The Renaissance Mediterranean Revisited: Christian Iberia and Muslim Egypt, ca. 1250–1517

THE RENAISSANCE MEDITERRANEAN REVISITED:

CHRISTIAN IBERIA AND MUSLIM EGYPT, CA.

1250–1517

ADAM G BEAVER

As the surfeit of new journals, new institutes, new professional associa-tions, prize-winning monographs, and new “thalass-”-related jargon all at-test, the medieval and early modern Mediterranean has once again become avigorous site of historical research.1 This surge of interest in the premodernMediterranean is, on balance, welcome news; yet it is hard to avoid feelingat least some unease about the fact that this new wave of scholarship hasgiven us not one new Mediterranean, but rather, two, neither of which seemsto have much to do with the other. On the one hand, there is the cosmopoli-tan Mediterranean, best reflected in works like Eric Dursteler’s Venetians inConstantinople or Natalie Davis’s Trickster Travels (among many others), inwhich the premodern Mediterranean appears as a fluid, free-wheeling, Chris-tian/Muslim/Jewish jamboree of roguish, pragmatic, and self-fashioning go-betweens, dragomans, converts, and renegades, busily weaving their braidedhistories on the margins of religious and imperial institutions that stood lit-tle chance of keeping them in their places.2 At the very same time, however,

Forthcoming in Mapping the Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 300–1550: An Encyclopediaof Perspectives in Research, ed. Amity Law. Leiden: Brill.

1 See the survey in Francesca Trivellato, “Review Article: Renaissance Italy and theMuslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work,” Journal of Modern History 82(2010), 127–155.

2 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds(New York, 2006); Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, andCoexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006). See also GulruNecipoglu, “Suleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Con-text of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry,” The Art Bulletin 71 (1989), 401–427; LisaJardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York, 1996); SanjaySubrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories: Cronica and Tarikh in the Sixteenth-CenturyIndian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49 (2010), 118–145; Deborah Howard,Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture1100–1500 (New Haven, 2000); Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Re-naissance Art Between East and West (Ithaca, 2000); Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaarto Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art (Berkeley, 2002); Fikret Adanr, “ReligiousCommunities and Ethnic Groups under Imperial Sway: Ottoman and Habsburg Landsin Comparison,” in The Historical Practice of Diversity: Transcultural Interactionsfrom the Early Modern Mediterranean to the Postcolonial World, ed. Dirk Hoederet al. (Oxford, 2003), 54–86; Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and theMulticultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York, 2003); Maya Jasanoff, “Cos-mopolitan: A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria,” Common Knowledge 11

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there also exists a divisive Mediterranean, best reflected in works like NancyBisaha’s Creating East and West and Margaret Meserve’s Empires of Islamin Renaissance Historical Thought which argue in improbably Saıdian fash-ion that, in fact, the premodern Mediterranean was precisely the milieu inwhich Europeans definitively decided that East is East and West is West,that the Islamic polities of the Eastern Mediterranean were fundamentallydifferent from, and threatening to, the Christian heritage of Europe, andthat Europe was to stand for civilization and the East for backwardness,decadence, and barbarism.3

The contradictory nature of these two visions of the premodern Mediterranean—one that highlights boundary-crossing and exchange, the other which positsgrowing antagonism and separation—would not necessarily be troublingwere it not for the fact that it is to a very large extent an artificial contradic-tion, invented by two problems with the way that historians have handledthe evidence at their disposal. The first is the way that historians have seg-regated their sources into incommensurable genres. While proponents of thecosmopolitan Mediterranean typically work from the records of merchantsand ambassadors, who by definition are interested in negotiation, mutualunderstanding, and deal-making across political and religious boundaries,those who see the Renaissance Mediterranean as a seminal moment in therise of Western Orientalism typically cite learned humanist treatises, the vastmajority of which were deliberately polemical, were written from an arm-chair perspective by churchmen with little or no experience of the MuslimEast, and were (by their very nature) obsessed with questions of antiquity,lineage, and civilizational distinctions in a way that could not but reflectpoorly on nomadic civilizations like the Ottomans.

(2005), 393–409; Gerald MacLean, ed., Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Ex-changes with the East (New York, 2005); Palmira Johnson Brummett, “Gender andEmpire in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Caricature, Models of Empire, and the Case forOttoman Exceptionalism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the MiddleEast 27 (2007), 283–302; Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotia-tion in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009);E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice andIstanbul (Ithaca, 2011); Eric Dursteler, “On Bazaars and Battlefields: Recent Schol-arship on Mediterranean Cultural Contacts,” Journal of Early Modern History 15(2011), 413–434.

3 Edward W. Saıd, Orientalism (New York, 1979); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East andWest: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, 2004); Mar-garet Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge,MA, 2008). See also James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist CrusadeLiterature in the Age Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), 111–146;Amanda Wunder, “Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of theTurk in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003), 89–119;James G. Harper, ed., The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: VisualImagery before Orientalism (Aldershot, 2011).

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The second problem with the sources relates to their limited geographicalscope. Whatever its considerable merits, recent historiography of the Re-naissance Mediterranean has also assumed, quite regrettably, that Venice,Rome, or France can stand in for the whole of Europe, and the OttomanEmpire for the entire Muslim world. This narrowing of the range of Mediter-ranean actors—a winnowing often perpetrated by precisely those historianswho argue most forcefully for the richness and diversity of the RenaissanceMediterranean—has flattened immeasurably the variety and complexity thatcharacterized East-West interactions. It is tempting to ask what Braudel,whose Mediterranean extended from the Atlantic to Poland, would makeof the present generation’s Mediterranean, reduced to a modest causewaybetween the Adriatic and the Bosphorus.4

Perhaps the most glaring absences in this narrowed vision of the Renais-sance Mediterranean are those of Christian Spain and Mamluk Egypt, whoseextensive and surprisingly well-documented relationship deserves much moreattention than it has received from the new wave of Mediterranean histori-ography. Though Spain appears more often than not in histories of Mediter-ranean exchange as the antithesis of Venetian cosmopolitanism,5 in pointof fact we have known for more than a century that the commercial anddiplomatic modus vivendi which the Christian kings of Aragon and Castileforged with the Mamluk sultans—rulers of an empire stretching from Syriato North Africa and the Indian Ocean—was one of the first, and most endur-ing, axes which organized medieval and Renaissance Europeans’ interactions

4 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age ofPhilip II, trans. Sian Reynolds. 2 vols. (New York, 1972).

5 Jardine, Worldly Goods, 86–90. According to Jardine, “the fall of Granada markedthe affirmation of a united Christian state in Spain, with an aggressively homogeneousculture,” as Fernando and Isabel “turn[ed] their backs on the peninsula’s multiculturalheritage,” “effectively proclaimed a non-reliance on that colorful traffic in goods andcommodities which animat[ed] the cultural life of Europe in the second half of thefifteenth century,” and “ostentatiously set their sights on an ethnically cleansed newworld’ unhampered” by multiculturalism.

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with the Levant.6 From the mid-thirteenth century until the Ottoman con-quest of Egypt in 1517, Christian Spain and Mamluk Egypt occupied acentral place in the increasingly dense web of consular, ambassadorial, andmercantile contacts which bound the Mediterranean together into a coherenteconomic, geopolitical, and (to at least some extent) cultural space.

