Gianluca Ratti
When one is asked to write a piece to present oneself, one is usually tempted to start from the beginning; but one is also told that readers need to be engaged and reading that I am soon to be 29 or that I have a cat is hardly engaging. So, I will begin from the end, which means explaining my role in DiplomatiCon. Now, this project is large and multifaceted and it was born with the non-trivial task of confronting once and for all the idea of a very defined and continuous Christian-Islamic divide in the late Middle Ages, theorising the existence of a consolidated but informal network of people that allowed frequent and non-occasional contacts between the Islamicate world (in our case, that of the Mamluk Sultanate) and European powers (the Crown of Aragon and the polities of Italy). Anyone with even just an inkling of interest in the history of Mediterranean civilizations will realize this is a monumental task; luckily, there are a fair few of us to try and tackle it. At my end, I will contribute by looking at Italian sources produced by those of travelled and traversed the lands under control of the Mamluks (Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Hijaz), with the aim of discerning and understanding how these people thought of the space that surrounded them and how they used it, claimed it and occupied it; if and when it was possible for them to do so. Moreover, I will also investigate when they had little or no agency in space or sphere of influence production in the exchanges and contacts with those who militarily and politically ruled the lands they visited, the caste of the Mamluks.
I think it is fair to provide a small example of what I will likely be dealing with. Olivia Constable has written a book on the truly international institution of the funduq or fondaco, a book that informs us on how European merchants traveling to Alexandria would have lived in a territory controlled by the Mamluks. Reading Constable (or, more simply, some of the edited sources she concludes from), we are reminded immediately of the agency European merchants would have had in imposing a sphere of influence in Alexandria at the tail end of the 1400s. Many polities had a fondaco (for example, there was a Catalan fondaco and two Venetian ones); Christian merchants from Europe would have used these places not only for lodging but also as bases for their commerce, as one of the main functions of the fondaco was the housing of wares. These large buildings were considered a safe heaven for Christian travellers, who also could live per their usual habits (like consuming alcohol or pork meat). At night, though, the conditions appeared to change considerably: whoever was housed in the fondaco would have been locked in at night. This means a great deal of agency during daylight and almost none after sunrise, when the space, paradoxically now necessarily occupied by Europeans, was effectively reclaimed by the Mamluk controllers who made the fondaco institution into something akin to a prison.
Source: Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria of Egypt, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (1507)
Very interestingly, we can also observe this paradox of agency by reading Italian pilgrimage sources written at the end of the 15th century: Pietro Casola, a Milanese pilgrim very fond (luckily for me) of detailed descriptions of the space that he inhabited, goes to great length to explain how the agency of the pilgrims in reclaiming a space – in this case neither political nor commercial, indeed an almost purely personal one – was completely annulled as soon as they were allowed to step foot off the Venetian galley (as much perilous as it was safe, in a sense) when they finally had reached the port of Jaffa. After an exhausting round of petty bargaining with – I have to imagine – the somewhat amused Muslim lords of Gaza, they were finally allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre. There, the pilgrims would have been locked in for the entire night, which they spent praying. From disbarred entry to a delayed exit, the agency of European pilgrims in visiting Jerusalem seems to have been sometimes present but just as often almost non-existent, in a striking parallel that I think makes us ask ourselves how much we can speak, if at all, of European space and influence in Mamluk territory and especially if we are to talk of claimed or reclaimed social space, or just of the allowance of one.
Recently, I was asked specifically how I would do this and the people I was in conversation with both chose the word operationality, which seems all but a term one would use to refer to historical research. On the contrary, it indicates something that we all need to keep in mind when considering forays into medieval history, which is the fact that sometimes abstracting human behaviours even in a faraway period, such as the 15th century, can be fascinating and thought-provoking, but eventually we must crash down to Earth and explain how we are doing the things we said we were going to do. In case of my own research, this means, I believe, the need for a deep understanding of social dynamics between people of different cultures even on a micro-scale level, with the aim of having a greater clarity on the myriad of the dynamics that we can presume must have existed on such a large geographical scale. To even get close to achieve this and being able to better visualize it, I will use the wonderful tools of Geographic Information Systems, in the hope of developing questions (and to answer them) by creating multilayered maps of different territories and spaces. Presumed spheres of influence and abstract, but hopefully perceived and described borders and diversified places will be then visualized to not only describe Christian places qualitatively, but also to understand these quantitatively. This is why I intend to draw as many different maps of as many other territories and cities as possible, in the hope of comparing extension and importance of Christian space in Mamluk territory and especially in the hope of widening our understanding and knowledge of spaces and places not yet well explored in the scholarship.
In their massive 16th century painting the venetians Gentile and Giovanni Bellini represented Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria of Egypt. To most observers, the city where the classically dressed patron of Venice is preaching looks at least unlikely. Saint Mark is supposed to have been in Alexandria in the first century CE, but the Bellini brothers instead depict a more modern, imaginary square, dominated by a church that is a mix between Saint Sofia at Constantinople and Saint Mark in Venice. Minarets and towers surround the church, in an anachronistic connubium. The crowd, listening attentively, is composed of both typical Italian Renaissance men and of white turban’s wearers, indicating an ottoman crowd. It is safe to say the Gentile Bellini (that died in 1507) likely had never seen Alexandria in the 15th century, and in his attempt to transpose a Greek-Roman antiquity into his own modernity, he had resorted to depicting the city as an entrepot of Italian and Ottoman architecture, as he had been to Constantinople before his passing and, some say, even to Jerusalem. Gentile and Giovanni Bellini clearly had their own set of biases, artistic needs and a manifest disinterest for representing (or even simply re-inventing) a probable image for Alexandria in the 1st century. Still, even as contemporaries, the Bellini brothers struggled to bring forth an image that clearly delineated a 15th century identity for the Egyptian port-city that Venice itself had relied on for so much of its trade.
In this sense, hopefully my attempts at representation can be more fruitful.