who have played especially significant roles in this project.
I was able to spend a pleasant and profitable year and a half researching in Venice as a result of generous funding from several sources. Without such crucial support, this project could never have been brought to completion. My thanks, then, to the Brown Friends of Italian Studies, the University of Florence, Brigham Young University, the Fulbright Commission, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. I am especially grateful to these latter two institutions whose generous support allowed me to spend a wonderful year in Venice accompanied by my wife and children.
As important as financial support is to the completion of any project, even more meaningful to me has been the personal support and encouragement I have received from many individuals both in the United States and in Italy. While a student at Brown University, I was very fortunate to work closely with several members of the faculty. These include Engin Akarli, Philip Benedict, Juergen Schulz, and Amy Remensnyder. I am especially grateful to Anthony Molho. He challenged me greatly during my graduate school years but also encouraged me, helped me to obtain research funding, and suggested outlets where I could present and publish my work. He was an ideal mentor and has become a good friend.
Others who have provided encouragement, constructive criticism, and moral support include Edward Muir, Margaret King, Stanley Chojnacki, Palmira Brummett, Camal Kadafar, Joanna Drell, Emily O’Brien, Kurt Graham, Frank Christianson, David D’Andrea, Karl Appuhn, Christopher Carlsmith, Bruce Casson, Monique O’Connell, and Marilyn Cooper. In Italy, Giovanni Levi, Francesca Trivellato, Maria Fusaro, Michael Knapton, Paolo Preto, and Rheinhold C. Mueller all provided much appreciated assistance and advice at various stages of my research. In Venice, Gabriele Argenti and his family provided a poor graduate student with room and board and a lasting friendship. Lucio Gabrieli and Mauro Saccardo introduced me to the Venice hidden behind its facades.
Vittorio Mandelli explained the intricacies of Venetian institutions and the complexities of the Venetian language and always guarded my seat at posto numero uno in the Archivio di stato. Thanks to Daryl and Mary Lee, Shawn and Kelly Miller, John and Melissa Snyder, and Kip Clark for friendship and regular distractions from writing and research. John Snyder also provided artistic and technical assistance with the book’s images.
A special mention goes to the archivists and staff members of the archives and libraries in which I worked in Venice. Dr. Maria Pia Pedani-Fabris of the Archivio di stato assisted me both in the archive and with her own work on VenetoOttoman relations. Roberto Greggio, formerly of the Archivio di stato, merits special mention. He took the time to explain the barely indexed notarial records at the heart of this study to a slightly bewildered graduate student and generously shared the private indices he had prepared while reorganizing this collection. His personal kindness and interest made my many months of research pleasant and fruitful.
The extensive revisions required to transform a 650-page dissertation into a manageable book manuscript were accomplished against the musical backdrop of All Soul’s Vespers: Requiem Music from Cordoba Cathedral and Nova Cantica-Latin Songs of the High Middle Ages, which served both to put my mind into the appropriate historical context and to drown out the exuberance of my children.
Friends, colleagues, students, and institutions at Brigham Young University have been of great assistance in bringing this project to completion. Craig Harline and Michael Farmer read various versions of the manuscript and provided helpful suggestions on how to improve it. Donald Harreld also read the manuscript and provided key references that greatly shaped my thinking on merchant nations and community. De Lamar Jensen and Douglas Tobler nurtured and inspired my love for history early on. The College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences and the History Department have been consistently supportive with both funds and time, as has the David M. Kennedy Center. Special thanks to Deans Clayne Pope and David Magleby and to Jeffrey Ringer, for their support.
Thanks are also due to the staff of the Harold B. Lee Library who tracked down almost every obscure book or article I requested. The maps were produced by Whitney Fae Taylor and Brandon Jones of the Brigham Young University Map Lab. Crystal MooreWalker, Anais Haas, and Daniel Daines took care of all the small things as my research students. Finally, without the support and wisdom of a great department chair, Frank Fox, this book would never have been completed. All young scholars should have such a chair to help them navigate the shoals along the road to tenure.
My most important acknowledgment must go to my family, who have accompanied, supported, and cheered me along this long road. Without the material and, even more, the moral, support of my parents, Larry and Tamra Dursteler, I would never have switched career paths in midstream. Their unfailing assistance and confidence have been a source of strength to me and my family. This book has evolved against the backdrop of my real career as husband and father. When this odyssey began, Lauren was starting kindergarten and Collin was still in diapers.
Now Lauren is ready to leave for college, Collin is starting high school, and another child, Addy Serena, who was named after La Serenissima, the city where she started her life, has rounded out our family. My children have made the trip so much brighter with their enthusiasm for their dad’s obsession; they have provided needed distraction and comic relief, and they have helped me always maintain a balanced perspective on life. Finally, this book would never have been started or completed without the support and encouragement of my wife, Whitney. Whenever I was in danger of slipping beneath the waves, she kept me afloat. These pages are dedicated to her.
Portions of this book previously appeared in often significantly different form in several articles. I am grateful to the editors and publications for permission to use portions of these works: “Identity and Coexistence in the Eastern Mediterranean, ca. 1600: Venice and the Ottoman Empire,” New Perspectives on Turkey 18 (1998): 113-30; “The Bailo in Constantinople: Crisis and Career in Venice’s Early Modern Diplomatic Corps,” Mediterranean Historical Review 16 (2001): 1-25; “Commerce and Coexistence: Venetian and Ottoman Merchants in the Early Modern Era,” Turcica 34 (2002): 105-33; “Neighbors: Venetians and Ottomans in Early Modern Galata,” in Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange, ed. James P. Helfers (Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 2005), 33-47.
Introduction
In early June 1614, fleeing a failed love affair, one of the early modern era’s most intrepid travelers, Pietro della Valle, set out from the Venetian port of Malamocco. A poet, an orator, and a soldier, the twenty-eight-year-old scion of a noble Roman family sailed on the Gran Delfino, a Venetian war galleon armed with forty-five artillery pieces that all but guaranteed a safe passage amid the corsairs that infested the Mediterranean. His objective was one of the most popular and intriguing destinations of early modern travelers, the seat of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople.
