Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s 1458 book Europa was largely an answer to the Ottoman taking of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, “a year as shameful and distressing to the Christian people as it was fortunate and joyful to the nation of the Turks”.1 The book was both a history of the recent events on the continent and an attempt to define Europe through the addition of specific historical descriptions of its territories, from Scandinavia to Naples. It opened, precisely, with Hungary as the new frontier against the Turkish advance into Europe: the Balkans to the south of the River Danube, the Greek peninsula, and Constantinople had already fallen into Ottoman hands. On the western side of the continent, Piccolomini alluded to the kingdom of Granada among the Iberian kingdoms, although he mentioned it in last place, “because it rejects the Gospel of Christ”.2 He intended to write, in his words, about the “Europeans and the islanders who are counted as Christian during the reign of Emperor Frederick III”.3 However, he also went on to write about the history of the Ottomans because, he stated, “I think it is not irrelevant to describe their origin [of the Turkish nation] and expansion. For in our era, this race of people has grown so great that it controls Asia [Minor] and Greece and instils terror throughout Latin Christendom”.4 Europe, in this early attempt to describe the continent, might have been defined in opposition to Islam, but it also could not be defined without Islam. With this in mind, our book seeks to analyse the early modern narratives that have historically shaped the European memory of the continent’s Islamic heritage across its different geographical corners. This periodization is broadly conceived/wide-ranging and it includes fourteenth and fifteenth centuries encounters and representations of Islam that were expanded during the early modern period. The volume closes with a chapter on museums that present how these historical narratives continue to inform particular views of Islam in Europe even today. It is important to note that the term “narrative” in this book is conceived in a broader sense, and is not limited to writing. Visual narratives, practices, rituals, and the display of artefacts are
1 Islam in Europe: a Connected Memory and an Entangled History
Over decades, if not centuries, historical writing about the Islamic past in Europe has defined separate geographic and academic areas: the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, central Europe and the Balkans, and Greece and the islands of the Mediterranean. Islam had varying timelines in different regions during the late medieval and early modern periods in Europe, based on diverse experiences at different times and places. Both seventeenth-century Ottoman Constantinople and ninth-century Umayyad Córdoba were deeply Islamic cities with a past rooted in a common Roman heritage, but their Islamic religious, political, social, economic, and cultural landscapes were not interchangeable, just as these landscapes were dissimilar during the rule of Constantine (d. 337) and Marcus Claudius Marcellus (d. ca. 148 BCE). Partly because of these variations, during the Middle Ages and the early modern period, different historical traditions regarding the place of Islam on the continent emerged in these geographical areas. As a continuation of that pattern, contemporary scholarship has examined these traditions in isolation and analysis has become further disjointed in a scientific context defined by the separation of disciplines and chronologies. Most of the historical analyses of Islam in medieval and early modern Europe have been written only from national or regional perspectives, as the shelves of any academic library will show. By contrast, the few general appraisals with a continental focus in existence have often followed an opposing trend towards homogenization and sometimes even stereotypes. This is true, for instance, in the realm of visual culture, where the study of the visual representation of Muslims in Europe has followed standardized and fossilized pan-European patterns. Historiography has paid little attention to distinguishing between how Muslims were represented in the Iberian Peninsula in the tenth century and how Turks were represented in Dalmatia or central Europe in the seventeenth.
All these premodern representations differed and changed, while presenting connecting points related to the construction of complex polyvalent notions of alterity and identity. In that regard, those narratives also allow us to problematize the origins of modern race thinking. Race or ethnic group in early modern Europe was not only a question of colour but also a matter related to lineage, as some chapters point out, and the multidirectional narratives, as discussed here, reveal the tensions and contradictions in the literary and visual
Moreover, cultural and artistic works from Muslim territories have been essentialized around their ‘Islamic’ component, disregarding chronologies, geographies, and contexts of production, as well as projecting monolithic readings about their mobility and circulation. A kind of geographical and chronological crystallization has prevented us from paying due attention to either the great diversity of cases or the shared connections that lie beneath the different circumstances. Different representations of Muslims, or the integration of Islamic artefacts in various Christian contexts individualized specific moments of a common dialogue, and cultural and political rapprochement, as well as hiding attitudes such as admiration and fascination with their artistic productions and material culture. As explored in this book, the fragmentation of academic literature and the varied history of Islam in the European lands could be measured against the fact that the narratives about Islam circulating in Europe during the period – and which are the basis for current memory of Islamic Europe – were closely connected. Nor was the connection within that variety lost on those who were living at the time: in the presence of Hagia Sophia, Diego Galán, a Spanish captive in early seventeenth-century Constantinople, echoed the same arguments as contemporary local churchmen were displaying before the former Great Mosque of Córdoba, by then known as the Cathedral of St. Mary: “I am not coming to see your temple, but mine, because it belonged to Christians before”.5 Historical narratives of Islam across Europe were also the origin of the stereotypes, homogenization, and disconnection that can be found in the subsequent literature. Genre conventions and rhetoric patterns, both in literature and the visual arts, affected the way in which Islamic societies and their material cultures were represented. However, differences over time in the power balance, as well as the shifting status derived from direct experience, offered the possibility of ambiguity and change and are linked to the creation of connected and disconnected historical narratives.
