Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World 1600-1800 9781442686854

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: THINKING WITH BRAUDEL
Chapter one. The Problem of Unbelief in Braudel’s Mediterranean
Chapter two. Braudel and the Mediterranean City
PART II: THINKING BEYOND BRAUDEL
Chapter three. A Mediterranean Culture of Factions? Bilateral Factionalism in the Greater Mediterranean Region in the Pre-Modern Era
Chapter four. Polyglottism in the Ottoman Empire: A Reconsideration
Chapter five. Braudel’s Eastern Mediterranean Revisited
Chapter six. Sebastianism in Theory and Practice in Early Modern Portugal
Chapter seven. Geneva by the Sea: The Reformation in Nîmes in Historiographical Context
Chapter eight. Some Thoughts on the Social and Political Culture of Baroque Venice
Chapter nine. The Algerian Economy and Cervantes’ First Work of Narrative Fiction
Chapter ten. Braudel and the Cultural History of the Mediterranean: Anthropology and Les lieux d’histoire
Chapter eleven. Il faut méditerraniser la musique: After Braudel
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

BRAUDEL REVISITED: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1600–1800

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BRAUDEL REVISITED THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1600–1800

Edited by Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

© The Regents of the University of California 2010 www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4133-4

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Braudel revisited : the Mediterranean world, 1600–1800 / edited by Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox. (UCLA Center/Clark series ; 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4133-4 1. Braudel, Fernand. 2. Braudel, Fernand. Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. 3. Mediterranean Region – History – 1517–1789. 4. Mediterranean Region – Civilization. 5. Historiography. 6. Historians – France. I. Piterberg, Gabriel, 1955– II. Ruiz, Teofilo F., 1943– III. Symcox, Geoffrey IV. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series ; 13 DE96.B73 2010

909′.0982205

C2010-900986-X

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 gabriel piterberg, teofilo f. ruiz, and geoffrey symcox PART I: THINKING WITH BRAUDEL 1 The Problem of Unbelief in Braudel’s Mediterranean lucette valensi 2 Braudel and the Mediterranean City geoffrey symcox

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PART II: THINKING BEYOND BRAUDEL 3 A Mediterranean Culture of Factions? Bilateral Factionalism in the Greater Mediterranean Region in the Pre-Modern Era 55 jane hathaway 4 Polyglottism in the Ottoman Empire: A Reconsideration leslie peirce 5 Braudel’s Eastern Mediterranean Revisited sj evket pamuk

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Contents

6 Sebastianism in Theory and Practice in Early Modern Portugal bryan givens 7 Geneva by the Sea: The Reformation in Nîmes in Historiographical Context 151 allan tulchin 8 Some Thoughts on the Social and Political Culture of Baroque Venice 177 matteo casini 9 The Algerian Economy and Cervantes’ First Work of Narrative Fiction 207 carroll b. johnson 10 Braudel and the Cultural History of the Mediterranean: Anthropology and Les lieux d’histoire 229 james amelang 11 Il faut méditerraniser la musique: After Braudel gary tomlinson Contributors Index

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Preface and Acknowledgments

We should like to record our particular debt of thanks to the many contributors who participated in the series of conferences entitled ‘Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800,’ held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, in 2002–3. Our special thanks go to the participants who rewrote their papers for inclusion in this volume, and for the admirable forbearance they have shown through the long delay in bringing this book to press. We are particularly grateful to our friend and colleague Peter Reill, the Director of the Clark Library and the UCLA Center for Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Studies, for the support and encouragement he gave us during our preparations for the conferences, and throughout the period when they were held. We extend our thanks also to the staff of the Center and the Clark Library for their indispensable administrative and logistical help, which ensured the smooth running and success of the conferences. Finally, we would like to register the sadness we felt when we learned early last year of the untimely death of our colleague Carroll Johnson, an acknowledged master in the field of Spanish literature, and a valued contributor to our discussions. The manuscript of his contribution to this volume was not completely ready for publication at the time of his death. We have revised it into final form, and wish it to serve as our modest tribute to our friend and colleague. Gabriel Piterberg Teofilo F. Ruiz Geoffrey Symcox Los Angeles, December 2009

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BRAUDEL REVISITED: THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1600–1800

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Introduction

Fernand Braudel’s monumental study of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II is undoubtedly one of the most important historical works written during the past century: indeed, a strong case can be made that it is the single most important historical work to appear in that entire span of time.1 The publication of the first edition in 1949 marked a pivotal moment that would fundamentally change the way historians thought and wrote. Braudel sparked controversy by challenging the then-accepted norms of historical practice: he expanded the scope of research into fields hitherto deemed unworthy of enquiry, counterpointing history and geography, space and time, in a seamless conceptual whole. Furthermore, his book was elegantly written, in a dense, forceful, at times poetic and evocative language. Today, almost six decades after its publication, it continues to inspire and fascinate.2 As historians whose research centres on the Mediterranean – or more specifically, on three different regions within it – we have long felt this fascination. We have each been deeply influenced by Braudel’s vision of the inland sea and the land masses bordering it as a single entity, unified by geography and climate, by commerce, and by deep-rooted cultural ties that transcended linguistic and religious divisions. Our shared enthusiasm led us in 2002–3 to organize a series of four conferences entitled Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800, which were held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles under the auspices of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies.3 The aim of these conferences was to assess Braudel’s influence on contemporary historical practice, and to see how the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his great book – its

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geohistorical plan, its comparativist approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, its timescale shifting from the longue durée to the staccato rhythm of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events – have withstood the test of time. To put it another way, we wanted to see how this masterly book has weathered the paradigm shift from social history, of which Braudel was a pioneer, to the current mode of cultural history, whose concerns and methods are very different. The articles in this volume are a selection of the papers presented at those four conferences. In their range and diversity they take their cue, though in a modest way, from the breadth and sweep of the original. As we explained in the invitation we sent to the participants, our purpose in organizing the conferences was ‘to think with and beyond Braudel.’ By this we meant re-examining the text in and of itself, looking at the different types of scholarship it had stimulated, and then reassessing it in the light of current historiographical concerns. Our volume opens with two contributions – ‘thinking with Braudel’ – that analyse the text itself, the assumptions behind it, and its intellectual resonance. Drawing on her personal knowledge of the milieu in which Braudel lived and worked, Lucette Valensi examines his book as a literary text, probing the motivations that impelled Braudel to give it its characteristic, very personal form, and the complex relationship between Braudel and the other leaders of the Annales school, from his mentors Bloch and Febvre to his contemporaries. Geoffrey Symcox analyses a central element in the book: the role Braudel assigned to the great cities of the Mediterranean, as economic engines and diffusers of what he termed ‘civilisation.’ This elusive term (also discussed by Lucette Valensi), which Braudel never defined in either edition of La Méditerranée, forms a crucial element in his concept of the Mediterranean as a single cultural sphere.4 Symcox argues that for Braudel, one of its meanings seems connected to the vibrant economic and cultural life of cities, their vitality as centres of exchange and innovation, in opposition to the inertia of their rural hinterlands. Jane Hathaway’s contribution takes the discussion ‘beyond’ Braudel, reassessing one of his basic historiographical assumptions. At the same time, it shifts the focus of the enquiry to the Ottoman empire, which Braudel attempted to integrate into his schema of a unified Mediterranean, but which he could not deal with adequately, in part because of his linguistic limitations, but also because of the undeveloped condition of early modern Ottoman historiography at the time he was writing. By

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looking at the perpetual problem of binary factionalism in Mediterranean societies, she raises the issue of politics and political culture, which Braudel only addressed as an afterthought. Although La Méditerranée had begun life as a study of Philip II’s foreign policy, under the influence of Lucien Febvre it metamorphosed into a work of social history. But Braudel never integrated his original research in political and diplomatic history into the final version, instead relegating it to the last section of the book, where it is overshadowed by the first two sections devoted to geography and the environment, and to social and economic history. Hathaway also modifies Braudel’s macrohistorical perspective, centred on the clash of empires, by emphasizing the endless local conflicts, ethnic or sectarian, that went on inside both of the Mediterranean empires, entirely unrelated to the epic struggle between Islam and Christendom. One of our concerns in planning the conferences was to pursue the path Braudel had mapped out when he began to collapse the boundaries between East and West, between Islam and Christendom, to see how later scholars picked up and developed his insight. We say ‘began to’ advisedly, because Braudel’s view here is (perhaps unconsciously) ambivalent. On the one hand, he posits a fundamental economic and cultural unity for the entire Mediterranean basin (though without defining the latter term). On the other hand, he places the conflict between Islam and Christendom at centre stage in his narration of events, at least until the great ‘turn’ he notes after about 1580, when Philip II’s attention shifted to Portugal, the Atlantic, and the Netherlands, and the Ottomans redirected their strategic energies eastwards, against Safavid Persia. Braudel’s relative ignorance of Ottoman history adds a further dimension to this problem, for it makes his treatment of western Christendom far more acute and nuanced than his treatment of the Islamic world. From her perspective as a cultural historian of the Ottoman empire, Leslie Peirce brings a critical light to bear on this issue, going ‘beyond’ Braudel and demonstrating – as do Hathaway and SJevket Pamuk – the complexity of a social and political entity that was conceived in simple, monolithic terms at the time Braudel was writing, but which later research has shown to be highly complex. Rather, she argues, we must think of it as an empire whose pluralistic, multi-ethnic – or in her word, ‘polyglot’ – nature was intrinsic, and was deliberately perpetuated by the sultans as an essential instrument of their rule. In an enquiry also centred on the Ottoman empire, but shifting focus to a revision of Braudel’s economic assumptions, SJevket Pamuk demonstrates that his concept of the Mediterranean economy relied heavily on

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the monetary theory of price inflation enunciated in the 1930s by Earl Hamilton.5 Braudel’s embrace of the Hamilton thesis greatly enhanced its authority among economic historians in the period after the Second World War, but as Pamuk demonstrates, later research has undermined the Hamilton thesis, and has thus called into question a fundamental element of Braudel’s argument. Which in turn leads to a related question (or rather an unresolved paradox): why did Braudel, who believed that economic processes were determined by the longue durée, and that the early modern Mediterranean economy was ‘immobile,’ rooted in the timeless realities of ecology, demography, and geography, accept so uncritically a monetarist explanation that contradicted his fundamental assumptions? Pamuk goes on to demonstrate how later research has completely superseded the concept of the Ottoman economy dominant at the time Braudel was writing: we can no longer define it as an archaic ‘bazaar’ economy, incapable of adaptation, condemned to irreversible decline. Until its integration into the capitalist world economy in the nineteenth century, he contends, it adjusted well to changing conditions, and the living standards of its population remained comparable to those of western Europe. The next contributions to this volume range across the cultural history of the early modern Mediterranean, in widely divergent geographical and cultural milieus. Bryan Givens examines a popular messianic movement, the cult of King Sebastian in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portugal. The young king had been killed in battle with the Moors in 1578, but it was widely believed that he had miraculously survived, that he would return to lead Portugal to glory, and would inaugurate a reign of peace and justice. Sebastianism gained a wide following after Portugal’s annexation by Philip II in 1580, and can be interpreted both as a reaction against Spanish rule and as a symptom of social tensions. Allan Tulchin anatomizes a very different religious movement, focusing on the critical moment when the Huguenots captured control of the city of Nîmes, turning it into a bastion of the Reformed religion. As with Sebastianism, the driving force behind the Reformed party at Nîmes was an alliance of popular and elite elements, united in their disgruntlement with the existing political and spiritual order. Braudel, an inveterate secularist, never broached the question of religion in La Méditerranée, apart from his use of the struggle between Cross and Crescent as its overarching (and highly conventional) organizational framework. By raising the issue of how religious movements develop, now a central concern to cultural historians, we broaden and deepen the impact of Braudel’s great work.

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Matteo Casini’s and Carroll Johnson’s contributions raise another question that Braudel never properly considered: the historical significance of the fine arts and literature. References to both recur in La Méditerranée, but as Lucette Valensi observes, one senses that Braudel saw them as epiphenomena, their function as essentially illustrative. Both of these contributions establish a direct link between artistic production and politics. Starting with an attempt to categorize how Braudel dealt with this problem, Casini goes on to take a detailed look at the public face of the plastic arts in Venice – a city that Braudel regarded as pivotal for Mediterranean commerce and culture – from the later sixteenth to the eighteenth century, demonstrating how sculpture and painting were used to glorify both the republic itself and some of its most prominent families. In his posthumously published paper, Johnson proposes a critical revision of the story of Cervantes’s captivity in Algiers, rereading the author’s own narrative in a way that suggests that, contrary to his own assertions, Cervantes behaved rather less heroically than he would later claim. As Johnson notes, the traffic in European captives, to which Braudel devoted considerable attention, and which has recently attracted a good deal of scholarly research, formed a fundamental element in the economy of Algiers and the other North African corsair provinces of the Ottoman empire.6 Cervantes was only one captive – though an extremely illustrious one – among the many thousands of Christians caught up in this traffic, which had its counterpart in the large-scale enslavement of Muslims by Christian slave-raiders such as the Knights of Malta. Our volume concludes with two reflections on Mediterranean culture, that all-pervading yet undefined presence that is central to Braudel’s grand historiographical enterprise. James Amelang re-examines Braudel’s text in search of its unstated anthropological dimensions. He shows that Braudel conceived the culture of the Mediterranean as timeless and chthonic, relying on works such as Carlo Levi’s study of southern Italian peasant culture, and revealing an unexpected affinity to the work of the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino. This deep cultural substratum forms the counterpart to the deep geohistorical structures that Braudel believed formed the foundation of the Mediterranean’s material civilization. Together, these two quasi-immobile structures conferred a profound unity on the lands bordering the inland sea: in his eyes, by comparison, the religious hostilities that divided the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century were recent, superficial, and transient. Like Amelang, Gary Tomlinson seeks to fill the cultural ‘gap’ in Braudel’s work

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by analysing a component of this fundamental unity. He proposes that we should envisage the Mediterranean as the meeting point between two very different psychic worlds, those of Eurasian shamanistic ecstasy and African possession cults. Out of the tensions inherent in this fertile convergence a rich intellectual culture emerged, which would serve as a spur to creativity and innovation in the evolution of European music, from the Renaissance down to the era of Wagner and Nietzsche. One question emerged with particular clarity from all our discussions: how to assess the lasting legacy of Braudel’s Méditerranée. Here we confronted a profound paradox, for despite its lasting renown and the homage it continues to attract, the text seems to have spawned no direct, lineal successors. True enough, its radical new approach and methodology inspired the next generation of scholars who came to be grouped in what has been called ‘the Annales school,’ which Braudel headed after the retirement of its previous leader, his mentor Lucien Febvre. But although La Méditerranée’s general influence was and remains vast and pervasive, the book itself did not become a model for later scholarship. It had few, if any, imitators. One explanation for this paradox immediately springs to mind. As Lucette Valensi argues, the book was sui generis, and thus inimitable: it was too ‘literary,’ too poetic, too much the product of Braudel’s intuition and sensibility. As its opening words made abundantly clear, it was not just a history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, but a personal testimony to the interaction between the author and his subject. It was like the bow of Ulysses, which he alone could bend. But this explanation does not go far enough: other factors must be invoked. When we study the rising generation of Annalistes in the post-war period, represented by figures such as Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie and Pierre Goubert, it becomes clear that, for them, Braudel’s influence would prove to be less important than that of Ernest Labrousse.7 Following his example, and that of the demographic historians Jean Meuvret and Louis Henry, the post-war Annales school’s signature methodology became the serial study of births and deaths, of subsistence, wages, and prices – in other words, the classic ‘Annales paradigm.’8 Braudel himself soon followed this trend, first editing a series of studies on ‘Ports, Routes et Trafics,’ and later incorporating a vast quantity of the new economic and demographic materials into the second edition of La Méditerranée (1966), ballasting his original text with a wealth of statistical information. His later work, notably the triad of volumes on capitalism and material life, would continue in the same vein, modulating between the two very different keys of the statistical

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mode of the ‘hard’ social sciences and the personal, speculative mode of his earlier work.9 Thus, La Méditerranée would never become a model for other scholars to imitate directly. Of necessity, its influence was bound to be indirect: its true impact would be its conceptual boldness, its author’s willingness to speculate, to pose sweeping questions, and to offer sweeping, but tentative answers to them. The flexibility – or ambiguity – of Braudel’s way of thinking would prove to be enormously, constantly stimulating. And so his classic work continues to inspire scholarly enquiry and debate in fields far removed from the early modern Mediterranean, resonating in new and unexpected ways. It has provided a crucial stimulus for the emerging study of world history, exemplified in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.10 It has also given rise to what we might call a genre of ‘pelagic’ histories, defined as the study of a maritime basin and the lands that border it, linked by commerce and culture. This genre, interweaving time and space in the classic Braudelian manner, is La Méditerranée’s most enduring legacy. The field of ‘Atlantic history’ should be seen as one of its descendants, transposing Braudel’s model and method to a different pelagic space, although this filiation has been rejected by Bernard Bailyn, the founding father of Atlantic history. In his review of the first edition of La Méditerranée, Bailyn questioned the heuristic value of Braudel’s tripartite geohistorical schema, and since that time he has steadily refused to recognize the book as one of the sources of Atlantic history.11 But his view is not shared by many of the other practitioners of the field, for whom Braudel’s idea of Mediterranean civilization serves as a model, albeit one requiring adaptation to fit the differences of scale and circumstance.12 And pace Bailyn, it is hard not to perceive a resemblance between the two: Atlantic history replicates the basic Braudelian schema of a diverse human world united by a single maritime space, in a dialogue between history and geography, time and space, which is typically Braudelian. Subsequently, the conceptual framework of La Méditerranée has been applied to other maritime spaces besides the Atlantic. Historians have adapted it to the study of the Indian Ocean, another maritime space, infinitely vaster than the Mediterranean, but in a certain sense resembling it in being ringed by different cultures linked by cultural and commercial exchanges.13 Beyond the Indian Ocean, the schema of La Méditerranée has been extended by other historians to the maritime spaces and archipelagoes of South-East Asia, where again it offers a valuable conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between the region’s cultures.14 And in Europe, La Méditerranée supplies a new way of looking

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at two other maritime regions, in many ways very similar to it: the North Sea and the Baltic.15 La Méditerranée is thus far more than a timeless classic, more revered than read. Its innovative geohistorical method, its audacious scale and scope, its power as a conceptual tool, have stood the test of time. More than half a century since it was published, it continues to stimulate new scholarship, both in the study of the early modern Mediterranean – as the contributions to this volume demonstrate – and at the same time in fields far removed from it in space and time. But let us conclude with a conundrum. In the final years of his life Braudel launched a new project entitled L’identité de la France, dedicated to defining the unique essences – or in Marc Bloch’s words, the ‘original characteristics’ – of French history, as rooted in its material culture. And although some commentators have belittled the project’s place in the master’s oeuvre, we prefer to follow Perry Anderson in insisting that it must be taken very seriously. It was massive and ambitious, and would have been even grander had Braudel been able to bring it to completion. But it represents a paradox: how can we account for the narrowing of focus of this last great Braudelian initiative, from the broad spaces of the Mediterranean and, in the trilogy on the material civilization of capitalism, much of the world, down to the confines of his own nation-state? Why this radical shift in scale and intention? An explanation is perhaps to be found in Braudel’s vision of the development of capitalism, which was the central concern of his work after La Méditerranée. He saw capitalism spreading in the later Middle Ages from northern Italy to the Low Countries, and from there to England and Germany. In his view this development affected France only slowly and peripherally, thus determining its distinctive cultural formation. ‘Is it perhaps both France’s tragedy and the secret of its charm,’ Braudel asked, ‘that it has never really been won – what is called won – over to capitalism?’16 Here, in his magisterial later work on the origins and evolution of world capitalism in the early modern period, is a question for another Braudel Revisited project. But it is one that would take us far from the shores of his beloved Mediterranean, and across the entire globe.

NOTES 1 The book is the published version of Braudel’s doctoral dissertation, defended in 1947; its full title is La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à

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l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: A. Colin, 1949); a second, enlarged edition in 2 vols. was issued in 1966 by the same publisher. See also the English translation of this edition by Siân Reynolds, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). ‘When he died in 1985, Fernand Braudel was undoubtedly the world’s most influential academic historian. His reputation was founded on a magnificent eleven-hundred page book entitled La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.’ William H. McNeill, ‘Fernand Braudel, Historian,’ Journal of Modern History 73, 2 (March 2001), 133. Testimonies to the book’s continuing significance abound; e.g., Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), which devotes vol. 3 entirely to Braudel; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell 2000); John A. Marino, ed., Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002). The themes of the four sessions were: ‘Economy and Society in the Early Modern Mediterranean,’ ‘Religion, Conflict and Popular Culture,’ ‘Cultural Transmission in the Mediterranean World,’ and ‘Aural and Visual Cultures in the Mediterranean.’ See The Center and Clark Newsletter, no. 40 (Fall 2002) for details. Braudel did offer a definition in his contribution to a high-school textbook, Le monde actuel, histoire et civilisations, co-authored with Suzanne Baille and Robert Philippe (Paris: E. Berlin, 1963), reissued separately as Grammaire des civilisations (Paris: Arthaud, 1987; English translation by Richard Mayne, A History of Civilizations, New York: A. Lane, 1994). In chapter 2 of this work he discusses the etymology of the term, then defines ‘civilisations’ in four ways: as geographical areas, as societies, as economies, and as ways of thinking. Earl J. Hamilton Jr, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501– 1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). See, for instance, Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002; New York: Anchor Books, 2004); Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See Pierre Goubert, Un parcours d’historien: Souvenirs 1915–1995 (Paris: Fayard, 1996), ch. 13; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier: P.C.P.S.U. 1945–1963 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 220–2. Note that Braudel and Labrousse co-edited the Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 4 vols. in 8 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970–82).

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8 The phrase was coined by Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); cf. Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,’ Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986), 209–24. 9 The series title is Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme: Xve–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1979). 10 See his Capitalism and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). We might add that in September 1976 Wallerstein established the Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York, Binghamton, dedicated to the study of ‘large-scale social change over long periods of historical time.’ 11 His review is in the Journal of Economic History 11 (1951), 277–82; cf. his most recent statement, in his Atlantic History, Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–5. 12 See for instance Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,’ American Historical Review, 111 no. 3 ( June 2006); Nicholas Canny, ‘Atlantic History: What and Why?’ European Review 9, no. 4 (2001), 400: ‘Soon after the appearance, in 1949, of Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen, his concept of a human world being defined by a surrounding sea was being applied to the Atlantic …’ 13 Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), explicitly invokes Braudel’s Mediterranean as the starting point for his own investigation. So does René J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 4, also pays homage to the influence of Braudel’s concept of the ‘unity’ of a maritime region, although he regards it as too focused on material culture. He draws an important distinction between the ‘maritime’ history exemplified by Braudel’s work and his own idea of ‘oceanic’ history as it applies to the much greater space of the Indian Ocean. 14 Heather Sutherland, ‘South-East Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy,’ Journal of South-East Asian History 34, no. 1 (February 2003). 15 For instance, in their preface, Juliette Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss (eds), The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), state that their objective is to see ‘whether in the Early Modern Period there

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existed a cultural unity in the North Sea area analogous to the one Braudel defined for the Mediterranean.’ 16 Perry Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity,’ in his A Zone of Engagement (London and New York: Verso, 1992); citation from pp. 256–7.

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PART I THINKING WITH BRAUDEL

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chapter one

The Problem of Unbelief in Braudel’s Mediterranean L U C E T T E VA L E N S I

J’ai passionnément aimé la Méditerranée, sans doute parce que venu du Nord, comme tant d’autres, après tant d’autres. Je lui aurai consacré avec joie de longues années d’études – pour moi bien plus que toute ma jeunesse. En revanche, j’espère qu’un peu de cette joie et beaucoup de sa lumière éclaireront les pages de ce livre.1

Braudel’s Mediterranean begins like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, with the first person, singular. The author’s senses and sensuality are explicitly exposed in the first few lines of the book, his love, his passion, his joy, in the radiant light of the Mediterranean. From the very opening of the book, Braudel’s libido is present. Moreover, Braudel calls for the reader’s complicity and help in the next few lines, asking him to bring his own vision and memories to give colour to his own book, involving him emotionally in a common experience. There are many things I find intriguing in this luminous opening and in the preface to the first edition more generally. First of all, this open confession about his personal tastes and passion; then the perception of a latent contradiction between the strong presence of the subject at this place, on the one hand, and the objectivist approach that will follow in the rest of the book. Indeed, Braudel remained very much present in the rest of the book, but in a different posture, as if ‘I’ as a subject with feelings and emotions had been dismissed. More broadly, what surprises me in the opening pages is the intuition of a contradiction between a declared filiation that bound him to Lucien Febvre2 and Marc Bloch, and what might be a blind spot in his approach to the Mediterranean. First, Braudel made fun, in his preface, of his teachers of those days who were

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‘slightly disdainful towards the achievements of civilisation, religions, and also of literature and the arts, the great witnesses of all worthwhile history,’ thus preparing his readers for a reflection on civilizations, religions, literature and the arts.3 Second, Braudel relegated the customary thanks to a final footnote at the end of his preface. He expressed gratitude first towards his masters at the Sorbonne, then to librarians, archivists, colleagues, and students; he mentioned as if in passing a ‘comrade of captivity’; and finally he addressed his thanks to Annales, to Marc Bloch (‘no aspect of his thought is foreign to me’), and to Lucien Febvre. Yet what seems to me to be if not missing, then at least underplayed in the book, is what we put under the words mentalités, representations, emotions, sensibilities, and expectations of all the various people Braudel so brilliantly staged in his Mediterranean. Was he inspired or not by Marc Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges? By Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais? What use did he make of the thinkers, artists, and writers of the period he studied? Where do religion, literature, and the arts fit into his portrait of the Mediterranean world? I will start with an exploration of the ‘manners and customs’ of the French by comparing the opening of Braudel’s Mediterranean – which was, as is well known, his dissertation – and the openings of other works he was acquainted with. I will continue with a brief analysis of what Braudel had to say about the issues we just mentioned, and propose an explanation of his choice. We shall see then if a few conclusions can be drawn from this exercise.

Locating Oneself: The ‘manners and customs’ of the French, a Rapid Survey of Braudel’s Cohort A rapid survey of some people who were within Braudel’s intellectual horizon, part of what I would call his intellectual family, might give us a hint of Braudel’s singularity. The authors I will discuss quickly are two older historians, one contemporary, and two younger ones: Ernest Labrousse, Lucien Febvre, Pierre Vilar, Pierre Chaunu, and Pierre Goubert. The works I will explore are their earliest, mostly their published dissertations, and to be more precise, only the opening pages of these books. What I want to observe is not their goals, their methods, or their sources, but the way these five authors located or positioned themselves at the very beginning of the books that would make them famous – or at least, make them legitimate scholars. Were the authors present in the picture or outside? If they were included, in relation to whom?

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Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) deserves priority because of the crucial role he played in Braudel’s formation and promotion. His earlier books date from 1912, Histoire de la Franche-Comté and Philippe II et la FrancheComté: Étude d’histoire politique, religieuse et sociale.4 The latter was dedicated to two people: ‘my master, Gabriel Monod,’ and ‘my friend Henri Wallon.’ Those are the only occurrences of the individual subject ‘I,’ and ‘my’ (master, friend). The rest of the opening pages explained Febvre’s object (‘A chapter in provincial history, of the formation of its bourgeoisie, of the obscure transformations of social life’), his method, and the difficulties the author encountered. Febvre, however, spoke as ‘We,’ which is a way to conceal oneself behind a neutral designation. This ‘pluriel de majesté,’ this ‘royal we,’ is in fact a device for negating one’s subjectivity in the work submitted to the public. It erases the individual agent, replacing him with some neutral, objective, and therefore scientific anonymous author. The foreword of the second book, Histoire de la Franche-Comté, quoted Camille Jullian’s notion of ‘the ways in which men of the past lived and thought,’ but acknowledged no other major figure. The author himself was absent from the text. For the sake of brevity I jump to another book by Febvre which Braudel must have known and read since it was dedicated ‘to F. Braudel, en espérance,’ in hope: Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais, which ran through two editions before Braudel published his own Mediterranean.5 The foreword was by Henri Berr, a major figure in the renewal of French history and of its transformation from a literary genre into something more comprehensive and closer to the social sciences. By 1942, Febvre was sixty-four years old and professor at the prestigious Collège de France, not to mention his other mutiple intellectual involvements. He did not really need the approval of a senior scholar, but Berr wrote a foreword for every book of the series he edited, The Evolution of Mankind. The preface was by Febvre, who openly claimed, ‘I like Rabelais.’ Thus, he dared push himself to the foreground, to present his subject subjectively. There was no hiding, this time, behind a purely cognitive goal, but nothing intimate, or indeed personal, in his revelation of his love for Rabelais. All he meant was that he enjoyed him as an entertaining author. Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle by Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) was a landmark in French historiography.6 Both in the French school of economic history and in the international project of an integrated history of economic parameters (prices,

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currency, etc.), the book was recognized as a classic immediately after its publication. It took some fifty years for two young fellows – Bernard Lepetit and Jean-Yves Grenier – to dare declare the book obsolete. In Braudel’s times, Labrousse’s book was a must-read for any avant-garde historian. In his foreword, Labrousse thanked several archivists, librarians, and other people who helped in his research; then his masters, three famous scholars of the generation before his (Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez, and William Oualid – the latter, today forgotten, belonged to the law school). In this, Labrousse was following the rules of humility and gratitude expected for a first book. He was presenting himself as a student of older masters, a ‘cadet,’ but mentioning at the same time prestigious mentors. As everybody knows, the glory of the masters rubbed off onto their disciples. The way Labrousse introduced himself was also typical: there was no ‘I,’ but always ‘We,’ the same device we saw used earlier by Febvre to obliterate oneself and announce an objective approach to the topic at stake. A third element of his staging is that his work had two prefaces by different scholars, Henri Sée and Roger Picard, both university professors, one of economic history, the second of law. In that way, Labrousse acknowledged his double ancestry – history and law – but was also protecting himself under the umbrella of two senior scholars who were both important at the time. The second book by Labrousse was completed ten years later, in 1943, and published the following year: La crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution.7 The author did not mention any master this time, probably because, as a confirmed historian, he did not need an umbrella any more; he was a master. The book, however, opened with two quotations: one by Michelet, ‘Famine is a fact of the civic order. One is hungry because of the king,’ and the other by Jaurès, on the role of the French bourgeoisie in the Revolution. Labrousse indicated that his book would explore which of the two was right in providing a political or a social explanation to the French Revolution. Rhetorically, this was a classic device for positing a problem in the French tradition. Symbolically, by doing so Labrousse positioned himself as a moderator and judge between two major figures of the republican left: Michelet, the romantic national historian par excellence (until Braudel, every historian in France wanted to be the Michelet of his time); and Jaurès, the socialist leader and extraordinary orator, who had been murdered on the eve of the First World War. Labrousse’s quotations were both a political

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statement (all the more so in 1943–4!) and an intellectual assessment: I, Labrousse, am going to arbitrate between these two giants. Indeed, ‘I’ was present this time, addressing readers and telling them what the notions of crisis, cycle, longue durée, and so on, he was going to use in the rest of the study meant. Thus, Labrousse adopted a friendly, rather fatherly, posture, establishing a didactic relationship with his potential readers. And finally the thanks: no name, only an institution, the CNRS, that provided him with help and funding. Period. He had no mentor or protector to thank. Labrousse was now on his own, acted as a master and educator, and debated at the highest level with two national icons. Pierre Vilar (1906–2003) did not publish his thesis, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne,8 until 1962, although he had done most of his research at the time of the Spanish republic and before the Civil and then Second World Wars. Like Febvre, Labrousse, and Braudel, Vilar was attached to the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, becoming one of its directors of studies, while also receiving the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne after Labrousse’s retirement. Vilar’s thesis opens with two ‘hors d’oeuvre,’ a foreword and a preface. While the latter included the intellectual debts Vilar acknowledged, the foreword was more personal. He mentioned the various people who helped him, and what seems remarkable is their unusual number – scores of individuals are mentioned; equally remarkable is their heterogeneity (a poet, the author’s wife, some friends). And he added at the end of this first list, ‘I hug them’ (‘je les embrasse fraternellement’ [8]). Unusual indeed! When it comes to the mention of his masters, we find again the names of Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Marcel Bataillon, and Ernest Labrousse. Little by little, we can see how a school was born, how a network of historians claiming the same intellectual genealogy was constituted, with a few scholars at the core. The last unusual element of Vilar’s foreword is his mention of historical events he went through: the Spanish civil war, his captivity during the Second World War, the tragedy of both wars. Vilar, who was close to the communists but never a party member, never a militant, and who spent most of his time immersed in books and preparing his classes, let the tragic episodes of history resonate in his book. Neither Braudel, who barely mentions that he was a prisoner of war, nor Labrousse, who published his second book during the war, let the outside world intrude into the scholarly circle (though Febvre did in the second edition of his

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Histoire de la Franche-comté, with a rather patriotic emphatic conclusion on the heroic role of his province in the Great War). Vilar revealed an emotional involvement, a personal sensitivity to history in the making that others either did not feel to the same degree or did not think appropriate to mention in their work. But to go back to what intrigued me in Braudel’s opening, the subject Vilar is stage-centre, unlike the other authors I have surveyed so far. Another giant was Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009),9 the author of a monumental dissertation in no less than twelve volumes, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), co-authored with his wife, Huguette Chaunu.10 I will consider only volume 1, Introduction méthodologique, and only its preface and foreword. The title by itself indicated a filiation: it was about Spain again, about more or less the same period as Braudel’s, but with the scope reversed, from the Mediterranean coast of the Peninsula to its Atlantic side. There would be other expansions of Braudel’s work, in the Indian Ocean, or in the eighteenth century, some successful (Louis Dermigny, Denys Lombard), some unfinished ( Jean Mathiex embarked on the impossible project of writing the history of the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century), some by now entirely forgotten. Like Braudel, Pierre Chaunu dealt with the Atlantic Ocean as a living being, a historical figure. The method, however, differed from Braudel’s: it aimed at being entirely statistical, a purely quantitative economic history. The book was by husband and wife; the preface, by Lucien Febvre, enthusiastically praised the book; the foreword was signed by Pierre Chaunu only. In other words, the same hierarchy can be observed as with Labrousse’s first book, where the patronage of senior scholars was deemed necessary. In this case, the proper division of labour was reasserted, with only the male author introducing the work that had been done jointly by Pierre and Huguette. As expected, thanks were addressed to some masters at the Sorbonne; to some high-school principals and inspectors who had allowed Chaunu to do his research while teaching in a high school; and to many Spanish figures who helped with collecting data. As for the intellectual debt, thanks were conveyed once to Labrousse, twice to Yves Renouard (a specialist in medieval social and economic history), twice to Lucien Febvre, three times to Braudel, once to Hamilton, and so on. Again, a kind of intellectual genealogy was thus drawn, a fact that was confirmed in the rest of the introductory volume where Lucien Febvre (twice), Fernand Braudel, and Pierre Goubert were mentioned in the first footnotes. The author(s) wrote in the plural form, ‘we,’ this time for technical

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reasons since they worked as a pair. There was, however, a personal note, at the end of the usual academic thanks, an expression of gratitude for ‘les nôtres,’ ‘ours,’ meaning our relatives, who seem to have occasionally babysat for our two authors, but remained forever anonymous. Finally, let us consider Pierre Goubert, born in 1915, thirteen years after Braudel. Because he is mentioned in Chaunu’s first footnotes, we know that he was entering the family of major historians. In fact, his opus magnum, and a real masterpiece, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730, was published only five years after Chaunu’s, in 1960.11 It was indeed acclaimed as a most innovative exercise in social history from the bottom up. While the book was dedicated to Ernest Labrousse, the first footnote cited Braudel. This time, ‘I’ was present at the very opening: ‘I felt a desire and almost a need to be concerned with all men,’ not those who shone because of their status, their function, wealth, or intelligence. A few lines later, he spoke of his passion for the French provinces, his enthusiasm as a young scholar discovering the different layers of his subject, the fervour caused by Marc Bloch’s program in rural history. ‘I’ takes centre stage, but so far, only as a scholar. Goubert’s libido, as expressed in this book, is mostly about history. (A bon vivant and jolly character, Goubert could obviously not refer openly in print to other pleasures and desires he might have enjoyed.) As for the expressions of gratitude, they were first for anonymous scholars, friends, librarians, and archivists, then for two figures of the past – Marc Bloch and one of Goubert’s schoolteachers – and finally, closer to his scientific project, to Augustin Renaudet, Braudel, Jean Meuvret, and Labrousse. At the end, Goubert’s opening did not reveal much about the man himself, in spite of the sort of religious fervour he felt for his work as a historian. The circle he drew remained the academic, professional circle, punctuated with almost the same big names of older members of the same milieu as were other books by historians. An ethnographic note will conclude this brief survey. With some variations, American male scholars open their books with thanks to the different people who helped them in their work, then to two categories of women, their secretary and their wife, each of them with their first name and family name. Lately what ‘the director of Routledge Press in New York’ called ‘a private space in the book’12 has expanded into a strategic space for networking and promoting oneself. As this small sample shows, the French avoided mentioning their friends and wives until recently. They applied the classical rule of separation of genre, which required

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them to hide their private lives, exclude family and friends, and remain strictly on academic ground: it was a matter of decency, and mostly a social code. The author himself, as an individual, had to stage himself as a scholar, not as an author in the Foucauldian sense, but rather as a disciple. It was as if while approaching centre stage, he had to step aside and push senior members into the limelight. It was also, at least for the two generations to whom my five examples belonged, a statement on their discipline: they wanted history to appear as a social science, to present the same rigour and objectivity as hard science. Needless to say, a look at their methodological statements would have confirmed this last point; but I thought it might be interesting to see the more hidden expressions of their strategy. In their practice, French scholars were still following, in the twentieth century, the rules of ancien régime craftsmanship by which the apprentice built his chef d’oeuvre – masterpiece – under the master’s supervision before being accepted as a master into the guild. The very historians who were breaking the rules of nineteenth-century historiography, and giving birth to a new school of history, were strongly traditional in their social manners and customs. Also, the relation between master and apprentice was similar to that between father and son. So much so that the son one day would take the position of the father. Thus, Braudel would, in 1957, write a preliminary note to the posthumous book by Lucien Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe siècle.13 So much so that while wanting to be cool, objective, and distant in their academic work, while concealing their intimate life, these historians built ties as tight as, indeed very similar to, family ties, and ran their scholarship like a family business. Typically, Braudel – like a preferred son and heir – got most of Febvre’s legacy: a professorship at the highest French academic institution, the Collège de France; the chairmanship of the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études; the directorship of the journal Annales; and the editorship of Destins du monde, a collection Febvre had launched with the Armand Colin publishing house. More broadly, my assumption is that this ancien régime form of organization of labour – craftsmanship cum hierarchy – was pervasive in the French academic system until the students’ movement of 1968. The denunciation of the hegemony of the ‘Mandarins,’ combined with the democratization of higher education that followed – a democratization that has been later characterized as massification, that is, a levelling down of former academic standards – and other institutional changes in the academic system I can only allude to here, resulted in a change of the rules for entering the scholarly world

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and introducing one’s first scientific project. I would suggest, without elaborating on this point, that young, assertive historians today would mention their peers as well as their masters; that the horizontal connection would be more meaningful than the hierarchical one. In this respect, Pierre Vilar hugging his friends was more in tune with post-1968 scholars than with those of his generation. I also assume younger historians would more often than before extend their thanks to foreign scholars and institutions, as if to show their integration into more international than national, parochial networks. As for Braudel’s incipit, it was in no way inaugurating the new codes that were to be adopted after 1968, but it is clear that he was breaking a rule. His attitude was transgressive both when he put himself at the very top of the page and when he relegated his masters and colleagues to the end, in a footnote and in fine print. It is as if he was saying, ‘Leave me alone, get out of the way, I know what I am doing.’ There was something subversive in such a positioning, revealing a man who knew his own worth – and rightly so. At this point, I had to check the validity of my assumption. Several possibilities were available, several directions were open in order to find out how the characters I studied related, retrospectively, to the moment when they became integrated within the academic community. Having taken prefaces and forewords as my starting point, I chose to continue in the same mode and to look into the autobiographical material, another ‘private space open to readers.’ What I found surprised me. All the people I mentioned lived long lives and would have had time to reflect on their past: Febvre died at the age of 78, Labrousse at 93, Vilar at 97, Braudel at 83, and Chaunu at 86, and Goubert is still alive. One observes a contrast between the older segment of the cohort and the younger one. Older historians rarely wrote their memoirs, while younger ones did, in spite of Bourdieu’s caveat.14 Obviously a major change has occurred in the way historians feel about the period they lived through, the milieu they belonged to, the readers they want to address beyond their former students and disciples, and mostly about the appropriateness of getting publicly personal, even emotional. (Ego is less hidden, private; narcissism is okay.) Fortunately for us, Braudel, who belonged to the older cohort, wrote a short autobiographical text when his Mediterranean was published in the United States.15 And in this text, a slip of the tongue reveals Braudel’s subversion. Remembering Febvre’s summer house, he wrote: ‘It was there, Braudel writes, that I became more than a companion to Lucien Febvre – a little like a son. His house in the Jura became

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my house, his children my children.’ But if he was Febvre’s son, Febvre’s children would have been his brothers! As for Chaunu, while alluding to his sometimes stormy relationship to Braudel, he tells his interviewer: ‘My master Fernand Braudel died; I loved him dearly … I was not an easy disciple. I told you that my relationship with Braudel was of the same nature as my relations to my father’; and later: ‘I loved Braudel the way I loved my father, the way I loved General de Gaulle in 1940, my feelings were therefore very violent.’16 It would be interesting to try a more thorough exploration of historians’ memoirs. Since I cannot do it here, I will only mention another assessment by Braudel. I know he said it with tongue in cheek, with the irony and smile he always displayed when interacting with other historians, and as the deeply agnostic character he was. Yet there is something revealing in his statement: ‘Choosing a long-time scale to observe from was choosing the position of God the Father himself as my refuge.’17

Exploring the Hearts and Souls of Sixteenth-century Mediterranean People The second point of my chapter will be about the substance of Braudel’s book. He was dealing with the late Renaissance and counter-Reformation period. This was a period of artistic splendour on both the Islamic and the Christian shores of the Mediterranean; a period of religious effervescence and of confrontation between Muslim and Christian armies, as well as between Christians in the West. Braudel was dealing with exchanges within the Mediterranean and far beyond, to the Baltic or the Indian Ocean. What about aesthetic exchanges? What about religious movements? On the historiographical level, how deeply was he influenced by his mentor Lucien Febvre? Let us meet at the end of the two volumes, in the index room, so to speak. The index was divided in two: one section for places and people (‘Proper Names’), one for concepts (‘General Index’). Both are amazingly long and diverse; both give some measure of the breadth of Braudel’s project. The first includes the names of a large number of colleagues, and even larger numbers of merchants, bandits, captains, shipowners, bishops, cardinals, kings, princes and their ambassadors, even a few women and some Eskimos. Painters, sculptors, religious reformers, and political thinkers do appear, but in small numbers, as if lost among the crowd. Rubens seems to be the only Flemish painter present; the two Tiepolos are not the painters you might be familiar with (it is true that

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they come much later, but dates were never a big constraint on Braudel); the Alberti mentioned is not Leon-Battista. Bellini, who went to Istanbul and whose paintings have so much to tell about the Mamluk and Ottoman worlds, is missing, as are Carpaccio and other Venetian painters who have such interesting representations of the East, of the sea, of maritime life. There are, however, mentions of such Italians as Bronzino, Cellini, Correggio, Michelangelo, Palladio, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto; such French as Callot, Portuguese as Camoens, and Spaniards as El Greco, Murillo, Velásquez, and Zurbarán. We will have to see how Braudel dealt with them. As we move to the second index, such words are missing as civilization, culture, emotions, creed, faith, unbelief, rituals, mentalities, representations, and painting. We find, however, a handful of entries that should deal with what I have in mind: Baroque, pilgrimages, Protestant, Reform, Renaissance. Again, Braudel’s references are so vast that one can only admire. Again, that some of the names were present is already a break from the kind of history written in the 1930s to 1940s. But I am looking at two interconnected issues: one is the relationship between mentor and student, Febvre and Braudel; the second is that of the place Braudel made for mentalities and representations in his depiction of the Mediterranean world.18 What could one have expected from him? First, one could expect a documentary use of iconographic or literary material. He could have looked at paintings as primary material, as sources representing the people he dealt with, showing the material culture he was so sensitive to, the objects, the tools, the vessels, the coins, the products he followed in every corner of the world. Second, one could have expected a use of such documents as a discourse, the use of books not only on religious matters, but equally on subjects such as architecture, gardening, politics, or history, as providing a vision of what would make sense of the world around. One could expect the exploration of people’s aspirations, dreams, fears, and expectations for this life and the next, their sense of what bound them together, a discourse on self and other. Since Braudel was interested in exchanges, an exploration of the economic ethos or the political culture would have been relevant to his project and within its scope. Last, bearing in mind that a large amount of information available to us was not available to Braudel in the 1930s, we would like to know if any changes were introduced into the second edition of The Mediterranean. Then let us go to the text, and check the use he made of the people he did include. First, passim: a random survey of some of the people

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mentioned shows that Braudel made a documentary use of the authors he read. He enjoyed picking up facts from their work or from their lives. Tavernier saw the shah of Iran smoking a pipe; Cervantes and Boccaccio mentioned pirates in their writings. ‘It was Busbecq, whose Turkish letters I have frequently quoted, who brought back to Vienna from Adrianople the first lilacs which, with the aid of the wind, soon covered the Viennese countryside.’19 Certain authors (Cellini, for example) illustrated some practices and ways of life. Even political thinkers such as Bodin or Botero were used for the same purpose of providing empirical evidence, much more than for their vision of their world. Only occasionally was Braudel sensitive to remarks by Montaigne or others about the differences in religiosity of Italians compared to other Catholics, for example. There are a few places that are worth mentioning because they remain so unusual in the book: ‘A few steps in the Uffizi take the visitor to Bronzino’s portrait of Cosimo de Medici.’20 Indeed, Braudel saw in the portrait the evidence of a changing social order by which the daring, enterprising bourgeoisie turned into a landowning class, and was replaced by such newcomers as Jews and Armenians. We may admire Braudel’s interpretation, but more important for us, we caught him at the Uffizi, and will come back to it later. Second, the entry ‘civilization’ is missing in the index, but there is, as announced in Braudel’s introduction, a substantial chapter on civilizations. It has numerous merits, combined with Braudel’s usual tricks. For example, it raises the issue of cultural exchanges and mentions, without further development, the possibility that Spanish mysticism could be traced back to Muslim Sufism; that chansons de geste were borrowed from Islam. But he quickly shifts to the subject of material culture and the migration of fruits and vegetables from one corner of the earth to another, and finally delineates a new research program: ‘a veritable saga could be written about the migrations of the cotton-plant,’ Braudel wrote enthusiastically. Braudel also devoted several pages to the contrast between the spread of Protestantism in the northern parts of Europe and the resistance of Catholicism in the southern parts; or on the confrontation between Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians; or again on the religious borders between Islam and Christianity in the Ottoman empire and in Spain. One could complain that they unfortunately turn into clichés about the different psychological qualities of different people. Some of his assessments would be strongly criticized today as ‘essentializing’ people and ‘reifying’ civilizations. Unfortunately, too, they often turn into a study of the geographical and demographic distribution

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of religious groups. But that such issues of confessional conflicts were raised is already an achievement. Another quality of Braudel’s is that he provides a weak theory of civilizations but renounces his own theory when it does not work, showing his lack of dogmatism and his willingness and ability to comprehend complex situations. Thus, he assumes that geography provides the basis for any civilization. ‘The fundamental reality of any civilisation must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers.’21 It is true that in Braudel’s broad concept of geography, the natural environment was combined with the work of man and history. But having said that, he finds problems with the Jewish and other diasporas which do not fit his geographical model. So he adjusts his model and looks for what substitutes for a territorial basis: contacts, education, common beliefs and segregation allow the civilizations of minority groups to last without a territory. And finally, within a few pages, there is a strange concentration of remarks about baroque art, which Braudel considers as an ecumenical civilization the Mediterranean offered as a gift to Europe.22 Under the heading ‘Baroque’ we find most of the artists’ names that appeared in the index. What we read about them is mostly a summary of art history that does not have much to say about the specific contribution of any of the names mentioned: Baroque has to be understood as a militant art directed by the Church, as Catholic propaganda against the Protestants and in defence of their own vision of religion. Its didactic, theatrical style was typical of southern religiosity. At this juncture, Braudel again uses his trick of opening a new agenda in order to avoid elaborating his own assumptions: ‘A whole book could be written on the devotional practices imported to all parts of Europe, on the part played by men of the Mediterranean in the violent reclamation of the contested lands of the North which returned to the fold of the Roman church.’23 But he does connect this discussion of the baroque with his main argument: ‘The Baroque was the product of two massive civilizations, that of Rome and that of Spain’ (in other words, of the Mediterranean again).24 Braudel needed to make his point that the Mediterranean he was studying still occupied an eminent position, but he was not at ease with artistic material. He exhibits no direct experience of the painters he mentions. The impression is that Braudel was immersed in the archives of every Italian or Spanish city, but that he rarely set foot in their museums. Could he, at the time he wrote? Let us for a moment be less Braudelian than Bourdieusian, at least to follow the earlier manner of

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Bourdieu, and pay attention to the social conditions of scientific production. First, art books and reproductions were not as available then as they are now. Museums were open, and as we saw earlier, Braudel reveals that on one occasion he entered the Uffizi. The impression remains, though, that he was not a regular museum-goer, and that he preferred to spend his time in the archives rather than in the Prado or other national galleries. A second circumstance relates to the scientific mindset of his time. What reduced his attraction to museums was more probably the then-dominant paradigm: art history was separated from general history; history contracted alliances with disciplines that had the prestige of appearing more like natural sciences, such as geography, while literature and art were weaker fields – fiction, not facts. Images did not have even the documentary status that they acquired later. But then, he had texts, by all sorts of authors he sometimes mentioned, mostly because of the information they provided on specific facts. Why did Braudel not take them more seriously? The answer might be that he had to remain in charge, that he had to think for the people he described, and finally that his own Weltanschauung mattered more than theirs. Braudel considered himself Febvre’s intellectual son, and asserted that he had meditated on every page Marc Bloch had written. That is true for the part they gave to geography, as well as for the program they together delineated in Annales, an agenda where social, economic, monetary, and agrarian history were to be developed. It was not true as far as the history of mentalities was concerned, although that was part of their common agenda and a major part of Febvre and Bloch’s own separate works. Here, a double genealogical link appears stronger than the influence of Bloch and Febvre. One was to descriptive geography, which posited the scholar as a kind of distant photographer. The second bound Braudel to Henri Hauser.25 Hauser was a major social and economic historian of his time, but what social and economic history meant at this stage was a descriptive, mildly quantitative paradigm in which the social was determined by, and subject to, the economic sphere. One might say that a ghost haunted his book (and would more visibly haunt his next masterpiece), the ghost of Marxism. And here we find a paradox. While his colleagues Ernest Labrousse or Pierre Vilar openly referred to Marx, Braudel did not. Never socially or politically close to the communist movement that attracted so many French intellectuals in his time, Braudel found in a form of Marxism he shaped and freely adapted to his own goals the broad lines of his intellectual construction. Both the Marxist and the geographical models were bending history towards a

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solid, secular materialism that left little room for what were then called ‘superstructures,’ or else the third layer in the pyramid of history, with first the economy, then the society, forming its foundations.26 The problem is that Braudel was not clear about the content of the third layer, and let it become a sort of box for miscellany, or worse, for leftovers from what really mattered. I will conclude with three simple, obvious remarks: First, Braudel applied his own theory of the historian’s craft and offered the best illustration of it. To use his own metaphors, a true historian is the one who opens a historian’s shop (not the one who repeats his masters’ experiments); the one who joins the wagon with luggage of his own (not just a follower). As stimulating as his admiration for Bloch and fascination with Febvre were, Braudel had to go his own way, define his own space, open his own shop. He worked as a contemporary of other scholars, and large numbers of them at that, but on his own and, when needed, as their conductor. Second, the same imperial posture Braudel adopted by pushing his masters to the side was the one he used in his approach to the Mediterranean world. It made him the painter and the thinker. He moved everybody around, even the powerful Philip II. They became not Braudel’s subject matter but rather the docile subjects of his royal majesty – an approach that had to do with the paradigms of his time, mostly geography, a field that encouraged a view from afar and an objectivist stance. Braudel spoke of the scenery, of pictures, images, and landscapes, but they were his, not those of the subjects who populated his book, not those of the painters or travellers who described the area. If there is a fresco of the Mediterranean, Braudel was its painter. His approach also had something to do with macro-history as a project – a history with little room for individual agents and much more for anonymous, non-voluntary, nonconscious forces. Braudel’s approach probably also had something to do with his relationship to the people of the past. While Michelet wanted to resurrect them, Braudel dispossessed the people he studied from their dreams, their fears, their expectations, and their beliefs, silenced their voices, and played as a soloist. Thus, he could run the show not only as the conductor, but also as the composer – as ‘God the Father himself.’ My final remark is about beginning a book. Proust opened À la recherche du temps perdu with a sentence whose poetics cannot be duplicated or translated, but just enjoyed and memorized. Likewise, Braudel’s opening is memorable: ‘I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt

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because I am a northerner like so many others in whose footsteps I have followed.’ (The French version is much more beautiful musically.) In his ‘Personal Testimony’ Braudel wrote: ‘Is history, perhaps, though aspiring to be a science, a matter of writing, of literary style?’27 A landmark in the Annales school of history, The Mediterranean remains indeed a work of art and literature. No wonder its author entered the French Academy, whose members, as everyone knows, are called the Immortals.

NOTES 1 ‘I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt because I am a northerner like so many others in whose footsteps I have followed. I have joyfully dedicated long years of study to it – much more than all my youth. In return, I hope that a little of this joy and a great deal of Mediterranean sunlight will shine from the pages of this book.’ In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 1:17. 2 The dedication to both the first and second editions reads ‘À Lucien Febvre, toujours présent, en témoignage de reconnaissance et de filiale affection.’ 3 This citation is taken from the English translation of the second edition, The Mediterranean, 1:19. 4 Paris: Brivin, 1912. 5 First ed., Paris: Albin Michel, 1942; 2nd ed., 1947. 6 Paris: Dalloz, 1933. 7 Paris: PUF, 1944. 8 La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne: Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962). 9 Pierre Chaunu was to become a prolific and major figure among French historians. The author of (or contributor to) some 80 books, he contributed to Annales from 1948 on. It is worth mentioning that Huguette Chaunu, without pursuing a visible academic carrier, was among the few women authors who signed an article for Annales as early as 1950, ‘Le mariage civil des protestants au XVIIIe siècle et les origines de l’état-civil’ (Annales ESC 3, 341–3). 10 Paris: Armand Colin, 1955–9. 11 Paris: SEVPEN, 1960. 12 See Mark Bauerlin, ‘A Thanking Task. What Acknowledgements Say about Academic Life,’ Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 2001. I want to thank Professor Amelang for sending me a copy of this article.

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13 Paris: SEVPEN, 1957. 14 A growing number of living historians have written memoirs, sometimes more than once: Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Gérard Noiriel, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Michel Winock, Jacques Julliard, Maurice Agulhon, Michèle Perrot, Mona Ozouf, and so on. For the authors mentioned in this paper: Pierre Chaunu, Colère contre colère (Paris: Seghers, 1991); Pierre Chaunu and François Dosse, L’instant éclaté: Entretiens (Paris: Aubier, 1994); Pierre Goubert, Un parcours d’historien. Souvenirs, 1915–1995 (Paris: Fayard, 1996). Goubert’s memoirs mention Bloch, Febvre, Braudel, and many others, without using the family metaphors I was looking for. 15 His ‘Personal Testimony’ appeared in the Journal of Modern History 44 (December 1972), 448–67. 16 These citations are from Chaunu and Dosse, L’instant éclaté, 79–80. For other evocations of Braudel, see Chaunu, Colère contre colère, 89–93. 17 ‘Personal Testimony,’ 454: italics mine. 18 On Braudel’s failure to embrace culture, see James S. Amelang in this volume, and W.H. McNeill, ‘Fernand Braudel, Historian,’ Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001), 133–46. 19 The Mediterranean, 2:762. 20 Ibid., 728. 21 Ibid., 773. 22 Ibid., 829. 23 Ibid., 833. It is obvious that Braudel met with numerous difficulties in this section of the book: the problem of limits (where to stop? He would have to go to Brazil and the New World to deal with the subject matter); the problem of competence (Islam deserved a study, but Braudel could not master the field) and of information (he indicates the lack of maps to follow the expansion of baroque art, and the weaknesses of museum catalogues and art history books). 24 Ibid., 835. 25 A point that is confirmed by his ‘Personal Testimony’: ‘Of the benignant and not very crowded Sorbonne of those days I retain only one agreeable memory: the teaching of Henri Hauser’ (449). 26 It was the paradox and the strength of Braudel’s position that it allowed a generation or two of younger historians to reconcile scholarship and activism, to combine the understanding of the world with the will to change it. Among anthropologists, whose discipline was the moving force in the 1960s, some young scholars used their energy at trying to unify Marxism and structuralism (Maurice Godelier, Lucien Sebag). Some sociologists were attempting to combine the Marxist model of class struggle with a structural-

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ist approach (Bourdieu). Historians did not have to do such acrobatics: they benefited from this happy moment less through Vilar, a professed Marxist, than thanks to Braudel, who took their efforts with a fatherly, ironical condescension. 27 ‘Personal Testimony,’ 464.

chapter two

Braudel and the Mediterranean City GEOFFREY SYMCOX

In this paper I should like to examine the way Braudel visualises cities in La Méditerranée, looking closely at the roles they play in his famous tripartite analytical schema of longue durée, conjoncture, and événements. Rereading his great book, I was struck anew by the often-poetic flair with which he describes urban life, and his fondness for layering detail upon telling detail to build up an impressionistic portrait of his favourite cities – Dubrovnik, Venice, Genoa, Istanbul. Yet I was struck too by the tight socio-economic focus of these urban portraits. Cities occupy a central place in Braudel’s grand tapestry of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean as social and economic actors, as nodal points in a network of roads and sea lanes, as powerhouses of change struggling against the inertia of rural society. But he has much less to say about their cultural role, which figures only fleetingly. To point this out is neither new nor original, I know. Braudel is habitually chided for his materialism, for his concentration on social and economic realities – his structures de base – and for his neglect of cultural and political ‘superstructures.’ But I find this criticism fundamentally anachronistic. Braudel and the school of social and economic historians he inspired in the years after the Second World War were not trying to write cultural history in today’s mode; though anticipated in the wide-ranging methods adopted by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the decisive linguistic and anthropological turns that would open up the field of cultural history were still far in the future. The great innovation made by Braudel and his generation of historians was to broaden the focus of historical enquiry beyond the single-minded concern with politics and diplomacy then dominant, in order to embrace social and economic developments. This radical break with the

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traditional goals and methods of historical research formed a necessary (though by no means intentional) precondition for the later emergence of cultural history. So my purpose here is not to join the legions of critics who have reproached Braudel (and the generation of Annalistes he led) for his inattention to cultural phenomena, but rather to try to offer some tentative explanations for his choice of the materialist explanatory framework that underpins his great work, which relegates both culture and politics to a secondary place – while not excluding them altogether, as some of his critics allege. I shall first analyse Braudel’s historical method, then look at how cities fit into it, and finally compare the two editions of La Méditerranée to see if his approach to urban history changed significantly between the first edition of 1949 and the revised version of 1966.

Geohistory As is well known – the story has often been told – Braudel set out to write ‘total history,’ which for him meant extending the scope of enquiry beyond the reconstruction of political and diplomatic events that dominated research in the 1930s. Social and economic history were just coming into their own as sub-disciplines, and were slowly penetrating the mainstream of research. Bold spirits such as Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), at the helm of the new journal Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, founded in 1929, were urging their colleagues to integrate these new disciplines into their research and to borrow methods from other kindred disciplines such as sociology and geography. For them, history was an unashamedly eclectic – not to say imperialist – enterprise, and they were ready to make use of any approach that would open the way to ‘a wider and more human history.’1 Following their lead, the young Braudel abandoned his original plan to write a history of Philip II’s Mediterranean campaigns and diplomacy. Under the influence of Febvre, with whom he established a close personal relationship, he set out to write a new kind of history: a history of the Mediterranean world from the geographical bottom up.2 He would come to call his method ‘géohistoire,’ because in it he sought to synthesize the two disciplines of history and geography.3 (The term does not really translate into English as ‘historical geography,’ and is best rendered as ‘geohistory.’) Mediated through Febvre, Braudel’s method grew out of the work of two earlier schools of geographers, German and French, and was especially endebted to Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), doyen of the

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school that came to be called ‘human geography’ in early-twentiethcentury France. Vidal de la Blache’s early work was heavily influenced by the then-dominant German school of geographers, and notably by Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). The latter’s Anthropogeographie (published 1882–91) studied the relationship between humans and their environment in historical perspective. Vidal de la Blache based some of his own concept of human geography on this part of Ratzel’s work, but he would distance himself from Ratzel’s later concept of political geography, which the latter set out in his Politische Geographie (1897). Vidal criticized this as a kind of determinism that legitimized existing political divisions by ascribing them to the impersonal forces of geography.4 At this point Vidal and the emerging French school of human geographers may be said to have parted company from their German counterparts, and from a similarly inclined group of political geographers in Britain led by Halford Mackinder (1861–1947).5 In Weimar Germany a group of scholars headed by Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) would turn Ratzel’s vision of geopolitics into a quasi-science. They posited a kind of Darwinian struggle between states for ‘living space,’ a term that the Nazis would seize upon, and endow with a sinister significance.6 Vidal de la Blache did not follow Ratzel into the field of geopolitics. Instead, he and the school he inspired in France developed what he called ‘human geography,’ which stressed the two-way interaction between human beings and their environment, and the way this relationship evolved over time.7 This methodology would be of decisive importance for Febvre and, through him, for Braudel. In 1922 Febvre summed up and developed Vidal de la Blache’s concept of human geography in La terre et l’évolution humaine (significantly subtitled Introduction géographique à l’histoire).8 Braudel would later pay a fulsome tribute to the importance of this work.9 In it Febvre pointed to the powerful historical component in Vidal de la Blache’s ideas, and emphasized the symbiotic relationship between the study of history and geography in France. He drew a clear distinction between what he termed the ‘possibilism’ of Vidal de la Blache’s method and the ‘determinism’ of Ratzel’s. According to the former, the geographical environment offered both a range of options for human beings to exploit and a range of constraints on their action; human societies evolved within these parameters, as the population strove to overcome the obstacles the environment posed and to make use of the advantages it offered. But the outcome of this interaction was in no way predetermined; it depended on human choices and human ingenuity, and was not the result of blind natural forces.10 So Febvre concluded

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that the task of the historian was to elucidate ‘the relationship between History and the Soil’ (capitals in the original), or rather ‘the relationship between the physical environment and human societies in their historical evolution.’11 Here in the French school of human geography we have the germ of the geohistorical method, rooted in the idea of ‘possibilism,’ that Braudel would use in La Méditerranée – a method that bears no resemblance to the methodology of political geography then being developed by Ratzel’s followers in Germany, or Mackinder and his school in Britain. At this point I must emphasize the selective way in which Braudel absorbed Febvre’s influence. What he took from his mentor was above all a materialist (though non-Marxist) interpretative schema, centred on humankind’s response to geography and climate. He did not pick up Febvre’s cultural interests; he learned his lessons from the author of La terre et l’évolution humaine, rather than from the author of Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. Why this should have been so remains an enigma, perhaps only to be explained by Braudel’s personal psychology. In her contribution to this volume, Lucette Valensi (who knew Braudel personally) offers a kind of generational explanation: that Braudel might have consciously chosen to diverge from his master in order to establish a distinct intellectual identity for himself.12 But in the end, what predisposed him to adopt the system of geographical and environmental causation that is the hallmark of his great work, while paying relatively little attention to cultural factors, remains a mystery. When he published La Méditerranée in 1949 Braudel was well aware that he would be accused of geographical determinism, and so he addressed the issue head-on at the very beginning of the book.13 He then went on to explain his method in the conclusion to the first segment of the book, in a brief section entitled ‘Géohistoire et déterminisme.’14 (For reasons I have not been able to clarify, he omitted this section from the second edition; perhaps by then he deemed it superfluous, given the general acceptance his method had achieved.) The purpose of geohistory, he explained, is to make possible the writing of ‘a true human geography,’ which was the object of the first segment of La Méditerranée. Braudel’s discussion of human geography covered the same ground as Febvre’s. He cited La terre et l’évolution humaine directly, and framed his argument in the same terms of ‘possibilism’ and ‘determinism,’ only adding a few historical illustrations to Febvre’s framework, in order to show how specific human activities (e.g., agriculture and maritime trade) evolve over time, in response to specific factors (e.g., demographic pressure). But

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his chief concern was to propose a dialectic of time and space, the fundamental coordinates that structured his interpretative schema. Change operates simultaneously in both these realms, he reminded his readers; their influences cannot be separated, and history unfolds as a dynamic relationship between them. Braudel emphasized that the action of space is as important as that of time in how human societies evolve. Knowing that his fellow-historians were much happier thinking about change in chronological terms, he reminded them that ‘time is not always that active, fluid principle that historians talk about. It is very often a dormant principle.’15 Space counts equally with time, even if its effects are harder for historians to gauge. Geohistory thus formed the intellectual armature around which Braudel constructed La Méditerranée. Its influence is most evident in the first section of the book, which he entitled ‘The Role of the Environment.’ In it he set out the immobile, or almost immobile, geographical matrix of human activity, where change is virtually imperceptible and can only be measured over very lengthy spans of time – the longue durée. Geohistory also pervades the second layer of the book, ‘Collective Destinies and Movements,’ which explores the level of conjoncture, an untranslatable term signifying medium-term change brought about by the interaction of social, economic, and demographic factors. It is in this section that Braudel devotes close attention to cities, focusing on their function as catalysts of social and economic development. In the final segment of the book, devoted to political history, or événements, geohistory disappears from view. This part of the book seems in fact to represent a fossil remnant of Braudel’s original project for a diplomatic and military history of the Mediterranean during Philip II’s reign, conceived before he came under Febvre’s influence in the late 1930s.16 Perhaps he retained it, even though it does not really fit well with the two earlier sections of the book, in order to deflect the criticism he expected from the traditionalists who dominated the French historical establishment in the years immediately after the Second World War, as a way to show that he could write their kind of ‘real history.’17 Significantly, in the second edition he reduced it markedly in scale.

