The Ugly Renaissance (53 page)

Although the response from Italy’s warring potentates was initially lukewarm, the art of the period was not slow to catch up with the virulent hatred that was felt among believers on the ground. In 1439,
Pisanello was completing his now sadly damaged fresco of
Saint George and the Princess
for Sant’Anastasia in Verona as a visual illustration of the resurgent crusading spirit. Saint George, the archetype of the warlike Christian saint, is shown having come to the rescue of the princess of
Trebizond, a city that—in the late 1430s—was ruled by the exiled Komnenoi family as one of the last outposts of Christendom, and
that was immediately threatened by the advance of the Ottoman Turk. Taken together, the two panels of the fresco were a powerful reminder of the need for Italian Christians to come to the rescue of regions like Trebizond in the hope of stopping the Islamic advance before it was too late. Only a few years later,
Apollonio di Giovanni and
Marco del Buono painted an exceptionally detailed
cassone
panel (the
Conquest of Trebizond,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)—perhaps for the Strozzi of Florence—that used the theme of the Turkish threat to Trebizond as a means of echoing the same call to arms, possibly with the added rider that the aid of the Timurids should be invoked in the name of the cross.

Soon, however, events conspired to impress upon Renaissance Italians that the perceived threat was closer and even more real than such artworks suggested. On July 28, 1480, an Ottoman fleet of more than a hundred heavily armed vessels fresh from the capture of
Rhodes attacked the port of
Otranto in the
kingdom of Naples. Within two weeks, the entire city had fallen. The bishop and the military commander were cut in two, and some eight hundred citizens who refused to convert to Islam were butchered en masse. Buoyed by his recent, dazzling successes, Sultan Mehmed II wanted to use Otranto as a bridgehead from which to launch a campaign to conquer Rome. Panic ensued. Christianity itself was faced with a real and present danger. There was to be no more procrastination. Rapidly assembling an army of Italian allies, Ferrante of Naples launched a counterattack that, thanks to Mehmed’s unexpected death on May 3, 1481, retook the city. It was the first step in what was to be a long-lasting and bitter conflict. Even though trade with the Ottoman Empire continued, and domestic affairs often dissuaded them from undertaking large-scale military action, the states of Italy would wage near-continuous war against the Ottoman Empire for the next ninety years, ending only with the bloody, hard-fought victory at the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

Throughout it all, Otranto remained the touchstone of memory, and its legacy perhaps provides a concise summary of Renaissance attitudes toward Islam. The eight hundred Christians who had been killed for refusing to surrender their faith were commemorated as martyrs. Their bones were encased in massive glass displays behind the high altar in Otranto Cathedral, and they became revered as a warning of what could happen unless the Ottomans were stopped. But most important, this
most grisly of ecclesiastical monuments served as a potent reminder that—despite the powerful economic ties that continued to bind Italy to the Near East—Renaissance Christians frequently wanted not merely to crush but to exterminate Islam. Magnificent though Ottoman culture may have been, and important as Islamic states were to Italian trade, artists and humanists continued to view the Muslim faith as a potent threat to Christendom, and, more often than not, were happy to put their cultural skills at the disposal of those who wished to take war to Islam, even if calls for a new crusade often fell on deaf ears in subsequent decades.

13

O
F
H
UMAN
B
ONDAGE

O
N
A
UGUST 26, 1441
, a Franciscan friar named
Alberto da Sarteano shuffled into Florence after an absence of more than two years. A quiet fifty-six-year-old mendicant, he was not the sort of person who usually attracted a great deal of attention, and in any other circumstances the arrival of so humble a figure would almost certainly have passed unnoticed. Yet almost as soon as he entered the city gates, he was surrounded by crowds of people gasping in amazement and jostling for a better look. But while Alberto himself enjoyed a modest degree of celebrity in Florence for his humanistic learning and his earlier voyages to Byzantium and Palestine, it was not the friar himself who attracted the mob’s attention. Instead, it was Alberto’s traveling companions who were the object of the Florentines’ fascination. For not only was he accompanied by a delegation of
Egyptian
Copts headed by a bearded abbot named Anthony, but he also brought with him two black Africans from Ethiopia.

Although Florence was already “
full of unusual faces and costumes,” Alberto’s little procession was the subject of intense scrutiny from all and sundry, with particular fascination being exerted by the dark-skinned Ethiopians. While they were inclined to sneer at the Africans (one noted that they were “
dry and awkward in their bearing” and “very weak”), even the most sophisticated humanists came out of doors especially to see the strange and unfamiliar apparitions walking through the city streets.