Accounting for the importance of Spain and Egypt will add more thanmere nuance to the picture which recent scholarship has developed of thepremodern Mediterranean. It will introduce new horizons to Mediterraneanhistory, connecting it more thoroughly to the early history of the Atlanticworld, as we come to appreciate the multitude of ways in which the Spanishtransposed patterns of negotiation, governance, and even bioprospecting de-veloped in the context of their encounters with the Mamluks onto the NewWorld. (As Antonio Barrera has observed, Spaniards’ fascination with har-vesting balsam in Santo Domingo in the 1510s followed directly from severaldecades of reports by diplomats and merchants warning that the preciousmedicament’s original source, the Egyptian shrine of Al-Matariya, had all

6 Girolamo Golubovich, ed., Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica della Terra Santa edell’Oriente Francescano, 5 vols. (Quarrachi, 1906–1927); Andres Gimenez Soler, “Elcomercio en tierra de infieles durante la Edad Media,” Boletın Academica de BuenasLetras de Barcelona 5 (1909), 171–199; R. Ruiz Orsatti, “Tratado de paz entre AlfonsoV de Aragn y el sultn de Egipto, al-Malik al-Asraf Barsbay,” Al-Andalus 4 (1936),333–389; Aziz Suryal Atiya, Egypt and Aragon: Embassies and Diplomatic Correspon-dence between 1300 and 1330 A.D. (Leipzig, 1938); Maximiliano A. Alarcn y Santonand Ramon Garcıa de Linares, eds., Los documentos arabes diplomaticos del Archivo

de la Corona de Aragon (Madrid, 1940); P.H. Dopp, “Les relations Egypto-catalaneset les corsaires au commencement du quinzieme siecle,” Bulletin of the Faculty ofArts, Cairo University 11 (1949), 1–14; Angels Masa i de Ros, La corona de Aragony los estados del norte de Africa: polıtica de Jaime II y Alfonso IV en Egipto, Ifriquıay Tremecen (Barcelona, 1951); Amada Lopez de Meneses, “Los consulados catalanesde Alejandrıa y Damasco en el reinado de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” Estudios de EdadMedia de la Corona de Aragon 6 (1956), 83–183; idem, “Correspondencia de Pedroel Ceremonioso con la Soldanıa de Babilonia,” Cuadernos de historia de Espana 6(1959), 239–337; Mario Del Treppo, I mercanti catalani e l’espansione della Coronad’Aragona nel secolo XV (Naples, 1972); Luis Suarez Fernandez, “Relaciones de losReyes Catolicos con Egipto,” in En la Espana medieval: estudios dedicados al profes-

sor D. Julio Gonzalez Gonzalez, ed. Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada (Madrid, 1980),507–519; Eliyahu Ashtor, “Alfonso il Magnanimo e i Mamlucchi,” Archivio StoricoItaliano 142 (1984), 3–29; Constantin Marinescu, La politique orientale d’AlfonseV d’Aragon, roi de Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona, 1994); Merce Viladrich, “Novesdades sobre les relacions entre el solda del Caire Al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Sayf al-Dın Qalawun i el rei Jaume II,” Anales de la Universidad de Alicante: Historia Me-dieval 11 (1996), 501–507; idem, “Solving the Accursed Riddle’ of the DiplomaticRelations between Catalonia and Egypt around 1430,” Al-Masaq 14 (2002), 25–31;Marıa Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, ed., Els catalans a la Mediterrania oriental a l’edat mit-jana (Barcelona, 2000); Damien Coulon, Barcelone et le grand commerce d’Orient au

Moyen Age: Un siecle de relations avec l’Egypte et la Syrie-Palestine, ca. 1330–ca.1430 (Madrid/Barcelona, 2004).

RENAISSANCE MEDITERRANEAN REVISITED 5

but ceased production.)7 For the purposes of this essay, however, I shall fo-cus more narrowly on what the mutual interactions of Spain and Egypt cantell us about the conundrum with which the essay began: namely, whetherthe late medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean is more properly to beunderstood as a porous zone of interfaith negotiation and collaboration oras an increasingly impermeable no-man’s land separating a strongly differ-entiated Muslim “East” and Christian “West”—or something else entirely.After a brief attempt to survey the unique recurring patterns of Spanish-Mamluk interactions between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, theessay will turn to a somewhat deeper consideration of what the two sides ofthe alliance—and, by extension, significant swathes of the Mediterranean’sMuslim and Christian populations—thought about each other, and how theycommunicated, particularly in the final decades of their partnership, whenRenaissance humanism’s allegedly “Orientalist” turn ought to be most sus-ceptible to analysis.

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The Spanish crowns’ centuries-long relationship with Mamluk Egypt orig-inated in 1260, when Alfonso X “the Wise” of Castile (r. 1252–1284) and hisMamluk counterpart—whether Sultan Qutuz (r. 1259–1260) or his succes-sor Baybars (r. 1260–1277)—exchanged a pair of embassies between Toledo,Cairo, and Seville with the goal of establishing diplomatic relations.8 It isdifficult to know exactly what each side hoped to achieve via this exchange,though it was a pregnant moment for all involved. The Mamluks were anew power in their region, having supplanted the Ayubbids and defeatedthe Mongols within the previous decade; as relative upstarts, they may havesought little more than the prestige which would accrue to sitting at the ta-ble with powerful Western monarchies.9 Alfonso X, on the other hand—anestablished ruler contending for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire—likely requested the more concrete quid pro quo of Mamluk neutrality ifand when he should extend Castile’s war of reconquest against peninsularIslam onto North African soil. From this modest start, relations between thetwo kingdoms deepened just a few years later, when Alfonso X’s Aragoneseneighbors—who were much more significant players in the Mediterraneanbalance of power—were incorporated into these exchanges. Flush with thesuccessful conquest of the southern Iberian kingdoms of Valencia and Mur-cia, the Aragonese declined invitations from the papacy, the Byzantines, andthe Mongols to march to Jerusalem and instead forged a commercial and

7 Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire andthe Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, 2006), 15–23.

8 For a recent discussion of the ambiguities surrounding this initial exchange, seeJoseph F. O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait(Philadelphia, 2011), 19–21.

9 On the Mamluks, see Carl F. Petry, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1:Islamic Egypt, 640–1517 (Cambridge, 1998), chs. 10–11.

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diplomatic pact with his Muslim counterparts.10 By June of 1264 Jaume I(r. 1213–1276) had established the first Iberian consulate in the port cityof Alexandria, with the Barcelonan Guillem de Moncada as his first ap-pointee.11

A number of embassies followed swiftly upon the heels of these first con-tacts, with extraordinary legates (in addition to the regularly appointedcommercial consuls) crisscrossing the sea between Alexandria and Barcelona,Seville, or Sicily throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cen-turies. The density of contact varied in proportion to the urgency andcomplexity of the matters to be discussed; during moments of pronouncedMediterranean instability, such as the tense decades of Aragonese-Angevinjockeying which followed the Sicilian Vespers (1282), annual or semi-annualembassies became the norm, with delegations from both sides sharing pas-sage on the same vessels as they shuttled back and forth between theirrespective courts.12 The reign of Jaume II of Aragon (r. 1291–1327), whichincluded at least seven embassies (1293, 1303, 1305, 1314, 1318, 1322, and1327) in the space of thirty-four years, may be representative. Though littlesurvives in the way of documentary records from the Mamluk side of theseexchanges, Iberian archives have yielded a rich harvest of instructions, let-ters, reports, and fiscal registers which attest to the steady growth of a robustportfolio of customs and rhetorical habits designed to sustain and nurturethis cross-Mediterranean alliance. The Aragonese routinely addressed theirMamluk hosts in respectful, if not adoring, terms; to Jaume II, Al-NasirMuhammad (r. 1293–1294, 1299–1341) was “the most high, most noble, andmost powerful . . . wise and discreet Melich Annacer Sultan of Babylon andall the lands of the Levant, son . . . of the most high and most noble andmost powerful . . . Sultan of Babylon and of all the Levant.” The Egyptianchancery reciprocated, hailing Jaume as

the magnanimous, glorious, esteemed king, valiant hero, in-vincible lion, the King of Aragon . . . , defender of Christen-dom, honor to the nations of Jesus, hope of the Christianrace, protector of the boundary fortresses, sovereign ruler ofthe coasts and the sea, supporter [of the religion] of baptism,aid to the Pope of Rome, refuge of Knights, beautiful ofthrones and tiaras, friend of Kings and of Sultans, sovereignruler of Barcelona.13

