A PORTRAIT OF MEHMED II, painted in 1480 by the Venetian Renaissance master Gentile Bellini, is on display in the Renaissance collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The portrait is similar to other Renaissance works, including the same artist’s 1501 portrait of Leonardo Loredan, the doge of Venice, which stares at Mehmed II’s portrait from the other side of the same room. Bellini depicted the Ottoman sultan as he did any other Renaissance figure. He framed Mehmed II in a classic, columned arch. He painted the portrait realistically and in three-quarter view, not shying from depicting Mehmed II’s aquiline nose. Although Ottoman rulers generally wore turbans rather than crowns, the artist added three golden crowns in the background, symbolising Mehmed II as the ruler of the Byzantine Empire in the west (Constantinople) and in the east (Trebizond) and as the monarch of Asia. The question is, does the painting belong in this room?
Many have claimed that it is an exaggeration to rank Mehmed II among contemporary Renaissance rulers.1 Even though he gathered Greek and Italian scholars at his court, ordered the Greek patriarch to write a treatise explaining Christianity, commissioned a map of the world, made great effort to learn the wisdom of the ancients, had Ptolemy’s Geographia translated, filled his library with Greek and Latin works, and established the Ottoman tradition of sultanic portraiture when he brought Bellini from Venice, his contemporaries in the rest of Europe saw him as a Muslim whose interest in the West arose only from his desire to conquer it. Were they right?
When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, the conversion from Eurasian nomad to Renaissance prince was complete. Once a pastoral and nomadic shepherd, the Ottoman ruler had become the settled leader of a huge bureaucratic undertaking.2 Beginning with Mehmed II, Ottoman rulers perceived themselves as caesars, the inheritors of ancient Rome, and world conquerors of the stature of Alexander the Great. Mehmed II was as keen to collect the wisdom of the West as that of the East. He collected books in Arabic, Armenian, Greek (Homer’s Iliad), Hebrew (Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed), Persian, and other languages for his library, including classical works such as Arrian’s Anabasis and Indica, the main sources about Alexander the Great’s life.3 The sultan’s library contained the books looted from the Byzantine emperors’ libraries, as well as works he ordered on contemporary European siege engines and artillery. He read classical literature, geography, cosmography, astronomy, and history. He favoured art and literature from Muslim-majority societies—though not Qur’anic commentaries and the like—especially heroic fiction, such as the chivalric romance of the Arab hero Antar; works on Sufism, law, medicine, philosophy, and music; and illustrated albums.4
He was as eager to recruit Greek scholars from the defeated Byzantine Empire as Persian scholars from the Central Asian and Turkic empires. Upon conquering the last Byzantine stronghold in the Black Sea port of Trebizond (Trabzon) in 1461, Mehmed II brought a Greek counsellor to his court, the philosopher George Amiroutzes. Amiroutzes was a cousin of convert-Greek grand vizier Mehmed Pasha Angelović, with whom he negotiated the surrender of the city.5 After its submission, the city’s main church, also called Hagia Sophia like its namesake in Istanbul, was converted to the central mosque and Anatolian Muslims were forced to settle in the city. In later years, Trabzon’s Greek population was deported to Istanbul.6
Amiroutzes was master of the philosophy of the Peripatetics and Stoics. Mehmed II spent much time conversing with Amiroutzes about the wisdom of the ancient Greeks.7 At the sultan’s command, the philosopher created for him a world map, replete with labels in Arabic, based on the separate maps in Ptolemy’s Geographia.8 After defeating the Turcoman White Sheep confederacy in eastern Anatolia in 1473, Mehmed II brought Giyas al-Din of Isfahan, the head of the White Sheep chancery, or office of public records, to his court.9
More significant was Mehmed II’s attraction of the celebrated astronomer Ali Kuşçu from Samarkand, who became professor of astronomy and keeper of the observatory attached to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The star tables he had compiled in Central Asia transformed Ottoman astronomy and made their way to the Polish scholar Nicolaus Copernicus and the Danish scholar and imperial court astronomer to the Habsburg emperor, Tycho Brahe. These tables were later formulated by Johannes Kepler (died 1630) at the court of the Holy Roman emperor into the laws of planetary motion, revolutionising European astronomy and contributing to the Scientific Revolution.