This departure marked the beginning of an eleven-year “pilgrimage of curiosity” that would take the Roman through Ottoman and Persian lands, and eventually as far as India. During his travels, della Valle actively engaged the cultures he encountered: he “copied ancient inscriptions, collected oriental manuscripts, dug up Egyptian mummies, researched Arabic science, translated or even composed Persian literature,” and even mastered several of the region’s languages. Because of the breadth and depth of his travels and experiences, he has been recognized as a particularly astute and thoughtful early modern cultural reporter.? Della Valle’s voyage into the east lasted just over two months, and he landed in Galata,? Constantinople’s cosmopolitan suburb across the Golden Horn on August 15, 1614.
During the course of his voyage, della Valle composed a detailed and suggestive description of the “men and women, soldiers, sailors, merchants and passengers,” some five hundred in total, who accompanied him. He paid particular attention to his fellow travelers, who were a decidedly diverse lot: “There were Catholic Christians, heretics of various sects, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Per- sians, Jews, Italians from almost all cities, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Germans, Flemings, and to conclude in a few words, [people] of almost all religions, and nations of the world.”*
Della Valle’s taxonomy represents his attempt to both order and describe the people he encountered. It illustrates the complexity of the world in which he traveled, as well as two of the primary markers of early modern identity, religion and nation. The image of the “medley of this company,” as della Valle describes it, sharing the limited space of the Gran Delfino—eating, drinking, conversing, passing the long days together for more than two months—also hints at unexpected possibilities of cultural exchange in the Mediterranean of the seventeenth century. Della Valle saw nothing unusual or troubling in the diverse mix of his fellow travelers; indeed he described his experience with them as “truly delightful,” which suggests the potential for seemingly antagonistic cultures to interact and even coexist.° It is this nexus between identity and coexistence, specifically in the context of the relationship between the two great early modern Mediterranean sea powers—the Venetian and the Ottoman empires—that is the focus of this study.
COEXISTENCE
The intersection of cultures has attracted much scholarly attention since at least the anthropological turn that produced the “new cultural history.”° The most important initial studies were usually within the context of European expansion and encounters with the societies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.” More recently the cultural pluralism of the Mediterranean has been rediscovered: as della Valle’s experience suggests, it represents an excellent laboratory in which to pose questions regarding identity, cultures, and the ways in which individuals and groups interacted in times of peace and of conflict. Because of their long and unique shared history, their abundant archival resources for the early modern period, and the richness of their modern historiographical traditions, the relationship between the Venetian and the Ottoman empires represents an ideal case study for examining the nature of cultural contacts in the Mediterranean.?
In the case of Venice, scholars in recent years have been drawn to the mullticultural character of the city and the possibility of analyzing diverse groups interacting in “relative harmony,” both in the city itself and in its expansive eastern empire, the stato da mar.”° In the early modern era, the Venetian Empire was uniquely situated to function as both boundary and cultural middle ground, “a place of transition” in which people from throughout the Mediterranean and from every corner of Europe came together.
As Luigi Groto wrote in 1616, Venice was like “‘a tiny dot on a great sphere’ towards which all the civilizations of the Mediterranean converge.”!! A culturally diverse group of merchants, travelers, and officials regularly mixed in the cities of the Venetian Empire, and indeed, many travelers felt in entering the lagoon that they had already arrived in the exotic “Orient.” This pluralistic mien is vividly depicted in the narrative scenes of painters such as Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio.* As William McNeill evocatively described it, the Venetian Empire represented the frontier of the European world, the hinge between east and west. Similarly, because of the diversity of the cultures that mixed within its borders and the complexity of their convergence over an extended period of time, cultural historians have also increasingly been drawn to the study of the Ottoman Empire.
Because of their lengthy common border and shared engagement in the eastern Mediterranean, for almost five hundred years, the histories of Venice and the Ottoman Empire were tightly intertwined. From its earliest days, Venice’s fortunes were directly founded on its Levantine trade, and during the Byzantine Empire’s waning centuries the city-state emerged as the dominant European commercial power in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as a significant political and military force, with colonies and outposts in Dalmatia and the Aegean and Ionian Seas. As Byzantium declined, the Ottomans increasingly assumed the role of Venice’s partner and rival. Already in the late thirteenth century, because Venice’s eastern territories were directly in its path, the Ottoman expansion began to have important political and commercial implications for both states.'* Well before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Venice recognized the changing political and commercial tides, and gradually established closer ties with the Ottoman sultans.
While all major European polities at one time or another maintained diplomatic and commercial relations with the Ottoman Empire, none did so to the extent of the Republic of Venice.!* Commerce was the initial basis of this relationship: for a time in the fifteenth century, after disposing of the Genoese challenge, Venice nearly monopolized Mediterranean trade. This imbalance of economic power in the region was perceived as a threat by the sultans, who implemented policies to weaken Venice’s stranglehold on Levantine commerce. These policies, combined with challenges from commercial competitors both old and new, gradually chipped away at the Venetians’ monopoly in the difficult sixteenth century, yet Venice remained among the Ottomans’ most important international trading
partners well into the seventeenth century.'® To be sure, Venetian and European trade, more generally, represented a relatively marginal part of the Ottoman economy, dwarfed by the much larger domestic market. This is not to say that Ottomans were indifferent to commerce with Venice; indeed Venetian luxury goods remained highly sought after in the Porte.” For Venetians, however, even in the changed economic environment of the sixteenth century, the Levant continued to occupy a place of primacy in their collective imagination, and many believed, as did Girolamo Priuli, that their city’s fortunes were still inseparably tied to the east.18
The Ottomans also affected Venice’s political affairs in the Italian peninsula: while it carved out an increasingly powerful terraferma state, in part as a response to the Ottoman expansion, that same threat served as a counterweight that kept the city-state from shifting the Italian balance of power decisively in its favor.” The disastrous wars with the Ottomans in 1463 and 1499, the near cataclysm of Cambrai in 1509, and the troubled years leading up to the treaty of Bologna in 1530 all made Venice painfully aware of its changed status and led its rulers to pursue a realpolitik policy of neutrality, a tricky balancing act between the French, the Habsburgs, and, most importantly, the Ottomans. As Guicciardini observed, the Venetians’ experience with the Ottoman Empire over the half century after the conquest of Constantinople taught them that “knowing well the art of defense” was better “than engaging the enemy in battle.””° From the first years of the sixteenth century, “the Serenissima lived between the anvil of the Habsburgs and the hammer of the Turks,” or as described by a papal nuncio, “between two counterweights.”?! The extent to which this stance of neutrality permeated Venetian society is evidenced in the assertion of a young citizen bureaucrat who affirmed that in his official duties he would not favor one prince over another as was required of “everyone who was born in Venice, city of great concord and of great neutrality.”
