Gerald MacLean

Introduction: Re-Orienting the Renaissance

Re-Orienting the Renaissance seeks to shift the angles from which we regard those unprecedented developments in learning and the arts that it is generally agreed occurred throughout western Europe between the late thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. From differing perspectives and from different kinds of evidence, the authors of this book show how a nineteenth-century term, ‘Renaissance’, has often encouraged us to forget just how many of the artistic, social, religious, philosophical, scientific, technical and cultural developments that distinguished the period depended upon the movement and exchange of ideas, skills and goods between what have come to be thought of as separate spheres: East and West. Had it not been for the importation of eastern goods and skills, many of the achievements most commonly associated with the European Renaissance would not have occurred; had it not been for continuing cultural rivalry among Christian and Muslim princes and aristocrats to display their wealth and magnificence in ways that others would understand and perhaps even emulate or envy, many of the artistic achievements of the period might not have taken the forms they did. In chapters ranging from Ottoman history to Venetian publishing, from portraits of St George to Arab philosophy, from cannibalism to diplomacy, the authors interrogate what all too often seem to be settled certainties, such as the clear border demarcating East from West, the inevitability of conflict between Islam and Christianity, and the regeneration of European civilisation nourished entirely by taproots in classical Greece and imperial Rome.

Introduction: on the road in Anatolia, and beyond

For millennia, Anatolia has been peculiarly synonymous with human travel. Anatolia is the Asian landmass resembling a horses head thrusting into Europe, and the heartland of modern Turkey. This special issue of Studies in Travel Writing introduces new perspectives and archives for the study of travel in the domains of the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. Written history began in Anatolia, and it was a history written by travellers: from the production of clay tablets by Assyrian merchants enabling and recording commercial transactions across a vast network centred on Kültepe, near modern Kayseri, to war records, Ottoman administrative reports, accounts by churchmen, pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, adventurers, archaeologists and the inventors of the ‘Blue Cruise’. The introduction lays out a framework for understanding changes in the technology and practice of travel from the earliest records to Ottoman imperial systems and Republican modernisation: from stamp seals to Evliya Çelebi, Irfan Orga, the ‘Fisherman of Halicarnassus’ and Orhan Pamuk. Revising the usual focus in Western scholarship by including new genres, archives and perspectives within the purview of travel writing, this special issue opens up new possibilities for further exploration.

Learn Of A Turk

Despite continuing suspicion, fear and even hostility, English attitudes toward the Ottoman Turks and Muslim culture more generally changed considerably during the Long Restoration. By the 1620s, the English had become the major trading partner with the Ottomans and influential players at the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The story of the execution of sultan Osman II in 1622 greatly shocked English statesmen at the time and would later be recalled to parallel the execution of Charles I in 1649, used to exemplify advice to Charles II in 1660, and would still be on the mind of Samuel Richardson when writing Pamela. The Ottoman Turks were not simply others but models by which the English framed their own self-representations while seeking and building an empire of their own. Spurred by imperial ambitions, English envy of the Ottomans produced not only political parallels but also some remarkable fantasies of Anglo-Ottoman filiation.