It was, however, no accident that Alberto had returned to Florence with such exotic and remarkable companions at just that moment. Together with his Coptic and Ethiopian friends, he had come to fulfill an important mission at the great ecumenical council then being held in the city. Back in the summer of 1439,
Pope Eugenius IV had decided that the time had come to unite the whole of Christendom against the
Ottoman Turks and set out to bring together
all
Christian believers, no matter where they were to be found. This being so, he had sent Alberto on a momentous mission to the very edges of the known world. Not only was Alberto to announce the ecumenical council to
Copts and
Melkites in Jerusalem and Alexandria, but he was also to make contact with the semilegendary Christian realms that were believed to exist somewhere beyond
Egypt. He was specifically charged with delivering messages to the shadowy figure of “
Prester John” and to the equally mysterious “
Thomas of the Indies,” both of whom were thought to be followers of the cross.

Despite his years traveling in the Near East, Alberto had set out on his journey armed with very little in the way of reliable information. At the time,
Africa was shrouded in mystery. Little, if anything, was known about what lay beyond the great southern desert, and in the absence of anyone who could have acted as a guide, he had only the vaguest notion of where he might find Prester John or Thomas of the Indies.

Yet he had exceeded all expectations. Venturing through Egypt—then ruled by the
Mamluk sultan Sayf al-Din Jaqmaq—he had not found any trace of the legendary potentates to whom Eugenius had written, but had instead managed to identify the Ethiopian Emperor Zara Yaqob, whose Christianity was established beyond question and whose claims to descend from King Solomon became apparent. Ethiopian Christians—many of whom lived in Jerusalem—were deeply interested in the ecumenical council, and it was clear there was scope for securing solid links between Christian Italy and the hitherto-mythical realm beyond the desert.

Pope Eugenius was thrilled by Alberto’s success. With tremendous pomp, he formally received the Coptic delegation in Santa Maria Novella on August 31, and two days later he greeted the intriguing Ethiopian representatives with even greater excitement. Despite their perplexing language and rather unexpected habits, Eugenius’s sub-Saharan visitors were a palpable sign that Christendom was larger than had previously been imagined. And for a brief moment, it would have seemed possible that all the nations of the Christian world—Italian, Greek, Levantine, Egyptian, even Ethiopian—would be bound together by the ties of a common faith in the holy cause of defeating the hated Turks.

Although the negotiations failed to produce a lasting union, the barriers
of myth had been broken down, and points of commonality had been found with peoples and cultures never before seen at such close quarters. As a mark of the momentousness of the occasion, the
pope commissioned
Filarete to immortalize the attendance of the Copts and Ethiopians on the bronze doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Depicting the travelers with a sharp eye for detail, Filarete made sure that the two scenes captured both the extraordinary exoticism of the
sub-Saharan Africans and the warmth with which Eugenius had received them as brothers in Christ. What his Ethiopian friends made of this encounter, however, may not have been exactly the same.

L
IGHT ON THE
D
ARK
C
ONTINENT

Taken together, Alberto da Sarteano’s journey and the Ethiopians’ arrival in Florence in 1441 were emblematic of Renaissance interactions with sub-Saharan Africa, and though often overlooked by historians, the encounter with Pope Eugenius marked a leap forward in the exploration of a continent that had, until then, remained opaque to Europeans.

It was not that the interior of Africa was completely unknown to Italians before Alberto returned from his travels. Those of a humanistic bent were aware of classical interactions with black African peoples in antiquity.
From Greek texts such as
Herodotus’s
Histories
, Italians gained a knowledge of ancient Egyptian attempts to explore farther south,
while from Roman accounts they derived an understanding of antique trade with peoples beyond the Mediterranean shore. Italians had also encountered black Africans before. Diplomacy had already opened a few channels. The states of Italy had tentatively begun to reach out to others they supposed to lie in the far South. In 1291, for example,
Genoa dispatched an embassy to modern
Mogadishu in an attempt to determine the whereabouts of the Vivaldi brothers, who had gone missing some time before. Similarly, Africans themselves had nervously begun to extend the hand of friendship. Envoys sent to Spain by Emperor Wedem Arad of Ethiopia had accidentally ended up in Genoa in 1306, and happily imparted tales of their native land to inquisitive citizens. What was more, a small population of sub-Saharan Africans had actually been resident in the Italian peninsula for several centuries. By virtue of Sicily’s position as a major Mediterranean trading hub, a limited number had been welcomed into the medieval courts, and
in the late 1430s trade with Arab merchants ensured that at least some colored individuals were known in Florence.
Along with
Moors and
Berbers, a few black African
slave girls intermittently found their way across the Mediterranean via Spain and Portugal, and by 1427 some 360 slave girls—mostly from the Caucasus, but including a small number of African descent—were owned by Florentine households.