10 Robert I. Burns, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 2.

11 Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983), 12–13.12 For the impact of the Sicilian Vespers on Spanish-Egyptian diplomacy, see Michele

Amari, “Trattato stipolato da Giacomo II di Aragona col sultano d’Egitto il 29 gen-naio 1293,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 3rd ser. 11 (1883), 3–15; P.M.Holt, “The Mamluk Sultanate and Aragon: The Treaties of 689/1290 and 692/1293,”Tarih 2 (1992), 105–118.

13 Golubovich, ed., Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica, 3:73.

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More important than these florid titles, however, were the gifts to whichboth sides—though especially the Mamluks—felt entitled.14 Aragonese del-egations bound for Alexandria departed Barcelona laden with all mannerof luxury goods for the Sultan’s delectation, particularly European textiles:wool from Chalons-sur-Marne, Douai, and Ypres, and linen from Reims.15

They returned bearing fine robes, exotic spices, and precious relics from theMamluk-controlled Holy Places of Jerusalem and Sinai.16

These exchanges of gifts and pleasantries soothed the impact of the am-bitious demands and recriminations which the Iberian and Egyptian ambas-sadors were charged with delivering to their respective hosts, often presentedwith remarkable frankness. Both parties’ objectives remained remarkablyconsistent throughout the two and a half centuries of their diplomatic rela-tionship. The Spanish, for their part, sought to achieve two objectives: first,to advocate on behalf of Western (and especially Iberian) merchants tradingin the East; and second, to establish a protectorate over the Christian HolyPlaces in Palestine and Egypt, through which they hoped to ensure the con-tinuity of the Roman Catholic cult, to oversee Eastern Christians residentin Mamluk lands, and to protect (and, when necessary, to ransom) WesternChristian pilgrims in the course of their journeys. (The latter goal, of provid-ing succor and access to the Holy Land, was shared broadly across WesternEurope, where the memory of the medieval Crusader movement remainedfresh. Yet over time it also came to be seen as a particularly Iberian project,as the Aragonese jealously asserted their right to manage the protectorateas part and parcel of their claim to exclusive possession of the crown ofJerusalem—a claim derived chiefly from Pere III of Aragon’s [r. 1276–1285]marriage to Frederick II’s granddaughter Constanza.)17 The Mamluks, fortheir part, requested similar considerations in return for the considerableprivileges which they extended to the Iberians and their Franciscan clients.Specifically, they sought to advocate on behalf of their coreligionists in whatremained of Al-Andalus; to work with the Aragonese consulate to disciplineWestern merchants, and particularly Catalan corsairs, in the East; and (lastbut not least) to receive Iberian foodstuffs and war materiel with which todefend themselves against Ottoman expansion, as by the fourteenth centurythe Turks had already begun to menace the Mamluks’ Syrian domains. TheSpanish, who had been somewhat reluctant to violate papal prohibitions on

14 On the importance of gift exchange within Mamluk diplomacy see Davis, TricksterTravels, 49.

15 Ashtor, Levant Trade, 37.16 For two (late) examples of relics as diplomatic gifts, see Hieronymus Munzer,

“Itinerarium Hispanicum Hieronymi Monetarii (1494–1495),” ed. Ludwig Pfandl, Re-vue Hispanique 48 (1920), 4–144, here at 131; Alvar Gomez de Castro, De las hazanasde Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, ed. and trans. Jose Oroz Reta (Madrid, 1984),140–141.

17 Alain Milhou, Colon y su mentalidad mesianica en el ambiente franciscanista espaol(Valladolid, 1983), 367–368.

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trading war materiel with the infidel, were all too happy to indulge this lastrequest and make common cause against the dreaded Turks after 1453.18

Given the apparent incompatibility of some of these objectives, the Iberi-ans and Egyptians managed to channel their respective concerns and de-mands in productive ways, resolving their differences by creating many ofthe institutions and practices which enabled the circulation of goods andpeople throughout the late medieval Mediterranean basin. The Aragonese,for example, developed legal fictions which allow their Christian merchantsto circumvent the papal embargo on trading with the “infidel” Mamluks.19 Inexchange the Mamluks proved surprisingly accommodating on the questionof the Christian Holy Places, enabling the Aragonese to establish a shadowfootprint of Iberian authority in and around Palestine via the gradual foun-dation, under Iberian auspices, of the Franciscan Order’s Custodia TerraeSanctae in the first several decades of the fourteenth century.20 Though oftenexcluded from histories of Mediterranean geopolitics on the basis of its “reli-gious” function, the Franciscan Custodia—essentially a collection of pilgrimhospitals and churches centered on Mt. Sion and the Holy Sepulcher—wasto prove one of the single most important institutions of the premodernMediterranean world. The Franciscans and their houses served not only pil-grims, for whom they comprised an analogue to the all-important fondacciof merchants, but also diplomats, whom they routinely accompanied, repre-sented, and interpreted at both ends of the Mediterranean; in these ways,the Custodia and the Iberian-Mamluk axis that sustained it were crucialto the efflorescence of travel and communication that characterized the latemedieval Mediterranean.21

On balance, then, it seems fair to say that the economic and diplomaticconnections between Iberia and Cairo were at least as fundamental to therelative peace and stability which characterized the late medieval and Re-naissance Mediterranean as were the better-known machinations of Venetianand Ottoman diplomacy. Indeed, such was the importance of the Catalanconsulate that one might even go so far as to annex a Pax Aegypto-Hispanicaof the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the well-known Pax Mongolica of

18 By the late fifteenth century, the Spanish Monarchy was prepared to support with-out reservation the Mamluks’ efforts to resist Ottoman expansion; when news of theMamluks’ defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Adana (February 1486) reachedSpain, it was celebrated as if it were the Spaniards’ own. Suarez Fernandez, “Rela-ciones de los Reyes Catolicos,” 512–513.

19 Ashtor, Levant Trade, 21–22, 32–33, 36–37, 46.20 Patrocinio Garca Barriuso, Espana en la historia de Tierra Santa: Obra pıa espanola

a la sombra de un regio patronato: Estudio historico-jurıdico, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1992);Felix del Buey and Cristoforo Alvi, “Orıgenes de la custodia de Tierra Santa: ayudade los Reinos de Aragon, Napoles y Castilla,” Archivo Ibero-Americano new ser. 65(2005), 7–96.

21 Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging,Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2009).

