WESTERN TRAVELERS, EASTERN ANTIQUITIES, AND THE IMAGE OF THE TURK IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

AMANDA WUNDER
University of WisconsinMadison

Abstract
Educated elite Europeans who visited Constantinople on diplomatic, scholarly, and commercial enterprises in the sixteenth century shared a common culture of antiquarianism, and their passion for the antiquities of the East shaped their accounts of the Turk and Ottoman Constantinople. The traveling antiquarians Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, Pierre Gilles, Melchior Lorck, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and Nicholas de Nicolay produced a diverse range of printed works based on their rsthand experiences in the Ottoman Empire, in which they used traditional Renaissance genres (such as the urban encomium, the city view, the historia painting, and the costume book) to depict the Turk either as the enemy of antiquities or, alternatively, as an eternal, exotic object like the relics of the past. While some antiquarian travelers, most notably Lorck, Coecke, and Nicolay, demonstrated the variety that existed amongst the Turks, the ultimate impact of sixteenth-century antiquarian accounts of the Ottoman Empire was to deepen the Western perception of Oriental diVerence.

The antiquities of the East were the subject of several unpleasant exchanges between the Habsburg ambassador Augier Ghislain de Busbecq and the Turks he met in the course of his diplomatic travels in the Ottoman Empire between 1554 and 1562. 1 In one of his famous Turkish Letters, Busbecq recounted how, en route from Constantinople to the sultans court at Amasia, he and his retinue encountered some Turks, who were digging up stone from the ruins for the construction of public buildings at Constantinople. The Flemish ambassador was watching when the Turkish workers struck upon an antique statue of excellent workmanship, and almost perfect and then smashed it to bits with their

An early version of this paper was presented at the 2000 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, and I am grateful to my co-panelists and the members of the audience for their thoughtful comments. I also thank Anthony Grafton, James Amelang, and Gen Liang for their insightful readings of previous drafts; Baki Tezcan for invaluable bibliography; and Tine Meganck for fruitful conversations about early modern European costume books. The Princeton University Department of History generously subsidized the illustrations that accompany this article.
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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online www.brill.nl

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hammers. On our expressing vexation at this act of theirs, Busbecq wrote, the workmen jeered at us, and asked us if we wanted, in accordance with our customs, to worship the statue and pray to it. This was not an isolated incident. In the same letter, Busbecq recounted a run-in with a coppersmith who, he discovered, had melted down a whole potful of ancient coins to make some new copper kettles. The Habsburg ambassador, greatly vexed at the destruction of so many interesting relics, retaliated by informing the metalworker just how much he would have paid for the coins that had been destroyed. So, Busbecq concluded, I sent him away quite as unhappy at the loss of the windfall which he had been so near getting, as I was at the sacri ce of these records of antiquity. 2 The soil governed by the sultan was rich with ancient manuscripts, monuments, buildings, and inscriptions, as well as coins and sculptures, which educated elites from the West coveted not only for the valuable materials out of which they were made, but as repositories of historical knowledge with a direct, physical link to the classical past. When Western Europeans traveled in the Ottoman East, those antiquities triggered angry confrontations, religious insults, and calculated reprisals, such as the Habsburg ambassador described. Thwarted in his eVorts to rescue antiquities on site in the Ottoman Empire, Busbecq attempted to salvage what he could by transporting massive quantities of mobile relics to safety in the West; when he left the Ottoman Empire for good in 1562, he returned to Vienna with a caravan of souvenirs that included a great medley of ancient coins for the Holy Roman Emperor and whole waggonfuls, whole shiploads, of Greek manuscripts destined for the Imperial Library.3 Western Europeans had been appointing themselves as the guardians of eastern antiquities ever since the Italian merchant Cyriacus of Ancona traveled the Levant in the 1420s-1440s, collecting antiquities, describing and drawing them in his notebooks, and lobbying men in power from the emperor in Rome to a provincial governor in Turkish territory to halt the spoliation of ancient monuments.4 Despite the severe political diVerences that shaped diVerent

2 Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters, ed. Charles Thornton Foster and F. H. Blackburne Daniell, in The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (London, 1881), 1:136, 141-42. 3 Busbecq, 1:416-17. 4 On Cyriacuss eVorts to sway important rulers to intervene and preserve monumental antiquities, see the life of Cyriacus by his childhood friend Francesco Scalamonti,

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Europeans relationships with the Sublime Porte in the sixteenth century,5 the Western traveler of a certain class and educationwhether he represented friendly France or the hostile Habsburgssaw the Ottoman Empire through the eyes of the antiquarian, that is, as a lover, collector and student of ancient traditions and remains.6 To the Renaissance European, a love of antiquity was a fundamental marker of civility, and it became one of the most important criteria by which Western Europeans judged the Turks.7 The present work aims to explore how the common culture of antiquarianism that was prevalent in Western Europe in the sixteenth century shaped the early modern European image of the Turk and added a critical new element to the perception of the East as fundamentally diVerent from the West that was based on con icting relationships with the past and its physical remains, thus widening the chasmic gap between the two civilizations that had been forged long ago by religious diVerences.8 During the reign of Sultan Sleyman the Magni cent (r. 1520-1566), educated Western European elites were traveling to the Ottoman Empire in signi cant numbers as diplomats, scholars, artists, and geographers. By de nition, the antiquarian traveler was a person who documented his encounters with the remains of the past for the bene t of posterity, so it comes as no surprise that the traveling antiquarians put into print a new art and literature based on their experiences in the East.9 Five

Vita Viri Clarissimi et Famosissimi Kyriaci Anconitani, ed. and trans. Charles Mitchell and Edward W. Bodnar (Philadelphia, 1996), 127, 131. 5 Paul Coles, The Ottoman Impact on Europe (London, 1968), 145-52. On the image and in uence of the Turk in France, see Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520-1660) (Paris, 1940); and for the contrasting story of England which had much less direct contact with the East in the era of the Renaissancesee Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York, 1937). 6 This de nition of the antiquarian comes from Arnaldo Momiglianos classic essay, Ancient History and the Antiquarian, 1-39 in Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 6. See Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1969) on the rise of antiquarianism in Italy; and, on the development of scienti c antiquarianism (that is, archaeology), see Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology, trans. Ian Kinnes and Gillian Varndell (London, 1996), 132-38, 179-219. 7 In Giovanni Paolo Maranas Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1684), for example, the author depicted his ctitious Turkish character as a sensitive antiquarian so that the protagonist could win credibility as a civilized commentator on European society. 8 See Robert Schwoebels fundamental book on the era immediately preceding the one treated here: The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517) (Nieuwkoop, 1967). 9 There were, to be sure, non-antiquarian travelers who published accounts of their