Mehmed II was a typical Renaissance patron of the arts, having his portrait made by one of the greatest of Renaissance painters and commissioning medallions with his image, also on display in the Renaissance rooms at the Victoria and Albert. He commissioned a medallion of himself made by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sculptor, Bertoldo di Giovanni, which depicts him as a heroic figure standing triumphant on a chariot. He reportedly had Bellini make him a view of Venice. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a plan for a bridge over the Golden Horn and may have visited Istanbul. Mehmed II decorated his palace with wall paintings made by other Italian artists. He had Bellini paint him an image of the virgin and child. He amassed a large and strange collection of Christian relics, including the corpse of Isaiah, complete with beard, hair, and ears.10 He collected ancient and Byzantine statuary.
Mehmed II owned and commissioned many Renaissance works of art and literature. He contacted various Italian rulers, among them the king of Naples and the Medicis in Florence, to send their court artists to him, including painters, sculptors, and medallion casters. Along with the Bellini portrait of the Ottoman ruler, a similar portrait, likely created by an Ottoman artist trained by an Italian at the court in Istanbul and long attributed to Nakkaş Sinan Bey, also bears evidence of Renaissance style, as it depicts a three-quarter, realistic profile of Mehmed II’s visage. What makes it unique is that the artist added the sultan’s full body in sitting position, rather than merely the upper body. Thereafter, sultans’ bodies would be depicted in this fashion, an outcome of the Italian-Ottoman artistic exchange at Mehmed II’s court.11
We usually do not think of Mehmed II when we think of the Renaissance. What comes to mind instead are the Medici family ruling Florence; Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321); Filippo Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome in Florence (1436); Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings The Last Supper (1495–1498) and Mona Lisa (1503–1506); Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513); and Michelangelo’s sculpture of David (1501–1504) and Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512) in the Vatican. Generally understood as the revival of classical culture and learning in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Western Europe, the Renaissance is not thought to have encompassed the Ottomans and their empire.
If we think of the Ottomans and the Renaissance at all, it is with a negative association based on two myths. The first myth is that the Renaissance was sparked in Italy by the arrival of Greek humanists fleeing Constantinople in 1453 after it fell to the Ottomans. But there are new views about the Muslim and Jewish role in the European Renaissance. We now know that until the fifteenth century, cultural exchange between the Muslim-majority regions and Western Europe was extremely one-sided.12 Muslims found little to learn from Western Europe, while Western Europeans absorbed knowledge from Muslims, which led to the growth of their own cultures. Ancient Greek culture and learning—including history, philosophy, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy—were actually preserved by being translated into Arabic or Syriac and improved upon with new commentaries by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers originating in Middle Eastern Islamic empires such as the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries.
In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, this humanistic worldview and knowledge was then transmitted to Christian Europe through Islamic Spain and Sicily when it was translated from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin. The Divine Comedy’s section entitled ‘Inferno’ demonstrates that Dante was familiar with Islamic narratives of Muhammad’s ascent to paradise and used it as a framing device for this work. Thus, the European Renaissance has its roots in Islamic Spain and the Arab world. The Renaissance raised Western Europe to the cultural level of Muslim-majority societies by incorporating the achievements of Eurasian, especially Islamic, societies.13 Importantly, the Islamic world in general and the Ottomans in particular had never been cut off from ancient knowledge as had Western Europeans. They had never needed to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients and catch up as the other Europeans had.