Venice’s was not a true neutrality, however; rather, the Signoria was involved in a difficult and sensitive “game of balance” and of “equivocation,” trying to play one power off the other. The Venetians used diplomacy, a system of ever-shifting alliances, and control over the dissemination of information to both the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in a sometimes desperate effort to appease and manipulate both states into positions favorable to the weakened republic as it confronted a brave new Mediterranean world.?? In the final equation, however, Venice’s rulers clearly understood that their city’s economic and political viability was most closely linked to their ability to maintain good relations with the dominant Mediterranean power of the day, the Sublime Porte. When presented with the possibility of obtaining peace with the Habsburgs, the patrician Lunardo Emo “wept at the speaker’s platform” as he warned his fellow senators against angering the Ottomans by choosing Charles V over Siileyman. A similar pro-Ottoman position was also the keystone of Doge Andrea Gritti’s diplomatic policy.”
Venice’s dependence on Ottoman goodwill was everywhere evident: after the discovery of the Cape route, for example, it became clear that only the sultans were powerful enough to challenge Portuguese monopolization of the spice trade; thus Venice pursued “a more subtle, even submissive, policy toward the Ottomans,” which led to a resurgence in the trade by 1550.”° Venice’s submission was further encouraged by its reliance on Ottoman grain, which was so significant that one official reported that Venice’s Dalmatian subjects would die of famine if the Ottoman trade were ever interrupted.*¢ In addition, Venice’s military forces often depended on the recruitment of Ottoman subjects, most notably the famed stradioti, a reliance that Girolamo Priuli decried as being like a “man cutting off his penis to spite his wife.”?” Politically and economically, then, there is little question that after 1470, Venetian well-being was subject to the favor of the sultans, which earned the city the sobriquet, “the Turk’s Courtesan,” and much disdain among the corps of Christendom. Of Venice, Pius II said famously, if over-simply, “too much intercourse with the Turks has made you the friends of the Mohammedans and you care no more for religion.”
Although circumstances occasionally dictated a momentary shift in this policy, Venice was generally successful in maintaining its neutral stance, evidenced most conspicuously in the rarity after 1503 of open conflict with the Ottomans.” Indeed, one of the striking, but often overlooked, features of Veneto-Ottoman relations in the early modern period is the degree to which the two powers’ relations were characterized by coexistence rather than conflict. From 1500 to the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, Venice and the Ottoman Empire were at peace, save for several relatively brief interludes of open hostility, punctuated by raiding and other corsair activities. These moments of open warfare were generally shortlived (with the exception of the War of Candia from 1645 to 1669) and were distinguished more by attempts on both sides to repair the rupture quickly than by total warfare. Thus, while hostility was certainly one aspect of Veneto-Ottoman relations, in many ways it must be seen as exceptional against this backdrop of peace.
This reality of Ottoman and Venetian coexistence is in many ways at odds with the way the encounter between the major religious cultures of the Mediterranean has been characterized. In these depictions, relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and more broadly between Christianity and Islam, are generally reduced to a shorthand of binary oppositions—East/ West, Muslim /Christian, Venetian /Turk, Europe/Other. This dichotomy is readily apparent in the titles of important monographs: Islam and the West, Europe and the Turk, Venezia e i turchi° The continued currency and persistence of this “oppositional framework”?! among the general population as well as scholars is evident in the influential “clash of civilizations” model that Samuel P. Huntington has posited, as well as in many works produced in the wake of the events of September 2001 and the subsequent hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
This bipartite vision of the early modern Mediterranean world is a product of the complex interaction of both historical and historiographical trends. Historically, its roots extend back to biblical representations of Near Eastern foes, but especially to the epic confrontation between classical Greece and the Persian Empire. In the postclassical era this clash metamorphosed into the inheritance struggle between the two great religious offspring of the classical world, Islam and Christendom. Each posed the threat of “conquest and conversion” to the other, though this was especially true in the case of Christendom, which progressively lost ground in Islam’s early centuries.*? In Europe, one product of this political and religious rivalry was an extensive anti-Muslim and anti-Ottoman literature that demonized the other and contrived to inspire crusades to liberate cruelly oppressed lands under the heel of Islam. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, nationalists (both Christian and Muslim) seeking to explain the political and economic retardation and cultural marginalization of their nascent nationstates drew on this polemical literary body to blame their failings on the deadening influence of the repressive Ottoman rule.** This vision conveniently ignored centuries of coexistence and the relatively tolerant attitude of the Ottoman state toward its minority populations,» and a narrative of subjugation at Ottoman hands became entrenched in western intellectual culture, which resulted in modern political and religious antagonisms being teleologically imprinted onto the past.*° Likewise, the fissures of the cold war era were reflected onto the past, depicting the Mediterranean as cleanly divided into two civilizational camps, opposed to each other geographically, culturally, and religiously, and each driven to impose its own image on the other in an ideological war of the worlds.>” The current of anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic opinion persists today, fed by stereotypical depictions of Islam in western media, and by events such as the “war on terror” and the recent debate over Turkey’s entry into the European Union, which the papacy has opposed on the grounds that Islam is “in permanent contrast to Europe.”38
These Manichean historical currents have been mirrored in the historiography of the encounter between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Since the nineteenth century, significant bodies of historical literature have focused on two fundamental aspects of the millennial engagement of these Mediterranean cultures: image and impact. One of the most common early approaches to the study of the Ottoman Empire by western scholars examined the impact of the “Turks’” presence and expansion on Europe. Foundational early works, such as Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen’s Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches in Europa and Nicolae lorga’s Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches were supplemented in the mid-twentieth century by Dorothy Vaughan’s Europe and the Turk, Paul Coles’s The Ottoman Impact on Europe, and Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West. These scholars focused to a greater or lesser degree on Ottoman history, but they also prominently dealt with the diplomatic and political implications that the Ottoman threat presented to European society and civilization. While significant contributions of historical scholarship, these works were based on a “clash of civilizations” model in their treatment of Ottoman-European relations and insisted on a fundamental opposition between two essentially different and ultimately incompatible cultures.
