Download PDF | Donald M. Nicol - Theodore Spandounes_ On the Origins of the Ottoman Emperors-Cambridge University Press (1997).
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Theodore Spandounes On the origin of the Ottoman Emperors
Theodore Spandounes (or Spandugnino) belonged to a Byzantine refugee family who had settled in Venice after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. He wrote an account of the origins of the Turkish rulers and of their phenomenal rise to power. It was partly a plea to the Popes and princes of western Christendom to unite against the infidel, and one of the earliest works of its kind.
The first version of the book, written in Italian, appeared in 1509 and was translated into French in 1519. The final version was made in 1538, and a full Italian text was published in 1890, though without any historical commentary. This book presents an English translation of the full text with a preface, commentary and notes; a discussion of the sources which Spandounes might have consulted; and an assessment of the value and interest of this hitherto neglected and undervalued treatise.
Introduction
In the early sixteenth century in western Europe there was a ready market for works about the origins and history of the Ottoman Turks. Many of them were collected and reprinted with greater or lesser accuracy in the celebrated compendium of Francesco Sansovino entitled Historia Universale dell’ origine, guerre, et imperio de Turcht, which went through seven editions between 1565 and 1654. The texts which Sansovino collected and reissued were all in the Italian language.
Among them is a substantial part of the present treatise, under the title of: Discorso di Teodoro Spandugino Cantacusino Gentil’homo Costantinopolitano Dall’ origine de’ principt Turcht, divided into three parts.! It was not the first work of its kind. But it was the first to be presented by an author who was of Byzantine Greek extraction, for all that he wrote in Italian. He knew his market in the west, and it was to western readers that he directed his observations on the emergence of a world power which was neither Greek nor Latin, which had already engulfed all of the Greek-speaking east and which, in his day, seemed capable of conquering the rest of the Christian world in western Europe.
Theodore Spandounes or Spandugnino was proud to boast descent from the imperial Byzantine family of Cantacuzene which had once produced Emperors of Constantinople and Despots or princes in the Peloponnese. He had lived in Constantinople under Ottoman rule. He had relatives in Thessalonica and in eastern Macedonia; and he had family connections in Serbia and Bosnia. He knew the Turks and their language. He was not unduly bigoted against them. He found some things to admire in Turkish culture. Yet, as a second-generation Greek-speaking refugee from Constantinople and the lost world of Byzantium, he felt bound to alert his Christian friends in the west to the danger that threatened them from the east.
From time to time they were jolted into an awareness of the danger. The Popes, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Kings of France and Spain, of Hungary and Poland, the Doges of Venice expressed pious horror and dread of impending doom. Momentous events like the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman conquests of Smederevo in 1459, of Negroponte (Euboia) in 1470, of Belgrade in 1521, of Rhodes in 1522, or the battle of Mohacs in 1526, concentrated their minds on the idea of a united counter-attack or a crusade against the infidel warriors of the Muslim faith. Spandounes repeatedly deplores the inability of the western Christian powers to sink their own petty squabbles and collaborate in this nobler and more vital cause.
He was a devout Christian, though not given to the obsessive Orthodoxy which so many of his fellow Byzantine expatriates found comforting after the loss of their material world. He condemns the ignorance of the Orthodox Christians. He was half in love with the humanist culture of Italy. He numbered Popes and prelates of the Roman church among his acquaintances and indeed served as aconfidant and adviser to Popes Leo X (1513-21), Clement VII(1523-34) and Paul III (1534~49). In them he saw the champions and promoters of a just war which might drive the Turks at least out of Europe. He was particularly disappointed by Pope Hadri ake pe Hadrian VI 3) who showed little enthusiasm for this Project. Spandounes accuses Hadrian, not without justice, of failing to support the Knights of St John in Rhodes and so contributin eevee es teas g to their defeat.
There was l-will. For it was Hadrian | petsot who cut short th pension which his predecessors had been Paying to the ae family. It was to the Republic of Venice, however, that Spandounes owed his special allegiance; for it was in Venice that his forebears had been accepted as refugees from Byzantium, and it was in Venice that he most probably was born. His mother, Eudokia, was a Cantacuzene, which entitled him to use that name. She had moved to Italy before the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and about 1460 she had married another Byzantine refugee called Matthew Spandounes or Spandugnino.? Matthew is said to have distinguished himself as one of the Greek cavalrymen in the service of Venice known as the stradiozt. Theodore has nothing to say about his father’s military exploits; but for one reason or another Matthew was honoured by the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III in 1454 with the titles of a Count and Knight of the Holy Roman Empire. He was also granted a fief in Greece on the northern side of the Gulf of Corinth not far from Naupaktos or Lepanto. It included the town of Loidoriki and the offshore island of Trizonia or Tridonia. It was in partibus infidelium and hardly in the Emperor’s gift at the time; but the deed may indicate the fact that this part of Greece was the earlier home of the Spandounes family, for the island of Trizonia was also called Spandonisi and the district had been given the name of Cantacuzinopolis after the heroic deeds done there in 1446 by one Constantine Cantacuzene.