The second myth about the European Renaissance is that the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople closed traditional sea routes to India and China, causing Europeans to innovate. This then sparked the Age of Discovery in the fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, leading eventually to Western world hegemony. But the Ottomans did not close off the spice trade in the Mediterranean. They connected Europe to the Red Sea and the East African and South Asian trade routes. Far from cutting off the Mediterranean, the conquest of Constantinople actually led to greatly increased trade between the Ottomans and Venice and Florence, including materials such as Murano glass and bronze, the latter for casting medallions and cannons. European powers such as the Portuguese relied on Muslims in their naval expeditions as navigators, and in the East they simply tapped into preexisting Arab-Islamic commercial networks. The Ottomans launched their own commercial-imperial seaborne empire in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, and sent naval expeditions as far as Indonesia. The Ottomans were very much seen as an integral part of Europe in terms of both diplomacy and commerce. The French and English obtained silks and cotton through the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottomans exchanged ambassadors and made commercial treaties with European powers.
The sources of these myths are easy to locate. The Greek humanists’ response to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 shaped Western perception of the Ottomans. Arriving in the Latin west, these Byzantine immigrants played a key role as mediators and translators of prejudice against the Ottomans, despite the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, whose failure to unite facilitated the fall of the Second Rome to Mehmed II.14 Byzantine immigrants worked as teachers and translators of ancient Greek learning for humanists in Italy, using their positions to gain support against the Ottomans and encourage the sense of a West-East, Europe-Asia divide. Latin hostility towards the Orthodox Greeks decreased, and a new philhellenism was linked to anti-Ottomanism. What these humanists added to medieval religious hostility towards Muslims—which had long existed in the West, witness the Crusades—was a secular, cultural, and political frame for animosity. Some still couched the conflict in religious terms—seeing the Ottomans as God’s scourge and blaming their own moral failings for the disaster—or interpreted the loss in apocalyptic terms. Or they saw Muslims as potential converts: countless Western European sources declared Mehmed II to be on the verge of converting to Christianity. Crusader imagery and motivation were still present.
Hoping to inspire Christian leaders to take up arms against the Ottomans, the Byzantine immigrants used classical rhetoric and ancient models to frame the contemporary situation. Already before the conquest of Constantinople, Italian humanists had likened the advance into Southeastern Europe of the ‘uncivilised’ Ottomans—who were supposedly hostile to learning and culture—to the ‘barbarian’ Goths and Vandals who sacked Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries and caused the decline of Roman civilisation.15 The sack of Rome and the ensuing plunge into a dark age was brought up more frequently following the conquest of Constantinople. Utilising and reinterpreting classical texts, borrowing their myths and historical concepts, Byzantine humanists who fled to Italy resurrected cultural prejudices that the ‘civilised West’ held against the ‘barbarian East’.16
Formerly conceived as ancient Greece, the West now became Christian Europe. The East, formerly understood as ancient Persia or the Trojans, became the Ottoman Empire. Byzantine intellectuals deployed the sharp distinction between Greece and Asia made by Herodotus in his analysis of the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE.17 They utilised Aristotle’s depiction of Greeks as a noble people facing the menace of barbarians from without. They made the Ottomans into Asians, outsiders who did not belong in Europe. They conceived of a dichotomy between the supposedly uncultivated peoples of the ‘Orient’—who lacked morality, letters, arts, and sciences and who wantonly destroyed books—and the superior peoples inhabiting the ‘Occident’. A humanist and future pope called the conquest of Constantinople and the looting of its libraries ‘a second death for Homer and a second destruction of Plato’.18 Even Erasmus of Rotterdam referred to the Turks as ‘a barbarous race’.19 The idea that the (Persian, Asian, Eastern) Turks were inferior barbarians who had destroyed a superior (Greek, European, Western) civilisation—burning its books, which were the storehouse of ancient learning—would be repeated time and again by European writers in the ensuing centuries.
For their part, at this stage in their history, the Ottomans were not immune to this way of thinking. When Mehmed II visited the presumed site of Troy in 1462, he declared that he had avenged the injustices inflicted on the Trojans and the East by the West.20 Yet the more common Ottoman way of seeing the world was not an East-versus-West binary. Rather, the Ottomans preferred to see themselves uniting East and West, just as their empire integrated Asia and Europe. Most of Mehmed II’s chroniclers made this claim about the sultan.