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the thirteenth and fourteenth.On the Catalan consulate of the sea, see Stan-ley S. Jados, ed. and trans., Consulate of the Sea, and Related Documents(Tuscaloosa, AL, 1975). The scholarly consensus around the RenaissanceMediterranean’s cosmopolitan ethos, which tends to focus on the individ-ual and corporate actors whom Natalie Rothman aptly calls “trans-imperialsubjects”—merchants, dragomans, renegades, pirates, et al.—should takecloser heed of the role which more “conventional,” state-sponsored diplo-mats and friars played in creating this world.22

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This is not to say, of course, that the two members of this axis alwaysaccepted each other’s petitions, or that the relationship between them wasalways successful or edifying. The Iberians and Egyptians both indulged intheir fair share of gratuitous provocation when it served their interests, andthe archives and chronicles of both sides of this relationship record numerousinstances of tit-for-tat threats and recriminations that threatened to snuffout more mundane acts of empathy and mutual understanding that nurturedthe relationship across nearly three centuries.

There were, first of all, isolated incidents of violence, insult, and conspiracy-mongering to be ameliorated. Though his reign as a whole proved pivotal ininstitutionalizing the Mamluk alliance, Jaume II’s second embassy to Egypt(1305) ended in disaster, as his legate—a Barcelonan named Eymerich—unilaterally decided to avenge himself of the poor treatment he felt he hadreceived in Cairo by humiliating the Mamluk legate assigned to accompanyhim back to Spain. Waiting until they were out of sight of the Alexandrianharbor, Eymerich apparently forced his Egyptian counterpart into a smalldinghy, stripped him of all of his possessions, and cut him loose to float orpaddle his way back to shore. The Sultan was, needless to say, enraged, andJaume was compelled to hunt down his rogue diplomat in Sicily.23

Equally damaging were Castilian and Aragonese allegations with regardto the Mamluks’ supposed support for clandestine Jewish or Muslim plotsagainst Spanish Christians. In 1321, for example, a rumor circulated throughsouthern France and Aragon that the Mamluk Sultan had joined forces withthe king of Granada to persuade Jews and lepers to poison the well waterof Christian communities.24 Likewise, Castilian and English sources claimed

22 Rothman, Brokering Empire. For another argument about the importance ofChurch/state bureaucracies to shaping the behavior of individual actors, see MollyGreene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the EarlyModern Mediterranean (Princeton, 2010).

23 Golubovich, ed., Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica, 3:79.24 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle

Ages (Princeton, 1996), 65. For the Mamluk connection, see Guillaume Agasse’s con-fession to the Inquisition of Pamiers in Jean Duvernoy, ed., Le Registre d’inquisitionde Jacques Fournier, eveque de Pamiers (1318–1325) (Manuscrit no Vat. Latin 4030de la Bibliotheque vaticane), 3 vols. (Toulouse, 1965), 3:13–147.

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to have discovered a letter from the “Sultan of Babylonia” in the Marinidcamp at the Battle of Ro Salado (1340) in which the sultan, describinghimself as “lord of Asia, Africa, and Europe,” promised to reward thosewho suffered martyrdom or made financial contributions to the holy war.Convert Christian churches into stables, he exhorted the Marinid king, and“their altars into mangers, and their crosses into hitching posts. Smash theirchildren against the wall; slit open the wombs of pregnant women; cut offthe breasts, arms, noses, and feet of other women. Do all this to dishonorChristendom. Do not leave until you have destroyed Christendom from seato sea.”25

At times, these isolated insults and rumors threatened to evolve into cyclesof violence. In 1468, for example, the ordinarily congenial Sultan Qaytbay (r.1468–1496) threatened to demolish the Holy Sepulcher upon hearing thatthe Aragonese king Joan II (r. 1458–1479) planned to demolish a pair ofmosques near Valencia.26 More interesting, however, are the more structuralpatterns of suspicion and recrimination which first became visible, and thenbegan to recur with some frequency, in the fifteenth century. These moreintractable fault lines are symptomatic, I would argue, of the emergence ofa kind of rhetoric of interfaith negotiation that would become characteristicof Mediterranean diplomacy in general, and Spanish policy in particular, inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a rhetoric based on the simplerecognition, accepted in equal measure by the Mamluks and their Christianallies, that it could heuristically useful to separate, however fictionally, thereligious and political identities of their subjects and their monarchies.

The main stimulus to this convenient fiction was the intractable problemof the Iberian reconquista and the ever more precarious status of IberianMuslims as successive generations of Castilian, Aragonese, and Portuguesemonarchs whittled the territory of Islamic Al-Andalus down to a mere rumpkingdom centered on Granada, in the southeast corner of the Iberian Penin-sula. The Mamluks—motivated partly by ideology and partly by a desireto outdo the propaganda spread throughout the Muslim world by their Ot-toman rivals—remained staunchly committed to a vision of themselves asthe defenders of all Muslim communities, wherever they might be found, anidentity which made it difficult for the Mamluk administration to counte-nance the frequent renewal of any sort of trade or mutual defense pact withIberian Muslims’ Christian opponents. This friction was a perennial featureof the Mamluk-Spanish relationship, but it lay relatively dormant for muchof the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the Christian war of reconquest

25 O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade, 170–171; Adam Murimuth, Continuatio chroni-carum, ed. Edward M. Thompson (London, 1889), 263.

26 G.S. Colin, “Contribution a l’etude des relations diplomatiques entre les Musulmansd’Occident et l’Egypte au XVe siecle,” Memoires de l’Institut francais d’Archeologieorientale 68 (1935), 197–206, here at 203 n.3; J.E. Lopez de Coca Castaner, “Mamelu-cos, otomanos y caıda del reino de Granada,” En la Espana Medieval 28 (2005),229–258, here at 234.

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dramatically slowed. It finally came to a head, however, and demanded animaginative solution in the late fifteenth century, as Ferdinand of Aragon(r. 1479–1516) and Isabel of Castile (r. 1474–1504) inaugurated the finalpush to Granada in 1482, famously occupied the city in 1492, and finally—in a reversal of their original plans—embarked upon the forcible baptism ofGranada’s remaining Muslim population in 1499.27

The final, sometimes ugly phase of the reconquest—including this last-minute decision not only to conquer the territory of Al-Andalus, but alsoto eradicate the practice of Islam from the Peninsula tout court—was notlost on the Mamluks in Egypt, who received frequent updates on Ferdi-nand and Isabel’s new policy of intolerance from the lachrymose stream ofJewish and Muslim exiles who arrived in Alexandria and Cairo from theIberian Peninsula.28 Nor was it lost on the Catholic Monarchs themselves,who worried about the steadfastness of their Egyptian allies, now so inte-gral to their broader Mediterranean policy of staving off Ottoman expansion.Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the Catholic Monarchs under-stood the recent civil war in Egypt (1496–1501), which saw the Mamlukstate destabilized by a series of coups and assassinations, as at least partlythe product of tensions and differences of opinion within the Mamluk eliteabout the proper course of action to take vis--vis the Mamluks’ traditionalallies in the Christian West.29 Accordingly, in the summer of 1501 Ferdi-nand and Isabel took the extraordinary step of dispatching their leadingcourt humanist, the Italian emigre Petro Martire d’Anghiera (1457–1526),on a mission to Cairo armed with an unusual set of instructions.30 He wasto make the case to the new Egyptian sultan that the reconquista in gen-eral, and the recent mass baptisms and/or expulsions of Iberian Jews andMuslims in particular, were motivated not by religion, but rather by badvassalage. The Muslims and Jews in question, he was to argue, had agreedto be obedient vassals of the Catholic Monarchs, but their behavior—whichwas said to have included armed insurrection and the rejection of peacefulefforts at evangelization—had shown them to be disobedient, and therefore,subject to corrective measures. As Martire was later to articulate this mes-sage to the Sultan,

When the cities of the Kingdom of Granada surrendered tous, many of their inhabitants pled with my monarchs that

27 L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 2005), 14–44.

28 James T. Monroe, “A Curious Morisco Appeal to the Ottoman Empire,” Al-Andalus31 (1966), 281–303; Rachel Arie, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides (1232–1492), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1990), 171–174.