Cities in La Méditerranée (1949) In Braudel’s original geohistorical schema, as set forth in the first edition of La Méditerranée, cities figure almost exclusively as economic actors. And as we shall see, in the second edition in 1966 his ideas had not really

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changed; he would merely amplify them with vast amounts of new evidence. He contends from the outset that cities are the product of trade routes: their geographical locations are determined by the flow of trade. ‘Trade routes nourish and explain cities, or least they explain their functions, their tasks, and their fundamental mechanisms’; or again, ‘Great cities are always at the intersection of trade routes.’18 It is the flow of trade, and the presence of a market – which does not exist in the countryside, Braudel says – that define the essential nature of the city. Here his conception is very close to that of Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), one of the founding fathers of social and economic history, and an ally of Bloch and Febvre in the early years of the Annales.19 For Pirenne, the city’s function as a market was its central, defining characteristic, its raison d’être, and Braudel clearly echoes his view. But he goes on from this basis to develop his own theory of how urban economies evolve. Every city’s economy is mercantile in origin, but if conditions are favourable, a second stage of manufacturing will evolve out of the original economy of exchange. Here Braudel cites the example of Florence: the textile industry that made it one of Europe’s most important manufacturing centres in the later Middle Ages grew out of its trading economy, which created the conditions in which manufacturing could develop. For Braudel, urban economic development thus follows a specific trajectory. In certain instances trade gives rise to industry, and in a few select cases, these will in turn give rise to a third sector, finance and banking. Here Braudel’s locus classicus is Genoa, ‘undeniably the metropolis of European capitalism,’ a city that always occupied a very important place in his thinking. He shows how the great Genoese banking families, which came to dominate the Mediterranean world from the 1550s to 1630 – or even beyond that date, Braudel opines – started out as merchants and manufacturers. But unlike their counterparts in Venice, whose fortunes remained firmly rooted in maritime trade, in the course of the sixteenth century the Genoese elite forsook textile manufacturing and shipping for high finance, moving their city into a third stage of economic development. They became bankers to the Spanish crown, underwriting its imperial designs in the Low Countries and the Mediterranean, and thus made Genoa the financial hub of Europe. But the triumph of these ‘manieurs d’argent’ was only achieved at a high social and human cost, Braudel observes: the decline of the city’s industries, and a dangerously widening gulf between rich and poor.20 At this point in his discussion of the functions of cities Braudel alludes briefly and cursorily to their cultural role. He dismisses the arguments

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of Richard Ehrenberg (1857–1921), who had sought to explain the flowering of Renaissance culture in Florence as the result of patronage by rich bankers with time and leisure to devote to the arts. ‘Clearly, not everything can be explained by economics,’ is Braudel’s verdict.21 Yet paradoxically a little later he would suggest that the ‘secret of the Renaissance at Florence between 1480 and 1530’ was that it was sustained by the physical growth of the city, and the wealth flowing in from commerce and manufacturing.22 Beyond this rather contradictory suggestion, however, Braudel has little to offer on the subject, other than a generalized suggestion that cultural flowering comes late in the history of any city, if at all. He concludes enigmatically by observing that this cultural efflorescence could be a sign either of a city’s ‘brilliance’ or of the ‘bruises’ it suffered.23 He offers no reason for this delphic assertion, but leaves it hanging in the void. Although these observations may strike one as unsatisfactory, they nonetheless show that Braudel was not indifferent to cultural issues. He concludes this chapter with a short but provocative section on ‘Les villes et la civilisation.’24 Cities, he says, are the true matrices of Mediterranean civilization. The public life of their streets and piazzas – which he contrasts to the ‘cold, hermetic’ cities of the North, where privacy reigns – is a powerful cultural force, polishing and refining the ‘barbarous’ rustic migrants who flock to them. But what does he mean here by ‘civilization’? Apparently, a certain urbanity in manners and deportment, a sense of display and public presence: its embodiment is ‘a man who lives for others and is watched by them, for whom life is appearances, playing a part in the human comedy before his fellows.’25 For Braudel, civilization is thus inseparable from public life played out against the theatrical backdrop of a city, under the critical gaze of one’s fellow-citizens, and is specifically Mediterranean. In support of this contention Braudel cites Goethe, crossing the Alps to be dazzled by his first sight of the bustling street life of an Italian city at Verona; for Braudel, another northerner who fell in love with the Mediterranean at first sight, Goethe’s excitement evidently struck a familiar chord.26 Braudel’s conception of urban culture extended also to architecture and the fine arts, which he touched on from time to time in La Méditerranée. Here his ideas were formed by a wide reading of the chief art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Burckhardt on, whom he duly cited in the footnotes to this section. Following their lead, he tended to think in terms of a sequence of distinct styles and distinct epochs, framed as reified categories such as ‘Renais-

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sance’ and ‘Baroque’ in the manner of Wölfflin.27 Significantly, Braudel visualizes these successive styles – Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque – in material terms, as a sequence of superimposed geological strata.28 The dividing line between the strata of Renaissance and baroque comes, for Braudel as for his art-historical mentors, with the sack of Rome in 1527 and the fall of the last Florentine republic in 1530. What followed was what Braudel (following his sources) terms ‘pre-baroque,’ or what we refer to today as Mannerism. After that comes the age of the baroque, defined by Braudel as a reaffirmation of Christian aesthetics against the ‘paganism’ of the Renaissance. Rome figures in La Méditerranée as the central point from which this new style radiated across Europe, propagated by the Jesuits and expressing the élan of the Counter-Reformation.29 For Braudel, the essence of ‘the baroque’ is represented by great churches such as Vignola’s Il Gesù at Rome, which would serve as a model throughout Christendom, and by the great fresco cycles that decorated it. (Braudel assumed these were part of the original décor, although they were in fact painted a century after the church was built.) He argues that the victory of the baroque was due primarily to the fervour of the reinvigorated monastic orders, mobilizing the Catholic faithful in a counter-attack against Protestantism. The baroque is thus the aesthetic face of the Church militant. (I note in passing that this discussion seems to be one of the rare occasions in La Méditerranée where Braudel broaches the question of religion.) But he is quick to point out the material factors behind the victory of Roman baroque. The later sixteenth-century popes avoided costly wars and devoted much of their revenue to building: St Peter’s was only one grand project among many others that employed the small army of architects, masons, and painters who inhabited Rome at that time. And the influx of Spanish silver into the Mediterranean after 1560 gave further impetus to the popes’ extravagant artistic program. Now, Braudel concludes, the artistic dreams of the Renaissance popes Julius II and Leo X could finally be realized. Rome thus occupies a special place in his urban schema, as the springboard from which Mediterranean civilization once again affirmed its artistic ascendancy over the rest of Europe: a rare instance in La Méditerranée of a city not conceived in solely economic and geographical terms. From this we can conclude that Braudel was to some degree attuned to cultural issues, as they were framed in the art-historical literature current when he was writing La Méditerranée in the 1930s and 1940s. And in some of his subsequent work his cultural interests would become more apparent. In 1968 he was commissioned by the art publisher Albert Skira

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to write an illustrated history of the early Mediterranean. Braudel soon completed the manuscript, a breathtaking sweep of ancient history interweaving economic, political, and cultural themes, from the Palaeolithic era via Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome. Skira, however, died a couple of years later and the project was abandoned. The text finally saw the light of day a few years ago, as part of Braudel’s Nachlasse.30 Similarly, the lengthy chapter he published in the Einaudi Storia d’Italia in 1975, on Italy’s influence on Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, displays a wide knowledge of art history and an awareness of cultural issues. This chapter was later published as a separate, sumptuously illustrated volume in English.31 But curiously, for one alive to art-historical issues, whose method was deeply rooted in geography, and who laid so much stress on the civilizing influence of public spaces in the Mediterranean city, Braudel evinced little interest in the forma urbis, the physical shape and plan of the cities he studied. The second edition of La Méditerranée contains a number of plans – for instance, of the central districts of Istanbul and Venice32 – but for the most part Braudel does not analyse the topography of the cities he studies. His focus remains resolutely on their economic role: in fact, the two plans just cited illustrate the layout of Istanbul’s central bazaar and the concentration of population and location of shops in Venice. Urban planning was evidently not Braudel’s concern, despite the fact that his formative years in the early twentieth century were a fertile period for visionary new concepts of city planning: Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle (1901), Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement (1902), Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City (1922), Voisin Plan for central Paris (1925), and Radiant City (1935), Frank Lloyd Wright’s project for Broadacre City (1935), along with a number of totalitarian schemes such as Mussolini’s EUR at Rome and the grandiose rebuilding of Berlin projected for Hitler by Albert Speer.33 But La Méditerranée gives no indication that Braudel was aware of the intellectual ferment among urban planners, even though Le Corbusier was proposing new plans for Algiers during the time he was living there – something of which he was probably aware.34 Curiously, too, Braudel’s residence in Algiers and his travels in North Africa do not seem to have sparked his interest in contemporary French scholars’ attempts to define the specific nature of the ‘Islamic city.’35 Nor, despite the emphasis his method placed on geography, was he touched by contemporary developments in urban geography, such as Christaller’s central-place theory, which postulated clusters of lesser towns gravitating around a major centre.36 This theory was not

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incompatible with Braudel’s own concept of cities as economic pivots situated at key points on trade routes, and could in fact have been used to enhance it. But Braudel never exhibited any affinity for theories of this kind; his method was always solidly empirical, and he seems to have felt no need for any kind of theoretical underpinning to sustain it. Probably for this reason his work shows no traces of influence from the most important single work on cities written in the first half of the twentieth century, Max Weber’s comparative historical-sociological essay of 1921.37 Braudel had read Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but apparently not much else of his oeuvre.38 His primary concern was to evoke the particularity and the materiality of a city as a specific geographical and historical artefact, and he evidently refused to submerge these qualities in the anonymity of a Weberian ideal type.

Cities in La Méditerranée (1966) To what extent had Braudel’s original geohistorical concept of the city changed by the time he came to revise La Méditerranée? The short answer is not much, if at all. What has changed, however, is the weight of evidence he brings to bear on the issue of cities and the part they play in his grand schema. Rereading the second edition I began to realise that part II (on conjoncture), in which cities play a commanding role, is far longer and fuller than it was in the first. Intrigued, I began to count pages, in the best traditions of Annales-school quantification. This admittedly simple-minded method revealed that although the two editions are of almost the same overall length,39 in the 1966 edition part II had in fact grown at the expense of part III, the section on political history, which Braudel had pruned drastically. Thus: 1949 edition Pt I 301 pages Pt II 309 pages Pt III 377 pages

1966 edition Pt I 300 pages Pt II 463 pages Pt III 275 pages

In addition, the final section of part I, on cities and trade routes, is slightly expanded in the second edition. All in all, therefore, the amount of space Braudel devotes to cities in the second edition has expanded significantly. But his geohistorical approach to urban history, with its emphasis on economics, has not changed; he has amplified it with new information, but his conception of urban culture remains just as it was before.

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Take the case of Rome, his prime example of a city as a cultural actor. The section on Rome as the forcing house of baroque civilization in the first edition is reprinted essentially word for word in the second, and the sources cited in the footnotes are almost identical.40 The only significant new reference is to Jean Delumeau’s social history of the city in the sixteenth century.41 No new art-historical sources are cited. Braudel has added nothing to his original treatment of Rome as ‘un grand centre de rayonnement méditerranéen.’ It appears that he did not see any need to bring it up to date, or to rethink it. But if we turn to Genoa, Braudel’s mercantile city par excellence, we find that the treatment has altered radically. The short chapter devoted to Genoa in the first edition has tripled in length, and has become a rich tableau celebrating ‘le siècle des Génois’ – the triumph of Genoese finance from the middle of the sixteenth century to 1627 and beyond. In the first edition Braudel had alluded briefly to the trade fairs of Piacenza, through which the Genoese banking houses controlled Europe’s high finance after 1579.42 In the second edition he traces the rise of the great Genoese financial dynasties, which took over the risky but highly lucrative business of loaning money to the Spanish crown after the Fugger of Augsburg withdrew in the late 1550s. He explains the different forms of Spanish government credit – juros and asientos – and how the Genoese financiers manipulated them. He shows how they survived and prospered despite the crisis brought on by Philip II’s refusal to pay the interest on his debts in 1575. The Genoese bankers forced Philip II to resume interest payments, and went on to establish the fairs of Piacenza as the key mechanism through which they could control Europe’s money markets. In this way they maintained their ascendancy, weathering successive Spanish crown bankruptcies down to 1627, and – Braudel tended to believe – well beyond that date. His whole account is much fuller than in the first edition; it has become a virtual paean of praise, heavily documented, to the nerve and skill that enabled the Genoese capitalists to dominate European finance for three-quarters of a century.43 These two examples indicate that Braudel’s basic method, and his focus on the economic functions of cities, had not been altered by the passage of time between the two editions of La Méditerranée. In fact, his concentration on the material aspects of urban life had intensified, thanks to the accumulation of new economic and demographic scholarship, much of it produced by his Annaliste colleagues and pupils. A lengthy section in the second edition (not present in the first) examines urban demography, reinforced with a battery of statistics culled

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from these recent studies.44 The issue of population had barely been broached in the first edition, when only meagre demographic data were available. But in the intervening years the fast-growing array of Annaliste demographic studies led Braudel into a new line of investigation: the structure of urban populations and the problem of urban poverty. He concluded that perhaps one-fifth of the urban population was poor and malnourished, in the east and west of the Mediterranean alike.45 Meanwhile, a new section on ‘Fairs’ re-emphasized the mercantile function of cities: ‘Merchant centres are the decisive motors of economic life; they overcome hostile distances, and launch traffics that, at the speeds attainable at that time, triumph over distance, come what may.’46 They are poles of ‘high economic voltage’ in a low-voltage rural environment.47 He stressed the importance of the ‘Quadrilateral’ of north Italian cities – Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence – as the heart of the Mediterranean economy, even more strongly than before: they were, says Braudel, a ‘Weltwirtschaft, a world economy, a universe unto themselves.’48 Their industries remained buoyant in the face of competition from northern Europe by shifting from woollen textiles into silk. Their profits from the crucial sector of long-distance trade continued to flow, undiminished. Any decline of these interlinked urban economies vis-à-vis the north was only relative, at least through the later sixteenth century. But their decline, when it came in the next century, would be precipitous.49

‘En guise de conclusion’ Finally, let me suggest a couple of possible explanations for Braudel’s greater emphasis on the material aspects of urban history, and his corresponding neglect of its cultural and aesthetic aspects, which became evident in the second edition of La Méditerranée. First and most obvious of these explanations would be the trend of Annales scholarship in the post-war period towards quantification and the use of serial data – births and deaths, prices, wages. Here I think Braudel’s colleague and collaborator Ernest Labrousse was of paramount importance.50 The post-1945 generation of historians who began to gather around the re-founded Annales ESC and the new VIe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, set up by Febvre to propagate the innovative methodologies he and Bloch had pioneered, was deeply influenced by Labrousse’s quantitative approach to economic history. Following his lead, the emerging discipline of Annales-school social history took on a definitely quantitative cast: witness the work of so many of Braudel’s associates and pupils in

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the 1950s and 1960s.51 Braudel’s own research moved in the same direction, away from the more impressionistic approach of the first edition of La Méditerranée into a search for a more solid empirical foundation, as prescribed by the new vogue for statistical evidence. In 1951 he launched a new series of monographs entitled ‘Ports, Routes et Trafics.’ The first volume, by Braudel himself and Ruggiero Romano, analysed the trade of the port of Livorno in the second half of the sixteenth century.52 Other volumes followed over the next few years, most notably the gargantuan study of Seville’s American trade by Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, which appeared between 1955 and 1959.53 The series was obviously grounded in Braudel’s original geohistorical and socio-economic conception of cities as nodal points on trade routes, but it took this conception a stage further, seeking to bolster it with hard data. The results of this new direction of research are evident in the abundance of quantitative data, and the array of charts and graphs, that punctuate the second volume of La Méditerranée and differentiate it from the first. Geohistory and economic history had now acquired a quantitative foundation. A second explanation for the shift of emphasis in the second edition of La Méditerranée is perhaps to be found in Braudel’s response to criticism from the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.54 This debate was a kind of curious replay of the attack directed against history as an incurably empirical and thus unscientific discipline by Durkheim’s pupil, the sociologist François Simiand, at the beginning of the century.55 A certain personal antagonism is also detectable in the exchange of polemics. Lévi-Strauss dismissed historians as collectors of information, incapable of penetrating systematically to the deep, unconscious structures of human society and human nature. He conceded that history and anthropology are allied disciplines, for each in its ways is a science de l’homme, studying humankind in society. But only anthropologists can unravel the secrets of human nature: historians, he maintained, are occupied only with the surface phenomena. Braudel responded to this challenge with a double strategy: by criticizing Lévi-Strauss’s method as atemporal, and by accentuating what he termed the ‘structural’ element in his historical method, as he and his team of Annalistes practised it.56 For Braudel, any social science that ignored the dimension of time could not give a valid idea of social reality. He was willing to accept the existence of deep mental structures governing human behaviour, but he argued that their most salient feature was their temporality: they emerged, evolved, and broke down with the passage of time. The weakness of structural anthropology, he contended,

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was its disregard of this temporal dimension, its inability to deal with any phenomenon outside the static, timeless realm of myths or kinship systems. Meanwhile he was at pains to stress the fundamental importance of long-term processes in history – his famous longue durée – which in his hands became a structure in its own right: at times he would use ‘structure’ and longue durée interchangeably. As examples of deep historical structures he identified the development of merchant capitalism, or the evolution of the Italian urban economies, from trade to manufacturing to finance, that he had outlined in La Méditerranée. So as a result of the debate with Lévi-Strauss, I think, his geohistorical and socio-economic paradigm shifted towards a greater emphasis on long-term structures, at the expense of other elements, cultural or political, which seemed to him less durable. This shift, I think, affected the way he conceived of cities and their historical role. It helps to explain the more prominent place he accorded in the second edition of La Méditerranée to the ‘quadrilateral’ of north Italian cities, now explicitly defined as the pivot of the Mediterranean economy, or the much-extended account he gave of the rise and fall of Genoese finance capitalism. Both, in Braudel’s terms, were historical ‘structures’ evolving slowly but perceptibly over time. The role of cities, or constellations of cities, as evolving structures within the broader structure of the longue durée now occupied his full attention, eclipsing whatever earlier interest he had shown in urban culture. The pull of structuralism had evidently reinforced his original materialist conception of the city, rooting it more firmly than ever in geohistory and economics.

NOTES 1 Marc Bloch (trans. Peter Putnam), The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), v. The words are from his dedication to Febvre, written in 1941. 2 Fernand Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony,’ Journal of Modern History 44, 4 (December 1972), 448–67. 3 See John Marino, ‘On the Shores of Bohemia: Recovering Geography,’ in his edited volume, Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 3–32; idem, ‘The Exile and His Kingdom: The Reception of Braudel’s Mediterranean,’ Journal of Modern History 76, 3 (September 2004), 622–52.

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4 Paul Vidal de la Blache, ‘La géographie politique: À propos des écrits de M. Frédéric Ratzel,’ Annales de Géographie 32, 7th year (1898). 5 Mackinder’s paper ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography,’ delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1887, marks the emergence of the British school: see Paul Coones, Mackinder’s ‘Scope and Methods of Geography’ after a Hundred Years (Oxford: The School of Geography, 1987). 6 Haushofer was one of the founders of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (1924–44; resumed publication 1950), the semi-official journal that propagated these ideas. He is portrayed as the evil genius guiding Nazi plans for world domination in Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1942), a view rejected by Hans W. Weigert, German Geopolitics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). For a balanced analysis see David T. Murphy, The Heroic Earth (Kent, OH, and London: Kent State University Press, 1997), ch. 1. 7 Summarized in his Principes de géographie humaine, edited posthumously by Emmanuel de Martonne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1921). 8 Paris: Albin Michel, 1922. It is vol. 4 of the influential series L’évolution de l’humanité, edited by Henri Berr. 9 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949; hereafter La Méditerranée [1949]), 301: ‘Peu de livres auront été plus éclairants, plus décisifs pour la pensée française …’ 10 Febvre, La terre et l’évolution humaine, 31, 62–72. 11 Ibid., 97. 12 ‘The Problem of Unbelief in the Mediterranean: Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée,’ Clark Library, Los Angeles, 12 April 2003. Chapter 1 of this volume. 13 ‘Les chapitres qui suivent (I à V) ne sont pas des chapitres de géographie. Ce sont des chapitres d’histoire; de même que tout ce livre est un livre d’histoire’: La Méditerranée (1949), 3. This criticism came from the traditionally-minded historians at the Sorbonne; thus Gaston Zeller, attacking La Méditerranée when Braudel presented it as his doctoral thesis (1 March 1947): ‘Vous êtes géographe, permettez-moi d’être historien’; Pierre Daix, Braudel (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 226. 14 Braudel, La Méditerranée (1949), 295–303. 15 Ibid., 298. 16 The decisive moment was the time they spent together during a voyage from Brazil to France in 1937: Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony,’ 453. Braudel’s original doctoral director was the eminent political historian Georges Pagès: Daix, Braudel, 75.

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17 Daix, ch. 7, details Braudel’s conflict with Pierre Renouvin, the leader of the traditionalists at the Sorbonne, and his supporters. 18 La Méditerranée (1949), 259, 262. 19 See his Medieval Cities (Princeton University Press, 1925), which attributes the revival of urban life in the ninth to eleventh centuries to the revival of trade. In the bibliography of La Méditerranée (1949), 1125, Braudel explicitly acknowedged his debt to Pirenne’s book. He also acknowledged that his conception of the Mediterranean as a single geographical space owed much to him: ‘In 1931, Henri Pirenne spoke at Algiers about his ideas on the closure of the Mediterranean after the Moslem invasions. His lectures seemed prodigious to me; his hand opened and shut, and the entire Mediterranean was by turns free and locked in!’ (Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony,’ 452). This was the thesis that Pirenne would advance in his Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937). 20 La Méditerranée (1949), 266. 21 Ibid., 267. 22 Ibid., 288. 23 Ibid., 267: ‘Il est indéniable toutefois que les fruits de civilisation n’apparaissent qu’à l’arrière-saison de la vie urbaine, qu’ils soient la preuve de son éclat ou de sa meurtrissure. Et ce qui compte à nos yeux, c’est ce retard de la civilisation dans la chronologie urbaine.’ (It is nonetheless undeniable that the fruits of civilization only appear in the late season of urban life, whether they are the proofs of its brilliance or of its suffering. And for us what counts is this delay of civilization in urban chronology.) 24 Ibid., 292–3. 25 Ibid., 292. 26 See the first sentence of his Preface: ‘J’ai passionément aimé la Mediterranée, sans doute parce que venu du Nord, comme tant d’autres, après tant d’autres’: La Méditerranée (1949), ix. 27 Ibid., 601: in the section ‘Les étapes du baroque,’ Braudel cites, besides Burckhardt, ‘les historiens allemands’ Wölfflin, Riegl, Brinckmann, and Weisbach. 28 Ibid., 602: These art historians conducted ‘un essai utile de classification, de reconnaissance d’une couche d’art, à la manière, si l’on veut, d’une couche géologique’ (a useful exercise in classification, in the identification of an artistic stratum, similar, if you will, to a geological stratum). 29 Ibid., 607–10. 30 Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée: Préhistoire et Antiquité, ed. Roselyne de Ayala and Paule Braudel (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1998; English trans. by Siân Reynolds, Memory and the Mediterranean, New York: Knopf, 2001).

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31 Originally published as ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia,’ in Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, 6 vols. in 10 pts. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975–7) 2: pt. 2, 2092–2248. The original French version appeared posthumously as Le modèle italien (Paris: Arthaud, 1989; English trans. by Siân Reynolds, Out of Italy: 1450–1650, Paris: Flammarion, 1991). See also Lucette Valensi’s observations in this volume on Braudel and the visual arts. 32 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966; hereafter La Méditerranée [1966]), 1:287, 289. 33 For background see Françoise Chouay, The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Braziller, 1969); and Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 34 Twice in the early 1930s: Fishman, Urban Utopias, 243–4. 35 André Raymond, ‘Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views,’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21, 1 (1994), 3–18. My thanks to Gabi Piterberg for this reference. 36 Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany, trans. Carlisle W. Baskin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). The German original was published in 1933. 37 ‘The City: Non-Legitimate Domination,’ in Max Weber: Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1212–1372. 38 On Braudel’s rejection of sociology in general and Weber in particular, see François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V. Conroy, Jr (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 88–9; cf. Daix, Braudel, 172. 39 This is of course a rough estimate: the second edition uses a smaller typeface, but includes many pages of graphs and tables not present in the first edition. 40 Only one new reference is given, to an article by Pierre Charpentrat: La Méditerranée (1966), 156n1. The rest are carried over verbatim from the previous edition. 41 Ibid., 158n4. Note that Delumeau was one of the younger members of the Annales school. 42 La Méditerranée (1949), 394–8. 43 La Méditerranée (1966), 454–68. 44 Ibid., 361–83. 45 Ibid., 413–19. 46 Ibid., 347. 47 Ibid., 413.

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48 Ibid., 354. 49 Ibid., 399. 50 E.g., Pierre Goubert, Un parcours d’historien: Souvenirs 1915–1995 (Paris: Fayard, 1996), ch. 13, for Labrousse’s formative influence on the post-1945 generation of historians. 51 For example: Felipe Ruiz Martín, Jean Delumeau, Pierre Chaunu, Ruggiero Romano, Herman van der Wee, Alberto Tenenti, Bartolomé Benassar, Jacques Heers, Frank Spooner, Ömer Lutfi Barkan, José Gentil da Silva, Robert Mantran, Barisa Krekic, René Baehrel, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie … 52 Fernand Braudel and Ruggiero Romano, Navires et marchandises à l’entrée du port de Livourne (1547–1611) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1951). 53 Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 8 vols. in 11 parts (Paris: SEVPEN, 1955–9). It is no. 6 in the series Ports, Routes et Trafics. 54 Dosse, New History in France, 85–97. 55 Entitled ‘Historical Method and Social Science,’ it was published in 1903 in Henri Berr’s journal Revue de synthèse historique. Ibid., 13. 56 Fernand Braudel, ‘La longue durée,’ in his Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 41–83; originally published in Annales ESC, 1958, no. 4, 725–53. Febvre reacted with sarcasm to this ‘structuralist turn,’ and the ‘Byzantine’ debates it was arousing. See his introduction to Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1:xi: ‘Et puis, “structures”? Mot à la mode, je le sais; il s’étale même, parfois, dans les Annales, un peu trop à mon goût. Car, en vérité, qu’y a-t-il de “structure” réellement, dans tant de structures dont, si j’ose dire, on nous emplit la vue?’ (And then, ‘structures’? This word is very fashionable, I know; it figures from time to time in the Annales, a bit too frequently for my taste. For if truth be told, what structure is there really, among all the structures that, if I dare say it, are everywhere to be seen?)

PART II THINKING BEYOND BRAUDEL

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chapter three

A Mediterranean Culture of Factions? Bilateral Factionalism in the Greater Mediterranean Region in the Pre-Modern Era J A N E H AT H AWA Y

In Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, political culture belongs to the realm of histoire événementielle, the shallow surface waters of the tripartite Braudelian ‘ocean’ of structure, conjuncture, and event.1 Here, however, I wish to examine a form of political culture that Braudel largely neglects but that arguably belongs to the structures, or at least to the conjunctures, underlying historical change in numerous Mediterranean societies. This is the political culture of bilateral factionalism, in which two rival blocs divide much of the society in question, leaving no opportunity for an alternative third grouping. These factions are often political, military, and/or administrative in their manifestations, although a pronounced class element not infrequently imbues them, as well. While not suggesting direct influences among synchronic forms of bilateral factionalism, I maintain that the culture of bilateral factionalism tended to express itself in certain patterns that are recognizable and even predictable across space, as well as time. Moreover, these characteristics seem peculiar, although not exclusive, to specifically bilateral factionalism; that is, they tend not to serve as effective factional markers in societies in which more than two competing political groupings exist. In this essay, I will put forward a number of characteristics of bilateral factionalism that have manifested themselves in various societies of the Mediterranean and environs at various periods. These characteristics are (1) colour dichotomy, (2) fictive genealogies or origin traditions stemming from defining quarrels or flights, (3) competing rituals (including ritualized violence) that take place in circumscribed spaces, (4) transcendence of the urban-rural divide, (5) enmeshment with imperial poli-

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tics, and (6) reincarnation of pre-existing factions. The various instances of bilateral factionalism that I have identified in the pre-modern Mediterranean region exhibit different combinations of these characteristics; no one factional culture exhibits all of them, nor do I wish to suggest that these are the only visible characteristics of bilateral factionalism. Therefore, I will explore these characteristics as variously manifested in a shifting collection of examples from three key geographical sub-regions of the Mediterranean: the north-central Mediterranean coast, specifically Greece and Italy; the southeastern coast, specifically Egypt and Syria; and the Iranian plateau, which we might call the eastern extension of the Mediterranean. Following this survey of characteristics, I will address the purposes that bilateral factionalism served in pre-modern societies.

1 Colour Dichotomy The most visible symptom of bipolar factionalism is arguably colour dichotomy, the phenomenon whereby each faction adopts a distinguishing colour, displayed in its members’ clothing and/or in its banners and other identifying insignia. The colours in question are typically quite basic, if not primary, colours. In the later Roman Empire, for a notable example, the two dominant factions were known by the names of the colours with which they were associated: blue and green. These factions consisted of the professional performers and their fans who participated in the chariot races staged by the Roman emperors beginning roughly in the second century BCE. The colours were those that the rival competitors displayed on their chariots and on the banners that accompanied them into the arena, as well as in their clothing. Initially, there were four factions that derived their colours from either the four seasons or the four elements believed in classical Greek science to constitute the universe: earth (green), air (white), fire (red), and water (blue). Yet quite early on, factional rivalries took the form of competition between pairs of colours (ultimately Blue and White versus Green and Red), rather than among all four; in other words, Roman/Byzantine factionalism was inherently bilateral.2 Nor were the factions and factional rivalries restricted to Rome; arenas and factional competition spread to Constantinople and Alexandria and, by the late fifth century CE, throughout Byzantium’s Asian territories.3 The Byzantine emperor himself belonged to one of the four factions and supported the interests of either the Blues or the Greens. Like the futuwwa brotherhoods prevalent in mediaeval Muslim cities, the factions were dominated by young men, who were responsible

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for most of the violence for which the factions were blamed.4 Moreover, the colour prejudice was as intense as the factional allegiance itself, as illustrated by an epigram on Metrodotus, leader of the Blues in Salonica, who kept a green table in his house to remind himself of the enemy.5 As Speros Vryonis has noted, the Blue-Green rivalry coloured the conflicts between the Byzantines and the Sasanian Persian empire that formed the backdrop to the rise of Islam. The ‘young men’ of Antioch unsuccessfully defended the city against the invading Sasanian emperor Khusrau I Anushirvan in 540 CE, while those of Jerusalem massacred the Persian garrison after the city’s conquest by Khusrau II Parviz in 614 CE.6 The factions may even have facilitated the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 CE. According to John of Nikiu, the Blue and Green leaders ‘assieged the city of Misr [the future Cairo] and harassed the Romans during the days of the Moslem’7 – meaning, presumably, that they either diverted the Byzantines’ attention from the Muslim invaders or actually fought alongside the Muslims. Of greater moment among the Muslims themselves was the deep-rooted and still incompletely understood antagonism between northern, or Qaysi, and southern, or Yemeni, Arabs. Initially, this schism had its roots in geography. Qaysi Arabs inhabited the territory extending from the borders of Yemen northward to the deserts of what are now Jordan, southern Syria, and southwestern Iraq. Yemeni Arabs, as the name implies, inhabited Yemen and the southern portions of the Arabian peninsula in general. They spoke a southern Arabian language which, while Semitic, was written in a different script from the northern dialects on which classical and modern Arabic is based, and diverged in numerous other ways, as well.8 The ancient kingdom of Yemen nurtured a distinctive southern Arabian civilization that enjoyed important links to Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Levant.9 Migrations of southern Arabs northward into the peninsula occurred periodically in connection with political upheavals and trade.10 In the sixth century CE, however, a series of military and natural disasters led to a wave of northward migrations of Yemeni Arabs. Ethiopian invasion in 525 was followed by retaliatory Persian occupation in 570; in 550, meanwhile, the ancient Marib Dam collapsed, destroying the basis of Yemen’s agricultural economy.11 It was perhaps during this period that the differences between northern and southern tribes became a serious source of division in the tribal politics of the peninsula. In the wake of Islam’s emergence and the expansion of the early Muslim empire, the schism between the northern and southern Arabs be-

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came more intractable. The Prophet Muhammad was himself a northern, or Qaysi, Arab, as were most of his early converts in Mecca; the disputes over the caliphate, or leadership of the Muslim community, following his death resulted in a Qaysi monopoly of the office. In contrast, the early Muslim armies included large numbers of both Qaysi and Yemeni tribesmen, and both groups were appointed to high offices in the early caliphal administrations. Consequently, the garrison towns that the early caliphs established throughout their expanding empire came to include a bewildering mixture of northern and southern Arabs; by this point, not surprisingly, the literal geographical significance of the ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ labels had become virtually meaningless. After the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate in 750 CE and the rise of the assimilationist ‘Abbasid dynasty, the Qays-Yemen rivalry grew somewhat more muted, yet it continued unabated in certain regions, notably Egypt and Greater Syria. In Egypt, Qaysi and Yemeni tribes in the Nile Delta took opposite ‘sides in the ‘Abbasid civil war of 809–13 CE.12 During the Ottoman era, Lebanon above all was torn by Qaysi-Yemeni rivalry; the Ottoman central government appears to have supported Qaysi families more often than Yemeni ones.13 In Syria and Palestine, meanwhile, the Qays-Yemen rivalry could still be observed in villages and small towns in the early twentieth century.14 The Qaysi-Yemeni struggle, like that of the Blues and Greens, is characterized by a pronounced colour dichotomy: the Qaysi colour is red, the Yemeni colour white, although no elemental explanation has been offered for the origins of the colour preference. Tribespeople and other partisans of Qays and Yemen appear to have attached as much importance to the visual display of their colours as the Byzantine Blues and Greens. Qaysis and Yemenis wore red and white, respectively; in twentieth-century Syria and Palestine, observers remind us, a bride dressed in white would be obliged to change into red clothing if her wedding party chanced to pass through a Qaysi village.15 While the Qays-Yemen conflict seems to have died out in Egypt by the Middle Ages, the Sad and Haram Bedouin factions and their urban counterparts, Faqari and Qasimi, who divided Egypt during the seventeenth century, partook of this Qaysi-Yemeni red-white colour dichotomy. The Faqaris’ banners were white, those of the Qasimis red; furthermore, the factional origin myths, as transmitted by eighteenthcentury Arabophone chroniclers, clearly allude to Qays and Yemen as antecedents of this latter-day incarnation of colour-coded rivalry. This colour clash was as deeply felt as that of the Byzantine Blues and Greens,

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if we are to believe the account of the well-known Egyptian historian alJabarti (1754–1825), according to whom the Faqaris not only wore white clothing but preferred to eat white food with white utensils. The Qasimis nurtured a similar affinity for red, the Qaysi colour.16 A variation on or complement to identification by colour is identification by emblem, such as that borne on a battle standard. The Faqaris and Qasimis appear to have combined colour dichotomy with such contrasting emblems. In public processions, the eighteenth-century chroniclers tell us, the factions could be visually distinguished by their standards, which were mounted on long poles or javelin-shafts: the Faqaris’ took the form of a ‘pomegranate’ (rummaFna), the Qasimis’ that of a metal plate ( jalba, from the Persian chalap). As I have argued elsewhere, these objects were almost certainly the Ottoman tugG, a golden ball from which horsetails designating rank were suspended, and the Mamluk alem, a metal plate in the shape of a spade.17 The factions of mediaeval Tuscany employed strikingly similar markers of factional identity, although not, it appears, in combination. In the thirteenth century, the Tuscan city-states were divided between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, two political factions that had originated in Germany during the previous century, when the pope’s choice of a Holy Roman Emperor from among the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria was opposed by the lords of Hohenstaufen. The Saxon and Bavarian dukes belonged to the house of Welf (Guelph), while the Hohenstaufen faction took their name from Waiblingen (Ghibelline), their castle near Stuttgart. In northern Italy, the Guelphs were known as the party of the pope, the Ghibellines as the party of the emperor. When Guelphs fought Ghibellines, battle standards were often the only means of telling the two sides apart. In 1260, at the pivotal battle of Montaperti between Guelph Florence and Ghibelline Siena, a Florentine turncoat, later reviled in Canto 32 of Dante’s Inferno, severed the hand of the city’s standard-bearer, so that the standard fell to the ground. Unable to see their standard above the heads of the combatants, who were all dressed similarly, the Florentine fighters panicked, allowing the Siennese to counterattack and seize victory.18 As preserved in collective memory, the depth of the GuelphGhibelline enmity resembled that of the Faqaris and Qasimis, as well as the Blues and Greens, in that it extended to quotidian details. To quote the venerable history of John Addington Symonds: ‘Banners, ensigns, and heraldic colours followed the divisions of the factions. Ghibellines wore the feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs upon the other. Ghibellines cut fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down … Ghibel-

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lines drank out of smooth, and Guelfs out of chased, goblets. Ghibellines wore white, and Guelfs red, roses.’19 Apart from the alleged red and white roses, the Guelph-Ghibelline rivalry does not seem to have spawned a colour dichotomy of the FaqariQasimi type. Once the Guelphs had expelled the Ghibellines from Florence in the late thirteenth century, however, the ‘Parte Guelpha’ itself split into two colour-coded factions: Black and White. The split allegedly originated within the Cancellieri family, one branch of which took the name White (plural, bianchi) after Bianca Cancellieri and began flying a white banner on its standard, prompting the other branch to choose black, the opposite end of the spectrum. The Cancellieri feud soon grafted itself onto a more deeply rooted feud between the Donati and Cerchi families. Ultimately, the Blacks, led by the Donatis, represented the old nobility, supported by the pope, while the Whites, led by the Cerchis, represented the rising merchant class.20

2 Fictive Genealogies/Origin Traditions and Transformative Events To a significant degree, factions constructed their own identities, appropriating existing markers of identity that may originally have served different purposes. Narratives of factional origins reinforce colours and emblems as appropriated markers of this sort. While the colours and emblems proclaim the factions’ identities in the present moment and in a public space, the stories construct their pasts, creating legitimacy through collective memory. The origin myths in question typically explain how the factions came to diverge; thus, they often centre on a split in a lineage or on a transformative event that spawned the factional rift. A divided genealogy deriving from ancient Arab tribal lineages attaches to the Qays and Yemen factions. The two factions are believed to descend from two legendary Arab ancestors: the Qaysi, or northern, Arabs from Adnan and the Yemeni, or southern, Arabs from Qahtan.21 Identification with one or the other of these two mythic Arab figures was quite strong well into the twentieth century.22 Ultimately, these two Arab ancestors could be traced back to Ishmael, son of the biblical and Quranic patriarch Abraham, thence to Shem, one of the three sons of Noah, thence to Adam, the first man. Thus, this Arab genealogical tradition built on the widespread and quite ancient tradition of tracing divergent populations to the three sons of Noah – Shem, Ham, and Japheth

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– who were thought to have given rise to, respectively, the Semitic, Hamitic, and Indo-European peoples.23 In seventeenth-century Egypt, the Qasimi grandee Ridvan Bey AbulShawarib commissioned a genealogy demonstrating his descent from the legendary figure Kisa, who supposedly fled into Byzantine territory to escape the advancing armies of the early Muslims and ultimately settled in the Caucasus mountains, where he became the ancestor of the Circassians. Kisa, the genealogy goes on to demonstrate, can trace his descent to the Prophet’s tribe of Quraysh, thence to Adnan, Ishmael son of Abraham, Shem son of Noah, and ultimately Adam.24 This genealogy, then, takes the traditional Qaysi Arab genealogy and grafts it onto the venerable Circassian folk tradition of descent from the Arabs. In so doing, Ridvan Bey’s genealogist transforms the latter tradition, which in most incarnations depicts Kisa as the brother of the last ruler of the Yemeni Arab kingdom of Ghassan, located in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula, who also fled the early Muslim armies.25 In either form, this legend focuses on a flight that results in a migration and the founding of a new community. In a Muslim context, the prototype for this sort of migration is the Prophet Muhammad’s migration (hijra) in 622 CE from Mecca to Medina, where he founded the original Muslim state. Ridvan Bey Abul-Shawarib appears to have hoped that his invented connection to the Prophet and the Holy Cities, reinforced by an implied parallel between his ancestor’s migration and that of the Prophet, would enhance his chances for the post of pilgrimage commander.26 In a variation on the migration-foundation myth, the factions arise from a rupture between two brothers or other close relatives, that is, from two otherwise harmonious halves of a common whole. The trope of two quarrelling brothers is, needless to say, virtually as old as human history; it is well represented in the Hebrew Bible stories of Cain and Abel and of Jacob and Esau. Such a myth stresses rupture and rivalry rather than the common origins of both factions, or the noble lineage of one or the other. Still, the focus remains a transformative event that breaks the continuity of history by engendering factionalism. In an origin myth of the Faqaris and Qasimis reported, in variant forms, by the Egyptian chroniclers Ahmad Çelebi and al-Jabarti, the factions stem from DhulFaqar and Qasim, two sons of a defeated Mamluk emir named Sudun who quarrel while jousting before the Ottoman sultan Selim I following his conquest of Egypt.27 This origin myth, then, combines the familiar motif of two quarrelling brothers with a pattern, common to Arab, Tur-

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kic, and Persian epic, of two champions squaring off in single combat, often in front of a ruler. At the same time, the myth draws on the dislocations caused by foreign conquest and occupation of a society. Here, Selim’s conquest is as much a transformative event as the brothers’ quarrel. In Safavid Iran, the pervasive Haydari and Nimati factions, which paralysed whole cities in the seventeenth century, stemmed from two fourteenth-century sufi, or mystical, brotherhoods: the followers of Sultan Mir Haydar Tuni, a Twelver Shiite based in Tabriz in northwestern Iran, and those of Shah Nimatullah Veli, a Sunni Shafii based in Kerman in northeastern Iran. Vague popular traditions persisted, nonetheless, that the factions had originated in two rival Iranian princes or in the rival overlords of two adjacent Iranian villages occupying the site of presentday Isfahan.28 The resemblance of such traditions to that of the brothers Qasim and Dhul-Faqar is obvious. Florence’s Black and White factions, if not the ‘parent’ Guelph and Ghibelline factions, offer an example of a similar, equally improbable, origin tradition, according to which a young member of the local Cancellieri family, on being reprimanded by his uncle for throwing a snowball, struck the older man. The uncle’s son then avenged the slight by cutting off his cousin’s hands and murdering the cousin’s father, his own uncle.29 Since this initial family feud quickly expanded into a much broader and deeper civil conflict with obvious class and ideological overtones, we may take this origin myth for what it is, whatever the ‘truth’ of the matter. The framework of the family feud, moreover, signals that this is in essence a variation on the ‘warring brothers’ type of origin tradition. What makes the warring brothers (or warring cousins) motif natural to myths of the origins of bilateral factionalism is the implication that until conflict erupted between the two brothers, a unified whole existed. Central to this motif, then, is not simply the presence of two brothers but the struggle between them. Two factions that cooperated with each other would not lend themselves to an explanation centred on disruption and strife, nor would they give rise to a society that was truly split in two. Nor would a variety of volatile, short-lived political groupings on the model of the factions of the Mamluk sultanate30 find a satisfactory explication in a ‘brothers’ myth. The motif itself, rooted in primal blood relationships, suggests a deep, enduring division caused by profound political and/or social change, such as the death of a powerful ruler or the conquest of a polity. The pervasiveness of this division encourages popular memory to cast it in dichotomous terms, or to adopt myths that cast

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the division in this way, and to assign each side basic, readily identifiable traits and symbols.

3 Competing Rituals and Ritual Spaces So far from being a constant, factional identity came to the fore at particular times and in particular spaces in which factional allegiance was especially meaningful and, therefore, visible. Public rituals, whether tied to religious observances, military preparations, or political display, are key examples of such occasions. Indeed, public ritual was arguably crucial to bilateral factionalism inasmuch as sharp differences in the public appearances – colours, emblems, banners – of two competing factions reinforced the binary opposition between the two. Hence, we find that the factions under consideration were most visible in recurring public rituals that took place in specified public spaces. These could be religious rituals or public observances of other kinds. The Blues and Greens of the Byzantine and Roman empires were publicly visible, Alan Cameron argues, only in processions accompanying chariot races in the hippodromes of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and other Roman cities. Such races, though possessing their own internal structure and protocols, were often religiously charged. In preChristian times, statues of the Roman gods were paraded in the arena before the games commenced; after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century, the emperor greeted the crowds with the sign of the cross, and, at the conclusion of the games, the victors decamped to the nearest church to offer prayers of thanksgiving.31 Over a thousand years later, the popular factions of Renaissance Venice fought with fists, sticks, and stones on the city’s bridges on Sundays or religious holidays, most frequently during autumn.32 The Haydaris and Nimatis of Safavid Iran, meanwhile, staged competing processions to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, at the hands of the Umayyads in Karbala, Iraq, in 680 CE; they also fought ritual battles, much like those in Venice, with sticks and stones.33 As for the contemporary Faqaris and Qasimis of Egypt, they displayed their banners and distinctive finials in processions to see off the departing pilgrimage caravan, to welcome a new Ottoman governor of Egypt, and the like. While the pilgrimage occurred every year (albeit the season rotated in accordance with the Islamic lunar calendar), the arrival of a new governor could not be predicted with any certainty.

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Nonetheless, the route of procession was consistent: in the case of the pilgrimage, from the ‘Pilgrims’ Pool,’ Birkat al-Hajj, just east of Cairo, onto the beginning of the route that ultimately led to Suez, whence the pilgrims crossed the Red Sea to the Hijaz and the Holy Cities. The governor, meanwhile, typically arrived at the Nile port of Bulaq (today a neighbourhood of Cairo) by boat from Alexandria, then proceeded through the tenth-century gate Bab al-Futuh and up to the citadel.34 These were processions in which both factions participated; if they competed, their competition was nonviolent and muted. When the factions clashed militarily, however, their battles unfolded predictably at Qasr al-Ayni, today a major urban thoroughfare, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an open space west of the city dominated by the palace of the Mamluk-era emir al- Ayni, or at one of the two hippodrome-like squares below the western face of the citadel. Hence, the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, who spent much of the last decade of his life in Cairo, describes the factions as periodically ‘gather[ing] on the Black Square (Kara Meydan) like black crows or black mountains.’35 The processions, the spaces, and often the conflicts themselves were highly ritualized and served to reinforce the factions’ identities by highlighting their rivalry. For a key component of each faction’s identity was its opposition to the other faction – that is, the simple fact that it was not the other faction. When the rival colours and emblems were displayed in public spaces on highly charged occasions, their contrasting identities were given tacit (or not so tacit) public sanction, as were the allegiances of each faction’s partisans.

4 Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide A feature of bilateral factionalism that distinguishes this form of political culture from one of multiple factions, parties, or households is the pervasiveness and longevity of the binary opposition. Although such factionalism may have manifested itself primarily on certain specified occasions and in circumscribed spaces, it tended to penetrate beyond the political elites of the society in question and beyond the urban headquarters of those elites into the countryside. Characteristic of this sort of factionalism are the factions’ solid foundations in the rural hinterlands. Certain specimens of bilateral factionalism appear even to have originated in the countryside, so that the better-known urban manifestations of factionalism were, in fact, outgrowths or associates of the rural prototypes. This seems to have been particularly common in societies whose rural

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populations were characterized by semi-nomadic tribalism. The Haydari and Nimati factions in Safavid Iran, for a notable example, were associated with two genealogically related Turcoman tribes: the Haydaris with the Fuladlus, the Nimatis with the Qojabiglus (Kocabeylus).36 In a strikingly similar pattern, the contemporary Egyptian factions known as Faqari and Qasimi were linked to two Bedouin blocs known as Sad and Haram. Chronicles of the late Mamluk sultanate suggest that the Bedouin rivalry predated the Faqari-Qasimi conflict by several centuries. Thus, the Haram appear in the narrative of Ibn Iyas as early as the fourteenth century, when they were locked in confrontation with a Bedouin bloc known as the Banu Wail, who were ultimately proscribed by the Mamluk administration. The Haram remained intact until the Ottoman period while the Sad, after figuring briefly alongside the Haram and Wail in the fifteenth century, reappear in chronicles only in the seventeenth century.37 Although the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence could not claim this one-to-one correspondence with rural counterparts, the White branch of the Parte Guelpha in the fourteenth century was sometimes labelled the ‘party of the woods’ in reference to the rural origins of the Cerchi family, who dominated the faction.38

5 Enmeshment with Imperial Politics In the same way that bilateral factionalism transcended the urban sphere, so it also tended to mesh easily with more transient political and ideological configurations, so that it frequently appears that factions existed primarily as reflections of competing political and ideological interests. A key debate among scholars of the Byzantine Empire centred on the question of whether the Blue and Green factions, though admittedly pre-Christian in origin, came to represent conflicting Christian ideologies; in particular, the Greens were thought to support the Monophysite conceptualization of Jesus’ divinity, whereby his human and divine natures are one and inseparable, while the Blues favoured the Diphysite position that Jesus’ two natures are distinct. Alan Cameron, however, has argued persuasively that the politico-religious loyalties of the two factions were not so predictably dichotomous; rather, the popularity of Monophysitism or Diphysitism with the factions changed according to the times, and either faction might favour either doctrine.39 By the same token, under the Umayyad dynasty, which dominated the Muslim world from 661 to 750 CE, Qays and Yemen are believed by some scholars to have functioned as rival political parties, the former

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favouring expansion and continued Arab exclusivism, the latter seeking to constrain expansion and assimilate non-Arab Muslims. Indeed, the Marwanid line, which came to dominate the Umayyad caliphate, relied militarily on the Kalb confederation of Yemeni Arabs. Yet, as Patricia Crone has shown, the tribal lineages of members of Qays and Yemen within the Umayyad military cadre easily took precedence over any political character the two groups may have had.40 The political cast of bilateral factionalism is more clear-cut in the division between ‘local’ and imperial Janissaries that plagued Ottoman Damascus and Aleppo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contingents of Janissaries, the Ottoman elite infantry, were dispatched to garrison these two provincial capitals following the Ottoman conquest of Syria in 1516. By the seventeenth century, however, the Damascene regiments were thoroughly infiltrated by provincial mercenaries of various kinds, as well as the clients of provincial grandees. New contingents of Janissaries were periodically dispatched from Istanbul, spawning a competition between ‘locals’ (yerliyye) and troops from the imperial capital (kapı kulları). In Aleppo, meanwhile, the population of descendants of the Prophet (plural, ashraFf ) ballooned as local elements purchased this noble status; these ashraFf acted as a paramilitary force in frequent clashes with Janissaries from the imperial centre. In this instance of bilateral factionalism, the local forces represented provincial interests – indeed, they often belonged to the households of provincial grandees – while the imperial troops embodied the assertion of the imperial centre.41 Even Egypt’s Faqaris and Qasimis partook of this centre-provincial tension, although not in so blatant a fashion. As I have argued elsewhere, the Faqaris visually referenced the Ottoman central authority in their use of banners and standards associated with the Janissaries; the Qasimis, in contrast, appear to have employed standards, if not banners, harking back to those of the Mamluk sultanate.42 By the same token, the first recorded instance of factional strife erupted in the 1640s over the pool of military manpower on which the two factions drew: while the leaders of the nascent Faqari faction gathered recruits from the Balkans and western Anatolia, traditional source of the sultan’s servants, the protoQasimis employed ‘Asiatics’ from the Arab provinces and the Iranian border region, at least until a stream of Bosnians entered the faction in the 1660s, perhaps at the behest of the central authority.43 Elsewhere, it was a matter of the emperor choosing one faction over the other. Certainly, this was the case in Rome and Byzantium, where the emperor belonged to the Blue or Green faction, or to one of its colour-

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coordinated associate blocs. In northern Italy in the thirteenth century, as earlier in Germany, the Ghibellines supported the interests of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor, the Guelphs those of the pope. Later, in Florence, the Black Guelphs retained the tie to the pope while the Whites were now associated with the emperor.44 By contrast, the Safavid shah Abbas I (r. 1582–1629) was accused of fomenting factional strife for his own purposes in every urban centre of Iran while standing outside factional allegiance himself.45

6 Reincarnation of Pre-existing Factions The geographical component of bilateral factionalism may go well beyond the occasional ranging of different towns or different topographical zones (mountains versus plains, for example) on opposite sides of the factional schism. Older and deeper geographical forces may be at work in bilateral factionalism of the Ottoman provincial, Safavid, or Byzantine sort. The ethno-regional distinction between the Faqaris and Qasimis, to begin with, reflected a much broader tension in the Ottoman Empire as a whole during the seventeenth century. What Metin Kunt has called ‘ethnic-regional solidarity’ pitted ‘western’ military-administrative personnel from the Balkans and western Anatolia against their ‘eastern’ counterparts from the Caucasus and other Asiatic territories.46 In very broad terms, not only the Faqari-Qasimi confrontation but that of the yerliyye and kapı kulları in Damascus, as well as that of Aleppo’s Janissaries and ashraFf , were coloured by this East-West antagonism insofar as ‘local’ forces were more likely to consist of Asiatics while imports from the imperial centre were more likely to be of ‘western’ provenance. Indeed, the East-West split identified by Kunt reflects a truly atavistic tension between the territories concerned, broadly conceived. Such an East-West tension, centred on the eastern Mediterranean littoral and the Iranian plateau, divided the ancient Greek and Persian empires, and later the Byzantines and Sasanians, Fatimids and Abbasids, Ottomans and Safavids. The dividing line ran roughly through the middle of presentday Iraq. In addition to this pattern of political dichotomy, the region’s status as a crossroads meant that merchants, nomads, political and religious refugees, and invading armies passed through it with some degree of regularity, triggering wrenching political and demographic change in the lands to which they relocated. In some respects, the factionalism of Ottoman Egypt and Syria reflects this ancient East-West divide. I would suggest, furthermore, that a kind of geographical atavism af-

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fected the political culture of the greater Mediterranean region, so that social tensions of one period fell into the bilateral pattern of an earlier period, sometimes to the extent of employing the names and symbols of pre-existing factions. The Haydari-Nimati factional conflicts occurred in territory that, five to six centuries earlier, had been the site of clashes between adherents of two Sunni legal rites, the Hanafis and Shafiis. Despite the fact that their ideological differences were minor, extending not far beyond details of ritual, the partisans of these two rites clashed so often and so violently that they laid waste entire towns in Iran. They were commonly known as ‘the two factions’ (farıFqayn), farıFq being the Arabic word typically used for two unalterably opposed sides, as in warfare or, in modern times, a football match.47 It would not be far-fetched to claim that the Hanafi-Shafii schism foreshadows the later Sunni-Shiite split that would characterize the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation in the same general region, and that would colour the intra-Safavid enmity of the Haydaris and Nimatis. In a less dramatic example of this geographical determinism, the Blacks and Whites clearly displaced the Guelph-Ghibelline rivalry, which in turn took place in territory once dominated by Blue-Green antagonism. Even if we stress the economic dynamic whereby the Guelphs and Ghibellines inevitably gave way to less spectacular, class-based factionalism, it is hard to deny the tenacity of the Guelph and Ghibelline names and trappings. Braudel himself points out that brigand factions in late sixteenth-century Italy ‘often used the convenient disguise of Guelph and Ghibelline for their own internal conflicts,’48 even though they had no direct link to the famous factions of yore. Certainly, when Charles VIII led a French army into Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, his supporters took the name Guelph and labelled their enemies, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, Ghibellines.49 In this context, Guelph and Ghibelline become bywords for generic factionalism, in the same way that Haydari and Nimati-inspired factions in the towns and villages of Iran took the generic labels Felenk and Pelenk,50 or in which ‘Sad-Haram’ became synonymous with popular unrest in the Egyptian countryside.51

7 The Functions of Bilateral Factionalism If bilateral factionalism was so prominent in the greater Mediterranean region, seemingly from antiquity through the pre-modern era, what purpose did it serve? Clearly, it was not limited to the greater Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau; extraneous examples readily suggest

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themselves, notably the Lancaster and York/Red and White Roses of the English Wars of the Roses (roughly 1455–87), or the Hatfield and McCoy vendetta that plagued West Virginia and vicinity during the American civil war. If we examine the circumstances under which factions arise in various societies, we find that they tend to appear at times of intense social, political, and demographic stress. These circumstances may be reflected in the factions’ origin traditions but often in schematic or overly paradigmatic fashion, so that, for example, one cataclysmic incident substitutes for years of accumulating tension. This is certainly the case for the Faqaris and Qasimis in Egypt. Despite their internal variations, the origin myths all point to the Ottoman conquest as the trigger for this instance of factionalism, yet the two factions make their first appearances, not yet fully formed and barely recognizable by later standards, in the early to middle decades of the seventeenth century,52 when Egypt and the empire as a whole were enduring wrenching demographic change. In Anatolia, the economic and military crises of the late sixteenth century had resulted in peasant flight from the land, rebellions among the imperial soldiery, and brigandage by demobilized mercenaries.53 Egypt experienced a somewhat delayed provincial version of the same phenomena, with a major cavalry rebellion and waves of migration from Upper Egypt to Cairo in the opening decades of the seventeenth century.54 Meanwhile, as in the imperial capital, growing numbers of mercenaries and elite slaves (mamluks) from the Caucasus entered the military and administrative ranks.55 Against this backdrop, the Qasimi and Faqari factions initially reflected the East-West ethno-regional divide that plagued the imperial-palace service during the same period. Yet, while each faction strove to distinguish itself from the opposing faction, internally, each faction fostered a strongly cohesive identity. A noteworthy feature of Egypt’s factions during this period is that each incorporated members from disparate and often historically antagonistic ethnicities. Although the Qasimis seem to have been dominated initially by Circassians, in the late 1650s, they received an influx of Bosnians whom, after some initial suspicion, the faction incorporated.56 In like fashion, the Faqaris counted among their ranks Anatolian Turks and Greeks, Bosnians, Circassians, Georgians, Abkhazians, Laz, Armenians, and members of other ethnic groups. In general terms, factional identity transcended the glaring differences that might otherwise have divided participants in Ottoman Egypt’s political culture: differences of ethnicity, geographical origin, native language, occupation, wealth, age, even gender. In Aleppo and Damascus, entrenched localism itself served as a

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source of cohesion among military forces of divergent provenance in the face of the onslaught of Janissaries from Istanbul. In this sense, factional identity fulfilled the function that national identity would fulfil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although the faction’s capacity for absorbing disparate groups was far greater than that of most nations, based as they were and are on considerations of ethnicity, language, and territorial origin.57 Haydari and Nimati factionalism in Iran evolved in the face of similar demographic ferment. The dislocations of continual war against Ottomans in the west and Uzbeks in the east were exacerbated by Shah Abbas I’s attempts to replace the KızılbasJ, Turcoman tribesmen who had formed the backbone of the Safavid armies that conquered Iran, with elite slaves (ghulams) from Georgia. At the same time, the shah transferred hundreds of thousands of Armenian silk workers from southern Azerbaijan to the outskirts of his new capital at Isfahan.58 Although we have no evidence similar to that gathered by Kunt to the effect that these population movements contributed to ethnic antagonism, it is difficult not to conclude that they agitated the Iranian landscape, both urban and rural. Similarly, northern Italy in the fourteenth century witnessed the challenge of the rising mercantile class to the entrenched nobility, in addition to the continuing struggles between the supporters of the pope and those of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Black Death exacerbated these pre-existing tensions exponentially.59 Some five to seven centuries earlier, the sheer variety of peoples under Roman and Byzantine rule, along with the Byzantines’ chequered fortunes in the Middle Ages, with the loss of much territory to the Arab empires and the Latins, surely contributed to the sort of demographic confusion that, it would seem, fosters factionalism. In such an atmosphere, factional identity could transcend differences of provenance, class, and ethnicity. Negative loyalty – the sense of solidarity engendered by hostility towards a common enemy, as well as the simple sense of not being the opposing side – was in this context a powerful social adhesive, to the extent that it repeatedly overrode details of ideology, chronology, and geography. If my enemy is a Guelph/Faqari/ Haydari/Green, then I have to be a Ghibelline/Qasimi/Nimati/Blue. This is the sole possibility, regardless of whether I am a merchant, Janissary, sufi, Diphysite, or foreigner. If we add to this oppositional sense of identity the accoutrements of factional identity – colours, emblems, rituals, and, perhaps most important, factional mythology – the result is a formidable package of factional markers of which virtually anyone

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could partake. The physical reality of coloured banners and outsized standards, the shared experience of preparing for and marching in processions, or being roughed up in ritual battles, and the indoctrination achieved by endless repetition of stories of the good faction versus the bad faction reinforced, indeed constructed, this sense of factional identity where seemingly more ‘rational’ sources of group solidarity, such as common ideology, profession, class, or geographic or ethnic origin, fell short.60 Alternatively, while these more ‘rational’ sources might give rise to smaller groupings, such as patron-client networks or households, the factions transcended these and, in fact, might incorporate them into the larger factional whole. By the terms of the now-classic Braudelian tripartite schema, political developments such as the battle of Montaperti or Selim I’s conquest of Egypt belong to histoire événementielle. Even the formation of the Holy Roman Empire might be relegated to this category. Here, however, I have suggested that bilateral factionalism, an undeniable phenomenon in the greater Mediterranean world not only in the early modern era but long before, runs deeper than événements. Its emergence in response to deep-rooted social and demographic currents renders this form of political culture at the least conjunctural, while its atavistic qualities arguably place it in the category of structures. Collectively, the examples addressed here have helped to make the case that manifestations of bilateral factionalism embody societal forces that are longer-lived and more profound than the comparatively superficial actions involved in playing party politics, forging patronage ties, or cementing alliances.

NOTES 1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2nd rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 1:20–1. 2 Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 12, 45–73, 215–22, 231, 234–8, 244–8, 308. 3 Ibid., 41, 191, 198–9, 201–13, 314–17. 4 Ibid., 75–9, 296; Speros Vryonis, Jr, ‘Byzantine Circus Factions and Islamic Futuwwa Organizations (Neaniai, FityaFn, AhdaFth),’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 58 (1965), 47–8, 56. See also Cameron’s critique of Vryonis, Circus Factions, 341–3.

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5 Cameron, Circus Factions, 54. 6 Vryonis, ‘Circus Factions and Futuwwa Organizations,’ 52–3; Cameron, Circus Factions, 76, 108–9. 7 Vryonis, ‘Circus Factions and Futuwwa Organizations,’ 58; Cameron, Circus Factions, 258. 8 Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1989), 338–9. 9 See Wendell Phillips, Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955). 10 On this point, see John Noble Wilford, ‘Ruins in Yemeni Desert Mark Route of Frankincense Trade,’ New York Times, 28 January 1997, B9–10. 11 Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, part 1 (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1995), 365–7, 547; Phillips, Qataban and Sheba, 221–3. 12 Matthew S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra, A.H. 200–235/815–889 C.E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 37–8, 185n254. 13 P.M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516–1922: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), ch. 8. 14 Miriam Hoexter, ‘The Role of the Qays and Yaman Factions in Local Political Divisions: Jabal Nablus Compared with the Judean Hills in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’ Asian and African Studies (Haifa) 9 (1973), 249–311; Salim Tamari, ‘Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History,’ in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Roger Owen (London: Macmillan; Oxford: St Antony’s, 1982), 177–202. 15 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘Kays Aylan: Kays and Yaman in the Ottoman Period,’ by Gabriel Baer and Miriam Hoexter. 16 Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1825), AjaFib al-aFthaFr fıFl-taraFjim wal-akhbaFr (The Most Wondrous Remains: Biographies and Events), ed. Hasan Muhammad Jawhar et al., 7 vols. (Cairo: Lajnat al-Bayan al-Arabi, 1958–67), 1:70–1. 17 Jane Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 116–18. 18 Oscar Browning, Guelphs and Ghibellines: A Short History of Mediaeval Italy from 1250–1409 (London: Methuen and Co., 1893), 6–7, 13, 17–18; J.K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy: The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000–1350 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 132–6; Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 256–62; Carol Lansing, The

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Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 179, 181–4. John A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1923), 57. Browning, Guelphs and Ghibellines, 49–52. Lansing, Florentine Magnates, 231–4, stresses instead the Cerchis’ emphasis on political patronage networks, as opposed to private militias. Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, 338, 340. See, for example, Anonymous, SıFrat al-ZaFhir Baybars (The Life of al-ZaFhir Baybars), 2nd printing, 50 parts in 5 vols., ed. Jamal al-Ghitani (Cairo: AlHaya al-Misriyya al- Amma lil-Kitab, 1996 [1923]), 2:808; Anonymous, ‘Announcement to the Arabs, Sons of Qahtan,’ in Sylvia Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press 1962, 1976), 83–8. See, for example, Anonymous, Nisba sharıFfa wa-risaFla munifa tashtamil ala dhikr nasab al-JaraFkisa min Quraysh (The Noble Genealogy and the Exalted Treatise comprising the Narrative of Circassian Descent from Quraysh), Princeton University, Garrett Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, MS 186H, fo. 19r–v. Anonymous, Nisba sharıFfa, fo. 19r–v. Schora Bekmursin Nogmow, Die Sagen und Lieder des Tscherkessen-Volks, trans. Adolf Bergé (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1866), 44–6; Evliya Çelebi (c. 1611–82), Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi (Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels), ed. . Ahmed Cevdet, 10 vols. (Istanbul: Ikdâm Matbaası, 1314/1896/7–1938), 2:100–2. Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions, 152–61. See also Nicholas Howe, Migration and Myth-Making in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 34–5, 41–2, ch. 3, 138–9. Ahmed Çelebi ibn Abd al-Ghani, Awdah al-ishaFraFt fıF man tawalla Misr alQaFhira min al-wuzaraF wal-baFshaFt (The Clearest Signs: The Ministers and Pashas who Governed Cairo, to 1737), ed. A.A. Abd al-Rahim (Cairo: Maktabat alKhanji, 1978), 283–4; al-Jabarti, AjaFib, 1:67–71. Hossein Mirjafari, ‘The Haydari-Nimati Conflicts in Iran,’ trans. and adapted by J.R. Perry, Iranian Studies 12.3–4 (1979), 139, 148–9. Henry D. Sedgwick, Italy in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 2:282. David Ayalon, ‘Aspects of the Mamluk Phenomenon,’ parts 1–2, Der Islam 53 (1976), 196, 225; 54 (1977), 1–32; idem, ‘Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army,’ parts 1–3, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

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31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46

47

48 49 50

Jane Hathaway 15 (1953), 203–28 and 448–76; 16 (1954), 57–90; Robert Irwin, ‘Factions in Medieval Egypt,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 2 (1986), 228–46. Cameron, Circus Factions, 152, 180–3, 188, 230–2. Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chs. 1–2. Mirjafari, ‘Haydari-Nimati Conflicts,’ 145–54. Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), 33–5, 37–40; Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt’s Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions, Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 54–60. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 10: Mısır ve Sudan (Egypt and Sudan), ed. Mehmed Zillîogglu (Istanbul: Üçdal Nesjriyat, 1966), 720. Mirjafari, ‘Haydari-Nimati Conflicts,’ 152; see also 154. See Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions, 73–4. Lansing, Florentine Magnates, 231–2. Cameron, Circus Factions, 80–6, 126–53, 271–96. Patricia Crone, ‘Were the Qays and Yemen of the Umayyad Period Political Parties?’ Der Islam 71, 1 (1994), 1, 4–5, 42–3. Karl K. Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89–97; Abdul-Karim Rafeq, The Province of Damascus, 1723–1783 (Beirut: Khayats, 1966), 25–35, 109, 133–43, 169–75, 209–12; Herbert L. Bodman, Political Factions in Aleppo, 1760–1826 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1963); Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 103–11, 132–3. Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions, 97, 115–18. On this point, see Jane Hathaway, ‘A Re-Examination of the Terms Evlad-i Arab and Rum Ogglanı in Ottoman Egypt,’ in The Turks, ed. Hasan Celal Güzel et al., 6 vols. (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002), 3:531–6. See n. 20. Mirjafari, ‘Haydari-Nimati Conflicts,’ 147. . Metin I. Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the SeventeenthCentury Ottoman Establishment,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974), 233–9. Mirjafari, ‘Haydari-Nimati Conflicts,’ 136–7; Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 158–67. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:752. Symonds, Age of the Despots, 423–44, 451–2, 457n1, 458. Mirjafari, ‘Haydari-Nimati Conflicts,’ 144, 147.