Alongside the Greek humanists, another group that was influential in shaping Western European opinion about the Ottomans was the ambassadors of the Republic of Venice who served in the empire. Members of the cultured elite, they were also immersed in humanist thought. Upon his return to Venice following a tenure in Istanbul, each ambassador gave a lengthy, ceremonial speech reporting his observations at a public session of the senate. Their speeches were not only popular among Venetians—from the early sixteenth century they were translated and circulated to chanceries across Europe, thus widening their impact.
For the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century, the Venetian ambassadorial reports reveal fascination, admiration, and respect for their Ottoman opponents, as well as an aversion and perceived threat.21 During this period, Venice controlled islands and ports across the Mediterranean, including those in Crete and Cyprus, and fought three wars against the Ottomans (1499–1503, 1537–1540, and 1570–1573). Its ambassadors perceived the Ottoman Empire as wealthy and powerful, its subjects as obedient. It was a society where all servants of the sultan supposedly acted ‘of a single will for the public good’, devoted to their emperor.22 The centre was a machine ‘in which every part had its place’. Each subordinate part, be it in the administration or military, was ‘measured, ordered, named, and situated in a strict configuration’ and absolutely deferential to the authority of the sovereign.23
The ambassadors depicted the Ottomans as the antithesis of the West, the opposite of what the Venetians presumed their republic to be—a free, enlightened polity. They were especially repulsed by the chaotic transfer of power from one ruler to the next. They abhorred the absence of a hereditary aristocracy that could check what they thought was the absolute power of the ruler over his subjects. By the late sixteenth century and in the wake of the Venetians’ defeat in the third Venetian-Ottoman War—which saw the Ottomans conquer Cyprus, where monthslong sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta were followed by the killing and enslavement of thousands of Christians, who were banished from living within the conquered cities’ walls—what these reports constructed was an image of Ottoman rulers as oppressive, violent, and arbitrary ‘Oriental despots’. The Venetians saw their own polity as Plato’s Republic ruled by sages, where liberty and nobility were core principles. The Ottoman dynasty, by contrast, led ‘a government or republic of slaves’, a republic of fear.24 This negative way of perceiving the Ottoman dynasty was taken up by Western European Christian thinkers who expanded the meaning of despotism, describing not only the administrators and soldiers of the sultan as slaves, but the entire subject population. As a consequence, the theory of despotism in Western political thought was based on what was perceived as the Ottoman model.25
A final major source of Western European antipathy towards the Ottomans was the Habsburg court of the Holy Roman Empire. As the Ottomans’ premier rival in the Mediterranean and Central Europe, the Habsburgs—whose progenitor, Rudolf of Habsburg of Austria, was a near contemporary of Osman—produced much propaganda against their enemy in the form of cartography, history writing, and even the decorative arts. The best example of the latter is a series of tapestries Charles V (reigned 1519–1556) commissioned in 1546 to commemorate his capture of Tunis from the Ottomans in 1535, illustrating his view of himself as valiant crusader and defender of the Christian faith. The panels portray the Ottomans as a massive, menacing, violent, and well-armed threat. Completed in 1554, the twelve magnificent panels of The Conquest of Tunis measure six-hundred square metres when hung side by side and are the most significant set of tapestries the Habsburgs commissioned.26 They were displayed at all major Habsburg court festivals, religious ceremonies, and official events. During Charles V’s reign, the tapestries were hung in the reception rooms of the Brussels Palace and then Alcázar Palace in Madrid, alongside those of his sister, Mary of Hungary—governor of the Netherlands (1531–1555), whose husband, Louis, had been slain by the Ottomans in the Battle of Mohács (1526)—and his son, Philip II (reigned 1556–1598). Smaller replicas were also produced and distributed to other Habsburg palaces across Europe. The valuable tapestries depicting the fall of the Ottoman heathens in gold, silk, and wool were displayed so often that in the eighteenth century a less expensive replica set was ordered to be displayed in their place, so as to conserve the precious originals.
