Creating East and West

Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks

Nancy Bisaha

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812201291
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other.Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.

1

Crusade and Charlemagne: Medieval Influences

Because the Middle Ages witnessed the first European responses to Islam, Renaissance humanists naturally turned to this period for inspiration and authority on the subject of the Ottoman Turks, finding such sources as crusade histories, chivalric literature, sermons, and theological works.¹ While the humanists’ most original contributions to Western perceptions of Muslims may be found in their use of classical exempla, it is undeniable that medieval themes and language also played a role. Indeed, as many scholars have argued, Renaissance thinkers were not so antimedieval and secular as Jacob Burckhardt suggested; nor was there a sharp break between medieval and Renaissance ideals.² Several Italian humanists researched and wrote on the Middle Ages; some, such as Benedetto Accolti and Donato Acciaiuoli, deliberately chose medieval topics to generate an interest among contemporaries in crusading against the Ottoman Turks.³ Images and rhetoric of crusading and Islam, then, represent particularly powerful examples of continuity between medieval and Renaissance thought. Yet humanists did more than merely echo these ideas; they also transformed them.

Humanist explorations of the medieval past produced some interesting results. On the one hand, it enabled them to view the Ottoman threat within a longer historical framework, making the crusades more relevant to their own time. Simultaneously, however, forging links to the medieval past may have created an unrealistic view of the Ottoman Turks. Comparing them to Muslims encountered by crusaders or by Charlemagne (in legend or reality) could produce a simplification and distortion of the Ottomans to make them fit the crusading or chivalric model. In some ways this comparison may reflect what Anthony Grafton has called “schizophrenic reading,” in which humanists simultaneously read texts historically and ahistorically.⁴ The historical approach promoted a greater understanding of the Crusades, while an ahistorical reading allowed humanists to lift their messages out of a medieval context so as to inspire readers to battle the Ottomans. While this method offered a multilayered engagement in medieval texts, it might also lead to confusion. The Seljuk Turks were not the Ottomans; the crusade battlefront and the nature of European warfare had also changed considerably since the late eleventh century. Still, if drawing on the medieval past sometimes clouded humanists’ perceptions of the present-day Ottomans, the medieval heritage, like the classical heritage, provided a rich array of materials for constructing perceptions of the Turks as a cultural and religious adversary.

Medieval Perceptions of Muslims and Crusading

Before humanist reworkings of medieval themes on Islam and crusading can be analyzed, it is necessary to gain a brief sense of these attitudes in their original context.⁵ The early centuries of Europe’s confrontation with Islam (c. 630–1095) have been characterized as an “age of ignorance,” with Spain and Byzantium being important exceptions.⁶ While this has been shown to be an overstatement,⁷ it is fair to say that most Europeans thought little about the rival religion until the era of the Crusades, which dramatically raised European interest in Islam and decisively shaped perceptions. Pope Urban II preached the call in 1095 for the first “armed pilgrimage” to the Holy Land in order to protect Christians and their shrines from the alleged ravages of Muslim rulers. Soldiers, increasingly chastised by the clergy for fighting fellow Christians, were given a chance to achieve glory and to channel their violence in a manner more acceptable to the Church, and purportedly to God. In exchange for their labors they would receive “remission of sins” or die as martyrs if they were struck down. In addition to enormous spiritual rewards, Urban proffered visions of plunder and lands for the taking. This military campaign was the first of several such undertakings that would later be termed “crusades.”⁸ Something in Urban’s appeal struck a chord with the warrior aristocracy; the response was overwhelming.⁹

An important question for this study is how crusaders perceived the enemy they set off to fight. From its inception the crusading movement was marked by propaganda calling for vengeance by Christians.¹⁰ The imagery crusaders absorbed from sermons combined with their own warlike mentality left little desire to explore foreign cultures. Some of these notions were taking shape before 1095, but the call for the First Crusade seems to have had the greatest impact on their formation.¹¹ The First Crusade would be widely preached through France, Italy, and Flanders, acting as an important source for burgeoning perceptions of Islam. The most famous of these sermons was Urban’s speech at Clermont in 1095, which became the cornerstone of crusade preaching and propaganda.¹² In one account of the sermon Urban is reported to have said:

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.¹³

The sermon goes on to describe specific abuses that include evisceration, circumcision, and rape. These images appear to have been exaggerated.¹⁴ Nonetheless, Urban’s speech filled crusaders with expectations of finding bloodthirsty, godless savages who delighted in torturing and killing defenseless Christians and in desecrating their shrines. Islam was presented as a sham religion, founded upon violence and unrestrained lust. The only way to deal with such people was to annihilate them. The savagery of the first crusaders in taking Jerusalem (1099), for example, bears witness to their view of Muslims as inhuman enemies of Christ.¹⁵