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51 Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions, 69, 77–8. 52 See Haci Ali, AhbaFr ül-yamaFnıF (Yemeni Events, 1666–7), Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, MS Hamidiye 886, fos. 210–11; Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, 10:720; Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions, 149–51, 165–7. 53 See Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,’ part 2 of An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil Inalcik, with Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 54 Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 74–6; Gabriel Baer, ‘Shirbini’s Hazz alquhuFf and Its Significance,’ in Baer, Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt: Studies in Social History (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1982), 3–47. 55 Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity’; Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, 2:102. 56 Mehmed ibn Yusuf al-Hallaq, TaFrıFh-i Mısr-ı KaFhire (History of Cairo, to 1715), Istanbul University Library, T.Y. 628, fo. 157v.; Ahmed Çelebi, Awdah al-ishaFraFt, 155; P.M. Holt, ‘The Beylicate in Ottoman Egypt during the Seventeenth Century,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 24 (1961), 225. 57 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), ch. 2. 58 Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1350–1750) (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1999). 59 Browning, Guelphs and Ghibellines, 110–11; Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy, 178–84. 60 On this point, see Crone, ‘Qays and Yemen of the Umayyad Period,’ 43.

chapter four

Polyglottism in the Ottoman Empire: A Reconsideration LESLIE PEIRCE

The multi-religious and multi-ethnic composition of the Ottoman empire is typically treated as one of its ‘natural’ features, an inevitable consequence of the human landscape that came with frontier origins and of the nature of Islamic rule. This volume, revisiting Mediterranean studies a half-century after the publication of Fernand Braudel’s inspiring work, invites reconsideration of phenomena that historians have come to take for granted. This essay reconsiders two such ‘givens’ for the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century: first, rule by an elite composed primarily of captive Christians of various ethnicities who were converted to Islam and trained to serve the sultan, and second, the existence of an ethnically and religiously diverse subject population. I use the term ‘polyglottism’ – perhaps inelegant and admittedly somewhat inaccurate – to refer to the multi-religious and multi-ethnic nature of the social and political constitutions of the Ottoman empire. A polyglot is one who knows many languages, and we might think here of ‘languages’ as encompassing not only tongues but also the cultural idioms of groups defined by shared religion, historical memory, occupation, or local geography. The empire, from its emergence until its collapse, spoke in many languages. I chose the term ‘polyglot’ because it is less anachronistic in describing the premodern landscape than ‘multiethnic’ and ‘multi-religious,’ terms that tend to be used in endorsement of the ultimate goal of human equality in difference. This is not a view the Ottomans would have endorsed in the period with which this essay is concerned. What follows are reflections on the practical and ideological implications of Ottoman polyglottism. The essay is an overview that draws

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primarily on the scholarly work of others, in smaller part on my own research on one Ottoman provincial capital (the southeastern Anatolian province of Aintab). It asks why and how a polyglot ruling elite emerged, and to what extent its constitution was by design and to what extent inherited practice. It also asks why such a consciously constructed ruling class – known collectively as the kul, slaves or servants of the Ottoman dynasty – was compatible with the government of a polyglot subject population. In placing greater emphasis on the imperial regime than on the subject population, the essay acknowledges that, as a conglomeration of disparate societies, the empire was possible only by virtue of constant imperial engineering and policing of the social peace. In a graduate seminar I taught a few years ago, I was struck when a student concentrating in American history remarked early in the course that, to her, the most striking characteristic of the Ottomans was their talent for making use of the talents of their various subjects. Her comment was on target in that it acknowledged the instrumentalist bias of the regime rather than anachronistically celebrating its multi-culturalism. And as Braudel’s remark about the ‘thoroughly colonial experience’ of Ottoman subjects suggests, Ottoman rule usually and perhaps inevitably meant that some groups were favoured at the expense of others. In marshalling resources to further the state’s goals, the imperial regime was able to draw on the wide spectrum of talent that was available in a domain that ranged from southeastern Europe to the Indian Ocean. That spectrum included local specializations; multiple forms of artisanal, commercial, and fiscal expertise; varieties of religious and secular learning; and regional merchant networks, each linked to a different global political and economic zone. The sultans exploited this huge human resource by design as well as by necessity. Regional differences were an important factor in generating the polyglot variety of the empire, but they were not independent variables. Politically, the experience of the predominantly Christian provinces in Ottoman Europe, new to Islamic rule, differed from the predominantly Muslim provinces of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Arabia, long ruled by Muslim powers. These latter areas were used to the Islamic practice of tolerating Jews and Christians, in exchange for which these ‘people of the book’ – recognized as having valid scriptures – were subject to a special poll tax and certain social restrictions. In the Balkan and Aegean regions, however, the project of negotiating accommodation was new. Anatolia (Asia Minor), whose Islamization had begun some two hundred years before the emergence of the Ottomans, formed a kind of middle ground in this

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regard. As for social inequalities, they were both created and inherited. Although Islamic rule meant that non-Muslims were generically treated as inferior to Muslims, being Muslim hardly guaranteed routine favourable consideration. For instance, tribal groups frequently received harsh treatment, and as a consequence of the rift with the Iranian Safavids in the sixteenth century, shi‘ite Muslims – or those thought to have shi‘ite leanings – were persecuted by the sunni Ottomans. On the other hand, the keen awareness of social and professional class differences that permeated all of the empire had the effect that social position often overrode religion. Virtually everywhere prominent merchants and financial brokers had bargaining power despite religious affiliation. Likewise, religious authorities – Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim – could exert pressure on the sultanate. Across this broad landscape of difference were imposed the rhythms of imperial conduct. Ottoman rule had its ups and downs for subjects – rougher in the immediate aftermath of conquest, comparatively benevolent once things settled down in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, more persecutional in the less tolerant later-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If a variegated subject population with its collective talents was a plus, at the same time it presented a huge management burden, since it was mainly government policing and mediation that kept the lid on communal antagonisms that could and did disrupt social peace. It was the kul, in the form of regional and provincial governors, garrison soldiers, and royal agents, who acted as the executive arm of the dynasty. The question of polyglottism in its political context is not one that Braudel gave much attention to in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Braudel was more interested in the long-term influence of the environment on human society than in the influence of humans on the social environment.1 To be sure, The Mediterranean exhibits a keen appreciation of diversity and flux: Braudel’s Mediterranean landscape is incessantly active with the meetings and clashings of different peoples, and its boundaries are permeable. But human agency, a post-Braudelian preoccupation, is unexplored; it is ‘the winds of fortune’ that made the life of Mediterranean man a wandering one and tossed him in every direction.2 Braudel was certainly aware of the costs of Spanish and Ottoman hegemony for the peoples ruled by the two great Mediterranean empires of the time, for in speaking of Ottoman rule he comments, ‘What richer and more thoroughly colonial experience can be imagined?’ and, quoting a letter from 1570 from an unhappy Greek subject of the sultan, he acknowledges the intolerant

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turn of the late sixteenth century as well as the sometimes parlous situation of Orthodox Christians between Catholicism and Islam.3 Likewise, his long section on the Spanish drive against the Moriscos in the later sixteenth century is even-handed, but then, at the very close of his work, he asks what ‘degree of freedom’ Philip II, the alleged protagonist of his study, possessed.4 The possibility of hybrid cultures is not envisioned: Islam and Christianity are opposing civilizations, the Moriscos are an ‘unassimilable population,’ and Ottoman colonization has no long-term impact, so that ‘the Bulgarian finds himself unchanged five centuries later.’5 My point here is not to criticize Braudel for failing to take up the concerns of this essay; that would be anachronistic. I simply wish to mark the relative absence in The Mediterranean of the issues discussed below. The survival of a polyglot subject population through several relatively orderly centuries – until the mid-nineteenth century, when intercommunal relations began to be marked by violence – cannot be taken for granted, nor can the peculiar ruling class evolved by the Ottomans. It mght be thought that the Islamic component in Ottoman rule dictated a blueprint for integrating Muslims and non-Muslims into a workable polity, but history showed that ruling regimes did not always observe the niceties of Islamic law. And while there were ample precedents for rule through a slave elite, the systematic recruitment and training of the kul exemplified the Ottoman habit of forging past practices into sharply honed instruments of statecraft. To understand the evolution of Ottoman polyglottism, we must review the narrative of Ottoman expansion. The Ottoman regime’s pluralistic outlook certainly drew something from the intimacy of contact and experience, if not necessarily of affection, that characterized its origins. It was as a polyglot enterprise that the nascent Ottoman principality emerged onto the stage of eastern Mediterranean history; hence, I would like to dwell for a moment on this period, as I believe it was critical in the construction of Ottoman sovereignty. That the first Ottoman warlords, who made their base in northwestern Anatolia, collaborated with Greek sympathizers and opportunists is well recognized, in part because it is memorialized in early Ottoman chronicles. Less well known but equally important is the leadership provided by the diaspora of Persian scholars and religious figures who either fled from the Mongols or took advantage of the pax Mongolica to move around the Middle East and often into Anatolia.6 It seems likely that the ultimate victory of the fledgeling Ottoman principality – only one of several such Turkish principalities on the western Anatolian

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fringe of the waning Byzantine empire – was its welcoming of diverse peoples into the collective enterprise of carving out a state and its skill in giving them a stake in its success. This ability to concentrate manpower and to manipulate it to the benefit of the regime is a key to the unparalleled longevity of the Ottoman dynastic regime. The early Ottoman milieu was a hybrid one. The considerable scholarly attention that has been devoted to Ottoman origins is limited for the most part by a tunnel vision that focuses on the emergence and growth of the unique new polity, to the point of obscuring the larger stage on which the Ottomans first became players. Happily, our understanding of this formative period has been enlarged by a variety of new scholarly approaches.7 In fact, the greater part of the fourteenth century is ‘Ottoman’ only in its representation as such in later Ottoman historical tradition. The world of the eastern Mediterranean was an extraordinarily fluid one, where Turkish mercenaries hired by Byzantine rulers might turn Christian and join forces with Catalan mercenaries to betray the emperor who hired them,8 and where hostility between Latin Catholic and Orthodox Christians outweighed antagonism between Christian and Muslim.9 Recent scholarship suggests that early ‘Ottoman conquests may actually have been accomplished by other Turkish warlords, and that signature ‘Ottoman’ institutional practices such as the levy of Christian youth to serve the sultan in his palace and army may have been initiated by these other warrior lineages.’10 In their conduct as warlords and then heads of state, the Ottomans as Turks drew on the long experience of adaptive living among Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia, and as Muslims on a fluid religious world where shrines and saints were often shared among followers of the three monotheisms.11 Confessional interchanges and ambiguities existed at many levels of society, from the nascent Ottoman court, where the Greek philosopher Plethon studied with a prominent Jewish scholar (who was ‘Jewish in appearance, but in reality a Hellenist’),12 to village families whose uncertain religious identity was reflected in the mix of names they carried - Muslim ones alongside others drawn from the calendar of Christian saints.13 The fact that the mothers of many Ottoman princes were Greek converts, especially in the early centuries, lent Byzantine cultural and political traditions an inevitable influence on Ottoman evolution; it was no accidental matter that by the fourth generation or so, the Ottoman dynasty had more Greek than Turkish blood.14 At some point, probably between the 1360s and the 1380s, the House of Osman, as the Ottomans called themselves, began to succeed in gain-

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ing control of this combustible fusion of disparate cultural elements. At this point we must begin to speak of subjects rather than followers of the dynasty. Christians were now less often collaborators than victims of conquest. Relations of dominance and submission emerged alongside, and in many places overtook, cultural give-and-take, and ordinary Muslims could begin to feel superior to the Christians among whom they lived. Yet until the conquests of eastern Anatolia in 1514 and in 1517 of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Arabian Hijaz, Christian subjects of the Ottoman regime continued to outnumber their Muslim subjects. It is critical to keep in mind that the first two centuries of Ottoman evolution took place in the heartlands of the declining Byzantine empire and among the several contenders for the spoils – Venetians, Genoese, Serbians, and Bulgarians as well as Turkish chieftains and Greek aristocratic hopefuls. The fact that Ottoman government records tended to use the legal term for non-Muslims living in Muslim-governed lands, dhimmi, only for Christians, while typically referring to Jews as ‘Jews’ (yahudi), underlines the degree to which Christians were the paradigmatic ‘other,’ in dialogue and dispute with whom Ottoman identity was symbiotically fashioned. It is also important to note that Christian cooperation with the Ottomans, such as it was, had much to do with the fact that Christians were not a monolithic block, and that particular Christian hegemonies and the overt tensions they provoked – notably between Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox, and between Orthodox and the Monophysite churches of the Armenians, Copts, and others – diluted the impact of the new Muslim hegemony.15 Although the Ottoman regime was increasingly attentive to Islamic norms of government as it evolved from principality to sultanate, we must be careful not to overestimate the degree to which higher law patterned social organization or even religious relations in the beginning. There was both too much intimacy and too much violence between Muslim and non-Muslim to suit the canons of Islamic jurisprudence. The Ottomans may have used the rhetoric of holy war in the fourteenth century, but it was arguably more to consolidate an ethos among their disparate followers than to establish a firmly Islamic polity. In Bulgaria, the Ottomans were as yet unconcerned with or unaware of the niceties of Islamic jurisprudence regarding the different treatment prescribed for communties that resisted conquest and those that submitted. For example, the Ottomans expropriated or destroyed churches that, under the rules of conquest, were the legitimate property of Christian communities; conversely, they allowed other churches to stand and new ones to

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be built that were not allowed by law. It was also easier for Christians to repair their churches in exclusively Christian settlements than in mixed Muslim-Christian settlements, since the opposition of local Muslims might overturn Christians’ legal entitlement to church upkeep and repair.16 Was the early intimacy of cultural fusion and tension completely lost as frontier eclecticism gave way to protocols of imperial governance and the legal architecture of Islam? I do not want to overdetermine the formative impact that the hybrid terrain in which Ottoman sovereignty first took root had on its long-term evolution. However, it is difficult not to see the connections between the origins of the Ottoman polity and certain institutional practices it later evolved. Central among these was the devshirme, the forcible recruitment and enslavement of young Christian men and women who, after conversion to Islam and considerable training, formed the cadres of the sultan’s household and the empire’s military and administrative elite. There were many precedents and rationales underlying the Ottoman ‘slave institution,’ but surely one motivation must have been to preserve, even in an attenuated form, the energizing mix of persons and cultures that fuelled early Ottoman expansion. In a parallel fashion, the fluid religiosity of early times was preserved through the formal institution of the heterodox Bektashi sufi order, famously friendly to Christians, as the patron order of the Janissaries, the formidable Ottoman infantry made up of devshirme recruits. All these slave servants of the sultan cultivated devotion to Islam. Yet, at the highest reaches of government at least, they were permitted a kind of double identity that acknowledged their origins and perhaps even their natal religion. Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, one of the greatest of Ottoman grand viziers, set up numerous charitable foundations in his Bosnian homeland, including the bridge at Višegrad chronicled in Ivo Andricm’s epic The Bridge on the Drina. He is also thought to have been instrumental in the re-establishment in 1557 of the Patriarchate of Pecm, to which office his nephew (in some sources, his brother) was assigned, to be followed by other family members over a period of thirty years. Other members of Mehmet Pasha’s family (including his father) converted to Islam and found high office in the service of the Ottomans. The pasha’s very nickname – Sokollu – memorialized his origins by replicating in Turkish his Serbian name, Sokolovicm, ‘from the town of Sokol.’17 The nineteenth-century biographical encyclopedia of Ottoman statesmen, Sicill-i Osmanî, further underlines the fact that memory of kul origins were not erased in the process of transformation into an Ottoman

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statesman (despite the arguments of some scholars to the contrary). The first item in each entry names the individual’s place of origin (‘he was from Bosnia/Albania/Georgia/etc.’). Grand viziers in the seventeenth century formed regional blocks – ‘the westerners’ (Albanian and Bosnian) versus ‘the easterners’ (Abkhasian, Circassian, and Georgian); some conspicuously cultivated their native dress and argot.18 It was not just male recruits through whom the preservation of ethnic diversity was accomplished: while the demise of the Byzantine and Serbian dynasties deprived the sultans of Christian brides, they formalized their preference for ethnic exogamy by reproducing the dynasty through slave concubinage. Concubine mothers of sultans came from Greece, Venice, the Ukraine, Russia, and so on, considerably widening the gene pool of the Ottoman dynasty beyond its Turkish and Greek beginnings.19 In describing the kul institution as a mechanism crafted deliberately to preserve the complex chemistry of Ottoman frontier origins and in using terms such as ‘blood’ and ‘gene pool,’ I certainly do not intend to rehabilitate the views of H.A. Gibbons, who argued in 1916 that the creative spirit in the Ottoman enterprise was not ‘Asian’ (Turkish) but rather ‘European,’ by virtue of the presence of former Byzantine Greeks in the new ‘race’ generated by the Ottomans.20 This view of course ignores the cultural exchange that had been going on in the region since ancient times, and more particularly, since the late eleventh century, among Turks and native Christians and Jews in the eastern Mediterranean. It also overlooks the assimilation of elite recruits into Ottoman culture. Members of the slave institution were devoutly Muslim in their words and actions, routinely endowing mosques, Islamic colleges, and dervish lodges; contemporary European travellers and ambassadors expressed no doubt that they were anything other than Muslim (although ambassadors were sometimes aware of, and made use of, their connections to their lands of origin). Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that Gibbons was looking in the right direction, at the polyglot nature of the early Ottoman enterprise. The kul system had multiple precedents. Elite military slavery had been a well-known phenomenon in the Muslim empires of the eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent since the heyday of Abbasid times (the eighth and ninth centuries).21 Earlier Muslim states typically sought slaves outside their borders. In the closest precedent in space and time, the Seljuk state, which preceded the Ottomans in Anatolia, sought recruits beyond their frontiers in Trebizond, Cilicia, the Caucasus, and the Crimea.22 Nor was the use of outsiders unfamiliar to Roman and

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Byzantine rule: ‘barbarian’ generals frequently commanded armies.23 Less well known are the Tourkopouloi (‘sons of Turks’), a Christianized cavalry corps that was a feature of late Byzantine times.24 Another early influence was the practice of exogamy, political as well as reproductive, that was prevalent among Turkish and Mongol tribes: raiding parties provided wives of different tribal or ethnic origin, and builders of tribal confederations, most famously the Mongols, deployed the talents of conquered elites to administer their domains. Ottoman comfort with foreign servants thus had many precedents. Pragmatic reasons for the sultans’ systematization of recruitment abounded. The embryonic devshirme can be seen as a tactical creation of the early sultans, enabling them to command their share of prisoners of war. Such a move was particularly apt in the context of the Ottomans’ struggle to assert primacy among Turkish warrior lineages in the later fourteenth century (where the origins of the devshirme are usually placed), and then again in the early fifteenth century, when competing lineages were subdued a second time following the temporary collapse of the Ottoman polity. Moreover, the levy provided the sultans with ‘expert knowledge’ of newly conquered regions. Later, the very success of Ottoman expansion in the Balkans threatened a shortage of foreign manpower; the levy on Christian subjects ensured a steady supply of recruits. In sum, the kul system grew up as a mechanism for mastery over newly acquired territories, particularly in the Balkans. New conquests tested this ability of the Ottoman regime to manage diverse populations and political ecologies. The victories of 1517 doubled the size of the empire and, through the elimination of the Cairobased Mamluk sultanate, transformed the Ottoman sultan into the most powerful Muslim potentate in the world. In the west, the Ottomans now confronted more serious rivalries, in particular with the combined Spanish-Habsburg empire of Charles V, which they encountered in both the Mediterranean and central Europe. In the east, the rise of new Muslim powers, most notably the Safavid regime in Iran, brought new kinds of challenges. The surprising Safavid declaration of shi’ism as the state religion initiated a profound sectarian split into sunni and shi’ite that was arguably the most significant development in the religious and cultural politics of the sixteenth-century Middle East. The now-classic synthesis of Christian Orthodox and Muslim Turk was overwhelmed by imperial expansion eastward. New groups required assimilation and regulation, a process that spawned new tensions and new preoccupations for the government. The old religious equation was al-

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tered by the influx of Iberian Jews who were expelled from Spain after 1492 or who later fled the persecutions of the Inquisition. And the conquests of 1517 brought other Christian communities into the empire in substantial numbers, including Armenians, Copts, and Syriac Christians. Religious divisions among Muslims were arguably equally sharp. Or, to put it another way, the discourse of religion figured centrally in the geopolitical rivalries on the empire’s east as well as its west. The population of the Arab lands was already largely socialized into imperial ways, but Turkmen tribal groups in newly acquired territory in Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq challenged Ottoman rule both politically and religiously. A series of violent rebellions led by charismatic religious leaders sympathetic to the heterodox millenarianism of the Safavids erupted in the 1520s and 1530s and were only gradually dissipated through an artful combination of force and incentives. Moreover, the array of Muslim devotional and mystical practices that go by the broad rubric of sufism was gradually cleansed of its heterodox and antinomian elements. The favouritism of the early Ottoman leadership to the Vefa’i order, which had a history of anti-establishment insurgency, gave way to patronage of more contemplative and sedate orders such as the Mevlevi and Naqshbandi.25 It is no wonder that the middle decades of the sixteenth century witnessed a greater appetite for legal distinctions among religious and social groups and a general concern for drawing social boundaries. In reaction, Christian religious leaders began to tighten up their own boundaries, urging their flocks to avoid contact with Muslims. This kind of boundary-drawing was even more pronounced in the less tolerant and more politically and economically unsettled seventeenth century, when Muslim neo-fundamentalist (salafî ) waves challenged the laissez-faire cultural and religious attitudes characteristic of earlier Ottoman times.26 Targets of conservative rhetoric included not only Christians and Jews, but also sufis, women, and more liberal circles in the empire’s religious establishment. The point here is that new frontiers were as much internal as external. The potential fault lines among groups in the subject population required policing just as the empire’s borders required defensive military garrisons. In the early modern Ottoman empire, it was the exercise of executive authority by kul stationed around the empire that constituted the principal mechanism of Ottoman absolutism. As generals and admirals, elite kul were the bodyguards of the empire. As governors of provinces, their command of police powers reminded faraway subjects that the sultan provided local peace but also demanded obedience. We will

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return to the question of the kul after a review of the dynasty’s relationships with its various subject constituencies. With the exception of its own quasi-fundamentalist moments that punctuated the seventeenth century, the Ottoman regime retained its policy of pluralism, tolerating doctrinal positions that were sometimes mutually contradictory and even patronizing opposing movements. The sultans fostered a chemistry of difference that generated competition for their goodwill and thus nurtured dependence on the imperial centre. And so they were able to strike a pose of neutrality towards their polyglot population. This style of governance worked reasonably well, at least from the dynasty’s point of view, until the nineteenth century. One solution to the burgeoning ideologies of nationalism and religious equality was to invite everyone to think of himself as Ottoman – in other words, to offer citizenship in what had been an exclusive imperial identity. But it was too late to ask people to think outside the box of polyglottism. The multiethnic empires of Europe and Asia – Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov, and Qing – were over by 1920. The power of the sultanate to manipulate groups in the population for its own benefit was perhaps the most important element in Ottoman statecraft. The reach of the sultan’s patronage – through the grant of high office, honours, or lucrative concessions – was very broad. It ranged from which European state to cultivate diplomatically to which mountain chieftain to privilege with a robe of honour and the title of vassal. The point always was to utilize the alliance that was most advantageous at the moment; tomorrow could instal a rival chieftain or state. Indeed, the contingent nature of patronage and its very temporariness kept rival groups within the Ottoman domain focused on the sultanate. ‘Loyalty’ may not be the right word to characterize the attitude of would-be honorees, but patronage certainly fostered the habit of desiring attachment to the dynasty as well as the appropriate display of cooperation.27 The high point of group manipulation – and of sultanic absolutism – was probably the reign of Mehmet II (1451–81), which stretched for nearly thirty years beyond his defeat of the last Byzantines in 1453, and which was characterized as much by state-building as by continued military expansion.28 The practice of manipulating groups never died out, although growing popular distaste for the raw exercise of royal power caused it to be increasingly cloaked as an exercise in justice. The lateseventeenth-century historian Mustafa Naima, a brilliant anatomist of the politics of faction, noted that the ruler’s ‘glory and fame will increase

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daily’ if he ‘honours the worthy and suddenly punishes the wayward.’29 At the local level, the practice went on wherever and as long as the regime had control over provincial life (there were periods when and places where it did not). The account that follows is a very partial inventory of group manipulation assembled from well-known and less-well-known examples. My purpose here is merely to illustrate for those unfamiliar with Ottoman history the extent to which the regime stretched the art of arbitrary patronage. As with all exercise of executive power, this was most easily accomplished at the highest levels, where the reach of popular opinion was most attenuated. If the following examples appear to concentrate on non-Muslims, it is because their usefulness to the dynasty consisted not only of their particular kinds of expertise but also of their greater dependence on sultanic largesse. The status of non-Muslims, at least until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was precarious: they could provoke unpleasant reaction should they appear to rise above their station as less entitled to honours than Muslims were. The favour of the sultan protected them from this risk, at least for the duration of their favoured position. Only with the coming of missionaries and, more importantly, the overt support of European governments in the nineteenth century did dhimmis begin to publicly assert group rights and entitlements. Kate Fleet’s study of Genoese merchants and the early Ottoman state provides a sharp example of imperial preferentialism.30 Fleet argues that the Genoese, with their capital and expertise, contributed to the early development and success of the Ottoman state. Their critical importance was recognized by Mehmet II, who dispatched his grand vizier right after the fall of Constantinople to urge the Genoese not to leave and to offer them better trading conditions than the Byzantine emperor had. The Genoese were valuable not only as traders but also as players within the Ottoman economic system, as tax farmers for the regime: employing them as tax farmers not only reduced the state’s risk in a fluctuating market, but also encouraged other westerners to trade within the Ottoman domain. This Ottoman-Genoese collaboration was a marriage of advantage: Fleet argues that the Genoese displayed a greater pragmatism and willingness to cooperate with local Turkish regimes and local traders than did other western traders, notably the Venetians; likewise, compared to their Turkish rivals to the south, Aydın and Mentesje, the early Ottomans were ‘more aware of their economic strength and of the importance of the Turkish market to western trading nations.’ It is again Mehmet II as architect of post-conquest empire who fig-

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ures in this next, well-known, example of group manipulation – the forcible resettlement of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the ravaged and depopulated ex-Byzantine capital (allegedly four thousand people from Anatolia and the same number from European Rumelia). When the sultan’s original orders for resettlement met with resistance, he enforced harsher measures.31 The late-fifteenth-century historian Nesjri reports the anger of some newcomers when the government began to charge rent for the houses in Istanbul that had been given out to them: ‘The people hated this, they said: “You had us sell our houses, you had us migrate here from our homelands, did you bring us here only to make us pay rent for these infidel houses?”’32 This frequently practised policy of wholesale demographic transfer (sürgün) could have the purpose either of removing rebellious populations from their milieu and their followers (as in the settlement of Turkmen tribal groups in the Dobruja region of Romania) or, as in the example above, to transport talent to where it was critically needed. Perhaps the most striking move of the Ottoman regime to simultaneously privilige and exploit a particular people is the welcoming of Iberian Jews fleeing the Inquisition, many of whom were absorbed into Ottoman government because of their financial expertise and their contacts with European bankers. Jewish financiers who had established their careers in Spain or Portugal were given high office at the centre of state, prominent among them Don Joseph Nasi, who virtually monopolized the wine trade under the Ottomans (his annual revenue from Cretan exports alone was allegedly 15,000 gold ducats), and the Portuguese Alvaro Mendès, who is said to have brought 850,000 ducats with him.33 Jewish expertise in financial management made its way to the provinces as well, where Jews were frequently appointed to the office of sarraf (moneychanger, local treasurer).34 Resistance to the privileging of these ‘new’ dhimmis occurred both in the capital and in the provinces. For example, an uprising in 1600 of the imperial cavalry troops in Istanbul was directed at Esperanza Malchi, one of a series of kira, Jewish women who acted as agents for the queen mothers of the sultans. Malchi and one of her sons, who was known as ‘the little sultan’ because of his and his mother’s influence as controllers of the customs office, were brutally murdered, the pretext being their responsibility for the debased coins with which the troops were being paid. It was with considerable difficulty that the queen mother, Safiye, was protected from the anger of the rebels, who held her responsible for the huge fortune the kira had amassed (at her death, her assets in commercial goods and cash alone were 50 million

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silver aspers).35 If the ‘reign’ of Jewish financiers during the sixteenth century was notable, equally notable was their loss of favoured status with the imperial government once the passage of time blunted the edge of their expertise. In the vast stretch of lands added to the empire between 1514 and 1517, the Ottoman regime profited from the established occupational specializations of, among other groups, Armenians.36 Armenian traders figured prominently in the important silk trade with Iran, largely because of the privileged position of their co-religionists there. Iranian Armenians had, as silk traders, the same symbiotic relationship with the Safavid Shah Abbas (r. 1587–1629) that Jews had, as financiers, with the sixteenth-century Ottoman sultans. Their networks stretched as far as Amsterdam, where their community numbered as many as one hundred merchants and had its own fleet. The connections of Iranian Armenians with the Syrian city of Aleppo made this third city of the Ottoman empire (after Istanbul and Cairo) a magnet for Ottoman Armenians during the unrest in Anatolia during the seventeenth century. That the Armenians of Aleppo were a favoured community is underlined by the new churches that went up, in a period when rules limiting dhimmi rights, for instance, to build new houses of worship, were being vigorously applied in other parts of the empire. Armenians in central and eastern Anatolia enjoyed other more homely occupational specializations, for example, as stone-cutters and builders. There were obviously Muslim stonemasons as well (in the 1540 court records for the province of Aintab, a Master Hüseyin, with his two apprentices, was contracted to help build a bridge in a neighbouring province).37 But it is noteworthy that both the largest Armenian church and the largest mosque in Gaziantep (the modern name for Aintab) were allegedly designed and built in the 1890s by the same Armenian architect.38 If it is true that Sinan, the great engineer and royal architect of the sixteenth century, was an Armenian taken by the devshirme from central Anatolia (as is sometimes alleged), then his recruitment may suggest a selective targeting of Christian youth likely to have shown early promise in building skills. But where were the Muslims? Their absence among groups conspicuously privileged and exploited by the Ottoman regime has led some to conclude, erroneously, that they played little role as merchants and financiers. There are two points to be made that help explain this misperception. First, Muslims were not always the best allies of the sultan, since their own patrimonal interests often caused them to clash with the regime,

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which sometimes confiscated their rural properties outright or partially usurped them through taxing practices. One rationale for creating a ruling class of slaves recruited through the devshirme had been to dispossess the early Muslim aristocracy of a role in high government as well as of its property. After the conquest of the Arab lands in 1517, similar attempts were made to dispossess the ex-Mamluk aristocracy, although less outright confiscation occurred in these more legally conscious times. Second, one must look in the right places to find Muslim allies of the regime – in provincial cities and towns. There we find the regime’s distant and mostly anonymous Muslim collaborators among members of local aristocracies. These aristocracies consisted principally of persons influential through their wealth (rural magnates, leading merchants, enterprising tax farmers) and persons distinguished religiously, either through their expertise in Islamic exegesis and law or their religious pedigree. The Ottoman regime engaged in manipulation of local groups in the provinces, but in a more indirect manner and with less conspicuous favouritism than it displayed in the large-scale acts of ‘engineering’ described above. The regime manipulated religious groups – scholars, teachers, influential sufis (dervishes) – by selectively bestowing funds to support religious colleges and dervish lodges and occasionally by appointing an individual to an institutional post. Merchants and tax farmers were of particular interest to the regime since provincial revenue, derived primarily from taxation of agriculture and commerce, was the lifeblood of the empire. The court records of Aintab, which was taken from the Mamluks in 1516, reveal a fascinating intervention by the regime, through a royal agent, in the status hierarchy of the city’s three leading families: one family suffered a setback in the entitlements of aristocracy (principally to lucrative tax farms), mostly likely because of its links with the former Mamluk regime; another was clearly favoured as an ‘ally’ of the new Ottoman regime through the tax farms it was able to acquire; the third, of distinguished dervish pedigree and thus less vulnerable to manipulation, continued to be supported by imperial grants as it had been in Mamluk times.39 Less powerful groups in the local population might also be exploited, for better or worse. The Armenian community in Aintab, arguably beleaguered because of its small numbers in 1540, was nevertheless protected (by the state-appointed magistrate), most likely for the lucrative tax imposed on its tavern.40 Drunkenness among Muslims was a problem in Aintab, but rather than eliminate its likely source in Armenian wine production, the regime (and provincial authorities) preferred to monitor and punish public drinking by their Muslim subjects.

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I would like now to engage in a digression that may cast some additional light on the Ottoman penchant for manipulating groups. Staying with the province of Aintab, I want to look at the ways a local community parsed the various elements in its population. The elite of Aintab can be identified by means of its membership in privileged groups; such group affiliation is indicated by the titles ascribed to individuals who figure in court records and cadastral surveys: ayan (leading merchants, the very wealthy), eshraf or sadat (families claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad and/or his clan), ulema (leading religious scholars and teachers), ekran (principal tax collectors and tax farmers), and ümera (local soldiers and military-administrative officials who belonged to the sultan’s slave elite). A single individual might belong to more than one such group simultaneously, for example, a religious scholar who was also a tax farmer, or a merchant who was descended from the Prophet. This means of marking individuals through their membership in groups suggests that ‘group-mindedness’ was a deep trait in Ottoman social understanding. This is perhaps even more strikingly evident when we look at labels for groups among ordinary subjects. Commonly encountered in Ottoman chronicles and documents is the term ta’ife, meaning a group recognizable through its shared identity.41 Looking at the Aintab court records of September 1540 through September 1541, we find that the term was used most often in naming tribes (e.g., ‘the Begdili ta’ife’) and also to label Kurds (Ekrad – the label in full is ta’ife-i Ekrad), Turkmen (Türkmen, yörük), Arabs (Arab, meaning Bedouin nomads, not sedentary Arabic-speakers), Armenians (dhimmi), Jews (yahudi), and peasants (reaya).42 The common thread in this list of ta’ife groups would seem to be that none represents the ‘default’ Ottoman subject – the urbanized Muslim male (in the prevailing social view, Kurds, Turkmen, and Bedouin were defined by their tribal affiliation, the antithesis of urban cosmopolitanism). Members of tai’fes, in short, were ‘others.’ Another common ‘grouping’ term was ehl, ‘the people of …’ This term is perhaps most recognizable in the languages of the Muslim world through its use to refer to the family of the Prophet Muhammad (ehl-i beyt, ‘people of the House’) and to dhimmis (ehl-i kitab, ‘people of the book,’ that is, non-Muslims with scriptures recognized by Islam, another way of referring to dhimmis). Looking locally, once again at the Aintab records, we find ehl used to refer to the following groups: local officials representing the government (‘örf – the full label is ehl-i ‘örf ), religious scholars (‘ilm), artisans (hiref ), fellow residents of a village or city quarter (karye, mahalle), and people with expert knowledge on a given subject (vukuf, haber). The common feature in this list is the community

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of knowledge or expertise (fellow villagers or urban neighbours were a community of knowledge because they were legally empowered to act collectively on certain matters of which they were expected to have common knowledge). Note, for the record, that women are not a part of these all-male groups, but rather appear as a group only in the term ta’ife-i nisa’, ‘womankind.’ Despite their public dealings in property and in a variety of legal matters, women were not viewed as ‘citizens’ of the community but rather as members of male-dominated households. Dhimmis and Muslims, at least in the usage that prevailed in sixteenthcentury Aintab, were unlikely to exist in the same ta’ife, but they could coexist in some ehl groups. In other words, dhimmis were different (and inferior) by virtue of their faith, but professionally they were full-fledged members of the community. That religious identity was cross-cut in everyday life by other forms of group identity is a common observation in the study of Ottoman history; it is confirmed by this brief exercise in looking at how social and occupational groups were perceived and identified in one ordinary community. More than that, the exercise is useful in demonstrating the habitual manner in which Ottoman social thinking located individuals and groups. The sultans, it seems, were not unusual in their ‘group-minded’ approach to management. The practice of manipulating groups in the subject population is obviously not an exclusively Ottoman phenomenon. But it was a conspicuous and constant feature of Ottoman statecraft, one that was facilitated by a broadly shared ta’ife-mindedness.’ I have been arguing that the Ottoman regime had an interest in promoting difference, but the truth is that it could hardly have ignored it. Marking difference was an ancient phenomenon, persistent in the broad region encompassed by the empire, both on the ground and in the imagination. Herodotus, the ‘father of history,’ was also an ethnographer (of Anatolian origin), keenly observant of cultural differences. And the Persian protagonist of his Histories celebrated its imperial hegemony in visual representations of its many subject peoples, with careful attention to details of regional dress and types of tribute.43 But more than simply manipulating existing groups, the Ottoman sultanate created a powerful ‘ta’ife’ in its slave elite, whose group identity depended on personal ties to the dynastic household. We return now to consider the relationships between servant and sovereign that constituted the royal tai’fe. In the pre-modern empire, this artificial ruling aristocracy was a tool in the displacement from high government of the

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native aristocracy that had originally advanced the fortunes of the Ottoman polity. But the kul did more than expand the empire, they were also pivotal in the formation and dissemination of the new imperial culture. The message of royal benevolence was broadcast through their monopoly of patronage outside the capital: to them belonged the prerogative of commissioning the major mosques, colleges, baths, caravansarays, and soup kitchens that populate every major Ottoman city. Royal mothers figured conspicuously in this endeavour, especially in cities with a religious prominence. Civic philanthropy had another function, of course. The aniconic nature of Islamic representations of authority meant that urban centres lacked statues of the monarch; nor were marketplaces alive with sovereign images, since coins carried only inscriptions. Rather, the imperial signature was written most prominently in the reconfiguration of urban skylines, most spectacularly in the capital.44 An aesthetic canon was developed for the exclusive use of the ruling class in the decorative programs of the monuments they constructed.45 In Aleppo, for example, the governor Husrev Pasha (of Bosnian origin) began the transformation of the cityscape with the large mosque that he built in the imperial style in 1537. This collaboration of servant and sultan in building an imperial culture also took the form of literary patronage, and aspiring poets and chroniclers dedicated their works to pashas as well as to princes and sultans. Of the four leading centres of literary patronage in Mehmed II’s time, one was the circle around Mahmud Pasha, the celebrated grand vizier from the Byzanto-Serbian noble house of Angelovic; the others were the courts of the sultan and two of his sons.46 The potential exuberance of the imperial master-and-slave collaboration can be sensed. acutely in the staging of Süleyman’s ‘magnificence’ by the sultan and Ibrahim Pasha, his intimate and grand vizier, a Greek from Parga in Epirus who was well versed in both ancient history and current rivalries among European monarchs.47 Yet in 1536, at the moment of the pasha’s greatest power – following his masterminding of a huge military campaign against Iran that captured . Baghdad – the sultan abruptly ordered his execution by strangling. Ibrahim was not the first celebrated grand vizier done away with by his creator, for Mehmed II executed Mahmud Pasha after twenty years of service. Gianmaria Angiolello, an Italian serving one of Mehmed’s sons, thought it was fear of Mahmud’s influence among the army: ‘The reason why the Grand Turk executed Mahmud Pasha was jealousy, more than anything else.’48 The relationship of sultan and servant was fraught with ambiguity and, for the male kul, with obvious danger. Through most of the sixteenth

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century, pashas and viziers could pass on to their offspring neither their offices nor their wealth, for an intrinsic feature of the kul system was the constant influx of new recruits to serve new sultans. The stature of the kul was merely on loan from. the sultan, although their household establishments could be grand (Ibrahim allegedly had 1700 slaves of his own). The contingent nature of sultanic largesse was publicly demonstrated in the confiscations of the kul’s possessions that often followed their dismissal from office or, more dramatically, their execution. There was some compensation for these deprivations. Powerful officials garnered enormous prestige, so much so that their activities were carefully tracked by European ambassadors. Codes of ritual permeated relations between the sultan and his slave recruits. Indeed, so compelling was the dynamic of honour that Hüsrev Pasha, the architect of Ottoman eminence in Aleppo, starved himself to death from shame when the sultan dismissed him.49 This sense of a special relationship trickled down to the rank-and-file military: in 1622, on the occasion of the first regicide, the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, noted that the rebels ‘first tooke a generall oath, not to sack the imperiall throne, which they call their house and their honor.’50 But why should the kul institution have persisted beyond the period of expansion in Christian lands, over by 1550 or so, when officials with local knowledge were particularly useful? Certainly non-Muslim converts continued to be useful at the highest levels of administration because of their particular dependence on sultanic favour. Indeed, kul and sovereign were mutually constitutive and inherently symbiotic, the one defining the other and unimaginable without it. It was the delicate boundary between sultan and servant, the pas-de-deux of power-sharing, that could inspire jealousy on the part of the most powerful of sultans. What the presence of the kul accomplished was to identify, to isolate, and to insulate the sultanate, enabling it to govern without favouring any one of its subject peoples as accomplices.

NOTES 1 See the comments to this effect by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in their The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 36–43. Horden and Purcell themselves are more interested in social-historical interaction with the environment than in political aspects of the society/environment dialectic (that is, they are not much interested in empires and states per se).

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2 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vol., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 2:758. 3 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:776, 769 respectively. 4 Ibid., 2:780ff., 1243. 5 The work of Molly Greene on the seventeenth-century Mediterranean is an excellent corrective to the dichotomies (Christianity/Islam, Ottoman/ European) that have informed the study of the early modern Mediterranean; see, for example, ‘Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century,’ Past and Present 174 (2002), 44–71. 6 New work is illuminating this feature of early Ottoman civilization: see Giv Nassiri, ‘Turko-Persian Civilization and the Role of Scholars’ Travel and Migration in Its Elaboration and Continuity,’ PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 2002; Ethel Sara Wolper, Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Dina Legall, Mysticism and Islamic Orthodoxy: Ottoman Naqshbandis and the Culture of Sufism, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 7 A notable contribution is the collected volume edited by Elizabeth Zachariadou, The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389) (Rethymnon, Crete: Crete University Press, 1993). 8 Nicolas Oikonomides, ‘The Turks in Europe (1305–13) and the Serbs in Asia Minor (1313),’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 159–68. 9 Anthony Luttrell, ‘Latin Responses to Ottoman Expansion before 1389,’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 119–34. 10 Vassilis Demetriades, ‘Some Thoughts on the Origins of the Devsjirme,’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 23–34. 11 Spyros Vryonis’s magisterial The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971) explores the various means by which Anatolia was both Islamized and Turkified as well as the ways in which Turkish occupiers were socialized by Byzantine (Greek) culture. For shared shrines and saints, see also Wolper, Cities and Saints. 12 Gennade Scholarios, Oeuvres complètes, 8 vols., ed. Louis Petit (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1928–36), 4:162, quoted by Michel Balivet, ‘Culture ouverte et échanges inter-religieux,’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 2. 13 Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, ‘La population non-musulmane de Bithynie (deuxième moitié du XIVe s. – première moitié du XVe s.),’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 7–22. 14 On this subject, see my The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Otto-

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16 17 18

19 20

21

22 23

24 25

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Leslie Peirce man Empire (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially chapter 2. On relations in Byzantine times among the state, Orthodox patriarchs, and the Armenian church, see Nina G. Garsoian, ‘The Problem of Armenian Integration into the Byzantine Empire,’ in Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire, H. Ahrweiler and A.E. Laiou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1998), 53–124. I thank Maria Mavroudi for bringing this work to my attention. Rossitsa Gradeva, ‘Ottoman Policy towards Christian Church Buildings,’ in Études Balkaniques 4 (1994), 14–36. See the excellent article by Giles Veinstein, ‘Sokollu Mehmet Pasha,’ in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–), 9:706–11. On these regional blocks, see I. Metin Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeeth-Century Ottoman Establishment,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974), 233–9. See my Imperial Harem for the origins of royal concubines. Herbert A. Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1916). See Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), especially chapter 1, for astute comments on the historiography of Ottoman origins. For a succinct account of the development of military slavery, see the article . ‘Ghulam,’ by Dominique Sourdel, Halil Inalcık et al., in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, 240–4. Elizabeth Zachariadou, ‘Les “janissaries” de l’empereur byzantin,’ in Studia Turcologica Memoriae Alexii Bombacci Dicata, ed. Aldo Gallotta (Naples: Herder, 1982), 591–7. Nicolas Oikonomides, ‘The Turks in Europe (1305–13) and the Serbs in Asia Minor (1313),’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 160. For elimination of more heterodox elements, see Ahmet Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994); for Ottoman favouritism of the Vefa’i, see Ahmet Yasjar Ocak, ‘Les miliuex Soufis dans les Territoires du Beylicat Ottoman et le probleme des “Abdalan-i Rum” (1300–1389),’ in The Ottoman Emirate, ed. Zachariadou, 145–58. The classic treatment of seventeenth-century neo-fundamentalism (my term) is Madeline Zilfi’s The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and her ‘Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45, 4 (1986), 251–69; see also Jon E. Manda-

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28

29 30

31

32 33

34

35 36

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ville, ‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman Empire,’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 10 (1979), 289–308. Molly Greene briefly suggests the role of religious conservatism in land regulation on Crete, conquered in 1669; see A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). I have been influenced in this discussion by J.E. Lendon’s study of honour in Roman statecraft, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Lendon’s emphasis on office as a powerful form of honour was particularly helpful. I am grateful to Erich Gruen for bringing this book to my attention. In his A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Sjevket Pamuk draws attention to the ‘interventionism’ practised by Mehmet II: ‘The interventionism exhibited by the central government in fiscal, economic, and monetary affairs during this period was unmatched in later periods’ (40). The same could be said of Mehmet II’s political manipulations as well. Mustafa Naima, Naima Tarihi (Istanbul, 1280/1863–4), 1:54. Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, 1999). . Halil Inalcık, ‘Istanbul,’ in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 4:225. Kritovoulos, the Greek biographer of Mehmet II, comments that Christians especially were brought: ‘He transferred them with all possible care and speed, people of all nations, but more especially of Christians’ (History of Mehmed the Conqueror [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954]). Mevlana Mehmet Nesjri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-Nümâ (Ankara, 1957), 2:708–9. . On these individuals, see Halil Inalcık, ‘The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300–1600,’ in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire . 1300–1914, ed. H. Inalcık and D. Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 212–14. On the local employment of Jewish sarrafs, see Haim Gerber, ‘Jewish TaxFarmers in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th Centuries,’ Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), 143–54. I have excerpted the account of Esperanza Malchi and the queen mother Safiye from my The Imperial Harem (242–3); see the sources cited there. The following account is drawn from Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 81ff. Gaziantep Sjer’iye Sicili no. 161, p. 35, case b. The court records for Gaziantep (the modern name for Aintab) are housed in the Milli Kütüphane (National Library) in Ankara.

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38 The mosque is the Alaeddevle Mosque, rebuilt in the 1890s on the site of what was likely a late-fifteenth-century mosque; the cathedral, currently used as a mosque, is located in the Tepebasjı area of the city. Local legend has it that the architect commented that no matter whether Islam or Christianity was the true religion, he would be saved. 39 For a fuller account of this process, see my ‘Localizing Legitimation: Bargaining Through the Law in a Provincial Court,’ New Perspectives on Turkey 24 (Spring 2001), 17–49; also, my Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 40 I thank Bruce Masters for suggesting that the extraordinary financial imposition on the tavern should be seen as an indirect tax on dhimmis; one assumes that the tavern was well frequented by local and travelling Christians, otherwise it seems unlikely that it could have supported the ‘tax.’ 41 For a discussion of the term ta’ife, see Masters, Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East, 43–5. 42 Gaziantep Sjer’iye Sicili nos. 2, 161. 43 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. and trans. Walter Blanco (New York: Norton, 1992); Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002). 44 This point is well demonstrated by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh in The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 45 Gülru Necipogglu, ‘A Kanun for the State, a Canon for the Arts: Conceptualizing the Classical Synthesis of Ottoman Art and Architecture,’ in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Documentation française, 1992), 207. 46 Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovic (1453–1471) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 294, . quoting Gönül Tekin, ‘Fatih Devri Türk Edebiyatı,’ in Istanbul Armagganı (Istanbul, 1995), 184–5. . . 47 M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Ibrahim Pasja,’ in Islam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul, 1968): 5/2: 908–15. 48 Quoted in Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs, 352–3. 49 Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City, 72. 50 Sir Thomas Roe, The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte (London, 1740), 46.

chapter five

Braudel’s Eastern Mediterranean Revisited Sj E V K E T PA M U K

Ever since the publication of his two-volume study on the Mediterranean in 1949, Fernand Braudel’s new methodology, vision for the unity of the Mediterranean, and emphasis on the study of the longue durée have been sources of inspiration for the economic and social historians of the eastern Mediterranean. At a time when historians of this large region were turning inward with competing nationalist agendas, Braudel was able to offer a broader vision and a larger research agenda. Moreover, although Braudel was not himself a practitioner of quantitative methods, the research agenda he helped establish for demographic, economic, and social history was later studied by employing quantitative methods. It is thus not surprising that his considerable influence on the historians of the Ottoman Empire, and more generally of the eastern and southern Mediterranean, is still evident today, more than half a century after the publication of his celebrated study. This paper will attempt to (a) assess the impact and influence of Braudel on the study of the eastern Mediterranean during the early modern era, and (b) evaluate, in light of recent research, the extent to which his judgments and analyses of the eastern Mediterranean have withstood the test of time. For this purpose, I will examine the economic-history literature over the last half-century on four aspects of the eastern Mediterranean vis-àvis the rest of the Mediterranean for the period 1500 to 1800:

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the impact of the Price Revolution economic integration across the Mediterranean incomes and standards of living economic institutions

I begin, however, with a review of population estimates in order to offer some perspective about where the eastern and southern Mediterranean stood in relation to the western or northwestern Mediterranean during the early modern era. Excerpts from Fernand Braudel are followed below by more recent estimates.

1 Population: West and East Braudel’s discussion of the population around the Mediterranean in the early modern era is typical of the way he handles numbers, figures, and statistics: There are no definite figures. Only approximate numbers can be given, reasonably reliable ones for Italy and Portugal, and not too unrealistic for France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. As for the other Mediterranean countries, the lack of demographic data is complete. In the West, the probable figures at the end of the (sixteenth) century are the following: Spain, 8 million; Portugal, 1 million; France, 16 million; Italy, 13 million: a total population of 38 million. Then there are the Islamic countries. Konrad Olbricht accepted 8 million as an estimate of the population of the European part of Turkey in about 1600. Since the two parts of the Turkish empire, the Asian and the European, usually seem to have been equivalent (the latter if anything slightly superior), a figure of 8 million for the Asian part of Turkey is a reasonable assumption. We are now left with the whole of North Africa. Can we attribute 2 or 3 million to Egypt and about the same to North Africa? This would give us a maximum of 22 million for Islam and its dependent peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean. And the total population of the Mediterranean would be in the region of 60 million ... Of these figures, the first total, 38 million, is comparatively reliable, the second much less so. But the overall estimate is well within the bounds of probability. I would be inclined to lower the figure of the first group and raise that of the second. There seems, from population studies over the ages, to be a rough and ready rule to the effect that the population of Islam

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in the Mediterranean (and the peoples under its rule in the sixteenth century) was about double that of Italy ... There is of course no reason to assume that this proportion was absolutely constant. But taking into account all possible variations, it does provide a rough guide. If it was the same in the sixteenth century, it would give a figure of 26 million, which is not very far from the 22 million of our previous estimate. We may still sympathize with Ömer Lütfi Barkan’s suggestion that Islam in the Mediterranean might have claimed a population of 30 or even 35 million, but this is an optimistic judgment. In any case, by lowering the figures for the West and raising those of the East, we still get a total of about 60 million inhabitants of the whole region, which seems to be an acceptable figure for the end of the sixteenth century, allowing a margin of error of about 10 per cent ... These figures were published in the first edition of this book. Since then, detailed research has been carried out, and new figures have been advanced. But we need not necessarily modify the calculations in the preceding paragraphs. The area most under discussion is of course the population of Islam ... An increase in the overall figure as suggested by Barkan seems reasonable but I am still not convinced that the two groups, Islam and Christendom were equivalent.1

Braudel’s figures were not far off the mark and they have withstood the test of time quite well. In a more recent and often quoted study, McEvedy and Jones offer the following estimates for the same areas around the Mediterranean:2 Estimates for the year 1600: for Christendom, as Braudel called it, or northwestern Mediterranean: 41 million; for the population of areas under Islam or eastern and southern Mediterranean: 27 million; total for the Mediterranean: 68 million. Estimates for the year 1800: for north-western Mediterranean, 57 million, under Islam 35 million; total for the Mediterranean: 92 million.

2 The Price Revolution: Crisis and Turning Point? It has been claimed that the Price Revolution of the sixteenth century contributed both to the rise of capitalism in Europe and the economic decline of the eastern Mediterranean. Doubts about the validity of both of these claims have increased in recent decades, however.

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The debate about the Price Revolution in Europe has not been about whether the price increases took place. That European prices, expressed in grams of silver, increased by more than 100 per cent, and in some countries by more than 200 per cent, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century has been well established and broadly accepted. In countries which experienced currency debasements, overall inflation was proportionately higher, reaching, in some cases, 600 per cent or more for the entire period. Rather, the debate has focused on the causes and consequences of the increases ever since the sixteenth century. With respect to the causes, one side has argued, ever since Bodin in 1568 and even earlier, that the price increases were caused by an expansion in the money supply arising from the inflow of New World treasure into Spain.3 In the twentieth century, this argument has been elaborated by Earl J. Hamilton and Fernand Braudel, and has more recently been reformulated by economic historians adhering to the quantity theory of money.4 In his studies in the 1920s based on evidence gathered in the archives of Seville, Hamilton boldly and explicitly linked the price increases to the arrival of massive amounts of silver from the New World. Assuming a stable function of demand for money or velocity of circulation, he argued that the increase in the money supply first led to a rise in Spanish prices and then, through trade and the balance of payments deficits of that country, began to spread to others in Europe and eventually to the Near East and Asia. Equally importantly, he argued that by redistributing income into the hands of new groups, the Price Revolution played a key role in the rise of capitalism in Europe. In The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel devoted more than eighty pages to the study of inflows of precious metals, most importantly of silver, and the rise of prices during the sixteenth century. He emphasized the far-reaching impact of the rise of prices on the economies and societies around the Mediterranean. The general price rise of the sixteenth century was felt with force in the Mediterrranean countries, especially after the 1570s, and was accompanied by its many familiar consequences. The violent character and the length of this ‘revolution’ – which in fact extended into the seventeenth century – could not fail to be noted by contemporary observers. For them it was an occasion to reflect on the complex problem of currency, the new and revolutionary power of money, and the general fortunes of men and states. Historians in their turn have looked for the culprit or culprits, and sometimes

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thought they have found the answer, but the truth appears more and more complex as fresh facts daily come to light and as economic history, why not admit it, is becoming a more scientific discipline. Although it has come under much attack I shall continue to use the term ‘price revolution.’ Opinions may differ as to its causes, its true dynamics and its extent, but not about its brutally novel character. One historian has suggested that we in the twentieth century have experienced a greater price revolution in our own time. But this is no way to approach the problem. It must be judged by the universal astonishment of Philip II’s contemporaries throughout this age of constantly rising prices which began well before 1500. To men of the sixteenth century it seemed that they were witnessing something quite unprecedented. The old days when goods changed hands for almost nothing had been succeeded by grim years during which the cost of living rose ever higher. One might possibly question the use of the word revolution to describe the situation in Italy, for example, an established country with an advanced monetary economy, but faced with the chain of upheavals in the Balkans, Anatolia, the whole of the Turkish empire, how can one avoid using the term ‘price revolution’? Dramatic situations require dramatic words.5

Braudel initially thought of the American treasure as the only possible explanation for the sixteenth century rise in prices and he adhered to this explanation in the French edition of The Mediterranean: ‘There is no possible doubt about the effect of the influx of gold and silver from the New World ... The coincidence of the curve of influx of precious metals from the Americas and the curve of prices throughout the sixteenth century is so clear that there seems to be a physical, mechanical link between the two. Everything is governed by the increase in stocks of precious metals.’6 He continued to give much weight to the inflows of American silver in the English edition, devoting more than fifty pages to the study of precious metals and the American treasure. At the same time, however, he was willing to consider other explanations for the Price Revolution.7 Braudel did not have much to say about the impact of the Price Revolution around the eastern Mediterranean in the French edition. However, he was able to include detailed figures and a large chart on the subject in the English edition thanks to the researches of Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the Ottoman archives during the 1960s.8 The idea of a crisis, a turning point at the end of the sixteenth century as proposed and elaborated by Braudel, was very attractive for historians

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of the Ottoman Empire looking for an explanation and possibly an external cause for the decline of this once-powerful entity. Soon after the publication in 1949 of Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean economy in the sixteenth century, historians of the Ottoman Empire began to inquire about the impact of the Price Revolution. As early as 1951 Halil nalcık took up and developed some of the themes that Fernand Braudel had suggested for the eastern Mediterranean.9 In later years Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Bernard Lewis and many others not only accepted the link between the inflows of American treasure and rising prices but took another large step and identified the price increases during the second half of the sixteenth century as the beginning and even the cause of the irreversible decline of the Ottoman Empire. The Price Revolution thus began to be viewed as the source of the economic decline around the eastern Mediterranean. Among the historians of the Ottoman Empire, it was the late Ömer Lütfi Barkan who undertook the most important study on the subject. In an article first published in Turkish in 1970, later translated into English with some revisions and published in 1975, he argued that the Price Revolution of the sixteenth century played a key role in the economic decline of the Ottoman Empire and, more generally, the Near East.10 After presenting evidence from the Ottoman archives indicating that food and raw materials prices increased more than five fold, Barkan argued that these increases were imported into the Ottoman economy through trade with Europe across the Mediterranean. In the English version of his article on the Price Revolution, Barkan is careful not to directly discuss the causes of the Price Revolution in Europe. In that version he emphasizes that the Ottomans sought to establish a self-sufficient and tightly regulated economic system and argues that inflation, ‘the product of contact with the Atlantic economy,’ was an imported phenomenon for the Ottoman empire. ‘The (inflation) in Europe gradually began a process by which those commodities were sucked out of Ottoman markets. Wheat, copper, wool, and the like, which had been the bases of the Ottoman economic strategy, now came in short supply and ... here ... developed a rapid inflation of prices which soon endangered the equilibrium and security of the closed (Ottoman) economic system.’11 As for the consequences of the price increases, Barkan claimed that ‘the decline of the established Ottoman social and economic order began as a result of developments entirely outside the area dominated by the Porte, and in particular, as a consequence of the establishment in

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western Europe of an Atlantic economy of tremendous vitality and force.’ He then concluded that ‘this grave inflationary current ... together with other more internal factors disturbed the social and economic security of the Empire, and in the end, proved to be irreversible ... The sixteenth century came to an end with the countries of the Ottoman Middle East falling into a grave economic and social crisis which presaged a decisive turning point in their history.’12 Recently, however, this long line of reasoning, based on various versions of the quantity theory of money, has been seriously damaged. Evidence compiled by Michel Morineau about the arrival of specie to the Old World from newspaper accounts in the Low Countries show that European receipts of New World treasure continued to increase during the seventeenth century even after prices had started to decline. Since prices in Europe actually declined during the seventeenth century, these findings cast serious doubt on the orthodox monetarist position linking bullion inflows or bullion stock directly to the price level. At the very least, they show that the same quantity-theory framework cannot be applied to the seventeenth century.13 On the other side of the argument are those who have attempted to explain the price increases in terms of real factors, most notably population growth and urbanization. From the very early stages of the debate, population growth has been proposed as one of the alternative explanations of the Price Revolution. It has been singled out primarily because agricultural prices rose much faster than the prices of manufactures during this period. One of the more important and insightful contributions came from Miskimin, who inquired whether there may be a more indirect causal connection between population growth and rising prices. He reasoned that an increase in population would put greater numbers of persons in closer contact with each other and may have enhanced trading opportunities and thus led to increased velocity of circulation.14 Jack Goldstone pursued this idea and developed a simple model of exchange to show how urbanization and increasingly more dense urban networks of exchange might permit small amounts of silver to sustain a growing number of transactions. He argued that a larger volume of monetary transactions triggered by rising population density and household specialization should bring about smaller cash balances thanks to more frequent and smaller individual transactions, thereby increasing the velocity of circulation. In response, governments might have sought to catch up with rising prices by increased minting and currency debasement. Money supplies would thus be expected to lag behind rising pric-

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es. Bullion imports would help sustain this spiral but would not drive this demand. Once population growth ceased and urbanizaton slowed, however, velocity of circulation would fall.15 Even though Barkan’s arguments linking the sixteenth-century price revolution to Ottoman economic decline were widely read and even cited, they have generated only a modest amount of debate and his conclusions have remained mostly unchallenged.16 I have recently completed a large study of prices and wages in Istanbul, and to a lesser extent in other leading cities of the Ottoman Empire, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.17 This study utilized data on the prices of standard commodities collected from more than six thousand account books and price lists located in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. These indices now make it possible to compare Barkan’s empirical findings with a much larger body of evidence also drawn from archival sources. The consumer price index I have calculated for the period 1469 to 1700 as well as the index originally calculated by Barkan are broadly similar. As a whole, they indicate that prices in Istanbul increased by approximately 500 per cent from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. When it comes to providing an explanation for this overall increase in prices, however, my findings differ from those of Barkan. Economic historians studying the Price Revolution have found it useful to make an analytical distinction between price increases in nominal terms and those expressed in grams of silver. The latter index is derived by multiplying the price indices calculated in nominal akçes with the silver content of the akçe expressed in grams of silver for each year. It then becomes possible to break down the total increase in prices into its two components. The changes in the index measuring prices in grams of silver may be taken as an indicator for the price level in the absence of debasements. Since prices in grams of silver would tend to converge between countries under open economy conditions, especially so for the port city of Istanbul, the difference between the silver price index and the other in nominal akçes would reflect the extent of price increases due to the debasement of the currency. This second component of price increases was not necessarily independent of the Price Revolution, however, since the latter created, or at least contributed to, the fiscal pressures leading to debasements. My recent price series based on a greater variety of sources and more realistic estimates for the silver content of the akçe diverge from those of Barkan. They show that silver inflation, that is, increases in the price index, accounted for a smaller part and Ottoman debasements for a larger

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part of these increases than what Barkan suggested quarter of a century ago. With this correction, it becomes much more difficult to explain Ottoman price increases in terms of the Price Revolution alone or as imported inflation, as Barkan put it. Instead, Ottoman fiscal difficulties at the end of the sixteenth century emerge as the more important explanation of Ottoman price increases during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was, above all, the growing need for maintaining larger central armies as well as the increasing frequency of long and exhausting wars in both the east and the west that gave rise to the budget deficits and eventually led to the debasements.18 While the debates about the Price Revolution in Europe and the world economy have focused on the causes of the price increases, their longterm consequences have attracted more attention from historians of the Ottoman Empire. One important reason for this difference was Barkan’s thesis that the price increases constituted a negative turning point and a leading cause of the ‘Ottoman decline’ at the end of the sixteenth century. Recent research has shown, however, that the Ottoman economy and especially industry did not enter a period of irreversible decline after the sixteenth century. It is true that Ottoman industry was adversely affected by the price movements. Ottoman guilds, especially those in coastal regions, were hurt by the shortages arising from the exportation of raw materials to Europe. However, there is a good deal of evidence that these shortages were not permanent and that the guilds later recovered. Moreover, the argument linking price increases to Ottoman industrial decline cannot explain why European manufactures, which faced similar price movements, did much better than their Ottoman counterparts. If the seventeenth century, or most of it, was a period of stagnation for Ottoman guilds, the reasons must be sought elsewhere and not in the adverse price movements associated with the Price Revolution. In fact, volume of trade with Europe remained limited and Ottoman manufactures were not subjected to any serious competition from European industry until the nineteenth century. The imports were mostly luxury goods and items such as colonial wares during this period. Recent research has also shown that the eighteenth century until the 1780s was a period of stability and expansion for the Ottoman economy including the manufactures.19 Interestingly, Fernand Braudel had made the same point almost three decades ago: While politics clearly bears some relation to economics and vice versa, the political decline of the Ottoman Empire, whenever that decline occurred,

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did not immediately bring about that of the economy ... In the Balkans ... the Pax Turcica and the demand of Istanbul created a genuine national market, or at the very least stimulated trade. And in the eighteenth century, there are clear signs of revival ... There was bound to be a market for the output of the empire’s textile trades – indeed they would not be seriously disrupted until the increase in imports ... at the end of the eighteenth century ... So while the gates of the Turkish economy had long since been stormed, that economy had still not been entirely conquered or totally marginalized, even in the eighteenth century.20

3 Trade and Market Integration One important and overarching theme in Braudel’s work is the importance of the linkages across the Mediterranean provided by human and commodity flows, by migration and trade. In fact, Braudel has occasionally been criticized for overemphasizing exchange and trade at the expense of production. For Braudel, these flows are essential in ensuring the integration and unity of the Mediterranean. With respect to trade, he makes a distinction between luxuries such as pepper and essentials such as grain. Grain is the linkage that connects east, west, and all parts of the Mediterranean many, many times each year. Grain was a preoccupation simply because it was always scarce: Mediterranean harvests usually verged on the inadequate. Richer kinds of farming, vines and livestock were in constant competition with cereal growing. Wheat in the Mediterranean took up a great deal of room, requiring large areas for not very high yields, particularly since the same land could not be sown every year … And then there were the recurrent tragedies of winter floods and summer droughts that devotional processions were powerless to avert. The final result was extreme instability of price levels which fluctuated with the slightest news … In the eighteenth as in the sixteenth century, there was a visible difference between the east, where bread was cheap, and the west where bread was expensive … As soon as scarcity became apparent in a particular area, merchants flocked towards it, dispatched their boats and cleared their stocks. Prices over an area sometimes extending well beyond the original zone were affected by this movement. But as more ships raced to the zone of shortage, the influx of grain brought prices down again – a perfect lesson in political economy … Transport costs were the greatest single factor in variations in the price of commercialized grain.21

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If the Mediterranean cities and markets were not yet integrated during the sixteenth century, as implied by the large price differentials between the east and the west emphasized by Braudel, did the subsequent centuries bring about a new level of integration? In the passage above Braudel points out that east-west price differentials in grains persisted in the eighteenth century just as they did in the sixteenth century. However, volume of trade across the Mediterranean including east-west trade increased substantially during the eighteenth century. To what extent did this expansion in trade draw closer or integrate the markets around the Mediterranean? In view of this expansion in trade, can one begin to talk about an integrated Mediterranean market, if not at the beginning, at least at the end of the early modern era? Price series that have recently become available from around the eastern Mediterranean together with the series constructed for Spain by Earl Hamilton and others can now be used to study the extent to which commodity markets across the Mediterranean were integrated before the Industrial Revolution. The theory of market integration in its simplest form stipulates that as inter-market trade commences, differentials in the prices of commodities will tend to decline and eventually disappear. Historical price data have been frequently employed by economic historians for testing the timing, extent, and dynamics of the conversion of discrete and autonomous markets into an interdependent and unified whole. Some of the earliest studies for testing cases of market integration were undertaken by B.H. Slicher van Bath and others, who employed European grain prices for this purpose. Many studies have since been undertaken to test market integration at regional and national levels. In a recent study, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson examined the timing and dynamics of market integration at the global level since 1500. They emphasize that trade volume may increase due to shifts in demand and supply, but only falling transportation costs or trade barriers may bring about price convergence. They conclude that European, Asian, and American prices do not exhibit any tendency towards convergence during the early modern era. In other words, integration of European, Asian, and other commodity markets did not begin until the transportation revolution that began after 1820.22 In another recent study, Robert Allen has concluded after studying prices faced by consumers in urban markets across Europe that the range of prices across Europe expressed in grams of silver was greater in 1800 than it had been in 1450 or 1500. In other words, prices in urban markets did not exhibit

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any tendency towards convergence during the early modern centuries. If anything, the range in aggregate price levels faced by consumers around Europe was greater in 1800 than it was in 1500.23 There is a good deal of evidence, on the other hand, that commodity prices did begin to converge from 1820 onwards. Our findings based on the study of the prices of different commodities in Istanbul, Madrid, and Barcelona, as well as Amsterdam and London, point to a similar conclusion. Our comparison of the prices expressed in grams of silver of standard commodities such as wheat, olive oil, butter, mutton, rice, honey, sugar, and soap in these cities indicate that despite the considerable expansion of trade across the Mediterranean, first during the sixteenth century and then during the eighteenth, prices of individual commodities at the western and eastern ends of the Mediterranean did not tend to converge during the periods 1500–1800 or 1600–1800. In the majority of the commodities and pairs of markets we examined, prices were not any closer in 1800 than they were in 1500.24 Such price convergence became evident only in the nineteenth century, along with the sharp decline in the costs of transportation. In short, while trade between the eastern and western ends of the Mediterranean did increase during the early modern centuries, prices did not begin to show convergence until after the Industrial Revolution and the revolution in transportation. If we define market integration as the convergence of prices over space and time, by that standard, it is difficult to talk about market integration around and between the two ends of the Mediterranean during the early modern centuries.