Parallel to this history of the Ottoman impact, other scholars advanced a cultural-intellectual history, a literature of the image of the “Turk” in European culture. Works such as Clarence Dana Rouillard’s pioneering The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature, Samuel Chew’s The Crescent and the Rose, R. W. Southern’s Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, Robert Schwoebel’s The Shadow of the Crescent, and Paolo Preto’s Venezia e i turchi all were concerned, at their core, with the manner in which Islam and the Turks were perceived and depicted as the Christian and European other. A number of recent publications suggest that this fascination with the representations of Islam in European society continues.*! Generally, this literature of image has unfolded in rich detail the virulent portrayal of Islam and Muslims within European society, and especially within European literature. This historiography is based on the seemingly endless literary output in Christendom devoted to explaining, demonizing, and dismissing Islam throughout their long, shared history.** While some of these scholars have been more nuanced in their discussion of the image of the “Turk,” acknowledging changes in views over time and diversity in attitudes depending on proximity, in the final analysis, the literature of image most often has painted a synchronic picture of hostility and misunderstanding that varies little from the Middle Ages into the early modern era.*?
This binary narrative of opposition, misunderstanding, and animosity that has dominated the historiographical discourse has in recent years been questioned by scholars who have argued for the need to approach the encounter between Islam and Christianity with a more nuanced view of the nature of culture and cultural interaction. These scholars maintain that structuralist and essentialist assumptions that reify abstractions such as nation, culture, religion, or civilization, and assume an inherent division and oppositional relationship between metacategories such as East and West, have obscured a more complex and varied reality. The traditional picture assumes a degree of cultural unity and homogeneity within these groups, and an unwavering antagonism between them, which is at odds with both the new cultural historians’ more sophisticated understanding of cultures and with the fluidity of borders and identities during the premodern period. Cultural contact and interaction were messier, more contradictory, and variable than this two-dimensional, static pattern allows.“
In terms of the literature of image, this revisionist view has challenged the often monotone and static depiction of previous image literature that limned Islam and the Ottoman Empire solely “as a barbarous monster.” Maxime Rodinson, for example, argues that “Christian Europe did not, as is commonly as- sumed, have one, but several images” of Islam.*5 Lucette Valensi shows how in the Venetian relazioni there existed alongside the traditional rhetoric an admiration for the strength of the Ottoman state’s institutions and the courage of its soldiers.*° She and other scholars have rightly pointed out the literary rumblings of a break with the medieval dogmas among some early modern observers. Following the conquest of Constantinople, Europe developed closer political and economic ties with the Ottoman Empire, giving rise to a greater curiosity and a need for more accurate information regarding the Ottomans. Growing numbers of travelers between east and west both were a product of and contributed to this demand.*” Another important element in this evolving picture was the spread of printing. As Rouillard suggests and others have since shown, this surge in information on and interest in the “Turks” led to increasing treatments of the matter in European art and literature, with subtle increases in objectivity and accuracy.* Indicative of Europe’s fascination and preoccupation with its neighbor is that in France alone, from 1492 to 1630 four times more books were published on the Ottoman Empire than on the New World.” Not surprisingly, some of the most nuanced and popular discussions of the Ottomans were contained in the relazioni of the Venetian baili who served in Constantinople, charged as they were to provide balanced, accurate information intended to guide the republic’s very sensitive Ottoman policies.°°
In response to the traditional literature of impact, some scholars have begun to question the axiomatic view that emphasizes the fixed nature and adversarial character of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Instead they have proposed a more complex approach to both identity and cultural interaction. Recent research, particularly by Ottomanists such as Cemal Kafadar, Suraiya Faroqhi, Palmira Brummet—but also Peter Sahlins writing on early modern France, Molly Greene and Sally McKee on Crete, Jeremy Prestholdt on East Africa, and Joan-Pau Rubiés on India>!—has made meaningful strides toward developing a more sophisticated model of cultural interaction that rejects the essentialization of identity and the reduction of the Mediterranean to a series of oppositional metacategories.°? Their work has challenged the “totalizing concept of the ‘Other’ ” expressed in Edward Said’s influential orientalist model as conceptually limiting and reductionist in interpreting and explaining cultural exchanges. They have argued instead for the need to “disarticulate the notion” that the premodern Mediterranean world “was composed of isolated blocks, secure and content in their foreignness.”*? Indeed, Richard Bulliet in a recent, provocative work contends that far from being diametrically opposed as in Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” model, the histories of Christendom and Islam are so closely intertwined that the Mediterranean ought to be envisioned in terms of a shared “Islamo-Christian” civilization. Linda Darling’s epitaph on the old view of the encounter between Islam and Christianity suggests the degree to which the paradigm has begun to shift: “The idea that the west is eternally opposed to the east, that the east stood still while the west progressed, should be relegated to the horse-and-buggy era as something once believed but no longer credible, like the flat earth, spontaneous generation, or the medical use of leeches.”*
IDENTITY
One of the core issues in the emerging discourse on Mediterranean culture focuses on identity. Questions of identity have, of course, permeated much recent discourse, both erudite and popular. Influenced by both the new cultural history and postmodernist reflections on identity, scholars have increasingly abandoned the structuralist-essentialist model for a view of self that emphasizes its fluidity and socially constructed character.°* This shift has been informed by current events, including mass migrations, the breakup and refashioning of longstanding nation-states, and the breakdown of linguistic, cultural, economic, and political boundaries in the era of globalization.°” In Europe, the growth and expansion of the European Union has produced a wide-ranging examination of European identity. Because of its religious and ethnic diversity, its status as a Christian and Muslim cultural middle ground, and the degree of geographic mobility in the region, the Mediterranean has become a fashionable focus for discussions of both cultural convergence and identity.
While much has been written on identity in the context of the modern world, we know decidedly less about it in the early modern era. To get some sense of the way in which contemporaries understood both themselves and how they configured their world, we return to Pietro della Valle’s intellectual pilgrimage. In his taxonomy della Valle lines up his fellow travelers into two parallel columns: the first includes “Catholic Christians, heretics of various sects, ... Turks, . . . Jews”; the second “Greeks, Armenians, . . . Persians, . . . Italians from almost all Cities, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Germans, Flemings.” In short, della Valle concludes, his companions represent “almost all religions, and nations of the world.”>* These two categories—religion and nation—are essential to della Valle’s conceptualization, and along with social hierarchies, they are the key categories of identity that contemporaries mobilized to order their world.