Despite their generalised antipathy towards the Ottomans, sixteenth-century European intellectuals and statesmen could not help but express admiration for Ottoman military success, for the discipline and obedience of the sultan’s troops, and for his clever statecraft. Analysing the strengths and weaknesses of different government systems, they considered whether Christian-ruled polities should adopt Ottoman practices, if only to defend their lands and defeat their rival.27 One late-sixteenth-century writer went so far as to promote raising Christian boys into a holy militia to battle the Ottomans, a kind of Roman Catholic Janissary corps.28 The origins of such ‘reason of state’ thinking have been traced to Niccolò Machiavelli. Dedicating his work to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli notes in The Prince how difficult it would be to conquer the Ottoman Empire because of its system of government. He writes that, unlike kingdoms such as France, where the king rules together with the noble class, in the Ottoman Empire there is only one lord—the ruler—and all others are his servants, whom he appoints as he wills. As a result, Machiavelli argues, it is difficult to conquer Ottoman territory, as the invader cannot side with any errant, treasonous nobles, as would exist in a kingdom like France. The sultan’s ministers, being all slaves and servants, cannot be easily bribed, and one can expect little advantage from them when they have been bribed, as they have no base of support among the populace. As a result, whosoever attacks the Ottomans will face a united people and will have to rely more on his own strength than on the rebellion of Ottoman subjects.29
The Englishman Richard Knolles, author of The General History of the Turks (1603), displayed admiration, envy, horror, and fascination with Ottoman wealth, splendour, and military might. Knolles used Marlowe’s description of Timur to refer to the Ottomans in general as ‘the present terror of the world’ and Mehmed II in particular as a bloodthirsty, cruel tyrant responsible for the death of nearly a million people. What the Bellini portrait hinted at was exaggerated by the Englishman: Knolles claimed that the sultan was hideously ugly, his face marred by a nose so crooked and sharp it nearly touched his upper lip. Yet he also spoke highly of the same Ottoman ruler. He admits that Mehmed II had notable intellectual qualities.30 Knolles declared Mehmed II to be ‘of a very sharp and apprehensive wit, learned… especially in astronomy’ and able to ‘speak Greek, Latin, Arabic, Chaldee [Syriac?], and Persian’, a man who ‘delighted much in reading of histories, and the lives of worthy men, especially the lives of Alexander the Great and of Julius Caesar, whom he proposed to himself as examples to follow’.
The English were fascinated by the Ottomans and other Muslim kingdoms. Nearly five dozen plays featuring Turks, North Africans, and Persians were staged in London between 1576 and 1603, forty of them between 1588 and 1599, when England was negotiating an anti-Spanish alliance with Morocco and sending its first ambassadors and merchants to Istanbul.31 The Ottomans play significant roles in the works of Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe’s blood-soaked play Tamburlaine the Great, featuring the humiliating death of Bayezid I, was a smash hit. In The Jew of Malta, written in 1589–1590, Marlowe conjures an anti-Christian Muslim-Jewish alliance among the evil Jewish merchant Barabas, his Turkish slave Ithamore, and the Ottoman troops besieging the island. In this play, the Jew and Muslim are united in their malicious hatred for Christians.
In Richard II (1597), William Shakespeare imagined England as isolated from the world.32 Yet Shakespeare’s view is belied by how internationally connected England was in his day. Just as London was peopled by foreigners, so, too, are his plays, and it is for this reason that he included Muslim characters in some. Among these are the villain Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus (1594) and the virtuous prince of Morocco, who claims to have defeated the Ottomans in battle, in The Merchant of Venice (1600). When, from 1600 to 1601, a large Moroccan entourage visited London to conclude an anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish alliance, they were seen by thousands of Londoners, including Shakespeare.33
The first Arab ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603), Abd al-Wahid bin Muhammad al-Annuri, may have been the model for Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). Ottomans, Venetians, and Moroccans all have a part in this play dominated by the tragic hero Othello, a baptised North African Muslim mercenary general in the service of Venice. Othello is charged with commanding the defence of the Venetian island of Cyprus from Ottoman attack. When Othello is first introduced by name, he is addressed as ‘valiant Othello, we must straight employ you against the general enemy Ottoman’.34 But by the end of the play, after the Ottoman navy has been scattered by a storm and Cyprus saved—contradicting the real event, in which the Ottomans conquered the island in 1571—Othello ‘turns Turk’, reverting to the stereotypical, cruel, bloodthirsty Ottoman, murdering his Christian lover Desdemona and then killing himself.
