The Ugly Renaissance (51 page)

What the embittered, broken moneylender could not know was that he was among the more fortunate Jews of the Renaissance. For though he lamented his misfortune and silently cursed the monstrous unfairness of his treatment, his co-religionists would shortly be ridiculed, confined, hunted, and killed on a scale that—despite some fluctuations in the later sixteenth century—would not be matched in Italy until the rise of Fascism. And what was worst of all, the artists of the period would lend their skill to celebrating—rather than condemning—this most shameful of episodes in human history.

12

T
HE
R
ISING
C
RESCENT

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1439, just as
Salomone di Bonaventura was embarking on his ill-fated business relationship with
Abraham Dattili and not long after
Filippo Lippi had finished work on the
Barbadori Altarpiece
, Florence was visibly reaching out to the Islamic world. Indications of a vibrant two-way exchange with the “Muslim Empire”—encompassing everything from the lands of
al-Andalus in Spain to the
Hafsid kingdom, and from the Ottoman sultanate to the distant lands of Tartary—were everywhere to be found in the city’s streets and squares. The grand palazzi of its richest citizens thronged with slaves and servants brought from Eastern shores, and hummed with the sound of alien tongues. Humanists gathered in convent cloisters were beginning to long for knowledge of Arabic texts, and church altarpieces like the
Barbadori Altarpiece
already included telling visual references to the culture of Islam. Merchants spoke freely of journeys across the seas to Alexandria, Constantinople, and beyond, into the dusty market towns of Timurid Persia. And, most strikingly of all, the markets were filled with a dazzling array of herbs and spices from the distant East. Filling the air with their pungent aroma were cloves from Indonesia, marjoram from Asia Minor, cumin seeds from the Levant, cinnamon from Arabia, and a host of other, even more exotic spices, such as cubeb and grains of paradise (
Aframomum
).

I
SLAM AND THE
W
EST

As any Florentine observer would have been able to see, relations between the Italian peninsula and the kingdoms of the crescent had begun to bear forth tremendous fruits by the early fifteenth century.

Italians had been acutely aware of Islam both as a Mediterranean power and as a cultural and religious force for almost seven hundred
years before Lippi’s journey. Since the early
Middle Ages, the Muslim faith had been a major force in European history, not only as a political and commercial player, but also as the object of conceptions of alterity and difference. It had been the invasion of
al-Andalus from 710 onward that had brought Islam into contact with the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe for the first time, but it was the Arabs’ arrival in Sicily during the next century that had succeeded in embedding Muhammad’s followers in the Italian imagination. Although Arabic raids had been launched against the island even before the fall of al-Andalus, divisions in the Byzantine hierarchy had allowed North African Muslims to embark on a full-scale campaign of conquest that culminated in Sicily’s complete subjugation by 902. But even though this period of domination was to last only a little over a century and a half—brought to a close by the Norman conquest of southern Italy—it bequeathed a long-lasting legacy. The experience left a powerful impression on Sicily, and despite the years of fighting that had gone before, the doors had been thrown open to a genuine two-way exchange between Christian and Islamic culture. After the emirate of Sicily collapsed, a large Muslim population remained, and the cultural impact of Islam was so strong that many of its Christian kings felt compelled to learn Arabic and continued to patronize forms of art and architecture that bore the hallmarks of the Moorish style. Thanks largely to the influx of Arabic learning, the medical faculty at the University of Salerno towered above all other institutes of learning, and the impact of Arabic commentaries on
Aristotle in particular set the philosophical development of the South apart from that of the North. But for all these positive influences, there was nevertheless a groundswell of contempt and even hatred. The experience of Sicily had brought home both the cultural “otherness” and the expansionist tendencies of Islam to Italy. The image of the Muslim as the most potent enemy of Italian Catholicism was cast in stone, and the idea that Italy was on the front line of a clash of cultures was given considerable currency. Medieval writings on history and geography were replete with commentaries that caricatured Muslims as barbaric heretics who threatened the very integrity of Christendom.