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such antiquarians are the protagonists of the present work. They are the Habsburg diplomat Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, whom we have already met; a Danish artist named Melchior Lorck who traveled in the ambassadors entourage; the Flemish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst; the French scholar Pierre Gilles; and his compatriot, the geographer Nicholas de Nicolay.10 These travelers have been selected in order to show the diverse range of antiquarian projects that were being undertaken and for the purpose of comparing the various genres of expression represented by their works in texts (Busbecq and Gilles), images (Lorck and Coecke), and the combination of the two (Nicolay). The books and printed images produced by these antiquarians encompassed a wide range of materials and included their impressions of the many diVerent peoples and places that they encountered during their travels in the Levant. Constantinople alone was a complex, multi-ethnic society where the majority Turkish population cohabited with a mlange of non-Muslim ethnicities, most notably Jews, Greeks, and Armenians.11 Here, however, the focus shall be limited to the topics of Constantinople and its Turkish residents, for this great city known as New Rome served as a ashpoint for Christian antiquarians after it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 and the Turks became the keepers of its monumental antiquities, including the church of Hagia Sophia. Focusing on our travelers accounts of mostly anonymous Turkish men and women, we will see how the sixteenth-century traveling antiquarians both built on and complicatedbut ultimately failed to topplethe stereotypical rendering of the Turk as a barbaric warrior that was prevalent in Europe at the time. The terrifying mounted Turkish warriorwearing an elaborate turban and an enormous moustache, waving the crescent ag, and wielding a pike with which to impale Christian babiesthundered across the

experiences in the Ottoman Empire as well, most notably captives like the Hungarian Bartholomeo Georgievitz, whose account of Turkish society and culture was published in dozens of Latin and vernacular editions from 1544 through the seventeenth century. 10 For a brief history of Western travel to Constantinople from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, see Jean Ebersolt, Constantinople byzantine et les voyageurs du Levant (Paris, 1918). An important biographical and bibliographical guide to Western travelers in the Ottoman Empire has been compiled by Stphane Yrasimos, Les voyageurs dans lEmpire Ottoman (XIV e-XVI e sicles): Bibliographie, itinraires et inventaire des lieux habits (Ankara, 1991). 11 Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300-1600, 9-409 in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 , ed. Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 209.

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printed page as the rise of print technology coincided with the fall of Constantinople in the mid- fteenth century. The very rst pamphlet printed in Europe was indeed a piece of anti-Turkish propaganda produced nineteen months after Constantinople was taken by the Turks.12 By the sixteenth century, there was an enormous body of printed matterprophesies, warnings, sermons, and alarmist news accountsin circulation that informed popular opinion about the Turk.13 European panic ebbed and owed with current events, reaching a crescendo with the 1529 siege of Vienna. In an edition of a Lutheran New Testament printed the following year, illustrations from the workshop of Lucas Cranach merged the tragedy of Vienna with the prophesy of Revelation as the Turkish army was unleashed by an angels horn ( g. 1) to trample a third of all men until being driven at last into a ery chasm just outside the walls of a ravaged Vienna ( g. 2). By the late-1520s, the Turkish threat was seen, quite literally, as the end of the world. This was the gloomy atmosphere when our ve antiquarian travelers visited Ottoman Constantinople during the middle decades of the sixteenth centurybetween the devastating losses of the 1520s at Belgrade and Mohcs and before the success of Lepanto in 1571when Europe felt most threatened by the Turk. The elite antiquarians who traveled East shared the loathing of Islam and the pessimistic fear of Turkish incursions into Western Europe that were expressed so vividly in contemporary prophesies and polemics. But while the source base of that popular literatureon the whole produced by Europeans who had never seen their subjectsconsisted largely of Biblical forecasts and signs in the sky, the traveling antiquarians, in contrast, based their accounts of Turkish peoples and places on what they saw rsthand on the ground in the Ottoman Empire.14 The same Renaissance culture that placed
Eyn Manung der Cristenheit widder die Durken (An Urgent Appeal to Christendom Against the Turks), commonly known as the Trkenkalender, was printed in the same type as Gutenbergs 36-line Bible and can be attributed to Gutenbergs workshop, if not to the master printer himself. For a brief discussion of this attribution, see Simon Eckehard, The Trkenkalender (1454) Attributed to Gutenberg and the Strasbourg Lunation Tracts (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 10-11. 13 As an indication of the size of this literature, there are some 2,463 bibliographic entries of such Turcica in Carl Gllner, Turcica: Die europischen Trkendrucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts , vols. 1-2 (Bucuresti, 1961-1978). 14 On German Flugschriften see John Bohnstedt, The In del Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 58 (1968): 1-56; see Marcel Bataillon on Italian prophesies in his Mythe et connaissance de la Turquie en Occident au milieu du XVI e sicle, 451-70 in Venezia e lOriente fra tardo Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Agostino Pertusi (Florence, 1966).
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Figure 1: Workshop of Lucas Cranach. The Turkish Threat as Revelation 9. Hand-colored woodcut. Martin Luther, Das Newe Testament (Wittenberg, 1530). Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Figure 2: Workshop of Lucas Cranach. The Turkish Siege of Vienna as Revelation 20. Hand-colored woodcut. Martin Luther, Das Newe Testament Mar. Luthers (Wittenberg, 1530). Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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so much value on antiquities as critical evidence also privileged rsthand experience in travel literature, a genre that had made a shift away from fantastic accounts of foreign wonders towards a Herodotean model of scholarship based on eyewitness experience abroad.15 Travel trumped reading, according to the author of a dedicatory letter prefacing one sixteenth-century travel book on the Levant, who queried the reader with a certain irony and an implicit criticism, what is more discommendable, what more unbecoming a man that is studious . . . than always to abide at home like a snail in the shell? The writer explained that it was in nitely more desirable to hover with the wings, to leave the nest, and to y abroad and learn rsthand what can never been known by the book or the map, which diVer as much in moving the imagination and other faculties of the mind, as the representation of a thing in a glass or a painted table doth vary from the thing that is represented. 16 The objective of the travel writer or artist was to overcome the limitations of his paper medium in order to mimic as closely as possible his personal experiences abroad for his armchair audience at home. Familiar forms of Renaissance communication including the urban encomium, the city view, the historia painting, and the costume bookserved to translate impressions of the East to a Western audience by comparing, contrasting, and even cross-dressing Turks and Europeans in a quest for commensurabilty.17 Multiple images emerged from the various antiquarian projects, some of which reinforced the old stereotypes established in the earliest years of print publishing, while others planted the seeds for a new, exotic imagery that would come into full bloom only centuries later. We will begin with the writings of Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, a traveling antiquarian best known for introducing the tulip to the West in the mid-1500s, which would set oV the tulip mania of the following century. He made two trips to the Ottoman Empire between 1554 and 1562 in the course of a doomed mission to negotiate a permanent peace between the Holy Roman Empire and the Sublime Porte. The

15 Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1969), 204; Arnaldo Momigliano, The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography, 12742 in Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 137. 16 John Stell, The Epistle Dedicatory, in Nicholas de Nicolay, The navigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois, Lord of Arfeuile, trans. T. Washington the Younger (London, 1585), [unfoliated front matter]. 17 Anthony Pagden uses the term commensurability in his European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, 1993).