Those narratives were also received, echoed and/or challenged by the other main religious minority in Europe: Jews. Although this book does not delve in how Jewish communities dealt with narratives around Muslims and Islam, their attitudes varying from the amplification of prejudices to the cultural
In an attempt to overcome these problems, this book has sought to provide deeply reflective historical material based on a collective conversation addressing those late medieval and early modern literary and visual narratives of Islam that gained currency across the continent at the time and which still have an impact on the current memory of the Islamic past in Europe. Very importantly, the writing of the book’s 12 chapters has been the result of a collaborative effort – with guidance from the editors – involving, in each case, two, three, or four authors from different European and Mediterranean regions and different disciplines. At one of the meetings that were organized to facilitate this collective conversation, one of the authors joked that this working method could be defined as a sort of blind-date writing. She was not far wrong, given that, before co-writing their chapters, many of the authors were not personally acquainted, and had to navigate their way together towards a common text.6
The intention behind this method was not to produce comparative histories, but rather to connect historiographies and research, revealing interactions, entanglements, and connected histories (stemming from Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s idea of connected history,7 although adapted to the Mediterranean context), but also local specificities and disconnections. It is an approach that has sought to define pan-European trends, while acknowledging differences in scale, and shifts in the political and military power around the Mediterranean.
2 Structure of the Book
The book is divided into four sections (with three chapters in each) focusing on different case studies of narratives connected to religion, permeability, opposition, and images. In these sections, all 12 chapters refer to confrontation, but also to a set of relationships that were not necessarily oppositional. Boundaries (geographically speaking, but also in terms of religion, language, or material culture) both divided and connected, and the narratives around them attest to the communication, exchange, and transformation of the different entities in contact. All sections and chapters share the pan-European perspective which is the focus of the book.
The first section on religion opens with the chapter “Islam in the Construction of Late Medieval and Early Modern European National Histories: A Connected Historiography across Europe”, which has been written by Antonio Urquízar-Herrera, Elias Kolovos, and Ferenc Tóth. It explores how historical writing has shaped the memory of Islam in Europe with the crossing of religion and national identity. It focuses on late medieval and early modern historical accounts that highlight the conflict between Islam and Christianity. The chapter aims to identify trends in this historiographical tradition and how it influenced national and continental identities in Europe. It raises questions about how the idea of Europe/Christianity intersected with the construction of national identities and whether Islam has been considered a part of the European common memory. The chapter also explores the role of minorities, non-canonical historical accounts, changes over time, and the use of Islamic
Permeability is the central topic of the second section of the book. The first chapter (Chapter 4 of the book) is “Entangled Narratives: Imagining and Crossing Borders in the Mediterranean”, co-authored by Ana Struillou, Ognjen Krešić, and Elena Paulino-Montero. This chapter discusses borders between Islam and Christianity in Europe as characterized not only by clashes and conflict, but as productive areas of artistic, cultural, and historiographic output. As mentioned above, these zones have been studied in isolation as unique places in Europe, understood as so-called ‘frontier zones’. The chapter aims to discuss changing historical perceptions of these places, based on different theories and ideologies, but also on experiences and practices around those borders. It focuses on the interplay of narratives and the material culture produced in those areas, as well as on the actors that shaped those places and played an active role in the creation of different conceptions of borders. Chapter 5, “The Other: Encounters and Narratives. Christians and Muslims in Movement in the Europe of the Fifteenth to Eighteenth centuries”, by Bruno Pomara and Houssem Eddine Chachia, deals with how the image of Muslims held by Christian Europeans and vice versa was not constant throughout the early modern period, and was shaped by a variety of factors such as religion,
The third section of the book is devoted to the general topic of opposition. Chapter 7, the first one in this section, is entitled “Tales of War: The Image of the Enemy in Christian and Ottoman Sources, 1350–1600”, and has been written by Ana Echevarría, Emir O. Filipović, and Magnus Ressel. It examines the relationship between Islam and Christendom during the late Middle Ages and early modern period through the lens of military conflict. It analyses the different writings that circulated and crafted the memory of episodes of war between the two religions around the Mediterranean. These tales of war advocated for violence and created utopian ideas about the future that shaped the imaginary of Islam at that time. The chapter addresses the role of Rome and the pope in collecting information about Islam, how this was crafted and circulated in Europe, and how polemical texts in the Balkans helped to create ideas about Islam and the impossibility of conciliation. Finally, it explores how these views intersected and evolved following political and territorial changes. Sophia Abplanalp, Rubén González Cuerva, and Evrim Türkçelik have co-authored the eighth chapter “The Habsburgs and the Different Corners of Islam in Early Modern Europe”, which explores how the Habsburgs’ image of Islam evolved and was expressed during the early modern period in different regions of Europe, shaped by their interactions with neighbouring Islamic polities through trade, diplomacy, and warfare. The chapter emphasizes the
