Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Ottoman-Venetian Encounters

Stephen Ortega

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317089193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Islamwissenschaft

Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean is a study of transcultural relations between Ottoman Muslims, Christian subjects of the Venetian Republic, and other social groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing principally on Ottoman Muslims who came to Venice and its outlying territories, and using sources in Italian, Turkish and Spanish, this study examines the different types of power relations and the social geographies that framed the encounters of Muslim travelers. While Stephen Ortega does not dismiss the idea that Venetians and Ottoman Muslims represented two distinct communities, he does argue that Christian and Muslim exchange in the pre-modern period involved integrated cultural, economic, political and social practices. Ortega's investigation brings to light how merchants, trade brokers, diplomats, informants, converts, wayward souls and government officials from different communities engaged in similar practices and used comparable negotiation tactics in matters ranging from trade disputes, to the rights of male family members, to guarantees of protection. In relying on sources from archives in Venice, Istanbul and Simancas, the book demonstrates the importance of viewing Mediterranean history from a variety of perspectives, and it emphasizes the importance of understanding cross-cultural history as a negotiation between different social, cultural and institutional actors.

Chapter 1
Scattered about the City: Ottoman Networks and Attempts to Control Them ¹

The year was 1574 and the War of Cyprus had just ended with the Ottomans gaining territory in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the island of Cyprus. While Venice in 1574 remained an important center of commerce, it was also going through a transformation. Venetian nobles had turned some of their attention away from trade to focus on other investments such as real estate and agriculture on the Italian mainland.² This shift contributed to the decision that long distance trade could no longer remain solely in the hands of Venetian nobles and resulted in a variety of foreign merchants, including those from the Ottoman Empire, coming to Venice.³ A debate ensued on how to deal with groups of Muslim traders staying in the city.

On September 28, 1574, a Greek trade broker named Francesco Lettino⁴ appeared before the Venetian senate, and asked that Ottoman Muslims be given a residence in the city. Lettino argued that Turks were living scattered about the city, having sexual relations with Christian women, and undermining Venice’s good standing with God and Christendom.⁵ Stating that he understood their customs and habits, he added that Turks should be given a place of their own to trade like the Jews had in Venice, and the Venetians had in the territories of the Ottoman Empire.⁶ His proposal was accepted in 1575,⁷ and in 1579,⁸ with his family as custodians, a lodging for Ottoman Muslims from the Balkans was established at the Insegna dell’ Angolo near the center of trade at the Rialto. Maintaining the custodial position throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the family also supervised a larger residence for all Ottoman Muslims established on the Grand Canal in 1621.⁹

Fig. 1.1 Andrea (Michieli) Vicentino, The Battle of Lepanto, (1539-1614). Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy / Cameraphoto Arte Venezia / The Bridgeman Art Library.

That Francesco Lettino would make this type of proposal does not seem strange. After the War of Cyprus ended in 1573, Ottoman Muslim merchants returned to the city. Housing them was a concern for Venetian authorities. German merchants had maintained a residence in Venice since the thirteenth century¹⁰ and, as Lettino noted, the Venetians stayed in these establishments in Islamic lands. While his proposal reflected a feasible solution for housing Muslims, what does seem odd is that the Venetians would choose to put a person of Lettino’s background and character in the position of custodian. A year prior, Lettino had been involved in an Inquisition case in Venice in which his connections to Muslims had raised suspicions.¹¹ Formed principally to stamp out Protestantism, the Inquisition in Venice was also interested in inquiring about and prosecuting Christians involved in Islamic or Jewish practices. In the case, Zorzi or Giorgio (his Italian name), a young servant of the Venetian noble Marcantonio Falier, who had been born Christian, became a Muslim, and had recently converted back to Christianity, made plans with three other young converts to leave Venice with some Ottoman merchants and return to the Ottoman Empire to be with his family. Needing a place to go, Zorzi chose to hide in Francesco Lettino’s inn. Here, he changed his clothes, and shaved his head so as to appear like a Muslim. Unable to board the ship with the merchants, Zorzi was forced to stay in Lettino’s inn. Compromised because of the change in appearance, Zorzi had no other choice but to continue to hide, until Lettino, out of fear, returned him to his master.¹²

A reading of Francesco Lettino’s petition for a residence for “Turks” might lead one to the conclusion that Lettino was a loyal Christian subject who proposed a solution for the problem of housing Muslims in the city. The Inquisition case though reveals a different profile of Lettino. The case provides a picture of a man more on the margins than someone who was principally interested in maintaining boundaries between Muslims and Christians. His position reveals a person interested in putting forth contradictory narratives of integration and separation. Given these contradictions, questions need to be asked about the nature of community, about the existence of Muslim groups in unsupervised spaces, about the role of people like Lettino in working with Ottoman groups and about the decision to house all Ottoman Muslims in one place on the Grand Canal. Gaining a better understanding of these issues helps explain the gap between how group activities worked in practice and how they were presented in Venetian political discourse.