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ambassador did not enjoy his time there, much of which was spent under house arrest in Constantinople, a city that he described as subject to an unnatural bondage, much like himself.18 He related his experiences in a series of four letters addressed to a friend named Nicolas Michault, who had been a fellow student in Italy and had, like Busbecq, made a career in international diplomacy. Busbecqs writing was warm and open as he recounted his pleasures and troubles to his peer, just as I should tell it if we were chatting together, as he put it.19 The letters featured accounts of the authors diplomatic eVorts, gossip about plots and intrigues at the sultans court, analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the Ottoman enemy, observations on Turkish costume and festivals, investigations of exotic plants and wildlife, and, nally, strongly worded lamentations over the Turkish captivity of Constantinople. Like many a traveler, Busbecq related his most negative experiences to his friend with the greatest gusto. His four letters were printed for public consumption in installments, beginning with the publication of the rst letter in 1581, almost twenty years after Busbecq ended his travels in the Ottoman Empire.20 The rst Latin editions of the so-called Turkish Letters were small, plain books equipped with wide margins that awaited the annotations of their learned readers. The genre of the published letter permitted a degree of informality, honesty, and spontaneity rarely found in a composed book, and Busbecq frequently insisted that the hasty, spontaneous nature of his expositions should excuse them from excessive scrutiny.21 This is not to say, however, that The Turkish Letters lacked formal rhetorical models. The rst Turkish Letter included a description of Constantinople that was loosely based on the classical encomium, a laudatory oratorical genre that was often used to describe cities. True to the form, Busbecq began his description of Constantinople with a celebration of the citys prime setting on the three seas, which nature herself seems to have designed for the mistress of the world.22 But location was just about the only
Busbecq, 1:129. Busbecq, 1:172. 20 Plantin, who published the rst Latin edition of The Turkish Letters as the Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum , printed Busbecqs second letter in 1582. All four letters were published together for the rst time in a Paris edition of 1589, and many more editions followed with translations into Czech (1594), Polish (1597), German (1596), Spanish (1610), French (1646), Flemish (1652), and English (1694). For catalogues of editions, see Yrasimos (1991), 239-42; also see Forster and Daniell, 2:288-91. 21 Busbecq, 1:89, 172-73, 314. 22 Busbecq, 1:123.
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thing that Busbecq found worthy of praise in New Rome. According to the Renaissance formula for urban descriptions, a special bond existed between a city and its citizens, so that the qualities of the one mirrored those of the other. In one of the greatest urban encomiums of the Renaissance, the Panegyric to the City of Florence of 1403-4, Leonardo Bruni described Florence as a place where the Florentines are in such harmony with this very noble and outstanding city that it seems they never could have lived anywhere else. Nor could the city, so skillfully created, have had any other kind of inhabitants. 23 For obvious reasons, Busbecq was not inclined to write such a panegyric to the Turksthough he did nd elements of their society compelling and even superior to Western waysand his description of Constantinople re ected how his perception of its Islamic inhabitants aVected his vision of the great ancient city. Busbecq had very little to say about the marvels of the Ottoman city around him, of its dazzling mosques and palaces, or its countless baths and fountains. He dismissed the splendid Topkapi Palace, which he had not seen himself, as lacking the grandeur of design or architectural details to make it worth a visit. Regarding the antiquities of Constantinople, he complained that in many places are to be found interesting remains of ancient works of art, and yet, as regards number, the only marvel is that more are not in existence, when we remember how many Constantine brought from Rome. But even surviving antiquities received little more than a cursory account in Busbecqs description of Constantinople. He focused on the obelisk, bronze serpents, and pillars of the Hippodrome, but his words were terse and uninspired. Seeing the Hagia Sophiawhich the ambassador had to receive a special dispensation to enter, since it had been converted into a mosque in 1453was the primary objective of Busbecqs visit to Constantinople, he told Michault, but in the end Busbecq had few words for the great St. Sophia, telling the reader only that it is a grand and massive building, well worth visiting. He devoted an equal amount of ink to describing the follies of a dancing elephant that entertained him in the Ottoman capital.24

23 Leonardo Bruni, Panegyric to the City of Florence, trans. Benjamin G. Kohl, 135-75 in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt with Elizabeth B. Welles (Philadelphia, 1978), 136. 24 Busbecq, 1:122-23, 125. Busbecq defended his giddy description of the dancing elephant by pointing to the classical precedents of Seneca and Plinys writings about extraordinary pachyderms, 128.

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Busbecqs lackadaisical account of Constantinoples greatest antiquities appears all the more striking when compared to the most famous Renaissance description of the city, the Comparison of Old and New Rome written by Manuel Chrysoloras in 1411. A Greek scholar who went to Rome on behalf of the Byzantine emperor in order to win allies against the Turkish menace, Chrysoloras converted to the Roman Church and had an enormous in uence on the development of Italian humanism through his teaching and writing. Just as Busbecqs description of Constantinople appeared within a piece of correspondence, so Chrysoloras had written his Comparison in the form of a letter addressed to Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. The native son of Constantinople perceived Old and New Rome as a mother and daughter who resembled each other so closely that he felt equally at home in either place. Comparing the cities as they were in Antiquity, Chrysoloras judged Constantinople the superior of the two, an inspiring prodigal child that had surpassed mother Rome and brought things to a further point of development.25 One of the most important elements of this in uential work was the authors appreciation of ruins for their aesthetic value and for their ability to evoke a glorious classical past.26 Regarding the antiquities extant in his own lifetime, Chrysoloras observed that Constantinople had fewer than Rome, but that some are much more beautiful and splendid. Each city nourishes and consumes itself, Chrysoloras explained, by using its own antiquities as a mine and quarry. He insisted, nonetheless, that even these ruins and heaps of stone show what great things once existed, and how enormous and beautiful were the original constructions. 27 In stark comparison, Busbecq and his antiquarian peers writing after the fall of Constantinople in 1453used a vocabulary of lth, spoilage, and destruction to describe the ruins of that city. The French geographer and antiquarian Nicholas de Nicolay described how the porphyry sepulcher of Constantine sat neglected in a corner of a street the lthiest in all the city, a sight particularly painful when compared to the splendor of the Ottoman tombs.28

