Humanist, Captive, Renegade: Three Modes of Displacement in the Ottoman Mediterranean
For the early modern period, it is virtually impossible to imagine an affective history of Mediterranean mobility without three essential bodies of sources: erudite travel accounts, captivity narratives, and inquisitorial apostasy trials. But as valuable as these sources are in documenting the experience of dislocation across the Mediterranean--and particularly between its Christian and Muslim halves--these are also distinctively European sources with no real equivalent in Ottoman Turkish. How can this apparent asymmetry be explained? What lessons does it hold? And what kinds of alternative sources does Ottoman history offer for reconstructing the experience of Mediterranean mobility "from the other side"? Giancarlo Casale is Chair of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. A specialist in Ottoman history, he is the author of numerous studies on the history of Ottoman trade, travel and exploration, as well as the comparative history of empires, and the history of geography and cartography. His most recent projects include "Did Alexander the Great Discover America? Debating Space and Time in Renaissance Istanbul," forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly (Fall 2019), and Prisoner of [...]