One day, sometime in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) was presented with a dilemma. The arrival of a tall, blond young man from Europe did not pass unnoticed in Fatehpur Sikri , the city in which the Mughal court was located at that time. Somehow, the stranger managed to gain access to Akbar, telling him an extraordinary tale. The emperor found himself in a quandary: should he believe the unexpected guest, or put him to death as an insolent trickster? It was not only the letter that the visitor bore, in which Queen Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603) proposed an alliance with the Mughal emperor in order to put a stop to the spread of Spanish Jesuits in Asia , that unsettled Akbar; even more disturbing was the stranger’s claim to be the emperor’s very own relation. It was on that occasion that Akbar learnt that, in fact, his grandfather Bābur (1483–1530), the first Mughal emperor (r. 1526–1530), had a sister, whose trace had been lost, and then even her memory. This sister’s name was Qara Köz, but the European young man, who was actually a Florentine by the name of Niccolò Vespucci, knew her as Angelica. Qara Köz/Angelica had been kidnapped by an Uzbek warlord and, after various vicissitudes in which she changed hands, brought to the court of the shah of Persia . From there she was sent to Istanbul , after which she had been accompanied to Florence by Antonino Argalia, a condottiero who had made his fortune in the service of the Ottoman Empire under the name of Pasha Avcalia the Turk. As a young man in his native city of Florence , Argalia had been close friends with Niccolò “il Machia”—Machiavelli, the future author of The Prince—and Ago (Agostino) Vespucci, a cousin of the celebrated Amerigo, from whom the New World discovered by Christopher Columbus was to take its name a few years later. This very Niccolò Vespucci, who in the second half of the sixteenth century entwined the threads of this account before a disoriented Akbar, was the son of Angelica and her last lover, Ago Vespucci. Thus, the double life of Qara Köz directly linked the greatest Mughal emperor to Machiavelli’s Florence and, through Amerigo Vespucci, to the discovery of America.
This bizarre story does not originate from some archival source. It is actually the web of relations that provides the basis for the plot of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008), a title that alludes to Qara Köz, alias Angelica. 1 The work blends fictional and factual elements, in a continuous flow of names, pseudonyms, places, digressions and fragmentary tales. 2 A case in point is Niccolò “il Machia”, a character modelled on the historical figure of the famous Florentine secretary—including his daily tiffs with his wife Marietta. Niccolò is presented as a man who fully identifies with the political life of his city, which Rushdie reveals chiefly through his eyes. Here we have a sympathetically portrayed Machiavelli, the author aiming to redeem his image from the centuries-old stratification of stereotypes that have made his name a “synonym for deviousness, cynicism and realpolitik”. 3
Rushdie’s is only one of a long series of representations of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) that have moulded his myth. At the same time, the novel outlines a framework of increasing exchanges and connections on a Eurasian scale, with significant links to America, which has been neglected as a means of more adequately situating Machiavelli’s writings in the historical context of their production and reception. Clearly, Rushdie is interested in finding a literary device to establish a relation between two ideal settings for his postmodern novel: the Mughal court , which was famous for its religious tolerance at the time of Akbar, and Renaissance Florence . The present volume, by contrast, while offering a reconstruction that considers the premises and circulation of Machiavelli’s literary output in a geography of cross-cultural interactions not so different from Rushdie’s, replaces fiction with philology and historical research.
Reorienting Machiavelli entails restoring the centrality of his encounter with Islam and the East, a term packed with implications. Here, we use the phrase to refer to the productive intersection of the physical and political reality of Asia with the vague knowledge of it shared by many, although not all, of the Europeans who wrote about it in the early modern period. In those centuries of broadening geographical perspective, Machiavelli’s works emerged as a much more effective tool to compare events and processes on a world scale than has been previously recognised. Furthermore, comparison with other cultures and traditions increasingly helped those writings to escape the “black legend” surrounding them and, among other things, make their way in eighteenth century Europe. As this volume demonstrates, reflection on Machiavelli himself was transformed by the contact of his writings with Islam and the East. Taking into account these features of the Machiavellian legacy allows us to understand in a less linear and teleological way his crucial contribution to the foundations of modern political thought, which is typically reduced to a process entirely limited to the West. 4 Moreover, careful scrutiny of evidence found in Machiavelli’s work of interest in Islam and the East, as well as a recreation of significant fragments of their reception, demonstrate the extent to which The Prince and Machiavelli’s other compositions can be read as pieces of a wider Eurasian mosaic. Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, this mosaic was already characterised by incessant political communication across linguistic, cultural and religious borders.
We seek to reclaim the complex and multiform nature of Machiavelli’s works, with respect to their origins, targets and spread. Moreover, we wish to bring to light the multiplicity of possible readings that his pages have suggested over the centuries. To do so, we must move beyond the simplifications that even today reduce Machiavelli’s thought to a flat anthology of maxims for governance, or, worse still, wrongly present him as a theorist of the supposed superiority of western values now threatened by an unavoidable “clash of civilizations” whose ugliest face is Daesh. 5
Hence, this volume takes a different tack. The substance of Machiavelli’s ideas cannot be encapsulated in phrases and slogans, and the rich reserve of references found on his pages has hardly been fully exploited. Moreover, if his writings quickly circulated round the globe, albeit through tortuous paths that, in the main, await reconstruction, this was partly due to his claims concerning Muslim powers. These are discussed here as manifestations of a shared political and cultural space with the Mediterranean at the centre, but also encompassing the main states and kingdoms in Europe. In other words, we aim to rethink Machiavelli within an open and global Renaissance , which was the outgrowth of interactions with a variety of cultures excluded from the traditional interpretation of it as a quintessentially European movement. 6 We also hope to re-establish the connections between Machiavelli’s reflections and the Islamic world, which predate by several centuries the translation of his compositions in north Africa , the Middle East and south Asia . 7
Recent scholarship has signalled the continuity that existed between Renaissance Europe and the Islamic world. 8 Yet this important revision has thus far failed to assign a place either to political thought or to Machiavelli, who lived in an epoch marked by the Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean and the emergence of two other Muslim empires—the Safavid Empire in Persia and the Mughal Empire in India . 9 As Margaret Meserve has aptly observed, “thinking about Turks without thinking of and objecting to their religion was something that few humanists were willing or even able to attempt. Machiavelli was probably the first to do so in total seriousness”. 10 Indeed, Machiavelli does this with every political configuration pertaining to the Muslim world.
Meserve rightly considers Chapter 4 of The Prince. 11 There we find a comparison between the Ottoman Empire and France , significantly inserted after mention of the eastern conquests of Alexander the Great , a key figure in the pantheon of shared political references in Eurasian culture. Machiavelli contrasts the “monarchy of the Turk”, “governed by one ruler” while “the others are his servants” and therefore more difficult to gain but easier to hold, with the French Kingdom, whose ruler “is placed amidst a long-established multitude of lords acknowledged by their own subjects and loved by them”, making it a princedom easy to gain but difficult to hold. 12 And if the alliance between these two powers in the following decades may also be seen as transferring to ...