4 Levels of Income and Standards of Living: West versus East When did the differences in the average incomes or standards of living between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean or between the northwestern part and the rest of the Mediterranean begin to emerge? This is an important question that contemporaries have been trying to answer ever since the sixteenth century. Historians have also addressed this question during the last half-century. In The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel was quite careful on this topic. He chose not to say very much. In his later work, he relied on the studies of Paul Bairoch. Can it be said for a start that the Mediterranean is an internally coherent zone? On the whole the answer is yes. It was my original idea, in the first edition of this book, that the many

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dimensions of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century should be suggested through a series of examples, by selecting certain important and indicative details. But this would mean leaving enormous blank spaces between the specks of color; at best, it would only give an impressionistic notion of the distance that separates our world from that of the sixteenth century. Today, on the other hand, I am more attracted towards the language of what economists call ‘national accounting.’ I should like to try to draw up a tentative balance sheet of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, not in order to judge its relative mediocrity or modernity but to determine the relative proportions and relationships between the different sectors of its activity, in short, to form a picture of the major structures of its material life: a difficult and hazardous project ... Any errors this may contain will be absorbed by the highly approximate nature of all our figures ... It will not be too difficult to calculate the wealth of the states. We already know a good deal about their budgets and we can fairly easily find out more. If we accept the following figures for the end of the century: 9 million ducats for Castile, 5 million for France under Henri IV, 3–9 million for Venice and her Empire, 6 million for the Turkish Empire, that is 24 million for a population of about 30 million and if we multiply this figure by two to correspond to the 60 million inhabitants of the Mediterranean as a whole, we arrive at the no doubt artificial total of 48 million. On this showing, a man contributed rather less than a ducat a year to his ruler (and a ducat to his landlord too, no doubt). If we add together all the different sources of income (although they are both indeterminate and partly overlapping) the gross annual product of the Mediterranean lies between 1200 million and 1500 million ducats, giving a per capita share of 20 or 35 ducats. These figures are by no means reliable and are certainly too high. The average income could hardly have reached this level ... This would be the average level if everything had passed through the market economy, which is not of course the case ... Our object has been to make the necessary initial survey, to situate, as it were, the huge inaccessible regions of the Mediterranean landscape in relation to each other. Let us now turn the page and leave an area where as yet quantitative history is unrewarding, where all the valid statistics are hidden from our gaze. Ten years from now, if the paths suggested here are followed and explored with success, this chapter will have to be rewritten from start to finish.25

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To reach conclusions about Europe and non-Europe, that is on the world as a whole, we should need some valid measurements and figures. What I have essentially given here is a description, an outline of some of the problems and some hints at possible or perhaps probable explanations. But we have by no means solved the enigma of the relations between Europe and nonEurope. For if it can hardly be questioned that until the nineteenth century the rest of the world outweighed Europe both in population and, while the economic ancien regime lasted, in wealth, if it is virtually beyond question that Europe was less rich than the worlds it was exploiting, even after the fall of Napoleon when Britain’s hour of glory was dawning – we still do not really know how this position of superiority was established and above all maintained – for the gap grew steadily wider. The great service Paul Bairoch has once more rendered to historians is precisely to pose this problem in statistical terms ... The chosen indicator is per capita income, GNP per inhabitant, and so as to give a meaningful picture of the respective positions of the various countries, all the levels have been calculated in dollars at 1960 US prices, so they are all presented in the same units. The results are as follows: England in 1700, between $150 and $190; the English colonies in America, the future United States in 1710, between $250 and $290; France (1781–1790), $170 to $200; India in 1800, $160 to $210 (but in 1900 between $140 and $180). These figures, which reached me as I was correcting the proofs of this book, confirmed my faith in the assertions and hypotheses I had already put forward. Nor was I surprised by the figure for Japan in 1750: $160. Only the high figure for China in 1800: $228 seems rather surprising, although it is true that this high level later declines ($170 in 1950) ... What emerges from Paul Bairoch’s calculations is that at the time when Europe was scoring dazzling triumphs all over the globe, when her ships commanded by Cook, La Pérouse or Bougainville, were exploring the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, she was (unlike today) far from having reached a level of wealth vastly superior to living standards in the rest of the world ... This perspective obliges us to take a rather different view of the respective positions of Europe (plus the other privileged countries) and the rest of the world, before 1800 and after the industrial revolution, which now appears to take on tremendous significance. It seems certain that only Europe (perhaps for reasons that have more to do with her social and economic structures than with technological progress) was able to carry out the machine revolution, with England leading the way. But this revolution was not merely an instrument of development in itself. It was a weapon of domination and destruction of foreign competition. By mechanizing, European

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industry became capable of out-competing the traditional industry of other nations. The gap which then opened up could only grow wider as time went on. The history of the world between about 1400 and 1850–1950 is one of an ancient parity collapsing under the weight of a multisecular distortion, whose beginnings go back to the late fifteenth century. Compared with this predominant trend, everything else is secondary.26

It is interesting that in his estimates or conjectures about the average income levels in different countries around the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century, Braudel refuses to assign different and lower income levels to the eastern and southern countries, choosing instead to use identical averages for all of the Mediterranean. Without detailed evidence, he agreed in his later work with the estimates offered by Paul Bairoch that the gap between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean, and more generally between the developed and developing countries, was rather small until the Industrial Revolution. Braudel’s position appears to be based on good common sense. It would be interesting to explore, however, whether we have learned anything new on this topic during the last three decades. Is it true that a gap between the incomes of the western and the eastern halves of the Mediterranean did not exist before the Industrial Revolution?

West versus East in Light of New Evidence During the last two decades economists and economic historians have paid a good deal of attention to the estimation of the per capita real product of different countries and the analysis of what happens over time to the gap between the leaders and followers.27 One of the most interesting questions in this respect concerns the emergence and evolution of the gap in levels of real income between developed and developing countries. We know that the gap is large today and can infer from the growth record of both groups of countries that it was smaller or did not exist at all prior to the onset of modern economic growth. Recent research by Angus Maddison and others has confirmed the existence of a gap in 1820.28 There is little information, however, about the period before 1820. How large was this gap in 1750, and was there a gap in 1600 or in 1500? These inquiries inevitably give rise to questions about the prevailing trends in per capita incomes, productivity, and institutions during the early modern era on both sides of the Mediterranean, west and east.

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With the exception perhaps of a handful of countries, estimates for per capita GDP for the period before 1820 are difficult to construct and not sufficiently reliable. An alternative approach for studying the gap in levels of per capita income or the standards of living has been to compare real wages of specific occupations, most often of skilled and unskilled construction workers in urban areas. In fact, real-wage series are virtually the only solid piece of information we have for the standards of living in the developing countries for the period before 1870, if not 1914. In short, real wages continue to be the most reliable source of information about the standards of living of at least part of the population. They also provide the most convenient vehicle for international comparisons of standards of living. Although they cannot be claimed to be ‘national’ in any sense, urban real-wage series exist for many regions and large inter-regional differences within the same country are not apparent in these series. Nonetheless, real-wage series are open to valid objections. Even if we accept the representative wage as an adequate proxy for the annual per capita earnings of labour, this does not mean that it should be a good proxy for income per capita. That depends on the further assumption that factor shares across countries are similar. Around the Mediterranean during the early modern era, incomes of households were often determined by changes in employment levels, participation ratios of men, women, and children, and above all by non-market incomes. Despite these qualifications, the link between wages and the standards of living remains. A decline in real wages did result in a decline in the standards of living or welfare of the household because more labour had to be supplied to buy the same amount of goods, thereby leading either to a decline in other types of income or, in the case where the household responded to the decline in real wages by working harder or longer, a decline in leisure time.29 Utilizing a large volume of archival documents, we recently established, for the first time, the long-term trends in the purchasing power of wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities in around the eastern Mediterranean, including Salonica, Edirne, Bursa, Damascus, and Jerusalem from the second half of the fifteenth century until the First World War. These real-wage series can also be compared with real-wage trends in European and western Mediterranean cities during the same period. This comparison provides new and important evidence regarding standards of living and growth in the early modern era. It also sheds light on the origins and evolution of a gap in real wages between the western and eastern halves of the Medi-

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terranean. Our indices indicate that real wages of unskilled construction workers in Istanbul declined by 30 to 40 per cent during the sixteenth century. After remaining roughly unchanged until the middle of the eighteenth century, Istanbul real wages increased by about 30 per cent from the late eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, and then by another 40 per cent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. On the eve of the First World War, real wages of unskilled construction workers were about 20 per cent above their levels in 1500. Because relative prices shifted in favour of goods consumed by higher-income consumers during these centuries and because the skill premium began to rise late in the nineteenth century, real wages of skilled workers in 1914 stood at more than 50 per cent above their levels in 1500. The purchasing power of the daily wages of both the skilled and unskilled workers were reasonably high during these four and a half centuries. During the sixteenth century, an unskilled construction worker could purchase with his daily wage 8 kilos of bread or 2.5 kilos of rice, or more than 2 kilos of mutton. Daily wages of skilled workers were 1.5 to 2 times higher. At these levels of daily pay, skilled construction workers must have enjoyed standards of living well above the average for the population as a whole and also above the average of the urban areas, even if they did not work for as many as 200 days per year. For the purposes of international comparisons, it is also possible to express daily wages in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities in grams of silver simply by multiplying the nominal wages by the silver content of the Ottoman akçe. Around 1500, for example, daily wages of unskilled construction workers in the capital city equalled 3.4 grams of silver and those of skilled construction workers equalled 6.6 grams of silver. We have also collected data on prices and daily wages of construction workers, both skilled and unskilled, in other cities around the eastern Mediterranean including the Balkans for the same period, 1490 to 1914. These observations were obtained from the account books of the pious foundations operating in these cities and are available from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. Our simple statistical analyses indicated that both prices and real wages in these second-tier urban centres, Bursa, Edirne, Belgrade, Salonica, Damascus, Jerusalem, and a few others, followed closely the trends exhibited by those of the capital city. Moreover, on the basis of the price and wage information provided by André Raymond in his seminal work in Cairo, we have established that the purchasing power of the wages of urban construction workers in Cairo, the second largest urban centre in the eastern Mediterranean remained close to that

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of Istanbul and these other urban centres during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.30 In a recent study of prices and wages in European cities from the Middle Ages to the First World War, Robert Allen utilizes a large body of data, most of which was compiled during the early part of this century in studies commissioned by the International Scientific Committee on Price History founded in 1929.31 In order to facilitate comparisons, he converted all price and wage series into grams of silver and chose as a base the index of average consumer prices prevailing in Strasbourg during 1700 to 1749.32 Allen argues that even though wages in a single city may be accepted as a barometer of wages in the whole economy, international comparisons need to be made between cities at similar levels in the urban hierarchy. Since his study uses data from cities at the top of their respective urban hierarchies, such as London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Milan, and Warsaw, it would make sense to insert Istanbul, another city at the top of the urban hierarchy of its region, into this framework. It is not very difficult to do so, since prices and wages were already expressed in grams of silver in our study. However, it was still necessary to express Istanbul prices in terms of the Allen base of Strasbourg 1700–49=1.0. For this purpose, Ottoman commodity prices for the interval 1700–49 were applied to Allen’s consumer basket with fixed weights. A second and equally useful method of linking Istanbul’s price level to those of other European cities in the Allen set was to employ the detailed annual commodity price series gathered by Earl Hamilton for Valencia and Madrid for 1500 to 1800 and compare them with the Istanbul prices for the same commodities.33 Since Valencia and Madrid prices were already calibrated into the Allen set, it was then possible to determine the Istanbul price level vis-à-vis western Mediterranean and other European cities for each interval. The price series for flour, mutton, olive oil, cooking oil, onions, chickpeas, pepper, sugar, and wood were used in these calculations. The two procedures produced results that were quite similar. Our indices show that daily wages in Istanbul and other Eastern Mediterranean cities expressed in grams of silver were comparable to those in many other locations in the western Mediterranean and elsewhere in Europe in the early part of the sixteenth century. However, because Istanbul prices were higher than those of all other cities in Allen’s sample, real wages in Istanbul varied between 60 and 90 per cent of real wages in other cities during that period. It is interesting that while real wages continued to decline after 1600 in western Mediterranean and many other parts of Europe, they remained little changed in Istanbul during the

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seventeenth and until late in the eighteenth century, leading to greater convergence with other parts of Europe except the northwest. A wage gap of one-third to one-half between Istanbul and the leading cities in northwestern Europe continued until the Industrial Revolution. Our real-wage series also point to the existence of a modest but statistically significant upward trend in urban wages around the eastern Mediterranean dating back to the sixteenth century, suggesting a modest but steady rise in demand for labour. It is not easy to interpret this result because the existing literature does not point to the existence of a longterm growth trend, especially for the period before 1850. In light of the new evidence, we now need to consider the possibility of a slow and modest rise in productivity around the eastern Mediterranean in the era before the Industrial Revolution. Learning by doing and/or the diffusion of new technology from Western Europe may help explain this trend. These results indicating that eastern Mediterranean standards of living did not decline but actually improved after the sixteenth century are consistent with the recent arguments that the Ottoman empire did not simply and irreversibly decline after 1600. Recent literature has emphasized that the Ottoman state and society showed considerable ability to reorganize as a way of adapting to changing circumstances from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. With pragmatism and flexibility, the Ottoman state adapted not only military technology but also its fiscal, financial, and monetary institutions during this period. This pragmatism and flexibility combined with the economic record may help explain the durability and longevity of the Ottomans.

5 Economic Institutions Even if income differences between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean remained limited until the Industrial Revolution, for Braudel some differences between the two areas were apparent and growing in the early modern era. In the excerpts below, Braudel emphasizes that economic structures around the eastern Mediterranean held their own until the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, he points to ‘political decline’ in the east. Could this be the source of the differences that became increasingly more apparent after the Industrial Revolution? So the Middle East as a crossroads of trade had declined in value, but it was far from being reduced to insignificance. The precious Levant trade, so long unparalleled, was not suspended when the Turks occupied Syria

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in 1516 and Egypt in 1517, nor were the routes through the nearby Mediterranean by any means abandoned. The Red Sea and the Black Sea (the latter as important to Istanbul as the ‘Indies’ were to Spain) continued to offer their services. After 1630, pepper and spices bound for Europe seem to have been permanently diverted to the Atlantic route but their place was taken by silk, before long by coffee and drugs, and eventually by cotton and cotton textiles, both printed and plain ... While politics clearly bears some relation to economics and vice versa, the political ‘decline’ of the Ottoman Empire, whenever that decline occurred, did not immediately bring about that of the economy … It is my view that one cannot properly speak of the decadence of the Turkish Empire before the first decades of the nineteenth century. If I had to suggest rather more precise dates, I would say that decline set in [in] 1800 in the Balkans, the living heart of the empire and the zone which provided the bulk of its armies and its taxes, but was also the most threatened; in Egypt and the Levant, the downturn perhaps occurred during the first quarter of the nineteenth century; in Anatolia, in the 1830s ... It was the industrial revolution which in the end got the better of an empire whose undoubted vigour was nevertheless insufficient to haul it out of its archaic ways and the legacy of its past ... But between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, it is perhaps permissible to talk of a single worldeconomy broadly embracing all three [the Balkans, Egypt and the Levant, and Anatolia].34

Fernand Braudel has written extensively on the institutions that gave rise to capitalism in western Europe. He has written in greatest detail about the institutions related to trade, money, and credit. In fact, for him capitalism has been, above all, a system of exchange rather than production. He is mostly silent about the eastern Mediterranean, however. He does not say very much about the growing differences between the east and the west in the period before 1800 that were apparent to him. Nonetheless, the following passage on the use of money around the eastern Mediterranean is very suggestive. It is also not surprising that with respect to the east, as well as the west, he chooses to talk about institutions pertaining to exchange rather than production: It was at grassroots level that the real economy of the Turkish Empire, an elementary but vigorous one, was to be found. Traian Stoyanovich has invented a picturesque name for it, ‘the bazaar economy’ that is a market economy articulated around the cities and regional fairs where exchange

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continued to obey traditional rules and was still, he argues, characterized by transparency and good faith. Even in the eighteenth century, credit was poorly developed, apart from usury which was ever-present even in the countryside. True, it was no longer the case that as Pierre Belon had noted in 1550, ‘Everything in Turkey is exchanged for cash.’ So there are not so many papers, record-sheets of loans or ledgers, and between neighbour and neighbour for any retail merchandise, there is no more credit accorded than if they were foreigners from Germany. But the old ways still survived to some extent, even if western merchants did make advance payments for goods to their suppliers and even if as we have seen the positive balance of their sales in Constantinople enabled them to sell in Smyrna or Aleppo bills of exchange on Constantinople. Overall, commercial life in Turkey still had some archaic features, one of which was the disconcertingly low price of everything compared with western Europe. In Tabriz in 1648, ‘one could buy for a sou enough bread to feed a man for a week’ ... Near Tokat in Asia Minor, Gardane in 1807 met ‘inhabitants dressed like ancient patriarchs and equally hospitable. They hasten to offer you lodgings and food, and are most astonished if one offers them money.’ The reason was that money, the sinews of western trade, usually made only fleeting appearances in the Turkish Empire. Part of it found its way to the everopen jaws of the sultan’s treasury, some was used to oil the wheels of top-level trade, and the rest drained away in massive quantities to the Indian Ocean. The West was correspondingly free to use its monetary superiority on the Levant market and even, when circumstances permitted, to deal in money itself, trading on the variable silver-gold ratio and on the preference accorded to certain coins – Spanish silver reals for instance, or the Venetian gold sequin which was always overvalued in the Levant ... By the end of the sixteenth century, it had become a profitable business to send gold by clandestine means from Turkey to Persia. And when Venice witnessed a decline in her eastern trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she continued to mint sequins to send to the Levant as a means of ensuring the extremely profitable returns she required.35

Kenneth Pomeranz has recently argued that core regions of China and western Europe were not very different from each other during the eighteenth century, not only in terms of technology and the levels and trends of development in their everyday economies but also in terms of the functioning of their economic institutions, land and labour markets, degree of commercialization, and even the legal and social regimes governing large accumulations of commercial and financial capital. Were it

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not for the large amounts of energy and land resources provided by the New World, he emphasizes, western Europe might not have experienced the industrial breakthrough that began in the second half of the eighteenth century.36 Whether parts of China and western Europe were so close to each other in terms of institutions or not, it is difficult to argue that institutions, technology, property rights, land markets, and the legal and social regimes governing capital accumulation around the eastern and southern Mediterranean were similar to those in western Europe during the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, it is highly doubtful that monetary institutions and traditions of money usage around the eastern Mediterranean were as different as Braudel suggests they were. When it came to the availability and use of money, historians including Fernand Braudel have long believed that credit was poorly developed and that the markets around the eastern Mediterranean were permanently starved for specie and coinage. There is no doubt that the markets around the Ottoman Empire experienced periodic shortages of specie during the early modern era. There were also periods such as the second half of the seventeenth century when these shortages assumed a long-term character. The passage above alludes to developments during this period. It would not be appropriate, however, to characterize these shortages as a permanent feature of economic life around the eastern Mediterranean from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence from a broad range of archival and other sources that while the degree of monetization varied considerably over time and space, use of money in Ottoman lands was not limited to the urban population. With the increased availability of specie and the growth of economic linkages between the urban and rural areas especially in the sixteenth century, large segments of the rural population came to use coinage, through their participation in markets and because of state taxation of a wide range of economic activities. In addition, small-scale but intensive networks of credit relations developed in and around the urban centres. Peasants and nomads as well as artisans and merchants took part in these monetary transactions. Similarly, the eighteenth century witnessed the establishment of a new Ottoman currency, increasing the availability of coinage and credit and augmenting linkages between Istanbul and the Ottoman currencies in different parts of the empire. Similarly, it has often been assumed that the prohibition of interest in Islam prevented the development of credit, or at best placed rigid obstacles in its way. Similarly, the apparent absence of deposit banking

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and lending by banks has led many observers to conclude that financial institutions and instruments were, by and large, absent in Islamic societies. It is true that a religiously inspired prohibition against usurious transactions was a powerful feature shared around the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, both by the Islamic world and the Christian West.37 While the practice of riba, the Arabic term for usury and interest, is sharply denounced in a number of passages in the Qur’an and in all subsequent Islamic religious writings, already in the classical era Islamic law had provided several means by which the anti-usury prohibition could be circumvented, just as the same prohibitions were circumvented in Europe in the late medieval period. Various legal fictions, based primarily on the model of the ‘double-sale’ were, if not enthusiastically endorsed by jurists, at least not declared invalid. Thus, there did not exist an insurmountable barrier against the use of interest-bearing loans for commercial credit. Neither the Islamic prohibitions against interest and usury nor the absence of formal banking institutions prevented the expansion of credit in Ottoman society. Utilizing the Islamic court records, the late Ronald Jennings has shown that dense networks of lenders and borrowers florished in and around the Anatolian cities of Kayseri, Karaman, Amasya, and Trabzon during the sixteenth century. Over a twenty-year period his study covered, he found literally thousands of court cases involving debts. Many members of each family and many women are registered in these records as borrowing and lending to other members of the family as well as to outsiders. These records leave no doubt that the use of credit was widespread among all segments of the urban and even rural society. Most lending and borrowing was on a small scale, and interest was regularly charged on credit, in accordance with both Islamic and Ottoman law, with the consent and approval of the court and the ulema. In their dealings with the court the participants felt no need to conceal interest or resort to tricks in order to clear legal hurdles. Annual rates of interest ranged from 10 to 20 per cent.38 It may be difficult to argue that institutions, technology, property rights, land markets, and the legal and social regimes governing capital accumulation around the eastern Mediterranean during the early modern era were similar to those in the western Mediterranean or western Europe. It would also be misleading, however, to label Ottoman institutions archaic or stagnant during the early modern era. In fact, the Ottoman state and society showed considerable ability to reorganize as a way of adapting to changing circumstances. Pragmatism, flexibil-

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ity, willingness to negotiate, and an ability to adapt their institutions to changing circumstances were traits that enabled the Ottomans to retain power until the modern era while many of their contemporaries in both Europe and Asia were unable to do so. Ottoman institutions undoubtedly changed during these centuries, but not exactly in the direction of capitalist economic development. Ultimately, pragmatism and flexibility were utilized and change was allowed rather selectively. Many of the key institutions of the traditional order, such as state ownership of land, urban guilds, and restrictions on private capital accumulation, remained intact until the nineteenth century.

Concluding Remarks For economic and social historians of the eastern Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel has been a highly influential figure during the post–First World War era. At a time when historians of this large region were turning inward with competing nationalist agendas, Braudel was able to offer a broader vision and a larger research agenda. With the large numbers of hypotheses and themes for further exploration that The Mediterranean generated, Braudel helped integrate the historians of the Ottoman Empire, and more generally the historians of the eastern and southern Mediterranean, to the international scholarly community. It is also remarkable that although Braudel was not himself a practitioner of quantitative methods, he frequently used numbers, statistical series, figures and graphs on population, trade, prices, wages, and other quantifable categories. For him, this was one venue through which history could be aligned more closely with the so-called hard social sciences. It is thus not surprising that many of the questions he posed, the research agenda he helped establish in demographic, economic, and social history of the eastern as well as the western Mediterranean were later studied by employing quantitative methods, as the foregoing pages have tried to illustrate. Fernand Braudel was always eager to incorporate the eastern Mediterranean into his analyses. Our retrospective examination also suggests that although he did not have first-hand or archival knowledge about the eastern Mediterranean, he was sensitive, perceptive, and careful in his judgments as well as conjectures about the region. Most, if not all, of these judgments have in fact stood the test of time, as we have tried to show. Perhaps most importantly, Braudel tended to emphasize the similarities in the material conditions and levels of income between the two

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halves of the Mediterranean in the era before the Industrial Revolution, but he also argued that the early modern institutions in the east were different from those in the west. For him, the secret of the west, or the secret in the rise of capitalism in the west lay in those institutions, particularly those of trade and finance. For the historians of the Mediterranean, perhaps one of his most important legacies is summed up in the following remarks: Today in 1972, six years after the second French edition, I think I can say that two major truths have remained unchallenged. The first is the unity and coherence of the Mediterranean region. I retain the firm conviction that the Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian, that the whole sea shared a common destiny, a heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if not identical consequences.39

NOTES 1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, English trans. by Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972), 1:394–8; all following references to The Mediterranean will refer to this English edition unless otherwise noted. 2 Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 55–60, 99–157, and 219–29. 3 On the strength of his Response to the Paradoxes sur le faict des Monnoyes of M. de Malestroict, Bodin has been designated the ‘discoverer’ of the Quantity Theory of Money. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 311–12. 4 Earl J. Hamilton, ‘American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism (1500– 1700),’ Economica 9 (1929), 338–57; idem, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934); Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:462–542. For a recent restatement of the monetarist position, see D.O. Fisher, ‘The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation,’ Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 883–902. 5 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:517–19. 6 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 1:426. 7 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:521–4. 8 Ibid., 518–19.

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9 Halil IHnalcık, ‘Osmanlı IHmparatorlugg u’nun kurulusj ve inkisjafı devrinde Türkiyenin iktisadi vaziyeti üzerine bir tetkik münasebetiyle,’ Belleten 15 (1951), 656–90. A decade later, Bernard Lewis also emphasized the contribution to the Ottoman decline of the developments unleashed by the arrival of American silver; see his The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 29–30. 10 Ömer L. Barkan, ‘The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point in the Economic History of the Near East,’ trans. Justin McCarthy, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975), 3–28; see also Barkan, ‘XVI. Asrın ikinci yarısında Türkiye’de fiyat hareketleri,’ Belleten 34 (1970), 557–607. 11 Barkan, ‘Price Revolution,’ 3–6. 12 Ibid, 5–7. 13 Michel Morineau, Incroyables Gazettes et Fabuleux Métaux: Les retours des tresors américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (New York and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985), 564; Arthur Attman and Ward Barrett’s surveys of the current research on the intercontinental flows of specie confirms that Morineau’s argument is essentially correct. A. Attman, American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600–1800 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps-och Vitterhets-Samhället, 1986); Ward Barrett, ‘World Bullion Flows, 1450– 1800,’ in The Rise of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 224–54. 14 Harry A. Miskimin, ‘Population Growth and the Price Revolution in England,’ Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975), 179–86. 15 Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Urbanization and Inflation: Lessons from the English Price Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ American Journal of Sociology 89 (1984), 1122–60. 16 One important exception is Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Die “Preisrevolution” im Osmanischen Reich während der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,’ Südost-Forschungen 42 (1983), 169–81. 17 Detailed results including appendices with annual price and wage series is available from Sjevket Pamuk, Five Hundred Years of Prices and Wages in Istanbul and Other Cities, 1469–1998 (Ankara: State Institute of Statistics, 2000), and ‘Prices in the Ottoman Empire, 1469–1914,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004), 451–68. 18 For further details, see Sjevket Pamuk, ‘The Price Revolution in the Ottoman Empire Reconsidered,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001), 69–89. 19 Mehmet Genç, ‘L’Économie Ottomane et la guerre au XVIIIe siècle,’ Tur-

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21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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cica 27 (1995), 177–96; idem, ‘Ottoman Industry in the Eighteenth Century: General Framework, Characteristics and Main Trends,’ in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 59–86. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, English trans. by Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 469–74. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:573–7. Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalization Begin?’ European Review of Economic History 6 (2002), 23–50. Robert Allen, ‘The Differentials in Gains That Persisted in the Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War,’ Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001), 411–47. Süleyman Ozmucur and Sjevket Pamuk, ‘Market Integration across Europe during the Early Modern Era’ (unpublished manuscipt). Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:419–20 and 450–61. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 533–5. Moses Abromowitz, ‘Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind,’ Journal of Economic History 46 (1986), 385–406; Angus Maddison, The World Economy, A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD Development Centre Studies, 2001). Maddison, World Economy. Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘Wages and the Standards of Living in Europe, 1500–1800,’ European Review of Economic History 3 (1999), 175–98; Jan De Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe,’ in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 85–132. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973–4); for prices, see vol. 1:17–80; for wages of urban construction workers, see 2:385–91. Arthur Cole and Ruth Crandall, ‘The International Scientific Committee on Price History,’ Journal of Economic History 24, 3 (1964), 381–8. Allen, ‘Differentials in Gains.’ See Hamilton, American Treasure. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 468–84. Ibid., 472–4. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a recent discussion of the classical Islamic views on interest, see Nabil

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A. Saleh, Unlawful Gain and Legitimate Profit in Islamic Law: Riba, Gharar and Islamic Banking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9–32. 38 Ronald C. Jennings, ‘Loans and Credit in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 16 (1973), 168–216. 39 Braudel, The Mediterranean, preface to the English edition, p. 14.

chapter six

Sebastianism in Theory and Practice in Early Modern Portugal B R YA N G I V E N S

Sebastianism – the Portuguese messianic tradition that King Sebastian, who was lost while on crusade in 1578, will one day return to lead Portugal to world-wide glory – is one of the most long-lived millenarian legends in the history of Western Europe. It was also one of the most politically influential, and had profound political resonances from the period of Sebastian’s lifetime until the 1890s in Brazil. These observations are not unrelated, and this chapter will briefly examine its origins and development through the seventeenth century in an attempt not only to document its political longevity, but also to explain why Sebastianism, and indeed why a particular strain of Sebastianism, beat out its apocalyptic competitors to become the dominant form of Portuguese messianism from the late seventeenth century onward. So, while this essay will study the mentalités of millenarians in early modern Portugal, in many ways, the type of analysis that I will use to draw my conclusions is inspired by the approach of Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II. This may come as a surprise to some given the topic of this essay – a popular religious belief – and given the relatively insignificant role assigned to religion in The Mediterranean. However, I believe Braudel’s seminal examination of the decisive role of largely unchanging geographic realities, which he classified as histoire quasi immobile, can also provide important insights into the dynamics of a long-lived, though evolving, cultural phenomenon such as Sebastianism. Braudel demonstrated that topography shapes history at its deepest level and that not all landscapes lead to equal outcomes. Here I will argue analogically that the landscapes of cultural reception are also not created equal, and that some systems of belief are better suited to their

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cultural climates than others, as was the case with Sebastianism in early modern Portugal.

The Millenarian Tradition in Medieval Portugal While the origin of all Western messianism is the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition, it was the apocalyptic views of the late-twelfth-century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore which were to have the most direct influence on the millenarian tradition in Portugal. As revealed in his masterwork, the Liber Concordie novi ac veteris Testamenti, Joachim developed a complex interpretation of human history based on the prophetic books of the Bible. The most famous element of his eschatology was the belief that history was divided into three ‘Statuses,’ each governed by a member of the Trinity and each moving to a higher fulfilment of God’s will on earth, with the final Status of the Holy Spirit being a time of peace, prosperity, and full-time contemplation of God.1 By the mid-thirteenth century, Joachimite ideas were eagerly being accepted by members of the newly formed Franciscan Order, especially by the Spirituals among them, who saw themselves as the fulfilment of Joachim’s prophecy of a new mendicant order of spiritual men being founded before the consummation of the Ages.2 The Spiritual Franciscans played a decisive role in the spread of Joachimite ideas in medieval Iberia, and in Portugal in particular. Manuel J. Gandra documents the profound influence that the Franciscans had in Portugal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and particularly in the dissemination of the Joachimite ideas. While he has not found evidence of any great production of Joachimite texts in Portugal during the period, he does make a convincing case for the widespread diffusion of Joachmite ideas by examining other forms of literature such as poetry, correspondence, and even iconography.3 It is certain that Joachimism had a profound influence on the Avis Dynasty after it came to power in 1385. Advocated first by the Franciscans and later by the Jesuits,4 the Avis saw in Joachimism both a prophetic incentive for and a prophetic legitimization of the crusading and empire-building policies they followed throughout the fifteenth century. Taken together with the Miracle of Ourique, which will be discussed below, many of the Avis rulers saw themselves and their kingdom as providentially chosen to bring about the conversion of the world by conquest and evangelization.5 The Joachimite figure of the Last World Emperor took on some particular characteristics in the Iberian kingdoms of the late medieval period.

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Given Iberia’s unique position (within Western Europe) as a frontier with Islam and the long (and legendary) history of the Reconquest, it should not be surprising that Iberians saw the prophesied ruler’s principal role as the leader of a decisive, final crusade against Islam.6 Another element was also to make the Iberian permutation of the legend unique: an emphasis on the ‘hidden-ness’ of the coming King, based on prophecies attributed to the seventh-century ‘Spanish’ bishop, St Isidore. Whether the inclusion of this element was due to some vestigial effect of Islamic messianism, the influence of the widely known Arthurian cycle, or some other factor remains unclear, but, whatever its origin, the belief that the coming King would also be hidden for a time had become standard in the Iberian kingdoms by the 1480s, at the latest. Sebastianism was also influenced by the native ‘Legend of Ourique.’ As the story had evolved by the sixteenth century, Dom Afonso Henriques, the night before engaging the armies of five Moorish kings at Ourique on 25 July 1139, saw a vision of the Crucified Christ, who reassured him that he would win the coming battle and go on to found a kingdom that would spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. The coat of arms for this new kingdom was also revealed: it would be a cross of five shields, representing the five wounds of Christ, and within the shields, thirty coins symbolizing the price for which Christ had been sold. Hearing of this divine message, Afonso’s men proclaimed him king before going on to defeat the ‘infinite thousands’ of the Moorish army.7 Certainly, on 25 July 1139, Dom Afonso Henriques did defeat a numerically superior army of Moors at Ourique, and so was proclaimed King of Portugal. Beyond those simple facts, however, little else is known with any certainty. According to an excellent short study by Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra, the process of mythification had already begun by the middle of the fourteenth century, with the association between Ourique and Portugal’s coat of arms by then already well established. By the early fifteenth century, the vision of the Crucified Christ had become part of the story, and by the time of Duarte Galvão’s Crónica de D. Afonso Henriques (1505), which would become the definitive version of the legend, the prediction that Afonso’s kingdom would spread the gospel to the ends of the earth had been added as well.8 Along with the contemporaneous preaching of Joachimism by the Franciscans, the legend of Ourique helped create a climate of eschatological expectation in Portugal that God would intervene in human history on behalf of the Portuguese. It also provided a discourse of national destiny: no matter how grim the situation seemed for Portugal,

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the promises made to Afonso Henriques provided an essential anchor of hope for the Portuguese psyche. The story played an important role in mobilizing the Portuguese against Castile during the succession crisis of 1383–5,9 and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers, interpreters, and apologists cited Ourique as the foundational event by which subsequent events, especially tribulations, were to be interpreted. Thus, the legend became the foundation of Portuguese national identity in the early modern period, a founding myth which gave the Portuguese proof of both the divine establishment of and divine purpose for their kingdom. As such, it is the first element in the evolution of Sebastianism that can be described as exclusively Portuguese. The Portuguese Synthesis: Gonçalo Anes Bandarra and the Trovas These diverse strands of messianic belief were brought together for the first time to form an independent and distinctively Portuguese eschatological tradition in the 1530s when Gonçalo Anes Bandarra wrote a collection of prophetic verses called the Trovas, in which he predicted the coming of a Portuguese king who would convert the Jews to Christianity, destroy the Turks, and bring universal peace to the earth. Born around 1500, Bandarra was a moderately prosperous cobbler who was gifted with an amazing memory, which he used to learn by heart long passages of scripture and prophecy; the Trovas reveal a considerable familiarity with the prophetic books of the Bible, in addition to being marked by the influence of Joachim, the pseudo-Isidore, and the Legend of Ourique.10 While Bandarra was not a New Christian, without a doubt he was sympathetic to the Portuguese converso community and it was his affinities with the New Christians which eventually led to difficulties with the Inquisition. On 18 September 1540, after a rapid investigation, arrest, and trial, the cobbler was ready for sentencing.11 According to his trial record, Bandarra was condemned as ‘being a friend of novelties and, with them, causing tumult among the New Christians, writing verses that, for lack of understanding, are understood in other ways and not according to his intention, by giving other interpretations of many scriptural authorities and answers to similar questions without training’ [emphasis added].12 Essentially, the charge was unintentionally stirring up the New Christians, by means of unauthorized and ill-conceived interpretations of biblical prophecy. After promising not to discuss the Trovas or write

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any more, Bandarra duly abjured his errors in an auto-da-fe held in Lisbon and the Trovas were banned.13 It is clear from this that the Inquisition wished to suppress any document that could undermine its policy of limpeza de sangue by lending prophetic legitimacy to the proposition that the conversion of the Jews was favoured by God. The Trovas continued to be circulated, however, and they quickly became the most important collection of prophetic literature in Portugal during the second half of the sixteenth century. The Trovas themselves included scathing criticisms of the status quo, condemning the ignorance and corruption of the clergy (I–IV) as well as decrying the influence of money in the Church and the judicial system (V–X). For Bandarra, corruption among the elites inevitably led to the oppression of the poor (XVI); it is clear, however, that Bandarra’s intent is more restorationist than revolutionary, for he also complains in trova XI that ‘the lineage of the nobles is exchanged for money.’ In all, one gets the impression that his ideal was that of a return to an ‘old moral economy,’ when economic (and spiritual) relationships were governed by custom and personal interaction rather than by money. That such a criticism should come from a small-town artisan in the very period that Portugal’s Asian commercial empire was reaching its peak of prosperity should not come as a surprise, because the increasing monetarization of Portuguese society threatened to sweep many of the old paternal customs away. Bandarra also offered a supernatural cure for the ills of Portuguese society, by predicting the arrival of a ‘Chief Shepherd’ who would defend his flock – seen as poor, Catholic, and Portuguese – against the threats of Castilian aggression, commercialization, schism and heresy, and neglect by native leaders, precisely the kinds of concerns we might expect from the sort of pious and patriotic artisan we know Bandarra to have been. As the ‘Hidden King,’ the major part of the Chief Shepherd’s eschatological program is a crusade against the forces of Islam, which was a ‘hot’ issue in Portugal at the time Bandarra was writing because, in 1532, João III made the very unpopular decision to pull back from several Portuguese strong points in Morocco. The Trovas can only be seen as a criticism of that decision, and given the influence of the Ourique legend on Bandarra, it would probably be fair to say that he viewed the pullback as an unacceptable halt in the divine crusade against the Moors begun by Afonso Henriques. In contrast to his militancy against Islam, Bandarra predicted the peaceful conversion of the Jews to Christianity. To cast the

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conversion of the Jews as part of God’s eschatological plan was to legitimate the conversions of the Jews in the present, a point which was all too clear to the Inquisitors who tried him and banned his work. Bandarra’s contribution to the development of Portuguese millenarianism stems from the fact that he wove the disparate strands of nonPortuguese messianic traditions together in such a way that Portugal was viewed as a vehicle specially chosen by God to nurture the Desired One and to bring about the divine will on earth. Even though the Trovas were highly contextualized when written, because they brought the panEuropean traditions together in a way that favoured Portugal, they became the foundational document for all subsequent Portuguese messianism. No future claimant or prophetic interpreter in the Portuguese cultural world, whether sympathetic to Bandarra’s goals or not, could afford to ignore him or the Trovas, and each sought to reinterpret him/ them in such a way as to support his favoured position.

Sebastian and the Battle of Alcazarquivir Even from his birth on 20 January 1554, there were some in Portugal who considered Sebastian the Desired One, since by simply being born, he prevented the end of male line of the Avis dynasty, a possibility which would have brought about Hapsburg control of Portugal. As Sebastian grew older, his behaviour tended to confirm messianic expectations: to many, he was the ideal Christian knight, known from an early age for his piety, his chastity, and his zeal for the Faith, and particularly for his desire to crusade against the Moors. Did Sebastian himself believe he was the Hidden One? Given the ubiquity of the legends of the Encoberto, it is doubtful that he was unaware of them in some form. The best known of those who saw a special destiny for Sebastian was Luís de Camões, the author of the epic poem Os Lusíades, written in 1572 and dedicated to the young king. António Quadros makes a good case that Os Lusíades was not intended merely as a nostalgic panoply of the past glories of Portugal but as a call to war, specifically war against the Moors in North Africa. Besides the epic’s obvious classical allusions, it shows a heavy dependence on the Legend of Ourique, a fact which lends weight to the view that Camões was urging the young King to complete the crusade begun by Afonso Henriques.14 If this analysis is correct, then Camões was representative of the outlook of at least a part of elite opinion during Sebastian’s reign, opinion that saw in Sebastian the opportunity to renew the tradition of crusading expansionism that had characterized the late medieval peri-

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od. Due to a lack of evidence, the question of whether Sebastian believed himself to be the Hidden One or not cannot be answered definitively, but it is clear that Sebastian did go to Morocco in 1578 to fight the Moor and find his destiny. There is no need to review in detail the Battle of Alcazarquivir, which took place on 4 August 1578, but suffice it to say that reading books of chivalry had not provided Sebastian with adequate preparation to fight a real war. On that hot August morning, his motley army was crushed by the superior forces of Abd-el-Malek, the Sherif of Fez. Whatever Sebastian’s shortcomings in planning or common sense, he was no coward: he often rode into the battle to rally his troops and to lead counterattacks against the advancing Moors in person. Despite his bravery, the Portuguese effort was foredoomed and, in the course of the battle, he disappeared and was almost certainly killed. However, no one could be found that had actually seen Sebastian die, and it was this slim uncertainty that changed the course of Portuguese messianism forever. At Alcazarquivir, the Portuguese lost not only a battle, but their army, their treasure, most of their nobility, and their king; they were soon to lose more, however. Sebastian had not secured the succession in case of failure, and the only other member of the Avis dynasty of any standing was Sebastian’s elderly uncle, the cardinal Henry, who suffered under the double disadvantages of being a priest and of having tuberculosis. Despite the fact that Henry was acclaimed king on 22 August – a sign of the regime’s acceptance of Sebastian’s death – reports that he was still alive were widespread. And even though a body had been identified as Sebastian’s a few days after the battle, the testimony of some soldiers who had fled the Moors fed the rumour that he had escaped to the fortified town of Arzila in the company of several knights. In the climate of uncertainty created by these conflicting reports, many people opted for the more hopeful of the possibilities, though the question remained of where Sebastian was, alive or dead. When Henry died in January 1580, an illegitimate cousin of Sebastian’s, Dom António, the Prior of Crato, emerged as the popular candidate for the throne against the claims of Philip II of Spain. During Dom António’s brief ‘reign,’ many people hoped that he was the Hidden One prophesied by Bandarra, a hope he did his best to encourage. His cause was lost, though, in the summer of 1580 when his ill-prepared army of volunteers was crushed by the veteran tercios of the Duke of Alva at the Battle of Alcántara. Dom António fled to the north and then to the Azores, but in 1583 the island of Terceira was captured by the Span-

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ish, with Dom António and his remaining supporters fleeing to exile in France and England. In the meantime, Philip II was proclaimed King of Portugal by the Cortes of Tomar in 1581 after swearing to respect the rights, laws, and privileges of the Portuguese. In 1582 Philip had the body that had been identified as Sebastian’s ransomed from Morocco and publicly interred in the Monastery of the Hieronymites outside Lisbon in a move calculated to convince his new subjects that Sebastian was indeed dead and thereby solidify his own legitimacy. Because some witnesses disputed the identity of the body, though, the burial did little to quell the belief that Sebastian was still alive. Besides the influence of pre-existing messianic associations and the uncertain identity of the corpse, the fact that several people were acclaimed as Sebastian did much to cement the idea that he was not truly dead in the popular mind.15 The stories of the anonymous ‘King of Pernamacor’ in 1584; Mateus Álvares, the ‘King of Ericeira’ in 1585; and Gabriel Espinosa, the ‘Pastry-Maker of Madrigal’ in 1595 are all proof of the continuing hope that Sebastian was the Hidden One of prophecy, a hope that, seemingly, was intensified by the tragedy of Alcazarquivir. Psychologically, such a phenomenon is not hard to understand; after the Spanish took control of Portugal in 1580, many Portuguese turned to the only kind of salvation they could really hope for, that of a supernaturally chosen national redeemer. And so, after Alcazarquivir, the Portuguese millenarian tradition was used increasingly to mobilize opinion against continued Spanish control over Portugal; the discourse of triumphalist expansionism was transformed into a discourse of national liberation.

Dom João de Castro, the ‘Prisoner of Venice,’ and the Middle Years It was the last of the pretenders, the so-called ‘Prisoner of Venice,’ who was to have the greatest effect on subsequent events, but before we discuss the ‘Prisoner,’ we must first discuss the man who is arguably the most influential figure in the development of sebastianismo: Dom João de Castro. The illegitimate son of a prominent Portuguese nobleman, he rallied to the cause of Dom António after Alcazarquivir and followed him into exile after Alcántara. At first, Dom João worked to rally support for Dom António in the courts of western Europe, but by May of 1587, de Castro’s faith in the Prior had waned, and so he left Dom António’s ‘court’ and went to stay with supporters in Paris.

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The year 1587 was decisive in more ways than one for de Castro, for it was during that year that he first read the Trovas of Bandarra and became convinced that Sebastian was not only alive, but indeed the ‘Hidden One’ prophesied in those verses.16 After that, Dom João began a peripatetic crusade to spread the gospel of the living Sebastian, though with only mixed results. In 1597 he wrote a book entitled Da Quinta e ultima Monarchia futura, which was never published, in which he called upon his formidable erudition in things eschatological to prove his case. Using a Joachimite schema as the foundation for his views, he identified Sebastian as the coming king who would destroy the Turks, overthrow Islam, and reform the Church with the help of the Angelic Pope.17 He also cited Isidore to prove Sebastian’s identity as the ‘Hidden One’ and, on the basis of the Trovas and some rather obscure numerology, he predicted that Sebastian would reappear in 1598. This fact goes a long way to explain his passion when, in 1598, rumours began to spread among the Portuguese community in Venice about a mysterious ‘Knight of the Cross’ imprisoned there. It is not necessary to review in detail the rather complicated course of events involving the ‘Prisoner of Venice,’ as he came to be called, but a summary is necessary. Living in Paris at the time, Dom João de Castro received news in the summer of 1598 that a man in Venice was claiming to be Sebastian. He had escaped from Alcazarquivir, he said, but after many years of wandering the world in penance for his defeat, he had finally come to Venice, where he had been arrested by the authorities there under pressure from the Spanish ambassador. After many months of spreading the news of the man’s claims, de Castro travelled to Venice himself in the summer of 1600 to help the Prisoner’s other supporters prove his identity and thereby secure his release. Spanish pressure eventually caused him to be expelled from the Most Serene Republic and he was later arrested in Florence and ultimately turned over to the Spanish authorities in Naples. He was questioned there by the viceroy and eventually confessed to being a Calabrian named Marco Tulio Catizone. In May 1602 he was condemned to life in the king’s galleys for the crime of impersonation. The confession caused many supporters to lose faith in the pretender, but de Castro did not. To defend the Prisoner, de Castro had returned to Paris and wrote the Discurso da Vida do Sempre Bem Vindo et Apparecido Rey Dom Sebastião nosso Senhor o Encuberto. Published in Paris in 1602, ‘with the licence of the King,’ and addressed to the ‘Nobles, Clergy, and People of Portugal,’ the Discurso had two principal apologetic purposes:

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to defend Sebastian’s reign from the criticism of hostile writers and to demonstrate that the Prisoner of Venice was, in fact, Sebastian. To that end, Dom João and several other partisans returned to Portugal to try and start a rebellion among the nobility in the Prisoner’s favour, but the pro-Hapsburg authorities in Lisbon moved in early 1603 to forestall any such insurrection and arrested several of the conspirators. Several letters implicating Catizone in the plot were confiscated, so the pretender was quickly transferred to San Lucar de Barrameda in Andalusia to stand trial for treason. While Catizone was being tried in the summer of 1603, de Castro completed and published his Paraphrase et Concordançia de Alguas Prophecias de Bandarra, Çapateiro de Trancoso in Paris. Where the Discurso had been a historical apologetic, the Paraphrase, as its title implies, was a prophetic one, based on the Trovas of Bandarra. In many ways, his gloss of the Trovas varied little from Bandarra’s interpretations; in the first chapter, he said that Bandarra had predicted ‘the conquest of the Holy House [i.e., Jerusalem] and the whole world, the universal proclamation of the Gospel, the universal triumph of Christianity over all the enemies of the Church, the major part being promised to King Sebastian and his kingdom, Portugal,’ although Bandarra clearly had not had Sebastian in mind.18 So, while de Castro’s ‘paraphrase’ of the Trovas recapitulates many of the themes and concerns of the original, there is, for our purposes, one important difference that needs to be examined: their very different attitudes toward the Jews and the New Christians. Bandarra’s close associations with the converso community of his day have already been noted, but de Castro had a different view of them altogether, and he consistently ignored or reinterpreted passages favourable to the Jews in Bandarra. Dom João did not merely ignore the issue, however; in an extended digression, he stated during Sebastian’s reign, the tribulations of the ‘Jews and apostates’ would be greater than ever before, and that the ‘Holy Inquisition’ would be extended to the entire world.19 All of Dom João de Castro’s efforts, literary and otherwise, were to fail in their immediate goal, however, because on 23 September 1603, Marco Tulio Catizone was executed by hanging in San Lucar. This turn of events did not dampen Dom João de Castro’s faith, though; the man executed by the Spanish had, in fact, been Catizone, de Castro admitted, but Catizone had been switched with Sebastian by the Spanish so that they could quell the growing support for Sebastian without having the guilt of royal blood on their hands. From that point on, de Castro always maintained that Sebastian was still alive.

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In the end, the execution of Catizone spurred Dom João on to new efforts in his defence of Sebastian, and in 1604 he began what he later considered to be his masterwork, the Aurora. Weighing in at over 1100 folios, it represents the most comprehensive treatment of de Castro’s apocalyptic views, even though it was never published. In the Aurora, he brought the full weight of his learning to bear to prove Sebastian’s providential destiny, citing predictions from the full range of the Western prophetic corpus to prove that Sebastian was destined to rule the world. Although he repeats (and even extends) the anti-Semitic comments found in his earlier works, it becomes quite clear in the Aurora that, in Dom João’s mind, the principal enemy of Christendom was Islam, headed by the Turks, and the major part of this long work is dedicated to explaining the details of Sebastian’s victorious campaign against the forces of Islam, culminating in the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of Mecca. The Aurora is, as a result, the most complete eschatological schema ever written in the Portuguese language, and it is also the most extensive elaboration in existence of the racist and militantly Catholic strain of Portuguese millenarianism that de Castro represented. De Castro did not cease writing when he could not raise the money to have the Aurora published, and over the next two decades until his death in 1628, he remained in Paris, surviving on the kindness of Portuguese exiles there and writing over twenty more books and treatises – none of which was published – on the liberation of Portugal and Sebastian’s glorious destiny. Beyond those unpublished works, very few books on the subject were written in the first decades of the seventeenth century, making it very difficult to trace the precise evolution of sebastianismo during that period. One important exception to this rule was the dissemination of three documents purporting to be papal bulls (dated 1598, 1617, and 1630) identifying the Prisoner of Venice as Sebastian. Since none of the originals of these bulls can be found in the Vatican, they are certainly forgeries, though, in a rather barren period, they are evidence of the continuing belief that Sebastian, in the person of the Prisoner of Venice, was alive. The trail of evidence improves somewhat in the 1620s and 1630s, though details remain sparse, and the nature and specific content of the belief during this crucial period are still quite unclear. These two decades were a period of increasing economic frustration and political tension in Portugal, as many Portuguese resisted the centralizing policies of the Olivares regime in Spain. Unsurprisingly, the evidence suggests that these decades saw a marked upswing in the spread and militancy of

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millenarian ideas in Portugal. One of the rare examples of a published work from this period is a book by the New Christian alchemist, astrologer, and physician Manuel Bocarro Frances. In 1624 he published the first part of a four-part poem entitled the Anacephaleosis da Monarchia Lusitania. Though the work was dedicated to Philip IV of Spain, it is clear that Bocarro thought the messianic prophecies he cited applied to Dom Teodósio, the Duke of Braganza, significantly described as ‘the principal Hero of this Monarchy.’20 This, at least, was the way the Hapsburg authorities read the poem and Bocarro was arrested. After a brief imprisonment, and after being denounced to the Inquisition as a judaizer, he fled to Rome. Safe there, he actually did convert to Judaism,21 but his conversion did not end his interest in Portuguese messianism. In 1626 he completed the Luz pequena lunar, in which he stated that the Avis had been rejected by God because of their oppression of the conversos,22 thereby excluding the possibility that Sebastian was the Hidden One. In another section, he stated clearly that his intention was to educate the ‘mistaken sebastianists,’ the first known use of that term. With the Avis rejected, the Braganzas became the focus of Bocarro’s attention, and he ultimately concluded that the ‘Sovereign Prince’ by Dom Teodósio’s side, his son and heir, the future João II of Braganza would be the Desired One.23 His work is important because it is the first clear example of what would become an intense debate between the supporters of the Braganzas and the supporters of Sebastian regarding the identity of the Encoberto. It is also a testament to the cross-religious nature of the millenarian beliefs then circulating in western Europe. Even after Bocarro converted, he remained a Portuguese nationalist and, reading the same sources that Dom João de Castro had used to promote an anti-Jewish agenda, continued to view the Catholic Duke of Braganza as the messianic saviour promised by the prophets. The clearest evidence of the influence of millenarian ideas in Portugal in this period comes from the accounts of the widespread, though ultimately unsuccessful, anti-Castilian revolt known as the Alterações of Évora. The rebellion began in the summer of 1637 as an anti-tax revolt in response to fiscal pressure from Madrid, but under the guidance of some Jesuit professors at the University of Évora it quickly took on radical and millenarian overtones. Dom Francisco Manuel de Melo, the principal chronicler of the rebellion, recounts that four such Jesuit Fathers – at least two of whom, Sebastião de Couto and Gaspar Correia, supported João of Braganza as the Desired One24 – were leaders of the rebellion and almost certainly were part of the body ruling Évora under the aegis

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of ‘Manuelinho.’25 The messianic tendencies of ‘Manuelinho’ can be seen in a decree written in his name at the beginning of the disorders in Évora which used radical language influenced by Molinist theories on tyrannicide to reject the Spanish king completely, stating that his rule was illegitimate because the Portuguese already had a true king.26 One should not conclude, however, that the ‘Alterations’ were, therefore, simply a pro-Braganza revolt with messianic overtones; de Melo, who was a careful historian, states that the sebastianistas were crucial participants in the rebellion,27 so the most likely conclusion is that Portuguese millenarians of all stripes came together in Évora to fight for the common goal of expelling the hated king of Spain. The issue of the Hidden King’s identity could wait until after Portugal was liberated, as indeed it did.

The Restoration Period The repression that followed the alterations (Alterações) of Évora only increased the desire among the Portuguese masses for an end to Spanish rule, and by 1640 virtually all support for the Hapsburgs among the elites had evaporated as well. So, on 1 December 1640, Duke João II of Braganza was acclaimed King João IV of Portugal by the nobles and people of Lisbon, an acclamation quickly accepted by the rest of the kingdom. So complete was the support for João inside Portugal that he was able to expel all the Spanish garrisons within three months of the acclamation, although the war for independence continued until 1668. The initial enthusiasm following the acclamation of João IV was accompanied by his widespread acceptance as the Hidden One, and many of his supporters were quick to use his perceived prophetic role to bolster support for the new regime, both at home and abroad. For example, in 1643 Panteleão Rodrigues Pacheco, one of João IV’s closest advisers, wrote the Manifesto do Reyno de Portugal, using legal, genealogical, and prophetic arguments to persuade Pope Urban VIII to accept the Braganza ruler as the legitimate king of Portugal.28 Another important contribution to the joanista cause was made by the Conde da Vidigueira, João IV’s ambassador to Paris, when he redacted the first complete printed edition of Bandarra’s Trovas in 1644. The text varied from the incomplete edition produced by Dom João de Castro in 1603 in several key passages, and in such a way that clearly favoured João IV as the Hidden One of prophecy. The most influential of the pro-Braganza apologies, though, was the Restauração de Portugal Prodigiosa, written in 1643–4 by the Jesuit Fr João de Vasconcelos, who used the book’s two

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enormous volumes to defend the proposition that the Restoration of Portugal (and João IV’s role therein) were the work of God.29 António de Sousa de Macedo was also well connected to the Braganza regime, serving in various governmental positions under both João IV and Afonso VI. In 1645, while in London, Sousa de Macedo published an erudite defence of João’s claims to the throne of Portugal, Lusitana Liberata, which used both legal and eschatological proofs to show that João was the rightful king of Portugal.30 Written in Latin, it was clearly intended for a welleducated, international audience, and was another of the many treatises of the 1640s that argued that João IV was both the true king of Portugal and the Hidden King of prophecy. However, even in the heyday of joanísmo in the 1640s, some held to the sebastianista faith as shown by works such as O Tratado da Quinta Monarchia (1641) by the Trinitarian Sebastião de Paiva or the anonymous Jardim Ameno. De Paiva’s work is one of considerable learning in which he used many scriptural and prophetic references to reassure his readers that Sebastian was still – even after the acclamation – the Desired King, and is proof that many held onto their sebastianista faith even in the heyday of pro-Braganza prophetic interpretation.31 While de Paiva’s work represented the erudite end of the spectrum of sebastianista literature, the Jardim Ameno, produced some time around 1650, comes from the popular end. It was an early example of the ‘prophetic collection’ and as such it had no central argument, or any text of its own. Instead, it was an anthology of the ‘high points’ of other prophetic works – including all the standard eschatological references that made up the western prophetic corpus – summarized Reader’s Digest–fashion and placed in a single volume. Copied and recopied through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collections such as the Jardim Ameno were well suited to their intended audience of literate, though not erudite, readers and their illiterate listeners.32

António Vieira By far the best known of the joanistas, however, was the Jesuit António Vieira. While serving in Brazil as a missionary, Vieira was a sebastianista,33 but after the acclamation of João IV, he quickly became an enthusiast of the Braganza king. Sent to Lisbon in early 1641 as part of a delegation to declare the loyalty of Brazil to the new dynasty, he immediately made a favourable impression on João IV, and soon became one of João’s closest confidants and most vocal partisans, as the messianic tone of his New

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Year’s Day, 1642, sermon demonstrates. In the sermon, he chastised those who waited for Sebastian’s return by arguing that João was the ruler who had been predicted by the prophets.34 João’s confidence in him was such that in 1644 he appointed him Royal Preacher, and he often sent the Jesuit abroad on important diplomatic missions to garner support for the cause of Portuguese independence.35 Enjoying royal support, Vieira was emboldened to air his long-held views of the Inquisition, and he was unsparing in his criticism of the Holy Office and its persecution of the New Christians.36 In 1644 he advocated the return of all Portuguese conversos who had fled to other countries, and it was his influence over João IV that was the principal cause behind the decree of 6 February 1649, which suspended the ability of the Inquisition to impose confiscations on those convicted of judaizing. Such confiscations, the king reasoned, only served to disrupt the Portuguese economy and hamper his ability to raise the monies he needed in order to defend the kingdom God had given him.37 None of this was well received by the Holy Office, but weakened by the Inquisitor-General’s participation in the August 1641 plot to overthrow João IV and return Portugal to Spanish rule, it could not act against Vieira. While he was protected by the king, the Inquisitors had to wait for a more opportune moment to strike back at their tormentor. In 1652 the Jesuit father returned to his mission work in Brazil, and while in Maranhão, he received the news he never thought he would hear: João IV had died on 8 November 1656. João’s death, however, did not shake Vieira’s faith that he was the Prophesied One, as can be clearly seen in a letter, dated 29 April 1659, from Vieira to André Fernandes, confessor to the Queen-Regent. Ostensibly intended as a means by which to comfort the still-grieving queen, in reality it was Vieira’s attempt to arrest a resurgent Sebastianism in the wake of João’s death. Similarly, though Vieira claimed that it was to be kept secret, the letter was widely disseminated in Portugal by figures sympathetic to him.38 Even the term ‘letter’ is a misnomer; in reality, it was a treatise dealing with the prophecies of Bandarra, and arrived with a title in place, As Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império do Mundo. From the very beginning of the work, Vieira made his intention clear: ‘although all refer to the coming of Sebastian,’ he would demonstrate ‘the future resurrection of our good lord and master, João IV.’39 He intended to prove his case by proving the truth of the following syllogism: ‘1. Bandarra was a true prophet; 2. Bandarra prophesied that João would accomplish many deeds he has not accomplished, nor could he accomplish unless he were resurrected; 3. There-

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fore, João will be resurrected.’40 The rest of the ‘letter’ is Vieira’s attempt to prove the major and minor premises, so that the desired conclusion would inevitably follow. While arguing these points, Vieira also demonstrated that his support of the conversos was not pragmatically based on their potential support in the struggle for Portuguese independence; their protection was an essential part of Vieira’s eschatological vision. Citing the same corpus of prophecy that had been used by de Castro, and by including the proJewish parts of the Trovas de Castro had excluded, Vieira tried to prove that João would peacefully convert all the Jews to Christianity, a prospect which de Castro would have found anathema. Esperanças de Portugal was to be the principal legacy of Vieira’s brand of millenarianism, and, with its pro-converso claims, was to lead to his conviction by the Inquisition. In 1649 Vieira had been denounced to the Holy Office for his pro-converso statements, but it was not until after João’s death, during the regency of the weak Afonso VI, that the Inquisitors avenged themselves on their most trenchant critic. Having to flee Brazil because of the colonists’ anger at his defence of the Indians there, Vieira returned to Portugal in November 1661 and was immediately taken into custody by the Inquisition, which, by that time, had already obtained a copy of the Esperanças.41 As the formal charges make clear, Vieira was not (officially, at least) prosecuted because of his history of pro-converso activism, but because his eschatology, as revealed in the Esperanças, contained several suspect propositions, the three most important of which were that Bandarra (whose Trovas were again placed on the Index in 1665) was a true prophet, that João would be raised from the dead to fulfil his destiny, and that the Jews would convert to Christianity en masse.42 Delayed because of the missionary’s ill health, the bulk of his trial took place in the summer of 1666. Vieira mounted a vigorous defence, but the end result was a foregone conclusion. In December 1667 Vieira was condemned as ‘heretic, a judaizer, and a bandarrista’ and was permanently stripped of his ability to preach. Given Vieira’s attitude of impenitence, it was a light sentence, but the Inquisition was constrained because Vieira still had powerful supporters, both in Rome and in Portugal.43 In 1675 those supporters were able to persuade Pope Clement X to nullify the Inquisition’s sentence and to permanently exempt Vieira from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.44 After his release, Vieira went to Rome and then to Brazil, where he attempted to complete what he intended to be the definitive statements

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of his apocalyptic views, the seven-part Historia do Futuro. Vieira was unable to complete the Historia before he died in 1697, though he did leave an outline and the text of the proposed work’s first two parts, both of which demonstrate that his thought by then had become more millenarian than messianic; the future ‘Fifth Kingdom,’ rather than the Desired King, was the focus of the book. Vieira is often cited as one of the premier expositors of the Portuguese prophetic tradition in the seventeenth century, but his legacy in that regard is rather doubtful. Only the Esperanças de Portugal was widely disseminated in his lifetime, and his sermons and letters were only available to a select group of people, most of whom were already members of the dwindling circle of joanistas. The most compelling evidence for a limited view of Vieira’s influence, however, is that, despite his efforts, joanísmo essentially died out in the 1660s. Even before João IV’s death, support for him as the Hidden One had begun to wane, largely due to the fact that he seemed unable to accomplish any of the goals of the Encoberto save the liberation of Portugal, and even that was not secure. Whatever sense of creeping pessimism had begun to infect the ranks of the joanistas by the early 1650s, it was nothing compared to the wave of disillusion that swept them upon João’s death. However, since the prophetic legitimization of the Braganzas was one of the primary means by which the still-embattled regime garnered support, there was an attempt to recast joanista interpretations in such a way that they would include a providential role for João’s heir, the sickly Afonso VI, though his dismal and disappointing reign ensured the attempt met with little success. After the high tide of support for the Braganzas in the 1640s, the joanista faith was in deep crisis by the 1660s, which left the field of prophetic interpretation open for a resurgent Sebastianism. The debate between the joanistas and the sebastianistas regarding the identity of the Hidden One only began in earnest after his death in 1656, and the sebastianistas produced several works intended to refute the conclusions of the joanistas. The widely copied ‘Livro das cousas mas notaveis’45 and the similarly anonymous ‘Reposta de Certa Pessoa a Outra,’ written in 1658,46 are examples of this literature, and both concluded that the claims of Sousa de Macedo in Lusitana Liberata and Vasconcelos in Restauração de Portugal were false, since João IV had not fulfilled the deeds prophesied of the Hidden King. The author of the ‘Reposta’ also makes reference to Dom João de Castro’s Discurso and, indeed, it is during this period that the true extent of de Castro’s legacy begins to take shape, since he was increasingly cited by sebastianista authors during the

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decades of debate after the Restoration. These, along with the Ante-Vieira [sic], the Opinião Contrária, and the ‘Epítome das esperades venturas de Portugal,’ are only a few examples of the voluminous sebastianista counter-literature written in the 1650s and 1660s in response to the ‘official line’ promulgated by the joanistas in the first decade of the Restoration. It was also during the Restoration period that the idea of the ‘Hidden Isle’ began to be associated with Sebastian. The idea of a hidden island of wonders has a long history going back to ancient times, though the Arthurian Island of Avalon and the Iberian myth of the ‘Seven Cities of Cíbola’ were probably the most direct sources for the Portuguese Ilha Encoberta. The earliest written references clearly linking the Hidden Isle to Sebastian both date from 1648, but the ways in which they describe the belief show that it was already widely held by that date.47 The long heroic poem Monarchia Luzitana, written around 1660 and frequently recopied in the anthologies, was heavily influenced by the legend of the Hidden Isle,48 and only a few years later, the ‘Noticia da Ilha Encuberta,’ which claimed to be the account of two Capuchin monks’ journey to the Hidden Isle, began to circulate in the collections.49 The significance of this development will be discussed in the concluding section below.