29 Carl F. Petry, Protectors or Praetorians? The Last Mamluk Sultans and Egypt’sWaning as a Great Power (Albany, 1994).

30 Antonio de la Torre y del Cerro, “Instrucciones a Pedro Martir de Anglerıa, Em-bajador al Sultan de Babilonia, publicado con el tıtulo de La Embajada a Egiptode Pedro Martir de Anglerıa,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubio i Lluch: Miscelaniad’estudis literaris i linguistics, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1936), 1:433–450.

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they might be allowed to continue living within the kingdom,on their native soil with their children and wives. . . . Butnow, these same people, many of whom fled the kingdom ascriminals, come to you [in Egypt] seeking to stir up revolu-tion, concealing their flight and calling it a perfidious expul-sion. . . . At the same time, they lie to you, claiming that theCatholic Monarchs forcibly baptized everyone in Granada.Never has a word been spoken that is further from the truth.The Catholic King and Queen of Spain . . . are called Chris-tian because they labor to follow in the footsteps of Christ,professing his teachings and obeying his Law. Christ neverforced anyone to follow him against his will; he never com-manded force to be used to make anyone a Christian. On thecontrary, our religion teaches openly that no one should dareto incite anyone to profess a different religion from his ownthrough violence or fear.

The forcible baptisms of which the Mamluks had been apprised were thusmerely the fruit of inexcusable civil disobedience:

The Granadans took up arms four times, which they were ab-solutely forbidden to do by a signed pact. With these arms,they killed royal prefects . . . and withdrew to the mountains,lying in wait for our king with 100,000 footsoldiers and 15,000cavalry. . . . Well, then, most majestic Emperor—what wouldyou have done if your citizens of another religion had com-mitted so many cowardly acts against your majesty? Wouldit have been sufficient for you to go through the regular Mo-hammedan institutions? I don’t believe it, for the economiccosts alone would have been too great to bear.31

The evident facility with which Martire could recast the final phase of thereconquista as a question of territorial jurisdiction and vassalage, evacuatingit of its religious content, is striking. It lends itself to two possible expla-nations: either it was insincere, or it wasn’t. The first scenario, in whichthe Spanish deliberately suppressed or misrepresented the reconquista’s re-ligious motivations, is no less intriguing for its insincerity. At the very least,it suggests that the jurists who prepared Martire’s instructions had accu-mulated enough experience with the legal cultures of the broader Mediter-ranean world, Islamic/Mamluk as well as Christian/Spanish, to know howto present the Iberian Peninsula’s beleaguered Muslims as the (ungrateful)beneficiaries of a scrupulously-enforced (if somewhat begrudging) policy ofreligious tolerance precisely like the dhimmi policies found throughout the

31 Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Legatio Babylonica, in Petri Martyris ab Angleria . . . Derebus Oceanicis & Orbe nouo decades tres . . . Eivsdem praeterea Legationis Babyloni-cae libri tres . . . (Basel, 1533), ff. 76r–92r, here at 87r–v.

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Islamic world.32 (It is worth noting in this regard that the very same genera-tion of Spanish jurists seem to have borrowed a second concept from Islamicjurisprudence, adapting the da‘a or “requirement” typically read out beforethe walls of besieged cities into the requerimiento by which the Spanishlegitimated their conquest of the New World.)33

But it is the second scenario—in which Martire’s interpretation of thereconquista as a political, but not necessarily religious, defeat for IberianMuslims was sincere—that is most intriguing of all. It suggests that thecenturies of sustained contact that the Spanish Monarchy had enjoyed withits Muslim allies, in Egypt as well as at home in the Iberian Peninsula, hadprepared Spanish Christians to articulate a vision of Spanish subjecthood inwhich religious and political identities might be considered separately. Werethe humanists of Martire’s generation in a position to distinguish betweenthe religion or culture of the Muslim world and its political practices ordestinies? Here we return to the question of Renaissance Orientalism’s debtto the late medieval Mediterranean.

* * *

As noted in the introduction to this essay, the number of scholars willingto trace the DNA of the modern, imperialistic, chauvinist strain of “Ori-entalism” described by Edward Saıd back to Renaissance humanism hasgrown steadily over the past several decades. This interpretation first crys-tallized in a body of scholarship which had itself begun as an experimentto see whether it was possible to “rescue” Saıd’s vision of modern Oriental-ism from his misrepresentations of its putative ancient, medieval, and earlymodern roots.34 That is to say, was Saıd correct in identifying the culturalstereotypes and power dynamics which haunt modern Western scholarshipon the Orient, but simply wrong about their particular origins? Is therean alternative early modern genealogy of Orientalism awaiting exposition?Given such questions, it was a relatively modest step to wonder whether thehumanists—who were prolific writers of crusade literature at the same timeas they were insistent spokesmen for an increasingly coherent notion of the“Western heritage”—might be the missing link.

There may be some truth to the picture that this new literature paints ofhumanist Orientalism; as noted above, the humanists certainly did see theOttomans—whose essentially nomadic origins in central Asia were no secretto any educated reader or diplomat in the fifteenth century—as somehow less

32 John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens, Europe and the Islamic World: AHistory (Princeton, 2012), ch. 3.

33 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World,1492–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 3.

34 Cf. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Wood-stock, NY, 2008); as well as the judicious comments of Suzanne L. Marchand, Ger-man Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge,2009).

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civilized in their alleged disregard for antiquity and antiquities, a fact whichmade the Ottoman conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1453 that muchmore traumatic for Italian humanists. The Ottoman-Italian encounter, how-ever, was only one piece of the larger story of the premodern Mediterranean,and one cannot help but register the presence of quite a different strain ofOrientalism if one looks instead at texts like Martire’s Legatio Babylonicawhich emerged from the most mature phase of the Spanish-Mamluk rela-tionship. In contrast to the Saıdian Western chauvinism which Bisaha andothers have discovered in the Italian Renaissance, Spanish humanism wasmolded by its encounter with the Mamluks to take a more nuanced andrelativist view of the politics, culture, and society of the Levant.

It is plain to see why Spain’s immersion in Mamluk affairs should haveignited a unique tradition of Orientalist scholarship within Spain. For onething, the Egyptian venture prompted the foundation of a number of cus-tomized institutions designed to produce knowledge about the Levant. Be-cause the terms of their partnership required more regular diplomatic con-tact than that which extraordinary embassies could fulfill, the Spanish quicklycreated or groomed a diverse array of permanent and semi-permanent in-stitutions charged not only with representing Iberian interests in the NearEast, but also with shuttling people and information back and forth betweenthe Levant and Europe. A complete list of these institutions would includenot only the Catalan consulates in Alexandria and Damascus, but also rene-gades like the (perhaps Sephardic?) convert Taghriberdi, who translated onbehalf of Spanish and Italian ambassadors to the Mamluk court ca. 1500,and the Franciscan Custodia Terrae Sanctae, which may have been evenmore effective than the consulate at protecting Western travelers and trans-shipping intelligence from the Levant to Spain via the Franciscan house ofAracoeli in Rome.35 So successful, in fact, were the Franciscans at negotiat-ing their relationship with both the Mamluks and their Iberian patrons thatby the late fifteenth century they had become the ambassadors of choice ofboth sides.

