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IN THE SUMMER OF 1439, just as Salomone di Bonaventura was embarking on his ill-fated business relationship with Abraham Dattili and not long after Filippo Lippi had finished work on the Barbadori Altarpiece, Florence was visibly reaching out to the Islamic world. Indications of a vibrant two-way exchange with the “Muslim Empire”—encompassing everything from the lands of al-Andalus in Spain to the Hafsid kingdom, and from the Ottoman sultanate to the distant lands of Tartary—were everywhere to be found in the city’s streets and squares. The grand palazzi of its richest citizens thronged with slaves and servants brought from Eastern shores, and hummed with the sound of alien tongues. Humanists gathered in convent cloisters were beginning to long for knowledge of Arabic texts, and church altarpieces like the Barbadori Altarpiece already included telling visual references to the culture of Islam. Merchants spoke freely of journeys across the seas to Alexandria, Constantinople, and beyond, into the dusty market towns of Timurid Persia. And, most strikingly of all, the markets were filled with a dazzling array of herbs and spices from the distant East. Filling the air with their pungent aroma were cloves from Indonesia, marjoram from Asia Minor, cumin seeds from the Levant, cinnamon from Arabia, and a host of other, even more exotic spices, such as cubeb and grains of paradise (Aframomum).
ISLAM AND THE WEST
As any Florentine observer would have been able to see, relations between the Italian peninsula and the kingdoms of the crescent had begun to bear forth tremendous fruits by the early fifteenth century.
Italians had been acutely aware of Islam both as a Mediterranean power and as a cultural and religious force for almost seven hundred years before Lippi’s journey. Since the early Middle Ages, the Muslim faith had been a major force in European history, not only as a political and commercial player, but also as the object of conceptions of alterity and difference. It had been the invasion of al-Andalus from 710 onward that had brought Islam into contact with the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe for the first time, but it was the Arabs’ arrival in Sicily during the next century that had succeeded in embedding Muhammad’s followers in the Italian imagination. Although Arabic raids had been launched against the island even before the fall of al-Andalus, divisions in the Byzantine hierarchy had allowed North African Muslims to embark on a full-scale campaign of conquest that culminated in Sicily’s complete subjugation by 902. But even though this period of domination was to last only a little over a century and a half—brought to a close by the Norman conquest of southern Italy—it bequeathed a long-lasting legacy. The experience left a powerful impression on Sicily, and despite the years of fighting that had gone before, the doors had been thrown open to a genuine two-way exchange between Christian and Islamic culture. After the emirate of Sicily collapsed, a large Muslim population remained, and the cultural impact of Islam was so strong that many of its Christian kings felt compelled to learn Arabic and continued to patronize forms of art and architecture that bore the hallmarks of the Moorish style. Thanks largely to the influx of Arabic learning, the medical faculty at the University of Salerno towered above all other institutes of learning, and the impact of Arabic commentaries on Aristotle in particular set the philosophical development of the South apart from that of the North. But for all these positive influences, there was nevertheless a groundswell of contempt and even hatred. The experience of Sicily had brought home both the cultural “otherness” and the expansionist tendencies of Islam to Italy. The image of the Muslim as the most potent enemy of Italian Catholicism was cast in stone, and the idea that Italy was on the front line of a clash of cultures was given considerable currency. Medieval writings on history and geography were replete with commentaries that caricatured Muslims as barbaric heretics who threatened the very integrity of Christendom.
It was the Crusades, however, that propelled Islam to the forefront of the Italian worldview. The First Crusade was launched in 1095 with the express intention of recovering the Holy Land from its (admittedly, very tolerant) Muslim occupiers, and the waves of invasion that followed ensured that both Italians and their European counterparts came to perceive violent opposition to Islam as an obligation of their Christian faith. A multiplicity of insidious myths was generated to describe Muslims and justify hatred for their religion. The Song of Roland, for example, contended that “the Muslim loves not God, serves Mahound, and worships Apollon,” while the Gesta Francorum accused Muslims of worshipping Muhammad himself as just one of a pantheon of gods. Tales were told of graven idols being set up in Christian churches, of magical cows being used to seduce believers into heresy, and of all manner of depraved sexual practices. “Barbaric” Muslims were even accused of being unmanly, effeminate characters, unworthy of respect, and the enemies of chivalric honor.