Conclusions From the fourteenth century at the latest, the millenarian tradition in Portugal had been closely connected to contemporary political concerns. The newly founded Avis dynasty used messianic claims to mobilize support against Castilian aggression during the succession crisis of 1383–5 and, later, to legitimize their imperialist policies in Africa and Asia. It is surely significant that the next stage in the development of the Portuguese tradition took place when this policy of crusade and empire was perceived to be threatened. Bandarra’s renewed emphasis on the necessity of a crusade against the Moors can only be viewed as a critique of João III’s decision to pull back from Morocco in 1532, while the other elements of his messianic synthesis tapped into contemporary concerns about the monetarization of Portuguese society and the persecution of conversos by the Inquisition. And during Sebastian’s reign there was widespread support for a renewal of the crusading tradition, in terms largely influenced by the Legend of Ourique, which is one reason the defeat at Alcazarquivir was so crushing to the Portuguese national psyche. After the Spanish takeover of Portugal, the messianic synthesis founded on Ourique and Bandarra was transformed from one of triumphal

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expansionism to one of national liberation. The careers of the false Sebastians demonstrate that freedom from Spanish domination became the principal goal of millenarian agitation in Portugal during the Hapsburg period. Dom João de Castro was an important spokesman for the new synthesis, pushing the independence of Portugal as the sine qua non for the rest of God’s eschatological program; De Castro’s views were explicitly based on Bandarra’s Trovas, and he recapitulated the cobbler’s desire for a crusade against the Moors and a reformation of Church and society. On the subject of the conversos, however, they differed radically, Bandarra’s sympathetic approach being replaced by de Castro’s virulent anti-Semitism. Not all millenarian writers followed de Castro’s lead, however; while all agreed on the necessity of national liberation, the first decades of the seventeenth century were a period of debate among Portuguese millenarians regarding both the identity and program of the hoped-for Hidden King. With the acclamation of João IV on 1 December 1640, the issue of Portuguese liberation was resolved, leading many people to see in the Braganza king clear signs of a prophetic destiny. During the 1640s this messianic connection was used by elite allies of João to support the new regime; joanista works represented the official view of the government. António Vieira went beyond merely trying to secure Portuguese independence, however; he also argued for better treatment of the conversos. By the early 1650s, however, hopes that João IV would fulfil the deeds of the Hidden One began to fade as the war with Spain dragged on. With his death in 1656, and the accession of the weak Afonso VI, the joanista cause collapsed. This left the field open for a reinvigorated Sebastianism, and by the end of the seventeenth century, for all intents and purposes, Sebastian was the only contender left for the apocalyptic role of the Desired One. The question remains, though, as to why this occurred. One reason is that the joanistas and the sebastianistas were talking to different groups of people during the Restoration. While all of the joanista works (except Vieira’s Esperanças, thanks to the Inquisition) were printed, many with royal patronage, no sebastianista works were printed in the seventeenth century in Portugal; they all circulated in manuscript. The exceptions to this rule – De Castro’s Discurso and the Paraphrase – were only printed because of a uniquely favourable political circumstance in France. The sebastianistas had neither the money nor the influence to have their treatises printed nor did their readers have the money to purchase them; the crude, hand-copied collections of prophecies were clearly geared to a poor, minimally literate, domestic audience. The

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joanista writers were members of the elite and they used their erudition to mobilize support for Portugal among those best able to provide it: the educated and powerful, inside and outside of Portugal. Sebastianistas were not elite, and they spoke to themselves. Thus, there was a glaring class division between the two camps, and there were many more poor than rich in seventeenth-century Portugal. Disillusioned, the elites of Portugal gave up on joanísmo and on messianism generally by the end of the century; the poor continued to believe as they always had. The figure of Sebastian, as it had developed by the mid-seventeenth century, also had a decisive advantage over his competitors, thanks largely to the influence of Dom João de Castro, or perhaps due to the ground strength of the strain of messianism he represented. Portuguese independence was finally resolved in 1668; neither a crusade against the Moors nor societal reform was realistically possible, and neither was a subject of dispute between the two camps. So, the only major eschatological goal that distinguished them was that of the destiny of the conversos. On one hand was Sebastian, who would punish the Jews instead of trying to convert them; on the other, were the Braganza candidates who, to a greater or lesser degree, were associated with protecting the New Christians. Unfortunately for the joanistas, the vast majority of Portuguese supported a policy of continued persecution of conversos, and the Inquisition was often praised in sebastianista texts. Equally, the Inquisitors of Portugal did not see in sebastianismo any threat to their own policies. The Holy Office did not persecute the followers of Sebastian as such;50 compare this to its treatment of a ‘bandarrista’ such as Vieira. Thus, on the crucial converso issue, the Holy Office and the sebastianistas saw eye to eye. The triumph of Sebastian was the triumph of de Castro over Bandarra and Vieira. Though he won on the issue of the conversos, not all de Castro’s goals for the Hidden One were accomplished. The crusade and the reform remained politically impossible, and those goals were increasingly relegated to the realm of fantasy. This is what I believe the appearance of the Hidden Isle in that period explains. Both de Castro and the Braganza apologists of the late Hapsburg period demonstrated a degree of political realism in that they sought a saviour in a person who was alive, or at least conceivably could be. This is not true of the sebastianistas of the Restoration Period, however. By that time, the real Sebastian would have been between eighty and one hundred years old, and his followers’ continued faith in him can only be interpreted as a retreat into political fantasy. The Hidden Isle solved the issue of aging; as the century wore on, the descriptions of it became increasingly elaborate, more and

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more in a Land of Cockaigne mode. Once being led back to Paradise by a providential leader became the goal, there was little incentive to work for change on earth. In one sense, though, the sebastianistas were right; only supernatural intervention could have brought about a radical reform of society or the pre-eminence of Portugal among the nations, but the continued clinging to these fantasies bred in the true believers a habit of political passivity. Among the popular classes, Sebastianism was both everywhere triumphant and everywhere irrelevant in political terms. Waiting patiently for Sebastian to return, they could no longer bestir themselves to real action, as they had in Évora in 1637 or in Lisbon in 1640. Messianic discourse, in early modern Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, was another means, another epistemological standard by which to make judgments about politics and religion, economics and justice, the ideal society and human destiny. The raw material of the millenarian discursive mode – the prophetic corpus of Western Europe – was held in common by all believers, no matter how much their interpretations differed. Indeed, since it was a common resource, there were often heated disagreements among interpreters as to the meaning and purpose of the millenarian texts as each group tried to prove its conclusions. But, as this case study of early modern Portugal demonstrates, not all interpretations were created equal; only those that resonated with already held cultural values and beliefs, particularly among the broad mass of people, would survive and be passed on. Those that did not, or did not fully, were either co-opted or ignored. As Braudel noted, certain crops do not flourish in certain terrain or at certain latitudes, and these basic facts shape the material culture of a given area at the most fundamental level. As I hope that I have shown here, the cultural topography of early modern Portugal, if I may so adapt Braudel’s insight to the current topic, favoured one strain of messianism over all its rivals. And so, Sebastian, mythic standard-bearer of a militantly Catholic, anti-Jewish populism, beat out all other contenders to become the single remaining messianic figure by the early eighteenth century. It was a case of the survival of the eschatologically fittest.

NOTES 1 Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical Thinking (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 6–7. 2 Ibid., 32–3.

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3 Manuel J. Gandra, Joaquim de Fiore, Joaquimismo, e A Esperança Sebástica (Lisbon: Fundação Lusíada, 1999), 39ff. 4 Marjorie Reeves in ‘The Abbot Joachim and the Society of Jesus,’ in Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays on the Influence of the Calabrian Prophet, ed. Delno C. West (New York: Burt Frankling & Co., 1975), 209–227. 5 Gandra, Joaquim de Fiore, 55ff. 6 Vicent J. Vallés Borrás, La Germanía (Valencia: Institució Alfons El Magnànim, 2000), 32. 7 João van den Besselaar, O sebastianismo: História sumária (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Lingua Portuguesa, 1987), 72. 8 Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra, Sobre a formação e evolução da lenda de Ourique (até à Crónica de 1419) (Lisbon: Imprensa de Coimbra, Lda., 1957), 6ff. 9 José Mattoso, A Primeira Tarde Portuguesa (Guimarães: Editora do Minho, 1979), 5–7. 10 See João Lucio de Azevedo, A evolucão do sebastianismo (Lisbon: Livraria Clásica Editora de A.M. Teixeira, 1918), 9; and Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 49–52. 11 Proceso da Inquisição de Lisboa, #7197: ‘Proceso de Gonçalo Anes.’ Reprinted in Theophilo Braga, Historia de Camões, vol. 1 (Porto: Imprensa Portugueza, 1873), 413–16. 12 Ibid., 415. 13 Ibid., 415–16. 14 António Quadros, Poesia e filosofia do mito Sebastianista, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Guimarães & C.a Editores, 1982), 35–57. 15 The classic study of the false Sebastians is Miguel d’Antas, Les Faux Don Sébastien. Étude sur l’histoire du Portugal (Paris, 1866). See also Yves-Marie Bercé, Le roi caché: Sauveurs et imposteurs. Mythes politiques populaires dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 17–81. The claims of Balthasar Gonçalves in 1581 (see Inquisição de Lisboa, Processo #5083, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo [hereafter cited as ANTT], Lisbon, Portugal) demonstrate that Sebastian was popularly viewed in messianic terms before the pretenders appeared, and probably even before the Battle of Alcazarquivir. 16 Dom João de Castro, Discurso da Vida do Sempre Bem Vindo et Apparecido Rey Dom Sebastião nosso Senhor o Encuberto desdo seu naçimento tee o presente (1602; repr., Lisbon: Edicões Anapa, 1994), fos. 46–8. In his Advertimentos ao Sempre bem vindo e apparecido Rey D. Sebastião (1604, MS Codex in Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal [hereafter cited as BN]) de Castro says that he was actively looking for prophecies that proved Sebastian was alive and that Portugal would be liberated (fo. 67v). See also João Lúcio de Azevedo, A evolucão do sebastianismo (Lisbon: Livraria Clásica Editora de A.M. Teixeira,

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19 20

21 22 23 24

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26 27

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1918), 8–28; and José van den Besselaar, O sebastianismo: História sumária (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Lingua Portuguesa, 1987), 49–50. Ibid., fos. 12, 43, 56. Dom João de Castro, Paraphrase et Concordançia de Alguas Prophecias de Bandarra, Çapateiro de Trancoso (1603, repr. Porto: Edicões Lopes da Silva, 1942), fo. 2v. Ibid., fo. 77. Manuel Bocarro Frances, Anacephaleosis da Monarchia Lusitania, Primeira Parte (Lisbon: Antonio Alvarez, 1624), 11. See also Quadros, Poesia e filosofia do mito Sebastianista, 1:61–2; Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 90–2. Azevedo, A evolucão do sebastianismo, 48–52. Manuel Bocarro Frances Rosales, Luz pequena lunar, 1626, fo. 102, in Jardim Ameno, Manuscrita da Livraria #774, ANTT. Ibid., fos. 107v–10. See also Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 90–2. For more on these two men’s sympathies, see José Filipe Mendeiros, ‘O Olivento Sebastião do Couto, Mestre Insigne da Universidade de Évora e Alma das Alterações de 1637,’ Anais da Academia Portuguesa da História 18 (1969), 31 and Gabriel Pereira, Estudos Eborenses: As Vesperas da Restauração, vol. 1 (Évora: Minerva Eborense, 1886–7), 5–12. Both are named as supporters of João II of Braganza in António de Sousa de Macedo’s Lusitana Liberata, 743. By the time of the revolt in August 1637, the actual prophet Manuelinho had been dead for several years. According to most analysts, his name and authority were used by a group of local notables, the university Jesuits among them, to legitimize the revolt, a position with which this author agrees. Joel Serrão, ed., Alterações de Évora, 1637 (Lisbon: Portugália Editora, 1967), 147–8. D. Francisco Manuel de Melo, Epanáfora Política Primeira, repr. in Alterações de Évora, 1637, ed. Serrão, 134; and idem, Tácito portugues, ed. Raul Rêgo (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1995), 62. De Melo wonders aloud how even wise and educated men could be pulled in by such ‘blindness.’ Panteleão Rodrigues Pacheco, Manifesto do Reyno de Portugal, Presentado a Santidade de Urbano VIII, N.S. (Lisbon: Domingos Lopes Rola, 1643), 26–9. Fr. João de Vasconcelos, Restauração de Portugal Prodigiosa (Lisbon: António Alvarez, 1643), 7–12. See Sousa de Macedo, Lusitana Liberata, ab injusto Castellanorum dominio, Restituta Legitimo Principe, Serenissimo Joanni IV (London: Richard Heron, 1645). See Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 106–7; Azevedo, A evolucão do sebastianismo, 74; and Gandra, Joaquim de Fiore, 187–201. See Manuscrita da Livraria, #774, ANTT.

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33 Jacqueline Hermann, No Reino do Desejado: A construção do sebastianismo em Portugal séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998), 226–8. 34 P. António Vieira, ‘Sermão dos Bons Anos,’ in Obras Escolhidas, vol. 10, ed. Hernâni Cidade (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa), 153–89, esp. 166–7. 35 Hermann, No Reino do Desejado, 234f. 36 See, for example, his ‘Carta’ reprinted in António Borges Coelho, Inquisiçião de Evora: Dos primórdiosa 1668, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, SA, 1987), 255–7. 37 ‘Alvara del Rey Dom João o 4o’ [of 6 February 1649], repr. in Coelho, ibid. 38 Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 116–22. 39 P. António Vieira, Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império do Mundo, printed in P. António Vieira, Obras Escolhidas, Volume VI, Obras Várias, ed. Hernani Cidade (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1952), 1. 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 121–2. 42 Hermann, No Reino do Desejado, 239–40. 43 Baião, Episodios Dramáticos da Inquisição Portuguesa, 209–28. 44 Hermann, No Reino do Desejado, 244. 45 MS COD 128, fos. 1–53v, BN. 46 MS COD 132, BN. 47 Azevedo, A evolucão do sebastianismo, 83–5; Besselaar, O sebastianismo, 140–4. 48 MS COD 400, fos. 73v–103, BN. See especially stanzas 75 and 80. 49 MS COD 132, BN. 50 See, for example, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processo #4404, fo. 123, ANTT, where the Inquisitors state that belief in sebastianismo alone was not worthy of the attention of the Holy Office.

chapter seven

Geneva by the Sea: The Reformation in Nîmes in Historiographical Context ALLAN TULCHIN

‘The Mediterranean After Braudel’ can be understood in two ways. The first is chronological, that is, looking at the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than in the sixteenth century, the focus of Fernand Braudel’s work. The second is to consider what approaches scholars should take to doing research on the social history of the Mediterranean, after the decline of the Annales School approach which Braudel’s work exemplifies. This chapter will interpret the title in this second sense, and consider how to rectify the flaws – and preserve the merits – of Braudel’s approach. Although Fernand Braudel’s intellectual genealogy has usually been traced back to the Annales school of social and economic history, this is not wholly accurate. Braudel’s work extended the geographical reach of the Annales School considerably. Its founders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, focused on French history. Braudel’s foray into Spanish history required him to take a large historiographical literature into consideration.1 This is crucial to understanding Braudel’s methodological approach, because the focus of that literature was a debate on the causes of Spain’s relative decline. (Historians have tended to forget this because it is less clear in the second, baggier edition of The Mediterranean.) The state of the art at the time was the work of Earl Hamilton. His classic article ‘The Decline of Spain,’ which blamed price inflation caused by the influx of American silver for Spain’s problems, had appeared only eleven years before the first edition of Braudel’s work. Other historians, before and afterwards, have argued that Spanish decline had political, religious, and cultural roots.2 Braudel argued forcefully that Spain, for geographic, social, and economic reasons, had reached the limits of

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its capacity in the later sixteenth century, and therefore as the Atlantic economies continued to grow, Spain was doomed relatively to stagnate. Although the book closes with a long political narrative, Braudel strove to show that Philip II was powerless to alter events, since he had only limited means at his disposal. Braudel’s belief in the importance of geography and economics can be clearly traced back to the influence of the Annales School, and before them to Marx. However, Braudel’s wish to explain stagnation, rather than change, must be a principal reason why he emphasizes structure rather than agency or change. Other members of the Annales School – certainly not Bloch, who wrote several studies of long-term change including The Royal Touch and French Rural Society – did not tend to stress what Braudel’s heir, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, called immobile history. Le Roy Ladurie’s conclusions were also formed by a study of Mediterranean history, his highly influential study of Langudeoc. He argued that prior to the Industrial Revolution, the standard of living in Europe oscillated about a relatively fixed point caused by basic limits of land, climate, and essentially unchanging technology.3 This thesis is clearly indebted to Braudel’s approach, and in writing the second edition of La Méditerranée, Braudel incorporated Le Roy Ladurie’s examples and statistics frequently. Together, they represent the most prominent members of the second generation of the Annales School. Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie’s emphasis on immobility was a fatal weakness in the eyes of many critics, who decried the lack of ‘agency’ in their work. The critics linked this to Braudel’s, and especially Le Roy Ladurie’s, use of computers in their work. They found the numbers dehumanizing. Much of this criticism was overdrawn. Although everyone wants to believe they have free will, we must also recognize the sharp limits to agency: do we really believe that everyone can achieve anything they want to do? Yet history remains a discipline driven by narrative and focused on change. It is true that explanations of a particular change, to be convincing, must explain why change occurred in one place and time and not another. If a historian describes causes for the Industrial Revolution that apply to Dubrovnik as well as to Manchester and Birmingham, something is amiss. At the same time, focusing on times and places where nothing was happening seems a problematic procedure. When there were major changes happening in the regions they studied, Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie had difficulties explaining them. In Le Roy Ladurie’s study of Languedoc, the major change was the Reformation. This is worth emphasizing, since many do not realize that in

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the sixteenth century, Mediterranean Languedoc became the most Protestant region in France. My forthcoming book, That Men Would Praise the Lord: The Triumph of Protestantism in Nîmes, 1530–1570, attempts to explain why this occurred. Although Le Roy Ladurie devoted considerable attention to explaining why the Reformation was so successful in the region, Braudel never discussed it. In any case, Le Roy Ladurie’s starkly Weberian analysis has found little favour with subsequent historians. But Protestantism’s success in Nîmes and elsewhere in the province also undermines Braudel’s relatively static picture of Mediterranean society. If the Mediterranean was open to new religious ideas, why not political and economic ones as well? So my first goal here is to complicate Braudel’s picture of the Mediterranean, using the Reformation in Nîmes as an example. At the same time, however, I do not wish to suggest that Braudel is outmoded and should be discarded. I am much more concerned, in fact, that Braudel has received far too little attention in the last decade or two than too much. Braudel’s neglect is due to the effects of the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies, as most readers are likely to be aware, and it is unnecessary to belabour the point. Instead, I wish to argue that in at least one major way, Braudel was superior to some of his critics, namely, in his use of a tremendous variety of sources, from state papers written by highly literate officials to shipping contracts buried deep in the Ragusan archives. Although Braudel emphasizes, somewhat rhetorically, that social and demographic structures shape politics, in actual fact he made extensive use of political documents and gives politics several hundred pages of analysis in The Mediterranean. Nor am I convinced that in practice Braudel believed his own programmatic statements that political events were mere froth on the waves of economic and demographic history. If nothing else, by the seventeenth century, governments were major economic players. Their decisions about taxing and spending clearly had important economic effects. Critics who attacked the use of quantitative methods by the Annales School are quite wrong. In the 1960s, it must be admitted, they had a point. Under the onerous constraints of that era, crude hypotheses and banal results were sometimes inevitable. It is now possible to do things with a desktop computer in seconds that would have taken weeks in the days of mainframes and punch cards. But to persist in such attitudes today is untenable: the computer revolution is probably the most important social and economic change of the past generation, and it seems positively churlish for historians not to take advantage of computing

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power. Furthermore, pace C.P. Snow, I would argue that there is no necessary opposition between the sciences and the humanities, tables and texts. Indeed, I would echo and extend the remark of Otto L. Bettmann, founder of the well-known Bettmann Archive of visual materials, who once wrote, ‘It is a fact that words and pictures go well together.’4 Numbers and words can be mutually reinforcing, too. One of the classic techniques of professional history, as I understand it, is the confrontation of documents: that is, since most categories of documents have built-in, systemic biases, using different kinds of documents to help overcome the inherent blind spots of each. It is precisely because words, numbers, and pictures are such different ways of knowing that using them together can be so fruitful. None the less, in order to limit the length of this paper, I will skip to the conclusions of my quantitative research without going through the tables in detail. Methodologically, I hope to show how juxtaposing numbers and texts enriches both. My second goal, therefore, is a methodological one, namely, to give an example from my own research of the fruitfulness of such juxtapositions. The example I have chosen is the cahier de doléances, a list of grievances, that was adopted by the city of Nîmes on 15 March 1561. It was then submitted to the Estates of Languedoc, as part of a process leading to a general presentation of such cahiers at the Pontoise session of the Estates General of France, in the summer of 1561. Although the cahier has received little attention from historians, if one juxtaposes it with quantitative evidence, it becomes clear that the Nîmes cahier is much more important for understanding the progress of the Reformation in France than has previously been understood. The quantitative evidence leads to three conclusions: (1) That lawyers and legal officials were the most powerful and prestigious members of Nîmes’s society, (2) that the period 1560–2 marked the most important time of mass conversions in Nîmes, when the bulk of the population began to think of itself as Protestant, and (3) that the conversion of lawyers and officials was crucial to that transformation. Knowing the chronology of conversion, and the changing sociology of the Protestant movement at that crucial juncture of 1560–2, makes it much easier to show what motivated the elite, since we can pinpoint where to look for the evidence. Once we know that the Protestant movement finally succeeded in recruiting large numbers of the elite in late 1560 and early 1561, it becomes clear that the cahier is the place to look if we want to understand the motivations of this crucial crop of new recruits. It was the major document composed by Nîmes’s Protestants in the crisis period.

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Without the quantitative evidence, the cahier’s ideology would be much harder to explain: if we did not know how crucial lawyers and legal officials were to the Protestant movement, it would be hard to understand why some of the dense, legalistic language in the cahier could arouse so much enthusiasm. At the same time, it is well-nigh impossible to explain religious conversion, a deeply interior, psychological process, without the help of texts. But the issues raised here are not merely important as illustrative examples; they are important historically as well as historiographically, because the people of sixteenth-century Nîmes ended up creating the heartland of French Calvinism. In so far as Nîmes’s concerns were shared by large portions of southern and some portions of northern France, the cahier merits wider discussion within the histories of the French Protestant movement and, given the importance of Huguenot thinking within the greater European context, of Calvinism and political theory in the sixteenth century.5 In the cahier, we can learn what people wanted because we have a document signed by hundreds of people asserting their demands. The cahier’s demands included religious reform, and indeed insisted that all other reform rested on a religious foundation. Nonetheless, the bulk of the provisions pertained to political reform. The cahier’s political provisions suggest that it was designed with the interests of Nîmes’s governing elite in mind. It probably succeeded beyond its authors’ wildest dreams. Protestant ideals were clearly behind the religious clauses of the cahier. Nonetheless, it was not exclusively a Protestant religious document: it scrupulously avoided direct or intemperate attacks on the Catholic Church, and asked for a whole host of non-religious reforms as well. It was intended to appeal to people whose concerns were economic, constitutional, and political, as well as religious. Some of the cahier’s demands for reform were intended to affect policy; far more of them altered the constitution, and would have dramatically altered the political process. This emphasis on procedure again indicates that the cahier was intended to appeal to political insiders. Insiders are likely to be as interested in the political process as they are in the outcome of policy. Ordinary people, even today, are far more interested in results than in procedural reforms, and the poor of sixteenth-century Nîmes were unlikely to be passionate about requiring the Estates General to meet more regularly. Only people with some political sophistication would recognize that improving the kingdom’s economy required constitutional change. They felt that if they restrained the crown’s ability to make war, the crown would be less likely to spend money, taxes would fall, and the economy would recover.

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More specifically, the cahier’s political reforms attempted to improve the network of institutions that linked the monarchy to the localities. It recognized the subject’s obligations to the prince as well as insisting on the prince’s obligation to his subjects and to the law. This anti-absolutist, contractualist ideal seemed eminently reasonable to the lawyers and officials who guided Nîmes’s government. Nîmes, the subject of my research, is a very old city, located on the northwestern edge of the Rhone delta on France’s Mediterranean coast, about fifty miles west of Marseille. It began as the capital of a Gaulish tribe that submitted to Rome in the second century BCE. In the sixteenth century, Nîmes was a town of about 10,000 people, and an important city in the province of Languedoc. It was also the seat of a bishopric, and its chateau had a small garrison of royal troops. Its economy depended on four main sectors: agriculture, clothing and leather, trade, and government. Much of the population worked the fields outside of town; a large percentage of the population was also occupied in transforming wool and cattle, the products of the Cévennes mountains, northwest of town, into cloth and leather. The most important people in Nîmes, however, earned their living from government. In 1552, King Henri II had awarded Nîmes a présidial court, which was grafted onto the town’s existing sénéchaussée. The judges of the présidial court were the most prestigious people in town. The court enjoyed a wide jurisdiction, and the steady flow of litigation produced a great deal of revenue: in effect, the judicial business was a mainstay of the local economy. The présidial had only one rival for power: the town council, led by its four consuls. These two institutions were key to maintaining local public order. From 1557 to 1560, the town went through a lengthy political and economic crisis, brought on by a flood, four failed harvests, and a series of illegal royal imposts that threatened the town’s financial stability and its revenues, since the crown (responding to a bribe from the city of Le Puy) tried to divide Nîmes’s présidial court’s jurisdiction in half. In the late 1550s, taxes doubled while grain prices were at exceptionally high levels for an especially long period. The Nîmes cahier was not presented by Jean Malmazet, the First Consul, or any of the other consuls. In an effort to reassert the crown’s faltering authority, royal officials had engineered the election of Catholic consuls the previous November by ordering the creation of a special list of ‘nonsuspect’ electors to choose them. Possibly recognizing the strength of public opinion behind the proposals, the town’s First Consul was absent

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from the 15 March meeting, thanks to a convenient illness. The proposals were introduced instead by Loys Bertrand, a wealthy, prominent Protestant, and explicitly as a member of a nascent party: ‘M. Loys Bertrand declared, in his own name and on behalf of his supporters, and asked the honourable sirs the President and Consuls to assemble the present Extraordinary Council, in order to remonstrate concerning the honour of God, the King’s service, and the repose and tranquillity of the People, and to report this to the local Estates of this province of Languedoc ... and to the Estates General.’6 Bertrand’s speech is worthy of note on two counts: first, in addition to insisting on the importance of the cahier, with his language about the honour of God and the service of the king, by mentioning the ‘repose and tranquillity of the people’ Bertrand was implicitly criticizing the consuls for not doing their duty to safeguard the community. He may also have been suggesting that since, without the reforms he was proposing, the people would be unhappy, the consuls might face violence if they rejected his proposals. Second, in defiance of established procedure, he was proposing that the Nîmes cahier be presented, not only to the provincial estates, but to the national ones as well. Bertrand’s position was no doubt strengthened because he was accompanied by 136 named citizens, making the session one of the best attended in contemporary records. The 136 included many members of the upper crust, but many also of more middling sorts, including bakers, tanners, and students at the College of Arts. Two hundred more people, many of whom were of quite low degree – wool carders, soldiers – later added their signatures to the bottom of the document. The campaign in support of the cahier was successful in attracting a large number of people, and in particular the kind of influential people who had so far been somewhat reluctant to join.7 The town consuls attempted to delay consideration of the cahier by pointing out that ‘There were no members of the ordinary council [the smaller, more élite body] present, as is well-known,’ and, in a well-calculated appeal to the town’s tendency to jealously guard its local rights and privileges, that to proceed ‘could be prejudicial to the transactions, statutes, and ordinances.’8 The consuls were arguing that the supporters of the cahier were out of order, as well as arguing that the cahier itself was poor policy: it should be rejected on procedural and on substantive grounds. The chair of the council meeting, normally the president of the présidial court, had the right to decide whether or not a motion was in order. The president, Guillaumes Calvière, had been notably absent from

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the intensive series of présidial meetings the previous spring, where the court debated how to suppress heresy. In any case, back in Nîmes, he ruled in favour of the Protestant party, and disallowed the consuls’ objections, insisting that ‘in [the councillors’] absence [the debate] should continue.’ Again, the consuls restated their objections, adding that they needed time to consider the articles of the cahier, which they had not seen before, and which the first consul should review, since he was ‘a man of letters.’ Calvière, however, did not accept this argument, since the absentees had been duly notified, ‘both by the sound of the bell, and individually by the [town’s] servants; and in order not to retard the affairs of the king, he commanded the consuls to give their opinions.’ But when given the chance to express their opinion on the document that they had done their best to table, the consuls – presumably because they were afraid to condemn a document in front of hundreds of people who supported it – refused, saying only that it should be referred to a committee. They also insisted that any list of grievances should only go to the provincial, not the national, estates. In the end, however, they lost every point.9 The cahier, as proposed and adopted, was composed of five parts: (1) the means to settle the king’s debts, (2) the regulation of the king’s expenses to prevent future deficits, (3) the regulation of the Christian religion, (4) the elimination of judicial abuses, and (5) the maintenance of law and order.10 For contemporaries, and certainly for the crown, the most pressing issue was that of the debt, and everybody, both Catholics and Protestants, assumed that the Church would have to contribute a significant portion of the money necessary to reduce it. Many Catholics were upset with the Church hierarchy, and were anxious to redistribute the Church’s funds away from overly wealthy bishops towards more urgent needs, including preaching and charitable foundations. Many were also prepared to divert money to pay off the crown’s debts. Although it was a much more moderate assembly, the Estates General of Orléans had made the rather radical suggestion in its cahier that the traditional exemption of the clergy from taxation should be ended, both from the taille and deniers imposed by the national or provincial estates.11 In the discussions leading up to the Estates General of Pontoise, some anti-clericalism was in the air, and many communities were in favour of making the Church pay. At Amiens, for example, the cahier urged that ‘the king must take for his own profit annates and the revenues of vacant benefices,’12 while the prévôté of Paris also said that the clergy (excepting poor vicars) should hand over at least a third of their income, if

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not more, to the crown.13 In its cahier for the Orléans meeting of the estates, the senechalsy of Toulouse, while insisting that no mercy should be shown to heretics, had also bitterly condemned the clergy, and called for reducing tithes.14 Even so, the Nîmes cahier was unusually detailed, and blunt. It expressed no sympathy for ‘poor vicars,’ and it incorporated both the above provisions from the Amiens and Paris cahiers, and more: In order that it will not be necessary to further burden his people ... it would be good to use two means, one which is of no concern and affects no one, the other which affects the fewest and will not be resented. The first is to take of the revenue of the confraternities, the bells, the half, or a third, or better all, in each and every temple, and the relics. The second is to take one third of the revenue of benefices worth more than 1000 livres, and the annates and the revenue of vacant posts ... and similarly, to take the temporal jurisdictions of the churchmen, which they cannot hold in good conscience, even according to the decretals. And the King can derive money from them by bestowing them on his vassals, receiving military service in time of war, and customary rights which the King can commute in exchange for cash, which would amount to greater sums than might be thought.

Given the hard economic times, it is not surprising that the authors of the cahier were also concerned about growing poverty, and urged that in order to ‘warm the hearts of men to charity and alms,’ either onequarter or one-third of Church revenue should be diverted for food for the poor.’15 This was a comprehensive attack on the Church’s revenues and jurisdiction. It went beyond a reorganization for the Church’s own benefit, as proposed by the Toulouse cahier, and indeed far beyond the light shearing proposed by the town of Amiens. Protestants, both in the draft memorandum and in the Nîmes cahier, were anxious to attack the Church, and particularly disposed to single out areas where they thought the crown and the public were likely to agree with them. For example, twenty years before, the royal edict of Villers-Cotterêts had ordered the abolition of confraternities.16 The Protestant movement therefore felt it had good reason to attack the confraternities, and since Nîmes had been one of the few towns that implemented the edict, at least in part, the provision was likely to arouse few objections there. Similarly, the authors of the cahier took care to attack the wealthiest members of the Catholic hierarchy, and the ecclesiastical courts, which were widely resented in sixteenth-century Europe. The cahier attacked the Church’s most unpopular features. Still, by any standard, the Nîmes cahier was radical. It is par-

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ticularly noteworthy that it refers to churches as ‘temples,’ the Protestant term. (The distinction, still in use today, is equivalent to the British Nonconformist usage of the word ‘chapel,’ rather than church, to describe their houses of worship.) Nîmes’s Protestants began to call the city’s cathedral a ‘temple’ shortly before seizing it in 1561 and converting it to Protestant use. Using ‘temple’ in the cahier may have been a way of getting more people in Nîmes accustomed to the term, and a faint suggestion that France’s churches belonged to the kingdom’s pious Christian subjects – the invisible Church universal, that is, the Protestants – rather than to the institutional Catholic Church. In sum, it is hard to avoid concluding that the cahier meant to harness a deep, visceral anti-clericalism among its supporters and, presumably, its potential supporters. Other provisions, whether directly religious or not, may have particularly appealed to a Protestant sensibility. The cahier asks, for example, that ‘No reproach, question, nor molestation, should be done to any person whatsoever, under colour of a conspiracy,’ referring to the Conspiracy of Amboise, the Protestant attempt to kidnap the young king François II. It also suggests that the Protestant-leaning king of Navarre should have a prominent role in the governing of the kingdom. Less directly, a Protestant suspicion of hypocrisy can perhaps be seen in the cahier’s singling out of ‘the calumniator and the false witness’ for special mention.17 Similarly, Thomas Robisheaux has argued, based on German evidence, that parents were concerned about their children marrying without their consent in the early sixteenth century, since canon law accepted such marriages as valid, although the Council of Trent made clandestine marriages more difficult.18 Although the Nîmes cahier does not mention the question of parental consent, it does show concern for the proper maintenance of hierarchy within the family, notably through concern about trustees (tuteurs or curateurs) for orphaned young people, and about dowries.19 Neither subject is mentioned in either the Toulouse or the national cahiers de doléances for the Orléans Estates General meeting, so it is possible to argue that such concerns reflect strictly local sensibilities. The cahier aimed to preserve hierarchy through sumptuary laws, and by restricting gaming to men of leisure, excluding ‘any man of mechanical occupation, or manifestly lacking the wherewithal.’ In a manner consistent with both Protestant and Catholic reformers, the cahier also attacked dancing and theatricals.20 If Protestant views are visible in numerous ways in the Nîmes cahier, however, some of the most explicitly religious clauses are surprisingly circumspect. It does say that ‘if we return to God, and serve Him purely,

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according to His Word,’ God will reward France with military victory, just as He did for the Israelites. But the notion of the Word of God is not, strictly, Protestant. Again, when asking for a national council to reunite the Church, anticipating the Colloquy of Poissy later in the year, the Nîmes cahier asks for the representation of ‘all those who speak French,’ presumably so that Genevans could be included, and that issues should be decided, not by tradition, but ‘by the word of God alone.’21 Other clauses ask for prayers to be conducted in the vernacular, the freedom to read the Bible, and the end of payments to Rome, and that the people’s ministers should urge them to sing hymns and the psalms. At the same time, bishops should be ordered ‘not to depart from the exposition of Scripture to set one against another, but only and simply to instruct the people in the pure word of God.’ But the key clause, demanding tolerance, is careful not to be too direct, asking that ‘those who believe they cannot take part in the ceremonies of the Roman church should be given means to be instructed and taught in the Word of God, for fear lest they fall into atheism.’22 This could almost be misinterpreted as a demand for special instruction for the wayward, to bring them back into the fold, rather than a demand for a separate church of their own. And finally, consider this clause: Similarly, to oppose the light of truth to the thick darkness of ignorance, which has filled the air and the earth unto this day, and to give an opening to everyone to know and understand their salvation, the catechizing of children and rustics should be restored, if the King pleases, to such effect that they will be clearly and simply instructed in the articles of our faith, of the Law of the Ten Commandments, of the way to pray to God for the explanation of the Lord’s Day’s sermon, and taught purely the dignity, the end, and the use of the holy sacraments, to all who are of age and capable of understanding.23

Considering that there was a major dispute between Protestants and Catholics over how many sacraments there were, this is remarkably imprecise. Indeed, even requests for Bible reading, although eventually considered irredeemably Protestant, were not out of the question for reform-minded Catholics in the early sixteenth century. Thus, the Nîmes cahier, although drawn up by Protestants, because of its careful phraseology might have been acceptable to some reformist Catholics. Why was the language of the religious clauses in the Nîmes cahier so ambiguous? Of course, a too-open Protestantism might have provoked

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persecution, but heresy only half-concealed seems hardly very useful protection. Protestants in Nîmes faced a terrible dilemma, since they both wished to escape trial for heresy and also felt a passion to give witness to their faith, to spread the good news. In the environment of the time, half-concealed digs may have taken on a special, symbolic significance, like the veiled criticisms of samizdat (the underground literature which flourished in the Soviet Union), which later seem timid and no longer of so much interest. However, it should again be stressed that the prevailing tone of the Third Estate, both nationally and in the province, was sharply anti-clerical. At Orléans, the assembled delegates concluded flatly, ‘It is certain that these troubles have come to pass by the inexcusable negligence and insupportable faults of some of the pastors.’ Of course, the use of ‘some’ leaves it ambiguous just what percentage of the clergy is being attacked, but later the delegates attacked ‘the faults of the majority of the ministers of the church.’ Unlike the authors of the Nîmes cahier, however, the delegates at Orléans did not attack the Church in order to justify conversion to a new religion. Instead, they were angry that the Church, in its bloated inefficiency, had been unable to prevent the rise of the new heresy.24 Toulouse was equally concerned by the ‘long absence, ignorance and boundless avarice of many Prelates,’ and suggested that church revenues should be seized and turned to more useful purposes, such as funding preachers and schools.25 This is still notably different from Nîmes’s cahier, which advocated that the crown simply confiscate the Church’s wealth. It is of course also true that some Protestants hoped for a reconciliation with the Catholic Church, although their proposals were such that from a modern perspective it seems more accurate to say that they hoped that the Church would capitulate to their demands. Perhaps we should understand demands to regulate the bishops’ sermons, rather than calls for the abolition of their office, in the light of the Protestant party’s extravagant hopes at this time.26 Fundamentally, the cautious language must be understood politically: Nîmes’s Protestants did not wish to give the opposition any ammunition. It was a sign of their political sophistication. If it was perhaps unrealistic to expect that the Catholic Church would capitulate to Protestant demands for reform, it was perhaps more reasonable to hope for conversions among less firmly committed Catholics. By demanding reforms, rather than the liquidation of the Church, the Nîmes cahier laid the groundwork for a later breach should the reforms not be adopted. Although this is a reasonable analysis of what eventually happened, it may overestimate the political shrewdness and foresight of

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the cahier’s authors. Still, it is reasonable to describe the Nîmes cahier as a document with unmistakable Protestant leanings, designed to appeal to the Protestant community, with a certain amount of ambiguous language that could also appeal to moderate, reform-minded Catholics, and a large amount of sweeping reform of government and society designed to appeal to both, and indeed to the religiously indifferent. If the Nîmes cahier advocated radical pruning of Church assets, its suggestions on the nature and limits of royal power were also startling. The Nîmes cahier does not merely advocate that the clergy pay for the king’s debts. It suggests that royal expenses be reduced, and measures taken to control them in the future. Gifts and pensions to members of the court should be reduced, tax officials more closely scrutinized, and, during the king’s minority, no war should be declared, nor any tax imposed, without the approval of the estates. Furthermore, the estates should be convoked on the king’s majority, ‘to see better in what state are the king’s affairs and how affairs have been conducted during his minority,’ and at least every ten years. In future, the monarchy would be much more tightly scrutinized, and joint decision-making would replace the personal rule of the monarch. Some of these provisions embody common prejudices of the era, notably the not-too-subtle suggestion that royal advisers during a king’s minority were liable to line their pockets from the public purse. It was always easier to attack the king’s evil counsellors than the king himself. Still, the provision for regular meetings of the estates was important: it represented a serious commitment of cash to the idea of a greater popular voice in national affairs. It offers a sharp contrast, for example, with the Toulouse cahier, which recommended that the Estates of Languedoc should be divided into two to reduce expenses for the communities that paid them.27 The cahier also turns the Catholic consuls’ resistance against them, arguing the populist case that cahiers should not be concocted by local elites alone, ‘sans y appeler le peuple’ (without calling the people). The cahier’s predilection for conciliar forms can also be seen in its suggestion that the kingdom should be governed by a council of sixteen or eighteen, to include the princes of the blood and the principal ministers of state, until the king reached his majority. Royal acts should be signed ‘Par le roy, à la relation de son conseil,’ and there should be provisions against nepotism, as in Nîmes’s own town council. The crown should also send out commissions in advance of provincial estates, so that local meetings could draw up cahiers, ‘so that the King may dispense his grace and justice unto the least of his subjects, according to his holy desire and will.’28

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In some areas, however, it is clear that the Nîmes cahier is less radical, or more circumspect, than, for example, the Languedoc cahier. Both the Nîmes and the Languedoc cahiers call for the end of all judicial fees, or épices – the Nîmes cahier urges that, ‘In order that they [the judges] can honestly support themselves, according to their estate and the importance of their offices, good and competent salaries should be assigned to them so that they may work without regret,’ and without taking bribes. But only in Languedoc did they go so far as to insist that ‘No judicial office shall be sold.’29 If there were no lucrative fees attached, it would be hard to imagine why people would be interested in buying an office, but perhaps the authors of the Nîmes cahier felt that mentioning the question of the sale of offices would impugn the members of the présidial court, all of whom had bought their offices. Some of the provisions in the Nîmes cahier may have excited interest because they reflected local concerns. For example, Nîmes had been involved in a long dispute with Le Puy, which wanted its own présidial, whose creation would have meant that the jurisdiction of Nîmes’s présidial would be severely reduced. Bribes and counter-bribes had been repeatedly offered to royal officials by the two communities, and the Nîmes town council had finally tried to get, via an offer of 10,000 livres, an assurance that the boundaries of the présidial would be ‘perpetual and irrevocable.’30 Section four of the Nîmes cahier asks that all jurisdictional boundaries be fixed, and that surplus jurisdictions and officials and ‘long and useless formalities’ in legal proceedings be eliminated. Similarly, the town council had quarrelled with the city’s butchers repeatedly over the years, and the cahier asks for royal regulation of the trade.31 Given the detail of some of the legal reforms that the cahier proposed, it is amply clear that people well versed in the law were involved in writing it. It does not, however, exempt them from criticism. The cahier accuses notaries, for example, of ‘great infidelity and corruption’ and declares that ‘especially the impudence of advocates, who advise and sustain an ill cause, is insufferable, which they cannot do without shame and a great weight on their conscience, nor the audacity and tergiversation of those who consume all the time in outrages and false facts which they allege against the parties.’ There is some reason to be sceptical about these protests: the cahier does not advocate a social revolution, which would reduce the power of the lawyers and legal officials who dominated Nîmes. Notaries are denounced, but the cahier suggests that their number should be reduced, which would presumably benefit the remainder. And the Ursi family, who

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probably had the largest clientele (at least among those notaries whose records survive) were also the most Protestant. Similarly, although the cahier attacks the lawyers, in its last clause it suggests that authority should be concentrated in the hands of the présidiaux and the municipal councils, that is, in the members of the traditional ruling elite.32 It is nonetheless worthwhile, however, to consider why such harsh language was included. The cahier was undoubtedly a compromise, and it is possible that these denunciations welled up from below, and that the elite cynically permitted them knowing that the actual proposals were to their benefit. It is also possible that the artisans who made up the early leadership of the movement, and who were relatively removed from access to power, may have held such resentments and wrote them into the cahier. But it seems more probable that the elite shared in a certain ambivalence, even guilt. If they did not, it would be somewhat difficult to explain why they converted: self-satisfied people, especially cynical ones, are not obvious candidates for conversion. Furthermore, the Nîmes elite had considerable reason to feel guilty: they had failed in their paternalistic roles, as protectors of the town. Floods and bad harvests were perhaps not their fault, but when times were bad their duty was to make up for them. Yet they had been unable to moderate extreme royal fiscal impositions, and the town’s empty treasury and granary were thus in some sense their responsibility. They felt at the same time responsible for the town’s problems and that they needed more power if they were to solve them. I have suggested elsewhere that the Nîmes elite thought habitually in paternalistic terms, and expressed these kinds of sentiments repeatedly in town council meetings.33 Their language was also shot through with a particular kind of humanistic morality, which probably owed something to the legal mind, formed as it was by Justinian’s code, as well as the town’s burgeoning pride in its Roman heritage, and the presence of the humanist scholars at Nîmes’s university and faculty of arts.34 Many examples of this could be cited, and some have been already, for example, the cahier’s concern that ‘children and rustics’ should be instructed in ‘the Law of the Ten Commandments.’ Good humanist principles – the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor – can also be seen in the provisions on charity, which on the one hand, as noted above, urged that Church funds be diverted to the poor, while at the same time making it clear that lazy people should be forced to take up a trade.35 As has been noted by many scholars of the period, this kind of language is as much humanist as Calvinist; if Nîmes’s elite were already imbued with humanist values, it helps explain why they converted. Cal-

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vinism reinforced the moral viewpoint they already adhered to.36 In that sense, even the ‘secular’ parts of the cahier were really religious. The cahier was a program to restore moral order to the kingdom. Once it was adopted, the town council forwarded the cahier to the provincial Estates of Languedoc, whose session opened on 20 March 1561 in Montpellier, only five days after the approval of the Nîmes cahier. Pierre Chabot, a radical Protestant, represented Nîmes. According to one contemporary account, at first he was not permitted even to address the assembly, but the clamour of the crowd outside the hall eventually persuaded the delegates to give him a hearing. Chabot later explained that the other delegates of the provinces had insisted that he could not discuss his proposals, because ‘there [the estates] only the funding of the king’s debts was to be discussed.’ The delegates to the estates were merely following the orders of the Queen Mother and regent Catherine de’ Medici, but Chabot was less obedient.37 Nonetheless, the Estates did consider far-reaching proposals for reform. Claude Terlon, a lawyer and capitoul 38 of Toulouse, had suggested that ‘the most prompt expedient would be to take all the temporal goods of the Church, reserving to those who hold benefices the houses and lands adjacent to their benefices.’ Furthermore, he proposed that any assets that remained after the crown’s debts had been paid off should be given to commissions of town officials to administer on the Church’s behalf. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has pointed out, this would have made the clergy salaried state employees, a local version of the procedures adopted by the French Revolution. Terlon was not an out-and-out Protestant, as indeed his proposal to reorganize Church finance shows: he was more interested in reforming the Catholic Church than in demolishing it. Nonetheless, the Church could hardly have been pleased with his proposals. It was particularly perturbed because Terlon’s views were rather the norm than the exception: the deputies at Montpellier adopted his proposals, and they named him the representative of the Third Estate of Languedoc to the Estates General of Pontoise.39 The delegates treated Chabot’s proposals much more gingerly. Rather than reject them, which would have inflamed Protestant opinion both within and without the chamber, they arranged instead to have Antoine de Crussol, vicomte d’Uzès, a great landowner and leading Protestant, take charge of Chabot’s complaints and present them at the Estates General meeting.40 Achille Gamon, a contemporary and a Catholic, notes that there was a wide spectrum of opinion, with some eager to have Chabot

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punished as a ‘disturber of the public peace.’ But more broadly, lines were generally blurred. As a Catholic, his description of the contemporary mood has special significance: ‘An air of reform, which the preachers of the new religion made seem necessary, seduced some; the licence which it encouraged corrupted the others, and in the uncertainty, or, more accurately, the ignorance about the Catholic religion and the Reformed religion that prevailed, people did not know which of the two to cleave to, and which pastors to follow.’41 In this fluid atmosphere, then, the Nîmes cahier had a use as a propaganda document, to convince the uncertain to join the Protestant cause. Preparations for the Estates General continued through the spring and early summer; the sessions had originally been scheduled to start on 1 May 1561, but were delayed. The clergy met separately from the other two orders. Its session began on 31 July 1561, at Poissy. The following day, the king and the queen mother opened the new Estates General. Instead of meeting at Melun, the session was moved to the nearby town of Pontoise; about eighty delegates attended. The session lasted just under a month, closing on 27 August. The nobility and the commons were reluctant to vote new taxes: the nobility proposed that the clergy pay twothirds of the outstanding debt, and the commons the remaining third. The commons felt that the clergy should pay the entire sum. Neither offered to pay anything themselves. Both recommended measures that the Nîmes cahier had also endorsed, including the right of the estates to consent to peace treaties and declarations of war, and biennial meetings of the estates. The clergy, thoroughly concerned by the antagonism that the other two estates had shown, agreed to pay more than nine million livres over ten years. As a result, the crown felt better disposed towards the clergy, who had shown themselves cooperative, than to the other estates, which had demanded much in exchange for little. The nobility and the commons, angry at both the crown and the Church, had attacked both at once, rather than husbanding their energies. Their strategy lacked shrewdness.42 The Nîmes cahier was brilliant at capturing the public mood, even though its goals were impossibly ambitious. Public opinion was in favour of both restraints on an extravagant monarchy and reform of the Church, which it believed to be rich but not performing its duties. These were simplistic solutions, but the problems were real. The Protestant movement’s strategy was somewhat short term in its thinking: if its primary goal was to weaken the Church, it was a mistake to antagonize the king at the same time. From a national perspective, it was foolhardy for the Prot-

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estant movement to pursue political reform. On the local level, however, it would have sacrificed much of the enthusiasm for the cahier if it had abandoned its proposals for increasing the power of the estates. It was in order to attract the fluid centre of public opinion, then, that the cahier adopted a number of popular, traditional reforms. It is also probable that the movement’s own deep-seated anger at the crown prevented it from allying with it, even against the Church. The Protestants could not readily disentangle the two. Finally, the French Protestant church’s structure, with its consistory and local and national synods, mimicked the provincial and national estates. There was also, therefore, an implicit contrast between the hierarchical structures of both the monarchy and the Church, on the one hand, and the conciliar structures of the Protestant churches and of municipal and provincial governments, on the other. It would have been grossly inconsistent for the movement to advocate a representative council structure for the Church and not for the crown. The result was that the movement campaigned for a document that was perfect for gaining converts in Nîmes, but served to unite Church and crown against it. It would have been more expedient for Nîmes’s Protestants to try to force a wedge between their adversaries, and to gain the crown’s support if it were possible, but the odds of a royal conversion were never good. In any case, the other choice was the more principled position. Furthermore, the cahier’s overarching structure was quite traditional. Politically, the cahier represents a classic contractualist view of politics, whereby the king was supposed to make significant concessions to the estates, and in exchange he was to be rewarded with a general carve-up of church revenues, lordships, and jurisdictions, so that on these fronts the crown’s powers would be greatly strengthened. If the crown had received sufficient new revenues, it would have become relatively independent of the estates, since it would not have to ask them for support. It was unlikely, however, that the crown could ever acquire so much land from the Church that it would have enough money to finance itself during wartime. The cahier’s proposals requiring the estates’ assent to declarations of war would also have severely limited the crown’s traditional prerogative to make foreign policy.43 Nonetheless, they were only a starting point, and with further negotiation, they could have proved the basis for an attractive bargain for the crown. In its original form, however, this was more a statement of principles than a completely realistic proposal. Eventually the leaders of the Protestant movement in Nîmes realized their mistake. On 13 November, more than six months later, at the next meeting of the town council, there was a discussion of the cahier and its

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purposes. This meeting was called in response to popular agitation and in spite of the consuls, and it was the hard-line Protestant, Pierre Chabot, who appears to have been a leader in the agitation and who was the first to speak. He first had to duel with the consuls about whether the meeting should be held, but he then turned to the question of the cahier, ‘in which,’ among other articles, ‘there was a request for the purpose of asking for Protestant churches, and that those who wanted to live according to the Word of God could assemble to be instructed in it.’44 At least in retrospect, then, the cahier was seen as an unambiguously Protestant document. The town council, however, did not see the cahier as simply a petition on behalf of the Protestant community. Rather, they formulated their request as an exchange, asking for religious concessions in exchange for cash, and specifically that the king work with the formula agreed to by the estates. Similarly, the council resolved to send deputies to the Languedoc Estates to continue the negotiations. They gave the delegates these instructions: To accord to His Majesty all taxes that he may please to command be levied on the province of Languedoc to satisfy his debts, charges, and the affairs of the Kingdom, with the allegiance that true and faithful subjects of His Majesty must give, sparing nothing, and for the share payable by this town. And insofar as the delegates of the Third Estate of this Kingdom assembled in the last Estates General, held in the town of Pontoise, in their list of grievances, for the reasons contained therein, agreed that, in order to satisfy those who wished to live in the purity of the Gospel, under the King’s obedience, a temple should be assigned to them in every town.45

Between the spring and the fall, there was a crucial shift in emphasis: in the cahier, the Protestant movement was prepared to antagonize the crown and the Church at the same time; by the fall, the leadership recognized that its religious goals required that an alliance be struck. If political discontent may have motivated some people to join the movement, their new religious identity became sufficiently important that they were prepared to forgo the very political reforms that had motivated them initially. But in the interval the cahier had succeeded in one crucial way: the Protestant party had gained the adherence of the majority of the town. In the preceding decade, primarily to pay for the king’s wars, the people of Nîmes had seen taxes rise year after year, during a period of flood, harvest failures, grain shortages, rising prices, and falling standards of

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living. The crown had also extorted money repeatedly by threatening to divide the Nîmes présidial’s jurisdictions, which would have hurt the local economy. So it is reasonable to imagine that some of the provisions of the cahier, for example, curbing royal power, fixing the boundaries of judicial districts, and regulating meat prices, won the support of local people who were upset by recent events. The cahier of 1561 is the best evidence that suggests how and why the economic and political crisis of 1557–60 helped the growth of the Protestant movement. It did so by linking economic and political grievances to a religious ideology that promised reform in church and state, grounded in a political philosophy, doctrine, and ecclesiology that were a coherent response to the problems of the day. Protestantism was not a mindless reaction to misery: it was a rational response that promised to solve real problems. Nonetheless, neither the crisis nor the campaign to adopt the cahier can fully explain the success of Protestantism in Nîmes. In the traditional debate over the origins of the French Reformation – were they political or were they religious? – I would answer that both factors operated, for different groups at different times. It is highly likely that the original core group of Protestants, who provided the crucial leadership, converted for different, more theological reasons, than did the people who responded to the cahier. They provided crucial leadership, but they were not the whole movement. Furthermore, the cahier alone did not ensure Protestant success, for several reasons. First of all, the case for the link between Nîmes’s problems and Calvinism was not self-evident: it had to be made, and skilfully. It could not have happened if the Protestant leadership had not had zeal, energy, and insight. The leadership’s success in converting the elite did demonstrate their ability to organize people, and helped remove the obstacle – persecution – that had hindered it from broadcasting its ideas in public and in private. Second, the events of March 1561 did not ensure success, because it took another year of immense activity for Protestantism to become the majority religion in Nîmes, and several years more for the Protestant party to achieve control over the town. The cahier marked a crucial breakthrough, but it was only the beginning of their march towards victory.

NOTES 1 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949). As is well known, only the much-expanded

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second edition of 1966 was translated into English: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2nd ed., 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–3). It should also be noted that Bloch also wrote at least one major work of comparative history, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England I (1924), trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Earl J. Hamilton, ‘The Decline of Spain,’ Economic History Review 8, 2 (1938), 168–79. For more recent literature, see J.H. Elliott, ‘The Decline of Spain,’ Past and Present 20 (1961), 52–75, and R.A. Stradling, Europe and the Decline of Spain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). ‘Immobile History’ was the title of Le Roy Ladurie’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: see his The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans. Siân and Ben Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–27, and The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974; orig. ed., 2 vols., Paris, 1966). Otto L. Bettmann, A Word from the Wise (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), preface. My argument is largely drawn from my dissertation (Allan A. Tulchin, ‘The Reformation in Nîmes’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000); interested readers will I hope look there for further details and citations. Léon Ménard, Histoire civile, ecclésiastique et littéraire de la ville de Nîmes (Marseille: Lafittte Reprints, 1976; orig. ed., Paris, 1750–6), vol. IV, Preuves, 268. The other edition available (Nîmes, 1874) was recently reprinted (Nîmes: Lacour, 1988–90, but it lacks the Preuves, a selection of original documents. To help anyone wishing to check a reference using the 1874 edition, which has different pagination, I give the volume, book, and chapter numbers as well. The French reads: ‘Maistre Loys Bertrand auroit remonstré que tant en son nom que de ses adherantz, auroit requiz mondict sieur le président et messieurs les consulz d’assembler le present conseil extraordinaire, où il avoyt à remonstrer choses concernantz l’honneur de Dieu, le service du roy, et le reppos et tranquillité du peuple, pour en estre faict rapport aux estatz particuliers du present pays de Languedoc ... [et] aux estatz-generaulx.’ Bertrand’s religion is clear since the Protestant church’s governing body, the consistory, named him a surveillant of one of the town’s ten quartiers at its first meeting only eight days later: see the Registres du consistoire de l’église de Nîmes, vol. 1 (1561–3), hereafter cited as CR, fo. 1. The original is now held in Paris, BN, Mss. Français 8666, 8668, and 8669. There are also two transcriptions available in Nîmes. ADG 42 J 26, formerly Archives of the Église Reformée de Nîmes B-90/1, was made in 1874 by Louis Auzière. It preserves the original foliation. There is a second copy by Auzière still at the

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church archives, B-91, which is paginated differently, but notes the original folio numbers in the margins. It is useful because it has an index. Ménard IV, Preuves, 267–8. Ibid. In French, the quotations read: ‘n’y avoit aulcuns des conseilliers du conseil ordinaire, comme est tout notoire,’ and ‘[To proceed] puisse préjudicier aux transactions, statutz, et ordonnances.’ On the role of localism in promoting heresy, see Henri Hauser, ‘Nîmes, les Consulats et la Réforme, 1532–1537,’ in his Études sur la réforme française (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1909), 187–202, esp. 201. Ménard IV, Preuves, 278, 280. In French, the quotations read: ‘en leur deffault seroit procedé,’ ‘homme de lettres,’ and ‘tant à son de cloche, que particulièrement par les serviteurs; et pour ne retarder les affaires du roy, a commandé ausdictz consulz oppiner.’ Suggesting that it was unnecessary to send delegates to the national estates was also a well-calculated hit: the assembly was traditionally loath to spend money and even Pierre Rozel (although not his brother Charles) agreed that sending deputies to the provincial estates was sufficient (see ibid., 279). Calvière eventually turned Protestant, but his exact commitment to the movement at this point is difficult to determine. He is first mentioned in the minute book of the Protestant consistory on 15 November 1561, when the consistory decided to complain to him about the ‘heresies’ preached by the bishop. On 10 January 1562 the consistory tried to elect him deacon, but he sought to avoid it for reasons ‘toutes fois fort frivolles.’ See CR, fols. 45v, 65v, and 67. Ménard IV, Preuves, 268. Jean-Charlemagne Lalourcé and [?] Duval, eds, Recueil des cahiers généraux des trois ordres aux États généraux d’Orléans en 1560, 3 vols. (Paris: Barrois l’aîné, 1789), vol. 1, 417, 422. Augustin Thierry, Recueil des mouments inédits de l’histoire du tiers état (Paris, 1853–70), vol. 2, 674, cited by James Russell Major, The Estates General of 1560 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 107. In French, the quotation reads: ‘le roi doibt prendre à son proffit les annates vacants et depports des bénéfices.’ The source is a deliberation of the town council, and the actual document, apparently approved by the Estates of Picardy, is not given in full: a speaker quotes the passage I cite, recommending it be weakened. Several speakers agree, while others advocate yet stronger measures, but both are defeated. Paul Guérin and Alexandre Tuetey, Histoire générale de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1892–6), vol. 5, 94–6, cited in Major, Estates General of 1560, 107. Claude Lafaille, Annales de la ville de Toulouse, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Chez Guillaume-Louïs Colomyez ... & Jerôme Posuë, 1687–1701), 48–50.

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15 Ménard IV, Preuves, 269. In French, the quotation reads: ‘afin qu’il ne soyt besoing de charger plus avant son peuple ... seroit bon de prendre deux moyens, l’ung qui n’interesse point et ne touche à personne, l’aultre qui touche le moingz et ne sera resenty: le premier est de prendre le revenu des confrairies, les cloches de deux, ou de troys une, ou plustost toutes, fores une en chascun temple, et les relicles: le second est prendre la tierce partie du revenu des benefices passantz mil livres, et les annates et sequestres des vaccantz, ... et semblable faict, prendre les jurisdictions temporelles des gens d’église, lesquelles ilz ne peuvent tenir, sellon mesmes les decretz, avec saine conscience; et le roy en tirera sommes d’argent, les infeudant, et service au bang et [ar]rière-bang au temps de guerre, ensemble des droictz censuelz fondés sur biens roturiers que le roy pourra extinguer à pris d’argent, que montera aussi beaucoup plus qu’on ne pense.’ Cf. BN, Ms. Fr. 15881, fol. 376v, para. 12. On poverty, see Ménard IV, Preuves, 277. In French, the quotation reads: ‘Il n’y a bonnement ordre d’eschauffer le coeur des hommes à cherité & aulmosne, que occasionnera le roy, s’il luy plaict, de retirer, au nom de Dieu, la quatre partie, voyre la tierce, du revenu des benefices, pour la norriture et alimentz des pouvres.’ 16 On confraternities, see Ménard IV:12:78–9, 165, and Arlette Jouanna, La France du XVIe siècle, 1483–1598, Collection Premier Cycle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 53. 17 Ménard IV, Preuves, 269–70. In French, ‘ne soyt faicte cy après reprosche, question, ne moleste, à personne que ce soyt, soubz quelque couleur de conspiration.’ Cf. BN, Ms. Fr. 15881v, 376, para. 13. 18 Thomas Robisheaux, ‘Peasants and Pastors: Rural Youth Control and the Reformation in Hohenlohe, 1540–1680,’ Social History 6 (1981), 281–300. See also Barbara B. Diefendorf, ‘Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France,’ Journal of Modern History 68 (1996), 265–307, esp. 286–8. 19 Ménard IV, Preuves, 274. 20 Ibid., 277. In French, the quotation reads: ‘aulcung homme de mestier mecanique, ou n’ayant manifestement de quoy.’ Gambling was to be permitted to ‘le gentilhomme faisant honneur à sa noblesse, l’homme d’estude estudiant, et le bourgeois vivent de ses rentes,’ while dancing should be permitted only at weddings. 21 Ménard IV, Preuves, 271. In French, the quotations read: ‘si nous retornons en nostre Dieu, et luy servons purement, sellon sa parolle,’ ‘tous ceulx de la langue Françoyse,’ and ‘la seulle parolle de Dieu.’ Parallel clauses appear in the anonymous letter that is the key source for Valois (Noël Valois, ‘Les États de Pontoise,’ Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 39 (1943), 241, and BN, Ms. Fr. 15881, fo. 378, para. 35).