These institutions and actors carried much more than diplomatic dis-patches or gifts to and fro; they also arrived in European and North Africanports carrying valuable cultural information. As Wikileaks has so pungentlyreminded us, even in our modern age diplomacy is always first and foremosta matter of understanding the idiosyncrasies, mores, and foibles of one’scounterparts at various levels of specificity, individual as well as cultural.The medieval and early modern Spanish monarchies understood this well,and the Aragonese in particular developed an unprecedented regimen of

35 On Taghriberdi, see John Wansbrough, “A Mamluk Ambassador to Venice in913/1507,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies 26 (1963), 503–530. On renegades more generally, see Bartolome Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar,Les Chretiens d’Allah: l’histoire extraordinaire des renegats, XVIe et XVIIe siecles(Paris, 1989).

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intelligence gathering that married information gleaned from the forced in-terrogation of merchants returning from the East with the information thatcould be harvested from the many pilgrimage guides that proliferated in thefourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.36 From the reign of Pere III (r.1276–1285) forward the royal library in Barcelona made a point of acquiringeditions and translations of practically the whole corpus of medieval travelwriting, a tradition which Ferdinand and Isabel continued through to theend of the Mamluk alliance. When Petro Martire d’Anghiera passed throughBarcelona on his way to Cairo in the autumn of 1501, he was able to con-sult a list of strategically relevant books that included the German pilgrimBernard von Breydenbach’s encyclopedic Itinerarium through Egypt andthe Holy Land (1486) in the handsome Castilian translation produced byMartire’s colleague Martın Martınez de Ampies with royal patronage threeyears before.37 To this harvest of Western sources Martire, when writing upand publishing an account of his own embassy in 1511, added new materialacquired directly from his experience in the Levant, including Taghriberdi’sopinions about Mamluk dress and customs, and a history of late antique andmedieval Egypt which he may have lifted from Arabic chronicles (tarıkh)provided by his hosts.38 It is not surprising, in light of these extensive con-tacts, that medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature, from the Libro delCaballero Zifar (ca. 1300) to the Viaje de Turquıa (1548) is so often set inthe Near East, and contains so many mysterious eastern characters.39

Yet, however extraordinary all of this knowledge collection and produc-tion may have been, arguably the most important factor in setting SpanishOrientalism on a different course was the unique history and demography ofSpain and Egypt themselves. Spanish humanists, after all—unlike the vastmajority of their Italian brethren—had real, lived experience with Islam, anexperience which, as Barbara Fuchs has shown, scrambled the boundariesbetween Christian and Muslim cultures to the extent that Spanish Christiansexhibited a marked “Muslim habitus” in their dress, foodways, recreation,architecture, and literary tastes.40 This habitus predisposed Spanish human-ists to take a more nuanced position on the Islamic empires of the eastern

36 Marıa Mercedes Rodrıguez Temperley, “Narrar, Informar, Conquistar: Los Viajes deJuan de Mandevilla en Aragon,” Studia Neophilologica 73 (2001), 184–196.

37 Bernhard von Breydenbach, Viaje de la tierra sancta, trans. Martın Martınez deAmpies (Zaragoza, 1498).

38 Martire, Legatio Babylonica, ff. 83r (Mamluk dress), 84r–v (Mamluk customs), and83v–84r (medieval Egypt). On other Europeans’ use of tarıkh, see Sanjay Subrah-manyam, “Intertwined Histories: Cronica and Tarıkh in the Sixteenth-Century In-dian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49 (2010), 118–145; Vincent Barletta, Deathin Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (Chicago,2010), 143–144.

39 Joaquın Gonzalez Muela, ed., Libro del caballero Zifar (Madrid, 1982); FernandoGarcıa Salinero, ed., Viaje de Turquıa, 5th ed. (Madrid, 2000).

40 Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early ModernSpain (Philadelphia, 2009).

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Mediterranean, preparing them to accept the Mamluks as legitimate part-ners (in a genealogical and civilizational, as well as constitutional, sense).While the impact of this unconscious habitus is visible among fourteenth-and fifteenth-century letrados like Juan de Segovia (d. 1458), it is perhapsmost striking in texts composed in the 1490s and thereafter, once Spanish hu-manists and courtiers had become more self-aware about their own culturalhybridity.41 Only within this particularly Iberian cultural matrix can one re-ally understand comments like Pietro Martire’s apparently “Orientalizing”observation that the Mamluk elite who attended his diplomatic audiencesin Cairo sat on the floor “like our women” (nostrarum foeminarum more).42

Such observations were intended to play a benign, ethnographic function nomore pernicious than Martire’s proximate comment that the portals of thecitadel of Cairo resembled those of Granada’s familiar Alhambra;43 in Span-ish texts, at least, there is no reason to overinterpret them as signals of alatent desire to deprecate or “other” the East by comparison with ChristianEurope.

The Mamluks, for their part, also scrambled the neat categories of Muslimand barbarian which other historians claim to have found in European dis-course. The example of Egypt, both ancient and early modern, played a vitalrole in the shaping of Renaissance notions of the progress of civilization andculture. Pharaonic Egypt—birthplace of the ancient sage Hermes Trismegis-tos and the exotic queen Cleopatra, and home to one of the greatest andmost mysterious civilizations of antiquity—fascinated European humanistsand antiquarians from Marsilio Ficino to Athanasius Kircher, its venerablewisdom begging to be decanted from its magical hieroglyphic code.44 Bycomparison with their reactions to the parvenu Ottomans, whose nomadicorigins were well known in the fifteenth century, Renaissance humanistswould have found it preposterous to fit the venerable antiquity of Egyptinto an Orientalist rubric which classified all Eastern societies as crude oruncivilized.45

Spanish scholarship is essentially invisible in the recent histories of Re-naissance Egyptology published by Brian Curran and Daniel Stolzenberg,and it is fair to say that even Pietro Martire—let alone the dozens ofless humanistically-inclined diplomats who served alongside of him—was

41 Anne Marie Wolf, Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslimsin the Fifteenth Century (Notre Dame, IN, 2014).

42 Martire, Legatio Babylonica, f. 82v.43 ibid., f. 82r.44 Anthony Grafton, “The Ancient City Restored: Archaeology, Ecclesiastical History,

and Egyptology,” in Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA,2001), 31–61; Brian A. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of AncientEgypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago, 2007); Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton,Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

45 cf. Miguel Moran Turina, La memoria de las piedras: anticuarios, arqueologos y colec-cionistas de antiguedades en la Espana de los Austrias (Madrid, 2010).