Yet despite the undoubtedly negative character of Christian perceptions of Islam in the Middle Ages, it seemed that the dawning of the Renaissance offered the opportunity for a more positive and constructive form of cultural exchange. Following the fall of the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1261, the popular appetite for crusading ideology waned dramatically. As Giotto was first taking up his brush, few seriously entertained the belief that the Near East could—or should—be the object of military attentions, and even fewer were prepared to advocate anything like the all-out warfare of the past. Like it or not, the Muslim powers—though diverse and divided—held the Levant, and the Ottoman Turks were beginning to emerge as one of Anatolia’s greatest forces, with designs set on Constantinople itself. What was more, as later medieval travelers had seen, Muslims of various stripes controlled the overwhelming majority of the territories between the Bosporus and China, and were not only massively diverse but also colossally strong in both military and economic terms. Now that merchant banking was beginning to emerge in the maritime republics of northern Italy, there was finally the means to embark on large-scale long-distance trade, and the quest for profit demanded a more sophisticated approach toward understanding Islam to achieve some sort of necessary coexistence, which became all the more vital as the years progressed.
Although Venetian traders had been doing business with the Muslim world for several hundred years, Italian merchants were really beginning to wake up to the immense amounts of cash that could be made from trade with the Near and Middle East by the early fourteenth century. With formal outposts already established in Constantinople and Pera, Venice and Genoa in particular were enthusiastically exploring the potential for importing raw materials (metals, alum, and so on), silks, and spices both via the maritime routes through the Black Sea and by land across Anatolia, while Florence and its competitors were beginning to appreciate the profits to be made from exporting finished cloths to Egypt and the Levant, and from importing grain and other much-needed foodstuffs. Indeed, by 1489, three-quarters of all the cloth produced in Florence was a modestly priced fabric that had been designed specifically to meet growing demand from the Ottoman Empire, a fact that naturally alerted Florentine merchants to the colossal importance of sustaining—if not expanding—commerce with the Turks, while the Ottomans’ near monopoly on the supply of alum until the discovery of fresh reserves in Volterra in 1470 only served to further emphasize their central role in the Tuscan cloth trade. Slaves, too, were a major source of commercial interest, and both the Ottoman and the Mamluk kingdoms provided rich sources of indentured manpower through their own exploitation of neighboring peoples, such as the Tartars.
While the growing profitability of trade with Islamic-held territories drew cities like Florence into ever more ambitious commercial projects, political changes over the coming years intensified links between Italy and the Muslim East. With the Mamluk capture of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia in 1375, one of the most important routes to the Silk Road fell into Muslim hands, and this vital source of valuable imports was accessible only through careful negotiation with its Islamic rulers. So, too, the massive expansion of Ottoman Turkish territory made it almost impossible to conduct any meaningful trade with southeastern Europe, the Black Sea region, or the Levant except through the maintenance of at least cordial relations with the sultans. By the close of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans had consolidated their grip on Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara and had surged up into the Balkans, and by 1453 had taken Constantinople itself. By the same token, Tamerlane’s conquest of much of central Asia made the serious exploitation of commerce with the farther East contingent upon some sort of constructive engagement with the Timurid Empire. Diplomacy was essential to any sort of commerce. Having invested 5,000 florins in a trading venture with three relatives in 1452, for example, Cosimo de’ Medici was eager to open negotiations with the Ottoman court to guarantee trading privileges, a strategy pursued with some energy by his grandson Lorenzo. So, too, Venice and Genoa both dispatched embassies to Muslim Constantinople in 1455 to plead for the rights to exploit the Ottomans’ alum mines, essential to the cloth trade.