And yet perceptions of Muslim antagonism toward Christians were only one factor in the crusading movement. European Christians had goals of their own: to possess the Holy Land—an area they already felt was rightly theirs—and to expand their faith, influence, territory, and wealth. Islam was perceived as an obstacle to these ambitions. Moreover, the Crusades were symptomatic of a growing sense of cultural and religious unity in the West in the High Middle Ages.¹⁶ Crusade preaching spoke to these evolving notions of religious and ethnic pride—among Latins in general but particularly among the Franks.¹⁷ Westerners defined themselves in a host of ways, presenting Muslims in opposite and largely inaccurate terms that recall Said’s model of “positional superiority.”¹⁸ For example, if Christianity was founded on love and chaste behavior, then Islam could only be perceived as a religion of violence and lust; if Latins were brave warriors, then Muslims were cowardly men who fired arrows from a distance or harassed noncombatants.¹⁹ It should come as no surprise, then, that the Crusades, at least initially, did not expand European knowledge of Muslims and their religion.²⁰

To some degree the stunning victories of the First Crusade seemed to confirm the Europeans’ view of their own superiority. Western Christians were convinced, now more than ever, that theirs was the true faith and that crusaders were doing God’s work.²¹ Even chronicles of the crusade written by eyewitnesses who traveled to the Holy Land did little to dispel fantasies about Islam. These works employed the model of early martyrologies, casting Muslims as pagans of the same stripe as the ancients who persecuted early Christians. The gross inaccuracy of these characterizations did not prevent readers at home or even crusaders themselves, who should have known better, from believing such powerful myths.²²

But feelings of hostility engendered by the Crusades did not represent the sum total of European attitudes toward Islam in the Middle Ages. While theologians continued to develop and support the theory of crusade and tout the religious superiority of Christians over Muslims, others could not contain their curiosity and admiration for Islamic culture and learning.²³ Such contradictory tendencies have been difficult to explain. As David Nirenberg argues, coexistence was not always peaceful but was in fact partially predicated on violence; hence a pattern of tense interrelations, in which conflict functions as a meeting ground, seems more realistic.²⁴ This would seem to be the case in Christian relations with Muslims. Religious and cultural differences made for a great deal of discomfort and tension, but they did not prevent fruitful exchange.

If the attitude of most crusaders toward Muslims was decidedly hostile, Franks who were born in the East or settled there often attained a more nuanced perspective. Despite the violence of many battles in the First Crusade, the Latins soon learned the merits of diplomacy, alliance, and cooperation with Muslim leaders in the area.²⁵ This is not to say that generations of Eastern-born Franks faced lives of perfect amity alongside Muslim neighbors; hostilities would flare up on both sides until the final collapse of the crusader kingdoms in 1291.²⁶ Nonetheless, a generation or so after the First Crusade it was not unusual for Franks to “go native,” adopting the dress, cuisine, hygiene habits, and medical practices of Muslim residents, not to mention befriending local Muslims, as the Syrian writer Usamah Ibn-Munquidh’s fascinating anecdotes illustrate.²⁷ Nor was the Holy Land the only site for such interactions; a good deal of political and cultural exchange took place at the court of Frederick II (1194–1250) in Sicily and in both Muslim and Christian courts in Spain.²⁸

One of the most significant exchanges between Muslims and Christians occurred in the field of philosophy. Beginning in the ninth century Arabs translated Greek works and soon produced original works and commentaries of their own. The Christian West’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the growth of scholastic thought were, in many ways, predicated on these Arab commentaries and translated texts.²⁹ Did the role of Islamic scholars in the growth of scholastic philosophy create a sense of interest in or sympathy for their culture and religion? Yes and no. As Rodinson observes, many Western thinkers “began to create an image of the Muslim world as the birthplace of the greatest and most wide-ranging philosophers.”³⁰ Alauddin Samarrai argues that both Muslims and Western Christians had much in common, such as their Hellenic cultural roots; however, he also suggests that neither side was well aware of these shared attributes.³¹ Moreover, indebtedness to Muslim thinkers did not prevent Latins such as Aquinas and Dante from characterizing Islam in unflattering terms. As in the case of Europeans wearing turban-inspired hats, borrowing from Muslim culture did not presuppose approval of it.³²

While contacts with Muslims in the Holy Land, Spain, and Sicily were important, few Western Europeans traveled to these areas as crusaders, pilgrims, missionaries, traders, or scholars. Any favorable impressions brought back to Western Europe had to compete with a powerful body of stereotypes circulating in Europe. For most Western Christians, at least in the High Middle Ages, their education about Muslims began and ended with crusade propaganda, sermons, and perhaps literary works such as chansons de geste. Propaganda and sermons were obviously negative, but chansons de geste and romances could be more ambivalent. These oral and written literary pieces are extremely important in gauging popular opinions of Islam and crusade—opinions not directly manufactured by the clergy.³³ Perhaps the most popular of the chansons de geste, the Song of Roland, acquired the form we know today around 1100, when crusade imagery was inserted into this epic celebration of martial valor.³⁴ The Saracens of Spain are repeatedly styled as pagans and idolaters with a vague connection to the devil.³⁵ All of these images may represent a trend that gained popularity around the time of the First Crusade—that of viewing the Muslims as impious idolaters.³⁶

While some songs dealing with crusade clearly drew on the doctrine, information, and propaganda of preachers and clerks, others were designed to entertain a lay, courtly audience and portrayed Muslims much like their French counterparts: noble, courtly, brave, l...