The first labels della Valle employs are religious: he divides his fellow travelers into Catholics, heretics, Jews, and Turks. During the early modern period religion remained one of the primary elements of individual and group identity. Where political status had perhaps comparatively minimal significance, religion was a fundamental constituent of identity because of its ability to “penetrate the masses of a population” in a way which pre-modern states were unable.» If Europeans no longer realistically harbored hopes for a united Christendom and regularly referred to themselves less by religious than regional and cultural signifiers, and if the Islamic world was rent by its own internal divisions, religion remained at the core a key, even assumed, element in constructions of identity.
In situations in which religious pluralism existed, religious identifiers were particularly common. This is evident in the general tendency among Christian Europeans to group the widely diverse elements of Islam generically under the rubric “Turk.” Although an ethnic and linguistic term, “Turk” was widely used in this period as a religious catch-all to describe all Muslims.® Curiously, the same term was also employed occasionally to describe Protestants.“ In the Ottoman Empire, people were usually classified by religion, not language or ethnicity, and Ottomans often referred to Christians “not in territorial or national terms but simply as infidels [kafir].” Indeed the popular view was “al-Kufr kulluhu milla wahida [unbelief constitutes one nation].”
In acknowledging the enduring importance of religion in questions of identity, however, we should not assume that religion was the only determining factor either in constructions of identity or in conceptualizing the world. The ideological clash between Islam and Christianity did not dictate all the actions of every early modern man and woman all the time. Muslims and Christians were not perpetually engaged in a life-and-death struggle: “coexistence and symbiosis were possible” and almost certainly the quotidian norm rather than the exception.™ While modern observers often attribute an unwavering religiosity to the medieval and early modern periods, the reality was infinitely more tangled. Many individuals moved easily between religious poles, and indeed polities were never averse to allying with a perceived infidel if the stakes were right. Robert Donia and John Fine have shown that Bosnian nobles were generally “indifferent to religious issues. They intermarried and formed alliances across denominational lines; when it suited their worldly aims, they changed faiths easily.”** Evidence from throughout Venice’s stato da mar and across the Mediterranean provides innumerable instances of religious migration across seemingly inviolable boundaries and suggests that frontiers of faith were more porous than we have previously believed. This same “confessional ambiguity” of the Mediterranean was also evident in Reformation Europe in relations between Catholics and Protestants.%°
Even when religious boundaries were not violated, a certain religious syncretism existed among Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim in the Mediterranean who shared popular beliefs in miraculous saints and the efficacy of Christian baptism.”
In the political realm too, apparently rigid divisions between Christian and Muslim states, proved much more pliable than is often acknowledged. Venice, of course, had little trouble breaking with Christendom to treat with the Ottoman Empire; indeed the city was famed for the position expressed by the Senate after Lepanto, “Prima semo veneziani, poi cristiani [first we are Venetians, then Christians].”°° Even at this moment of glory following the first major defeat of the Ottomans in memory, Venice clearly recognized the importance of pursuing an independent policy in opposition to the crusading stance advocated by the papacy and Spain, and it soon broke with its Christian allies to sue for a separate peace. Venice was not alone in this openness to the Ottomans: in the same breath European powers could decry Venice and its policies, demonize the “Turks” as infidels, and still attempt to benefit from relations with the sultans themselves.© At one time or another, almost every European power, including the papacy, made overtures toward the sultans and even established open alliances with them.” Peasants too were generally more interested in the oppressiveness of their sovereigns’ rule than in their religion. A sixteenth-century Balkan maxim stated, “better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope,” and peasants throughout the Mediterranean often voted with their feet by fleeing Christian rule for Ottoman or even assisting the sultans’ forces in their conquests of Christian lands. This ambiguity was succinctly expressed by Luther: “A smart Turk makes a better ruler than a dumb Christian.”7!
In the case of Islam, the familiar maxim that religion subsumed all and that “unbelief constituted one nation” is generally invalid, but especially so in the case of the Ottomans, who derived from their frontier milieu a cultural mix of classical Islamic legal traditions joined with Byzantine and Inner Asian elements. Ottoman society was particularly open to Christians and Jews, and the cases of nonMuslims or converts to Islam who played leading roles in the Ottoman state are too common to enumerate. In the early modern era, the Ottomans engaged in close economic, political, and cultural relations with many so-called infidel powers and were very open to importing “Western” ideas and specialists. Indeed, while Europeans were narcissistically convinced that the sultans had “as objective the monarchy of all the world and the destruction of Christendom,” in reality Ottoman military and political efforts were focused primarily against fellow Muslim rulers in Egypt, Iran, and North Africa.”? The sultans also recognized and exploited the divisions among Christians after 1517 to their political advantage.”?
To return to della Valle, it is clear that our intrepid traveler did not conceive of his world solely in religious terms. He divided his companions into a second, nonreligious subset: Greeks, Armenians, Persians, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, Dutch, Germans, and Italians from all cities; in short, people from all the “nations of the world.””4 In this he was in no way unique; every early modern traveler utilized this taxonomic category. For example, the sixteenthcentury imperial ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq wrote of encountering “Ragusans, Florentines, Venetians, and sometimes also Greeks, and men of other nations.””° The idea of nation is, of course, notoriously imprecise, and its conceptual utility is seriously undermined by the significant variance between its modern and premodern usages. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that the modern concept of nation is “historically very young,” dating back at most to the eighteenth century. Such a view of the nation is at the heart of the work of the postmodernist, anti-essentialist views of scholars such as Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson who see nations as socially constructed, “imagined communities.””° While these important works have focused primarily on the modern era, some scholars working on premodern Europe have challenged this view, holding that the roots of the modern concept of nation are firmly situated in the Middle Ages.”’ Although this is not the place to engage this debate, a historically precise understanding of early modern concepts of nation, because of its widespread usage, is crucial to understanding premodern identities.