Matthew Spandounes and Eudokia Cantacuzene had at least three children: a daughter who married Michael Trevisan of Venice; a son called Alexander who served the interest of Venice and his own family as a merchant; and Theodore. Matthew was dead by 1511; but long before that date, perhaps when Eudokia died (before 1490), he sent the still young Theodore to be a ward of his great-aunt Mara or Maria who was living in some style as a wealthy widow in eastern Macedonia. Maria~Mara was a Serbian princess who had been given in marriage to the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. When he died in 1451 she had been granted her freedom as the favoured stepmother of his son and successor, the Sultan Mehmed II, soon to be known as the Conqueror. He was very attached to her as a mother-figure, for all that she remained a Christian; and it was he who in the end ae her on her estate at JezZevo in Macedonia not far from the city of Serres in 1459. She was well provided for and maintained a privileged and protected enclave of Christian faith and charity in what had become a Muslim world. Her stepson allowed her to be joined at Jezevo by her ees sister Catherine who had become a widow in 1456; and fe two widowed ladies for many years thereafter held court in Macedonia
Though they did not venture far afield their influence was ei anown and respected not only in Turkish Constantinople but also in Christian Venice. Ambassadors from Venice and elsewhere in the
west would often make a detour re) i issi n their missions to the Sul Mehmed to seek the advice and su a mee pport of the great man’s step
made between Venice and the Ottoman Porte following three years of warfare. His purpose was partly to try to disentangle the business affairs of his brother Alexander who, like many other Venetian merchants in the Ottoman Empire, had been financially ruined by the terms of the peace treaty, for it had allowed the Turks to retain all the Venetian goods that they had seized during the hostilities. He was too late to make any representations, for he found that his brother had died. Nothing of his fortune was ever restored. It was, as he admits, to recover from the shock of this affair that he undertook the laborious task of composing his account of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. The patriotic Greek scholar and statesman of the nineteenth century, Constantine Sathas, who produced the first proper text of Spandounes, eagerly seized upon any scraps of evidence in that text to show that its author had been one of the glorious stradioti, heroically serving Venice and his Greek fatherland in warfare against the Turks. The evidence is meagre. Theodore’s patriotism is not in doubt; but it was a patriotism for the whole Christian world, east and west alike, Roman as well as Greek. It was not directed, as Sathas would have liked to prove, simply to a war of Greek independence from the Turks. To Spandounes the word Greece or Grecia meant Europe, not merely the peninsula of the Hellenes. Taking his cue from the Ottomans, he divided the world into Grecia or Rumelia and Asia or Anatolia, the European and the Asiatic territories. By the time that he was writing Anatolia had been Turkish for many generations. It was probably irredeemable. His concern was to ensure that Greece, or Christian Europe, should not suffer the same fate. There is, however, little in his work to suggest that he ever took up arms in the cause himself. What influence or wealth he enjoyed derived more probably from business, merchandise or property. On the other hand he knew where and in what quarters he could best exert his influence. His religious persuasion inclined him more to the Roman church than to the Orthodoxy which was his ancestral faith; and it was to the Popes and princes of that church that he addressed himself. It was to Pope Leo X that he sent the second draft of his treatise in 1519.5 He emphasised the moral that the victories of the Turks in Europe were signs of God’s punishment of the princes of Christendom for their greed and selfishness. Disaster upon disaster could be attributed to the sins of the Christians. This was music to the ears of the leaders of the church. In truth, however, Spandounes was more excited by the new humanism in Renaissance Italy than by Christianity whether Greek or Roman, sympathetic though he was to the plight of Christians condemned to live under Turkish rule. He goes out of his way to record how Sigismondo Malatesta exhumed the mortal remains of the neoplatonist philosopher George Gemistos Plethon from Mistra and brought them to Rimini.6 He cultivated the friendship of the humanist scholar Janus Lascaris who, like himself, claimed Byzantine ancestry. It was a friendship that cost him dear, piiacat, had been acting as ambassador of the French King Louis XII in Venice and was obliged to leave when the League of Cambrai was formed in December 1508. Spandounes, as a suspected Francophile was exiled by the Venetian government. He was later to be ae in France; and it was to Louis XII that he presented another earl version of his treatise on the Ottomans. He was back in Venice ore actively pressing his claim to possession of the castle of Bel fo in Friuli, which rightly belonged to his father Matthew and Le te Venetians had appropriated.”
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