News from the East: the rise of Ottoman power and reason of state thinking in early modern Italy

While the extensive economic, cultural, scientific, and diplomatic interconnections between Christian European polities and the Islamic world in the early modern era have been well documented in recent scholarship, the impact of these interactions on the development of Western political thought has rarely been examined. This study attempts to address this lacuna by examining the relationship between the growing empirical discourse on Ottoman political institutions in the West over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries and the development of reason of state thinking in Italy during the same period. In particular, I investigate how empirical accounts of the Islamic empire were interpreted and put to use by various Italian political observers as they sought to make sense of the new political imperatives of the nascent modern state. Part I elucidates the medieval and quattrocento background of the Islamic question. Particular attention is paid to the political rationale of medieval Christian polemicists and apologists, who, in their efforts to explain (and diminish) the temporal achievements of successive Muslim powers, generated a lasting image of Islam as a quintessentially political religion (lex). The parallel emergence of two distinct discourses on the Ottoman Turks - the first primarily polemical, the second more observational - is also identified. Part II tracks the latter discourse into the sixteenth century through a chronological reading of Venetian ambassadorial reports on the Ottoman Empire. Valued by contemporaries for their unparalleled insight into the secrets of reason of state, the relazioni have been praised by modern historians for their objective political analysis. While this may be valid for the reports on European states, I suggest that the Porte presented a unique set of obstacles that rendered such an ideal difficult to meet in practice. Consequently, the Venetian ambassadors\u27 descriptions of Ottoman rule remain for the most part highly polemical, despite their celebrated veneer of objectivity. Part III examines how the quasi-empirical problematic of the causes of Ottoman greatness is taken up by two early proponents of a Catholic reason of state, René de Lucinge and Giovanni Botero. Initially invoked as a purely polemical topos, I suggest that this problematic ultimately provides these writers with an important model of political conservation