5. See the cartouche in window 11, of the Saracens climbing the walls of Assisi, reproduced in Marcel Beck, Peter Felder, Emil Maurer, and Dietrich Schearz, Königsfelden: Geschichte, Bauten, Glasgemälde, Kunstschätze, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1983.
6. A fifteenth-century French image distinguished Arabs from Crusaders by presenting the former as half-naked savages. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Add. 21143. f. 90.
7. As can be seen in the crest of the medieval Lords Audley, whose ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Their arms, in the quaint language of heraldry, consisted of an arm couped at the shoulder, embowed, and resting the elbow on the wreath, holding a sword in pale, enfiled with a Saracen’s head. The crest depicts a hand holding a sword on which is spiked the head of a bearded man of “Eastern” appearance. The motto given below the crest, Mors ad inimicum (death to the oppressor), makes the point clear.
8. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, London: J. Ollivier, 1847, p. 180.
9. For the range, and significance of early images, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. The interrelationship between the image and text is not generally well covered: Hélène Desmet-Grégoire’s study of eighteenth-century French images of the East is a notable exception. See Hélène Desmet-Grégoire, Divan magique.
10. The OED gives the first usage as Edward Hall’s in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, published in 1548: “Aparaled after Turkey fashion … girded with two swords called cimitaries.” It cites Christophorus Richerius, De rebus Turcarum, published in Paris in 1540, for the statement that the janissaries called their swords “cymitharra.” Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmesteter in their Dictionnaire général de la langue Française du commencement du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, précédé d’un traité de la formation de la langue (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1890–1900) say it has a fifteenth-century origin but are not specific.
11. The Turkish incident was inserted at the personal insistence of Louis XIV, who had become entranced with the Ottomans after an embassy to Paris in 1669. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 72–3. Göçek gives a full account of the mutual effects of the links between France and the Ottoman Empire.
12. G. Horton, The Blight of Asia, 1922, chapter 19, www.hri.org/docs/Horton/hb-29.html.
13. “Outlandish” moved from its late medieval usage—meaning “external”—to the later use, which had become a term of abuse. See OED.
14. That is, it seemed to represent the stereotypical medieval Christian view of the Jew.
15. These included an edition printed by Mikulas Bakalar in Pilsen; a Lyons edition of 1488 printed by Martin Huss (freely adapted with new illustrations); another by Anton Sorg in Augsburg, also in 1488; another brought out by Pablo Hurus as Viaje de la Tierra Sancta in Saragossa in 1498; see Clair, History, and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976.
16. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books, London: William Stainsby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625. The copy I have used is British Library BL 984 h. 5.
17. One, Lithgow, opined that “the nature of the Arabs was not unlike the jackals,” decried the “villainy of the Armenians” while noting “the constancy of the Turks,” ibid., p. 1846. “Sir John Mandeville” was the author of the most famous (and widely read) medieval travel narrative. Mandeville—supposedly an English knight, but this was probably a pseudonym—made his “travels” in the first half of the fourteenth century. He plainly did go east, but much of his book is the purest fantasy.
18. Othello, act 5, scene 2, lines 357–61.
In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
19. On Beham, see M. Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550, vol. 1, New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974, pp. 268–75.
20. Türcken Biechlin, which is written in a south German dialect; see Bohnstedt, “The Infidel Scourge,” pp. 10–11.
21. This topic is not well covered, but I have found useful elements in the chapter “Towards an Emblematic Rhetoric” in Manning, The Emblem, pp. 85–109.
22. See Certeau, Writing, p. 94: “We admit as historiographical discourse that which can ‘include’ its other—chronicle, archive, document—in other words, discourse that is organised in a laminated text in which one continuous half is based on another disseminated half.” The “dissemination” of an image is implicit in the multiplicity and coordination of its visual elements, arranged in predetermined order.
23. See Anna Pavord, The Tulip, London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 80.
24. Ibid., pp. 48–52.
25. See Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque, vol. 3, p. 687.
26. See Marquis de Sade, 120 days of Sodom, London: Arena, 1989, pp. 263 sqq.
27. The figure was given in a paper by Professor Gary Schwarz at a colloquium led by Professor John Brewer at the European University Institute, Florence. More recently, Schwarz has extended these impromptu remarks. See Gary Schwarz, “The Shape, Size and Destiny of the Dutch Market for Paintings at the End of the Eighty Years War,” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, vol. 2, Art and Culture, Münster: Veranstaltungsgesellschaft 350 Jahre Westfälische Friede mbh., 1998, pp. 240–42.
28. The text volumes, with their 72,000 articles by 140 contributors, were often held up by censorship. But the plates did not seem to interest the censors and were published at the rate of about one volume a year from 1761. Many of the 2,569 pages of plates showed images on a double-page spread.
29. The 1783 Amsterdam and Paris edition was enlarged to eleven volumes, in a “Nouvelle édition, enrichie de toutes les figures comprises dans l’ancienne édition en sept volumes, & dans les quatre publiés par forme de supplément par une société des gens de lettres [a new edition, enriched with all the images in the old edition in seven volumes and the additional four published in the form of supplements by a group of literary gentlemen].”