Etymologically, the word nation derives from the Latin natio, which shares the same stem as natus. In the classical era, nation referred to people born in the same city or region, such as Jews or Syrians who resided in Rome or some other city. In medieval and early modern times, nation retained this classical, geographical connection with place of birth, origin, or descent.’* This is particularly evident in Romance languages: Dante used nazione to refer to “men who originated in the same province or city,” and an early French dictionary’s definition cited Froissart’s “je fus retourné au pays de ma nation en la conté de Haynnault [I returned to the land of my birth in the county of Haynnault].” Machiavelli used the terms province and nation, and often patria, interchangeably, as did Guicciardini.”? The meaning of nation in the early modern period, then, remained closely linked to the classical concept of nation as a community of people with a shared place of origin.®°
Early modern Ottoman and other writers in the Muslim world utilized a concept with some similarities to the premodern European notion of nation. This is evident in the writings of the Ottoman intellectual and bureaucrat Mustafa Ali, the historian Naima, and the seventeenth-century Ottoman poet Nabi who referred to Constantinople as “the nursery of many nations.”*! The Ottomans came to use the term taife, which could describe generically any group, in a similar fashion to the premodern European uses of nation. While Ottomans referred to Europeans generically as Franks (Ifrandj or Firandj), they clearly recognized degrees of difference in this general category. Thus they described their own Latinrite Christian subjects as “tatlisu frengi, sweet-water Franks,” while other European Christians were designated “salt-water Franks,” and were further differentiated into cultural and linguistic groups: “taife-ya Efrenk-i Ingiliz or taife-yi Efrenk-i Filemenk” (English Franks or Dutch Franks).*
The association of nation with geography is evident in the practice of using place of birth as surname among non-nobles.® This association is also clear in a Venetian dispatch in which Bailo Almoro Nani refers disparagingly to a certain Mustafa, “who was by nature Greek, and as one partial to the rite of his nation spoke more in that language than in Turkish.”** His birth identity (his nature or nation) was Greek, and linguistically he was Greek, but in religion he was a “Turk.” Nani’s observation suggests a second element of identity associated with provenance and birth: language. To nineteenth-century nationalists, language and nation were inseparable; in premodern times the relationship between language and identity was significantly less clear-cut. While often an important piece of the whole, language was rarely “the prime identity criterion.”*> This was evidenced in the unusual linguistic combinations of the nations of medieval universities, as well as the linguistic diversity of many conglomerate states, including the Holy Roman, Venetian, Ottoman, and Spanish empires. In the case of Denmark, one scholar has argued that “as long as language was not considered a vital component of man’s identity, the multilingual character of the state raised no problems.”* In the frontier region between France and Spain, “the Cerdans’ chosen languages of expression . .. stood in no necessary relation to their possible identities and chosen loyalties.”®” In the varied world of the Ottoman Empire, with its linguistic diversity and not insignificant body of multilingual individuals and groups, “language was a means of communicating between peoples, not a means of distinguishing among them.”** The existence of the Italianate lingua franca in the European and Mediterranean regions also served to complicate the importance of linguistic boundaries.®
If regional provenance was one of the most important elements of “national” identity, it was both expressed and reinforced by language, and by other external markers. These might include dress, foodways, and common customs, as well as more intangible factors such as a sense of some kind of a shared historical past. Costume especially was an important, if easily mutable external signifier of identity.°! Latin-rite Ottomans, for instance, were recognizable by their luxurious “gownes black, & . . . velvet caps,” which stood in contrast to the garb of GreekOttomans, who wore violet-colored clothing and bonnets.** Books that illustrated and illuminated costume and identity were popular in the latter half of the sixteenth century, particularly among travelers. Peter Mundy carried an illustrated reference book during his Levantine travels, which depicted “the severall habitts used att Constantinople, where most officers and Nationes are distinguished by their habits.”°? While sumptuary laws were common to most polities of the day, they were especially important in the often confusing Mediterranean world, and particularly the Ottoman Empire.
Beyond its integral significance in constructions of identity, the term nation was also used to express concepts of community. Nation was commonly applied in a variety of cultural and institutional usages, including divisions of students at university, or religious officials at church councils.%> For the purposes of this study, one of the most important early modern usages of nation was in reference to communities of merchants and diplomats living abroad under the aegis of a particular city or state. Thus early modern Constantinople was home to Venetian, French, English, and Dutch nations. These trading and diplomatic nations were juridically defined, and membership was limited, at least in theory, to a small cadre of individuals who met certain specific legal requirements. In practice, these communities’ borders were much less clearly delineated, and they contained individuals of many different religious, linguistic, political, and geographic backgrounds. For example, the Dutch merchant nation in Constantinople consisted of subjects of the Habsburg emperors from the Southern Provinces, as well as individuals from the Northern Provinces who were subjects of the new Dutch Republic. Other members of the nation were “Dutch by choice, such as some Czech Calvinists.” Often Protestants of every persuasion accepted the protection of the Dutch nation, though a number of Catholic priests and monks did as well.*°
If the nation-state in the nineteenth century was seen as the political expression of the cultural, even biological, volk, in premodern times nation did not necessarily correspond to any political entity so much as to a cultural geography that often seems random. This is evident in the accounts of our travelers who referred to Greeks, French, Spaniards, Dutch, English, Germans, and Italians. In some instances—the French and the English, for example—nation did generally correspond to polity. In other cases—the German, the Greek, the Italian—it did not. It is revealing that both della Valle and Busbecq acknowledged the complexity of the category Italian, by further breaking it down to variations based on regional, political, and cultural differences—Venetians, Florentines, and so forth.