As this all gathered pace, knowledge became crucially important. In the earliest years of the Renaissance, a close acquaintance with the Muslim world was recognized as key. In his Pratica della mercatura, Pegolotti not only listed Muslim centers such as Alexandria, Damietta, Acri di Soria (modern Antalya), Laiazo d’Erminia (Ayas), and Torisi di Persia (Tabriz) as trading cities of vital importance to the ambitious merchant, but also devoted considerable time to describing the most profitable routes to follow between them. What was more, Pegolotti stressed the value of a good working knowledge of languages including Arabic, Persian, and Tartar, which were collectively the largest linguistic group other than the Italian dialects discussed in the treatise. Later, with the advance of the Mamluks and the Ottomans, the value of accurate information became almost incalculable, and commercial interests coalesced with the antiquarianism of the humanists to produce a powerful appetite for informative travelogues. Before the fall of Constantinople, it was “not uncommon for men of learning to travel to the Levant and record what … they had seen there.” In 1419, for example, the Venetian merchant Niccolò da Conti went to Damascus, where he learned Arabic so that he could understand different cultures and traditions more easily. Traveling with Arab merchants, he then ventured to Baghdad and Persia (where he picked up the local language), before setting out for Southeast Asia, visiting India, Sumatra, Burma, and Java, and acquiring a wealth of useful knowledge about the spice trade and gold mining. Conti subsequently related his experiences to Poggio Bracciolini, who produced an exhaustive account that inspired many fifteenth-century cartographers—including the unusually brilliant Fra Mauro—to transform their understanding of the geography of the East. Later, the stream of humanistic travelers became a torrent, and travelogues of one complexion or another became one of the most vibrant forms of literature. Cyriac of Ancona (Ciriaco de’ Pizzecolli), for example, was to record his experiences in the Near East in the most engaging and richly illustrated fashion after returning from travels throughout the Ottoman world in the service of the sultan, and figures including Guarino Veronese, Giovanni Aurispa, Francesco Filelfo, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Bernardo Michelozzi, and Bonsignore Bonsignori were all to tread a similar path.
When the Ottoman capture of Constantinople brought Islam into direct conflict with Italian states, military engagement often served to bring the two cultures into closer contact. Forcing them to face the “other” across the battlefield, and across the negotiating table, it had the corollary effect of exposing Italians to the inner workings of Muslim society. Artists and humanists—particularly from Venice and Naples—journeyed to the East in the wake of conflict. As part of a peace deal in 1479, for example, the Venetian Senate dispatched Gentile Bellini as a kind of roving cultural envoy to Constantinople, where he made a number of careful observations of the Ottoman court and even completed a striking portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (now in the National Gallery in London). Similarly, post-conflict diplomatic relations between Mehmed and King Ferrante of Naples resulted in Costanzo da Ferrara being sent on a comparable cultural mission in ca. 1475–78. There, Costanzo completed a series of important and revealing works, including a flattering portrait medal of the sultan (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and a remarkably detailed study of a court figure (Standing Ottoman; Louvre, Paris) (Fig. 37). But conflict and divisions within the Ottoman court could also lead to even more profound exchange of personnel across the ravages of war. After an unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne from his half brother, Bayezid II, Cem Sultan (1459–95) was banished first to Rhodes and then to Italy itself. He was handed over to Pope Innocent VIII, and his captivity was ensured by regular, massive payments by Bayezid, but his presence in Rome opened the doors to a wave of fascination for all things Eastern in the Christian capital.
From time to time, however, the accidents of proximity could throw up rare but extraordinary occasions for cultural interaction between Christians and Muslims that transcended the limits of commerce and conflict. Echoing the tale of Filippo Lippi’s capture and enslavement, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan—a Spanish-born Muslim raised in Fez and better known as Leo Africanus—was offered as a gift to Pope Leo X after being seized by pirates in the early sixteenth century. In Rome, Leo Africanus acquiesced in attempts to convert him to Christianity and provided a valuable, firsthand insight into the character of the Arabic language and his native Islamic faith. With notable care, he completed a Latin translation of the Koran for Egidio da Viterbo and wrote an Arabic translation of the Pauline epistles for Alberto Pio.
But if high-profile individuals went back and forth between East and West with increasing ease and frequency during the Renaissance, there was also a more mundane—though no less important—exchange of personnel. The reignition of the slave trade in Italy served to make Muslims of all stripes seem a good deal less “foreign” to Renaissance Italians. Indeed, by virtue of the vicissitudes of conquest and trade agreements, the overwhelming majority of the slaves trafficked across the eastern Mediterranean were Muslim, and it was by this route that many well-to-do merchant households in northern Italy came to own a Muslim slave. While the status of slaves in Italian society perhaps precluded any meaningful exchange of ideas and customs, the fact of an Islamic presence—of whatever legal character—helped to rob the peoples of the East of some of the mystique with which they had previously been surrounded, and made their dress, habits, and language more familiar to Italian society.