Were we to list all the terms Shakespeare associates with the Turk in his play, they would read thusly: cruel, jealous, lustful, violent, aggressive, merciless, faithless, lawless, damned, circumcised, murderous, adulterous, whoring, wrathful, seductive, polygamous, libertine, black devil, destructive energy, despot, tyrant, ally of Satan, enemy, sodomy, castration, and unnaturalness.35 The Shakespearean English theatregoer would imagine him or herself to be the opposite of all these terms. But at the same time, they wished to be like the Turks—to be as successful, rich, and powerful as them. The Turks had what the English wanted. They wanted their goods.
Even as English playwrights such as Shakespeare depicted ‘the Turks’ (along with ‘the Moors’, the Black North African Muslims) as angry, lustful pagans or evil sinners, the English Crown and merchant companies pursued ever increasing diplomatic and trade relations with Muslim empires when it suited their interests.36 The Ottomans were considered an integral part of the balance of power within Europe during the Renaissance period, as they had been since their rupture into Southeastern Europe in the fourteenth century. Since medieval times, the Ottomans had allied with one European Christian kingdom after another against other Christian rulers, beginning with the Byzantines and Serbs. Prior to that, they had forged alliances with Christian princes in Anatolia. Renaissance-era Ottoman-European alliances were simply a continuation of a much longer history of accords. Both Christians and Muslims often became ‘allies with the infidel’.37 While European powers were motivated to use an alliance with the Ottomans to threaten their enemies with the might of the most powerful empire in Europe, the Ottomans sought alliances to defeat their main rivals, as well as to divide Europe, ensuring it did not unite against them.
Together with political alliances and dynastic need, another motivating factor pushing Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire together was trade. Western Europeans such as the English and French engaged in commerce with the Ottomans as junior partners, having been granted capitulations in the form of favourable trading privileges and legal autonomy. Opening embassies in the Ottoman Empire, these Western Europeans were allowed to have their own postal system, law courts, and churches, and the right to protect their subjects. The Ottomans became the largest trading partner of Western Europe in the Renaissance era, paving the way for Western European global expansion. Seeking allies against enemy Spain, Elizabeth I established close diplomatic and trade relations with Muslim powers, including the Ottomans, to whom England sent its first ambassador in 1583. Had it not been for Moroccan sugar, she would have kept her teeth.38
The Ottomans did not perceive the other European powers to be their equals. In the first flurry of diplomatic exchanges and correspondence between England and the Ottoman Empire at the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman ruler Murad III (reigned 1574–1595) was
the monarch of the lands, the exalter of the empire, the Khan of the seven climes at this auspicious conjunction and the fortunate lord of the four corners of the earth, the emperor of the regions of Rûm [Southeastern Europe] and Persia and Hungary, of the lands of the Tatars and Wallachians and Russians, of the Turks and Arabs and Moldavia, of the dominions of Karamania and Abyssinia and the Kipchak steppes, of the eastern climes and of Cawazir [Iraq] and Shirvan, of the western climes and of Algeria and Kairouan [Tunisia], the padishah bearing the crown of the lands of Hind and Sind and Baghdad, of the Franks and Croatians and Belgrade, possessor of the crown of his [eleven] predecessors, Sultan son of Sultan… the Shadow of God, the protector of faith and state, Khan Murad.39
In contrast, Elizabeth I is referred to as merely ‘the pride of the virtuous Christian women, the chosen of the honoured ladies in the Messiah’s nation, the supreme mediatrix of the Nazarene sect’ and queen of England.40
Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII (reigned 1509–1547), enjoyed dressing like the sultan, complete with turban, and Islamic fashions were the rage at his court, from clothing to rugs.41 The jewels and fabrics Elizabeth wore in the famous Rainbow Portrait make her look like an Ottoman sultana. What is considered Tudor dress is actually Ottoman style, as seen in portraits on display at Hampton Court Palace. One of the portraits there is of a European woman in Persian attire.42 It is not a coincidence.