Although nation was not necessarily coterminous with political status, this did certainly make up one possible layer of identity. As J. H. Elliott has observed, “loyalty to the home community—the sixteenth century patria—was not inherently incompatible with the extension of loyalty to a wider community, so long as the advantages of political union . . . outweigh[ed] the drawbacks.”®” This is evident in the experience of the many Greek subjects of Venice’s stato da mar who came to Constantinople to trade or work in Ottoman shipyards and galleys, and often married and settled in the city, never to return to their lands of birth. While to outsiders culturally and linguistically quite indistinguishable from the many Greek subjects of the sultan, they differentiated themselves as Venetian subjects by registering annually in the embassy’s chancellery in order to avoid paying Ottoman taxes. As Venetian subjects, they were legally under the bailo’s jurisdiction, yet they often moved effortlessly between Ottoman and Venetian institutions as circumstances dictated, playing the two systems off each other to their own benefit. Their identity in a sense was hyphenated—while religiously and culturally members of the larger Greek nation that cut across several political boundaries, as well as residents of the Ottoman Empire, which in many cases employed them, politically they continued to identify themselves as Venetian subjects. They were “political amphibians,” and they were not unique in their adaptability.°®
As the experience of Venice’s Greek subjects in Constantinople suggests, we should not exaggerate the importance of political factors in early modern identities. Europe in this period was characterized by “vast polyglot and polyethnic” composite states from Vienna, Paris, and Madrid, to Constantinople.®*° Certainly the Venetian Empire qualified as a composite polity, stretching from Bergamo in northern Italy to the islands of Crete and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. The empire’s physical space contained a precarious mixture of diversity, including historically antagonistic groups, an “ethnic pluralism,” whose relationship to the state was not always clear.!°° There was no natural geographical, religious, linguistic, or cultural coherence to the state’s “heterogeneous totality of distinct territories,” except that provided politically by Venice’s governing institutions.1™ Legislation recognized only a tiny minority of the empire’s inhabitants as Venetian, namely the patriciate in Venice and a small number of non-noble citizens.” The remainder of the imperial population, and indeed the majority of Venice proper’s inhabitants, all fell under the broad rubric of subjects. Subjects from certain terraferma cities were accorded Venetian citizenship, but in comparison to the patriciate and the cittadini originari, they were second-class citizens. Most of Venice’s subjects, however, never even acquired this level of political status and remained part of the mass of generally undifferentiated subjects.1°? Given the composite nature of so many contemporary polities, as well as the constant variability of political boundaries, it seems clearly unwise to attribute political divisions sketched on maps too weighty a significance in individual or communal constructions of identity.!*
Indeed, while Venice coalesced into a reasonably viable political and economic construction, in many ways the state remained “disorganic and fragmentary.” The often loose ties that bound Venice’s expansive empire could fail at times, as was vividly underscored in the disaster of the War of the League of Cambrai, in which all Venice’s mainland holdings were rapidly lost to an alliance led by the warrior pope, Julius II.!°° Misgovernment and arrogance on the part of Venetian officials accentuated latent dissatisfaction among the ruling elites of these conquered territories, who in some ways viewed the dominante as an “occupying force.”!°7 While these prodigal lands eventually returned somewhat sheepishly to the fold, the trauma of the experience made manifest the weaknesses of the Venetian state to the patriciate. The lessons of 1494 and 1509 were clear: in Italy, governments “could not command enough support or loyalty from [their] subject communities to have any firm faith in survival. External danger made for internal threat.”!°° If this were true for Venice’s terraferma state, it was even more the case for the stato da mar. In both Cyprus and Crete, prominent local families openly encouraged the Ottomans to attack the islands in the hopes of throwing off what they perceived as oppressive Venetian rule.1°
Contemporary observers commented on the precariousness of early modern states. English traveler Henry Blount observed, “the Greeks lived happier under the Turks, than [the Sicilians] under the Spanish” and that the Sicilians were “not much averse from the Turkish government.”!!° When the Duke of Florence’s corsairs tried to liberate Chios from its Ottoman overlords, the island’s inhabitants complained to Clement VIII.1"! At the core of these expressions was the realization that for the popular majority, the real difference between one sovereign and another, even a Muslim one, was in many ways irrelevant. This realization and the specter of another Cambrai profoundly informed the policies and politics of Venice’s rulers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in their relationship to the distant and diverse regions of the stato da mar,'12
In the final analysis, “national” identity—that is, one’s sense of association with region or place of birth—seems to have been, in many instances, stronger than religious or political identities. This is apparent in the case of the Ottoman grand vizier, Albanian-born, who was described as “very inclined” to men of his region and language, regardless of their religion. Such identification often bene- fited Venice’s dragomans from the same region but on the Venetian side of the border, who emphasized their birth and regional over their political and even religious identity in order to facilitate their access to and negotiations with officials at the highest levels of the Ottoman government.!
This cursory reflection on identity in the early modern era has not treated a number of other factors such as social estate, occupation, or gender, all of which certainly were important facets of individual and group identities. Nor has it considered the place of family in constructions of identity, which may prove to have been the most important factor of all. In describing the multivalence of identity, my intention has not been simply to replace panoptic labels such as Venetian or Ottoman with inelegant chains of descriptors such as VenetianRoman Catholic-Greek or Ottoman-Jewish. Rather, I would like to propose a different way of conceptualizing identity which divorces it from static and often convoluted fusions of all its imaginable constituent parts. Identity in the early modern era did not possess “an essential, primordial quality,” nor was it “defined by a nuclear component of social or cultural characteristics.” It was not an object but rather a process, “a bundle of shifting interactions,” a “part of a continuum.” It was socially constructed, a process of defining and redefining or, perhaps better, of imagining boundaries. It was then, as it is today, “contingent and relational.”!*°
Perhaps overly influenced by the nation-state paradigm, we have often overlooked the intricacies of early modern identity and instead have categorized and systematized the much messier reality of the prenational world into simplistic religious and political blocs. Early modern observers, while utilizing broad organizing categories, acknowledged the possibility of individual and group identities that were more multilayered than simply religion or nation. Busbecq, for example, wrote of encountering a man who was an “an Italian Greek, i-e., both in birth and manners half Greek and half Italian.” The English organ builder Thomas Dallam met a man who “was a Turke, but a Cornishe man borne.” Another English traveler recorded an encounter with “Mr. Wyllyam Robynsoun, ane Inglyshe man, ... [whom] tyme hathe so allterred . . . that he ys becom a Slavonyan in natur.”1!6 This fluidity is also evident in the mobility of merchants, artisans, and others who became citizens of Italian city-states through adopting, and adapting to, the culture of their new homes and being awarded citizenship by privilege."”” Clearly contemporaries were comfortable, or at least familiar, with ambiguity and multivalence in individual identity.
We have ample evidence of the fluidity of identity in the early modern Mediterranean. A familiar example is that of the Marranos, who were expelled from Spain in 1492 in part for crypto-Judaism. As one scholar has written, the Marranos “used their Jewishness instrumentally, presenting themselves, when occasion called for it, as Jews, but as often as not assuming Christian identities.” Evidence also exists of Christians in the Ottoman Empire reconfiguring themselves similarly."8 Another group that has attracted much attention are the renegades, men and women who crossed over from the Christian to the Muslim sphere and in so doing violated the most elemental boundary in the early modern era."° They represent a fascinating collection of individuals, and in some cases whole communities, who adapted not only their political but also their religious identity in response to a range of factors.
One might argue that because Jews and renegades exist on the margins of society they are not representative; however, there is ample evidence of a similar versatility and protean quality of identity among the quintessential Venetians, its merchants. Venetian legislation required that all merchants trading under the city’s aegis be Venetian citizens, born or naturalized; by 1550 in practice most were the latter. Many came from the Venetian terraferma, but others were not even culturally Venetian or Italian, such as the Helman brothers, who fled the religious troubles of the Low Countries.’”° In some cases even Ottoman subjects traded as Venetian merchants without obtaining citizenship. The archetypal Venetian merchant in Constantinople, then, was Venetian not by birth but as a result of shedding—or rather adapting—cultural, political, and even religious layers of identity in order to participate in the lucrative Levantine trade. As the Marranos, renegades and merchants of Venice, suggest, identity in the premodern Mediterranean was more than just a sum total of its parts; it was a dynamic process.