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22 Ibid. In French, the quotations read: ‘ne sortir hors l’exposition de l’escripture pour ruer les ungs contre les aultres, mais seullement et simplement instruire le peuple en la pure parolle de Dieu,’ and ‘ceulx qui croyent ne pouvoir en saine conscience communiquer aux cerimonies de l’église Romaine soyt donné moyen d’estre instruictz et enseignés en la parolle de Dieu, de peur qu’ilz ne tumbent en atheisme.’ Cf. BN, Ms. Fr. 15881, fo. 378v, paras. 39, 37. 23 Ibid., 272. In French, the quotation reads: ‘Pareilhement pour opposer la lumiere de verité à l’espesseur des tenebres d’ignorance, qui ont remply l’air et la terre jusques aujourd’huy, et donner ouverture à chascun de sçavoir et entendre son salut, sera, si plaict au roy, restitué le catechisme des enfans et des rudes, à tel effect qu’ilz seront clerement et simplement instruictz des articles de nostre foy, de la loy du decalogue, de la maniere de prier Dieu pour esposition de l’oraison dominicale, et enseignée purement la dignité, la fin, et efficace des sainctz sacrementz, à tous qui seront d’aage et discretion competantz.’ (There is no parallel paragraph in the BN Mss.) 24 Recueil des cahiers, vol. 1, 279, 281. In French, the quotations read: ‘Il est certain que ces troubles sont advenus par les inexcusables négligences et fautes insupportables d’aucuns des pasteurs,’ and ‘les fautes de la plupart des ministres de l’église.’ It should be noted that, unlike in modern French, in sixteenth-century usage ‘aucuns’ meant ‘some, a few.’ 25 Lafaille, Annales, 2:48. In French, the quotation reads, ‘longue absence, ignorance et avarice demesurée de plusieurs Prélats.’ 26 As discussed in Tulchin, ‘Reformation,’ chapter 6, it was just at this time that the Colloquy of Poissy was in preparation (it was held in August), where Catholic and Protestant churchmen, including Calvin’s chief lieutenant and successor, Theodore Beza, met to discuss the reunion of the churches. 27 Ménard IV, Preuves, 270 (quotation), and Lafaille, Annales, 2:55. In French, the quotation reads: ‘pour veoir mieulx en quel estat seront reduictz sesdictes affaires et le mesnagement qu’on aura faict durant sa minorité.’ BN, Ms. Fr. 15881, fo. 378, para. 33 suggests that the estates should meet every two years, while the parallel paragraph in 20153 also has ten years. 28 Ménard IV, Preuves, 269–72. In French, the quotation reads: ‘affin que le roy puisse despartir sa grace et justice jusques au moindre de ses subjectz, sellon son sainct desir et voloir’ (271). 29 For Toulouse, see Lafaille, Annales, 2:52. The French reads: ‘aucun Office de Justice ne sera vendu.’ Ménard IV, Preuves, 276. In French, ‘affin qu’ilz [judges] puissent honnestement s’entretenir, sellon leur estat et gravité de leur office, leur soyent assignés gaiges bons et competentz qu’ilz ayent occasion de trevailher sans regret,’ and even more directly, ‘qu’ils soyent si hon-

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nestement estipendiés que ne soyent occasionnés de prendre chose que ce soit.’ AM Nîmes LL9, fo. 151v, cited in Ménard IV: 13:73, 245. Ménard IV, Preuves, 272, 277. In French, the quotation reads, ‘longues et inutilles formalités.’ On disputes with the butchers, see Tulchin, ‘Reformation,’ chapter 2. Ibid., 273, 275, 278. In French, the quotations read: ‘heu esgard à la grande corruption & infidelité desdictz notaires, qui sont en grand nombre, sera bon les reduyre à chascune ville & villaige, à tel petit nombre que sera advisé par les habitans de tous estatz,’ and ‘Et surtout il ne fault plus souffrir l’impudence des advocatz, qui conseilhent & soubstiennent manifestement une maulvaise cause, ce qu’ilz ne peuvent fere sans honte & grande charge de conscience, ny l’audace & terguiversation de ceulx qui consomment tout le temps en oultrages & faulx faictz qu’ilz alleguent contre les parties.’ See Tulchin, ‘Reformation,’ chapter 2. It seems quite significant that the first (of many) guides to Nîmes’s Roman monuments was published just at this time: Jean-Poldo d’Albenas, Discours historial de l’antique et illustre cité de Nîmes (Avignon, 1559, and Lyon, 1560; reprint ed. Marseille: Lafitte Reprints, 1976). Ménard IV, Preuves, 277. This conclusion embodies a sociological truism. See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996; reprint ed. San Francisco: Harper, 1997), 55, and the sources cited therein. Chabot, quoted in Ménard IV, Preuves, 285. In French, the quotation reads: ‘en iceulx ne se traitoyt que la subvention des debtes du roy.’ For summaries of the March 1561 Estates of Languedoc, see Ann Guggenheim, ‘Calvinism and the Political Elite of Sixteenth-Century Nîmes,’ PhD dissertation (New York University, 1968), 240–4; Dom Claude Devic and Dom Joseph Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc, 15 vols. (Toulouse: Privat, 1872–92), 11:346–8, and Le Roy Ladurie, Peasants, 172–5. Capitoul was the term for the town officers of Toulouse, equivalent to the consul for Nîmes. Achille de Gamon, ‘Mémoires,’ in Claude Bernard Petitot, Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France depuis le règne de Philippe-Auguste jusqu’au commencement du dix-septième siècle (Paris, 1823) vol. 34, 304 (cited by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols. [Paris: Mouton, 1966], 1:361). In French, the quotation reads: ‘l’expédient le plus prompt étoit de prendre tout le temporel de l’Eglise, en reservant aux bénéficiers les maisons et les terres adjacentes de leurs bénéfices.’ On Chabot’s Protestantism, see CR, fo. 1, where Chabot is named a surveillant. Le Roy La-

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durie, Peasants, 173, calls Terlon ‘vaguely sympathetic’ to the Reformation; Guggenheim, ‘Calvinism and the Political Elite,’ 241, presents evidence to suggest that he was not a ‘convinced Protestant,’ and J. Russell Major, ‘The Third Estate in the Estates General of Pontoise, 1561,’ Speculum 29 (1954), 460–74, 470, concludes that he was ‘at least a nominal Catholic.’ Gamon, ‘Mémoires,’ 304, and Devic and Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc, 11:347n2. Gamon, ‘Mémoires,’ 304–5. In French, the quotations read: ‘un perturbateur du repos public,’ and ‘Un air de réforme, dont les prédicateurs de la nouvelle religion faisoient voir la nécessité, séduisoit les uns; la liberté qu’elle favorisoit corrompoit les autres, et dans l’incertitude, ou, pour mieux dire, l’ignorance de la religion catholique et de la religion reformée où on étoit, on ne sçavoit à quelle des deux on devoit s’attacher, et quels pasteurs il falloit suivre.’ Major, Estates General of 1560, 107–14. See also Paul Van Dyke, ‘The Estates of Pontoise,’ English Historical Review 28 (1913), 472–95. Valois, ‘Les États de Pontoise,’ 241, concludes that the Protestant position ‘tendait à rien de moins qu’à l’établissement d’une sorte de gouvernement représentatif,’ which he concludes the French people did not want. See also ibid., 253–6. Van Dyke, ‘The Estates of Pontoise,’ 493–5, provides a summary of the political clauses of the Pontoise cahier. Ménard IV, Preuves, 285. In French, the quotation reads: ‘dans lequel, entre aultres articles, y avoit requisition aux fins de demander des temples, et que ceulx qui desirent vivre sellon la parolle de Dieu se puissent assembler pour estre instruictz en icelle.’ Chabot also criticized Terlon for not presenting the Nîmes cahier at Pontoise, as Chabot insisted he ought to have done. Ibid., 286. In French, the quotation reads: ‘acorder à sa majesté toutes impositions qu’il luy aura pleu commander estre faictes sur le pais de Languedoc pour satisfaire à ses debtes, charges, et affaires du royaulme, en usant du debvoir que vrays et fidelles subjectz sont tenus envers sadicte majesté, sans y rien espargner, et pour la quotité concernant ladicte ville; et encores pour aultant que les gens du tiers estat de ce royaulme assemblés aux derniers estats generaulx tenus en la ville de Pontoyse, par leur cahier, pour les causes en icelluy contenues, furent d’advis que pour satisfaire à ceulx qui desirent vivre en la pureté de l’évangille, soubz l’obeyssance du roy, leur debvoit estre assigné en chascune ville ung temple.’

chapter eight

Some Thoughts on the Social and Political Culture of Baroque Venice1 M AT T E O C A S I N I

This essay is part of a wider research project on the features of the selfcognizance of Venetians in the period from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth, the age of Venice’s last, great Mediterranean wars: Cyprus (1570–3), Candia (1645–69), and the Morea (1684–99). Those events nurtured vast and complex forms of exaltation and autocelebration of the ‘Most Serene Republic’ and her men, through public festivals, prints, paintings, booklets, poems, and architecture. We may understand the deep changes in contemporary Venetian society by observing how those media represented fundamental social values such as honour, heroism, piety, civic harmony, friendship, competition, sense of the state, individualism, family – to name but a few. In particular, the target of the project is to seek the ‘social culture’ of the city, the culture whose primary function is structuring the mythical visions of the community, to convey aristocratic and popular interests, and to put the two parts into dialogue; a culture that, however, may sometimes reveal some conflict and resistance to the establishment of concord and the common well-being. The approach to the social culture must necessarily be interdisciplinary, attempting to combine social, political, cultural, and art history. Therefore, a vast number of literary and iconographical sources have to be considered, describing festivities or the lives of major military, civil, and political figures, or the social life of the city; but also presenting the basic features of the auto-celebration of individuals, families, and the state. The influence of Fernand Braudel in this field must not be underrated. The author of La Méditerranée only rarely mentioned public feasts

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or similar phenomena, but stressed the relevance of the Italian late Renaissance and baroque culture for Europe, while suggesting some methodological and historical lines that I would like to recall. From the methodological point of view, most relevant is the famous introduction to the first edition of The Mediterranean. Among the three different divisions of historical time suggested by Braudel, the history of the Venetian civic culture may be concerned with two: – The second level, that of conjuncture, history ‘with slow but perceptible rhythms,’ the ‘social history of groups and groupings,’ states, societies and ‘civilizations.’ Braudel calls it ‘social time.’2 – The third level, the événementielle: the history of the ‘individual’ and events, or ‘individual history.’ My project operates mainly on this level. It focuses on prominent men such as captains or doges, as well as single moments such as one-time ceremonies. Events allow a dialogue between structure – Braudel’s first level – and conjuncture as well: ‘Movement and immobility complement and explain one another,’ Braudel wrote.3 Furthermore – he said ten years later – each event is linked to a series of other events and realities, and may bear witness to deeper phenomena.4 Beyond methodology, Braudel’s concept of ‘civilization’ is very interesting. In chapter 6 he admits that civilizations are the ‘most perplexing’ of the ‘complex and contradictory faces of the Mediterranean world,’ sometimes stable but sometimes even ‘shifting and straying.’ Then he stresses the importance of the Mediterranean baroque for the rest of Europe: ‘the Baroque, conveniently designates the civilization of the Christian Mediterranean: wherever we find the Baroque we can recognize the mark of Mediterranean culture.’ The Renaissance did not have the same impact in Europe, while the baroque spread out from Italy, Rome, and Spain, to Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland. The influence of the Roman baroque, for instance, permitted Catholic iconographical themes to cross and re-cross all of Europe.5 For Braudel this is another proof that the Mediterranean did not go into a complete decline after the end of the sixteenth century. On the contrary, the Mediterranean kept an ‘eminent position ... in the building of the modern world.’ Some of these observations were recalled and expanded in Braudel’s outstanding chapter of the Storia d’Italia (1974): ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia.

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Due secoli e tre Italie.’6 In that essay Braudel analyses, among other things, ‘Italy’s greatest age,’ the century between 1550 and 1650, the ‘baroque’ century. This period was like ‘wave after wave of the sea’ for the Italian contribution to European culture: ‘Italy knew at that time an extraordinary tension,’7 and the baroque ‘was responsible for a series of modern inventions going well beyond the religious or artistic forms they invented.’ Also, culture became a leading ‘business and industry,’ and the primacy of culture had never been so ‘officially’ accepted as it was now. Venice played a crucial part in this. In La Méditerranée Braudel stated that Venice was still flourishing in the sixteenth century, and during the final years of the century and the beginning of the following she abandoned herself ‘once more to the pleasures of living and of thinking. Her late Renaissance is a proof of this.’8 Even in the seventeenth century, Venice was able to draw forth strength and financial resources and play a crucial role in two major Mediterranean crises, the wars of Morea and Candia. In fact, Braudel called the latter ‘Venice’s Thirty Years War,’ a war which the Republic waged ‘practically alone, with courage, determination and resources indicative of the city’s wealth.’9 My concern is to evaluate the effects of the ‘baroque explosion’ described by Braudel on the dialogue between the different sectors of Venetian society, even beyond Braudel’s ‘baroque century,’ and going beyond a purely cultural approach. Most important for my research is that the two conflicts, as well as the later Morean war, brought the flowering of several public and private celebrations, from the joy over the victory of Lepanto to the abundant productions, in the seventeenth century, to honour the ‘glorious’ sea captains and their victories. The apogee was reached late in the century, during the Morean war, with the huge commemorations for the captain, doge, and hero Francesco Morosini. The vast number of visual and literary sources proves that in baroque Venice, on the one hand, power had to search for a renewed way to display itself; and that, on the other hand, closer contact between noble and popular culture was needed, to enhance and maintain social consensus through long decades of international and internal hardship. In this essay I will present just a few directions that might be taken to enquire whether the rebuilding of a ‘social culture’ worked or not, and how for Venice in this period what Braudel wrote in 1950 may be true: ‘In a civilization’s area, the social content may completely renew itself two or three times without touching certain deep structural elements.’10

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1 ‘Feeding’ the Venetian Public: Civic and Religious Festivals We must recall here one of Braudel’s insights about the Italian baroque: there was ‘an exuberance, a bubbling of life, an intellectual effervescence, all over Italy. The public had become an ogre hungry to be fed.’11 To ‘feed’ the population, the Venetian state adopted many different methods in the baroque. For instance, after a long period of inactivity (since 1540), it resumed the patronage of monuments exalting key figures of the Venetian wars. Sculptures were sponsored to represent famous captains who served the Republic at different times, such as Pompeo Giustinian and Orazio Baglioni (in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, 1620), Bartolomeo d’Alviano (Santo Stefano, 1633), Almerigo d’Este (Frari, 1666), and Orazio Farnese (Gesuiti, 1675).12 More important, to celebrate the crucial moments of the city’s history the government staged impressive public festivals which aimed to dictate precise models of civic spirit and communal moral behaviour. A main feature of these ceremonies was particularly reinforced in the late Renaissance and baroque, that is, the tight interplay between civic worship and religious worship through the evocation of the Republic’s patron St Mark, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints. In September 1571 and February 1572, for instance, the identification between Venice, St Mark, and Charity was displayed on two occasions: the procession for the League against the Turks and a Carnival masquerade for the victory of Lepanto.13 In June 1649 the devotional allure of the Republic was stated in the vast celebrations which followed the news of the Venetian victory in the waters off Phocaea. These festivals lasted eight days, and included a series of great processions, one inside the basilica of St Mark’s, others connecting the basilica to the cathedral of San Pietro in Castello. The bodies of three saints, Nereus, Archelaus, and Pancratius, were exposed in San Zaccaria (in fulfilment of a vow to God made by the doge a few weeks before), while in the basilica of St Mark’s two Marian images and other relics were displayed. On 24 June, the feast day of St John the Baptist, the Greek community held a procession from their church of San Giorgio to St Mark’s. The chronicler of the event, Giovanni Dalla Spada, wrote: ‘The whole City was a Church ... or an earthly paradise.’14 In these events the strategy of ‘republican’ worship was combined again – as so many times in the past – with the capacity of Venetian ritual to connect the centre, St Mark’s, to various ‘peripheries.’ The same combination was realized when the creation of a new church and a new feast

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day was celebrated. All through the history of the ‘Most Serene Republic,’ the foundation of a religious building by the state had been a pretext for the so-called ‘andata dogale,’ the procession of the ducal court from St Mark’s to the new church and its return to the basilica (where a final mass was performed). This typical ‘network’ ritual procedure had the effect of predetermining the form of public space by linking the centre to peripheries or new settlements, and by allowing those peripheries to be transformed into active and integrated parts of the political topography. But the ‘andata’ conditioned sacred time as well, since a new feast was normally inserted into the city’s calendar (and the same processional route would be followed each year).15 The continual refining of the civic year was therefore a way for the state to perpetuate the ancient presence of St Mark in the urban fabric and in popular religiosity: in fact, the patron saint was the highest expression of the osmosis between the Republic’s secular and spiritual power, as the doge was at the same time the supreme head of the state and of the Venetian church. This confirms Braudel’s basic view: ‘Through all the changes ... there are areas of astonishing permanence ... Civilizations live on in their own way, anchored to a few fixed and seemingly unalterable points.’16 After assigning 7 October to be the feast day of Santa Giustina, in 1571, to commemorate the victory of Lepanto, in the baroque period the government introduced important additions to the traditional calendar. The foundation of the church of the Salute was celebrated on 21 November 1631, to thank God for the end of the plague; the ceremony would be observed in future on the same date. (See illustration on page 182.) Similarly, it was decided to honour the victory in the Dardanelles in June 1656 by establishing a ducal procession to the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and a regular feast day on 26 June.17 In 1690 another annual rite was established on the day of San Gaetano, with an ‘andata’ to the Theatine convent: the purpose was to commemorate the triumphal conquest of the Morea, a region in southern Greece.18 The religious fever that was sweeping the city at the instigation of the government influenced other components of society as well, such as the religious orders and the clergy. One important action these religious components attempted was to impose a more religious content onto the traditional carnivalesque day of the Giovedì Grasso (Fat Thursday). New devotional rites were introduced, such as the exposition of the Holy Sacrament and the Forty Hours, or processions around the city’s churches.19 Nevertheless, achieving this end was not always easy, as the following example will show.

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M. Boschini and D. Lovisa, Tempio eretto alla Beata Vergine della Salute, per un voto fatto dall’Eccellentissimo Senato l’anno MDCXXXI, print, in ‘Il Gran Teatro di Venezia, overo raccolta delle principali vedute e pitture che in essa si contengono,’ Venice, per Domenico Lovisa, 1720.

Divota Comemoracione della Passione di N.S. Solenizata in Venetia l’anno 1682 il Giovedi Grasso, print, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Stampe P.D. 1969, Venice.

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Poem in honour of the Procurator Alvise II Contarini, 1778, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Stampe Prov. Molin 2059, Venice.

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Façade, Church of Santa Maria del Giglio, Archivio fotografico Osvaldo Böhm, Venice.

A. Piazza, Celebrations in honour of Franceso Morosini returning from the Levant, painting, Museo Correr, Venice.

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Front cover of F. Fabro Bremundan, L’eroe trionfante. Historia delle gloriose attioni dell’ilustrissimo et eccellentissimo Signor Alvise Mocenigo II ..., Venice, Milochi, 1651.

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Anonymous (17th century), Lotta dei pugni a San Barnaba, painting, Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia, Venice.

A. Della Via and A. Porto, ‘Peota’ of the Goddess Diana in honour of the Duke of Brunswick, 1686, print, in Bissone, peote e galleggianti, ed. G. Romanelli, Venice, 1980, pl. 56.

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In the 1670s, on Giovedì Grasso the Jesuits of the Oratorio of Santa Croce established a procession of orphans and the poor, proceeding from the Fondamenta Nuove to the hospital of the Incurabili. But in 1681 the Jesuits found difficulties in traversing the city because of the carnival confusion, and therefore the following year the cortege was transformed into a ‘devout lagoon procession in honour of the Passion of the Redeemer.’ Permission was granted by the prominent Council of Ten, while two burchielli and twelve peote (festive Venetian boats) were donated by various noblemen, and several liveries by Francesco Morosini (an important senator). On the Fat Thursday of 1682 the waterborne procession followed a route from the Pietà to the Fondamenta Nuove. It included poor from the hospital of the Mendicanti and orphans from the Ospitaletto and the Pietà, and displayed many boats and representations of the Lion of St Mark, the Virgin with Christ in her arms, and angels.20 (See illustration on page 183.) This ceremonial experiment sought to offer new avenues to piety to minor and disadvantaged groups living in the urban and social peripheries. But in the following years it was abandoned, perhaps due to difficulties of organization: the Jesuits, being under the control of Rome, could not hope for much support from the Venetian authorities. It is also true that after the mid-Seicento Venice had entered a new depression, as Braudel reminds us; a factor that contributed to the peace of 1669 with the Turks. Braudel formulated a well-known idea on the relation between war and the economy. After the peace, ‘culture and peaceful expenditures’ should have regained ‘their rights,’ and expanded again.21 However, in the following decades Venice departed from Braudel’s schema, and started another war, the Morean (1684–99). The news from the front led to the staging of rich festivals celebrating once again the values of Venetian history and society. At the end of the baroque the fascination for the East was still able – as in so many times in the history of the Most Serene Republic – to fuel the involvement of many different social and intellectual sectors of the community. In September 1686, for instance, a remarkable temporary monument was set up in the ‘patriarchal contrada’ (the Castello quarter) to celebrate the conquest of the Greek port of Nauplia, which the Grand Captain Francesco Morosini had achieved that summer. The brothers Gaspare and Domenico Mauro, designers of famous ephemeral monuments of the period,22 created the apparati. In front of the church of San Pietro di Castello – the church of the patriarch (the archbishop of Venice) – there were five bridges, each carrying a triumphal arch. A water pro-

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cession was held with floats that displayed Venice trampling the Moon (symbolizing the Turk) and various achievements of Morosini. The procession concluded with the same Morosini being crowned with laurel by the figure of Glory, assisted by Venice.23 The celebration of the Venetian hero in front of the church which represented the power of Rome inVenice was an ambiguous sign if one considers the always problematic relations between the papacy and the Venetian government. Another peripheral area, Santa Eufemia of the Giudecca, planned rites and decorations on 27 October 1686. The themes were almost the same as those in San Pietro di Castello. A marvellous apparatus combined a triumphal arch with two castles representing the city of Navarino, which had been occupied during the previous campaign. In addition there was ‘a wonderful Theatre’ with Venice trampling the Turks, and a ‘formidable Giant,’ a symbol of the punishment inflicted on the Ottomans. Finally, on a majestic throne the allegorical figure of Faith was paid court by four figures representing the Holy League, that is, Rome, Vienna, Poland, and Venice. A procession with fourteen knights escorted the war hero Francesco Morosini, followed by the chapter of the church of Santa Eufemia with its relics and the elders of the parish.24 The fervour brought about by the news from the Morea, therefore – which even stimulated the publication of the first printed gazettes in Venice25 – provided the opportunity to exalt the Republic as a place of social cohesion and profound militant faith. More than in the past, festivals could now unite the urban peripheries to the destiny of the whole city. And this was true for ‘social’ peripheries as well. Foreign communities always appeared in Venetian festive events,26 but a particular community was involved in October 1686: the Jewish ghetto. The entire area was ‘superbly furnished all around’ to celebrate the victory of Nauplia. In the ghetto novo a large and tall theatre was built to contain the ‘natural simulacrum of the Grand Hero,’ Francesco Morosini. Genuflecting at the feet of Morosini, several supplicant pashas presented the keys to the greatest cities of the Morea in cups of gold, and received, from the supreme captain, the laws ‘given to the vanquished by magnanimous victors.’ Two artificial mountains were also raised, the first carrying the equestrian statue of the captain Morosini defeating the Turkish commander; the second portraying the port of Nauplia conquered by the lion of St Mark. The ghetto novo was the location of the German Jews, but the rest of the ghetto participated as well. Inside the ghetto vecchio, in the square called ‘piazza Spagnola,’ an amphitheatre was erected with the equestrian statue of another hero, the captain Gi-

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rolamo Corner. Meanwhile the synagogues displayed, according to the anonymous chronicler of the festivals, a great ‘pomp of their richness.’ The same chronicler states that with the apparati the Jews wished to express ‘their joy for the victories of a Power [the Republic] which knows how to make itself loved by those who profess a foreign religion.’ The extensive popular participation, with masques and musicians, made the author conclude that ‘the Hebraic Nation ... of this Ghetto, lives most loyal to her prince.’27 The pompous words of the chronicler of the Jewish celebrations of 1686 cause one to reflect on their importance as a moment of reconciliation: in fact, only two years before, at the beginning of the war, the Venetian ghetto had been attacked by 200 citizens, imitating the much more serious sack of the ghetto in Padua that had occurred a few days before.28 Furthermore, one should not forget the complex rapport between the government and the Jews around the practical arrangements for civic rituals: for instance, the German Jewish strazzaroli – specialists in the second-hand objects market – were obliged to furnish important support during the reception of foreign guests of the Republic, and they often complained about this obligation.29

2 The Celebration of Self The public scene was not the only one for staging ephemeral festive creations; the private one was central as well. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the manifestations of joy for a rich person’s accession to high political and bureaucratic offices – such as the Procuratorship of St Mark, the Grand Chancellorship, or the Patriarchate – were particularly elaborate. The financial excess displayed on these occasions reflected the huge wealth of a few families inside the aristocracy and the bureaucratic milieu of the ducal chancery, and underlined not only the wide gap between fortunes within the nobility, but also the birth of a new solidarity between rich lineages of different classes. This new type of solidarity was based on prestige and patrimonial wealth, and threatened to replace the traditional one, based on membership in a closed class.30 The major events were the feasts for the new procurators, important magistrates in charge of the church, treasury, and legacies of St Mark’s basilica. These feasts are well known thanks to surviving descriptions, and we will present in brief just two cases, the elections of Giovanni Pesaro in 1641 and Girolamo Basadonna in 1682. The descriptions record that, after the proclamation of the newly

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elected official, the first step in the rite was papering the bridge of Rialto, and the surrounding streets and alleys, with festoons and decorations. The square of San Salvador was filled with tapestries as well. Moreover, at the beginning of the Mercerie – the street from St Mark’s to the Rialto – a triumphal arch with columns was built, bearing the family coat-of-arms. The Mercerie themselves were fully decorated. To congratulate Giovanni Pesaro there was the special gesture of the German merchants, who placed an inscription to honour him on the side of their Fondaco on the Grand Canal, and a temporary arch on the street side. Pesaro followed the processional route down the Mercerie, finding at the beginning a triumphal arch bearing his arms with a sceptre and an eye in the lower section, exalting his eloquence and prudence. On top of the arch there was ‘un’eccelsa piramide, nel di cui mezzo si leggeva scritto il motto: PERENNITATI.’31 Girolamo Basadonna encountered instead in the Mercerie his arms and the glorification of the well-established relations between Rome and Venice (members of the Basadonna family pursued a career in Rome, gaining elevation to the cardinalate). Further along, the German merchants placed a sort of clock made from mirrors, with various capriccios. At the foot of the Ponte alla Nave were placed two great Mappamundi of Heaven and Earth. The square of San Zulian was full of paintings, and beyond it was located an imitation of the Staircase of the Giants at the Ducal Palace.32 The festivals for the procurators were focused therefore in the true heart of the city: using the Mercerie, they connected the Rialto, the commercial centre, to the political centre, St Mark’s. Along the Mercerie the new procurator was accompanied by up to 300 persons, including soldiers and captains, knights from the mainland, other procurators, and many Venetian and Veneto noblemen. In St Mark’s Square, arches and colonnades with the arms of the guest of honour were erected under a great tent that extended from the Torre dell’Orologio to the Procuratia Nuova. The tent welcomed the elected official who was about to receive his formal investiture in the basilica of St Mark and in the Sala del Collegio in the ducal palace. Then followed a ball and a sumptuous banquet, with extensive use of sculptures in sugar.33 (See illustration on page 184.) The line between individual and public celebration was hard to trace in such circumstances, and the government was sensitive to the display shown by the new procurators: the pomp was considered dangerous both for the finances of the families and because it emphasized the economic

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divide between rich and poor patricians. In 1683 the Great Council intervened with an important decree, forbidding all apparati between St Mark’s and the Rialto, as well as pageant boats and fireworks machines. Only ordinary, simple fireworks were permitted.34 It was difficult, however, to prevent this kind of pageantry, and the government eventually surrendered. The Senate passed a new law in 1692 and decided to simply profit from the situation by selling licences for the festivities.35 Private needs imposed themselves on the public scene; private festivities celebrated the success of the individual, not of the state. In this sense, Braudel reminds us that the baroque is not a ‘sheet of untroubled waters,’ but a ‘series of storms.’36 In a society traversing difficult times, as Venice was, individuals might generate dangerous signals, at odds with the common civic or political culture. That is the case with the artistic patronage of some ambitious members of the ruling class, willing to profit from the wars in order to appear as leaders or heroes. In particular, we must deal with architectural patronage, another of Braudel’s favourite topics. Highly interesting are the works requested and commissioned by some prominent sea captains.37 From the 1650s to the 1690s impressive monuments and façades were built for Alvise Mocenigo at the church of Mendicanti, Antonio Barbaro in Santa Maria del Giglio, and Giorgio Morosini in San Clemente. Also the captain and doge Francesco Morosini commissioned important projects in Santo Stefano and San Vidal (in the end they were not realized, but the drawings have survived). The aim of these men was to exalt their success as heroes in the wars against the Turks. Following the typical trend of Venetian baroque architecture, the experimentation was carried on mostly in religious buildings, and not in civic ones, but the visual programs were rich in pagan, rather than sacred, motifs. In addition, the tendency shifted to personal glorification, away from the traditional glorification of the Republic.38 We may look at the façade of a famous baroque church, Santa Maria del Giglio, commissioned by Antonio Barbaro, one of the major protagonists of the war of Candia, not only because of his military skill but for the continual disputes he had with other captains (above all with Francesco Morosini).39 This is probably the reason why he never obtained the highest military office of capitano generale, but only that of provveditore generale (1658–61). Barbaro came from a poor patrician family, but thanks to the war he accumulated remarkable wealth and was able to patronize Santa Maria del Giglio. In accordance with Barbaro’s will, the façade today still bears his statue ‘dressed as a General, and fully armed.’ The statue has also a ‘Baretin’ (a special hat) and the baton, the two signs

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of supreme military power, in accordance with iconographic tradition: therefore, we surmise that Barbaro asked to be represented holding an office that he never actually received in his life, the general sea captainship. This fact conveys a sense of ambiguity and is perhaps directed at Barbaro’s class, the patriciate, which never fully acknowledged his skill and value. Furthermore, no references to the Republic can be found in the entire façade.40 (See illustration on page 185.) The desire for personal and family glorification was a constant factor in architectural commissions. In 1669 the state Inquisitors ordered Leonardo Pesaro to eliminate an inscription from the Pesaro family monument in the Frari church because it extolled his uncle, the deceased doge Giovanni Pesaro, too much.41 The same desire motivated the changes that Francesco Morosini wished to make in the decoration of the façade of San Vidal in the late 1680s. The point here is that in several baroque festive and architectural displays commissioned by prominent members of the nobility the borderline between exaltation of the individual and the acceptance of the rules of an aristocratic community had become very thin and ambiguous, reflecting the internal difficulties of a ruling class facing a political and social crisis. Moreover, this growth of ‘individualism’ was not restricted to the patriciate: after the middle of the seventeenth century there was a ‘sudden invasion’ of neo-nobles or nonnobles willing to commission new monuments.42 For example, Girolamo Cavazza, a secretary from the secondary social order of the ‘original citizens,’ invested enormous sums for himself and his family to buy access to the nobility and patronize two important monuments, his sepulchre at the Madonna dell’Orto and the façade of the Scalzi church.43 The most complex and emblematic case of individualism in baroque Venice, however, was that of Francesco Morosini, the captain general who achieved the high command of the fleet two times during the war of Candia, negotiated the end of the war in 1669, led Venice in the new war of the Morea in 1685, was elected doge in 1688, but continued as commander-in-chief until his death, in late 1693. His conduct provoked reactions and judgments of all kinds. He enjoyed wide popularity for his heroism, but the French observer Casimir Freschot wrote that he was not loved within the nobility, mostly because of his military fierceness and his disregard for the formalities of his class.44 In 1690 he added the office of grand captain to that of doge, a rare occurrence in Venetian history, and one that was frowned upon by some members of the ruling class: by consequence, after Morosini’s death a law of February 1694 established strict rules to keep the doge from obtaining the captainship.45 While he was alive, Morosini was exalted by several authors as the

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champion of the new liberty of Greece. Especially from 1685 on, a deluge of paintings, prints, poems, and sculptures sang his civic and military virtues. He was the man ‘gloriously identified with the Morea,’ stated the Peloponnesiaco on the bronze effigy in the hall of arms of the Council of Ten; the man for whom, after his death, the Hall of Scrutiny in the ducal palace was adorned with a triumphal arch and the paintings of Gregorio Lazzarini.46 Just to mention one big festival in his honour, in January 1690 a grandiose triumphal arch, forty feet in height, was erected in the Piazzetta of St Mark for his arrival from Greece. The arch was supported by two loggias with galleries of arms, and there were two fountains spouting wine, each fifteen feet high, one adorned with a figure of Neptune and the other with two dolphins. A colonnade extended out to the door of the ducal palace, where trophies of war were hung. The courtyard of the palace was adorned with damask and fifty-two paintings, depicting Morosini’s achievements.47 The complex decorations for the hero of the Morea pervaded the central zone of power of the Republic, and recalled the settings arranged on the Lido for the greatest ceremonial event of the late Renaissance, the visit to Venice of Henri, future king of France, in 1574. At that time, however, the elaborate pageantry was set on the Lido, far from St Mark’s, and dedicated to a foreign guest, not to a captain-doge. (See illustration on page 186.) Morosini’s dominating position in Venetian society for almost forty years also fuelled much criticism. During the war of Candia, and after its end in late 1669 – Morosini had negotiated with the enemy the surrender of the island without formal permission of the government – several anonymous manuscripts attacked his behaviour. A fake ‘Will of the City of Candia,’ for instance, reported the city as saying: ‘I bequeath to Francesco Morosini, the present General Sea Captain, who gave me a nice passage into Turkish hands, all the gold and precious things he found in my coffers.’48 Later, in the period just after his death in late 1693, another anonymous author wrote the interesting, sarcastic poem ‘Satira formata nella morte del Serenissimo Prencipe Francesco Morosini,’ about a visit by the famous captain to the King of Hell, Pluto. At first, Morosini was not recognized by Charon, who got angry at him for not being paid to bring him across the Styx.49 Later Morosini met Pluto, and started describing his ‘victories’ and ‘glories.’ When Pluto asked the reason for his visit, Morosini mentioned the crisis of the Venetian fleet, and demanded to have

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back his dead soldiers. But the soldiers, asked by Pluto if they wanted to return to life, refused, not wanting to go back to eating ‘frisoppo asciuto’ (crumbled biscuit) and the other miserable food they received in the army. Above all, the soldiers no longer wanted to follow Morosini, ‘who is without faith, who enjoys all alone our booty.’50 We may conclude that the conduct of Morosini provoked opposition in both the aristocracy and the popular classes, and brought to light the tensions running through the city at war, but also those within a community in which the behaviour of single men threatened the ancient, perfect social balance of the Republic. The popular criticism of Morosini, moreover, proves the involvement of the Venetian populace in the main debates of the city, and shows how baroque Venice, like baroque Italy, was still a ‘political laboratory’ where the ‘entire population discussed politics, everyone having a passionate axe to grind.’51

3 Family, Sociability, Competition, Pageantry As we may guess from the cases of Antonio Barbaro and Morosini, many insights into Venetian social culture may be gained by examining specific aspects and values of prominent social figures, such as the grand captains. According to the literary sources, especially pamphlets, a basic value for the military hero was the importance of his family, the casata, the house, and his noble origins. The honourable roots and life of the family helped the captain to secure recognition of his glory by both the aristocracy and the common people. Glorification of the casata pervades many of the pamphlets praising the heroes of Candia. (See illustration on page 187.) For instance, Cristoforo Ivanovich opened his eulogy of Lazzaro Mocenigo by referring to the actions and offices of illustrious members of his house, their ‘Embassies, Procuratorships, Captainships.’ Marco Trevisan wrote of the Grand Captain Girolamo Foscarini that ‘the native nobility is a continual splendour, and the destiny that lights our life since infancy.’ Furthermore, Antonio Barbaro wanted his casa – which was about to expire – to be represented on the façade of Santa Maria del Giglio, and therefore commissioned statues of himself and his four brothers.52 The whole ruling class strongly believed in the link between family, nobility, and the past: in many patrician testaments, belonging to a casata was believed to be a ‘common patrimony of antiquity, and therefore of prestige, fame, and honour.’ The sense of familial continuity was fundamental, and the more ancient the house was, the more it was reputed to be powerful.53

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For the supreme captain, nevertheless, the love of family could not be separated from the love of country, the patria. In fact, the captain was a true representative of his country at war, and the famous generals were praised as fathers to their soldiers. Girolamo Foscarini was reminded that ‘the Patria and the Citizen have the same relationship the Father has with the Son.’54 Doge Francesco Erizzo’s decision to accept the position of supreme captain in 1645, at the outbreak of the war of Candia, was described as an example for the young, because the good prince must be ‘more a father then a guardian of his People.’ The general Leonardo Foscolo was honoured by his men, according to an anonymous pamphlet, as a ‘Father, Benefactor, and Preserver.’55 Behind all these writings we feel a particular atmosphere in baroque Venice, a general demand for strong and pure passions, for the celebration of a new ‘social heroism.’ And sentiments of this kind were growing even before the period of war, in the first part of the seventeenth century. We may recall a ‘famous’ friendship which raised discussions across the whole city, the friendship between the two nobles Marco Trevisan and Nicolò Barbarigo. In the 1620s Trevisan defended Barbarigo against obscure accusations, and supported him against the government and the aristocracy. The idea of this ‘heroic friendship’ was incredibly successful in Venice and beyond, being described in many books and poems. It underlined the society’s need to recompose itself through the bonds of affection and solidarity. A contemporary chronicler, Zuan Antonio Venier, requested a new peace in the city, ‘a more honest and easy life,’ the return to sentiments now oppressed by violent passions.56 Similar messages came from the feminine world as well, a world ready to relax social formalities and restore its affective freedom and financial independence. According to Joanne Ferraro, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in wedding disputes and intellectual writings, women were acting differently than in the past. They began to reject the marriage plans their parents made for them, and brought their cases to court more often than men. They furthermore criticized the wide difference in age between themselves and their husbands, or being forced into unwanted sexual relations, or the disparities in social class that sometime occurred in marriages.57 One must also consider the development of the so-called war of fists, the ludic fighting between the two groups into which the Venetian populace was divided: the Castellani and Nicolotti. The two factions set mock battles on specific bridges, located along the borders dividing the two parts of the city to which the factions belonged. In the seventeenth centu-

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ry the game underwent important changes, losing the violent and vindictive expressions of the previous period, and adopting more ‘honourable’ rules. In practice, honour became the new language of the game, and the famous champions now constituted the centre of factional and local enthusiasm.58 (See illustration on page 188.) The war of the fists was carefully controlled by the government, and was eventually abolished in 1720. However, to feed the popular need for ‘honourable’ competition, another game was promoted by the state, the famous Venetian regatta. These were staged mostly on the Grand Canal, with special boats of different sizes – such as peote, bissone, margarotte, ballottine – and the male and female participants came in large part from the islands of the lagoon, as is still the case today.59 A French visitor, Saint-Didier, related that the regattas were often arranged for important guests because they were the preferred sport of Venice, the exercise of rowing being so near to the ‘spirit of the people.’60 In the last part of the seventeenth century they acquired a particular importance, judging by how many detailed booklets on the competitions and the winners began to be printed and circulated.61 An examination of the sources would reveal whether in the regattas, as in the war of fists, new heroic figures appeared on the scene to stir popular passions. The competition was not the regatta’s only feature, nevertheless, because expensive and complex ‘artistic’ boats and water theatres, the so-called machines, were realized and displayed. Wonderful paintings by Joseph Heintz the Younger and later by Luca de Carlevarjis, Canaletto, and other artists show the beauty and complexity these boats could achieve. Requiring huge expenditure, they allowed the regattas to combine popular competition with high artistic creation and the upper classes’ desire for pageantry. Those artefacts should be compared with contemporary festive architecture in Rome, Naples, and Florence, since they are the real core of the baroque festival, the ephemera. The festive ‘apparatus,’ the ‘machine,’ the temporary structure could deconstruct and reconstruct the urban environment, combining social and political patronage with experimentation, allegory, and striving for the merveille.62 Thanks to their iconographic potential, moreover, ephemera could associate or mingle private and public messages, giving to the wealthiest classes the opportunity to display the fortunes and power of their families to the city. Here we can see at work the link between the economy and splendour in art and pageantry suggested by Braudel: ‘any economic recession leaves a certain amount of money lying idle in the coffers of the rich: the prodi-

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gal spending of this capital, for lack of investment openings, might produce a brilliant civilization.’63 In the last part of the seventeenth century Venice’s ceremonial boats took on a new, more emphatic role, in the same way as the winners of sporting contests. (See illustration on page 189.) More rich and complex ornaments and allegories were exhibited, and the regatta ‘machines’ of the 1680s were included by Vincenzo Coronelli in his collections of Venetian nautical marvels.64 The leaders in this development were the Mauro scenographers mentioned above, who must be considered among the Italian leaders of the movement, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from festive apparati to theatrical settings.65 Gaspare, Pietro and Domenico Mauro, and later Alessandro, designed models for vessels which were truly definitive examples of baroque taste, and not solely on the Venetian scene. Because of their skills, in fact, the Mauros were called to Parma to create the décor for the wedding of Ottaviano Farnese, in May 1690.66 This reflects another phenomenon underscored by Braudel, that is, the importance for the Italian baroque of the ‘travelling artists,’ technician-artisans trained in staging spectacles, and speeding from Venice and Rome to the rest of Italy and Europe.67

4 Conclusion In baroque Venice a wide array of instruments was available to renew communal representations of honour, harmony, friendship, heroism, pride, and other key aspects of the Venetian social culture. However, when we examine this social culture we must not look only at the images and values promoted by the state, which needed to present strong and impressive models of moral and civic standard behaviour. In a society in crisis, indeed, contradictory and polemical images might emerge, for instance, through popular writings showing sarcasm and dissent or through the artistic patronage of ambitious members of the aristocracy, willing to profit from wars to win renown as leaders or heroes. Among the features of the social culture of baroque Venice, therefore, we find multiple motivations, interacting but sometimes diverging: the desire to re-launch the international prestige of a state that was perilously fading away from the European scene; the search to maintain the ancient harmony and stability of Venetian society through public festivals that aimed at unifying the ‘peripheries’ to the centre, or at changing the urban environment; the desire to give new religious stimuli to citizens; the attempt of certain prominent men to glorify their own success, their

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families, and their wealth; the challenge of creating diverse and innovative festive technologies, and establishing relationships between urban space and the theatrical. Beyond trying to give an interpretation of celebration and polemics in seventeenth-century Venice, nevertheless, one must be astonished by the vitality and cultural richness of that society. I would conclude by recalling Braudel’s famous words, closing the 1974 Italian essay: ‘It seems to me that there must be a kind of nightfall preceding, and determining, almost every cause of cultural greatness. It is the darkness that provokes a multitude of lights.’68 In the deep crisis of the last great wars in her history, Venice and her heroes employed all their remaining forces to reaffirm once again the primacy and uniqueness of their civilization. In this context every single class, every single voice tried to express its own message, its own desire, its own anxiety to contribute to a unique world.

NOTES 1 I would like to thank Dr Deborah Walberg and Geoffrey Symcox for reviewing my translation. 2 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1972), 1:20–1. 3 Ibid., 1:21; 2:757. 4 ‘Storia e scienze sociali. La “lunga durata”’ (1958), in Fernand Braudel, Scritti sulla storia (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), 60. 5 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:757, 827–32. 6 In Storia d’Italia, ed. Corrado Vivanti, 6 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), vol. 2: Dalla caduta dell’Impero romano al secolo XVIII, 2089–2248. Later published in a separate volume as Il secondo Rinascimento: Due secoli e tre Italie (Turin: Einaudi, 1986); then translated into French (Paris: Arthaud, 1989) and into English as Out of Italy: 1450–1650 (Paris: Flammarion, 1991). In my opinion, the English translation is not appropriate at several points, remaining too far from Braudel’s own language. Therefore, I will sometimes use my own translation of the original Italian text. 7 Braudel, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia,’ 2173; Out of Italy, 118–21. 8 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:393. 9 Braudel, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia,’ 2194; Out of Italy, 155. 10 Braudel, ‘Posizioni della storia nel 1950,’ in Scritti, 41. 11 Braudel, Out of Italy, 121.

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12 Marco Molin, ‘Un monumento a Bartolomeo d’Alviano,’ Diana Armi 10, 2 (February 1976), 34–9; Martin Gaier, Facciate sacre a scopo profano: Venezia e la politica dei monumenti dal Quattrocento al Settecento (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002), 250, 254. 13 Ian Fenlon, ‘Lepanto: The Arts of Celebration in Renaissance Venice,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 73 (1987), 201–36; Ernst Gombrich, ‘Celebrations in Venice of the Holy League and of the Victory of Lepanto,’ in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt (London: Phaidon Press, 1967), 62–8. In general, many sources presented the battle of Lepanto as a victory of Christ, leading the Venetians, ‘holy warriors of God’ (see also Fenlon, ‘Lepanto’). 14 Virginio dalla Spada, Giubili, e acclamationi della città di Venetia per la vittoria contro l’armata turchesca, ottenuta l’anno 1649 a’ 12 Maggio ... (Venice: Pinelli, 1649). 15 For the Renaissance see Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe: La festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età rinascimentale (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), ch. 4. 16 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:770. 17 Lina Urban, La festa della Madonna della Salute (Venice: Centro Internazionale Grafica, 1988); Andrew Hopkins, Santa Maria della Salute: Architecture and Ceremony in Baroque Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 4. 18 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Senato Terra, reg. 152: 294r–v (1.8.1656); Giustina Renier Michiel, Origine delle feste veneziane (Milan: Ed. Annali Universali della Scienza e dell’Industria, 1829), 413–14, 446–8. On the religious feasts honouring the Venetian victories see also Antonio Niero, ‘Spiritualità popolare e dotta,’ in La chiesa di Venezia nel Seicento, ed. Bruno Bertoli (Venice: Studium Cattolico, 1992), 254. 19 Ibid., 255–6. 20 Anon., Impronto, e relatione della Divota Commemoratione della Passione del Redentore celebrata in Venetia l’anno MDCLXXXII. Da’ Fratelli dell’Oratorio del SS. Crocefisso… (Venice, 1686); Venice, Museo Correr, Cod. Cicogna 2991, b. 1–4: fo. 10v. 21 Braudel, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia,’ 2212; Out of Italy, 180. 22 Giandomenico Romanelli, ‘I mostri effimeri,’ in Bissone, peote e galleggianti: Addobbi e costume per cortei e regate (Venice: Alfieri, 1980); Elena Povoledo, ‘Mauro,’ in Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo (Rome: Casa Editrice Le Maschere, 1960), vol. 7, 310–11; Dario Succi, ‘“Que la fête continue”: Ospiti illustri e feste straordinarie nelle vedute da Carlevarijs a Guardi,’ in Luca Carlevarijs e la pittura veneta del Settecento, ed. Isabella Reale and Dario Succi (Milan: Electa, 1994), 67–8.

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23 Gaspare and Domenico Mauro, Breve racconto Delle Feste, e degl’Applausi, Fatti dalla Contrada patriarcale di Castello, per le Vittorie Segnalatissime, della Serenissima Republica di Venetia … (Venice: Nicolini, 1686). 24 Anon., Distinta relatione Del Solenne apparato, Processione, e Cavalcata, che si farà il Giorno di Domenica, 27 Ottobre nella Parochia di S. Eufemia Della Giudeca, Per la Presa di Napoli di Romania (Venice: Leonardo Pittoni, 1686). 25 Mario Infelise, ‘Sulle prime gazzette a stampa veneziane,’ in Per Marino Berengo: Studi degli allievi, ed. Livio Antonielli, Carlo Capra, and Mario Infelise (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 470. 26 I have already mentioned the attendance of the Greek community at the celebrations of 1649. Another community, the German merchants, had a long history in Venetian rituals since the Renaissance. Their participation is mentioned in Sanudo’s diaries, while in 1571 they contributed to the feasts for Lepanto. In the seventeenth century they participated in the feasts for the new procurators of St Mark, as we shall see. 27 Anon., Il Ghetto veneto essultante per le segnalate vittorie della Serenissima Republica di Venetia nella Morea … (Venice: Andrea Baroni, 1686). 28 Mario Infelise, ‘The War, the News and the Curious Military Gazettes in Italy,’ in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Alcorn Baron (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 232. 29 See Anon., Discorso circa il stato de gl’Hebrei. Et in particolar dimoranti nell’inclita Città di Venetia (Venice: Gioanne Calleoni, 1638), 29v–30r; Gaetano Cozzi, Giustizia ‘contaminata’: Vicende giudiziarie di nobili ed ebrei nella Venezia del Seicento (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 75, 93. On the Jewish community in Venice see Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, eds, The Jews of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 30 Roberto Sabbadini, L’acquisto della tradizione: Tradizione aristocratica e nuova nobiltà a Venezia (Udine: Istituto Editoriale Veneto Friulano, 1995), 59, 76– 82; Volker Hunecke, Il patriziato veneziano alla fine della Repubblica, 1646– 1797. Demografia, famiglia, ménage (Rome: Jouvence, 1997); Claudio Povolo, L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona: Cierre, 1997); Silvana Olivieri Secchi, ‘“Quando mio padre suonava l’arpicordo …” Note sulla famiglia e il sentimento della famiglia nel dominio veneziano a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento,’ in Musica, scienza e idee nella Serenissima durante il Seicento, ed. Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1996), 13–41. 31 Domenico Vincenti, Gli apparati veneti overo le feste fatte nell’elezione in Procuratore dell’Illustrissimo et Eccellentissimo Signor Giovanni da Pesaro Cavalier (Venice: P. Miloco, 1641).

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32 Cristoforo Ivanovich, Minerva al tavolino …, 1st printing, part 2 (Venice: Nicolò Pezzana, 1688), 118–30. 33 See the description by the Roman nunzio Scipione Pannocchieschi, in Pompeo Molmenti, Curiosità veneziane (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1919), 316. 34 ASV, Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, reg. 42: fos. 280r–81r (4.7.1683). 35 Giuseppe Bistort, ‘Il Magistrato alle Pompe nella Repubblica di Venezia. Studio storico,’ in Miscellanea di Storia Veneta edita per cura della R. Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria, series 3, vol. 5 (Venice: a spese della Società, 1912), 267–8. 36 Braudel, Out of Italy, 122. 37 I will summarize here some issues covered in my article ‘Immagini dei capitani generali “da Mar” a Venezia in età barocca,’ in Il ‘Perfetto Capitano’: Immagini e significati del ‘capitano’ fra Cinque e Seicento, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), 219–70. 38 Guglielmo De Angelis D’Ossat, ‘Autonomia dell’architettura barocca veneta,’ in Barocco europeo e barocco veneziano (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), 51–62; Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 247–9; Martina Frank, ‘Spazio pubblico, prospetti di chiese a glorificazione gentilizia nella Venezia del Seicento. Riflessioni su una tipologia,’ Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 144 (1985–6), Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 109–26; Paola Piffaretti, Giuseppe Sardi, architetto ticinese nella Venezia del Seicento (Bellinzona: Arti grafiche Salvioni, 1996), 14–15; Lionello Puppi and Ruggero Rugolo, ‘“Un’ordinaria forma non alletta.” Arte, riflessione sull’arte e società,’ in Storia di Venezia: Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, ed. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi, 12 vols. (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 1992–8), vol. 7, La Venezia barocca, 636–46. See now the important work of Gaier, Facciate sacre a scopo profano, chs. 5–6. 39 The never-ending disputes between Venetian captains during the war of Candia were widely emphasized by polemicists writing against Venice, such as Vittorio Siri: see Brendan Dooley, ‘Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat: History and Imagination in Baroque Italy,’ The Seventeenth Century 15, 1 (Spring 2000), 103. 40 Mario Brunetti, Santa Maria del Giglio, vulgo Zobenigo, nell’arte e nella storia (Noale: L. Guin, 1952); Gino Benzoni, ‘Antonio Barbaro o l’esasperazione individualistica,’ in Una famiglia veneziana nella storia: I Barbaro, ed. Michela Marangoni and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1996). It is worthwhile to recall that while serving as ‘podestà’ in Padua, in 1672–3, Barbaro placed his own bust on the façade of the palace of the Venetian representatives (Gaier, Facciate sacre a scopo profano, 291).

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41 Valentina Conticelli, ‘Architettura e celebrazione a Venezia: I progetti di Antonio Gaspari per Francesco Morosini,’ Studi Veneziani, new ser., 38 (1999), 129–77; Ennio Concina, Le chiese di Venezia: L’arte e la storia (Udine: Magnus, 1995), 66. 42 Gaier, Facciate sacre a scopo profano, 305 ff. 43 Gino Benzoni, ‘Morire per Creta,’ in Venezia e Creta, ed. Gherardo Ortalli (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1998), 161. 44 Anon., Nouvelle relation de la Ville & République de Venise (Utrecht: Guillaume van Poolsum, 1709), 241–2. 45 ASV, Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, reg. 43, Maria: fos. 206r–v (22.2.1694). 46 Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Venezia nello scenario europeo (1517–1699),’ in La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna. Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica, ed. Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello (Turin: UTET, 1992), 144; Gino Damerini, Morosini (Milan: Editrice Alpes, 1929), 338–40. 47 Felice Gallo, Distinto ragguaglio delle Cerimonie, e Sollennità nel Ricevimento in Venetia dell’Invitto e Serenissimo Doge, Francesco Morosini … (Venice: Prosdocimo, 1690). 48 Venice, Museo Correr, Cod. Cicogna 1182: fos. 177v–78r. See also Antonio Medin, La storia della Repubblica di Venezia nella poesia (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1904), 355–8. 49 The theme of Charon bringing a famous guest to Hell was popular in Venice, as displayed after the victory of Lepanto, in 1571: Gombrich, ‘Celebrations in Venice,’ 63–4. 50 Venice, Museo Correr, Cod. P.D. 506c/32: fos. 3v–6r. 51 Braudel, Out of Italy, 121. 52 Cristoforo Ivanovich, La Fenice. Panegirico all’Immortal Nome dell’Illustrissimo, & Eccellentissimo Signor Lazaro Mocenigo … (Venice: Camillo Bortoli and Alessandro Zatta, 1658); Marco Trevisan, I gesti heroici di Geronimo Foscarini Procurator di San Marco e Capitano General da Mar della Serenissima Republica di Venetia (Venice: Alessandro Zatta, 1665); Gaier, Facciate sacre a scopo profano, 351–2. 53 Olivieri Secchi, ‘“Quando mio padre,”’ 27–8. 54 Trevisan, I gesti heroici. 55 Marco Trevisan, Vita di Francesco Erizzo Prencipe di Venezia (Venice: Gio. Antonio Pinelli, 1651); Anon., Relatione de’ felici progressi dell’Armi della Serenissima Republica nella Dalmatia (Venice, 1654). 56 See the notable article by Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Una vicenda nella Venezia barocca: Marco Trevisan e la sua “eroica amicizia,”’ Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano 2 (1960), 61–154. 57 Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (New York and Ox-

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ford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 61–7. Olivieri Secchi sees more attention to women in patrician testaments starting from the 1560s (‘“Quando mio padre,”’ 36 ff.). Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 3. On Venetian regattas see Arnaldo Segarizzi, ‘Regate di donne, freschi e passeggi a Venezia,’ Emporium 28 (September 1908), 213–24; Emanuele Cicogna, ‘Lettera di Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna a Cleandro Conte di Prata intorno ad alcune regate veneziane pubbliche e private,’ in Cleandro di Prata, La Regata di Venezia, 2nd ed. (Venice: Tip. Giambattista Merlo, 1856); and Renier Michiel, Origine delle feste veneziane, 451–8. Alexandre Toussaint Limojon, Sieur de Saint-Didier, La Ville et la République de Venise (Paris: Louis Billard, 1680), 476–82. Two examples are Anon., Relazione Della Regatta fatta il giorno di Martedì 18 Settembre 1696 … (Venice, 1696); and Anon., Relatione Della sontuosa Regata da farsi il 4 Marzo 1709. Nel Canal Grande di Venetia … (Venice, 1709). Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, eds, Barocco Romano e Barocco Italiano: Il teatro, l’effimero, l’allegoria (Rome: Gangemi, 1985); Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome: De Luca, 1997); Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, eds, Feste e apparati medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1969); Barbara Riederer-Grohs, Florentinische Feste des Spätbarocks … 1670–1743 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1978); Franco Mancini, Feste ed apparati civili e religiosi in Napoli (Naples: E.S.I., 1968) and Il concreto evanescente: Gli apparati festivi tra potere e popolo (Naples: Guida, 1982); Giovanni Isgrò, Feste barocche a Palermo (Palermo: S.F. Flaccovio, 1981). Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:899. Braudel quoted the examples of the Florentine Renaissance and the Spanish ‘Golden Age.’ Vincenzo Coronelli, Singolarità di Venezia; Navi o Vascelli ... raccolte nell’Accademia degli Argonauti (Venice: Accademia degli Argonauti, 1697). See note 23. Irène Mamczarz, ‘“La gloria d’amor” d’Aurelio Aureli et les naumachies aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,’ in Problèmes, interférences des genres au théâtre et les fêtes en Europe, ed. Mamczarz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 191–201; Giuseppe Cirillo and Giovanni Godi, Il trionfo del barocco a Parma nelle feste farnesiane del 1690 (Parma: Artegrafica Silva, 1989). Braudel, Out of Italy, 155. Ibid., 226.

chapter nine

The Algerian Economy and Cervantes’ First Work of Narrative Fiction* CARROLL B. JOHNSON

The Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century was divided into two spheres, Christian and Muslim, dominated by the Spanish and the Ottoman empires respectively. These two superpowers engaged each other politically, culturally, and religiously as rivals and enemies, much as the United States and the Soviet Union would do in the same geographical arena in the late twentieth century. Fernand Braudel fundamentally alters the binary vision of the Mediterranean as the site of competing superpowers when he contrasts the official ideological antagonism with the unifying force of international commerce. ‘Islam and Christendom faced each other along the north-south divide between the Levant and the western Mediterranean, a line running from the shores of the Adriatic to Sicily and then on to the coast of present-day Tunisia. All the great battles between Christians and Infidels were fought along this line. But merchant vessels sailed across it every day. The economy, all-invading, mingling together currencies and commodities, tended to promote unity of a kind in a world where everything else seemed to be conspiring to create clearly distinguished blocs.’1 In literary terms, the disjuncture between ideological antagonism and commecial rapprochement might be conceptualized as the disjuncture between two kinds of texts: on the one hand, an official, hegemonic discourse, always on public view, concerned with questions of good and evil and couched in terms of the differences – racial, religious, linguistic, sexual-erotic – between Christians and Muslims; on the other, an invisible discourse of another kind, concerned with maintaining the flow of merchandise and money from one side of the water to the other. The relation between these two discourses, and how that relation is enacted in the life and writing of Cervantes, is the subject of this paper.

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The Algerian economy was dominated by corsair activity, which included trade in seized merchandise and the commodification and sale of human captives. The economic concept is primitive: wealth is generated by taking it away from somebody else. The corsair economy was built on slavery as the chief source of labour and as the chief commodity. Captives taken at sea were divided into two classes that correspond to the two aspects of a commmodity delineated by traditional economic theory. The poor ones, who constituted the vast majority, were considered to have a use-value only. They were put to work rowing in the corsair ships, and they also constituted the urban labour force in the city of Algiers. The wealthy and prominent captives had an exchange value, and were held for ransom. In order to maintain their market value they were generally exempted from labour. Ransom of captives was the most important economic activity in the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century. As Braudel has noted, this trade was by no means limited to Algiers and the other Barbary ports, but was practised by Christians on the north shore as well.2 The economies of Algiers and western Europe were in fact mutually interdependent, and a number of Christian European merchantbankers were established in Algiers to provide funds for the redemption of captives. In the process, they put the indispensable Spanish escudos de oro en oro into circulation in the Algerian economy. The friars who ransomed Cervantes, for example, borrowed 220 escudos from various merchants in Algiers to add to the 280 they had already received in pledges for him in Spain.3 Cervantes became enmeshed in that regional economy, as both a commodity and a player, when he was captured and taken to Algiers to be held for ransom while he was returning from Italy to Spain in 1575. The five-year Algerian experience was arguably the most important in the writer’s life. This paper seeks to explore the relation between the identity he constructed for himself there and his role in the economy of latesixteenth-century Algiers. We have two texts from the period, a document called the Información de Argel de 1580 prepared by Cervantes himself, and the story of a particular episode from it recounted by Cervantes’ friend and fellow captive Antonio de Sosa in the Diálogo de los mártires de Argel. There is also a considerable body of miscellaneous facts and conjectures by everyone from Luis Astrana Marín in 1948 to, most recently, María Antonia Garcés in 2002. I want to expand here on some observations I made in 1995 (‘La construcción del personaje’). Specifically, I want to study the Información

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in the context of what Jean Canavaggio calls ‘Cervantes en primera persona,’ as one of the various self-portraits we know from his prologues, from the captive captain’s story in Don Quijote I, 39–41, and other semiautobiographical fictions. Canavaggio offers an opportune caveat to the notion that the texts in question accurately describe the real, historical Cervantes. Cervantes en primera persona no es una persona real y verdadera. Es un ser imaginario: elaborado, claro está, con elementos sacados de la experiencia del manco de Lepanto, pero engendrado por un ‘decir’ específico y establecido como tal por la mirada del lector. Lo que le confiere su trascendencia es, primero, la suma de atributos físico-morales que le son propios; es, también, la identidad permanente que se le otorga de modo tan espontáneo como unánime, haciendo que se llame ‘comúnmente’ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.4

The last statement is particularly important, because it situates Cervantes’ identity outside Cervantes himself, ‘conferred upon him’ by all those Others who agree to call him ‘Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.’ I would go further. We now know that the ‘permanent identity’ encoded in the name ‘Cervantes Saavedra’ is in fact an aspect of an ad hoc construction by the writer. He was not born Cervantes Saavedra; the identity encoded in that name has only been permanent since Cervantes began using it regularly, some time after his Algerian captivity, as Mauricio Molho, Françoise Zmantar, and María Antonia Garcés especially have shown.5 In reference to Cervantes’ ironically self-deprecating self-portrait in the prologue to Don Quijote (1605), E.C. Riley has written: ‘The characteristic and original art of Cervantes begins with an act of detachment from himself and from his work’6 What Riley described in 1962 as Cervantes’ almost uncanny ability to get outside himself and contemplate himself as an object can now be seen as a particularly sophisticated, ironic exercise in what Stephen Greenblatt has taught us to call ‘Renaissance self-fashioning.’ It is not that an object is being contemplated; rather, an identity is being constructed, in and through language. The identity so constructed exists and resides in a text. Identity and text are inseparable. But the verbal representation of Cervantes the writer, paralyzed by the difficulty of writing an acceptable prologue to an embarrassingly deficient book, is surely not what Cervantes the self-fashioner had in mind. As every reader remembers, the prologue becomes a narrative in which a friend enters and shows the represented Cervantes how all the attributes

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he perceives as deficiencies are in fact markers of artistic originality and excellence. The friend, not the represented Cervantes, is responsible for a positive vision of the author, in all likelihood much closer to what Cervantes the self-fashioner actually did have in mind. From this exercise we can derive first the trivial lesson that Cervantes prefers modestly to praise himself in the voice of another, and the more interesting observation that it is neither the friend nor the represented Cervantes, but the reader, who is ultimately responsible for the construction of identity here. Cervantes offers a less ironic version of self-fashioning in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (1613). At that time he was at the height of his powers, and his literary reputation had been assured by the enormous success of the first part of Don Quijote. In fact, Cervantes had become a member of the literary Establishment. In the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares he offers a kind of distanced self-portrait, with both physical and moral qualities on display. The latter derive from his heroic military career in the service of king and country, represented by two episodes in particular. ‘Fue soldado muchos años’ (‘I was a soldier for many years’), he says, referring to himself in the third person. He lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto, a wound which, ‘aunque parece fea, él la tiene por hermosa, por haberla cobrado en la más alta ocasión que vieron los pasados siglos, ni esperan ver los venideros’ (‘although it is ugly, he has it for beautiful, for having had it wounded in the greatest event that has been witnessed by past and coming centuries’). And he was for five and a half years a captive, ‘donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades’ (‘where he learned patience in the face of adversities’). He was a heroic soldier at Lepanto and a heroic captive in Algiers. But there is something not quite right in this prologue. The vision of Cervantes as heroic soldier and captive is not really offered by Cervantes himself, but by some anonymous friend who might offer it if Cervantes asked him to. It is a hypothetical portrait; it is there but it isn’t there. Cervantes begins by introducing some friend, ‘de los muchos que en el discurso de mi vida he granjeado’ (‘of the many I have gained in the course of my life’), who might have offered the verbal description, but didn’t. Then he goes on to mention the painter Juan de Jáuregui, who might have painted his portrait, but didn’t. The text we read is a hypothetical verbal caption to the hypothetical painting by Jáuregui, written about Cervantes in the third person by the hypothetical friend, which contains the pertinent information but does not identify Cervantes as its source. In his own voice he concludes by saying that the opportunity for the verbal portrait and the painting passed him by, and, he says, ‘yo he quedado en blanco

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y sin figura’(‘a blank page, without a face’): a non-existent text, verbal and pictorial. There is here the same insistence on identity as text that can be extracted from the Don Quijote prologue, this time explicit in the discourse. And there is a similarly explicit recognition that this identity must be constructed for Cervantes by the Other. The text provides the reader the materials for the job – a verbal portrait of his physical person and reference to the important (for this purpose) episodes in his life history – and in the last sentence invites the reader to create the text by filling in the ‘blank page’ using the information provided. In 1605 and 1613 Cervantes was a mature writer at the height of his powers, so the complexity we have just observed should not surprise us. What is interesting is that the same definition of identity as text and the same strategy of self-construction-by-the-Other through discourse are already present in Cervantes’ first prose work, the Información de Argel ante fray Juan Gil (1580). The Información de Argel is key to Cervantes’ literary production for three reasons. It is his first treatment of what was then becoming a pervasive theme in Spanish literature, the relations between Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean. It is his first attempt at self-fashioning and, as I hope to show, his first work of narrative fiction. He prepared this self-serving document in 1580, after he had been ransomed out of captivity but before he returned to Spain. As the centerpiece of the job search that awaited him when he got home, Cervantes constructed for himself a publicly verifiable identity as exemplary soldier, heroic captive, constant and steadfast Christian, the living embodiment of all the national ideals and official rhetoric. He wrote up a narrative of selected activities since his capture and arrival in Algiers. This narrative is devoted to a series of four escape attempts that he organized on behalf of his fellow captives. All ended in failure, and on all four occasions Cervantes escaped punishment. Two of these affairs are large-scale operations narrated in some detail. In both cases Cervantes heroically insisted on taking the rap for everyone. After he composed his narrative, Cervantes divided his text into a series of questions that begin: ‘Does the witness know or has he heard that … ?’ Then he got a dozen of his friends to come forward as witnesses to answer the questions. Their testimony was duly recorded by a notary and attested by Fr. Juan Gil, as the official in charge of redemption of captives for the Crown of Castile. The whole thing, questions and answers together, was made into an officiallooking (but not official) document and given to Cervantes to take back to Spain with him. The document mimics the format of all official government and Inquistion inquiries. The same set of questions is put to a

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series of witnesses, and their testimony is then transcribed and notarized. The chief difference is that it is Cervantes himself who determines which witnesses shall be called to testify to the truth of a narrative he himself has prepared. In a genuine official document, naturally, both the formulation of questions and the selection of witnesses are the prerogative and responsibility of the authorities. The complete title of the Información is an eloquent statement of the circumstances and the purpose of its composition: Información de Miguel de Cervantes de lo que ha servido a S.M. y de lo que ha hecho estando cautivo en Argel, y por la certificación que aquí presenta del duque de Sesa se verá como cuando le cautivaron se le perdieron muchas informaciones, fees y recados que tenía de lo que había servido a S.M. (‘Miguel de Cervantes’s report of all that he has served His Majesty and of what he has done while captive in Argel, and by the certification [notarial papers] presented here by the Duke of Sesa it would be seen when he was captured he [Cervantes] lost a lot of information, testimonies, and messages that he had validating how he had served His Majesty’).7 We should begin by rehearsing the narrative movement created by the questions to be asked of the witnesses. The questions are not real questions, for example, ‘who is Miguel de Cervantes?’ but statements prefaced by an interrogative: ‘Does the witness know or has he heard that Cervantes is an Old Christian, an hidalgo, and considered as such by everyone?’ By eliminating the interrogative tags and the formulaic procedural language, the discourse can be recast as narrative prose and divided into episodes or ‘chapters.’ If we perform this operation, we see that this text was originally conceived as a coherent narrative by and about Cervantes, to which witnesses are invited to assent at more or less natural stopping-points. The format of the document facilitates this operation, because the questions are all grouped together in numbered sequence at the beginning. This block of text is what Cervantes himself composed. The witnesses’ testimony follows, and comprises an independent block of text, separated from the questions. The testimony is referenced to each question by number, but the text of the question is not repeated. In order to read a question and then a witness’s answer to that question, that is, in order to reproduce the sequence of events that took place during the interrogation, it is necessary to flip back and forth between questions and answers, a cumbersome process that the format of the document discourages. The text authored by Cervantes divides itself as follows. Numbers are the numbers of the questions put to the witnesses. Preamble (1) and in-