Attracted by the allure of adventure and opportunities for employment, social mobility, and advancement, hundreds of common English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and other Christian European men travelled to Ottoman and other Muslim-majority lands such as Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis.43 There they lived as sailors, ship captains, slavers, soldiers, pirates, and merchants, many in the service of Muslim sovereigns. Thousands of other Europeans were captured on the high seas and spent years as slaves in captivity, forced to serve in Muslim militaries. Many acculturated and converted to Islam in the process and were circumcised, married, and remained in North Africa or the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, Muslims were not just characters on the English stage. Hundreds of Muslim men appeared in southern England and Wales, as traders, pirates, ambassadors—the first Ottoman emissary was seen by thousands of Londoners bearing lions, horses, and ‘unicorn horns’—servants of dukes, or prisoners captured at sea.44 England exchanged Muslim captives it held for English captives jailed by Morocco and the Ottoman Empire as often as it traded goods. A few of the Muslims appearing in England became Anglicans.
Contrary to the inherited view, the Renaissance was not a strictly Christian European affair, for it was undergirded by economic, diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural interaction with Muslim-majority societies. When we add the Ottomans to the Renaissance as it is traditionally understood, we see it as the global phenomenon that it was. The revival of ancient knowledge was a process that occurred not sui generis in fifteenth-century Florence, but connected to an older and ongoing phenomenon, a diffusion of knowledge travelling from East to West, from eighth-century Baghdad, to twelfth-century Cordoba, to fifteenth-century Florence and Constantinople.45 How indeed did Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith with no formal architectural training, manage to create the most sublime monument of the Renaissance?46 Perhaps because the Ilkhanid khan Öljeitü’s turquoise-blue, double-shell, domed mausoleum, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century at Sultaniye in Iran, anticipated Brunelleschi’s double-shell, domed cathedral in Florence by a century. It may in fact have been its inspiration.
So, too, can we accept that Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was as much a Renaissance prince as were François I of France (reigned 1515–1547) and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. The curators at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace outside London choose to display portraits of these two men as the English king’s contemporary rivals. What is missing is the portrait of the Ottoman sultan that the Tudor elite owned.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, too, the Ottomans did not play a negative role in the Renaissance, blocking cultural, diplomatic, and economic exchange across the Mediterranean. Instead, sultans were Renaissance princes, employing the same artists to paint their portraits, sharing the same history and heritage, and engaging in cross-confessional military and political alliances. Admired and envied, the Ottomans stimulated classic European political thought, including promulgation of an imagined division between East and West that continues to this day.
For the Ottomans, however, no matter Sultan Mehmed II’s cultural relations or references, the exchange with Renaissance Italy was to be brief. An effigy of Mehmed II was reportedly borne atop his coffin during his funeral procession from Topkapı Palace to his mosque in 1481. If so, it was an allusion to the funeral march of Constantine the Great, founder of Constantinople. It meant that Mehmed II saw himself as the heir of the Romans.47 But Mehmed II’s pious successor, Bayezid II (reigned 1481–1512), was opposed to human depictions in art. He sold the Christian relics his father had collected—as well as the palace frescoes and paintings he had commissioned, including Bellini’s portrait—in the bazaars of the city.48 The latter eventually found its way to London.
Bayezid II may have turned away from being a patron of Renaissance art, but he found himself in the thick of European politics due to his family troubles. Bayezid II’s fight for the throne with his own brother and his fear of this and other threats compelled the dynasty to record its history for the first time, nearly two centuries after its establishment.