The Ugly Renaissance (52 page)

From time to time, however, the accidents of proximity could throw up rare but extraordinary occasions for cultural interaction between Christians and Muslims that transcended the limits of commerce and conflict. Echoing the tale of Filippo Lippi’s capture and enslavement, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan—a Spanish-born Muslim raised in Fez and better known as
Leo Africanus—was offered as a gift to
Pope Leo X after being seized by pirates in the early sixteenth century. In Rome, Leo Africanus acquiesced in attempts to convert him to Christianity and provided a valuable, firsthand insight into the character of the Arabic language and his native Islamic faith. With notable care, he
completed
a Latin translation of the Koran for
Egidio da Viterbo and wrote an Arabic translation of the Pauline epistles for Alberto Pio.

But if high-profile individuals went back and forth between East and West with increasing ease and frequency during the Renaissance, there was also a more mundane—though no less important—exchange of personnel.
The reignition of the slave trade in Italy served to make Muslims of all stripes seem a good deal less “foreign” to Renaissance Italians. Indeed, by virtue of the vicissitudes of conquest and trade agreements, the overwhelming majority of the slaves trafficked across the eastern Mediterranean were Muslim, and it was by this route that many well-to-do merchant households in northern Italy came to own a Muslim slave. While the status of slaves in Italian society perhaps precluded any meaningful exchange of ideas and customs, the fact of an
Islamic presence—of whatever legal character—helped to rob the peoples of the East of some of the mystique with which they had previously been surrounded, and made their dress, habits, and language more familiar to Italian society.

From the early fourteenth century onward, trade, diplomacy, politics, war, and even coincidence all conspired to bring Islam—and especially the culture of the
Ottoman Empire—into sharper focus than ever before. Knowledge of the Muslim world was growing exponentially, and it was not long before an appreciation of the Near and Middle East began to make itself felt both in literature and in the visual arts.
Particularly due to its commercial links to the eastern Mediterranean,
Venice was especially receptive to Islamic influences, and although it is perhaps harder to uncover the precise trajectory of cultural transmission than some have supposed, it is certainly not difficult to sense a palpable effort to integrate the forms and motifs of Muslim buildings into the architectural fabric of the Serene Republic. In the tracery of palatial windows along the Grand Canal and in the haunting interior spaces of San Marco can be found a willingness to absorb, assimilate, and transform the artistic achievements of the Islamic world. So, too, with painting. Even from the portraits painted by
Bellini and
Costanzo da Ferrara, it can be seen that Italian art began to show a much greater enthusiasm for both the inclusion and the accurate representation of Muslims from the Near and Middle East, be they Ottoman courtiers, Mamluk soldiers, or Timurid subjects. In
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco the
Martyrdom of the Franciscans
for the church of San Francesco
in Siena, for example, care has been taken to depict both Mediterranean Moors and the Tartars who had recently conquered the port of Tana in as realistic a manner as possible. Later, Gentile and
Giovanni
Bellini’s
Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria
(Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), painted in ca. 1504–7 (
Fig. 38
), is—despite its conscious echoes of Venetian architecture—the product of an assiduous study and appreciation of Muslim costume and mores. But the impact of Christian-Muslim cultural exchange can also be detected in more varied and subtle features of the visual arts.
In a refreshingly daring and original study,
Lisa Jardine and
Jerry Brotton have, for example, detected strong signs that the equestrian art of the Renaissance was as heavily influenced by contact with the
Islamic world as it was by a knowledge of classical sculpture. Yet one of the most intriguing—and perhaps unexpected—instances of the open-minded assimilation of Islamic influences is provided by
the appearance of
oriental carpets in Italian paintings. From the fourteenth century onward, growing contact with the Near and Far East led artists to integrate depictions of Persian and Turkish floor coverings into their scenes as an indication of the status of the subject or the location of the drama. Works such as
Carlo Crivelli’s
Annunciation
,
Piero della Francesca’s
Montefeltro Altarpiece
, and
Lorenzo Lotto’s
Alms of Saint Anthony
, for example, all feature richly decorated oriental rugs of various types and seem to testify to a genuine sense of a positive meeting of cultures.