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far from an expert or dispassionate student of Egyptian antiquities. Mar-tire’s ignorance of ancient Egypt, even by the modest standards of the six-teenth century, provides some of the more comedic moments in his variousdispatches from Egypt. Soon after arriving in Egypt, for example, Martiredispatched a letter to his friend Pedro Fajardo in which he speculated thatthe port city of Alexandria “must not have been a very distinguished citybefore the time of Alexander the Great,” for he had found nary a singlepyramid, and only one obelisk, “and they say that all of Egypt’s ancientcities are just full of marvelous pyramids, mausoleums, and obelisks.”46

Yet—as the several early modern editions and translations of his Lega-tio Babylonica suggest—Martire (and the accumulated Iberian database ofknowledge he transmitted) certainly was a key link in the chain which unitedthe earliest, rather mystical and ecstatic, generations of “Renaissance Egyp-tologists” like Marsilio Ficino, Annius of Viterbo, and Cyriac of Anconawith the more mature scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies, when (as Stolzenberg has noted) scholars began to discard some ofthe wilder notions they had harbored about the primordial wisdom buriedin hieroglyphics and began to look at the material culture of ancient Egyptwith fresh eyes.47 At the very least, Martire’s antiquarian pursuits oftendemonstrate a firm commitment to empirical observation whenever logisticsallowed. While resident in Cairo, where was left to languish in the houseof his interpreter for several months while the Mamluk bureaucracy chore-ographed audiences and prepared formal agreements, Martire seized the op-portunity to visit the Great Pyramids at Giza. He measured and studiedthem in some detail, and—his interest piqued by the story of a North Africanscholar’s discovery of a secret portal on one of the faces—he likely becamethe first European traveler to make a serious attempt to penetrate to theinterior of the great pyramids of Giza, sending several of his men down a con-cealed shaft to confirm (for the first time since antiquity) that the pyramidswere, in fact, tombs.48

Spain’s Egyptian embassies thus provided at least some European hu-manists the opportunity to make unfiltered assessments of North Africa’sdistant past. Where Martire’s, and his fellow humanists’, lack of dogmatismconcerning Egypt’s “oriental” civilization is even more apparent, however,is in their responses to the Mamluk society and culture of their own time.The contemporary Egypt of the Mamluks offered Europeans not only access

46 Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Opus epistolarum Petri Martyris Anglerij Mediolanensisprotonotarij aplici atque a consilijs rerum Indicarum (Alcala de Henares, 1530), ep.234.

47 Curran, Egyptian Renaissance; Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: AthanasiusKircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, 2013).

48 Martire, Legatio Babylonica, f. 89r–v.

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to a lucrative trade in eastern spices and luxury goods,49 but also the oppor-tunity to observe and analyze the spectacle of an elective empire ruled by aforeign slave caste, a form of political organization which engrossed Machi-avelli, Guicciardini, and a host of other humanist political commentators.50

The fact that Martire—not to mention subsequent Iberian humanists likeLuis del Marmol Carvajal (1520–1600), author of an unusually penetrating

and well-informed Descripcion general de Africa, sus guerras y vicisitudes(1573–1599)—were so keenly aware of the Mamluks’ Circassian, Christianorigins meant (again) that they would find it extremely difficult to render asimplistic verdict on the quality of “Islamic” civilization.51 (In fact, the samewas true of Spanish responses to the Ottomans, whom they also conceivedas a complicated, multi-ethnic, multi-faith empire.)

Returning to Martire’s Legatio Babylonica, the effect of Spain’s long ex-perience of the Levant on its humanists’ analyses of the internal dynamics ofMamluk state and society is clear. As previously noted, Martire arrived inEgypt just after the conclusion of a five-year-long civil war, and the Sultanwho emerged victorious (Qans.uh al-Ghawrı [r. 1501–1516]) still had a fairlytenuous grip on power which depended upon him taking (or at least seemingto take) a hard line with the Mamluks’ “infidel” suitors in Europe.52 Tour-ing the ruined and desolate neighborhoods of Alexandria, Martire—every bitthe humanist lover of antiquity—was moved to tears by the contemporarystate of Alexander the Great’s foundation.

Oh, sorrow! What once was the most illustrious, grandest,most populous, handsomest, and most opulent of cities, seatof the Ptolemies, lay in ruins, upon which I wept. It was,for the most part, a desert. Oh, sad spectacle! Oh, misfor-tune! What great walls! What ample avenues, and in whata state of desolation! What an awe-inspiring sight, that ofits houses rising to meet the skies! . . . And yet, as we passedthrough, we could see that the interiors of its buildings wereall reduced to ashes. I was offered various explanations forthe extent of the destruction: some attributed it to a plague;others blamed the wars and civil unrest; some think thatthe principal cause of the devastations was the cruelty of

49 Ashtor, Levant Trade; Paul H. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the MedievalImagination (New Haven, 2008); Francisco Javier Apellaniz Ruiz de Galarreta, Pou-voir et finance en Mediterranee pre-moderne: le deuxieme etat mamelouk et le com-merce des epices (1382–1517) (Barcelona, 2009).

50 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago,1998), 82 [ch. XIX]; Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, ed. and trans. SidneyAlexander (Princeton, 1984), 299 [bk. XIII].

51 Miguel Angel de Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes y del norte de frica enla Espana de los siglos XVI y XVII. Los caracteres de una hostilidad (Madrid, 1989),92.

52 See Robert Irwin, “The Political Thinking of the ‘Virtuous Ruler,’ Qans.uh al-Ghawrı,” Mamluk Studies Review 12 (2008), 37–49; Petry, Protectors or Praetorians.

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the kings and the terrible foreign tyranny . . . : for all of theSultans robbed the inhabitants of Alexandria, for—with theexception of Damascus—it was the chief emporium of all ofthe Sultan’s kingdoms and the seat of all his affairs; and theSultans despoiled them like so many sheep. With the aid ofsecret informants, they even confiscate many of their sub-jects’ fortunes by force of torture and suffering for no otherreason than this: “we want your money.” Because of this,all of the merchants (and all of the rich citizens, whateverthe source of their fortunes) who live here live in fear dayand night, fearing for their lives because they are reputed tobe wealthy. Consumed by this great uncertainty, they live adisgraceful life. This is why there is little trade at this time,because all of the merchants pretend to be poor, living anddressing more modestly than is customary so as not to at-tract attention.53

This is not a flattering portrait, to be sure; but it is hardly a precociousarticulation of the pernicious trope of “Oriental despotism,” either. Martiredid not blame the desolation he witnessed on the defective quality of Islamiccivilization, lamenting its inability to appreciate history and culture in thesame way that some of his Italian and central European counterparts mighthave done.54 Rather, he saw it (accurately) as an example of shoddy gov-ernance, the predictable consequence of a mistaken fiscal and tariff policyon the part of a Mamluk regime which was overextended trying to protectits frontiers from the Ottomans and Safavids and its seaborne trade fromPortuguese incursions into the Indian Ocean.55 If anything, the Muslim in-habitants of Alexandria and Cairo—who “pass their lives without glory andin silence, their efforts channeled exclusively into manufacturing and trade—struck Martire as capable of an economic and cultural Renaissance of theirown should their crisis of governance relent.56

Martire’s contemporaries would have picked up on a parallel in his analy-ses that is almost certainly lost on modern readers: namely, that the visionof Egypt which one obtains from the Legatio Babylonica appears almost in-distinguishable Martire’s native Italy at the very moment of his embassy,convulsed by the aftermath of the French invasion of 1494 and the lackof political will and fellow-feeling which Martire often decried in its rulingclasses. Only slightly more than a decade prior to his Egyptian embassy,Martire had been quite explicit about Italy’s failures in the letters which he

53 Martire, Legatio Babylonica, f. 80v.54 Wunder, “Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities.”55 On the Mamluks’ fiscal woes, see David Ayalon, “Some Remarks on the Economic

Decline of the Mamluk Sultanate,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 16 (1993),108–124; Petry, Protectors or Praetorians; but also the revision of Apellaniz Ruiz deGalarreta, Pouvoir et finance.