Manuel Chrysoloras, Comparison of Old and New Rome, trans. Christine Smith, 99215 in Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 14001470 (New York, 1992), 206. 26 On ruins: See Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London, 1953); and, most recently, Christopher Wood, In Ruins (London, 2001). 27 Chrysoloras, 210, 200. 28 Nicolay (1585), f. 50v.
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In the early fteenth century, the antiquities of Constantinople inspired in Manuel Chrysoloras feelings of pride and patriotism, and they led him to heady re ections on the capacity of man to build on past accomplishments and to supercede them. In a lengthy, nostalgic description of the Hagia Sophia, his prose positively quivered at the recollection of so splendid a structure, which makes the spectator wonder at the ready intelligence and capacity to achieve great things not only of this architect and of the other builders but of the whole human race, as well as of this living person.29 The ruins of Constantinople led Busbecq, however, to moody musings, and he concluded his description of Constantinople by decrying the suVering of the Greek lands which in ancient times discovered the ne arts and every liberal science and now seemed to be demanding back that civilization which it gave to us, and were adjuring us, by the claim of a common faith, to be its champion against savage barbarism. He lamented that much-needed Western aid was not arriving in the East, for the princes of Christendom have other objects in view, namely the Indies and the Antipodes. Before 1453, the antiquities of Constantinople had inspired the Christian antiquarian Chrysoloras to write a passionate piece in praise of New Rome. In the 1550s, those selfsame ruins, tumbling to pieces in an Islamic city where no relic of its original splendor is left, moved Ambassador Busbecq to express his regrets over the past, his complaints about the present, and his fears for the future: the former rival of Rome is now crushed beneath the yoke of the most cruel slavery. Who could see this proud city and not pity her fall, while musing over the changes and chances of this eeting world? Besides, who knows how soon her fate may be ours?30 Busbecqs inability to take pleasure in the antiquities of Constantinople reminds us that he and his peers were not only antiquarians; they were Christian antiquarians, for whom the remains of the past lost their luster when they existed under Islamic captivity. A much more detailed account of the antiquities of Constantinople was produced by a French antiquarian named Pierre Gilles, who preceded Busbecq in Constantinople by three years.31 Gilles had gone to

Chrysoloras, 213. Busbecq, 1:129-30, 252. 31 Pierre Gilles was in Constantinople from about 1547 to 1551; he traveled there in the company of the French ambassador dAramon, who was on a mission to solidify the French alliance with Sleyman and to convince the sultan to wage war against the Holy Roman Empire. DAramons retinue also included Nicholas de Nicolay (discussed
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Constantinople around the year 1547 to collect Greek manuscripts for his king, Francis I. But the French scholar prolonged his stay well beyond his obligationsnot with any prospect of sensual pleasure, any view of worldly interest, or any pretense of popular applausebut in order to complete an ambitious antiquarian project of his own to discover all the details of how Constantinople had been laid out in antiquity. He felt great pressure to complete the work, he explained, since the inhabitants are daily demolishing, eVacing, and utterly destroying the small remains of antiquity, so that whoever wants to engage in the same inquiries after me, even though they may far exceed me in industry and application, they will still not be able to make any further discoveries of the monuments. The work was not easy, for Gilles found sixteenth-century Constantinople much changed from the ancient city of his dreams. He decried above all else the changes that had been made since the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453, writing that for the last hundred years they have incessantly endeavored to deface and destroy [Constantinople] entirely by building it in so diVerent a manner that those who have formerly seen some parts of it scarcely know its ancient condition. The Ottomans were following the pattern established by the ancient Romans and the medieval Byzantines by taking the best of the ancient monuments and incorporating them into their new structures. Educated Western writers like Busbecq and Gilles understood well that the antiquities of Constantinople had always been threatenedby civil war and foreign invasion, earthquake, accidental re and arson, and iconoclastic emperors.32 But neither Gilles nor Busbecq could accept the Islamic rulership of Constantines city, and the Turks therefore bore the brunt of their anger for the sorry state of antiquities that they encountered in Constantinople in the 1500s. There is strong evidence from Gilles himself that he was assisted in his antiquarian inquiries by local Greeks, who provided information about legends and locations, and by the Turks, whom he employed to take complicated measurements at the Hagia Sophia and the Pillar of Constantine. Nonetheless, he described the residents of Constantinople

at length below), Andr Thevet, and Pierre Belon, all of whom also published accounts of their travels. On the dAramon embassy, see Frdric Tinguely, Lecriture du Levant la Renaissance: Enqute sur les voyageurs franais dans lempire de Soliman le Magni que (Geneva, 2000); on Belon in particular, see George Huppert, The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 1-20. 32 Pierre Gilles, The Antiquities of Constantinople, 2d ed., trans. John Ball (New York, 1988), 51, 219-20, 222.

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as having a natural aversion for anything that is valuable in antiquity and bitterly complained that they purposefully impeded his work in the city. He was shocked by what he saw as ignorance and apathy among the Greeks towards their own antiquities; he expected as much of the Turks, however, whom he proclaimed to be the most inveterate enemies of statuary and the whole Vitruvian art. Gilles based his characterization on what he witnessed in Constantinople, where Ottoman buildings were being erected with materials quarried from ancient structures. Such was the fate of seventeen ancient pillars made of white marble, which were removed from their home at the Hippodrome to construct a new hospital under Sultan Sleyman. I was concerned to see them thus demolished, not so much for the use they were intended, Gilles explained, but because the capitals, made after the most exact plans of ancient architecture, were cut into rude and ill-shaped models for mundane constructions.33 Apparently the French antiquarian could understand and appreciate that antique architectural elements might be incorporated into modern buildings; what he could not tolerate was the undoing of their classical proportions. To Gilless eye, the way that the Turks treated antiquities as raw material was symptomatic of a fundamentally backwards approach to the distant past among a people so fond of change and novelty that anything may be called antique among them that is beyond their memory. 34 Ambassador Busbecq expressed a similar sentiment in his Turkish Letters, writing that the Turks have not the slightest idea of chronology, or of diVerent epochs, and they mix up together in a wonderful way all historical events. 35 The Turks did not, in short, share the Renaissance sense of the past of these traveling antiquarians, and this made them dangerous caretakers for the antiquities of Constantinople.36 The same might have been saidand indeed was being saidof contemporary Europeans who did not share the values and priorities of the elite antiquarians. Back in 1433, Cyriacus of Ancona had denounced the citizens of Rome for reducing their own magni cent antiquities into lime in so lazy, barbarous, and indecent a fashion, and that destruction
Gilles, 61-66, 82-84, 135. Gilles, 222. 35 Busbecq, 1:149. 36 As de ned by Peter Burke, the Renaissance sense of the past included an understanding of the concept of anachronism, a critical approach to evidence, and a focus on causation as historical explanation. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York, 1969) 1.
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continued with vigor during the lifetimes of Gilles and Busbecq.37 The incidents that arose between Turks and Europeans over the antiquities of the East might well be seen as clashes of class and education more than anything else, but the traveling antiquaries of the sixteenth century read into them a chasmic cultural divide between East and West. Gilles died before he could nish writing up the research that he had conducted on site in Constantinople. His nephew completed the work for him and published it in 1561 as a book called On the Topography and Antiquities of Constantinople.38 This nal product was a prose description of Constantinople that walked the reader through the ancient city ward by ward, stopping along the way to describe the monuments and provide their measurements. Like Pirro Ligorios famous birds eye View of Ancient Rome printed that same year, Gilless Topography attempted to strip away the accumulated dross of the centuries to reveal only the classical layer of the citys past.39 By its very nature, this was a project that precluded its author from describing the Islamic constructions of sixteenth-century Constantinople. But it is clear from his text that Gilles was, in fact, fascinated by the modern Ottoman city. Relying on the standard orators trick of naming all the topics that he would not discuss in order to include them all anyway (a technique used by Chrysoloras in his Comparison as well), Gilles expressed his regret that it would require another entire book to describe adequately the public buildings of the Mahometans. He did, however, devote a signi cant descriptive passage to the Imperial Palace, evoking for the reader how its roof proudly glitters with gold and is beauti ed with the most rich and lively colors of Persian work. The same man who marveled at the luxury of Constantinoples Islamic buildings ticked oV the impressive number of mosques and baths in the city, and praised local craftsmanship in the