It was the
Crusades, however, that propelled Islam to the forefront of the Italian worldview. The First Crusade was launched in 1095 with the express intention of recovering the Holy Land from its (admittedly, very tolerant) Muslim occupiers, and the waves of invasion that
followed ensured that both Italians and their European counterparts came to perceive violent opposition to Islam as an obligation of their Christian faith. A multiplicity of insidious myths was generated to describe Muslims and justify hatred for their religion. The
Song of Roland
, for example, contended that “the Muslim loves not God, serves Mahound, and worships Apollon,” while the
Gesta Francorum
accused Muslims of worshipping Muhammad himself as just one of a pantheon of gods. Tales were told of graven idols being set up in Christian churches, of magical cows being used to seduce believers into heresy, and of all manner of depraved sexual practices. “
Barbaric” Muslims were even accused of being unmanly, effeminate characters, unworthy of respect, and the enemies of chivalric honor.

Yet despite the undoubtedly negative character of Christian perceptions of Islam in the Middle Ages, it seemed that the dawning of the Renaissance offered the opportunity for a more positive and constructive form of cultural exchange. Following the fall of the Latin Empire of
Constantinople in 1261, the popular appetite for crusading ideology waned dramatically. As Giotto was first taking up his brush, few seriously entertained the belief that the Near East could—or should—be the object of military attentions, and even fewer were prepared to advocate anything like the all-out warfare of the past. Like it or not, the Muslim powers—though diverse and divided—held the Levant, and the Ottoman Turks were beginning to emerge as one of Anatolia’s greatest forces, with designs set on Constantinople itself. What was more, as later medieval travelers had seen, Muslims of various stripes controlled the overwhelming majority of the territories between the Bosporus and China, and were not only massively diverse but also colossally strong in both military and economic terms. Now that merchant banking was beginning to emerge in the maritime republics of northern Italy, there was finally the means to embark on large-scale long-distance trade, and the quest for profit demanded a more sophisticated approach toward understanding Islam to achieve some sort of necessary coexistence, which became all the more vital as the years progressed.

Although Venetian traders had been doing business with the Muslim world for several hundred years, Italian merchants were really beginning to wake up to the immense amounts of cash that could be made from trade with the Near and Middle East by the early fourteenth century. With formal outposts already established in Constantinople and
Pera, Venice and Genoa in particular were enthusiastically exploring the potential for importing raw materials (metals, alum, and so on), silks, and spices both via the maritime routes through the Black Sea and by land across Anatolia, while Florence and its competitors were beginning to appreciate the profits to be made from exporting finished cloths to Egypt and the Levant, and from importing grain and other much-needed foodstuffs.
Indeed, by 1489, three-quarters of all the cloth produced in Florence was a modestly priced fabric that had been designed specifically to meet growing demand from the
Ottoman Empire, a fact that naturally alerted Florentine merchants to the colossal importance of sustaining—if not expanding—commerce with the Turks, while the Ottomans’ near monopoly on the supply of alum until the discovery of fresh reserves in Volterra in 1470 only served to further emphasize their central role in the Tuscan cloth trade.
Slaves, too, were a major source of commercial interest, and both the Ottoman and the Mamluk kingdoms provided rich sources of indentured manpower through their own exploitation of neighboring peoples, such as the Tartars.

While the growing profitability of trade with Islamic-held territories drew cities like Florence into ever more ambitious commercial projects, political changes over the coming years intensified links between Italy and the Muslim East.
With the Mamluk capture of the Armenian kingdom of
Cilicia in 1375, one of the most important routes to the
Silk Road fell into Muslim hands, and this vital source of valuable imports was accessible only through careful negotiation with its Islamic rulers. So, too, the massive expansion of Ottoman Turkish territory made it almost impossible to conduct any meaningful trade with southeastern Europe, the Black Sea region, or the Levant except through the maintenance of at least cordial relations with the sultans. By the close of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans had consolidated their grip on Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara and had surged up into the Balkans, and by 1453 had taken Constantinople itself. By the same token,
Tamerlane’s conquest of much of central Asia made the serious exploitation of commerce with the farther East contingent upon some sort of constructive engagement with the
Timurid Empire. Diplomacy was essential to any sort of commerce.
Having invested 5,000 florins in a trading venture with three relatives in 1452, for example,
Cosimo de’ Medici was eager to open negotiations with the Ottoman court to guarantee trading privileges,
a strategy pursued with some energy by his grandson Lorenzo. So, too,
Venice and
Genoa both dispatched embassies to Muslim Constantinople in 1455 to plead for the rights to exploit the Ottomans’ alum mines, essential to the cloth trade.

