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7 Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks: visual imagery of the Trojan War and the politics of cultural identity in fifteenth-century Europe James G. Harper In Italo Calvino’s 1972 Le città invisibili. Marco Polo describes the imag­ inary city of Zora to Kublai Khan: Questa città che non si cancella dalla mente è come un armatura o reticolo nelle cui caselle ognuno può disporre le cose che vuole ricor­ dare: nomi di uomini illustri, virtù, numeri, classificazioni vegetali e minerali, date di battaglie, costellazioni, parti del discorso . per essere meglio ricordata, Zora languì, si disfece e scomparve. La terra l’ha dimenticata.' [This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an arma­ ture, a honeycomb into whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: the names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech . in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.] Calvino’s words might equally apply to Troy, an obliterated city that remains a perennial motif in Western literature and visual arts. Like placing things in a honeycomb, the imagining of Troy is an action that inevitably reflects the identity politics of the cultural moment that remembers and re-creates it. This chapter argues that a collective anxiety in Europe, which developed in the face of the military and the cultural threat of the Ottoman Empire, influenced the way in which Europeans imagined Troy and the Trojans. It concentrates on the visual imagery of the fifteenth century, a period that saw the apex and subsequently the partial suppression of a trend among European artists to dress the ancient Trojans in the costume of contemporary Ottoman Turks, and 151 James Harper Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks demonstrates that the trope of translatio imperii underpins both the tall, and brave. His eyes were very beautiful, his hair soft and blond, adoption and the rejection of the representation of “Trojan as Turk.” his mouth charming, and his voice pleasant. He was swift, and eager In the late medieval period, as awareness of the Ottoman Empire to take command . Aeneas was auburn-haired, stocky, eloquent, was just beginning to register in the Western imagination, conventional courteous, prudent, pious, and charming. His eyes were black and twinkling.]^ imagery of the Trojan War showed the Trojans caparisoned as medieval knights. The fifteenth-century trend toward the depiction of Trojans as Turks grew up alongside the persistence of this older chivalric mode. Dares gives similar descriptions for the Greeks, without suggesting any The conventions of High Renaissance art, by contrast, displaced both patterns of discernible ethnic difference between Greek and Trojan. of these, preferring the use of all’antica Roman costume for the Trojans. Each side has its swarthy, its fair, its blond, and its bearded. Medieval The shift towards the classical is generally explained as a reflection (and versions of the legend were content to follow the patterns of non- inevitable result) of the reverence for antiquity that is a hallmark of the differentiated physical description established in the late antique texts. Renaissance. While this essay does not propose to reject this interpre­ Benoit de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie {c. 1160) follows Dares, tation entirely, it intends to challenge its hegemony, and enrich it with embellishing somewhat, though in a formulaic fashion. The same a second, concurrent reading. Explored within a colonial discourse, the may be said for the less poetic Historia destructionis Troiae (1287) of evidence of the visual imagery suggests that the reoccupation of the Guido delle Colonne. Significantly, these texts do not even assign symbolic territory of the Trojan legend compensated - at least in part - ethnic or racial alterity to King Memnon, even though this Tro­ fot the ongoing loss of real territory to the expanding Ottoman Empire. jan ally hails from far-off Ethiopia, and the geographic distance of Visual treatments of peoples are inherently less schematic than verbal his origins is acknowledged in the epithet Hpaôicoua [son of the descriptions.^ Writers from Homer to Benoit de Sainte-Maure distin­ day] ? guished Greek and Trojan by naming them, rather than by relying on Yet one must assume that the Greeks and their Trojan enemies at ethnic descriptors or costume details. Homeric references to the specific the very least dress differently. In Book ii of the Aeneid, as their city appearance of the Achaeans and Trojans are, with a few notable excep­ falls around them, Coroebus suggests to a band of his fellow Trojans: tions, vague: helmets are “dazzling,” shields “glittering,” and heroes “mutemus clipeos Danaumque insignia nobis/aptemus. dolus an virtus, “broad-shouldered” or “fair to see.”^ Such descriptors require the active quis in hoste requirat?. spoliis se quisque recentibus armat./vadimus compensation of the reader’s imagination to produce a visual image.'