37 Scalamonti, 131; Rodolfo Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome (New York, 1899), esp. ch. 16, Marble-Cutters and Lime-Burners of Mediaevel and Renaissance Rome and ch. 19, The Monuments in the Latter Part of the Sixteenth Century. 38 De topographia Constantinopoleos et de illius antiquitatibus libri quatuor was rst published by Guillaume Rouille at Lyon in 1561 and again in Leiden by Elsevir in 1661. 39 On Ligorios place in the milieu of Roman antiquarianism, see Anthony Grafton, The Ancient City Restored: Archaeology, Ecclesiastical History, and Egyptology, 87123 in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, ed. Anthony Grafton (Washington, D.C., 1993), 106-110; for a discussion of Ligorios sources and methods, see Howard Burns, Pirro Ligorios Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: The ANTEIQVAE VRBIS IMAGO of 1561, 19-92 in Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, ed. Robert W. Gaston (Milan, 1988).

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decorative arts, could also turn around and describe Ottoman contributions to Constantinople in the most derisive terms:
Although they are always attempting to beautify it with public buildings, at present it looks more dingy in the day than it did formerly at night . . . The clarity of the day now only serves to show the meanness and poverty of their buildings.40

Clearly con icted, Gilles was unable to reconcile his interests in both ancient and modern Constantinople, and the restrictive nature of his particular antiquarian enterprise did not lend itself to communicating the complex, mixed experience of the author. Unlike the rhetoric of urban description, the visual tradition of the city view provided the antiquarian traveler with a way to display multiple layers of urban history all at once. Antiquarian artists who visited Constantinople overwhelmingly rejected the learned model of a city view anchored in the past, as represented by Pirro Ligorios map of Rome, and chose instead to depict the actual city, the Islamic city.41 Their model was the printed city view, as it had developed in fteenth-century books like Bernhard von Breydenbachs Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1493) and Hartmann Schedels Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). One of the rst printed books with images based on eyewitness observation in the East, Breydenbachs book on the Holy Land broke new ground by depicting the cities of the Levant as they had actually appeared to the author and to the artist who accompanied him on his travels.42 The convention of the printed urban view was indeed a travelers art that represented cities as they would rst be seen when approached from across the sea or from outside the city walls.43 As a busy port city with grand monuments standing at attention to greet the visitor, Constantinople was especially attered by this style of urban portraiture, as we see in a prospect that the Danish artist Melchior

Gilles, 216-17, 20-25, 221. On the uneven development of accurate images of Constantinople in the fteenth century, see Ian R. Manners, Constructing the Image of a City: The Representation of Constantinople in Christopher Buondelmontis Liber Insularum Archipelagi, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997): 72-102. 42 For the evolution of the speci c (as opposed to the conventional) city view, see Juergen Schulz, Jacopo deBarbaris View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500, The Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425-74, especially pp. 458-62. 43 Charles Talbot, Topography as Landscape in Early Printed Books, 105-16 in The Early Illustrated Book: Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald, ed. Sandra Hindman (Washington, D.C., 1982), 114.
40 41

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Lorck made sometime between 1559 and 1561. 44 This small segment of the drawing (which measures almost twelve meters long in its entirety) showed the artist at work on the selfsame picture, dipping his pen into the ink pot held by a Turkish assistant ( g. 3). Lorcks prospect combined elements from the antique past with the Islamic present: the Hagia Sophia with its new minarets, the mosques of the sultans, the Hippodrome, Constantines Column, the aqueduct of Valens. Constantinople rose in front of the artist from across the harbor and simultaneously came to life on the scroll before him in a cohesive panorama in which the citys Muslim architecture t beautifully into the cityscape, the minarets mimicking the shapes of the ancient columns and pillars. Standing far back from his subject, Lorck smoothed out the citys rough edges and created patterns unseen or unnoticed within the city walls. Though it never reached print, this image of Constantinople was well-known among the itinerant literati of early modern Europe, who saw the scroll in the university library of Leiden, where it hung under the windows on a wall behind a table of globes and shelves of mathematics, philosophy, and philology books.45 Melchior Lorck, the author of this magni cent view, went to the Ottoman Empire in the service of the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I and joined the retinue of Ambassador Busbecq in Constantinople sometime around 1555. When he took up residency in Constantinople, Lorck joined a respected line of artistic predecessors who had spent time in the Ottoman capital, most notably Gentile Bellini, who had worked for Sultan Mehmed II.46 Artists were valuable participants in European expeditions to the East, and Lorck was an especially strong match for Busbecqs group as an artist who shared the ambassadors passion for

Though the drawing is dated 1559, when Lorck was in Constantinople, the Lorck expert Erik Fischer has determined from watermarks that the drawing could not have been executed until after the artist had returned to Europe, most likely around 1561. Erik Fischer, Melchior Lorck: Drawings from the Evelyn Collection at Stonor Park, England, and from the Department of Prints and Drawings, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen , Catalogue (Copenhagen, 1962), 24-25. 45 Fischer surmises that Lorck intended for his view to be published in a very large print. Erik Fischer, Melchior Lorck: A Dane as Imperial Draughtsman in Constantinople in the 1550s, 31-43 in The Arabian Journey: Danish Connections with the Islamic World Over a Thousand Years, ed. Kjeld con Folsach, et al. (rhus, 1996), 34. In a 1610 engraving of the Leiden library by Willem Swanenburg, Lorcks prospect is distinctly visible hanging on the wall, though it is impossible to make out details of the drawing in the print. 46 Unlike Lorck, Bellini never created a composite view of Ottoman Constantinople. Julian Raby, Venice, Drer and the Oriental Mode (London, 1982), 21.
44

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Figure 3: Melchior Lorck. Self-portrait of Lorck drawing his prospect of Constantinople, with a Turkish assistant. Green and pink ink on paper. Detail from Byzantium sive Constantineopolis (dated 1559). Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden.