30. “Let the Protestant burin of Bernard Picard exert itself as it will in tracing to us hideous representations of real or imaginary tortures inflicted by the judges of the Inquisition; it signifies nothing, or can only be addressed to the king of Spain.” Cited in Richard Lebrun, “Joseph de Maistre’s Defence of the Spanish Inquisition,” www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/spanishinquisition.html.
31. On the development of the frontispiece see Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, pp. 1–47.
32. Part of the caption reads: the “successor of Mahomet, Ali, explained the Alcoran to the many people who make up the Mahometan Religion,” translated from “Le tableau des principales religions du monde,” in Bernard Picard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, représentées par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard avec une explication historique, et quelques dissertations curieuses, Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1733–43.
33. He went back in 1691–92.
34. Marsigli had created his own institute in Bologna and a printing house to prepare his published works. However, he had a number of them published in Amsterdam. See Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, p. 309.
35. Copy in the Library of Congress listed as Voennoe sostianie Ottomanskiia Imperii s eia prirascheniem I ipadkom. Vse ukrasheno grydorovanrlistami, St. Petersburg: Imp. Akademii nauk, 1737. I have not yet seen this text.
36. Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Travels into Turkey … Containing the Most Accurate Account of the Turks, and Neighbouring Nations, Translated from the Original Latin of the Learned A. G. Busbequius, London: J. R
obinson and W. Payne, 1744. This was successful enough to reissue in 1774. The first edition of Busbecq in English had been edited by Nahum Tate and printed by J. Taylor and F. Wyat in London in 1694. It was published as “The four epistles of A. G. Busbequius concerning his embassy into Turkey; being remarks upon the religion, customs, riches, strength and government of that people. As also as a description of their chief cities and places of trade and commerce. To which is added his advice how to manage war against the Turks. Done into English Epistolae quatuor.” However, Latin editions of Busbecq were also still being published—for example an Oxford edition of 1771.
37. Cited and translated in Findley, “Ebu Bekir Ratib,” p. 48.
38. The page size of an elephant folio volume is twenty-three by fourteen inches.
39. My historical data on d’Ohsson is taken from the extended version of Findley’s paper “A Quixotic Author.” I am extremely grateful to Carter Findley for letting me use his impressive work, which deserves a much wider audience.
40. Çirakman, “From Tyranny to Despotism,” p. 58. Dominique Carnoy presents a rather different picture in her study of French images in Représentations.
41. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13. By his second pamphlet of the following year, Gladstone was less violent and more circumspect in his utterances. See Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria Since May 1876, London: John Murray, 1877.
42. And as Joseph Conrad observed at the beginning of his Eastern novel Under Western Eyes (1911), “This is not a story of the West of Europe.”
CHAPTER 13: THE BLACK ART
1. The history of print is in a state of rapid transformation. New theories and objectives have become dominant. In my view, apart from key texts such as those of Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, and Henri-Jean Martin, Robert Darnton, Rudolf Hirsch, and most recently Adrian Johns, the most helpful restatement has come from Gérard Genette in his construct of the “paratexte.” This connects the physical forms of the text to its audiences, potential and actual. However, even Genette himself gracefully demurred from discussing the issue which concerns me here—the role and effect of images. “I have likewise left out three practices whose paratextual relevance seems to me undeniable, but investigating each one might demand as much work as was required here in treating this subject as a whole … [the third] constitutes an immense continent: that of illustration.” I can here only allude to the issues involved but I am taking the topic up in more detail in a forthcoming work. See Genette, Paratexts, pp. 405–6.
2. This appears in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; see William Blake, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London: The Nonesuch Library, 1961, p. 187.
3. See Çirakman, “From the ‘Terror of the World.’ ”
4. Volney, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 177–9. Volney is in error in one small particular: Arabic letters change in terms of where they come in the word rather than in the sentence.
5. He wrote On the Simplification of Oriental Languages in 1795, and The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of Asia in 1819.
6. See C. F. de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire and the Law of Nature, rep. New York: Twentieth Century Publishing Company, 1890, p. 81.
7. Ibid., p. 76.
8. I find the whole idea of counterfactual history, of which Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) was a pioneering approach (and unjustly criticized when it first appeared), an invaluable critical tool. The collection edited by Niall Ferguson, Virtual History (1997), makes the case for the approach, especially Ferguson’s long introduction, pp. 1–91.
9. Jonathan Bloom in his sparkling survey of paper in the Islamic world (Paper Before Print) can cite only one book: Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, first published by Knopf in 1943, revised and republished in 1947, and reissued in 1978. Hunter’s is still the sole general overview available in English.
10. A short-lived mill was set up in France at Troyes a little earlier.
11. Little is known of this first paper mill, while much more is known of the eighteenth-century mill set up at Yalova, on the southern (Asian) side of the Sea of Marmara in 1744. This spa town has a constant supply of high-quality water necessary for any volume of production. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 114–15.
12. Most of the Ottoman sources are not contemporary with the first fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prohibitions. See ibid., pp. 110–11.