^ immixti Danais baud numine nostro” [let us exchange shields (with Some of the later accounts give the artist more to work with, but still some slain Greeks) and don Danaan emblems; whether this is deceit or are hardly prescriptive. In the late antique De excidio Troiae historia, valor, who would ask in warfare? . (and so) each man arms himself which falsely claims the truth-status of an eyewitness account. Dares in the new-won spoils. We move on, mingling with the Greeks, under the Phrygian gives brief descriptions of physique and character:^ (the protection of ) gods not our own]Here, the difference in cos­ tume is significant enough to make Coroebus’ ruse plausible, yet the Priamum Troianorum regem vultu pulchro magnum voce suavi reader is given no indication of the distinguishing characteristics of that aquilino corpore . Alexandrum candidum longum fortem oculis difference. The precise visual appearance of the Trojans remains elusive pulcherrimis capillo molli et flavo ore venusto voce suavi velocem and thus mutable, a fact borne out in the wide variety of depictions of cupidum imperii. .. Aeneam rufum quadratum facundum affabilem Trojans in art over the centuries. Filling in the blanks, as it were, visual fortem cum consilio pium venustum oculis hilaribus et nigris. artists interpreted the differences suggested in the textual narratives and, [Priam, the king of the Trojans, had a handsome face and a pleasant inevitably, did so in manners that reflected the interests and discourses voice. He was large and swarthy . Alexander [i.e. Paris] was fair. of their own eras. 152 153 James Harper Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks For the ancient Romans, easternness was a defining factor in the depiction of the Trojans, and Roman artists often showed them wearing the Phrygian cap, a generic signifier of “the Orient. Though this distinctive, forward-curling headgear originated in ancient Phrygia and not in Troy, the Romans deployed it as an identifying attribute in a range of contexts, giving it to the noble Trojan, to enslaved Dacian captives, and to the god Mithras, whose cult was of Indo-Iranian origin. Early Christian artists within the Roman Empire also gave the Phrygian cap to the Three Magi, whom the Bible identifies simply as “wise men from the East.”*® The most notable exception to the ancient Roman trend of depict- ing the Trojans as Orientals is the figure of Aeneas. According to the Aeneid, this Trojan prince escaped the destruction of his native city and founded a new line in Italy. Though Virgil maintained the tradition that Romulus founded the city of Rome (probably because it was too well-rooted to displace) he embellished a complementary foundation lo Anonymous sculptor, marble sarcophagus with Aeneas departing for the hunt, second myth by which Aeneas was the progenitor of the Julio-Claudian house century a d . Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. and the Roman “race.”** The translatio imperii laid out in xSxe. Aeneid was a key component of imperial and dynastic legitimization as well as Phrygian caps serve to express the distance of place, a factual component a source of pride for Roman citizens. Anachronistically, ancient Roman of the story expressed by way of an ahistorical detail. Yet making Aeneas artists often depict Aeneas wearing Roman garb, an iconographie choice resemble a contemporary Roman (he bears a striking resemblance to the that signals his privileged status as ancestor and emphasizes continuity Antonine emperors) effectively minimizes the cultural distance between between Troy and Rome. As contradictory as Orientalized and Roman­ the Romans and their legendary ancestors, obviously a matter of impor­ ized interpretations of the Trojan may seem, however, they were not tance to the patron. The designers of the sarcophagus gave minimal value mutually exclusive, and could even coexist in the same image. For exam­ to the third consideration, time, sacrificing reference to the chronologi­ ple, a second-century AD marble sarcophagus in the Museo Nazionale in cal distance of the narrative in favor of emphasis on other aspects of the Rome (Fig. lo) shows Aeneas departing for the hunt. A cuirassed (and story. hence Roman) Aeneas is accompanied by Phrygian-capped (and hence Medieval artists, on the other hand, tended to deprioritize both the Oriental ) comrades.*^ This mixed band of Trojans simultaneously chronological distance and the easternness of Troy. Instead, their images, signifies the closeness and the distance of Troy. most often illustrations of manuscript chronicles or romances, empha­ With its dissonant commingling of signs, the Aeneas sarcophagus size cultural closeness by depicting both the Greeks and the Trojans as embodies the tension that faced every Western artist who took on the medieval knights.*^ This parallels the literary treatment of the same theme of Troy. In a chronological and geographical sense the Trojans themes in contemporary chivalric epics like Benoit de Sainte-Maure s are Other, yet at the same time, as putative ancestors, they are some­ twelfth-century Roman de Troie.

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