Enterprising Sultans and the Doge of Venice: Political Culture and the Patronage of Science and Philosophy in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean

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CHAPTER 20 Enterprising Sultans and the Doge of Venice: Political Culture and the Patronage of Science and Philosophy in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean

Ali Humayun Akhtar

The Politics of Patronage: Secular Humanism or the Religious Dimensions of Legitimacy?1

In April of 1454, just one year after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantine Constantinople, the Republic of Venice signed a treaty with the Ottoman dynasty guaranteeing the right of the Venetians to maintain a bailo, or ambas- sador, in the district of Pera.2 This bailo would be responsible for the free move- ment of Venetian merchants in and out of Ottoman territory and would exercise certain legal authority over them.3 This arrangement was nothing new for the Venetians and Ottomans, as it was a renewal of an earlier agreement signed in 1408. As far back as 1388, when the Ottoman capital was still in Edirne, the Venetians had already signed agreements with the Ottomans establishing vari- ous trading privileges in the eastern Mediterranean.4 These events took place before western European kingdoms like the Portuguese had pursued a western

1 This essay was written with the support of Bates College and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I spent 2015–16 as Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in Judeo-Christian Studies. I thank the Director of the Institute, Prof. Susan Friedman, for feedback on this essay’s theoretical approach. 2 In their studies of the role of interpreters (dragomans) and merchants in Ottoman and Venetian diplomatic service, Gürkan and Rothman offer a picture of the bailo as an important diplomatic anchor of Ottoman-Venetian political and commercial relations. Rothman, Interpreting dragomans; Gürkan, Mediating boundaries 19–28. 3 Dursteler’s study of Ottoman-Venetian imperial boundaries in politics and diplomacy high- lights the significant political authority of the bailo, despite the brevity of the official’s two- year appointment, among Venetian citizens and subjects resident in Istanbul. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople. 4 Kafadar and Necipoğlu have each traced examples of continuity and rupture during the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule in Istanbul, including the continuous presence of Venetian and Genoese merchants in the eastern Mediterranean. Kafadar, Between two worlds; Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004343290_021 362 Akhtar passageway to Asia through the southern Atlantic and Indian Ocean in the six- teenth century.5 Back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottomans provided the Venetians privileged access to a lucrative Asian market, while the Venetians provided the Ottomans access to a profitable European market. One of the most interesting aspects of Venetian-Ottoman trade and commercial relations was the exchange of texts on Greek and Graeco-Arabic philosophy and science. In both Edirne and, later, Istanbul, Ottoman sultans including Sultan Murad II (d. 1451), his son Fatih Sultan Mehmed (d. 1481), and his grandson Bayezid (d. 1512) developed a reputation among politicians and humanists in the Italian city-states for their patronage of philosophy and science at the Ottoman court, especially Ptolemaic astronomy, cartography, and Aristotelian-Neo-Platonic metaphysics.6 The Byzantine scholar Georgious Gemistos Plethon (d. 1452) worked under the patronage of the Ottoman sultan Murad I (d. 1389) in Edirne, expounding Platonic philosophical doctrines and defending Plato against the attacks of contemporary philosophers.7 At the same time, in Venice, the Doges were slowly becoming the rulers of Europe’s most important geographical center of Greek learning as other Byzantine scholars made their way westward from former Byzantine cities. These scholars included George of Trebizond (d. 1484), who, in 1417, dedicated his translation of Plato’s Laws to the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo (d. 1423).8 Some time later, in 1468, the Byzantine scholar and cardinal Basilios Bessarion of Constantinople (d. 1472) moved to Venice. There he donated some 452 Greek manuscripts to Venice, which the Senate eventually decided to house in a new library specifi- cally dedicated to these manuscripts, namely the Biblioteca Marciana, or the library of St. Mark in Piazza San Marco. The new library, built at the political center of the city where St. Mark’s Cathedral and the palace of the Doge stood,

5 Borschberg’s analysis of Dutch commerce in Southeast Asia can be compared with Subrahmanyam’s examination of early Portuguese expansion around the Indian coast. Both studies shed light on how the eastern Mediterranean Venetian-Ottoman trade was not eclipsed by, but rather competed with, Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes. Borschberg, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and free trade; Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese empire in Asia. 6 Casale analyzes Ottoman interest in Italian cartography and astronomy within the context of Ottoman aspirations of global commercial expansion in competition with the Portuguese. Casale, Ottoman age of exploration 13–33. 7 Woodhouse’s study, George Gemistos Plethon, offers an important starting point for examin- ing the history of Plethon’s intellectual legacy in the European Renaissance. 8 Monfasani has traced the progression of George of Trebizond’s thought against the backdrop of his move from Crete to Venice and eventually Rome. Monfasani, George of Trebizond 3–68.