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troduction of the protagonist (2–3). The narrative begins. It is the story of four heroic but unsuccessful attempts to escape. First attempt: overland to the Spanish garrison at Orán (4). Second attempt: Cervantes’ brother Rodrigo arranges for a boat (5), Cervantes hides other captives in a cave, a renegade denounces the plot to the authorities (6–9). Cervantes is hauled before Hasan Veneciano, the king of Algiers (10). Third attempt: letters to Orán. Cervantes is condemned to two thousand lashes (11–12). There is a gap in Cervantes’ discourse here; the two thousand lashes are not narrated. In another section of the document, a witness observes that Cervantes escaped punishment ‘porque hubo buenos terceros’ (‘because he had good terceros [meaning here protectors]’), but Cervantes’ own discourse suggests that the lashes were in fact administered. Fourth and final escape attempt: the Valencian merchant Onofre Ejarque buys a boat for Cervantes and other captives (13–14), Doctor Juan Blanco de Paz denounces the plot, Cervantes goes into hiding (15– 16). Cervantes gives himself up and appears a second time before Hasan. He is ransomed in the nick of time, just moments before Hasan was to ship him to Constantinople (17). The narrative ends here, but the document continues, first with a moral portrait of Cervantes, divided into three sections. Cervantes is an exemplary captive (18). Cervantes is the friend and confidant of the most influential Christians in Algiers (19). Cervantes is not a sodomite (20). A second section narrates how Juan Blanco de Paz attempted to victimize Cervantes (21–5). End of the text composed by Cervantes. I turn now to an analysis of Cervantes’ text in terms of the normal literary categories. Plot. It is interesting to note how well plotted Cervantes’ narrative is. E.M. Forster many years ago defined a plot as a narrative structured by cause and effect, and more recently Hayden White has extended the phenomenon of what he calls ‘emplotment’ to the construction of historical, non-fictional narrative. Cervantes is always careful to provide that structure of cause and effect, in the form of his own and his enemies’ motivation for their behaviour. Three brief examples are found in Appendix I. Intention. Cervantes had thought he was going to be well recompensed in Spain when he returned from Italy in 1575. Alas, the identity he had forged as heroic soldier at Lepanto in 1571, and which existed officially, validated and authenticated in the letters from Don Juan de Austria and the Duque de Sessa, was becoming irrelevant to the situation in Spain as the years in captivity rolled by, and was in fact practically useless in securing him the kind of government post he desired. So in 1580,

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on the eve of his actual return to Spain to begin the job search, he set about fabricating a new one, this time as heroic captive in Algiers. In a historical period and especially in a society where identity did not reside in onself, but in the Other, Cervantes’ strategy is to provide the Other with the materials necessary to construct for him the identity he wished, and then to cause those materials to exist in a text, an official-looking document. As in the hypothetical caption to the hypothetical portrait in the Novelas ejemplares prologue, the third-person narrative format further masks Cervantes’ active role in this process. Story and discourse. Our mission as we read this text is exactly the same as our mission when we read any narrative text, fictional or nonfictional: we attempt to reconstruct the story (the events and their meaning) from the discourse we have before us. It is apparent what story this particular discourse is trying to tell, or is supposed to be telling: Cervantes was a hero, who conceived his mission the entire time he was in captivity as aiding and comforting other Christians and helping them to escape. But there is also a story the discourse is hiding, which we can perhaps begin to bring to light. It seems to me that what Cervantes was doing, arranging all the escape attempts and assuming full responsibility, sounds like what a modern-day coyote does along the US-Mexico border. He smuggles human beings across a dangerous, forbidden frontier, for a fee. In the Algerian context this correlative business would be a natural dialectical response to the principal economic activity of capturing human beings, commodifying them, and holding them for ransom. I believe that the self-serving fictional rhetoric of the document masks or is secretly inhabited by a particularly damning reality, namely that Cervantes was in the business of smuggling captives out of Algiers, and that the heroic escape attempts he narrates were really just instances of professional activity, the very negation of all the official values and rhetoric. I also believe this discrepancy between fact and fiction is mainly what accounts for Cervantes’ obsessive return again and again to the theme of Muslims and Christians and especially for the hyperbolic superpatriotism of the Algerian captivity plays and the episodes in La Galatea and the Persiles. I am led to this hypothesis by the following considerations. First, all the captives involved are personas principales (important persons). On the one hand, this appears to document Cervantes’ membership in the same group; these men were just his friends. But they could also be his clients, and they would need to be principales in order to afford his services. Sec-

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ond, Cervantes insists on taking full and sole responsibility for all these attempted escapes. On the one hand, this is an exercise of Christian charity and constancy. Indeed, it raises Cervantes to Christ-like heights of sacrifice for his friends, and suggests an analogous identification of Blanco de Paz with Judas. On the other hand, and in view of the repeated comments about how grateful all the principales were that he had not implicated them or revealed their true market value as commodities, it could be that he was not so noble and self-sacrificing, and that assuming responsibility was part of the deal he had negotiated with his clients. Finally, Cervantes brokered two boat purchases in connection with two escape attempts. The first time (1577) he took money that had been sent to ransom him but which proved insufficient and instructed his brother Rodrigo to use it to buy a fragata. This must have involved either sending the money back from Algiers to Spain via letra de cambio or having Rodrigo buy the boat on credit, to be repaid COD when the captives all returned to Spain. The second time (1579) he gets the Valencian merchant Onofre Ejarque to advance 1300 Algerian doblas to buy a boat through the agency of the Muslim Abd ah-Ramén (né Girón), who was about to renege again and return to Christianity. At the very least, these boat purchases suggest an entrepreneurial spirit. This raises the classic and absolutely crucial ‘Cervantes-in-captivity’ question: how could Cervantes afford to assume responsibility for offences that were much graver than those routinely punished by slicing off ears, slitting noses, impalement, decapitation, and other forms of execution? Traditionally it has been assumed that Cervantes performed these heroic deeds at enormous risk, and that he was in fact prepared to sacrifice his life for his king, his faith, and his comrades. This vision, derived almost exclusively from Cervantes’ own Información and rather too naively idealistic for the cynical times we live in, has been called into question. One recent hypothesis, advanced particularly by Rosa Rossi and Fernando Arrabal, is that Hasán Veneciano spared Cervantes because he was sexually attracted to him.8 In the latest variation on the ‘sexual attraction’ theme, Michael D. McGaha conjectures that Zahara, the daughter of the influential Ragusan convert Hajji Murad, was attracted to Cervantes and took him as her lover. When she married Hasán Veneciano in 1580 she was able to intercede on Miguel’s behalf.9 This thesis has been seconded by Helena Percas de Ponseti. Emilio Sola and José F. de la Peña conjecture that Cervantes may have been a secret agent of the Spanish crown and recognized as such by his Algerian captors, who assumed he had some authority to negotiate. Jean Canavaggio is inclined

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toward this hypothesis; he also suggests that Zahara’s father Hajji Murad, the Sultan’s chaúz or representative in Algiers, might have played a role himself. On two occasions Hajji Murad made secret overtures toward Spain.10 Another hypothesis, defended recently by Alberto Sánchez, is that Cervantes was simply too valuable a commodity to destroy. Hasán couldn’t afford to punish him, except by imprisonment in isolation.11 Cervantes could afford to assume responsibility because Hasán could not afford to execute him. The operative word here is ‘afford.’ This is an economic situation. With one stroke we get rid of all the official rhetoric about serving God and King and coming to the aid of Christians, and all the dubious speculation about homoeroticism. What we have instead is business. Cervantes turns the fact of his own commodification into ... a commodity! The fact that he is valuable becomes his capital, his caudal, what he trades on. We come back to texts. Cervantes’ identity in Algiers resides in the texts of those letters from Don Juan de Austria and the Duque de Sessa. That identity might be ‘valuable spy’; it most certainly is ‘valuable commodity.’ Those texts, those documents, which may be said to be his capital, are analogous to a merchant’s letter of credit, which he deposits on his arrival in a city and on the strength of which he is allowed to conduct business there. It should be kept in mind that ‘credit,’ or belief, is the key concept in the construction of an identity: the merchant presents a letter of credit; the ambassador presents his credentials. On the strength of these texts a structure of belief is created. This initial act of credit founds all succeeding acts of credit, those that occur every day and which allow commerce to happen. Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar have demonstrated that it was possible to be a Christian captive in Algiers and simultaneously be involved in the business of ransoming Christian captives, for a fee. They cite the case of the captive Christian captain Defendi Massarolo, of Ferrara, who had been favoured by his master (and countryman) the renegade corsair captain (arráez) Ali Ferrarese, and who participated from his captivity in the business of ransoming other Christian slaves: ‘Le pauvre chrétien qui, selon ses dires, bénéficiait des aumônes d’Ali raïs cinq ans après sa capture, se livrait, trois ans plus tard, à des opérations financières d’une certaine envergadure … En 1617, par deux fois, le captif fit attester les sommes versées à Tunis pour le rachat d’esclaves chrétiens, sommes qui étaient généralement remboursées par les captifs à leur retour en Chrétienté. On le voit, la servitude du capitaine était douce!’12 I believe that Cervantes was what in my part of the world is called a

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coyote, and what Braudel, in the Algerian context, calls a passeur. The ensemble of texts authored by Cervantes and his friends comes suggestively close to documenting this hypothesis. Some fairly lengthy citations will allow the suppressed commercial subtext to be glimpsed below the surface of the discourse. [At this point in the text, Professor Johnson provides a long list of quotations from Cervantes’ Información de Argel and from other sources which aim to show that Cervantes identifies himself repeatedly, obsessively, as a persona principal. His clients were also personas principales.] (See Appendix II.) [Johnson’s narrative continues.] Clearly, all these Christians – aristocrats, merchants, ecclesiastics – are heavily in Cervantes’ debt, but money is mentioned only once. The document uses the official rhetoric of religious fervour and aristocratic noblesse oblige to mask what had to have been a commercial arrangement. Cervantes’ awareness, at some level of his psychic apparatus, of the secret reality behind the ideologically correct mask is probably why he returns so obsessively to the theme of moros y cristianos and to the question of constancy and heroism in captivity throughout his career. I find myself in disagreement with the hypothesis proposed recently by María Antonia Garcés in Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale, an otherwise splendid contribution to Cervantes studies. Garcés insists on the trauma Cervantes suffered during his Algerian captivity and she reads the Información de Argel as his first attempt to come to terms with that trauma, to work through it, or, making the nice distinction derived from her extensive research on trauma theory, to work out of it. Both Garcés and I base ourselves on Freud, who tells us that when a person re-enacts the same behaviour over and over he is returning to an unresolved conflict in search of a resolution. Lacan considers this dynamic, known as repetition compulsion, one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Garcés argues that the various cervantine texts derived from the experience of captivity and beginning with the Información de Argel represent the writer’s successive attempts to distance himself from the trauma and efface the psychic scars as much as possible. My interpretation of the same data is more cynical. Cervantes knew he was not in fact the old-style hero he constructs in this document. He knew he was never really at risk when he was laying himself on the line for his fellow Christians, and he feels some pangs of conscience, especially after writing things like the following: En lo cual corría grandísimo peligro de la vida y de ser enganchado y quemado vivo [‘In which he ran great danger for his life and of being taken and

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burned alive’] (6). En lo cual manifiestamente se puso a peligro de muerte [‘During which he placed his life in manifest danger’] (9). Cervantes respondió, animándole, que estuviese cierto que ningunos tormentos ni la misma muerte sería bastante para que él condenase a ninguno sino a él mismo. Y lo mismo dijo a todos los que del negocio sabían, animándoles que no tuviesen miedo, porque él tomaba sobre sí el peso de aquel negocio aunque tenía cierto morir por ello (16). [‘Cervantes answered, giving encouragement to his listeners, since they should be certain that no torture, nor even death itself would be sufficient to make him denounce anyone but himself. And the same he told to those involved in the business, encouraging them not to be afraid, because he took all the weight of that venture even if he had to die for it.’] Amenazándole el rey con muchos tormentos … y mandandole, por más atemorizarle, poner un cordel a la garganta y atar las manos atrás, como que le querían ahorcar (17). [‘The king threatened him with many tortures ... ordering, to make him even more afraid, to put a rope around his neck and tie his hands behind as if they were to hang him.’]

If Cervantes was ashamed about something, it was that he knew he was never really at risk because he was too valuable a commodity to destroy, and that he knew he was betraying the official aristocratic values by taking money for what the code said he should have been doing simply because he was noble. Before closing, I want to revisit the role of the friends-clients-witnesses, to consider their overall relationship to Cervantes and to the self-fashioning he performs in the Información. This exercise grows out of an observation I had made, but which because it wouldn’t fit neatly into my thesis I kept repressing, namely the active role of the witnesses in creating Cervantes’ story. Several of them offer extended commentary and even narrative of particular episodes. Domingo Lopino has a lot to say about his own personal relationship with Blanco de Paz (22, 23, 24, 25). He also expresses envy that Cervantes was so well liked by so many VIPs (19). Rodrigo de Chaves supplies some particulars about Blanco de Paz (15), and the arráez Maltrapillo (16). The alférez Luis de Pedrosa’s father knew Cervantes’ grandfather, Juan de Cervantes (3). Cervantes consulted Pedrosa in particular concerning the trustworthiness of the renegade who was to purchase the fragata (13). Fray Feliciano Enríquez expands on the sodomy question (20). Don Diego de Benavides offers additional testimony about Cervantes’ character (3).

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Cervantes’ friend Dr. Antonio de Sosa is a special case. He was a witness to the Información de Argel, and he also narrates the escape attempt involving the cave, in a separate work entitled Diálogo de los mártires de Argel, traditionally attributed to Fr. Diego de Haedo and not published until 1612. Sosa was not interrogated with the other witnesses called by Cervantes in 1580, because his master kept him chained to the furniture in a room in his house. Sosa gave his testimony in the form of a deposition. Curiously, he is the only participant in the document who refers to himself in the first person. In fact, his deposition can be read as his own exercise of self-fashioning. Although physically isolated from his fellow captives, Sosa presents himself as a kind of nerve centre of all their activities and dealings. He knew everyone, and he was everyone’s confidant. All the clandestine escape attempts passed through him. He was always invited to be a participant, and the organizers always consulted him on tactics and strategy. Cervantes in particular cleared all his plans with him. In his Diálogo de los mártires de Argel, Sosa offers a version of the episode of the captives hidden by Cervantes in the cave, who were betrayed by El Dorador (questions 6–9 in Cervantes’ Información). Sosa extends himself in what can only be called an advertisement for Cervantes. [In the original text, Johnson includes here long quotes from Sosa’s Diálogo de los martires de Argel (in footnote) which glorified Cervantes’ actions in captivity and emphasized Hasan Baja, king of Argel’s fear of Miguel de Cervantes.]13 Sosa’s texts corroborate Cervantes’ own narrative and provide new material for the construction of Cervantes’ identity independent of that authored by his friend. The most striking of these independent commentaries, however, is the story Juan de Balcázar recounts about Cervantes and five muchachos, a code term for boys who have converted to Islam and who have become the bardaj or homosexual protegé of a powerful older man. Cervantes convinces these wayward youths to renounce the life they have chosen, to escape from their masters while at sea, and return to Christianity. This is the kind of triumphalist episode Cervantes will later recount in the Algerian captivity plays, attributing the heroism to fictional doubles. Balcázar’s narrative situates Cervantes himself at the centre of it.14 My thesis at first would not allow for these independent acts of creation, until I saw how they were in fact not so independent. As I observed at the beginning of this essay, the act of self-fashioning is actually performed by an Other, not by Cervantes himself. Cervantes provides the material from which the Other, in this case the reader of the text,

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can construct the public Cervantes. The additional discourse authored by the witnesses provides additional material for the reader to use as he performs that task. Some of the observations provided by the witnesses, for example Balcázar’s semi-hagiographic narrative, would have stepped over the line separating modest heroism from vain boasting had Cervantes enunciated them himself. In this sense they resemble the comments offered by the fictional friend of the represented Cervantes in the prologue to Don Quijote I in 1605. We can trace a progression throughout Cervantes’ career of this practice of locating significant raw material for the operation of creation of a public identity outside himself. Here in the 1580 Información we see Cervantes manipulating real people. In the 1605 prologue there is a fictitious character, the friend, who appears in the represented Cervantes study and has a conversation with him. In the final phase, the 1613 Novelas ejemplares prologue, the fictional but represented friend has become a reference to a hypothetical, absent friend. This progressive abstraction exactly parallels the progression María Antonia Garcés has noted in what she considers Cervantes’ attempts to master the psychic trauma of the experience of captivity, from the conflicted doubled characters of Los tratos de Argel to the two phony captives in the Persiles at the end of his career, who finally receive official permission to make their living telling fictions about captivity, as long as they are verisimilar fictions. Virtually everything we think we know about Cervantes in Algiers we know from a series of texts, authored by Cervantes himself, by the friends he called to validate his account of himself, and by his good friend Antonio de Sosa. I read these texts as we all read all texts, attempting to reconstruct the story on the basis of the discourse. It is highly unlikely, or as the Aristotelian poetics current in Cervantes’ time would say, highly inverisimilar, given what we know from a variety of sources, that any captive could have got away with the things Cervantes recounts: the foiled escape attempts in themselves, and especially the total absence of punishment by Hasán Pasha. The historical question becomes how he was able to pull this off. The analogous literary question is how can this improbable, inverisimilar story be brought within the orbit of verisimilitude. My hypothesis, which I derive from Alberto Sánchez and documentation of other cases provided by Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, depends on Cervantes’ status as a valuable commodity and locates the escape attempts within the sphere of commmercial activity. While conceding their status as fact, this strategy removes them from the realm of personal heroism, and religious and patriotic fervour. The text’s rheto-

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ric, that is, the motivation offered for the events recounted, which assumes and depends on those ideological categories, is thus revealed as a fiction. But it is a fiction that exacts a psychological price from its author, because it creates a public Cervantes at variance with what Cervantes knew about himself. This is why he not only returns obsessively to Algiers and his Algerian experience as a source of thematic material throughout his writing career, he also returns to the question of the relationship between event and text, the same relationship that informs the Información de Argel.

Appendix I From the Información de Argel: I. Miguel de Cervantes, deseando servir a Dios y a Su Majestad y hacer bien a cristianos, como es de su condición, … (14). II. Viendo Cervantes el cruel bando que contra quien le tuviese escondido se había echado, por respecto a que no viniese mal a un cristiano que le tenía escondido, y temiendo también que si él no parecía el rey buscaría otro a quien atormentar o de quien saber la verdad del caso, luego de su propia voluntad se fue a presentar ante el rey (17). III. El doctor Juan Blanco, viéndose aborrecido de todos, corrido y afrentado y ciego de pasión, amenazaba a Cervantes diciendo que había de tomar información contra él para hacerle perder el crédito y toda la pretensión que tenía de que Su Majestad le había de hacer merced por lo que había hecho e intentado de hacer en este Argel (21).

Appendix II Note: Number of pages is in reference to the Información de Aragel unless otherwise noted. 1 / Cervantes es cristiano viejo, hijodalgo, y en tal tenido y comúnmente reputado y tratado de todos (3). 2 / Cervantes se perdió en la galera Sol … con otras personas principales que allí se perdieron (2). 3 / Llegado cautivo en este Argel, su amo, Dalimán arráez, renegado griego, le tuvo en lugar de caballero principal, y como a tal le tenía encerrado y cargado de grillos y cadenas (4).

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4 / En 1577, habiéndole sus deudos enviado dineros para su rescate y no pudiendo acordarse con su patrón, porque le tenía por hombre de mucha calidad (5). 5 / Cervantes mandó una carta al señor marqués don Martín de Córdoba, general de Orán y de su fuerzas, y a otras personas principales, sus amigos y conocidos en Orán ... le llevasen a él y a otros tres caballeros principales que el rey en su baño tenía (11). 6 / Deseando servir a Dios y a su Majestad y hacer bien a muchos cristianos: caballeros, letrados, sacerdotes que al presente se hallaban cautivos en este Argel (5). 7 / Y para mejor efectuar esto se favoreció del favor de don Antonio de Toledo y de Francisco de Valencia, caballeros del hábito de San Juan [i.e., de Malta], que entonces estaban en este Argel cautivos, los cuales le dieron cartas para los visorreyes de Valencia y Mallorca y Ibiza, encargándoles y suplicándoles favoreciesen el negocio (5). [Johnson’s comment is inserted here. Don Antonio de Toledo was the brother of the fifth conde de Alba de Liste, Don Diego Henríquez de Guzmán, virrey de Sicilia. Francisco de Valencia, natural de Zamora, held important political and military positions. He was with the Duque de Alba in the Italian campaigns, he carried out various diplomatic missions in London, Flanders etc. He fortified Orán. He participated in the conquest of Portugal in 1580. In 1596 Felipe II named him to the consejo de Guerra. (Astrana Marín, II, 540, n. 1)] 8 / [Cervantes] dio orden como catorce cristianos de los principales que entonces había en Argel cautivos se escondiesen en una cueva (6). 9 / Muy secretamente dio parte de este negocio a muchos caballeros, letrados, sacerdotes y cristianos que en este Argel estaban cautivos, y otros de los más principales, que estuviesen a punto y se apercibiesen para cierto día, con intención de hacerlos embarcar a todos y llevar a tierra de cristianos, y toda gente de la más florida de Argel (14). 10 / En todo el tiempo en que Cervantes ha estado en este Argel cautivo, siempre y de contino ha tratado, comunicado y conversado con los más principales hombres cristianos, así sacerdotes, letrados, caballeros y otros criados de Su Majestad con mucha familiaridad, los cuales se holgaban de tenerle por amigo y tratar y conversar con él. Y particularmente es verdad que los muy reverendos padres redentores que aquí han venido, como el muy reverendo padre fray Jorge del Olivar, redentor de la corona de Aragón, y el muy reverendo padre fray Juan Gil, redentor de la corona de Castilla, le han tratado, comunicado y conversado con él, teniéndole a su mesa y conservándole en su estrecha amistad (19).

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[Author’s comment is inserted here:] Cervantes takes control and insists on assuming responsibility. This includes physical maintenance of the clients for six months while they were hiding in the cave. 11 / Deseando hacer bien y dar libertad a algunos cristianos, buscó un moro que a él y a ellos los llevase por tierra a Orán (4). 12 / Deseando servir a Dios y a su Majestad y hacer bien a muchos cristianos: ... dio orden como un hermano suyo que se llama Rodrigo de Cervantes ... pusiese en orden y enviase de la plaza de Valencia, de Mallorca y de Ibiza una fragata armada para llevar en España a los dichos cristianos (5). 13 / Esperando la dicha fragata, [Cervantes] dio orden como catorce cristianos de los principales que entonces había en Argel cautivos se escondiesen en una cueva, la cual había él de antes procurado fuera de la ciudad, ... y allí les proveyó y procuró proveer, y que otras personas proveyesen de lo necesario, teniendo Cervantes el cuidado cotidiano de enviarles toda la provisión (6). 14 / En efecto, la fragata vino conforme a la orden que Cervantes había dado, y en el tiempo que había señalado (7). 15 / Viendo Cervantes que eran descubiertos, dijo a sus compañeros que todos le echasen a él la culpa, prometiéndoles de condenarse él solo, con deseo que tenía de salvarlos a todos. Y así, en tanto que los moros los maniataban, dijo en voz alta, que los turcos y moros le oyeron: ‘Ninguno de estos cristianos que aquí están tiene culpa en este negocio, porque yo solo he sido el autor de él y el que los ha inducido a que se huyesen’ (9). 16 / Presentado así, maniatado y todo, ante el rey Hasán, [Cervantes] con mucha constancia dijo que él era el autor de todo aquel negocio y que suplicaba a su alteza, si había de castigar a alguno, fuese a él solo, pues él solo tenía la culpa de todo. Y por muchas preguntas que [el rey] le hizo, nunca quiso nombrar ni culpar a ningún cristiano. En lo cual es cierto que libró a muchos de la muerte, … y a otros de grandísimos trabajos (10). 17 / [Cervantes] hizo con Onofre Ejarque, mercader de Valencia que entonces se hallaba en este Argel, diese como más de mil y trescientas doblas para que comprase una fragata armada, persuadiéndole que ninguna otra cosa podía hacer más honrosa ni al servicio de Dios y de Su Majestad más acepta, lo cual así se hizo. Y el dicho renegado compró la fragata de doce bancos y la puso a punto, gobernándose en todo por el consejo y orden del dicho Miguel de Cervantes (13). 18 / Cervantes nunca quiso nombrar ni condenar a alguno, diciendo siempre al rey, con mucha constancia, que él fuera el autor y otros cuatro

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caballeros que se habían ido en libertad, los cuales habían de ir con él, y que si más gente había de llevar que ninguno lo sabía ni había de saber hasta el mismo día (17). [Johnson’s gloss on the text and list of the statements by ‘personas principales’ about Cervantes.] The personas principales are particularly grateful not to be implicated, and to have been able to conceal their own status as valuable commodities. This is not so apparent from Cervantes’ discourse; it surfaces especially in the testimony of witnesses. It is important to note that, of the twelve witnesses Cervantes called, nine identify themselves as participants in the 1579 escape attempt, the one that was foiled by Blanco de Paz. Of the three who were not, one (Hernando de Vega) was probably too old, at age 58; the second ( Juan de Balcázar) was at sea with his master Dalí Mamí; and the third (Don Diego de Benavides) had not yet arrived in Algiers. In other words, Cervantes’ witness list draws heavily on what I take to be his client list. Here is their testimony. Witnesses: 1 / Alonso Aragonés: ‘Este testigo fue uno de los que el dicho Miguel de Cervantes llamó y aconsejó se apercibiesen para el dicho negocio, y sabe que si viniera en efecto, tuvieran libertad muchas personas principales, que serían cantidad de sesenta cristianos, los más lucidos y principales que en aquel tiempo estaban en Argel’ (15). ‘Y este testigo tiene por cosa cierta que si Cervantes dijera lo que sabía, que muchos caballeros que estaban en el negocio, tenidos de sus patrones y amos por gente pobre, fueran descubiertos y vinieran a manos de Hasán Bajá rey de Argel, de quien no se rescataran sino por precios excesivos. Y fuera de esto, los mercaderes perdieran sus haciendas y quedaran cautivos’ (18). 2 / El alférez Diego Castellano: ‘Cervantes procuró hacer … que se llevase en libertad muchos cristianos …, de los más principales del cautiverio, entre los cuales había caballeros, letrados y sacerdotes y soldados muy particulares, y Cervantes los avisó muy secretamente que estuviesen apercibidos para un día …, y … avisó … a más de sesenta cristianos, y este testigo era uno de ellos’ (13). 3 / Rodrigo de Chaves: ‘Todo lo contenido en esta pregunta sabe este testigo ser verdad como hombre participante en este negocio’ (14). ‘Siempre procuró con grande ánimo, constancia y discreción echarse a sí la culpa y no a otro ninguno, hasta que se vino a zafar por buenos términos de manos del rey. De lo cual por todos los cristianos cautivos de Argel fue loado el dicho Miguel de Cervantes, y tenido en más reputación y corona que antes, por hacer negocio tan bueno’ (16).

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4 / Hernando de Vega: ‘Echándose a sí toda la carga y culpa por salvar a otros muchos cristianos que estaban metidos en el negocio, que eran en gran número, los cuales o la mayor parte de ellos corrieran mucho detrimento de sus personas, así de muertos de palos, como cortarles orejas, narices, como lo acostumbra a hacer por casos y negocios de menos importancia y calidad, por ser tan cruelísimo y de poca humanidad el dicho rey. Por las cuales causas el dicho Miguel de Cervantes fue tenido en mucha reputación y corona más que la que antes tenía respecto de haber sido hombre de mucho ánimo y constancia en haber reservado a tantas personas principales de tan grave y atrocísimo peligro’ (17). 5 / Domingo Lopino: ‘Este testigo era consorte en este negocio’ (13). ‘Después de haberse sabido dirimir y zafar de manos del rey de Argel cuyo nombre tiene de cruel y asesinador de cristianos, este testigo a Cervantes desde aquella hora lo tuvo en más reputación y corona, pues de razón debía ser galardonado por ello de cristianos muy principales caballeros que había entre ellos, respecto de haberlos reservado de detrimentos de muertes y otras afrentas y lástimas que personalmente habían de padecer’ (17). 6 / Fernando de Vega: ‘Este testigo, como consorte en el negocio, se escondió’ (16). ‘[Cervantes] envió a decir a muchas personas que estaban fuera escondidas sobre este negocio que no tuvieran temor ninguno ni pesadumbre, que él descargaría a todos y se haría solo a él daño, echándose la carga y culpa, y que todos, uno por uno, de mano en mano, se avisasen que si los prendiesen por el negocio, que todos estuviesen advertidos de echarle a él la carga, como autor del negocio, y así muchos lo divulgaban’ (17). 7 / Cristóbal de Villalón: ‘Este testigo era participante en el negocio’ (13). ‘Miguel de Cervantes le dijo a este testigo … que no se escondiese ni tuviese miedo ninguno, que él en semejante ocasión usaría el término que deben usar los hombres de valor, ánimo y constancia. Y así este testigo se reportó y no hizo ausencia, y tomó grande ánimo por lo que Miguel de Cervantes le dijo. El cual así lo cumplió …, pues a ninguno hizo mal ni daño, ni condenó, sino antes les enviaba a decir dende la prisión que si alguno prendiesen, que le descargase con el dicho Miguel de Cervantes, echándole a él solo la culpa’(16). 8 / El alférez Luis de Pedrosa: ‘Este testigo era uno de los principales consortes en este negocio’ (14). ‘Cervantes se dirimió, cargó y descargó a sí y a otros, de forma que salió de las manos crueles del rey de Argel, cuyo nombre, fama y obras eran asesinador de cristianos. Finalmente, que por hacerlo tan discretamente, Cervantes cobró gran fama, loa y

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honra y corona, y era digno de grande premio’ (17). [Johnson’s gloss to the text.] Pedrosa makes an important distinction between clients (gente principal) and employees (gentes comunes que [Cervantes] tenía prevenidos para el remo). ‘Había trabajado mucho en buscar muchas personas principales que entrasen en ello, como buscó y entraban de más de otras gentes comunes, hombres de hecho [¿pecho, i.e., pecheros?] que tenía prevenidos para el remo’ (21). 9 / Fray Feliciano Enríquez actually admits to giving Cervantes money. ‘Este testigo ... fue uno de los participantes en este negocio, y estuvo preso con el dicho renegado y Cervantes, y que aun para algunas prevenciones dio algunos dineros, porque por momentos tenía la libertad en las manos’ (13). 10 / El doctor Antonio de Sosa: ‘Lo entendí de personas que tenían a cargo saber lo que pasaba con el rey el dicho Cervantes, por respecto del temor en que estaban muy muchos cristianos no fuesen ellos descubiertos y el rey los mandase matar o tomar por esclavos’ (17).

NOTES * This posthumous article is published in this collection with some editorial changes, translations, and minor revisions, and in honour of the late and distinguished scholar of Cervantes, Carroll Johnson. 1 Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th– 18th Century, vol. 3, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 22. 2 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 2:867. 3 Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 149. See also Luis Astana Marín, Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, 4 vols. (Madrid: Reus, 1948–58), 3:89–91. For a general description of the Algerian slave economy, see Ciro Manca, Il modello di sviluppo economico delle città maritime barbaresche dopo Lepanto (Naples: Istituto Universitario Navale, 1982), 14–15, 70, 141–52. 4 Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes entre vida y creación (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2000), 69–70: ‘Cervantes in the first person is not a real and true person. He is an imagined being: elaborated, of course, with

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experiences drawn from the “manco” (maimed armed man) of Lepanto, but created by a specific saying (decir) and established as such by the gaze of the reader. That which grants him transcendence is, first and foremost, the sum of his own physical and moral attributes. It is also the permanent identity that it is granted to him in such a spontaneous fashion, making him to be known commonly as Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.’ Mauricio Molho, ‘Cervantes and the Terrible Mothers,’ in Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes, ed. El Saffar and Wilson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 240–1; Françoise Zmantar, ‘Saavedra et les captifs du Trato de Argel de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,’ in L’autobiographie dans le monde hispanique. Actes du Colloque de la Baume-lès-Aix, Mai, 1979 (Aixen-Provence: Publications Université de Provence, 1980), 189–92; María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 191–202. E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), 27. See Miguel de Cervantes, Información de Miguel de Cervantes de lo que ha servido a S.M. y de lo que ha hecho estando cautivo en Argel, y por la certificación que aquí presenta del duque de Sesa se verá como cuando le cautivaron se le perdieron muchas informaciones, fees y recados que tenía de lo que había servido a S.M (1580), ed. Pedro Torres Lanzas (Madrid: El Arbol, 1981). Rosa Rossi, Sulle tracce di Cervantes: Profilo inedito dell’autore del ‘Chisciote’ (Rome: Riuniti, 1997), 16–17; Fernando Arrabal, Un esclavo llamado Cervantes (Madrid: Espasa, 1996), 156. Michael D. McGaha, ‘Hacia la verdadera historia del cautivo Miguel de Cervantes,’ Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 20 (1996), 555. Helena Percas de Ponseti, ‘¿Quién era Belerma?’ Revista Hispánica Moderna 49 (1996), 389; Emilio Sola and José F. de la Peña, Cervantes y la Berbería: Cervantes, mundo turco-berberesco y servicios secretos en la época de Felipe II (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 63–4, 156–82; Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, en busca del perfil perdido (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1992), 99–100. Alberto Sánchez, ‘Revisión del cautiverio cervantino en Argel,’ Cervantes 17, 1 (1997), 7–24. Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des ‘renégats’ XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 395–6. Dr Antonio Sosa, Diálogo de los mártires de Argel (1612), ed. Emilio Sola and José María Parreño (Madrid: Hiperión, 1990), 180–1: ‘Y si a su ánimo – e industria y trazas – correspondiera la ventura, hoy fuera el día que Argel fuera de cristianos, porque no aspiraban a menos sus intentos’ (180). ‘De las cosas que en aquella cueva sucedieron en el discurso de los siete meses

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que estos cristianos estuvieron en ella, y del cautiverio y hazañas de Miguel de Cervantes, se pudiera hacer una particular historia. Decía Hasán Bajá, rey de Argel, que como él tuviese guardado al estropeado español, tenía seguros sus cristianos, bajeles y aun toda la ciudad. Tanto era lo que temía las trazas de Miguel de Cervantes’ (181). 14 Cervantes, Información, 18: ‘El dicho Miguel de Cervantes, en todo el tiempo que este testigo lo conoce en Argel, ha vivido muy bien, virtuosa y cristianamente, así en su trato como en hacer bien y limosnas a pobres cautivo, sustentándoles de comer y pagándoles sus jornadas, para el efecto de evitar que sus patrones no les maltratasen de darles palos y otros malos tratamientos. Asímismo sabe y vio este testigo como a cinco muchachos que eran renegados de los más principales turcos de Argel, el dicho Miguel de Cervantes les animó y confortó, dándoles aviso e industria que yendo en viaje en galeras con sus patrones, para huirse en tierra de cristianos, respecto de que los dichos muchachos eran del arráez de galeotas, como en especial fueron los dos de ellos, del capitán mayor de Argel, Arnaute Mamí, y otros dos del patrón de este testigo y Cervantes, que era Dalí Mamí, que también es capitán por el Gran Turco, y los demás de particulares. Lo cual, si no fuera por el buen industria y ánimo de Cervantes, que les dio, los dichos muchachos se estuvieran todavía en Argel, fueran moros y prosiguieran en su mala inclinación y sucedieran en los oficios de sus amos, porque los tales renegados privan mucho en esta tierra con los semejantes patrones. Y no solamente hizo un solo bien Cervantes en encaminarles que se volvieran a la verdadera fe de Jesucristo que de antes tenían, mas evitó a que permaneciesen en andar por la mar en corso, martirizando a los cristianos que bogaban al remo por hacerse bien querer de sus patrones y amos.’

chapter ten

Braudel and the Cultural History of the Mediterranean: Anthropology and Les lieux d’histoire 1 JAMES AMELANG

One does not usually walk away from reading Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean thinking about what has been left out. The range and magnitude of his achievement overwhelm the reader, as was surely the author’s intention. Still, it may not be inappropriate for the opening paper in a colloquium devoted to Cultural Transmission in the Mediterranean World to state the obvious: that wide as was Braudel’s total vision of the Mediterranean and its history, it signally failed to embrace culture in general and, while we are at it, religion in particular. As to why this is, one can only speculate. However, it will not do simply to chalk it up to his supposed ecological determinism, and the resulting relegation of culture to the status of epiphenomenon. After all, Braudel famously regarded politics as similar icing on the cake. Yet to forestall traditionalist detractors who might seize on this to dismiss his work as a negative ideal-type of Trevelyan’s ‘history with the politics left out,’ Braudel devoted a hefty chunk of his book to politics, even though it was clear to all that his heart was not in it. He took no such cautionary steps with culture. It is of course absurd to state that there is no ‘culture’ in Braudel’s Mediterranean. Culture, understood either as formal expressions of ideas and beliefs or as a more anthropological notion of practices learned and communicated in society, is found constantly both in and between the lines of his book. Evoking Braudel’s ‘decision against culture’ refers to something different: his deliberate avoidance of a systematic cultural history, a choice that he himself recognized explicitly in his work. Hence the following well-known passage in the introduction to part III: Nowadays we have two fairly well established ‘chains’ to choose from ... the chain of economic events and their short-term conjunctures [and] ... the

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chain of political events in the wide sense ... In turn we should be aware of assuming that these two chains preclude the existence of any others, or of falling into the trap of naively assuming that one can explain the other, when even now we can guess at future possible chains composed of data from social or cultural history and even from collective psychology.2

‘Cultural history and even ... collective psychology’ – not a bad description of the direction towards which the history written by Braudel’s elder colleague and chef d’école Lucien Febvre had moved. When speculating about thematic and methological choices among prominent French historians, it would be reckless indeed to ignore issues of personal rivalries (even among friends) and academic politics (even among members of the same faction). Still, Braudel’s decision, while hardly unaffected by such factors – note his near-Oedipal comments on Febvre and other senior colleagues in his very revealing ‘Personal Testimony’ – does not seem to have sunk its roots in this soil.3 One senses deeper attachments at play. It may be, of course, that Braudel saw himself eventually moving in the cultural direction he mentioned in the passage reproduced above, even though later works such as Civilization and Capitalism (1979) or his last, unfinished project, The Identity of France (1986), hardly show him renouncing his life-long emphasis on ‘the slow unfolding of structural realities.’4 What is not open to doubt, however, is the fact that Braudel’s boundless intellectual energies and restless curiosity could have encompassed a specifically cultural history, were he interested in so doing. That he did not do so suggests, as noted earlier, that he made a decision against it. The following paper thinks out loud a bit about this choice. It argues that one key to reading Braudel’s decision is found in a historiographic tension that engaged his attention throughout his life, and which led him to formulate some of his most important theoretical observations.5 I am referring to the classic question of continuity versus change in history, indeed, of continuity versus history itself. Braudel devoted the conclusion of the second edition of the Mediterranean to a recapitulation of the aims as well as the findings of his magnum opus. After acknowledging the profound ambition of ‘bring[ing] together in all their multiplicity the different measures of time past,’ he reviewed in turn the three parts of the book, envisioned as ‘a new kind of history, total history, written in three different registers, on three different levels.’ He then presented Part One, the extensive introduction to the geography of the Mediterranean, as ‘my homage to those timeless realities whose images recur throughout the whole book, from the first page

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to the last ... those local, permanent, unchanging and much repeated features which are the “constants” of Mediterranean history ...’ Braudel went on to locate these constants, in time as well as space: They are to be found unchanged in Mediterranean life today: one may stumble across them in a journey, or in the books of Gabriel Audisio, Jean Giono, Carlo Levi, Lawrence Durrell or André Chamson. All western writers who have at some time in their lives encountered the Mediterranean, have been struck with its historical or rather timeless character.

He then dedicates particular attention to the case of Levi: I also believe, with Carlo Levi, that the wild countryside which is the true subject of his evocative book Christ Stopped at Eboli, takes us back into the mists of time. Eboli ... is on the coast near Salerno, at the point where the road turns inland toward the mountains. Christ (in other words civilization, the rule of law, the gentle arts of living) never reached the highlands of Lucania, and the village of Gagliano, crouching among the barren treeless slopes ‘above the cliffs of white clay’ ... An emigrant may return to his almost deserted village from America laden with the strange new gadgets of the outside world: but he will never change the way of life in this isolated, archaic little universe. This is the deep bone-structure of the Mediterranean and only with the eye of the geographer (or the traveller or novelist) can one truly discern its rugged contours and oppressive reality.6

Braudel’s readers would have instantly recognized the book to which he referred. Christ Stopped at Eboli had been published in 1945, and quickly won fame as one of the most penetrating depictions of European rural life in the twentieth century. It also established its author – a painter, physician, and prominent leader of the antifascist Resistance – as one of post-war Italy’s leading writers and political activists. Levi himself was a foreigner to the villages in Lucania (now Basilicata) in which he briefly resided; indeed, he had been exiled there in 1935 for his participation in Turin’s ‘Justice and Liberty’ resistance organization. He clearly was fascinated by this alien and magical peasant world, and wrote his first-person account largely to document and explain its seemingly inexplicable ways and customs to other outsiders like himself. A strong sense of political and social sympathy also informs Levi’s book. As Braudel noted, this work stressed that poverty and oppression had always been the lot of the peasantry. Levi’s own mode of writing con-

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stantly erases the difference between past and present. Hence his seemingly effortless recourse to classical references to explain contemporary phenomena – hardly an unusual literary device for an urbane intellectual of his generation, but one that Levi wields in an unusually explicit fashion in order to draw direct ties between pagan antiquity and the more pressing tragedy taking place before his eyes. ‘Pagan’ and ‘tragic’ are indeed the keywords that order his relentless emphasis on the suffering of the peasantry. Thus, for example, after seeing one of the satirical plays the peasants put on each year towards the end of Carnival, this one involving the murder of a patient by a physician in league with Rome, Levi pauses to wonder: ‘Was this classical form the reminiscence of an ancient art, descended to a popular level, or was it an original and spontaneous recreation in a language natural to this land, where the whole of life is a tragedy without a stage?’7 Continuities of this sort served to distance village life from the broader, indeed alien, sphere of history. In the opening paragraph of the book Levi introduces the peasants as inhabitants of ‘that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State’ (1). Not surprisingly, myth is a discreet but constant presence in his evocation of this ‘motionless civilization on barren ground’ (1). Like the tales of Ulysses or Aeneas, his is a descensus ad avernam, of forced entry into a bewildering ‘other world’ that yields up its secrets slowly and against the ingrained mistrust born of centuries of oppression by outsiders. Levi saw in this descent a unique form of tutelage, one that gave rise to a form of knowledge which pitted history against myth: They [the peasants] have lived exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect. Of the two Italys that share the land between them, the peasant Italy is by far the older; so old that no one knows whence it came, and it may have been here forever ... There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining itself to that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. (118–19)

Many writers have linked the Mediterranean with myth; many others have remarked on the seeming timelessness of the customs of its inhabitants.8 Needless to say, much of what Braudel himself presented as his deeper vision of history – and sea-depth was a metaphor he turned to again and again – resonates with this erasure of historical time, and the consequent relegation of ‘mere’ political and military events to relative

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insignificance. It comes as little surprise to find Braudel describing the great, paradoxical challenge of his work as the need to devise a specifically historical (as opposed to geographical) language with which to depict the absence of change. Commenting later on the difficult conditions (a prison camp in Germany during the Second World War) under which he wrote the first draft of the Mediterranean, he exclaims: Down with occurrences, especially vexing ones! I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level ... Far removed from our persons and our daily misery, history was being made, shifting slowly, as slowly as the ancient life of the Mediterranean, whose perdurability and majestic immobility had so often moved me. So it was that I consciously set forth in search of a historical language – the most profound I could grasp or invent – in order to present unchanging (or at least very slowly changing) conditions which stubbornly assert themselves over and over again.9

In the contest of continuity versus history, then, Braudel from his own confino sided with Levi. At the very same historiographic moment, another, more closely placed observer of Mediterranean culture found himself pondering the same choice. Despite a recent revival of interest in his work, Ernesto de Martino (1908–65) is not a figure well known to scholars outside of Italy. A selfproclaimed follower of Croce who trained in classics in Naples in the 1930s, de Martino has long been recognized as one of the founders of Italian anthropology. Although he spent a number of years outside his native Mezzogiorno, virtually all his work focused on the South, which he, along with other left-wing intellectuals and activists who struggled with the ‘Southern Question,’ saw as the most intractable problem facing post-war Italy. The author of numerous books and articles, de Martino is best known for five major studies: The World of Magic (1948), a critical survey of social-scientific accounts of magic; Death and Ritual Mourning (1958), an ambitious attempt to connect contemporary mourning by peasant women with the ritual laments of ancient Mediterranean cultures; The South and Magic (1959), a study of fascination (‘evil eye’) and other forms of popular magic; The Land of Remorse (1961), an analysis of the unique southern practice of tarantismo, or the curing through music and ecstatic dance of psychic illnesses attributed to spider bite; and the posthumously published The End of the World (1977), a dense essay on apocalyptic thought in a wide range of contexts.10

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Many of de Martino’s writings bear directly on the question of continuity, especially in the cultural realm. While there is neither time nor space to examine his work in detail, a few points can be made regarding the characteristic way in which he confronted the balance between timelessness and history that so intrigued Braudel and Levi. From the point of view of method, his studies share a number of distinctive features. First, they are full of historical references, drawn in particular from classic sources and scholarly writing from the early modern as well as modern eras. Moreover, de Martino’s reading was not only unusually deep in terms of historical knowledge. It also covered an exceptionally broad range of themes, and derived inspiration from a number of quarters. The result was a highly eclectic analytical framework, a ‘hybrid historicism’ in which his lifelong interest in classics and the comparative history of religions was leavened with insights from psychology, Marxism, and existentialist philosophy.11 Finally, de Martino, for all his impressive erudition and brooding formality as a writer, was passionately committed to fieldwork. He headed several interdisciplinary teams comprising photographers, ethnomusicologists, and fellow anthropologists and linguists in ‘expeditions’ to gather material for his various projects. Among the more unconventional outcomes of his strenuous efforts to collect and organize ethnographic data were his innovative presentations of images along iconographic lines, and his collaboration in a number of documentary film projects. One particularly striking instance of cinematic representation of southern peasant customs was a short documentary film based on one of de Martino’s books, although it did not involve his direct participation. In September 1959 a young photographer and filmmaker from Rome, Cecilia Mangini, journeyed to Martano, a Greek-speaking village in the Salentine peninsula. Her aim was to record local women performing the dramatic rites of mourning that she had read about in de Martino’s second book, Death and Ritual Mourning. The result was a ten-minute black-and-white re-enactment of collective lament issued in 1960 under the title Stendalì (‘They Still Sound,’ in reference both to the ringing of church bells and to the musical cries of the mourning women).12 Like many of the Italian documentary films from the period, this short but intense work eventually dropped out of sight. Its recent rediscovery owes much to the fact that its background narration had been written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was just then beginning his own ventures into the world of cinema.13 Despite its brevity, the film lays bare the jarring drama of the lament,

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whose rhythm builds up into a near-ecstatic crescendo at the end. Less evident to the viewer, but well known to other readers of de Martino’s book, was the rigid patterning underlaying ritual mourning, and the way in which its basic script was repeated in a surprisingly wide range of historical and geographical settings. The similarities in the visual representation of collective mourning in films as diverse as the documentaries of Mangini and Michele Gandin (the latter directed a short feature, Funeral Lament, in 1953), the later adaptation of Christ Stopped in Eboli by Francesco Rosi (1981), and classical recreations such as Pasolini’s Medea (1970) or Michael Cacoyannis’s The Trojan Women (1971), echo de Martino’s highlighting of the close resemblances among the different, even farflung instances of this cultural practice.14 Ritual mourning, in other words, posed an unusual problem of cultural continuity, in both chronological and geographical terms. So much so, in fact, that the cultural problem begging for analysis turns out to be the question of continuity itself. De Martino approached this question from several angles. In terms of philosophy, he responded to provocative observations by Croce on both death and mourning and on the – to Croce, quite limited – possibilities of expressiveness in ‘primitive’ cultures. Via the comparative history of religions he emphasized the significance of Christianity’s long-term rejection and disciplining of the pagan mourning of antiquity. Above all, he drew on contemporary and historical psychology – especially Janet, Freud, and Melanie Klein – to depict collective mourning as psychodrama in which ritualization managed to ward off the risk of the disintegration of personality under the pressure of the ‘crisis of presence’ caused by the death of persons from the mourner’s inner circle. By applying this model of explanation to virtually every context that came under his purview, however, de Martino incurred a risk of his own: of reducing ritual behaviour to its psychological functions, above all that of assuring individual emotional integrity within a closely observed social setting. De Martino was too sophisticated an analyst to leave matters in mid-air like this. Yet precisely when dealing with cultural continuities on such a broad scale, he tended more to pose questions than to answer them. The reader of his book cannot fail to be struck by the many passages in which the author brings up a problem, only to move on quickly to the next issue in view. It is as if one puzzle – of time, place, affinity, whatever – gives rise to another in rapid succession, and the best the anthropologist can hope to do is to arrange the riddles in proper order. Thus, at one point in his study, de Martino evokes the plaintive cries of Hecabe in The

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Trojan Women: ‘What should I leave unsaid, what should I tell the world? What should I lament?’ He then notes without further comment that the exact same words appeared in the ritual cries of Sardinian and Lucanian women recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.15 So uncanny a coincidence could be read to suggest that the Mediterranean was a coherent cultural area, one which facilitated direct continuities in speech and behaviour over lengthy periods of time. Yet de Martino was too acutely aware of the difficulties in tracing the precise connections between the past and present to do much more than hint at this. Hence the silence, which one might read as a historical temper keeping under control a keen eye for structural affinities. Such epistemological caution when dealing with linkages with the distant past in particular was very much in the air when de Martino wrote his major works. By the mid-twentieth century the newly consolidated discipline of anthropology looked on the meta-historical proclivities of earlier generations with no little embarrassment. Structural functionalism’s consecration of the ethnographic present was in full stride, and Malinowskian professionals tried and tested by fieldwork regarded the enthusiasm for classical antiquity of Frazer or Mauss, to cite merely two well-known cases, as fishing in the wrong waters. In such a climate, it was a rare anthropologist who turned to history. Rarer still were anthropologists who approached problems of long-term continuities by engaging in direct historical research. In this and other respects de Martino stood apart from his professional colleagues. However, he was not utterly lacking for company. There are certain parallels with the case of Edward Evans-Pritchard, whose forceful if lonely argument for the reconciliation of anthropology and history went largely unheard by either side, until it was rescued by future generations much more sympathetic to his aims.16 An analogue closer to home was the Spanish anthropologist and polymath Julio Caro Baroja (1914–95). While Caro arguably kept his ethnographic and historical writings more separate than was the case with de Martino, they both exhibited a distinctive interest in the past at a moment when professional anthropology had moved in the opposite direction.17 And it was precisely this unusual commitment to history that helps explain some of the current interest in de Martino. Ironically, what then raised eyebrows as too much continuity of his own with the compromised tradition of Frazerian forefathers is now seen as a precocious anticipation of the present-day interdiscipline of historical anthropology.18 There were many rugged contours, to use Braudel’s expression, in the ground where anthropology met history in de Martino’s work. The

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same can be said of the more general challenge assumptions of continuity, timelessness, and the like posed to the historicist temper. Seen from the perspective of the long-term development of anthropology, however, de Martino appeared as one of a number of participants in a lengthy tradition of struggle over the role of historical perspective in anthropological research. An intriguing history of its own waits to be written of this encounter. The problem of continuity had been present as a tension since the very birth of anthropology. Nevertheless, it reached a height of sorts in the early decades of the twentieth century – roughly from the First World War to the time of de Martino’s own writings. This was the long intermediate moment that Edmund Leach in a memorable essay of 1961 characterized as witnessing the decline of Frazer-like symbolists and the new ascendancy of functionalists, above all Malinowski and his followers in England, and Durkheim and his school in France.19 The worst mistake such a history could make would be to present these two sides – devoted respectively to what Lévi-Strauss later distinguished as the synchronic and the diachronic – in hardened opposition to each other. It would be much more interesting – and more faithful to the historical record – to focus on the back and forth, the numerous uncertainties expressed and the concessions made, as participants on both sides groped their way towards a science of culture that could accommodate alternative explanations for continuities and change over the long term. One could hardly ask for a more colourful cast of characters. Think, for example, of W.H.R. Rivers, the Cambridge physician, anthropologist, and early supporter of psychoanalysis who was in direct contact with Frazer, A.M. Hocart, Jane Ellen Harrison, and other scholars working on the frontiers between history and anthropology. Among his many contributions, Rivers sought to specify the characteristics of ‘culture history,’ which he saw as a down-to-earth, practical ‘history without dates and heroes.’ In his History and Ethnology, written in 1922 for a popular reading public, Rivers affirmed that this form of history must always be on broad lines and will fail to deal with the personal relations which give to the study of history so much of its interest and charm. It may be noted, however, that the general tendency of recent movements in history has been in this direction. Every year more and more attention is being paid to history of institutions and ideas, while the personal relations and details of the transactions between individuals and nations are coming to be of less interest in themselves.20

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Rivers envisioned a major task of anthropology as helping to give birth to a new approach to the past, one that would chart the movements of peoples, the development of societies, and ‘the diffusion of features of culture.’21 This was, to be sure, hardly a recipe for either Braudelian history or DeMartinian anthropology. It did, however, make the same sort of decisive break with traditional Rankean historiography that the early Annales school advocated and Braudel consummated in his Mediterranean. It also, in practice, drew on the same interest in psychological scenarios that would be the hallmark of de Martino’s studies. Clearly, Rivers felt that some sort of convergence was in store, and it would entail a substantial change of perspective within both disciplines. Rivers knew from his own fieldwork – which involved historical tasks such as the elaboration of genealogies, in which he played a pioneering role – that there would always be ‘lost links in the chain of evidence.’ He moreover believed that reconstruction of such chains was a task for which anthropologists, with their awareness of ‘morphology’ and talent for ‘conjecture,’ were especially suited.22 Not surprisingly, in the closer confines of the Mediterranean world one could find other anthropologists drawn to the same issue of long-term continuity, as well as to some of the same techniques for studying it. Among them was Robert Hertz, whose pathbreaking essay on the Saint Besse cult in Aosta offered ‘a structural analysis,’ in the words of Evans-Pritchard, relating ‘certain prominent and puzzling features of the cult and its attendant myths to local and politico-ecclesiastical organization, thereby rendering them intelligible.’23 At roughly the same time, the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, most notably Jane Ellen Harrison, broke professional precedents by interpreting ancient Greek customs and texts by applying insights from anthropological studies of myths and rituals, with some additional help from Freudian theory. In so doing they inaugurated a fertile – as well as highly controversial – interdisciplinary undertaking whose influence soon extended well beyond the world of classical studies.24 Other significant contributions included the more theoretical (and largely neglected) work of Margaret Hodgen, ranging from her 1936 book on evolutionary ‘survivals’ to her later prescriptions for systematic analysis of cultural change over long periods of time.25 In the end, over the course of several decades many scholars were engaged – often quite passionately – in the search for common terrain between two disciplines, the majority of whose practitioners were trying to undo whatever ties continued to bind them together. What later appeared as extravagantly individual achievements – the measureless ambition of a total history of a huge inland sea, or the single-minded pursuit of the connections among the ritual cries

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and gestures of women from the same area during more than two millennia – drew in ways which we can still barely glimpse on foundations laid by earlier generations perplexed by the same question of continuity. Part of the excitement of reading Braudel’s study of the early modern Mediterranean world derives from the unresolved tensions within this huge, rambling, yet tightly controlled masterpiece. Braudel himself loved to draw attention to these ‘fundamental contradictions,’ as in the preface to the second edition, in which he asked, ‘Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes – and that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time?’26 The answer to this rhetorical question is obviously yes. Braudel firmly believed – and convinced countless readers – that the paradox could be resolved in practice. The challenge was to envision history not as a choice between change and continuity, but as a ground for their provisional reconciliation. Within the proper analytical (and literary) framework, history itself could isolate and examine the very continuities that threatened to deny its existence. De Martino’s studies also centred on the same sort of tensions and contradictions. Other parallels tied their work together. For example, both first caught the public’s eye at the exact same and, viewed in retrospect, highly fruitful historiographic moment. However, the tools at de Martino’s disposal were very different from those Braudel brought to his task. At first glance, one would place the Frenchman much closer to the point of view of Carlo Levi. Hence our starting point, in Braudel himself explicitly noting his attraction to the sense of timelessness that underlay Levi’s vision of Mediterranean peasant life. All the same, the French historian’s purpose differed radically from that of the Italian aesthete and activist. Braudel sought to create a new understanding of the past by which history would chart long-term continuities instead of losing sight of their existence through an obsessive focus on short-term and (to him) insignificant events. In this respect his approach more closely resembled de Martino’s historicism, which similarly saw in continuity, not change, the fundamental characteristic, as well as problem, of the past. As a result, while both felt the attraction of Levi’s language of timelessness and myth, they wound up rejecting it for a history of continuities. Where de Martino and Braudel differed most was in the types of continuities they found of interest. While the Neapolitan anthropologist made passing bows to social and economic issues – a Marxist-inspired intellectual of

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his generation could hardly do otherwise – his work focused exclusively on cultural and religious issues. These were precisely the subjects that Braudel omitted from his otherwise ‘total history.’27 A common convergence on the Mediterranean as a locus of continuity brought together these three singularly gifted observers. My grouping them together has a different purpose in mind, that of exploring the differences among their responses to the seemingly intractable question of the longue durée of Mediterranean culture. For it was at this point that they parted paths. Braudel framed continuities largely in terms of physical landscape and daily, material life; tellingly, his most famous metaphors are geographical, even geological.28 Levi and de Martino approached them more from their stance as ethnographic voyagers for whom peasant culture raised the problem of continuity in particularly acute fashion. Despite significant differences in accent and approach, they ended up contributing to a different sort of understanding, a mixture of testimony and ethnography focused on the intersection between the ancient myths of the Mediterranean and the rituals and other practices of its present-day inhabitants. It would be going too far to suggest that for Levi, much less for de Martino or Braudel, culture lacked a history. But all three may have endorsed the notion that culture – and more specifically the deepest beliefs and daily practices of the Mediterranean peasantry that attracted their interest – was one of those basic structures in which change was least likely to manifest itself. In the end, when Levi called for ‘a history outside the framework of time, confining itself to that which is changeless and eternal’ (Eboli, 118– 19), he would soon be able to turn for a vigorous response in two very different directions. The first was northward, towards Braudel and the future of what the Frenchman referred to confidently as scientific history. He could also look further south, towards a fellow mythographer who like himself stood as melancholic witness not only to the past that lingered on in the present, but also to the forthcoming demise of the peasant culture that had sustained Europe for millennia. In the end, the efforts of both would be needed to create Levi’s new sort of history, focused on the puzzling permanence of the old.

NOTES 1 Part of the original talk I gave at the April 2003 conference ‘Braudel Revisited: Cultural Transmission in the Mediterranean World, 1600–1800’ has

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appeared as ‘Mourning Becomes Eclectic: Ritual Lament and the Problem of Continuity,’ in Past and Present 187 (May 2005), 3–31. I have tried to limit the overlap between the two texts to a bare minimum. The reader is referred to the companion piece for more extensive consideration of Ernesto de Martino’s singular contribution to the study of ritual mourning in the ancient and modern Mediterranean. I am grateful to Bill Christian, Natalie Davis, Tony Grafton, Scott Taylor, and especially Louis Rose for critical comments on an earlier draft of this essay, and to the editors of this volume for their patient encouragement. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972; based on the 2nd French ed., 1966), 2:902. Fernand Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony,’ Journal of Modern History 44 (December 1972), 448–67. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1:23. Conveniently available as Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), and in English as On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Braudel, Mediterranean, 2:1238–40. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Simon & Schuster,1965; 1st ed., Eng. trans., 1947; orig. ed. 1945), 197. Further quotations from this book are indicated by brackets within the main text. The ‘classic form’ Levi refers to here is the presence of a chorus within the satirical Carnival play put on by the peasants. Much has been written about this book and its author; for background, see for example Nicola Carducci, Storia intellettuale di Carlo Levi (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 1999). In passages such as these Levi moved close to a view of the past as myth in the sense explored by Moses Finley in his fundamental essay ‘Myth, Memory and History,’ in The Use and Abuse of History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), 11–33. See p. 15 in particular for ‘timelessness’ as a quality of myth as opposed to history. Not surprisingly, Levi’s text serves to introduce the chapter on ‘Anthropology and Continuity’ in the provocative study of P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 463–84. Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony,’ 454. Ernesto De Martino, Il mondo magico: Prologomeni a una storia del magismo, ed. Cesare Cases (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997); Morte e pianto rituale: Dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria, ed. Clara Gallini (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000); Sud e magia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959); La terra del rimorso:

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Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961); La fine del mondo: Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, ed. Clara Gallini (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). Among the many recent studies of de Martino, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Momigliano e De Martino,’ Rivista Storica Italiana 100, 2 (1988), 400–13; Riccardo Di Donato, ed., La contraddizzione felice? Ernesto De Martino e gli altri (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1990); and George R. Saunders, ‘“Critical Ethnocentrism” and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino,’ American Anthropologist 95, 4 (1993), 875–93; Clara Gallini and Marcello Massenzio, eds, Ernesto De Martino nella cultura europea (Naples: Liguori, 1997); Alfonso Di Nola, ‘How Critical Was De Martino’s “Critical Ethnocentrism” in Southern Italy?’ in Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998), 157–75; and above all Riccardo Di Donato, I greci selvaggi: Antropologia storica di Ernesto De Martino (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1999). Pietro Citati, the author of a penetrating review of the first edition of Death and Ritual Mourning, remarked on De Martino’s original mixture of ‘psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Croce, [and] literary criticism,’ and concluded that ‘his intelligence is essentially eclectic and combinatory’ (cited in Gallini’s introduction, xvi–xvii). Ginzburg, in ‘Momigliano e De Martino,’ also stresses the latter’s unusually broad range of intellectual reference. I am grateful to María José del Río for bringing this film to my attention, and to Piero Ventura and Letizia Cortini for helping me contact Cecilia Mangini, who not only has provided me with numerous references and documents, but also has written to me extensively about this film and its intellectual and political background. Thanks to her generosity and the good offices of Geoffrey Symcox, a copy of Stendalì is on deposit for public viewing at the Department of Italian Studies, UCLA. Pasolini’s screenplay is reproduced in Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli, eds, Pasolini: Per il cinema (Milan 2001), 2099–100. The case of Pasolini is especially interesting. The Venetian poet and critic Giuseppe Zigaina maintains that de Martino was an important source of inspiration for Pasolini, and that the latter read de Martino’s book on ritual mourning while filming Medea. See Hostia: Trilogia della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 241, 244, and 269. His is one of the few among the growing number of studies of Pasolini’s film career that dwell on this connection. I found no mention of de Martino or ritual mourning in Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Maurizio S. Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University

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of California Press, 1993), nor in the more general biography by Barth D. Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). Morte e pianto rituale, 45. The passage from The Trojan Women is from lines 110–12. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Anthropology and History (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1961). Keith Thomas played a crucial role in bringing this text to the attention of historians, amid his more general effort to incorporate anthropological perspectives into the study of early modern European culture. See in particular his ‘History and Anthropology,’ Past and Present 24 (1963), 3–24, and ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft,’ in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas (London: Tavistock, 1970), 47–79. For a summary of Caro’s career, see Joseba Agirreazkiuenaga, ‘Julio Caro Baroja: Maestro in Social History and Non-Conformist Intellectual (Madrid, 13-XI-1914 – Bera de Bidasoa, 18-VIII-1995),’ History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), 195–206. More recently, another Italian scholar working between history and anthropology has taken this particular bull by the horns. Not surprisingly, Carlo Ginzburg’s explanation of the bold epistemological wager underlying his Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Penguin, 1990; orig. ed. 1989) takes him near the figure of Frazer. As he later put it, ‘In ... [his first book] I Benandanti ... I was following the example of Marc Bloch, who in his Rois thaumaturges had distinguished between a properly historical comparison of phenomena belonging to societies historically in contact, and an anthropological comparison which examines phenomena belonging to societies not linked by documented historical relations. As an example of the second type of comparison Bloch, who was writing in 1924, quoted Frazer ... [Ecstasies] is the result of these contradictory pressures.’ See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Witches and Shamans,’ New Left Review 200 (July–August 1993), 83–4. Note also on p. 85 Ginzburg’s acknowledgment of his intellectual debt to De Martino’s ‘radical ... historicism.’ Edmund Leach, ‘Lévi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden: An Examination of Some Recent Developments in the Analysis of Myth,’ Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, ser. 2, 23 (1961), 386–96. Cited in Richard Slobodin, W.H.R. Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist, Psychiatrist of The Ghost Road (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 118. The revised title of Slobodin’s biography and selection from Rivers’s writings (orig. ed. 1978) alludes to the latter’s stellar role in Pat Barker’s trilogy of First World War novels (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, published 1991–5). For more on Rivers, see also George W. Stocking, Jr, After Tylor: British Social An-

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thropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), especially 184–208 and 235–44. Slobodin, W.H.R. Rivers, 119. Ibid., 129; for his ‘conjectural history’ and use of the term ‘morphology,’ see 2, 49, and 154. On Rivers’s famed ‘genealogical method,’ see 25, 133, 139–40, and 219–20, as well as Stocking, After Tylor, 112–13. See Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s introduction to Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960; orig. ed. 1907–9), 16. Hertz’s ‘Saint Besse’ was first published in the 1913 issue of the Revue d’Histoire des Religions, and is also mentioned in João de Pina-Cabral, ‘The Gods of the Gentiles Are Demons: The Problem of Pagan Survivals in European Culture,’ in Other Histories, ed. Kirsten Hastrup (London: Routledge, 1992), 45–61 [59]. Moses I. Finley, in his 1972 essay ‘Anthropology and the Classics,’ noted that Eric R. Dodds, the classicist who adopted the most explicitly psychoanalytic perspective on the ancient past, cited Harrison (along with Rivers) in connection with the paired Freudian metaphor identifying myth with collective dream-thinking and dreams with the myths of individuals. See his The Use and Abuse of History, 104. For more on the ‘Cambridge School,’ see Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York: Routledge, 1991), William M. Calder, III, ed., The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), as well as Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See her The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man (London: Allenson and Co., 1936) and Anthropology, History, and Cultural Change (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1974). Hodgen is best known as the author of the first full-scale study of early modern European anthropological thought, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). Braudel, Mediterranean, 1:16. As noted by, for example, William H. McNeill in his ‘Fernand Braudel, Historian,’ Journal of Modern History 73 (2001), 133–46 [141–2], and Peter Burke in ‘Civilizations and Frontiers: Anthropology of the Early Modern Mediterranean’, in Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean, ed. John A. Marino (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 123–41. See p. 129 for Braudel and cultural history, and p. 132 for brief mention of De Martino and Caro Baroja as anthropologists interested in history when most of their colleagues were given over to ‘timeless functionalism.’ Hence in the history of the ancient Mediterranean he wrote later in life,

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Braudel reaffirmed his commitment to the study of change within a long term imposed by physical limitations and man’s technological and cultural responses to them. See his The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, ed. Roselyn de Ayala and Paule Braudel, preface and notes Jean Guilaine and Pierre Rouillard, trans. S. Reynolds and intro. O. Murray (London: Penguin, 2002; orig. ed. 1998), xx–xxi.

chapter eleven

Il faut méditerraniser la musique: After Braudel* GARY TOMLINSON

1 Historiographic Prolegomena It is more than whimsy that leads me to link in the title of this essay a phrase from Nietzsche with the name of Braudel. Nietzsche’s historiography could in many respects scarcely differ more from Braudel’s – the one intently culturalist in emphasis, narrating the course of a JudaeoChristian ethics, its superseding of ancient vitalities, and its unhappy consequences for the modern world (I am thinking here specifically, though not exclusively, of The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morals); the other just as resolutely economic and demographic in orientation, with little to say about expressive culture. Yet Nietzsche’s history arches over the sort of huge time span Braudel featured in his work, the longue durée; and in this we see at least the shadow of a connection that begs further illumination and might indicate a reconciliation of millennial trends with the local events whose importance Braudel famously minimized. Il faut méditerraniser la musique: the phrase comes in one of the latest of Nietzsche’s writings, The Case of Wagner – his broadside, hilarious, exasperated, brilliant, and sad, aimed at the hero of his youth.1 For Nietzsche the phrase connoted, not least by virtue of the French in which he framed it, the need for European society to turn away from the metaphysical mists of the Germanic north to something brighter – the need to give up fables of transcendence and embrace a frank, on-the-ground, quotidian fatum – the need to repudiate German things (most of all: beer, newspapers, and, precisely, Wagner) in favour of a ‘south of music,’ of the irresistible dance, the sun, and the sea. For the twenty-first-century reader Nietzsche’s phrase must recall both a southward-gazing exoticism

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characteristic of northern Europe in the late nineteenth century and the contentious reception history of Wagner. In this it is emblematic of important, connected episodes in the ideological and artistic course of modernity. And the phrase can do other work than this. It signals the opportunity, little grasped yet in musical studies – little grasped, perhaps, in cultural accounts all told – to comprehend the circum-Mediterranean world as a unit distinguished from others by certain long-term trends. It focuses our gaze on the distant historical horizon where we might perceive, in Braudelian fashion, sets of commonalities extending far and wide beneath the ‘dust’ of individuals and events. At the same time, it calls our attention to music-making, to gestures of expressive culture that are as inevitably immersed in specific contexts as they are representative of ubiquitous human aptitudes and attainments. In this double vision, looking at once towards the global and the local, it poses in an acute form a question fundamental to whatever afterlife Braudel’s geohistory might have: What is the relation between the broadest sweep of historiographic vision and precise, contextualized, local historical studies? Or, to take a phrase from Braudel, how are we to understand and describe ‘the interrelation between change and the near-permanent in history’?2 In its injunction to Mediterraneanize a cultural product such as music across the longue durée, Nietzsche’s phrase diverts Braudelian history from its characteristic concerns. It suggests the possibility of a geohistory comprising the shards of expressive culture rather than the demographic, quantitative (‘serial’), and material measures of settlement, agriculture, trade, and economics that dominated Braudel’s account. Or, at least, it urges another question, related to the first: What are the means – what are the sorts of studies, what the specific traces of the past – that might enable the historian to describe cultural history in the frame of the longue durée? Are individual attainments in expressive culture no more than Braudel’s foam on the surface of the deep, powerful wave of history, or can they be understood, in some other perspective, to embody driving forces beneath the wave itself? The turning of Braudel’s geohistory towards expressive culture might seem to narrow the hiatus The Mediterranean opened between the first generation of Annalistes, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and Braudel’s own, second generation. It calls to mind the histoire des mentalités championed by Febvre, the notion, adapted especially from the ethnographer Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, that culture is the expression of a characteristic set of ‘mental tools’ and that the historian’s aim is to describe and analyse

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these tools for a specific – even if expansive – time and place.3 Febvre attempted such an analysis in the book that remains the most famous of his works today, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Braudel’s Mediterranean certainly reflects a departure from such concerns, whatever influences of Febvre and Bloch it otherwise reflects; so the re-emphasis of expressive culture in a Braudelian time frame seems to enact something of a rapprochement between the two agendas. Or does it? To suggest this reconciliation, thus pointing up the differences of program between the first two generations of Annalistes, is to open a broader perspective on the roots and offshoots of Braudel’s historiography. It leads us back towards the ‘human geography’ of Paul Vidal de la Blache, the teacher of Febvre whom Braudel himself named as a formative influence on The Mediterranean. De la Blache attempted a balancing act in regard to the environmental determination of human affairs, an act that Braudel would manage similarly, if perhaps more adroitly.4 But already before Braudel drew on the work of de la Blache, Febvre had reshaped it in a more thoroughgoing fashion, offering in the place of determinism a ‘possibilism’ that stressed, as Stuart Clark has put it, ‘the idea that environments are as much vehicles of endowed meanings as brute facts about the external world.’5 This relating of the environment to expressive culture – indeed, the idea, tentatively advanced, that the environment could be seen to be a product of expressive culture – grew up at the intersection of an older determinism with a historiography that aimed to describe collective mentalities. It is not a specifically Braudelian turn of mind, but it lurks already in the sources of his more quantitative, demographic, categorical geohistory. It limns what we might call a geocultural history.6 To look back to Febvre’s pre-Braudelian histoire des mentalités is simultaneously to look forward, to the outgrowths of Braudel’s historiography, for, in the decades since the post-war pre-eminence of The Mediterranean, Annales historians have drifted back towards mentalities. The trend has been remarked by many observers.7 At first it was a move not so much to history of mentalities as to regional, microhistorical studies that preserved Braudelian geographic, economic, and demographic priorities (here Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is an exemplary figure). But in more recent years, in the work of writers such as Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel, there has been a wholesale resurgence within this microhistorical mode of histories of discourse and cultural practice.