IDENTITY AND COEXISTENCE
This study reconsiders identity in the early modern world in a more fluid and complex fashion in order to both illuminate and explain Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence. To accomplish this, it is necessary to move beyond the “clash of civilizations” model, which surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical and rhetorical perch on high, and instead to analyze the lived reality microscopically and on a local, cultural level. Focusing on a localized microcosm such as the Venetian nation reveals the experience of Venetians and Ottomans living side by side and illuminates the complex ways people of diverse religious, cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds interacted and coexisted on a communal level. By moving from the global to the local, shuttling “between the macroscopic and the molecular levels,” a more precise picture of the real rather than the rhetorical character of everyday existence on the frontier materializes.’ In order to supersede broad generalizations and categorizations that help organize, but may also obscure, the past, we must turn to individuals and small groups and examine their experiences without assuming that their relationship to a state, religion, or culture was paramount.!”?
Venice’s merchant and diplomatic nation in Constantinople represents an ideal environment for examining the nature of identity and its place in understanding cross-cultural contacts in the Mediterranean. The Venetian community was one of the largest and most vibrant foreign communities in the Ottoman capital in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Located in the interstices of the Mediterranean, it is particularly well situated for studying the character of cultural interaction and identity because of its proximity to and close dealings with the diverse world of the Ottoman capital. Chronologically, the decades from 1573 to 1645 are intriguing because they represent the longest continuous period of peace between the Venetian and Ottoman empires, which permits an examination of Veneto-Ottoman relations in a time not distorted by hostility. Finally, the rich archival records surrounding the Venetian nation—including extensive notarial records, diplomatic reports and correspondence, supplemented by travel literature and French, English, and Ottoman sources—show the physiognomy and experience of this community, as well as its place within the broader networks of early modern Constantinople.”
The essence of my argument is really quite straightforward. First, through a detailed study of the microculture of Venetians in Constantinople in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, I argue that while factors such as religion, culture, and political status all could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, we must avoid the inclination to essentialize identity into any single one of these elements. Early modern identity was multilayered, multivalent, and composite. It was also not an apprehendable object, the sum total of its constituent parts, but rather a dynamic process. This is evidenced both in the Venetian nation, with its multiple layers of official and unofficial elements and its porous boundaries, and in the self-fashioning of Jews, renegades, merchants, and subjects who inhabited the broader world of Constantinople.
Second, I challenge the conflictual model of Veneto-Ottoman relations and suggest instead a more sophisticated understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, coexistence and cooperation were more common. The Orientalist image of a binary Mediterranean is unsatisfactory because it is rooted less in quotidian experience than in the descriptive vituperativeness of the era’s rhetoric, which easily lends itself to “generalizations and striking metaphors” that oversimplify in- finitely more complex realities.1** Overreliance on certain genres of literary documents, from which broad postulates about Veneto-Ottoman relations have been drawn, has produced what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “theoretical mistake and... practical blunder [of] collaps[ing] the distinction between representation and reality.”25 While there clearly is a relationship, the two must not be conflated. Rhetorical literature allows us to glimpse perceptions of the other from both Christian and Muslim perspectives, but it leaves open for speculation the question of whether this matched actual experience. Perhaps an Italian saying expresses succinctly the concept I am suggesting: tra il dire e il fare c’é di mezzo il mare (the chasm between words and actions is as large as the sea). Ottomans and Venetians did find ways to inhabit the same world in relative peace; the challenge is to explain this reality.
A more complex understanding of both identity and the interaction of cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can help us understand VenetoOttoman coexistence. Early modern identity was not “a cultural trap” of totalizing categories but rather an ongoing process of fashioning and refashioning. Premodern societies were not characterized by rigid, invariable, or inviolable patterns of association and identity; rather barriers that have often been “regarded as watertight and impassible” were much more permeable and porous than imagined.!2° When viewed in this light, the experience of Venetians in Constantinople seems less exceptional and may even suggest some broader insights into identity and cultural interaction in the early modern world.
STRUCTURE
This argument is developed in three stages. The first part examines the structure and institutions of the Venetian nation in Constantinople and suggests the need for a more ample, fluid view of community and communal identity. One of the core questions is who was a Venetian. Chapter 1 looks at what I have termed the official nation—the bailo, his famiglia, and the institutions of the nation. Chapter 2 examines the other major component of the official nation, the merchants, suggesting that the label of merchant of Venice masked a much more unstable and intricate reality than this seemingly clear-cut rubric implies. Chapter 3 considers the community on the periphery of the official core, the unofficial nation. This largest component of the broader Venetian community was made up of men and women in Constantinople without the express endorsement of the Venetian state yet who functioned within and were considered an integral part of the nation.
Chapters 4 and 5 build on the first chapter’s problematization of the concepts of community and nation and address the question of identity in the early modern era. Through an examination of Jews, Christian renegades, but also merchants, patricians and the community of Latin-rite Ottomans, these chapters challenge the structuralist, essentialized image of identity as based on religion and/or nation and instead attempt to show that early modern identity was a composite of many factors, as well as a fluid process of definition and redefinition.
Chapter 6 attempts to connect the discussions of nation and identity to the issues of cultural exchange and coexistence. Freed from a fixed model of identity, I argue that Venetians and Ottomans interacted in a more complex and varied fashion than the binary, clash of cultures model permits. Coexistence between Muslim and Christian, Venetian and Ottoman, was possible, and even common on the Mediterranean frontier, and this was facilitated by the fluidity of both individual and collective identity.
NAMES AND DATES
Standardizing dates is a tricky proposition when studying the early modern Mediterranean. In Venice, for example, the year began not on January 1, but on March 1. Thus in most cases, a Venetian document dated “February 23, 1588 (more veneto)” would on a modern calendar refer to February 23, 1589. I have elected to record dates as they are indicated in the original documents, with MV following the year to indicate that the date is based on the Venetian calendar year, or the more veneto. In the case of the Turkish and Jewish worlds, each of which has its own calendrical traditions, I have simply placed the equivalent Christian year in parentheses.
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