C
LASH OF
C
IVILIZATIONS

But if the growth of knowledge and cultural exchange evidenced by such artistic representations of the Muslim East has led some scholars to posit that the Renaissance witnessed the collapse of negative, “orientalist” attitudes toward the Islamic world, and the fragmentation of earlier prejudices, the veneer of tolerance was only wafer thin. Behind the facade of openness and assimilation lurked a degree of
intolerance toward and hatred for Islamic culture that far surpassed anything that had been witnessed before. Indeed, “
Renaissance thinkers adopted an attitude toward Muslims that was more hostile on the whole than was that of their medieval predecessors.”

As with the Jews, the fundamental obstacle to the acceptance of Muslims as true cultural partners was religion, and this fact alone facilitated the perpetuation of earlier prejudices. However much or little individual
humanists knew about the details of Islamic theology, they were fully conscious that Muslims denied the divinity of Christ, and as such perceived Islam’s very existence to strike at the heart of all that they held dear. Indeed, for precisely this reason, humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries felt justified not only in likening Islam to the greatest heresies in history (Judaism and Arianism) but also in attacking Muhammad himself as being a vicious, lust-driven adulterer hell-bent on sin and deviance.
In the
De vita solitaria
, for example, Petrarch condemned the Prophet as “an adulterous and licentious fellow,” a “wicked, infamous robber,” a “butcher,” the “creator of a wicked superstition,” the author of “poisonous teaching,” and “an accomplished voluptuary and an instigator of every obscene lust.” Writing a century later, Pope Pius II offered a yet more ludicrous and critical view of the origins of the Islamic faith that missed not a single opportunity to tarnish it with the stain of heresy and sin. Pius not only drew attention to the Prophet’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity but also asserted that

Muhammad [was] an Arab steeped in gentile error and Jewish perfidy, who received instruction in the Nestorian and Arian heresies. He advanced his fortunes by seducing a rich widow and grew notorious for his infidelities; his reputation attracted a band of brigands to his side, and with their help he made himself lord of the Arabs. Acquainted as he was with the Old and New Testaments, he perverted them both; he had the effrontery to call himself a prophet … He cast such a spell over this primitive nation that he was able to persuade them to abandon Christ the Savior and accept instead the new religion he devised for them. To this end he employed magic spells and tricks and gave his sanction to sex in all sorts of unspeakable combinations; by these means he easily seduced the common people, who are slaves to sensual pleasure.

Not merely a false prophet, but also a heresiarch, a witch, a thief, a tyrant, and a sexual deviant, Muhammad was also, Pius and his contemporaries believed, the source of all that was opposed to the Christian religion and the purest evidence that all Muslims were “enemies of the Cross.” The sins of the Prophet were, by implication, the sins of his believers: to condemn one was to condemn all.

Whereas the coexistence of Christians and Muslims in the crusader states of the Middle Ages had predisposed many medieval historians to make a careful study of Islamic history in both its religious and its secular forms, the Renaissance humanists’ interest in writing the history of the Muslim peoples was not matched by a comparable interest in acquiring a reliable understanding of the Muslim past. Despite the massive amounts of knowledge at their disposal, early-fifteenth-century historians such as
Andrea Biglia and
Flavio Biondo “
took little interest in the accuracy or even the historical plausibility of the narratives of Islamic history they constructed.” Their objective was not scholarly but polemical, and their tone was vituperative in the extreme. They sought simply to use pseudo-history to present Muslims—especially the Mamluks and the Ottomans—as barbaric, almost subhuman peoples who embodied the very opposite of civilization, and who existed simply for the sake of inflicting cruelty and suffering. Brushing aside both the evidence of eyewitness testimonies and the accounts found in classical treatises, the humanists took the very worst fantasies from medieval texts, stripped away anything that was balanced or reasonable, and amplified the bad with a liberal dose of bile. Thus, even a figure such as
Niccolò Sagundino—who had actually spent some time in Ottoman society—could ignore his own experience and instead depict the Turks as a people who had
always
been evil, barbaric, and savage. For the humanists of the age, there was no such thing as a good Muslim, and there never had been, either.