As this all gathered pace, knowledge became crucially important. In the earliest years of the Renaissance, a close acquaintance with the Muslim world was recognized as key. In his
Pratica della mercatura
, Pegolotti not only listed Muslim centers such as Alexandria, Damietta, Acri di Soria (modern Antalya), Laiazo d’Erminia (Ayas), and Torisi di
Persia (Tabriz) as trading cities of vital importance to the ambitious merchant, but also devoted considerable time to describing the most profitable routes to follow between them. What was more,
Pegolotti stressed the value of a good working knowledge of languages including Arabic, Persian, and Tartar, which were collectively the largest linguistic group other than the Italian dialects discussed in the treatise. Later, with the advance of the Mamluks and the Ottomans, the value of accurate information became almost incalculable, and commercial interests coalesced with the antiquarianism of the humanists to produce a powerful appetite for informative travelogues. Before the fall of Constantinople, it was “
not uncommon for men of learning to travel to the Levant and record what … they had seen there.” In 1419, for example, the Venetian merchant
Niccolò da Conti went to
Damascus, where he learned Arabic so that he could understand different cultures and traditions more easily. Traveling with Arab merchants, he then ventured to
Baghdad and Persia (where he picked up the local language), before setting out for
Southeast Asia, visiting
India,
Sumatra,
Burma, and
Java, and acquiring a wealth of useful knowledge about the
spice trade and gold mining.
Conti subsequently related his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini, who produced an exhaustive account that inspired many fifteenth-century cartographers—including the unusually brilliant
Fra Mauro—to transform their understanding of the geography of the East. Later, the stream of humanistic travelers became a torrent, and travelogues of one complexion or another became one of the most vibrant forms of literature.
Cyriac of Ancona (Ciriaco de’ Pizzecolli), for example, was to record his experiences in the Near East in the most engaging and richly illustrated fashion after returning from travels throughout the Ottoman world in the service of the sultan, and
figures including
Guarino Veronese,
Giovanni Aurispa,
Francesco Filelfo,
Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Bernardo Michelozzi, and Bonsignore Bonsignori were all to tread a similar path.

When the
Ottoman capture of Constantinople brought Islam into direct conflict with Italian states, military engagement often served to bring the two cultures into closer contact. Forcing them to face the “other” across the battlefield, and across the negotiating table, it had the corollary effect of exposing Italians to the inner workings of Muslim society. Artists and humanists—particularly from Venice and Naples—journeyed to the East in the wake of conflict. As part of a peace deal in 1479, for example, the Venetian Senate dispatched
Gentile Bellini as a kind of roving cultural envoy to Constantinople, where he made a number of careful observations of the Ottoman court and even completed a striking portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (now in the National Gallery in London). Similarly, post-conflict diplomatic relations between Mehmed and King Ferrante of Naples resulted in
Costanzo da Ferrara being sent on a comparable cultural mission in ca. 1475–78. There,
Costanzo completed a series of important and revealing works, including a flattering portrait medal of the sultan (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and a remarkably detailed study of a court figure (
Standing Ottoman
; Louvre, Paris) (
Fig. 37
). But conflict and divisions within the Ottoman court could also lead to even more profound exchange of personnel across the ravages of war.
After an unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne from his half brother,
Bayezid II,
Cem Sultan (1459–95) was banished first to Rhodes and then to Italy itself. He was handed over to
Pope Innocent VIII, and his captivity was ensured by regular, massive payments by Bayezid, but his presence in Rome opened the doors to a wave of fascination for all things Eastern in the Christian capital.