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antiquities.47 In a brief autobiography, Lorck described how his travels in Italy had inspired in him a great desire to see the antiquities of the Greek world. Of his time in Constantinople, he later wrote, I saw and studied many remarkable antiquities and other eminent works and objects of art (of which I made frequent drawings and whose origin I studied), and he explained how he had intended to write a book about the antiquities of Constantinople, and have it printed and published to the special pleasure, use and bene t of all lovers of art and antiquity. 48 As Lorck wrote to his king, he did not come home from the Ottoman Empire loaded down with gold, pearls and treasures, for they were not the cause of my travels.49 He returned, rather, with a corpus of drawings. During his four and a half years in the Ottoman Empire, Lorck produced a rich graphic record of Turkish life and landscape and, once back home, he personally prepared many of his drawings for the prints that were published posthumously in a book entitled WellEngraved and Cut Figures (1619). 50 Lorcks compilation of 125 woodcuts was like a carefully edited sketchbook of the artists observations in Constantinople. Unlike Pierre Gilles, Lorck indulged his interest in Islamic architecture, from the greatest monumentslike Sultan Sleymans mosqueto the most mundane details of the lived-in citylike the cemeteries on the outskirts of town with the distinctive turban headstones so exotic to the European viewer ( g. 4). Lorcks interest in the range of images available in Constantinople is equally evident in his depictions of the diverse peoples whom he saw in the Ottoman Empire. Like his predecessor Bellini, Lorck created iconic portraits of the sultan. But Lorck also drew less celebrated peoples, including soldiers, harpists, dancers, and prostitutes, and men riding camels, selling beverages, and shoeing oxen. Most intriguing, perhaps, is his series of enigmatic pictures that posed anonymous men and

47 Busbecq never recorded Lorcks name in his Turkish Letters, but he did mention acquiring a picture of the pillar at the Avret Bazaar, which suggests that he had artists making drawings of the antiquities that he saw in his travels. Busbecq, 1:126. 48 Autobiographical letter by Melchior Lorck ( Jan. 1, 1563), trans. Erik Fischer, 1013 in Melchior Lorck in Turkey (Copenhagen, 1990), 11. 49 Lorck in Fischer (1990), 13. 50 There are only ve known surviving copies of Lorcks Wolgerissene und geschnittene Figuren (Hamburg, 1619). On the copy that I consulted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Alexandrine N. St. Clair, A Forgotten Record of Turkish Exotica, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27 (1969): 411-23; and the same authors The Image of the Turk in Europe (New York, 1973).

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Figure 4: Melchior Lorck. Turkish cemetery. Woodcut. Wolgerissene und geschnittene Figuren (Hamburg, 1619). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932. (32.86, leaf 83 recto).

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women among the columns, obelisks, and ruins of the former Byzantium. His subjects stood full-length, usually with their backs to the viewer so that their faces were at least partially obscured. In one portrait from the Well-Engraved and Cut Figures, a woman holds a ower in each hand and stands between a domed mosque to her left and a perfect obelisk engraved with hieroglyphs to her right ( g. 5). The obelisks of Constantinople were second only to the Hagia Sophia as the citys most recognizable symbols.51 Through this exotic antiquarian imagery, the Turk was granted a place in Constantinople through an association with its antiquities, and, at the same time, Lorcks Turk receded even further back in time and space to become all the more distant and distinct from the European viewing audience. The Turk was trans gured into an object as ancient, mysterious, and hieroglyphic as the obelisk itself. While Melchior Lorck used the relics of an ancient past to create exoticized images of isolated individuals with generic antiquities, a nearcontemporary named Pieter Coecke van Aelst depicted a vast panoramic view of Constantinople and other territories of the Ottoman Empire in which hundreds of Turksa rush of humanity in all its diversityperformed the business of daily life among the monumental antiquities of the ancient city. While the only Turk in sight in Lorcks prospect of Constantinople was an exotic servant,52 Pieter Coecke seamlessly wove hundreds of Turks into the view that he drew in 1533, and which was printed by his widow in 1553. 53 Coecke had gone to Constantinople in 1533 to make cartoons for a tapestry company; the business venture fell through, but Coecke remained in the Ottoman Empire for about a year. In his characterization of Coeckes career, the biographer Karel Van Mander emphasized Coeckes Italian training and scholarly talents,

For a biography of the obelisks of Constantinople, see Erik Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, vol. 2, The Obelisks of Istanbul and England (Copenhagen, 1972). 52 Presumably there was a second Turk holding the other end of Lorcks scroll in a destroyed section of the drawing. Hans Harbeck, Melchior Lorichs: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1911), 96. 53 Coeckes view of Constantinople was printed in Antwerp under the title Ces moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz avecq les regions y appartenents, ont est au vif contrefaictes par Pierre Coeck dAlost. The print is altogether about 17.5 high and 15 wide. All the prints are reproduced in a slightly reduced format in William Stirling Maxwell, The Turks in MDXXXIII: A series of drawings made in that year at Constantinople by Peter Coeck of Aelst and published from woodblocks, by his widow, at Antwerp in MDLIII (London and Edinburgh, 1873).
51

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Figure 5: Melchior Lorck. Woman with an obelisk. Woodcut. Wolgerissene und geschnittene Figuren (Hamburg, 1619). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932. (32.86, leaf 10 verso).

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and he credited this artist with singlehandedly bringing the correct manner of building to his home country with his translation of Sebastian Serlios books of architecture into Flemish.54 Coecke combined his skills as a Renaissance artist with his interest in Turkish society and culture in an enormous panoramic view that brought Constantinople to vibrant life and transformed the peoples whom Gilles had denounced as the most inveterate enemies of statuary and the whole Vitruvian art into the classically beautiful protagonists of the consummate Renaissance drama known as the historia. A historia was a complicated composition that captured multiple gures in an idealized moment in time. Most famously de ned by the fteenthcentury Italian Renaissance master Leon Battista Alberti in his On Painting (1435), the proper historia would feature attractive people with appealing features, well-proportioned bodies, and digni ed dress. The most important element, however, was a plentiful variety to delight the viewer, for, according to Alberti, just as with food and music, novel and extraordinary things delight us for various reasons but especially because they are diVerent from the old ones we are used to, so with everything the mind takes great pleasure in variety and abundance.55 Coeckes view merged the historia painting with the tradition of the printed city view, and the result was a stunning vision of sixteenth-century Constantinople as lived in, owned, and occupied by the Ottoman emperor and his Turkish subjects. Each of the seven panels that together formed Coeckes fteen-foot-long panorama could be read as individual historia compositions depicting, in order: travelers in the Turkish mountains, travelers in the lowlands, Turks performing basic human functions (eating, praying, voiding), the celebration of a new moon, a Turkish funeral, circumcision ceremonies, and the procession of the sultan through the Hippodrome. Those seven panels were joined by anthropomorphic columns, male and female Turks who had been transformed into atlantides and caryatids. With a stroke of the pen, Coecke turned the most dreaded enemy of Europe into the most classical of forms by freezing him into a gure as harmlessness as one of the porch maidens of the Erectheum.