Ottoman Muslim Communities

In thinking about Lettino’s situation and in considering the ways in which Ottoman Muslim merchants were housed in Venice, one issue that needs to be addressed is the nature of the Ottoman Muslim community or communities in the city. One of the claims that Lettino raised in his petition was that “Turks” were living scattered about the city. Broadly speaking, the term Turks was used to refer to the Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1419 Ottoman/ Venetian treaties not only guaranteed the rights of Venetian subjects in Ottoman territories but also the rights of Ottoman subjects in Venetian domains as well.¹³ Sixteenth-century trading patterns had begun to change and the Venetians found themselves in an intense commercial competition with other ports such as Ancona and Livorno. No longer in a position to dominate trade the way it had in earlier centuries, the Venetian government had to develop new ways of raising revenues and one of these was to attract more foreign traders to the city. In 1524 a law was passed that stated that “Subjects of the Turk are exempted from a law that prohibits foreigners from bringing their goods on Venetian galleys and ships from the Balkans, Alexandria, Syria and Istanbul to Venice and from Venice to its subject territories.”¹⁴ In the period after the War of Cyprus, the size of the Muslim merchant community in Venice continued to grow, and during this period its numbers were comparable to European trading groups.¹⁵

Yet to think of Turks or Muslims from the Ottoman Empire as a community requires further elaboration. While we do not want to dismiss religious identity as either a way that people defined themselves or as a way that people distinguished themselves from others, we do need to gain a better understanding as to how group consensus worked. From our perspective, the idea of a Turk represents a sociological term that defines people from a particular society, the nation-state of Turkey. ¹⁶ This way of thinking is based on the belief that Turks have a shared identity, and thus form an imagined community.¹⁷ In the early modern period, though, the idea of the Turk represented a type of identification that was very different. References to Turks were largely connected to Europeans’ attempts to define categorically their Muslim rivals. Turks represented a combination of what was reviled and what was feared. They served as the antithesis of what it meant be Christian, and thus formed in the minds of many a specific manifestation of the European “other.”¹⁸

This categorical definition of Ottoman Muslims, though, obscures Ottoman cultural and social realities. While the Ottomans maintained a certain amount of central control, particular regions within the Empire could be very autonomous. Covering an area that stretched from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, the Ottoman Empire encompassed a territory that included people from a wide variety of different linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds. Not all Muslims were Turks or even spoke Turkish. Arabic, Albanian and Slavonic were only a few of the languages spoken within the boundaries of the Empire. Significant cultural distinctions existed between those people who lived in the Balkans and those who lived in the Arab provinces of the Empire such as Iraq. These differences could lead to social divisions based on language and regional and local affiliation.¹⁹

One term that has been used to define these ethnic/linguistic groups is nations. In the early modern period, nations were not nations in the modern sense, nor did they constitute clearly defined ethnicities. Instead, they reflected a connection or a perceived association with a particular geographical or political entity. For instance, in Istanbul, the Venetians, the French, the Ragusans and the English constituted different nations.²⁰ The Venetians’ desire to designate Muslims as separate nations reflected a line of thinking that resembled the way they differentiated Ponentine, Germanic and Levantine Jews.²¹ As was noted above, the first residence for Muslims established near the Rialto only housed Muslims from the Balkans; Muslims from other parts of the empire still stayed in other parts of the city. In 1579, around the time that the site at Rialto was chosen, the issue was still under debate and the Venetians considered housing the different nations of the Ottoman Empire in a number of different places.²² This dilemma continued to draw attention and at the time the decision was made to establish the Fondaco dei Turchi in 1621, Giacomo de Nores, the dragoman for Turks, commented that there would be two separate sections, one for Balkan merchants and the other for those coming from Asia. He believed that these two groups were fundamentally different in nature and in custom.²³

Regional and linguistic ties were also expressed in the way that different Ottoman groups presented themselves in Venice. For instance, in 1582 two merchants from Bosnia had petitioned the Venetian government for more brokers on the Rialto who could speak Slavonic. Commenting that there were only four brokers capable of helping them with their business transactions, they argued that some of them were ill-intentioned and thus of no help.²⁴ While the merchants’ principal concern was to argue that trade brokers who could speak their language were under-represented, their petition also reflected a certain geographical sensibility. Yet other individuals defined themselves in even more local terms. Following an Uskok attack on a Venetian ship in 1587, a group of merchants signed their claim as residents of Sarajevo, as opposed to Bosnians.²⁵ In 1741, a ruling sent from...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Ottoman Terms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Scattered about the City: Ottoman Networks and Attempts to Control Them
• 2 Negotiating with the Venetian Bureaucracy: Paths of Integration
• 3 Moving Across Boundaries
• 4 Projecting Ottoman Power
• 5 A Mediterranean Conflict: Alliances, Factions and Networks
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index