The fourth and last section of the book deals with images. It opens with Chapter 10: “Images of Islam in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”, by Borja Franco Llopis, Laura Stagno, Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Giuseppe Capriotti, and Defne Naz Defne Kut. While many studies that analyse the depiction of the Muslim Other in the late medieval and early modern periods rely on an ahistorical homogenization that leads to stereotyping, this chapter reconsiders the creation and perception of the image of the Muslim Other over time and in different spaces of central Europe and the Mediterranean basin. It addresses questions such as when and how images of Muslims were created, the influence of the medieval past, the role of potential spectators and genres, and the main visual narratives and stereotypes that circulated in Europe and the Mediterranean. The chapter also examines the (pre)racialization of the Muslim Other, and the relationship between literary texts and visual culture. The eleventh chapter “From Granada to the Ottoman Empire: The Legacy of Images of Granadino and Ottoman Dress on European Court Culture and Display”, by Charlotte Colding Smith and Ana Cabrera Lafuente, focuses on the depiction of Iberia and the Ottoman Empire in costume images and books during the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries. The authors analyse how these printed books and images introduced Christian Europe to depictions of foreign carnivals and processions, and how they impacted perceptions of Islamic-Iberian and Ottoman peoples, as well as more distant groups. They discuss early costume books, their
This book, then, provides a new discussion on old topics. It encompasses different materials, chronologies, geographies, and actors that have conditioned contemporary ideas about Europe’s Islamic heritage. Throughout the chapters, the role of specific direct experience becomes apparent and how this affected the way in which images, dress, religious rituals, and cultural specificities were perceived and described in shifting narratives about Islam in Europe. Moreover, in different places and at different times, the importance given to those direct experiences changed. Sometimes they were crucial, even as private and intimate contacts, to transmit details and circulate knowledge. At other moments, direct experience and detailed knowledge were less important, and emotive resources that could create communities of opinion and mobilize people tended to predominate. In this sense, many chapters also address questions about intention, as well as expectation, including genre expectations, from both authors or creators and readers or spectators.
Costume books, records sent to the pope, polemical religious books, treatises regarding a border, paintings commemorating military victories, or the display of artefacts from different cultures all created different narratives. Differing degrees of importance were assigned to direct knowledge, and the
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe (c. 1400–1458), ed. Nancy Bisaha, trans. Robert Brown (Washington, D.C., 2013).
Diego Galán, Edición crítica de Cautiverio y trabajos de Diego Galán, ed. Matías Barchino (Cuenca, 2001).
Secondary Literature
Baldi, Barbara, “Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Il ‘De Europa’: umanesimo, religione e politica”, Archivio storico italiano 161, no. 4 (598) (2003), 619–83.
Guida, Francesco, “Enea Silvio Piccolomini e l’Europa orientale: il ‘De Europa’ (1458)”, CLIO 15, no. 1 (1979), 35–75.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Connected History: Essays and Arguments (London, 2022).
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, From Tagus to the Ganges: Explorations in Connected History (Oxford, 2011).
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe (c. 1400–1458), ed. Nancy Bisaha, trans. Robert Brown (Washington, D.C., 2013), p. 100. See Francesco Guida, “Enea Silvio Piccolomini e l’Europa orientale: il ‘De Europa’ (1458)”, CLIO 15, no. 1 (1979), 35–75; and Barbara Baldi, “Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Il ‘De Europa’: umanesimo, religione e politica”, Archivio storico italiano 161, no. 4 (598) (2003), 619–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26229399
Ibid., p. 212.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 72.
Diego Galán, Edición crítica de Cautiverio y trabajos de Diego Galán, ed. Matías Barchino (Cuenca, 2001), p. 159.
In 2019, Cost Association/EU H2020 funded the creation of the research Action IS-LE. Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350–1750). Over the course of four and a half years, this initiative has brought together more than 250 scholars from 35 different European and Mediterranean countries as well as from different disciplines (history, history of art, philology, anthropology, social sciences, history of science, politics, etc.). In this period, the Action has promoted several workshops and conferences addressing three main research problems: Otherness, migration, and borders, and has also organized three training schools for young researchers on these topics. Thanks to this experience, the Cost Action IS-LE has not only contributed to the formation of a wide network of researchers hailing from different regional and academic traditions facilitating this kind of approach, which is likewise the purpose of this book, it has also shaped the research topics themselves through its hosting of a programme of specific debates among the book’s 35 authors. It is only due to being grounded in this previous conversation that this book aims at overcoming the existing segmentation of knowledge and providing a new and more comprehensive reading of past relations between Christianity and Islam on European soil. Cost Action IS-LE has been awarded with an Europa Nostra - European Heritage Award 2025 (Research Category).
See, among others, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From Tagus to the Ganges: Explorations in Connected History (Oxford, 2011); and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Connected History: Essays and Arguments (London, 2022).