But despite this, Italian knowledge of the continent south of the desert was limited at best. Maps of the period rarely showed any serious understanding of African geography beyond the former Roman colonies, and display no consciousness of the sheer extent of what remained to be discovered. A now lost portolan chart drawn in 1306 by the Genoese priest
Giovanni da Carignano shows nothing below the upper Egyptian Nile, while
Pietro Vesconte’s
mappa mundi
(ca. 1320) simply assumes that only sea lay beyond the Sahara. Apart from the settlements along the North African coast and the lower Nile, there seems to be no knowledge of any major towns, and no awareness is shown of any of the peoples of the interior. Until the time of
Alberto da Sarteano’s return to Florence, the gaps left by such ignorance were filled more by mythmaking than by any serious investigation. In 1367, for example, the Venetians
Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano produced a telling portolan chart showing a river of gold that connected up with the Nile and had its source in the “Mountains of the Moon” described by
Ptolemy. In an attempt to add extra color, the brothers also relocated the legendary Christian king
Prester John (whom Marco Polo had described as living in the Orient) to the shady regions of West Africa and postulated that his realm, too, was littered with so much gold that it lacked almost any value.
Even as late as the 1430s, such fantasies were accepted at face value, and in this respect it is telling that the letters Eugenius IV entrusted to Alberto were informed by vague rumors of Prester John rather than by factual information.

The reappearance of Alberto da Sarteano and his Ethiopian companions was a sign that change was in the air. The rise of the Ottoman Turks in the Near East had provided a crucial spur. At a religious level, the desire to find new Christian allies had motivated Italians to test the waters of legend and to acquire a deeper knowledge of under-explored lands. But the desire for commercial profit swiftly took center stage in driving discovery. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had a major impact on trade. On the one hand, the overland gateway to the
Silk Road was
more vulnerable than ever before, and the vital trade in spices and raw materials from the
Far East was in jeopardy. And on the other hand, the Ottoman seizure of the Bosporus barred the way to the Caucasus, which until then had been the major source of (officially illegal)
slaves. The need for solutions provided the spur to exploration. In the quest for a new sea route to the Indies that would bypass the Ottoman-controlled Near East, Portuguese seamen penetrated the interior of modern
Sierra Leone,
Ghana, and the
Gold Coast, and discovered not only a rich, hitherto-unknown land but also vast potential for exporting precious metals and slaves. The obvious moneymaking opportunities accelerated the desire for exploration, and though Portuguese sailors continued to lead the way, Italian explorers such as
Alvise Ca’da Mosto and Antoniotto Usodimare—who navigated the river Gambia and discovered the
Cape Verde Islands in 1455 and 1456—avidly took up the baton.

Although Renaissance Italians had previously had only a limited understanding of sub-Saharan Africa, both their exposure to and their knowledge of the continent and its peoples now increased dramatically. Travelers to the new lands brought back a torrent of information. African travelogues enjoyed a tremendous popularity, and
works such as Ca’da Mosto’s
Navigazioni
became instant hits. Despite clinging to a few old legends, Ca’da Mosto’s account contained remarkably detailed descriptions. His sensitivity for commercially useful observations was particularly pronounced. Identifying the two-way trade in gold and salt linking the
Songhay kingdom of Mali with
Morocco,
Tunisia, and
Egypt, he painted a vivid picture of the hot, dry atmosphere of market towns such as
Timbuktu,
Teghaza, and
Ouadane, and conjured up clear images of
Berber caravans wending their way lazily across the Sahara. The kingdom of the Wolof (Senegal) was analyzed with a similarly searching eye for precision, and unfamiliar customs, dances, and patterns of cultivation were laid bare for the first time. His remarks on topography, flora, and fauna were no less striking for their exactitude. To the amazement of his readers, he described the rivers Senegal and Gambia, the African elephant, the hippopotamus, and the multitude of new plants and flowers he had encountered on an almost daily basis.