From the early fourteenth century onward, trade, diplomacy, politics, war, and even coincidence all conspired to bring Islam—and especially the culture of the Ottoman Empire—into sharper focus than ever before. Knowledge of the Muslim world was growing exponentially, and it was not long before an appreciation of the Near and Middle East began to make itself felt both in literature and in the visual arts. Particularly due to its commercial links to the eastern Mediterranean, Venice was especially receptive to Islamic influences, and although it is perhaps harder to uncover the precise trajectory of cultural transmission than some have supposed, it is certainly not difficult to sense a palpable effort to integrate the forms and motifs of Muslim buildings into the architectural fabric of the Serene Republic. In the tracery of palatial windows along the Grand Canal and in the haunting interior spaces of San Marco can be found a willingness to absorb, assimilate, and transform the artistic achievements of the Islamic world. So, too, with painting. Even from the portraits painted by Bellini and Costanzo da Ferrara, it can be seen that Italian art began to show a much greater enthusiasm for both the inclusion and the accurate representation of Muslims from the Near and Middle East, be they Ottoman courtiers, Mamluk soldiers, or Timurid subjects. In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco the Martyrdom of the Franciscans for the church of San Francesco in Siena, for example, care has been taken to depict both Mediterranean Moors and the Tartars who had recently conquered the port of Tana in as realistic a manner as possible. Later, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), painted in ca. 1504–7 (Fig. 38), is—despite its conscious echoes of Venetian architecture—the product of an assiduous study and appreciation of Muslim costume and mores. But the impact of Christian-Muslim cultural exchange can also be detected in more varied and subtle features of the visual arts. In a refreshingly daring and original study, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have, for example, detected strong signs that the equestrian art of the Renaissance was as heavily influenced by contact with the Islamic world as it was by a knowledge of classical sculpture. Yet one of the most intriguing—and perhaps unexpected—instances of the open-minded assimilation of Islamic influences is provided by the appearance of oriental carpets in Italian paintings. From the fourteenth century onward, growing contact with the Near and Far East led artists to integrate depictions of Persian and Turkish floor coverings into their scenes as an indication of the status of the subject or the location of the drama. Works such as Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation, Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece, and Lorenzo Lotto’sAlms of Saint Anthony, for example, all feature richly decorated oriental rugs of various types and seem to testify to a genuine sense of a positive meeting of cultures.
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
But if the growth of knowledge and cultural exchange evidenced by such artistic representations of the Muslim East has led some scholars to posit that the Renaissance witnessed the collapse of negative, “orientalist” attitudes toward the Islamic world, and the fragmentation of earlier prejudices, the veneer of tolerance was only wafer thin. Behind the facade of openness and assimilation lurked a degree of intolerance toward and hatred for Islamic culture that far surpassed anything that had been witnessed before. Indeed, “Renaissance thinkers adopted an attitude toward Muslims that was more hostile on the whole than was that of their medieval predecessors.”
As with the Jews, the fundamental obstacle to the acceptance of Muslims as true cultural partners was religion, and this fact alone facilitated the perpetuation of earlier prejudices. However much or little individual humanists knew about the details of Islamic theology, they were fully conscious that Muslims denied the divinity of Christ, and as such perceived Islam’s very existence to strike at the heart of all that they held dear. Indeed, for precisely this reason, humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries felt justified not only in likening Islam to the greatest heresies in history (Judaism and Arianism) but also in attacking Muhammad himself as being a vicious, lust-driven adulterer hell-bent on sin and deviance. In the De vita solitaria, for example, Petrarch condemned the Prophet as “an adulterous and licentious fellow,” a “wicked, infamous robber,” a “butcher,” the “creator of a wicked superstition,” the author of “poisonous teaching,” and “an accomplished voluptuary and an instigator of every obscene lust.” Writing a century later, Pope Pius II offered a yet more ludicrous and critical view of the origins of the Islamic faith that missed not a single opportunity to tarnish it with the stain of heresy and sin. Pius not only drew attention to the Prophet’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity but also asserted that
Muhammad [was] an Arab steeped in gentile error and Jewish perfidy, who received instruction in the Nestorian and Arian heresies. He advanced his fortunes by seducing a rich widow and grew notorious for his infidelities; his reputation attracted a band of brigands to his side, and with their help he made himself lord of the Arabs. Acquainted as he was with the Old and New Testaments, he perverted them both; he had the effrontery to call himself a prophet … He cast such a spell over this primitive nation that he was able to persuade them to abandon Christ the Savior and accept instead the new religion he devised for them. To this end he employed magic spells and tricks and gave his sanction to sex in all sorts of unspeakable combinations; by these means he easily seduced the common people, who are slaves to sensual pleasure.
Not merely a false prophet, but also a heresiarch, a witch, a thief, a tyrant, and a sexual deviant, Muhammad was also, Pius and his contemporaries believed, the source of all that was opposed to the Christian religion and the purest evidence that all Muslims were “enemies of the Cross.” The sins of the Prophet were, by implication, the sins of his believers: to condemn one was to condemn all.