54 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the rst edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603-1604) , ed. Hessel Miedema, (Doornspijk, 1994), 1:133. 55 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York, 1991), 71-76.

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Like Lorck, Coecke displayed both ancient and modern Constantinople in his image of the city. The nal panel, which depicted the sultan in procession before the major monuments of the city in the Hippodrome ( g. 6), revealed the multiple layers of the city with its coexisting mosques, minarets, columns, and obelisks. But unlike Lorcks prospect, which was created from across the sea, Coecks view showed the ruins of the Hippodrome at close range. Those ruinson the right-hand side of the panelappeared attractive and appropriate, as much a part of the natural setting as the craggy rocks and bluish mountains that typically formed the backgrounds to Northern European paintings, the tradition in which Coecke was trained. Coeckes rubbly antiquities boasted an aesthetic value, just like the ruins of Old Rome that Chrysoloras described as beautiful even in their dismembered state.56 Seen here processing with great pomp and dignity through the relics of the Hippodrome, Sultan Sleyman was clearly the master of these ruins. Coecke complied well with Albertis prescription for variety (though he did include what Alberti would have considered an overabundance of gures) by depicting men, women, and children in a dazzling diversity of poses, activities, and costumes.57 In the third panel ( g. 7), the landscape featured both mountain and sea. There were Turks in every possible position: sitting, squatting, kneeling, riding, lunging forward, and twisting backward. Bearded, moustachioed, and clean shaven, the men were shown from the front, from the back, in three-quarter views, and in pro le. Van Mander wrote that Coeckes demonstration of variety and abundance proved to contemporaries that Pieter was a very intelligent master.58 This Albertian variety also provided the artist with an opportunity to communicate the extraordinary ethnographic details of custom and costume that he had observed so keenly in the course of his travels, and this picture thus demonstrated a range and contrast among the Turks that was rarely seen in Western Europe at the time. While following Western prescriptions for good art, Coecke turned the historia into an ethnography lesson.59 In this, Coeckes view represented real progress, even among the works of other eyewitness travelers who

Chrysoloras, 201. Alberti followed Varros prescription for avoiding more than nine dinner guests in painting as well as at supper. Aberti, 75-76. 58 Van Mander, 133. 59 On travel literature and ethnography see Joan-Pau Rubis, New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology, History and Anthropology 6 (1993): 157-97.
56 57

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Figure 6: Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Sultan Sleyman in procession through the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Woodcut. Detail from Ces Moeurs et Fachons de Faire des Turcz (Antwerp, 1553). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. (28.85.7).

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Figure 7: Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Woodcut. Turks performing the functions of nature. Woodcut. Detail from Ces Moeurs et Fachons de Faire des Turcz (Antwerp, 1553). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. (28.85.3).

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had come before him. For example, the cluster of men depicted in the lower left-hand corner of the third panel ( g. 7) clearly was modeled after a like composition of four men gathered around a shared dish, which was printed in Breydenbachs Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1493. Compared to the earlier model, Coeckes version of the scene demonstrated a much greater diversity and a precocity of detail by depicting a variety of very speci c asks, headgear, and shoes. If Karel van Mander is to be believed, Coecke truly immersed himself in Turkish culture during his year in Constantinople, learning the language as well as drawing the sites. It comes as little surprise, then, that Coecke would have depicted himself in Turkish costume in his view. According to van Mander, the man bearing a bow who stood in the center foreground of Coeckes rst panel was a self-portrait of the artist in Turkish costume.60 Just as the shape of the column could morph a erce Janissary into an innocuous atlantide, so the right costume could temporarily turn a Fleming into a Turk. Coecke joined a distinguished line of Western European artists who portrayed themselves in Eastern garb, including Albrecht Drer, who once fashioned himself as a bearded Turk in a robe and headgear borrowed from his friend and fellow artist Gentile Bellini.61 While Coecke used costume to incorporate himself into his view of the Ottoman Empire, Lorck manipulated his outerwear to achieve the opposite eVect. In his prospect of Constantinople, the 32year-old artist appeared as himself, a Western artist at work, with long, delicate ngers and light curly hair, in re ned dress and a rakish beret ( g. 3). The Turkish assistant to his right provided a strong contrast through costume and thereby heightened the sense that Lorck was an outside observer of the city sprawled before him. Artists like Coecke and Lorck understood well the transformative power of costume to integrate or to alienate a gure in a work of art. A diplomat like Busbecq was obliged to pay especial attention to costume and decorum in the world of diplomacy. In his rst Turkish Letter, the ambassador told of the embarrassment that his short and scanty

Van Mander, 132-33. Erwin Panofsky asserted that the bearded Turk in Albrecht Drers 1518 etching Landscape with a Cannon was a self-portrait. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Drer, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1995), 197. Alexandrine St. Clair cited several cases of Turkish fashions and costumes worn in Europe, especially at court; St. Clair (1973), 10-11; and Robert Schwoebel intriguingly suggested that it was not unusual for European travelers to aVect Turkish ways back home, writing that more than one voyager returned home attired in Turkish dress complete with turban. Schwoebel, 178.
60 61

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Western costume caused him at the Turkish court amidst the elegant, unadorned, ankle-grazing robes of the Turks. But the Habsburg ambassador felt even sillier when he and his men donned embroidered robes in the Turkish style for an audience with the Sultan. With this procession, he wrote, I advanced as if I was going to act the part of Agamemnon or some other monarch of ancient tragedy. 62 Notably, Busbecq related the Turkish costume to an ancient drama, and he perceived the attire of his hosts as something from a distant past. Costume was important not only to travelers, but to European society at large as a means of marking social distinctions and as a medium of personal transformation and self-presentation. Europeans who never left home could see for themselves the diVerences between their dress and that of exotic strangers in printed books of costume, a genre of illustrated books that became extremely popular in this era of travel. Europeans had a strong appetite for costume books that categorized the peoples of the world, including themselves. A typical costume book featured peoples from diverse places of origin, stations in life, and occupations, who were depicted in full-length images that showcased details of costume by removing any contextualizing background. Comparison and judgment were implicit to the genre, for costume was a moral issue as well as a source of entertainment at a time when increasingly rigid sumptuary laws were being promulgated to control wardrobe excesses from Augsburg to Madrid. In a book on feminine costume with woodcuts by the famous Nuremberg printmaker Jose Amman, the dedicatory letter from the publisher explained that the books pictures illustrating the attire of women from around the world would unequivocally prove the superiority of the most commendable women of Germany.63 The costume books comparative function was readily apparent in Ammans Theater of Women, in which facing pages depicted a well-covered nun from the order of St. Catherine opposite a suggestively bare-breasted Peruvian woman, hair long and loose, pelvis tilted forward. European men and women could compare their own costumes to those of their Turkish counterparts in an extremely popular book on the costumes of the Levant, Nicholas de Nicolays Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages Made into Turkey, which was published for the rst time in