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If, however, we look to this shift to close the hiatus opened by Braudel between himself and the earlier Annalistes, we will once again be disappointed. For along with it came a de-emphasis of social and economic history and an inattention to Braudel’s longest time-frame. The new cultural history seems not to have reconciled his geohistory with cultural concerns so much as it neglected the longue durée altogether. This is puzzling, since a primary influence on the new cultural history, as Chartier himself, Lynn Hunt, and others have noted, is Michel Foucault. Foucault’s own archaeology of knowledge and the epistemic history he practised in works such as The Order of Things and Madness and Civilization represent one of French historiography’s closest approaches to a cultural history of the longue durée. Foucault’s practice is related to Braudel’s in several ways, each of them marked, to be sure, by significant differences. In it we see the long time spans of Braudelian history – characterized not by patterns of trade or settlement or economic relations but by discourse, cultural practices, and in particular deep conditions circumscribing and shaping the possibilities of knowledge. We see the attempt to describe in overarching terms the glacial traits characterizing these time spans and differentiating one from another, though Foucault stressed rupture and discontinuity between adjacent time spans or epistemes, a problematic ingredient of his historiography less evident in Braudel. We see also, finally, the de-emphasis of individual events and agency – now a more radical move than in Braudel, given that the aim of Foucault’s history is human discourse itself and the practices that arise from it.8 Historians’ misgivings regarding Foucault’s approach, which remain powerful today, should not blind us to these congruities between his epistemic history and Braudel’s history of the longue durée. Neither should we ignore other instances of poststructuralist historical writing that attempt in broadly similar fashion to write cultural analysis on a Braudelian scale. One instance betrays clearly enough, at many points, its indebtedness to Foucault: the quixotic and brilliant A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.9 Many would not consider this a work of history at all, and perhaps I exhibit only lax historiographical standards in doing so. Be that as it may, again and again the book aims to analyse, or describe, or – perhaps ‘toy with’ is the best phrase – cultural developments across huge time spans, attempting to discern, for example, the slowly changing semiotics of the West, the ‘Several Regimes of Signs,’ in a manner reminiscent of Foucault’s epistemes of resemblance and representation from The Order of Things. The titles

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themselves of some of Deleuze and Guattari’s chapters seem devised to catch a glimpse of Braudel through the looking glass: ‘10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?).’ The Wonderland is, of course, a self-consciously Nietzschean one – here also Foucault’s impact is marked – and so in poststructuralist historical play we discover trajectories of human power unfolding across the longest of longues durées. Another instance of poststructuralist Braudelianism grew up in counterpoint, at times dissonant, with Foucault but again reveals general similarities with his project. Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology can be read easily enough as history: the history of a Western metaphysics of epochal chronological duration and its disturbance (but not displacement) by a set of novel challenges and apprehensions in the eighteenth century.10 The deployment of this metaphysics occurs mostly at a level deep beneath subjective intent, yet its effects are everywhere written in culture. Or, better: its effects everywhere write culture. Derrida’s analysis leads him to an encompassing conception of writing – arche-writing, as he calls it – that takes in, it seems, the whole span of human history and even prehistory. In this we can discern, again at the level of the longest longue durée, a fundamental countering of Braudel’s tendency towards environmental determinism and the materialist prioritizing of history dependent on it. Derrida’s environment comes to seem a written, social construct, and in this it looks back not only on André Leroi-Gourhan, the paleoanthropologist whom Derrida now and then cited, but also on Febvre’s possibilism. The Derridean environment enters perception exactly through human processes of working it over, inscribing it. Standing behind poststructuralist efforts such as these is the view that the topics that concern the historian are all constituted, within human perception, in language, discourse, and cultural practice. Here arise the deepest worries of opponents of poststructuralism, more substantive than their complaints about empirical verification, abundance of sources, and so on. It is this that leads Hunt, for example, to cite the ‘nihilistic strain’ in such approaches: ‘Where will we be,’ she writes, ‘when every practice, be it economic, intellectual, social, or political, has been shown to be culturally conditioned? To put it another way, can a history of culture work if it is shorn of all theoretical assumptions about culture’s relationship to the social world – if, indeed, its agenda is conceived as the undermining of all assumptions about the relationship between culture and the social world?’11

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The logic of this framing of the Foucauldian position is not clear. Why would the idea that human practices are all culturally shaped disallow theories of culture’s relation to the social world or the connection itself of the two? It would seem to disallow only theories of a singlemindedly materialist bent, theories narrowly predicating cultural practices on material realities. The question is especially pressing in the light of the ‘linguistic turn’ that helped usher in poststructuralist approaches all told, since the effect of this turn has been to affirm ever more deeply in our experience the social nature of language. A view of a bounded self spinning out ‘culture’ independent of its social entanglements stands behind clear separations of culture from society (such as Braudel’s and perhaps, in her worries about nihilism, Hunt’s). This view has, however, been challenged from all sides – linguistics, philosophy, hermeneutics, psychology – by the new view of language. In its place we see a self created in intersubjective, dialogical, social relations, intercourse carried on crucially in discourse but also in practice. Culture, society, and the self are the multiple births resulting from this intercourse. In pointing up the very constituting of subjectivity in the social practice of language, poststructuralists sometimes have aimed at a hermeneutic level of analysis involving the description of conscious actions and discourse. Just as often, probably, they have attempted instead to elucidate an altogether distinct level in culture, one, as Foucault wrote, ‘that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is a part of scientific discourse.’12 Foucault’s archaeology describes not the realm of subjective and conscious intents, but rather the conditions and determinants of knowledge itself that allow these intents to take shape. Foucault, along with most other poststructuralists, was concerned much more with the ways subjects are formed by discourse than with the ways they form it. It was in this subjective formation by broader epistemological forces – as well as, especially in his later work, by sociocultural practices – that Foucault detected the Nietzschean trajectories of power that ever more firmly riveted his attention. In general, the poststructuralist reliance on Nietzsche starts from his intuitions of deep, wide ideological currents shaping the deployment of power. The archaeological conditions Foucault analysed seem in several ways to transpose Braudel’s geohistorical forces into the key of culture, with language the keynote. They elude sovereign consciousness. They linger over long, even epochal time spans. Though they are neither causes nor determinants, they exert on individuals and events from beneath a quiet

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and consistent force. They do not, to be sure, resolve all historiographical difficulties. (For example, they can raise within the culturalist sphere troubling questions of historical determinism analogous to those raised by Braudel. Such questions lie at the root of Foucault’s own difficulty in his early works in accounting for shifts of episteme.) Nevertheless, they define a realm of cultural production where we might hope to see the broad outlines of musical culture, as often as not buried from the cognizance of its very makers – where, in the event, we might enable ourselves, as historical exegetes rather than Nietzschean polemicists, to Mediterraneanize music. The sort of history I envisage here is by no means unknown to some recent Annalistes. Roger Chartier in particular has teased something like it out of precisely the Braudelian problematic of micro- and macrohistory I posed above, and he has done so by carrying poststructuralist perceptions to the heart of his method.13 Chartier challenges in three ways the distinctions that Braudel urged between the histoire historisante of events and individuals and the geohistory of the longue durée. First, with Paul Ricoeur Chartier points out that the narrative formulas and orderings of time of microhistory and macrohistory do not differ in substance. Second, from Foucault Chartier elaborates the idea that events cannot be defined by individual agency in the way Braudel tended to do; they manifest instead the play of deep forces and have more the character of unexpected, even violent ruptures in culture than of the fluid carrying-out of self-conscious strategies. Third, Chartier explores Bourdieu’s contention that time itself is a social construct. Braudel’s temporalities – events, conjunctures, and longue durée – cannot withstand scrutiny if they are conceived as lying outside human expressions and practices; they are, instead, produced within culture itself. From all this, Chartier comes to question not only the Braudelian categories that distinguished macro- and microhistories but also the bracketing, in more recent historiography, of macrohistorical aspirations. He describes a history that not only points inward towards the full density of its own case studies but outward towards ‘the perception of the most broadly shared myths and rites’ (9). He adduces Carlo Ginzburg’s work, particularly the synthetic study Storia notturna of 1989, as an example of such a history. The sort of approach Chartier describes embraces a microhistory that views its subject at once as localized and unique and as an instance of traits shared across far wider vistas. This microhistory avoids customary assumptions regarding human agency, instead understanding historical

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actions – even the most individual, even those that seem most self-conscious (for example, the composing of a symphony) – as the result of an amalgam of conscious intent and complex forces unknown, even unknowable, to the actors involved. Such a history builds, then, towards a macrohistorical account that is not alienated from the events that reveal its imbrication, always, in culture. The desired endpoint of this sort of history is not only the description of the broadest historical conditions of this or that cultural locale. Instead, it extends such description in two further directions. In the first place, it enables, through the juxtaposing of different areas, a new comparative history of broad reach. This neocomparativism would be, as I have suggested elsewhere, a critical history, forged in ideology critique and therefore able to loose itself somewhat, at least, from the ethnocentric agendas that have crippled broadly comparative histories in the past. Second, through its chronological and geographical breadth this approach brings into view a truly global history, enabling us to raise in meaningful terms the most basic questions about cultural practices that have extended across huge stretches of time and space – in some cases, across even the whole history of the species. The endpoint of cultural description across the longue durée is a comparative, critical, and global perception of its subject matter.14

2 Music Mediterraneanized We can begin to Mediterraneanize music by reference to Carlo Ginzburg’s Storia notturna, the same work Chartier took as exemplary of his joining of macro- and microhistory. Ginzburg argues that the witches’ Sabbath, the diabolical rite at the heart of the witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stems ultimately from an ancient cult of shamanism. This originated in northern Eurasia and spread through large stretches of Europe and Asia across the centuries. It involved, above all, soul-loss: the journeying of the shaman’s soul out from his inanimate body to encounter spirits and spirit realms. Ginzburg differentiates this soul-loss from a converse mediumistic experience, possession, in a distinction well developed in the ethnographic and historical literature.15 In possession, the medium undergoes the influx into the soul of supernatural forces, not the departure of the soul from the body. (The influx is captured in the Greek- and Latin-derived coinages enthusiasm and inspiration, the soul-loss instead by the Greekderived ecstasy.) Ginzburg notes, as have his predecessors, that shamanic

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practices are all but unknown in Africa, where possession cults are instead the rule. Possession cults also dominate in African-American cultural areas: Sudanese bori, Ethiopian and Egyptian zar, and West African orisha worship find their counterparts in Brazilian candomblé, Haitian voudun, and Cuban santería. The geographic region between the northern realm of shamanism and the southern areas of possession is the Mediterranean basin. The more I have looked at the mystical practices of this area, the more I have been struck by the notion that the circum-Mediterranean culture area as a whole seems to be characterized by the meeting and merging of the shamanic soul-loss of the north and the possession of the south. Access to metaphysics in these areas seems to be a dualistic affair, operating according to one of two feasible mechanisms, if not both at once. Music, ranging from the shaman’s drum, aiding his soul’s journey, to much more elaborate performances, is a characteristic ingredient of rites of shamanism and possession; indeed, these rites, in their various distributions across the world, provide deep and oft-replayed societal impulses to music-making. I will suggest, in the sketch drawn here, that it is possible to discern special consequences in circum-Mediterranean musical traditions across the last half-millennium of the intersection of soul-loss and possession – that, more pointedly, the music of the elite European tradition was shaped in some measure by the convergence of these two modes of mystical experience in the geographical area where it arose. My sketch will lead us not only inward, towards the great modern avatars of European musical high culture, Beethoven and Wagner, but also outward to another epochal cultural shift: Europe’s move from the fifteenth century on to conquer and colonize vast stretches of the rest of the world. In Music in Renaissance Magic I discussed mystical experiences in earlymodern Italy, focusing on three examples that seem to bear out the juxtaposition there of soul-loss and possession: a north Italian agrarian cult described by Ginzburg, the benandanti (an instance of soul-loss); the Apulian spider-bite cult of tarantism (possession); and the Neoplatonic gnosis of Marsilio Ficino (both at once).16 These examples could be multiplied. Mediterranean possession cults to place alongside tarantism include related ‘bite’ cults on Sardinia and the Iberian peninsula and a Sardinian cult of possession by Catholic saints reported by Peter Burke. These cults seem to look back across the centuries to the cult of the Corybantes reported by Plato – an especially fascinating connection, given

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the tantalizing specifics he reports of its musical ingredients.17 More broadly, demonic possession was a familiar threat in early modern Europe, and possession of a less dire sort remained a popular explanation for illness.18 The practice of musical soul-loss, meanwhile, would need in the wake of Ginzburg’s analysis to take account of the bacchanale itself, associated in the popular imagination with the Sabbath. Moreover, something redolent of shamanism has reared its head recently at the very epicentre of elite Renaissance religious and musical practices. Writing on the L’homme armé melody, favoured for more than a century as a cantus firmus for polyphonic mass composition, Craig Wright has seen symbolized in this ‘armed man’ the Church Militant defending Christian souls against diabolical forces. The armed man can variously assume the guise of St Michael the archangel, knights crusading against the Turk, Christianized heroes from ancient mythology, and Christ himself. Extending Wright’s interpretation, Andrew Kirkman has identified the armed man of this widely used melody with the parish priest himself, struggling in defence of his parishioners’ souls. It requires no long leap to recognize in this priest and in Wright’s militant Christ the institutionalized survival of the ancient figure of the shaman, venturing out on soul-journeys to battle spiritual forces assailing his charges.19 Soul-loss and possession together, finally, enter into a complex and self-conscious relation in the religious experiences of late-Renaissance Christian mystics such as St Teresa of Ávila, St John of the Cross, and St Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. Maria’s visions show all the ingredients of possessions – they and other similar experiences were often thought to be demonically rather than divinely inspired – but her sisters, who recorded them, call them raptures, a word fraught in the sixteenth century with the sense of ‘seizure’ and ‘carrying off’ of its Latin root, raptus. In describing the fourth and highest stage of prayer in her autobiographical Libro de la vida, Teresa devotes a whole chapter to the distinction between mystical union and soul-loss. ‘I should like, with the help of God,’ she begins, ‘to be able to describe the difference between union and rapture [arrobamiento], or elevation, or what they call flight of the spirit, or transport … These different names all refer to the same thing, which is also called ecstasy.’ Later, in describing the desire that leads to ecstasy, she captures the dual trajectories that at once invade the soul and inspire its flight: ‘And this desire, which in a single moment penetrates to the very depths of the soul, begins to weary it so much that the soul soars upwards, far above itself and above all created things.’20

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In mainstream, elite, musical ideologies of the later Renaissance it is above all the wide dispersion of Ficino’s Neoplatonism that bespeaks the merging of soul-loss and possession.21 One of the most important legacies of Neoplatonism was the conception of inspired artistic genius that set down deep roots already in the early-modern period and has flourished ever since. In the sixteenth century this conception proliferated in connection with Plato’s divine madnesses or furores and in particular the poetic furore (which is to say, frenzied song). Ficino brought these furores back to the centre of European thought in his translation and exegesis of Plato; their revival is one of the most durable and influential of his many contributions. Ficino explained the furores by recourse to both mystical mechanisms, possession and soul-loss, though his emphasis is clearly enough on a possession-like divine influx. A related recourse to soul-loss, on the other hand, occurred in his model of gnosis and the influential psychology of love he built on it – the latter a topic with long resonance in poetic, musical, and psychological discourse. And both these mystical mechanisms were strongly associated with a temperament of intellectual inclination that veered always towards melancholy. The ingredients of a full-fledged musical mysticism were, then, widely dispersed by the late sixteenth century under the aegis of a resurgent Platonism. They were three: the idea of song as divine influx; the conception of the impact of song on its listeners as an amorous raptus of the soul; and the association of the frenzied singer with a melancholic temperament. The meeting of possession and soul-loss lingered at the heart of this nascent ideology. After the Renaissance, with madness ever more clearly construed as early-modern pathology and the influx of divinity waning as an explanation for creativity, this frenzied, melancholic, poetic gnosis was gradually transmuted into the model of artistic genius still familiar today: introspective, often alienated and brooding, privy to contemplations and insights beyond the rest of us. Two signal moments in this long history occurred across the eighteenth century; both were ambivalent in the face of music. First, the emergence of a modern aesthetic led to an emphasis of older, mimetic understandings of artistic expression, then to a dissatisfaction with them and the broaching of other, less tractable explanatory categories, especially a sublime reconceived in regard to its ancient, Longinian underpinnings. The mimetic models were notoriously ill equipped to deal with music, while the new sublime came only slowly to be applied to it.22

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Second, by the end of the eighteenth century a novel conception of the human subject was taking hold in Europe, one most famously analysed by Kant. This new subjectivity folded within the psyche conditions and categories inaccessible to reason and cognition; the psyche was, in regard to itself, transcendental. In the popularized versions of this anthropology that quickly proliferated – and that must have answered to deep-felt needs for new characterizations of the human subject – these inaccessible reaches took the form of noumenal mysteries. In an anticipation of Freudianism, the soul was now understood as partially unknown (indeed unknowable) to itself, divided between familiar and unfamiliar shores.23 The soul-journeys of the ancient shaman and the divine inspiration of the poet could now take place within the soul, as journeys to or messages from its unknown reaches. The two forms of circum-Mediterranean mysticism were introjected into the modern subject. The figure of Beethoven provided the exemplar of this post-Kantian psyche, and it seems not accidental, given the musical entailments of the poetic furore from which the genius ascribed to him descended, that this exemplar was a musician. The ambivalence of eighteenth-century aesthetics in the face of music was swept away by what came to appear, already in Beethoven’s lifetime, as the sublime emanations of a soul miraculously in touch with its deepest mysteries. But what is important to note here is that the Beethovenian exemplar is a deep expression of the mystical dualism I have described. It folds into itself not merely music, but a music that is at once the product of possession and a vehicle for the soul’s journey. E.T.A. Hoffmann heard both and described them in his famous review of ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ of 1813. This difficult music, Hoffmann said, required hard labour and a romantic temperament to vouchsafe its secrets; but with enough of both, it revealed ‘the high selfpossession [Besonnenheit] inseparable from true genius’ of its composer – the illumination from within, in other words, that was the newest model of poetic furore, of possession. At the same time, the music led ‘the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite [das Geisterreich des Unendlichen]’ – out, that is, onto the shamanic spiritual itinerary to the depths of the artist’s soul.24 None of the many later writers who agreed with Hoffmann about Beethoven’s ‘spiritualization of instrumental music’ – the phrase comes from A.B. Marx, certainly no Hoffmannesque rhapsode25 – would have been able to articulate Beethoven’s place in a millennium-old Mediterranean merger of ideologies of possession and soul-loss. Yet the composer’s

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imposing role in elite European artistic ideologies across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has much to do with his position at a culminating moment in this merger, when a new model of subjectivity endowed the artist with new versions of old mysteries and powers. Beethoven, to put the matter more baldly, is at once the possessed genius and the shaman of modernity. The ideology that grew up around him was nurtured by these age-old mystical mechanisms even as it renovated them. His music, which in the generations after him carried music in general to the forefront of the European creative arts, its condition to be aspired to by all the others, came to seem the apotheosis of a culture whose most exalted expressions were connected simultaneously to the influx of divine forces and to spiritual journeys. The juxtaposition of soul-loss and possession provided the deep cultural paradigm within which such music could be created and heard. Is there some sleight of hand in this assimilation of Hoffmann’s appreciation of Beethoven to my two circum-Mediterranean mystical modes? Whereas I have presented possession and soul-loss as experiences undergone by the soul of the mystic himself, Hoffmann contrasts the selfpossession of Beethoven with the listener’s journey to spirit worlds. But this is not a real difference. The frenzied poet, already in Ficino’s time, had impelled his listeners to follow the itineraries dictated to him too by the divine afflatus. Ficino put it succinctly: ‘Song imitates and enacts everything so forcefully that it immediately provokes both the singer and the hearers to imitate and enact the same things.’26 The sung inspiration at once shapes the shaman’s journey and carries others along on it. The poet not only assays metaphysics but also renders the experience audible and compelling. Thus, the duality in mystical experiences is revealed not only in their informing mechanisms but also in their performative effects. Just so we encounter it in Hoffmann. And so we encounter the duality again in the writings of Richard Wagner from about 1850. The actor who would embody the Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner envisaged in the culminating chapters of his Artwork of the Future, for example, was imagined, like Hoffmann’s Beethoven, to traverse simultaneously pathways that recall the trajectories of soul-loss and possession. Wagner described the itinerary in words redolent of trance experiences the world over: In drama [the actor] broadens his own particular being by the portrayal not of himself but of an individual personality that is universally human. He

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must completely step outside himself in order to seize the essence of a foreign personality so thoroughly as to be able to portray it; he will succeed in this only if he studies so exactly and perceives so vividly this one individual in his contact, interpenetration, and fulfilment with other individuals … that he will be able to absorb sympathetically into his own being that contact, interpenetration, and fulfilment.27

The Wagnerian actor at once embarks on a journey outside himself to experience another individual in all his social connectedness and is overtaken by this foreign presence, carrying it deep within himself. A few years later, in a crucial passage from the second part of Opera and Drama, Wagner put the dualism more succinctly and in different terms: ‘Man is in two ways a poet,’ he wrote, ‘in beholding [Anschauung] and in imparting [Mitteilung]. His natural poetic gift is the capacity to condense into an inner image the phenomena presented to his senses from the outside, his artistic to project this image back outward.’28 With this Wagner embarked on the least read but arguably most important section of his treatise, in which he described the general historical course that needed now to culminate in his new music drama. In conceptions such as these Wagner’s project carried forward the venerable mystical dualism that lived on also in the legacy of Beethoven. In doing so it shows itself to be, from the start, a Mediterraneanizing of music – confuting in advance, to speak whimsically, Nietzsche’s hope that by turning to ‘the south of music’ we might evade Wagner. Two generations earlier, Beethoven’s achievement had signalled the elaboration of southern musical mysticisms in German-speaking lands of the north. Nietzsche’s mistake lay in not realizing that the Wagnerian music he knew was, across the long European durée, always already Mediterraneanized. In the same motion, however, Wagner’s project embodied another epochal history: the wrenching chronicle of European expansion into the non-European world. This too was at first a Mediterranean adventure that subsequently spread to northern Europe. To understand Wagner’s place in it will require us to pause over some of his particular views and their background. The historical course Wagner describes in the opening chapters of part 2 of Opera and Drama starts from the dualism of Anschauung and Mitteilung and is a story of a falling-away from grace, with the return to be accomplished by his own reform.29 Wagner envisages an aboriginal history of humanity and society where the poet was a central figure. This primordial poet’s special capacity was to express the pure feelings aroused by

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sensations from the outer world in images created by the most sentient part of the soul, the phantasy. No understanding intervened in the making of these Phantasiebilder; they were images formed from phenomenal appearances according only to sensation, feeling, and phantasy. The poetic force or Dichtungskraft deployed in these images bound the folk together in societies; its expression took the form of anthropomorphic gods first, and later myths. The creation of art arose from this anthropomorphic urge, in which the folk represented to itself first gods, later heroes, and finally man. In the ancient Greek world, the artistic form assumed by the myths was tragedy, akin to a phantasy-image in its direct, representational appeal to the senses and feelings alike. Across the intervening ages – now summarizing quickly Wagner’s rambling disquisition – all these poetic powers and institutions decayed. Poetically bound society (Gesellschaft) gave way to the modern political state (Staat), characterized by arbitrary law and an unfeeling bourgeoisie. The state’s trammelling of individual feeling rendered the human being opaque to itself; because of this, the true feeling of ancient myth was replaced by Christian legend, in effect myth under the constraint of state and law. Direct access to feeling was severed by the intervention of analytical understanding. Indeed, insofar as the state sponsored any access to feeling – insofar as it sustained the state-poet – this was discovered only in masked and alienated form and entered into only through understanding, not prior to it. All these developments were expressed artistically in the decline of tragedy and the ascendancy of romance. What is now needed, Wagner urges in chapters 4 and 5, is a return from understanding to feeling, which will replace the individuality-throughunderstanding of the state with true individuality-in-society. This will take artistic form in the drama of the future. But to achieve this drama a double focusing will be required: First, the themes and motives of the drama must be so concentrated as to recapture the power of myth. Next, the reasoned word-speech of the state-poet (Wortsprache) must be concentrated and enhanced into a tone-speech (Tonsprache). Only through these two means will an artistic expression emerge in which phantasy can regain some of its lost powers and understanding give up its analytic bent and approach feeling. Wagner devoted the last chapter of part 2 of Opera and Drama to the tone-speech thus anticipated. This, he says, is the spontaneous, unreasoned expression of feeling stimulated by sensory impressions. It first took the form of a melody of open, vocalic sounds alone, accompanied by a rhythmic element of bodily gesture. To express the diversity of feel-

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ings aroused by external stimuli, however, required further articulation; consonantal sounds were joined to the vowels, and the element of alliteration (that is, Wagner’s famous Stabreim, alliteration) arose. But already here the seeds were sown of the reasoned word-speech opposed to phantasmic tone-speech. Consonantal articulation and distinction pointed exactly toward the analysis characteristic of discursive understanding and so directed language, almost from the first, away from its origins in feeling. As Wagner sums up the development, ‘Precisely in the degree that poiesis (Dichten) ceased to be a function of feeling and became a corollary of understanding was the creative bond of gesture- tone- and word-speech, all once united in the lyric, loosened.’30 The drama of the future needs to repair this breakdown by revivifying the features of aboriginal tone-speech, and to this Wagner turns his attention in the familiar opening chapters of book 3 of his treatise. Anyone who has read even cursorily in the eighteenth-century literature concerning the origins of language and society will immediately recognize many of these themes. Several Wagnerian exegetes have pointed to this connection. Thomas Grey, in particular, has seen Rousseau and Herder in Wagner’s background.31 I wish, instead, to point in a different direction. I believe that, even in the face of Wagner’s omnivorous reading, even amid the wealth of sources he drew on, a single source from this literature shines through in this section of Opera and Drama. This is Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova or New Science of 1744. At first blush it may seem farfetched to connect Vico to Wagner, since the influence of Vico’s treatise is hard to trace through the later eighteenth century. But the fortunes of the New Science shifted dramatically from the 1820s on, to the extent that, by the later nineteenth century, its influence is explicit or implicit everywhere from the positivists – on whose calendar Vico was given the equivalent of a Saint’s Day – to George Eliot, whose Casaubon in Middlemarch pursues a key to all mythologies of distinctly Vichian tone, to the youthful Aby Warburg, and to Freud. The signal moment in this change of fortune occurred in 1827, when the prodigious young historian Jules Michelet published a French translation of most of the New Science and several other Vichian writings. These translations were reprinted across the next decades; with them the northern European renown and influence of Vico burgeoned. It is easy to imagine the young Wagner – in Paris in 1840, working to finish the historical drama Rienzi, seeking the company, as he later wrote, of scholars rather than musicians – coming under the sway of the vast historical syntheses Michelet was, with the inspiration of Vico, constructing;

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it seems to me rather harder to imagine Wagner paying them no heed at all. Vico’s history of the emergence of society was, at any rate, readily available to him. The New Science anticipates part 2 of Opera and Drama at many points – indeed, at a greater number of points than any other single eighteenthcentury writing that Wagner drew upon. In Vico, first and foremost, we find the fertile, creative poiesis that leads to the formation of society – he called it poetic wisdom, sapienza poetica, and it is the touchstone of the New Science all told. This poiesis, as in Wagner, depends among the faculties of the soul upon the phantasy. It is a focusing by the phantasy of the perceptions of the senses into a unified, anthropomorphic image. The focusing is a result of the passions aroused by the sense stimuli involved; it is exclusively a product of the sentient portions of the soul and of feeling, not of understanding. It is a pure, felt response to phenomena, not a reasoned account of them. In earliest germ this phantasmic response was expressed only through mute gestures, but its first full-fledged manifestation took the form of song accompanied by gesture. This aboriginal song, as the natural utterance of passion, was a purely vocalic outcry, characterized especially by diphthongs. Only later did it come to be articulated by the addition of consonantal sounds. In this articulated form, finally, discursive speech was born from passionate song. The images that resulted from this phantasmic condensation of feeling were, according to Vico, the first gods; they gave rise to the first myths. Their expression bound people together in societies and set these societies on an inevitable course from an age of gods, to one of heroes, to a final age of men and reason. In this final age the phantasy was enervated, no longer capable of generating unified images from sense stimuli and feelings; discursive understanding instead came to hold first place.32 I have lingered over this substantial list of anticipations of Opera and Drama not only to establish the connection of Vico to Wagner but also to underscore the pervasive relation, recognized by Grey and others, between Wagnerian themes and the many Condillacs, Warburtons, Rousseaus, Lord Monboddos, and Herders who followed Vico through the eighteenth century. At the level of Wagner’s self-conscious intent we cannot doubt that his reform project was based on a model of societal history and language evolution devised by and characteristic of the European eighteenth century. To scrutinize this model is to broaden our hermeneutic history of Wagner’s aims in Opera and Drama – and, by extension, his aims in Der Ring des Nibelungen, the musical project most intimately allied to this prose.

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But there is more, and it leads back towards the general theme of a history of music understood across the longue durée. To scrutinize Wagner’s model is also to expose a deeper, archaeological level of his project, one that was beyond even his domineering ken. The discourse Wagner drew upon harboured within it momentous shifts in the emergence of European modernity. In taking it up, Wagner carried with him its deepest presumptions. These presumptions, in turn, were shaped above all by the colonial experience – Europe’s destabilizing, world-changing encounter, from the sixteenth century on, with new societies and cultures. In reading Vico, Rousseau, Herder, and the rest it cannot escape our notice that again and again they answer questions on the origins of language and society by what they took to be an empirical appeal to contemporary languages and cultures beyond Europe. Above all, the most far-flung examples, China and the New World, are invoked. In this predilection, these writers embody a process that anthropologist Johannes Fabian has analysed from other, later perspectives; he calls it, inelegantly but effectively, the denial of coevalness.33 That is, the European writers imagine societies contemporary to their own to represent the features of a temporally distant European society; they project present-day societies along a chronological axis reaching back to the primeval past. Observed in hindsight, this operation brings with it reciprocalities of complex sorts, some of which shape our historical and anthropological methods to this day. Space is conceived as time, and by the same token distance in time is equated with distance in space: The past is another country, in other words. A historical past, in addition, is assimilated to an ethnographic present, and vice versa; the representation of the one by the other can move in either direction. Geographical and spatial distance, finally, come equally to represent cultural difference. Another condition of the denial of coevalness cuts even deeper than these. Fabian describes it as the fading of a Christian vision of time, an incorporative vision that holds out a future history of the salvation of all peoples. In place of this eschatological time a new, secular temporal order begins to take hold. This takes the form of a graded, evolutionary scale, discriminating and exclusive in that contemporary peoples can be located with ostensible scientific neutrality at different, disconnected points along it. ‘Primitives’ in the Europeans’ own world are now seen to be playing out their own, separate evolution rather than awaiting, within a single temporal order, the saving grace Europe brings. As Fabian says, the ‘pagan … always already marked for salvation’ gives way to the ‘savage … not yet ready for civilization.’34 Fabian locates all these developments in a generalized ‘Enlighten-

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ment thought,’ and undoubtedly the eighteenth century of Vico and the rest is the (the?) moment of their first culmination. Closer scrutiny suggests, however, that their emergence came earlier, in the late sixteenth century, at the first climax of European encounters abroad. Already at this time, to take one broad example, the history of Christianity in the New World and the accounts of its missionaries present rich, abundant evidence of the decline of eschatological time. This expresses itself as a pervasive disillusionment with the effort to Christianize native peoples and a corollary suppression of indigenous social practices. What is left in the wake of this disillusionment is certainly not any wholesale decline of Christian tenets, not any pervasive secularization. What is left, I think, is instead something less tractable: a tension, not quite articulable, between Europe’s Christianizing efforts and a dawning, unsettling awareness of a new cultural and epistemological category: a category of irredeemable difference. Not an amassing of details of specific cultural idiosyncrasies, then, but a new place at the heart of thought where categorical difference could lodge: This was the seismic effect within European mentalities of the encounters and colonization. On the reordered mental terrain left by the tremors, universal Christian eschatology ceded ground, and plottings of present-day cultures along a historical, graded scale sprang up. The proliferation of schemes for understanding these cultures as snapshots along the evolutionary path of human capacities shared by Europeans – especially speaking, singing, writing, and the formation of societies – represents, at the last, an attempt to redeem what was quickly coming to seem the irredeemable. Wagner’s project in Opera and Drama and the Ring properly belongs to this archaeological history. It is, at one level, an effort to retrace the path of a primeval evolution so as to restore to art its earliest, most bracing engagement of feeling. In order to do this, it seeks to apply eighteenthcentury historicizing formulas for the redemption of others to redeem instead the European soul itself. But this effort could only be conceived under the aegis of the abiding, modern European illusion in which difference could soft-focus into the play of evolutionary histories. It is worth veering down one more byway to underscore this point. Charles Darwin’s project, too, was an outgrowth of the decline of eschatological time. His building upon the modern archaeological formation of irredeemable difference led him, as it led others, to history – but to history on a geological timescale. Darwin had much to say, in The Descent of Man, about primordial song. He accepted the eighteenth-century no-

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tion of language’s origin in passionate song, but he framed it in a history ranging far beyond the human pasts of his predecessors or of Wagner: a natural history of all species. When he wrote that ‘Primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably used his voice largely, as does one of the gibbon-apes at the present day, in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing,’ he deployed another denial of coevalness, but one extending beyond homo sapiens to gibbons. If we are tempted to think that this strategy was politically neutral and far removed from earlier, similar strategies, we need only read on: ‘The imitation by articulate sounds of musical cries might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions. As bearing on the subject of imitation, the strong tendency in our nearest allies, the monkeys, in microcephalous idiots, and in the barbarous races of mankind, to imitate whatever they hear deserves notice.’35 The distance between gibbons and humans might seem wide – even Wagner, despite his penchant for birdsongs, would not have dreamed of a tone-speech based on gibbons’ songs – but it is immediately filled in by the same present-day ‘barbarians’ who stood somewhere in the background of Stabreim. One musical writer was quick to pick up on Darwin’s views: Edmund Gurney. In The Power of Sound of 1881, Gurney differentiated musical expression from musical impressions, and these from those of all other arts. With Darwin he sought the origin of musical impressions in primordial emotions; but unlike Darwin he resisted the connection of early song to the origin of language. Instead, he argued that the primordial force of musical impressions lived on in the modern psyche and remained the basis for all musical appreciation in the present-day world. ‘If the associations from the various passions were formed of old in connection with the satisfactory exercise of a rudimentary [musical] faculty,’ he explained, ‘so with the developed [modern] faculty it can only be when the mind is satisfied by its hidden co-ordinative exercise … that the deep emotions, distilled from these passions through ages of inherited association, can be evoked.’36 For Gurney, to ring changes on a familiar nineteenth-century dictum, it was not ontogeny that recapitulated phylogeny, but psychology: In a way that anticipates Freud’s uncanny, he asserted that the deepest, most primitive perceptions of the human mind are still with us today, to be tapped by all musical stimuli, even the most exalted (for Gurney, Beethoven’s). For Darwin, instead, ontology recapitulated phylogeny – the ontology of the world around, read as evolutionary narrative and exemplified in the songs of gibbons. For Wagner, finally, it was the Gesamtkunstwerk itself that

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recapitulated phylogeny. Ruminations over the history of opera led him to prescriptions for a new artistic praxis that might stage the early history itself of language and society. But here, we can see, the Gesamtkunstwerk partook of an ontology like Darwin’s and psychology like Gurney’s: the first because it replayed a species history that was increasingly seen to extend beyond the species; the second because it sprang from (among other sources) a dichotomy of mystical psychological states rooted as deeply in the history of the mind as Gurney’s musical impressions. To understand this background to Wagner’s project is to see it as the culmination of a particular awareness of cultural difference that had not existed in pre-Columbian Europe, that set in slowly but momentously in the centuries after Columbus, and that is, I am convinced, a fundamental marker of early modernity. It is to see Wagner’s Ring not only against the background of Norse sagas and proto-Nietzschean imaginings of ancient Greece, but against present-day experiences of difference. It is also to see that the question of some aboriginal, European tone-speech could only have arisen out of the regimens whereby Europeans struggled to construct an evolutionary scale for the myriad human cultural technologies that existed alongside them in the world. Unbeknownst to Wagner, his project pulsed with the energy of an archaeological disruption in European perceptions of others. His concerns, which have so often seemed the epitome of an aloof European high culture – and which were that, to be sure – were also generated by internalized pressures of global difference. The heart of Europe and its proud modernity were in this sense now constituted from without; they emerged from a knowledge of self achieved through the detour of other, to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur’s famous aphorism about ethnography. Such knowledge is dialectical, as Ricoeur knew. The heart of Europe beat also according to its own, internal rhythms: the dual systole and diastole of the circum-Mediterranean mysticism carried forward in the ideology of Beethoven and the post-Kantian subjectivity he epitomized. Or, to recall the example of Wagner’s actor, Europe found itself enacting a role in a global drama that arose from its journey out into the wider world and its possession by what it discovered there. A deep paradox of elite European culture emerges in this period from the meeting of these two archaeological formations, the mystical and the colonial. The one preserved an ancient access to metaphysics that had seen millennia of development within Judaeo-Christian traditions. But these very traditions, this very metaphysics, had sponsored the es-

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chatological time of salvation countered by the more recent eruption of irredeemable difference. The two archaeological formations, then, opened between them a rift in which European modernity took shape. The unsettled home of the modern European psyche was this novel space between the divine and the other. It had not existed at the outset of the European age of expansion across the globe. There is a place in Wagner’s project where this archaeological rift is more apparent than in the Ring ; a place which, despite Wagner’s own attempts to rationalize it as an outgrowth of his earlier concerns, moves with a momentum beyond his control; a place where, partly because of this odd disparity of overweening aims and uncontrolled effects, commentators have from the beginning felt uneasy; a place where, in a word, the prerogatives of eschatological time and the divine resurface, implausibly, to confront evolutionary difference. To this place I give the last word: It is Parsifal.

NOTES * A version of this article has appeared in my Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays (Aldershot, Eng., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 601–53; see section 3, 615. 2 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 892. 3 For one particularly good discussion among many, see Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch.1: ‘Intellectual History and the History of Mentalités: A Dual Re-evaluation.’ The metaphor of ‘outillage mentale’ as it developed in the early Annales years is suggestive against the backdrop of huge advances in France in the understanding of palaeolithic culture and technology in the same period, with its new evaluation of the cultural significance of ancient stone tools. This interdisciplinary influence would repay closer attention; it carried over from structuralist thinking to the early poststructuralist period and is manifest in Jacques Derrida’s citations, at important moments in Of Grammatology, of André Leroi-Gourhan. 4 See Samuel Kinser, ‘Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel,’ American Historical Review 86 (1981), 63–105; esp. 68–9.

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5 See Stuart Clark, ‘The Annales Historians,’ in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 179–98; esp. 182. 6 The long genealogy that preceded this geocultural position of Febvre’s included, in addition to de la Blache, a tradition of historians who embraced more or less wholeheartedly environmental determinism (or its later variant, national-cum-environmental determinism). The tradition leads back through Jules Michelet to eighteenth-century writers such as Montesquieu, Condorcet, Rousseau, and Vico (to whom we will return below). Vico was, to be sure, no stranger to environmental determinism; moreover, a Christian determinism stands always at the centre of his reasoning. But at the same time, his ‘poetic wisdom’ (sapienza poetica), the crucial force, as he saw it, in the emergence and early history of all human societies, is a force of human perception that transmutes and even reinvents the environment; it endows the brute physics of nature with a sacred metaphysics, in the process both creating societies and bringing their environments into the realm of social perception. Sapienza poetica is by no means exactly the mentalist position that emerges in Febvre, but it stands behind this position as a challenge to environmental determinism and a recognition of human powers to fashion whatever worlds are accessible to perception. 7 See, for example, the works by Chartier and Clark already cited; also Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction: History, Culture, and Text,’ in The New Cultural History, ed. Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1–22. 8 For my own longer analysis of Foucault’s archaeology and its relation to hermeneutic history, and for discussion of further secondary sources on the topic, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 1. 9 Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 10 Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 11 Hunt, ‘Introduction,’ 10. 12 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), xi. 13 ‘Relire Braudel: Histoire et sciences sociales’; I am grateful to Professor Chartier for allowing me to read this essay in manuscript. 14 Gary Tomlinson, ‘Musicology, Anthropology, History,’ in Il Saggiatore musicale 8 (2001), 21–37. 15 Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); for shamanism, passim; for possession, 231. For a review of the distinction in earlier literature, see Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, ch. 5.

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16 Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic. 17 See Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 212; Plato, Ion 536c; and E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). On tarantism and related bite cults see Ernesto de Martino, La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del sud (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961). 18 On demonic possession see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), passim; for a fundamental hermeneutics of possession, see Michel de Certeau, ‘Language Altered: The Sorcerer’s Speech,’ ch. 6 in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 19 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 164–205; and Andrew Kirkman, ‘L’homme armé: A New Hypothesis,’ paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, November 2003, Houston, Texas. 20 For St Maria, see Armando Maggi, Uttering the Word: The Mystical Performances of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, a Renaissance Visionary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). For St Teresa, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image, 1960), 189, 193; and Santa Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida, ed. Otger Steggink (Madrid: Castalia, 1986), 271–2, 277. 21 For the following material see Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, esp. chs. 4–6. 22 The literature on these issues is large. For several different perspectives see Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992); and Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23 I describe this new subjectivity at somewhat greater length in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 73–83. 24 Ernst T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,’ trans. in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, ed. Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), vol. 6, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Solie, 151–6; for the German original, Ernst T.A. Hoffmann, Fantasie- und Nachtstücke (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1960), 41–9 (i.e., no. 4 of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier). 25 Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, ed. Treitler, vol. 6; The Nineteenth Century, ed. Solie, 76. 26 Quoted from Ficino’s De vita libri tres; see Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 112; emphasis added.

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27 Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1995), 193 (translation modified); see Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften (10 vols., Frankfurt: Insel 1983), 6:137. 28 Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama, ed. Klaus Kropfinger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 159. See also Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 152. 29 For an illuminating analysis of this section of Oper und Drama with emphases somewhat different from mine, see Thomas S. Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 257–69. 30 Wagner, Oper und Drama, 236 (Opera and Drama, 229). 31 Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 259–62. 32 For Michelet’s translations from Vico’s Scienza nuova and other writings see Jules Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 21 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–87), 1:257–605. For modern editions of the Scienza nuova see Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), and The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). See also Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), and Gary Tomlinson, ‘Vico’s Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno)Musicology,’ The Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 344–77. 33 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 34 Ibid., 26–7. 35 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 56–7. 36 Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound, ed. Edward Cone (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 123; see also 315.

Contributors

James Amelang is professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Among his publications are Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490-1714 (Princeton University Press, 1986), A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets, 1651 (Oxford University Press, 1991); and The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (University of California Press 1998). Matteo Casini is the author of I gesti del principe: La festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età rinascimentale (Marsilio, 1996). He has held numerous fellowships and has taught at the Universities of Venice and Padua. He is currently teaching at Suffolk University, Boston. Bryan Givens completed his dissertation, ‘The Reluctant Visonary: Maria de Macedo and the Millenarian Culture of Early Modern Portugal,’ at UCLA in 2003. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. Jane Hathaway is Professor of History at Ohio State University. She is the author of The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800 (forthcoming); Beshir Agha, Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem (Oneworld, 2006); A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (State University of New York Press, 2003); and The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Carroll B. Johnson, late Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA,

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Contributors

and a well-known scholar of Cervantes, vigorously challenged long-held views of the author and his work. His best-known works are Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote (University of California Press, 1983); and Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction (Twayne Publishers, 1990). SJevket Pamuk, professor at Boghaziçi (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul, is an economic historian of the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean. His recent publications include A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2001); ‘Selective Institutional Change and the Longevity of the Ottoman Empire,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2004); and ‘The Black Death and the “Great Divergence” across Europe, 1300–1600,’ European Review of Economic History (2007). Leslie Peirce is Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies, and Director of the Program in Ottoman Studies, at New York University. She is the author of The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993); and Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (University of California Press, 2003). Gabriel Piterberg is Professor of History at UCLA. He teaches and writes on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean, as well as on Zionism, Israel, and settler colonialism. Among his publications are An Ottoman Tragedy (2003, Turkish edition 2005) and The Returns of Zionism (2008). He writes for the New Left Review and London Review of Books. Teofilo F. Ruiz is Professor of History at UCLA. His major publications include Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), awarded the Premio del Rey prize for Spanish history by the American Historical Association; Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (Longman, 2001); From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Late Medieval Castilian Society (Princeton University Press, 2004); Medieval Europe and the World (with Robin W. Winks; Oxford University Press, 2005); and Spain: Centuries of Crises, 1300–1469 (Blackwell, 2007). In preparation are a monograph on festivals in late medieval and early modern Spain, and a general history of the Mediterranean. Geoffrey Symcox is Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. He special-

Contributors

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izes in the history of early modern Italy, with a focus on urban history. His most recent publication, co-authored with Anthony Cardoza, is A History of Turin; Italian edition, Storia di Torino (Einaudi, 2006). Gary Tomlinson is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. His major publications include Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (University of California Press, 1987); Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton University Press, 1999); and The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voices in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Allan Tulchin received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000, with a dissertation entitled ‘The Reformation in Nîmes,’ which he is revising into a book to be titled Calvinist Crucible. He has published articles in French Historical Studies and The Journal of Modern History. He is currently assistant professor in the History and Philosophy Department at Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. Lucette Valensi holds the rank of Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author of, among other works, Le Maghreb avant la prise d’Alger, 1790–1830 (with Abraham Udovitch; Flammarion, 1969); The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia (with Abraham Udovitch; Harwood, 1984); Venise et la Sublime Porte: La naissance du despote (Hachette, 1987); and L’Islam en dissidence: Genèse d’un affrontement (with Gabriel Martinez-Gros; Seuil, 2004).

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Index

Abbas I, 67, 70, 89 Abul-Shawarib, Ridvan Bey, 61 Adnan, 60–1 Adrianople, 28 Afonso Henriques, Dom, 129–32 Africa, 7–8, 43, 100, 132, 144, 254 Ah-Ramén, Abd, 215 Aintab, 77, 89–92 Alcántara, 133–4 Alcazarquivir, 132–5, 144 Aleppo, 66–7, 69, 89, 93–4, 119 Alexandria, 56, 64 Algiers, 7, 43, 208, 210–11, 213–17, 220–1, 224 Allen, Robert, 109, 116 Álvares, Mateus, 134 Amasya, 121 America, 103, 112, 231 Amiens, 158–9 Amsterdam, 89, 110, 116 Anatolia (Asia Minor), 66–7, 69, 77, 79–81, 83, 85, 88–9, 92, 103, 118, 121 Andalusia, 136 Anderson, Perry, 10 Andricm, Ivo, 82

Angiolello, Gianmaria, 93 Annales (School), 4, 8, 18, 32, 36, 44, 46–7, 151–3, 238, 247–9, 252 Annales (Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations), 24, 30, 36, 40 Antioch, 57, 63 António, Dom, 133–4 Antwerp, 116 Arabia, Arabian Peninsula, 57, 61, 77 Argel, 212, 217, 219, 221 Arrabal, Fernando, 215 Arzila, 133 Astrana Marín, Luis, 208, 222 Aulard, Alphonse, 20 Austria, 178, 213, 216 Austria, Don Juan de, 213, 216 Azerbaijan, 70 Baghdad, 93 Baglioni, Orazio, 180 Bailyn, Bernard, 9 Bairoch, Paul, 110, 112–13 Balcázar, Juan de, 219, 224 Balkans, 66–7, 84, 103, 108, 115, 118 Baltic, 10, 26

276 Bandarra, Gonçalo Anes, 130–3, 135–6, 139, 141–2, 144–5 Barbarigo, Nicolò, 198 Barbaro, Antonio, 194–5, 197 Barkan, Ömer Lutfi, 101, 103–4, 106–7 Baroja, Julio Caro, 236 Basadonna, Girolamo, 192–3 Bataillon, Marcel, 21 Bavaria, 59 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 254, 257–9, 265–6 Belgrade, 115 Bellini, Gentile, 27 Benavides, Don Diego de, 218, 224 Bennassar, Bartolomé and Lucile, 216, 220 Berlin, 43 Berr, Henri, 19 Bertrand, Loys M., 157 Bettmann, Otto L., 154 Birmingham, 152 Black Sea, 118 Bloch, Marc, 4, 10, 17–18, 21, 23, 30–1, 35–6, 40, 46, 152, 247–8 Bocarro Frances, Manuel, 138 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28 Bohemia, 178 Boschini, M., 182 Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 29–30, 252 Brazil, 127, 140–2, 254 Bremundan, F. Fabro, 187 Bulgaria, 81 Burke, Peter, 254 Bursa, 114–15 Byzantium, 56, 66 Cacoyannis, Michael, 235 Cairo, 57, 64, 69, 84, 89, 115 Calvière, Guillaumes, 157–8

Index Cameron, Alan, 63, 65 Camões, Luís de, 132 Canavaggio, Jean, 209, 215 Cancellieri, Bianca, 60 Candia, 177, 179, 194–8 Carlevarjis, Luca de, 199 Castile, 111, 130, 211 Castro, Dom João de, 134–9, 142–3, 145–6 Catizone, Marco Tulio, 135–7 Caucasus, 61, 67, 69, 83 Cavazza, Girolamo, 195 Çelebi, Ahmad, 61 Çelebi, Evliya, 64 Cervantes, Juan de, 209, 218 Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 28, 208–26 Chabot, Pierre, 166, 169 Charles V, 84 Charles VIII, 68 Chartier, Roger, 248–9, 252–3 Chaunu, Huguette, 22, 47 Chaunu, Pierre, 18, 22–3, 25–6, 47 China, 112, 119–20, 263 Cilicia, 83 Clark, Stuart, 248 Clement X (Pope), 142 Constantinople, 56, 63, 87, 119, 213 Contarini, Alvise II, 184 Corner, Girolamo, 192 Coronelli, Vincenzo, 200 Correia, Gaspar, 138 Couto, Sebastiáo de, 138 Crimea, 83 Crussol, Antoine de, 166 Cyprus, 177 d’Alviano, Bartolomeo, 180 d’Este, Almerigo, 180 Damascus, 66–7, 69, 114–15 Dante Alighieri, 59

Index Dardanelles, 181 Darwin, Charles, 37, 264–6 Deleuze, Gilles, 249–50 Delumeau, Jean, 45 Dermigny, Louis, 22 Derrida, Jacques, 250, 267 Dubrovnik, 35, 152 Durkheim, Émile, 47, 237 École Pratique des Hautes Études, 21, 24, 46 Edirne, 114–15 Egypt, 43, 56–8, 61, 63, 66–9, 71, 77, 81, 100, 118, 254 Eliot, George, 261 Ehrenberg, Richard, 41 Ejarque, Onofre, 213, 215, 223 England, 10, 112, 134, 237 Enríquez, Fray Feliciano, 218, 226 Erizzo, Francesco, 198 Espinosa, Gabriel, 134 Ethiopia, 57, 254 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 236, 238 Fabian, Johannes, 263 Farnese, Orazio, 180 Farnese, Ottaviano, 200 Febvre, Lucien, 4–5, 8, 17–22, 24–7, 30–1, 35–40, 46, 151, 230, 247–8, 250; Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle, 19, 38; La terre et l’évolution humaine, 37–8 Fernandes, André, 141 Ferrarese, Ali, 216 Ferraro, Joanne, 198 Fertile Crescent, 83 Ficino, Marsilio, 254, 256, 258 Fleet, Kate, 87 Florence, 40–1, 46, 59–60, 62, 65, 67, 135, 199

277

Forster, E.M., 213 Foscarini, Girolamo, 197–8 Foscolo, Leonardo, 198 Foucault, Michel, 249–52 France, 10, 20, 37, 100, 111–12, 134, 138, 145, 153–6, 160–1, 196, 237 French Revolution, 20, 166 Freschot, Casimir, 195 Freud, Sigmund, 217, 235, 261, 265 Galvão, Duarte, 129 Gamon, Achille, 166 Gandin, Michele, 235 Gandra, Manuel J., 128 Garcés, María Antonia, 208–9, 217, 220 Garnier, Tony, 43 Gaziantep, 89 Genoa, 35, 40, 45–6 Georgia, 69–70, 83 Germany, 10, 37–8, 59, 67, 119, 178, 233 Gibbons, H.A., 83 Gil, Fr. Juan, 211, 222 Ginzburg, Carlo, 252–5 Giustinian, Pompeo, 180 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 41 Goldstone, Jack, 105 Goubert, Pierre, 8, 18, 22–3, 25 Greece, 43, 56, 83, 181, 196, 266 Greenblatt, Stephen, 209 Grenier, Jean-Yves, 20 Grey, Thomas, 261–2 Guattari, Félix, 249–50 Gurney, Edmund, 265–6 Haedo, Diego de, 219 Hamilton, Earl, 6, 22, 102, 109, 116, 151 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 237–8

278

Index

Hasan Pasha, 220 Hauser, Henri, 30 Haushofer, Karl, 37 Heintz, Joseph, 199 Henri II, 156 Henri IV, 111 Henry, Louis, 8 Herodotus, 92 Hertz, Robert, 238 Hijaz, 64, 81 histoire événementielle, 55, 71 Hocart, A.M., 237 Hodgen, Margaret, 238 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 257–8 Howard, Ebenezer, 43 Hunt, Lynn, 249–51 Hüsrev Pasha, 93–4 Iberia, 128–9, 254 Ibn Iyas, 65 Ihbrahim Pasha, 93 Indian Ocean, 9, 22, 26, 77, 119 Iran, 28, 62–3, 68, 70, 84, 89, 93; Iranian plateau, 56, 67–8; Persia, Persian empire, 5, 57, 62, 119; Safavid Persia/Iran, 4–5, 62–3, 65–7, 70, 78, 84–5, 89 Iraq, 57, 63, 67, 77, 85 Isfahan, 62, 70 Isidore, St, 129–30, 135 Istanbul, 27, 35, 43, 66, 70, 88–9, 106, 108, 110, 114–18, 120 Italy, 43, 56, 59, 67–8, 70, 100–1, 103, 178–80, 197, 200, 208, 213, 231–3, 254 Ivanovich, Cristoforo, 197 al-Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman 59, 61 Japan, 112 Jáuregui, Juan de, 210

Jennings, Ronald, 121 Jerusalem, 57, 114–15, 136–7 Joachim of Fiore, 128, 130 João III, 131, 144 João IV, 139–43, 145 John of Nikiu, 57 Jordan, 57 Julius II, 42 Jullian, Camille, 19 Jura, 25 Karaman, 121 Karbala, 63 Kayseri, 121 Khusrau I Anushirvan, 57 Khusrau II Parvis, 57 Kirkman, Andrew, 255 Kunt, Metin, 67, 70 Labrousse, Ernest, 8, 18–23, 25, 30, 46 Lazzarini, Gregorio, 196 Leach, Edmund, 237 Lebanon, 58 Le Corbusier, 43 Leo X, 42 Lepanto, 179–81 Lepetit, Bernard, 20 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 250 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 8, 152– 3, 166, 248 Levant, 57, 117–19, 186, 207 Levi, Carlo, 7, 231–4, 239–40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 47–8, 237 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 247 Lewis, Bernard, 104 Lindley Cintra, Luís Filipe, 129 Lisbon, 131, 134, 136, 139–40, 147 Livorno, 47 Lombard, Denys, 22

Index London, 110, 116, 140, 222 longue durée, 4, 6, 21, 35, 39, 48, 99, 240, 246–7, 249–50, 252–3, 263 Lopino, Domingo, 218, 225 Low Countries, 10, 40, 105 Lucania (Basilicata), 231, 236 Mackinder, Halford, 37–8 Maddison, Angus, 113 Madrid, 110, 116, 138 Mahmud Pasha, 93 Malchi, Esperanza, 88 Malek, Abd-el-, 133 Malmazet, Jean, 156 Manchester, 152 Mangini, Cecilia, 234–5 Maranhão, 141 Marseille, 156 Martino, Ernesto de, 7, 233–40 Marx, Karl, 30, 152, 257 Massarolo, Defendi, 216 Mathiex, Jean, 22 Mathiez, Albert, 20 Mauro, Gaspare and Domenico, 190, 200 Maximilian I, 68 McGaha, Michael D., 215 Mecca, 58, 61, 137 Medici, Catherine de’, 166 Medici, Cosimo de’, 28 Medina, 61 Mediterranean (geographical area), 3–10, 17–19, 22, 26–7, 29, 31, 35–6, 39, 40–3, 46, 48, 55–6, 67–8, 71, 76, 78–80, 83–4, 99–104, 108–11, 113–18, 120–3, 151–3, 177–9, 229, 231–3, 236, 238–40, 247, 252–4, 257–9, 266 La Méditerranée, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age

279

of Philip II (Braudel), 3–10, 17–19, 25, 27, 32, 35–6, 38–9, 41–8, 78–9, 102–3, 110, 122, 127, 151–3, 156, 177–9, 207–8, 211, 229–30, 233, 238, 247–8 Mehmet II, 86–7 Mehmet Pasha, 82 Melo, Dom Francisco Manuel de, 138–9 Melun, 167 Mendès, Alvaro, 88 Mesopotamia, 43 Metrodotus, 57 Meuvret, Jean, 8, 23 Michelangelo, 27 Michelet, Jules, 20, 31, 261 Middle East, 79, 84, 105, 117 Milan, 46, 116 Miskimin, Harry, 105 Misr (Cairo), 57 Mocenigo, Alvise, 187, 194 Mocenigo, Lazzaro, 197 Molho, Mauricio, 209 Montaigne, Michel de, 28 Montpellier, 166 Morea, 177, 179, 181, 191, 195–6 Morineau, Michel, 105 Morocco, 131, 133–4, 144 Morosini, Francesco, 179, 186, 190–1, 194–7 Morosini, Giorgio, 194 Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, 58, 61, 63, 91 Murad, Hajji, 215–16 Mussolini, Benito, 43 Naima, Mustafa, 86 Naples, 135, 199, 233 Nasi, Don Joseph, 88 Nauplia, 190–1

280

Index

Navarino, 191 Navarre, 160 Nereus, 180 Nesjri, 88 Netherlands, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 246–7, 250–2, 259, 266 Nîmes, 6, 153–70 North Africa, 7, 43, 100, 132 Olbricht, Konrad, 100 Orán, 213, 222 Orléans, 158–62 O’Rourke, Kevin, 109 Ottoman empire, 4–7, 27–8, 58, 63, 66–70, 76–94, 99–100, 104–7, 114–18, 120–2, 191, 207 Oualid, William, 20 Ourique, 128–32, 144 Paiva, Sebastião de, 140 Palestine, 58, 81 Pancratius, 180 Paris, 43, 134–7, 139, 158–9, 261 Parma, 200 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 242–3 Paz, Juan Blanco de, 213, 215, 218, 224 Peña, José F. de la, 215 Persia. See Iran Pesaro, Giovanni, 192–3, 195 Pesaro, Leonardo, 195 Philip II, 3, 5–6, 31, 36, 39, 45, 79, 103, 133–4, 152 Philip IV, 138 Piacenza, 45 Picard, Roger, 20 Pirenne, Henri, 40, 50 Plethon, 80 Poland, 191

Pomeranz, Kenneth, 119 Ponseti, Helena Percas de, 215 Pontoise, 154, 158, 166–7, 169 Portugal, 5, 6, 88, 100, 127–9, 131–2, 134–47, 222 Proust, Marcel, 17 Qahtan, 60 Quadros, António, 132 Quraysh, 61 Rabelais, François, 19 Raphael, 27 Ratzel, Friedrich, 37–8 Raymond, André, 115 Red Sea, 64, 118 Renaudet, Augustin, 23 Renouard, Yves, 22 Revel, Jacques, 248 Ricoeur, Paul, 252, 266 Riley, E.C., 209 Rivers, W.H.R., 237–8 Robisheaux, Thomas, 160 Rodrigues Pacheco, Panteleão, 139 Roe, Sir Thomas, 94 Roman Empire, 56, 63 Romania, 88 Romano, Ruggiero, 47, 86 Rome, 29, 42, 138, 142, 156, 199, 232, 234 Rosi, Francesco, 235 Rossi, Rosa, 215 Russia, 83 Safavid Empire. See Iran St Archelaus, 180 Saint-Didier, Alexandre de, 199 St John the Baptist, 180 St John of the Cross, 255 St Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, 255

Index St Mark, 180–1, 190, 192–4, 196 St Teresa of Ávila, 263 Salonica, 57, 114–15 Sánchez, Alberto, 216, 220 San Lucar, 136 Santo Stefano, 180, 194 San Vidal, 194–5 Saxony, 59 Sebastian, King of Portugal, 6, 127, 132–8, 140–1, 144–7 Sée, Henri, 20 Selim I, 61–2, 71 Sessa, Duque de, 213, 216 Seville, 47, 102 Sicily, 207 Simiand, François, 47 Skira, Albert, 42–3 Smyrna, 119 Snow, C.P., 154 Sola, Emilio, 215 Sorbonne, 18, 21–2 Sosa, Antonio de, 208, 219–20, 226 Sousa de Macedo, António, 140, 143 Soviet Union, 162, 207 Spada, Giovanni Dalla, 180 Spain, 22, 28–9, 88, 100, 102, 109, 118, 133, 137–9, 145, 151–2, 178, 208, 211, 214–16 Speer, Albert, 43 Strasbourg, 116 Stuttgart, 59 Switzerland, 178 Symonds, John Addington, 59 Syria, 56–8, 66–7, 77, 81, 85, 89, 117 Tabriz, 62, 119 Teodósio, Dom, 138 Terceira, 133 Terlon, Claude, 166

281

Toulouse, 159–60, 162–3, 166 Trabzon (Trebizond), 83, 121 Trevisan, Marco, 197–8 Tunisia, 207 Turkey, 100, 119 Tuscany, 59 Ukraine, 83 Urban VIII, 139 Valencia, 116, 213, 215, 222–3 Valensi, Lucette, 37 van Bath, B.H. Slicher, 109 Vasconcelos, João de, 139 Veneciano, Hasán, 213, 215 Venice, 7, 35, 40, 43, 46, 63, 83, 111, 119, 134–7, 178–80, 182–91, 193–201 Venier, Zuan Antonio, 198 Verona, 41 Vico, Giambattista, 261–4 Vidal de la Blache, Paul, 36–7, 248 Vieira, António, 140–6 Vienna, 28, 191 Vilar, Pierre, 18, 21–2, 25, 30 Vryonis, Speros, 57 Wagner, Richard, 8, 246–7, 254, 258–67 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 9 Warburg, Aby, 261 Warsaw, 116 White, Hayden, 213 Williamson, Jeffrey, 109 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 42 Wright, Craig, 255 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 43 Zmantar, Françoise, 209