Whereas the coexistence of Christians and Muslims in the crusader states of the Middle Ages had predisposed many medieval historians to make a careful study of Islamic history in both its religious and its secular forms, the Renaissance humanists’ interest in writing the history of the Muslim peoples was not matched by a comparable interest in acquiring a reliable understanding of the Muslim past. Despite the massive amounts of knowledge at their disposal, early-fifteenth-century historians such as Andrea Biglia andFlavio Biondo “took little interest in the accuracy or even the historical plausibility of the narratives of Islamic history they constructed.” Their objective was not scholarly but polemical, and their tone was vituperative in the extreme. They sought simply to use pseudo-history to present Muslims—especially the Mamluks and the Ottomans—as barbaric, almost subhuman peoples who embodied the very opposite of civilization, and who existed simply for the sake of inflicting cruelty and suffering. Brushing aside both the evidence of eyewitness testimonies and the accounts found in classical treatises, the humanists took the very worst fantasies from medieval texts, stripped away anything that was balanced or reasonable, and amplified the bad with a liberal dose of bile. Thus, even a figure such as Niccolò Sagundino—who had actually spent some time in Ottoman society—could ignore his own experience and instead depict the Turks as a people who had always been evil, barbaric, and savage. For the humanists of the age, there was no such thing as a good Muslim, and there never had been, either.
TO THE DEATH
Renaissance humanists were filled with a burning desire to rekindle the flames of the crusading movement, and longed to recapture Jerusalem from the Egyptian Mamluks. Throughout the early fourteenth century, the idea of launching a new crusade had been mooted by various European powers on several occasions—most notably by King Philip IV of France, who claimed he wanted to swap France for Jerusalem—but because of their unusually strong links with the East, the early humanists soon began to take the lead in whipping up popular agitation for brutal reprisals against the Muslims. In the wake of calls announced at the Council of Vienne, for example, a Venetian merchant named Marino Sanudo Torsello presented Pope John XXII with a copy of his recently completedLiber secretorum fidelium crucis (The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross) in 1321. Bursting with pious exhortations and virulent hatred, the treatise explained the need for the “protection of the faithful, the conversion and destruction of the infidel, and the acquisition and retention of the Holy Land.” It struck a chord. Within a very few years, humanists up and down Italy were calling for a fresh expedition against the Islamic occupiers of the Holy City. Petrarch was among the most enthusiastic. Despite having passed up an opportunity to go on a pilgrimage to the Levant, he vented his pent-up fury at the Islamic faith in a lengthy digression in the De vita solitaria aimed at stirring Europe’s Catholic princes into crusading action. Berating kings and potentates for being unmoved by Jerusalem’s plight, he lamented that Christianity’s “holy places” were being “trampled on” and “mangled with impunity by the Egyptian dog,” and mourned that “impious feet” were “insulting the sanctuary of Jesus Christ.” Overlooking the fact that this was patently untrue—the Mamluks being tolerant of Christians and respectful of Christian sites, many of which they themselves venerated—Petrarch urged all Europe to rise up in a mighty campaign to wipe out the “stain” of Islam from the Holy Land. It was a dream later shared and elaborated by Petrarch’s great admirer Coluccio Salutati. Extending his gaze to encompass the Ottomans as well as the Mamluks, Salutati agitated for an even more ambitious crusade headed by both pope and emperor. As the Ottomans advanced steadily throughout Anatolia and around the Sea of Marmara, he came to believe that the Holy Land should be recovered as a matter of extreme urgency, and that the Christian nations of the world should unite in exterminating the Muslim threat before it reached any further. Unless something were done, he warned, the “vile” enemies of the cross would soon threaten Italy itself.
Salutati was ahead of the curve. The Muslims were indeed on the march. The Ottoman advance through Anatolia, the Near East, and the Balkans soon brought the humanistic hatred of Islam into sharp focus. For the first time since the early Middle Ages, a powerful Islamic state seemed to threaten the territorial integrity of Western Christendom, and the risk of Europe being conquered by the Muslims appeared to be a very real possibility. The Council of Florence in 1439—memorialized by Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem—had been a last-ditch attempt to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches in the hope of providing a united Christian front to meet the Turkish onslaught. But the fall of Constantinople in 1453 illustrated the magnitude of the threat and the futility of such theological quibbling. The capital of Rome’s first Christian emperor had been lost to the infidel after more than a thousand years. As the last vestiges of the Roman Empire tumbled to the ground, shock waves swept throughout Italy. Action, the humanists felt, was needed. Now. The earlier desire to avenge the inglorious failure of the crusading movement metamorphosed into a broader longing to crush the Ottoman Empire by whatever means necessary, or Italy might be next.