Busbecq, 1:155-59. Jost Amman, Theatrum Mulierum (Frankfort, 1586), ed. Alfred Aspland, The Theatre of Women, The Holbein Societys Facsimile Reprints (Manchester, England, 1872), xxxviii.
62 63

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a French edition of 1568. 64 Nicolay traveled to the Ottoman Empire in the entourage of Ambassador dAramon in 1551-52; most likely he was included in the voyage in his capacity as a geographer, in order to survey the fortresses of the Turks and their neighbors for the French crown.65 Nicolay clearly reveled in the adventure. As a self-described citoyen du monde, he proclaimed that it is the will of reason, and nature seems to order man as well, to seek out, visit and inquire, to know and to understand all beings, all the parts and living quarters of his universal dwelling.66 The rsthand exploration of the remains of the past was an important element of Nicolays travels in the Levant, and he was a sporty antiquarian who hiked, climbed, and crawled over exotic terrains in search of relics and antiquities to refresh my spirit and eschew idleness.67 Nicolay made sketches of the people he saw in the course of his travels, which the artist Louis Daret later converted into the sixty prints that accompanied the Navigations. The book covered a great deal of ground, both topically and territorially, including urban histories, city descriptions, measurements of islands, explanations of governments, and most of alldetailed descriptions of foreign peoples and their appearance, as they are and as I saw them, representing them in portraits according to nature, as Nicolay wrote. 68 The author was surprisingly silent about pigmentation and physiology, channeling his energy instead into detailed descriptions of costumes.69 The print portraits in the book directly communicated what Nicolay had seen abroad, down to the nest details, while the text revealed that which the black-and-white linear images could not communicate (colors, fabrics, and explanations for

64 Additional French editions of Nicolays Navigations were published in 1576 and 1586, and it was quickly translated into German (1576), English (1585), Dutch (1576), and Italian (1576). Yrasimos (1991), 224. 65 Marie-Christine Gomez-Graud and Stphane Yrasimos, Dans lempire de Soliman le Magni que (Paris, 1989), 11. 66 La raison veut, et nature semble le commander lhomme, de chercher, visiter et enqurir, savoir et connatre tous les tres, toutes les parties et mansions de son universelle habitation. Nicolas de Nicolay, Les navigations, prgrinations et voyages faits en la Turquie, in Gomez-Graud and Yrasimos (1989), 44-45. 67 Nicolay (1585), f. 32v; 8v-9r. 68 Tels quils sone et que je les ai vus, les reprsentant en gure portraite auprs du naturel. Nicolay in Gomez-Graud and Yrasimos (1989), 51. 69 The captive Georgievitz and the ambassador Busbecq were equally silent about skin color. Cf. Richard G. Cole, Sixteenth-Century Travel Books as a Source of European Attitudes Toward Non-White and Non-Western Culture, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972): 59-67.

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peculiarities of dress). The combination of the images and the verbal explanations created a multi-layered ekphrasis that brought to life the peoples of the Levant for the reader/viewer of the Navigations. Nicholas de Nicolays Navigations depicted men and women from all walks of life: a female slave in Algiers, the wife of the Ottoman Sultan, a Jewish maiden, a duo of Turkish women walking to the baths; a Greek peasant, pilgrims returning home from Mecca, a pair of wrestlers, and a trio of drunkards. Some of Nicolays images would have been shockingly incommensurable to the books audience in Western Europe, most of all the portraits of Turkish religious men like the long-haired Geomaler, the Calender with his pierced penis, and the Dervish slashing his own skin with a long blade. But Nicolay also brought into view humanizing images of the Turks going about their daily business in ways that would have been most familiar, such as the woman placing her hand protectively on the head of her little girl as she led her down the street, and the chef with his apron full of produce ( g. 8). The diverse range of humanity depicted by the artist-antiquarians who visited the Ottoman Empire ultimately did little to complicate the image of the Turk in sixteenth-century Europe.70 The standard image of the Turkish warrior maintained its hold over the European imagination. When Jost Amman made the woodcuts for a book of artists models, the Kunstbchlein of 1578, he featured several images of the Turks, warriors all, in various poses with elaborate turbans decorated with jewels and feathered plumes ( g. 9).71 In this printed book, which was intended to provide illustrations of standard elements that artists would need for their compositions, the only Oriental image was that of the ferocious Turkish warriorfull of Renaissance grace, but fundamentally no diVerent from the pictures rst pulled from the presses in the fteenth century. In the end, it seems that the eyewitness depictions of Ottoman Constantinople that were produced by traveling antiquarians in the sixteenth century served more than anything else to deepen the Wests vision of the East as a diVerent, exotic, and backwards place by adding to the already potent religious divide another dichotomy, this one based

70 St. Clair (1973) concluded that the image of the Turk actually became increasingly conventionalized in sixteenth-century Europe; see St. Clair, The Image of the Turk in Europe , 10. 71 Facsimile as Jost Amman, 293 Renaissance Woodcuts for Artists and Illustrators, with an introduction by Alfred Werner (New York, 1968).

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Figure 8: Nicholas de Nicolay. A cook of Turkey. Woodcut, after the 1576 Antwerp edition. The Navigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkey by Nicholas Nicolay (London, 1585).

Figure 9: Jost Amman. Turbaned Turk with shield and staff. Woodcut. Enchiridion Artes pingendi, fingendi & sculpendi (Frankfurt am Main, 1578). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949. (49.10, plate A3).

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on the perception of the past and its remains. Augier Ghislain de Busbecqs Turkish Letters and Pierre Gilless Topography of Constantinople developed a distinction between the Western antiquarian and the Eastern barbarian that would have a lasting impact on the learned European perception of the Oriental as lacking a sense of history. Images by Lorck and Coecke incorporated the Turks into scenes with the antiquities of the East and thus showed them as timeless, unchanging peoples of the past, while depictions of Turkish women, especially by Nicolay, laid the groundwork for future fantasies of the Oriental female.72 These images of the Turk, created by the lovers of antiquities who visited Constantinople in the sixteenth century, would come to full development only in the late eighteenth century, when Orientalism replaced antiquarianism as the academic discipline through which the East was perceived by the West.73

72 For example, Leslie Luebbers has traced the similarities between Nicolays pictures of women and nineteenth-century paintings by artists like Ingres. Leslie Luebbers, Documenting the Invisible: European Images of Ottoman Women, 1567-1867, The Print Collectors Newsletter 24 (1993): 1-7. 73 On the eighteenth-century Orientalist vision of Easterners as both lacking a changing history of their own and as failing to understand the concept of history, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1994), esp. 240, 253.