T
O THE
D
EATH

Renaissance humanists were filled with a burning desire to rekindle the flames of the crusading movement, and longed to recapture
Jerusalem from the Egyptian Mamluks. Throughout the early fourteenth century, the idea of launching a new crusade had been mooted by various European powers on several occasions—most notably by King Philip IV of France, who claimed he wanted to swap France for Jerusalem—but because of their unusually strong links with the East, the early humanists soon began to take the lead in whipping up popular agitation for brutal reprisals against the Muslims. In the wake of calls announced at the Council of Vienne, for example, a Venetian merchant named
Marino Sanudo Torsello presented Pope John XXII with a copy of his
recently completed
Liber secretorum fidelium crucis
(
The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross
) in 1321. Bursting with pious exhortations and virulent hatred, the treatise explained the need for the “
protection of the faithful, the conversion and destruction of the infidel, and the acquisition and retention of the Holy Land.” It struck a chord. Within a very few years, humanists up and down Italy were calling for a fresh expedition against the Islamic occupiers of the Holy City.
Petrarch was among the most enthusiastic. Despite having passed up an opportunity to go on a pilgrimage to the Levant, he vented his pent-up fury at the Islamic faith in a lengthy digression in the
De vita solitaria
aimed at stirring Europe’s Catholic princes into crusading action.
Berating kings and potentates for being unmoved by Jerusalem’s plight, he lamented that Christianity’s “holy places” were being “trampled on” and “mangled with impunity by the Egyptian dog,” and mourned that “impious feet” were “insulting the sanctuary of Jesus Christ.” Overlooking the fact that this was patently untrue—the Mamluks being tolerant of Christians and respectful of Christian sites, many of which they themselves venerated—Petrarch urged all Europe to rise up in a mighty campaign to wipe out the “stain” of Islam from the Holy Land. It was a dream later shared and elaborated by Petrarch’s great admirer
Coluccio Salutati. Extending his gaze to encompass the Ottomans as well as the Mamluks, Salutati agitated for an even more ambitious crusade headed by both pope and emperor. As the Ottomans advanced steadily throughout Anatolia and around the Sea of Marmara, he came to believe that the Holy Land should be recovered as a matter of extreme urgency, and that the Christian nations of the world should unite in exterminating the Muslim threat before it reached any further.
Unless something were done, he warned, the “vile” enemies of the cross would soon threaten Italy itself.

Salutati was ahead of the curve. The Muslims were indeed on the march. The Ottoman advance through Anatolia, the Near East, and the Balkans soon brought the humanistic hatred of Islam into sharp focus. For the first time since the early Middle Ages, a powerful Islamic state seemed to threaten the territorial integrity of Western Christendom, and the risk of Europe being conquered by the Muslims appeared to be a very real possibility. The Council of Florence in 1439—memorialized by Gozzoli’s
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
—had been a last-ditch attempt to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches in the hope of providing
a united Christian front to meet the Turkish onslaught. But the fall of Constantinople in 1453 illustrated the magnitude of the threat and the futility of such theological quibbling. The capital of Rome’s first Christian emperor had been lost to the infidel after more than a thousand years. As the last vestiges of the Roman Empire tumbled to the ground, shock waves swept throughout Italy. Action, the humanists felt, was needed. Now. The earlier desire to avenge the inglorious failure of the crusading movement metamorphosed into a broader longing to crush the Ottoman Empire by whatever means necessary, or Italy might be next.

Almost immediately after his coronation in 1455, Callixtus III began “to prepare himself to support Christendom, which, it was seen, was about to be oppressed by the Turks.” To this end, preachers such as Fra
Giovanni da Napoli,
Michele Carcano, Fra
Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce, and San
Bernardino of Siena were sent throughout Italy “
to persuade princes and peoples to arm themselves on behalf of their religion and to support an undertaking against the common enemy with their money and their persons.”
Although this ultimately came to nothing, the baton was taken up with greater fervor by Callixtus’s successor, Pius II. Claiming that Mehmed the Conqueror aspired “
to rule all of Europe” and “to stamp out the holy gospel and sacred law of Christ,” Pius sought to unite all of Christendom for the sacred task of conquering the Turks, and it was for the sole purpose of announcing the war that a diet was convened in
Mantua in 1459. Reminding the princes present that “
once the Hungarians were conquered, the Germans, Italians, and indeed all Europe would be subdued, a calamity that must bring with it the destruction of [the Christian] faith,” Pius did his best to impress upon them the urgent religious need for an immediate campaign against the Ottoman Turks.