Almost immediately after his coronation in 1455, Callixtus III began “to prepare himself to support Christendom, which, it was seen, was about to be oppressed by the Turks.” To this end, preachers such as Fra Giovanni da Napoli, Michele Carcano, Fra Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce, and San Bernardino of Siena were sent throughout Italy “to persuade princes and peoples to arm themselves on behalf of their religion and to support an undertaking against the common enemy with their money and their persons.” Although this ultimately came to nothing, the baton was taken up with greater fervor by Callixtus’s successor, Pius II. Claiming that Mehmed the Conqueror aspired “to rule all of Europe” and “to stamp out the holy gospel and sacred law of Christ,” Pius sought to unite all of Christendom for the sacred task of conquering the Turks, and it was for the sole purpose of announcing the war that a diet was convened in Mantua in 1459. Reminding the princes present that “once the Hungarians were conquered, the Germans, Italians, and indeed all Europe would be subdued, a calamity that must bring with it the destruction of [the Christian] faith,” Pius did his best to impress upon them the urgent religious need for an immediate campaign against the Ottoman Turks.
Although the response from Italy’s warring potentates was initially lukewarm, the art of the period was not slow to catch up with the virulent hatred that was felt among believers on the ground. In 1439, Pisanello was completing his now sadly damaged fresco ofSaint George and the Princess for Sant’Anastasia in Verona as a visual illustration of the resurgent crusading spirit. Saint George, the archetype of the warlike Christian saint, is shown having come to the rescue of the princess of Trebizond, a city that—in the late 1430s—was ruled by the exiled Komnenoi family as one of the last outposts of Christendom, and that was immediately threatened by the advance of the Ottoman Turk. Taken together, the two panels of the fresco were a powerful reminder of the need for Italian Christians to come to the rescue of regions like Trebizond in the hope of stopping the Islamic advance before it was too late. Only a few years later, Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono painted an exceptionally detailed cassone panel (theConquest of Trebizond, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)—perhaps for the Strozzi of Florence—that used the theme of the Turkish threat to Trebizond as a means of echoing the same call to arms, possibly with the added rider that the aid of the Timurids should be invoked in the name of the cross.
Soon, however, events conspired to impress upon Renaissance Italians that the perceived threat was closer and even more real than such artworks suggested. On July 28, 1480, an Ottoman fleet of more than a hundred heavily armed vessels fresh from the capture of Rhodes attacked the port of Otranto in the kingdom of Naples. Within two weeks, the entire city had fallen. The bishop and the military commander were cut in two, and some eight hundred citizens who refused to convert to Islam were butchered en masse. Buoyed by his recent, dazzling successes, Sultan Mehmed II wanted to use Otranto as a bridgehead from which to launch a campaign to conquer Rome. Panic ensued. Christianity itself was faced with a real and present danger. There was to be no more procrastination. Rapidly assembling an army of Italian allies, Ferrante of Naples launched a counterattack that, thanks to Mehmed’s unexpected death on May 3, 1481, retook the city. It was the first step in what was to be a long-lasting and bitter conflict. Even though trade with the Ottoman Empire continued, and domestic affairs often dissuaded them from undertaking large-scale military action, the states of Italy would wage near-continuous war against the Ottoman Empire for the next ninety years, ending only with the bloody, hard-fought victory at the Battle of Lepanto (1571).
Throughout it all, Otranto remained the touchstone of memory, and its legacy perhaps provides a concise summary of Renaissance attitudes toward Islam. The eight hundred Christians who had been killed for refusing to surrender their faith were commemorated as martyrs. Their bones were encased in massive glass displays behind the high altar in Otranto Cathedral, and they became revered as a warning of what could happen unless the Ottomans were stopped. But most important, this most grisly of ecclesiastical monuments served as a potent reminder that—despite the powerful economic ties that continued to bind Italy to the Near East—Renaissance Christians frequently wanted not merely to crush but to exterminate Islam. Magnificent though Ottoman culture may have been, and important as Islamic states were to Italian trade, artists and humanists continued to view the Muslim faith as a potent threat to Christendom, and, more often than not, were happy to put their cultural skills at the disposal of those who wished to take war to Islam, even if calls for a new crusade often fell on deaf ears in subsequent decades.