56 Martire, Legatio Babylonica, f. 84r.

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wrote to friends as he prepared to begin his career anew in Spain. To hispowerful protector Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, he lamented the fact that Italy,though “tranquil on the surface,” “on the interior—to its own ruination—the country meanders along in suffering,” “rent by opposing tendencies;” somuch “discord reigns among its leaders,” he averred, that he “doubted” itwould ever “recover its senses.”57 To his old tutor, Giovanni Borromeo, Mar-tire was even more blunt: “I saw the affairs of Italy going from bad to worseday by day, as a result of the dissensions and rivalries among the powerful. . . .”

This was a perspective which Martire’s adoptive homeland could under-stand equally as well, as Castile and Aragon themselves had been in pre-cipitous decline for much of the century prior to Ferdinand and Isabel’sascension to their respective thrones. Martire’s fellow humanist HieronymusMunzer, who paused for audiences with the Catholic Monarchs while tour-ing Spain in 1494–1495, summarized things nicely. Medieval Iberia, he inti-mated, “seemed almost fractured, drowned, and destroyed by intestine wars,hidden hatreds, and private interests.” It was a land adrift: held hostage byinfidels, fragmented politically into hostile kingdoms, ravaged by civil wars,and dominated by an incorrigible nobility unchecked by a series of weakmonarchs. Now, however, Munzer saw nothing but promise. Fernando andIsabel’s strong, centralizing monarchy allowed Spain “to pass from the great-est discord to such a peaceful, tranquil, and prosperous state” such that it“fills the princes and nobility of [Munzer’s native] Germany with admira-tion.” “The glory of the deeds Your Majesties have carried out,” declaimedMunzer, “is known throughout the globe.”58 The Spanish Monarchy, in otherwords, was superior to that of its Mamluk ally; it was strong and dynamic,in contrast to Egypt’s supine and dilapidated state. Spain was on an up-ward trajectory; Egypt on a downward one. But these differences could allbe explained—indeed, Martire did explain them—as a function of the poli-cies and financial circumstances of the two states, which neither he nor hissovereigns ever doubted were peers. In short, Spain’s diplomatic engage-ment with Mamluk Egypt had created the conditions in which humanistslike Martire—or Machiavelli—could articulate a contingent view of civiliza-tional development that did not distinguish between East and West, butrather only between stronger and weaker governments, and more and lessdynamic societies.

Indeed, one of the most significant features of Renaissance humanism—which coupled a fierce interest in what we would now call the disciplineof comparative politics, stimulated by the recovery of texts like Aristotle’sPolitics and Xenophon’s description of the Spartan polity, with a new dis-position towards the vita activa et civile—is its elaboration of a flexibleor broadly applicable lexicon with which to talk analytically about social

57 Martire, Opus epistolarum, ep. 1.58 Hieronymus Mnzer, “Itinerarium Hispanicum Hieronymi Monetarii (1494–1495),” ed.

Ludwig Pfandl, Revue Hispanique 48 (1920): 4–144, here at 127–129.

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and political hierarchies and the variability of constitutional arrangementsacross polities.59 Within this classical lexicon, Islamic governance and cul-tural customs could appear perfectly neutral to a humanist like Martire,mere habits characteristic of different civilizations. At best, they could bequite noble: Martire was genuinely impressed, for example, by Taghriberdi’sclaim that the Mamluks wore heavy and awkward headgear for the purposeof inculcating decorum in their courtiers.60

* * *

By the time Pietro Martire departed Cairo, in the spring of 1502, theMamluk-Iberian axis that organized much of the travel and commerce be-tween late medieval or Renaissance Europe and the Levant was alreadydrawing to a close. To some extent, Spain’s Iberian neighbor Portugal pre-cipitated the end of the relationship. In approximately a decade, between1496–1506, the Portuguese managed to wreak irreparable damage on theEgyptian economy by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, establishing trad-ing posts in India and East Africa, and siphoning off a prodigious amount ofthe revenues which the Mamluk regime expected to earn by virtue of Egypt’sfortunate position astride the spice routes which had connected the IndianOcean to the Mediterranean.61 Alexandria, which had transshipped approx-imately four million Venetian pounds (libbre sottili) of spices per year asrecently as 1496–1497, was receiving only a quarter of that amount—some1.1 million pounds per year—by the time Martire departed the city for Spainin mid-1502, a drop of more than seventy percent. In Beirut, another keyport under Mamluk control, the decline was even worse, in the neighbor-hood of eighty-five percent.62 In the absence of the lucrative customs dutieswhich disappeared into the holds of Portuguese ships, the Mamluks foundit increasingly difficult to mount an effective defense against either theirnew Iberian or old Ottoman rivals. The Ottomans were relatively slow tocapitalize on the Mamluks’ new vulnerability, as their hands were tied until1514 by war with the Safavid Empire of Persia. In 1516, however, the Ot-toman Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) ordered his troops to move south fromAnatolia into Mamluk Syria; by January 1517, Egypt had fallen as well, andthe Spanish Monarchy’s oldest and most intimate partner in the Near Easthad vanished.

59 Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe(Cambridge, 1990); James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern PoliticalThought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye(Cambridge, 1996), 118–141.

60 See n. 38 above.61 Petry, Protectors or Praetorians, 4960.62 C.H.H. Wake, “The Volume of European Spice Imports at the Beginning and End of

the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 15 (1986), 621–635,here at 633.

22 ADAM G BEAVER

The Spanish experience of Egypt, captured in complex and ambivalentnarratives like Martire’s, challenges several of the most confident conclu-sions to have come out of the current wave of scholarship on Renaissanceviews of the East. For one thing, it is far from clear that more than a hand-ful of fifteenth-century European scholars defined and codified the bound-ary between “West” and “East” in the terms of civilization and barbarism,progress and stasis, virtue and decadence that constitute the fundamentalpolarities undergirding Edward Saıd’s definition of “Orientalism.” Spanishhumanists, who encountered Islam on a quotidian basis at home, and whoseprimary point of contact with the “Muslim East” was the Mamluk empire,tended to relate to the polities of the East in terms that were markedly morepragmatic, and less ideological, than those which we find in the crusadingsermons of the papal court. One searches in vain for a category approximat-ing “Islamic civilization” in Spanish literature about the East; when authorslike Martire did try to explain the ascent and decline of Muslim regimes, theydid so in the same vocabulary which they used to understand “European”states. The legitimacy of Egypt’s Mamluk rulers depended upon their abilityto make good on their treaties, not on their appreciation of classical culture.

In this regard, at least, Spain’s interactions with the Muslim powers of theLevant were similar to those of the Venetians, who also cultivated a prag-matic modus vivendi with the Mamluks and Ottomans. Yet ultimately theSpanish were not like the Venetians, either. While the Venetians sought toconduct their diplomatic affairs in isolation from their religious preferences,that Spanish kingdoms conducted their diplomacy precisely in terms of re-ligious difference, layering their economic and military interactions with theMamluks on top of a Catholic framework staffed by Franciscan friars andostensibly dedicated to the preservation of the pilgrim, rather than the spice,trade. Insofar as Spanish intervention in the Mediterranean fostered “cos-mopolitanism,” it was a cosmopolitanism undergirded by an elaborate set ofinstitutions designed to facilitate certain kinds of boundary crossing whilequashing others.