SPEAKING IN TONGUES: LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IN THE EARLY MODERN MEDITERRANEAN* I

I live in a place that very well represents the Tower of Babel; in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, * This is a much revised version of a paper presented in a workshop at the 10th Mediterranean Research Meeting (2009), sponsored by the European University Institute. I am grateful to my co-organizer Natalie Rothman and other participants for their many pointed criticisms, as well as to those who commented on subsequent versions in presentations at the University of Minnesota and the University of Colorado. Per Whit. 1 Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge, 2008), 79. 2 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Turquie et de Perse, ed. Ste´phane Yerasimos, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), i, 272. All translations are my own. 3 The Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, Levant Merchant, 1647–1656, ed. Michael G. Brennan (London, 1999), 121. Past and Present, no. 217 (Nov. 2012) doi:10.1093/pastj/gts023

! The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012

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Upon arriving in the Mediterranean for the first time, most early modern travellers were struck by the linguistic cacophony that greeted them. In 1608 Thomas Coryat reported that in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, one could ‘heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes’.1 Thirty years later, the intrepid French traveller JeanBaptiste Tavernier noted thirteen languages in use at a dinner, comprising ‘Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Syrian and Malaysian’. In this company, a conversation was ‘begun in one language . . . continued in another and completed in a third’. This ‘me´lange de nations’ resulted in a situation, according to Tavernier, in which ‘there are no Turks or Armenians who do not know three or four languages’.2 At mid century, the Englishman Robert Bargrave reported that the sultans’ ‘territories conteine by generall Credit: 72: distinct Languages 7 speeches; most whereof are dayly spoken in Constantinople’.3 In the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador in Istanbul, experienced this diversity first-hand:

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Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and what is worse, there is ten of those languages spoke in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English and Germans, my nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians, half a dozen other servants Greeks, my steward an Italian, my janissaries Turks, that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it. There is very few men, women or children here that have not the same compass of words in five or six of them. I know myself several infants of three or four year old that speak Italian, French, Greek, Turkish and Russian . . . This seems almost incredible to you and is, in my mind, one of the most curious things in this country.4

4 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Malcolm Jack (London, 1994), 122–3. 5 Carol L. Schmid, The Politics of Language: Conflict, Identity and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 2001); Tony Crowley, Standard English and the Politics of Language, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2003). 6 Colin H. Williams, Called unto Liberty! On Language and Nationalism (Clevedon, 1994), 7; John Edwards, ‘Language and Nation’, in Athena S. Leoussi (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (New Brunswick, 2001), 169; John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982), 279; Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective (London, 2010), 29–32. 7 Edwards, ‘Language and Nation’, 170; Clare Mar-Molinero, The Politics of Language in the Spanish-Speaking World: From Colonisation to Globalisation (London,

(cont. on p. 49)

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Clearly, for many contemporaries, one of the identifying traits of the pre-modern Mediterranean was its multilingual character. This suggests a linguistic world markedly different from contemporary notions of language and linguistic systems. In the modern era, language has been elevated to totemic status: legislatures attempt to establish official idioms; children are alternately forbidden or encouraged to speak their birth tongues in classrooms; and regional dialects are dusted off, celebrated in song and verse, and given institutional validation in bilingual highway signs.5 In both defining and defending national identity, language in the modern world represents ‘the prime cultural marker’ and the ‘most salient identity criterion’. It is, in short, ‘the stuff of ‘‘blood and belonging’’ ’.6 This linguistic nationalism is rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and particularly in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered the ‘language of its fathers’ as ‘the touchstone of [a nation’s] spiritual existence’. Internally it embodied the historical, cultural, intellectual and psychological matrix of identity, whilst externally it functioned as a boundary, a citizenship test that permitted nations ‘to differentiate themselves from other linguistic communities’.7 These views had widespread

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(n. 7 cont.)

2000), 7, 170; Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge, 1969), 57; Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th edn (Oxford, 1993). 8 Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione, ed. Armando Saitta and Ernesto Sestan (1961; Rome and Bari, 1996), 46–7; Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (New York, 1929), 55; Edwards, ‘Language and Nation’, 171; Williams, Called unto Liberty!, 5. 9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London, 1991), 40–6; Chabod, L’idea di nazione, ed. Saitta and Sestan, 46–7; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1992), 5–6; Kurt Braunmu¨ller and Gisella Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History (Amsterdam, 2003), 1 (editors’ intro.); Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 35–6. 10 Blackledge and Creese, Multilingualism, 25–32, 66. 11 Claire Kramsch, ‘The Multilingual Subject’, Internat. Jl Applied Linguistics, xvi (2006), 100–1; John Edwards, Multilingualism (London, 1994). 12 Louis-Jean Calvet, Towards an Ecology of World Languages, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, 2006), 1; David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 2010), 372.