13. Thevet’s life of Gutenberg, in Histoire des plus illustres et savans hommes de leurs siècles (Paris: Manger, 1671), vol. VII, p. 111, cited by Gdoura, Début, pp. 86–7.
14. The Taliban’s and the “Islamic Emirate” of Afghanistan’s attitude toward images was aniconistic. Comparisons have been drawn with Byzantine iconoclasm as state policy, and it is hard to find so radical and coordinated an Islamic equivalent in modern times. Even the murderous excesses of the Ikhwan in the capture of Mecca and Medina (and the destruction of tombs and images) were not acts of state. The Taliban’s policy plainly was. The supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all statues in the country, which resulted in the notorious and highly public blowing-up of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. The official statement made through the AP agency stated that “in view of the fatwa [religious edict] of prominent Afghan scholars and the verdict of the Afghan Supreme Court it has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.” It was also asserted that photographs and electronic images were likewise forbidden, but Taliban officials themselves photographed the destruction of the statues. Many Taliban leaders allowed their photographs to be taken, and it has been suggested that their “image policy” was religious in theory but selectively political in practice.
15. See David Talbot Rice, Islamic Painting: A Survey, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971, pp. 21–6. For the Abbasids, see Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, New York: Rizzoli, 1977, pp. 41–53. The classic statement is Arnold, Painting in Islam.
16. Iconoclasm in Reformation Europe was directed not so much at images but at art used in a religious context. See, for example, Philips, Reformation.
17. See Goffman, Ottoman Empire, p. 91. This short book, which is innovative both in its structure and in its insights, is a mature and compelling correction to a long tradition of misrepresentation. I am extremely grateful to Virginia Aksan for drawing it to my attention.
18. See Lewis, Discovery, especially his account of the Egyptian scholar Sheikh Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi’s five-year stay in Paris.
19. The stage of final reading, when a written text is read out loud, is still an essential part of the legislative process in the United States and the United Kingdom.
20. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici financed the establishment of the Typographia Medicea Linguarum Externarum by Raimondi in 1585.
21. The first book to be printed in Ottoman Turkish was George Seaman’s translation of the New Testament. He was the interpreter to Sir Peter Wyche, English ambassador to Constantinople, and the book was printed at Oxford in 1606. In 1734 William Caslon was commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Literature to cut an Arabic font for a New Testament to be used in missionary work.
22. See Bloom, Paper, p. 116.
23. For the prevalence (and design) of libraries, see Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
24. See Dov Shidorsky, “Libraries in Late Ottoman Palestine Between the Orient and the Occident,” Libraries & Culture 33, 3 (summer 1998), pp. 260–76. See also Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
25. Müteferrika had
already begun to print by 1719. He sent a map of the Sea of Marmara to the grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, with a note to the effect that “if your Excellency so commands, larger ones can be produced.” For the document from the Sultan setting up the printing press in Constantinople, see “The Firman of Ahmed III, Given in 1727 Authorizing Said Effendi and Ibrahim Müteferrika to Open a Printing House Using Arabic Script,” trans. Christopher Murphy, in Atiyah (ed.), Book, pp. 284–92.
26. He was by then himself the ambassador to the court of France.
27. It has been estimated that from 1455 to 1500 between 6 and 20 million copies of publications were printed in Europe. Six million is a very cautious estimate, and probably about 12–15 million might be a good working figure. Between 30,000 and 35,000 separate editions of books from this half century still survive, representing various versions and reprints of some 10,000 to 15,000 different texts. See the estimates for editions in Europe and the useful analyses of content in southern and northern Europe in Gerulaitis, Printing, pp. 17–18 and 57–129. Hirsch, Printing, pp. 133–5, uses J. M. Lenart’s figures from Pre-Reformation Printed Books (New York: 1935). Assuming that about 500 copies (on average) of each edition were produced, then printing in aggregate 15 million copies is reasonable. So who read or bought all these books? This question has never been answered satisfactorily. The calculations of copies printed are of necessity approximate, hence the wild discrepancies. See also Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976, p. 248.
28. There had been several attempts to set up printers’ workshops in the Balkan lands, all of which failed. In the centuries of Ottoman rule, only a handful of books were produced in the southern Slav lands. The first were printed in Cetinje in Montenegro in the 1490s by a monk named Makarije. Eight other short-lived presses were later set up, but their total output was eleven slender titles. From the sixteenth century Slavic books were produced in other lands and brought across the frontier. Many were printed by a succession of specialist printers in Venice, beginning with the Vuković family from Montenegro in the early sixteenth century. Another major center developed at the same time in Wallachia; but it was not until the 1770s, when recognizing the demand for texts for the Serbian market, that printers in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Leipzig competed to supply Serbs both in the Vojvodina and in the lands under Ottoman rule. However, supplies were irregular and many printers could not be bothered with the effort of sending them south of the Danube, where trade was erratic and often risky. See Michel Lassithiotakis, “Le rôle du livre imprimé dans la formation et le développement de la littérature en Grec vulgaire XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” and Nathalie Clayer, “Le goût de fruit défendu ou, La lecture de l’Albanais dans l’empire Ottoman finissant,” both in Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 52