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currency amongst contemporaries: Mazzini counted language as one of a nation’s ‘highest and clearest ‘‘tokens’’ ’; Wilhelm von Humboldt considered it ‘the spiritual exhalation of the nation’; and for Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘wherever a separate language is found there a separate nation exists’.8 This ideology of ‘one state — one nation — one language’, and its attendant monolingualism, has been challenged in our post-national, global and increasingly connected age.9 The nationalist notion of languages as ‘discrete, bounded and impermeable autonomous systems’, and their attendant communities of identity as fixed and static ‘natural phenomena’, is being replaced by a social constructivist model that perceives linguistic boundaries as ‘multiple, plural, shifting, and eclectic’.10 As part of this shift, there is a growing body of work on multilingualism, broadly defined as the ability to ‘use’ (read, write, understand and/or speak) more than one language with varying degrees of efficacy.11 This scholarship has shown that multilingualism should be seen not as an exceptional state, but rather as an innate human property. Indeed, the sociolinguist Louis-Jean Calvet has stated that multilingualism is ‘the most widespread situation . . . [and] that there are no, or practically no, monolingual countries’.12 In response to this sea change in contemporary views of language, scholars have begun to re-examine some axiomatic assumptions about language in the pre-modern world, revealing a

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13

Seth Schwartz, ‘Language, Power and Identity in Ancient Palestine’, Past and Present, no. 148 (Aug. 1995); D. A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2000), 2 (editor’s intro.); Michael Richter, Studies in Medieval Language and Culture (Dublin, 1995), 77. 14 Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 2–4; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 5–7. 15 J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, no. 137 (Nov. 1992); Ralph Fasold, The Sociolinguistics of Society (Oxford, 1984), 9–12, 30. 16 Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Oxford, 2003), 1–2; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siaˆn Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1972–3), i, 276–7; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), 5; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Oxford, 2005), 213. 17 Joan-Pau Rubie´s, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge, 2000), 393 n. 6; Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 1–3; Giuseppe Galasso, ‘La mobilita` delle persone (cont. on p. 51)

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more linguistically ambiguous and complex reality that has been obscured by the anachronistic imposition of ‘modern monolingualism’ onto the past.13 Historians have argued that during the early modern period, ‘the frontiers between languages, like the frontiers between states, were less clear-cut’ than nationalist agendas have permitted. Rather than demarcating stark boundaries between speech communities, they see language and communication as existing in linguistically mixed zones. In this more fluid linguistic world, ‘receptive bilingualism, functionally restricted multilingualism or the command of a foreign linguistic variety [such] as a lingua franca’ were unexceptional.14 The early modern Mediterranean world was dominated by three polyglot, multicultural, composite states — the Habsburg, Ottoman and Venetian empires — which were characterized by many of the traits that generate multilingualism: the existence of imperial political structures uniting diverse cultural groups; the presence of lengthy frontier regions where borders were in constant flux; and significant levels of migration.15 The early modern era was ‘highly mobile’, and the Mediterranean with its ‘network of regular and casual connections’ and ‘easy seaborne communications’ facilitated rather than blocked movement, producing a ‘ceaseless circulation of humans’ who relocated for economic, social and political motives.16 This led to ‘the gradual erosion of linguistic barriers’, and produced a linguistically diverse environment (in Europe alone forty to seventy languages were spoken) in which multilingualism was necessarily widespread.17

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(n. 17 cont.)

nel Mediterraneo: qualche osservazione preliminare’, Mediterranea: ricerche storiche, vii (2006), 212; Burke, Languages and Communities, 8, 173–5. 18 Paul Cohen, ‘Linguistic Politics on the Periphery: Louis XIII, Be´arn, and the Making of French as an Official Language in Early Modern France’, in Brian D. Joseph et al. (eds.), When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence (Columbus, 2003), 167–8; Paul Cohen, ‘Penser un empire de Babel: langues, pouvoirs et identite´s dans le monde atlantique franc¸ais, 16e–17e sie`cles’, unpubd paper, presented at ‘Colloque international. Eˆtre et se penser franc¸ais: nation, sentiment national et identite´s dans le monde atlantique franc¸ais du XVIIe au XIXe sie`cle’, 5–7, 16–17. 19 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989), 268. 20 Peter Burke, Towards a Social History of the Early Modern Dutch (Amsterdam, 2005), 20–1; Ole Feldbæk, ‘Clash of Cultures in a Conglomerate State: Danes and Germans in 18th Century Denmark’, in Jens Christian V. Johansen, Erling Ladewig Petersen and Henrik Stevnsborg (eds.), Clashes of Cultures: Essays in Honour of Niels Steensgaard (Odense, 1992), 81; Marika Tandefelt, ‘Vyborg: Free Trade in Four Languages’, in Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 85–91. 21 John Wansbrough, ‘Diplomatica siciliana’, Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, xlvii (1984), 16–18. 22 Rembert Eufe, ‘Politica linguistica della Serenissima: Luca Tron, Antonio Condulmer, Marin Sanudo e il volgare nell’amministrazione veneziana a Creta’, Philologie im Netz, xxiii (2003), 33; Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia, 2000), 115–26; Burke, Languages and Communities, 119; Peter Burke, ‘Rome as Center of Information and (cont. on p. 52)

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Contemporaries did not consider this ‘linguistic mosaic’ unusual or undesirable: early modern France, for example, was a ‘profoundly polyglot society’ with a ‘dizzying variety of local languages and dialects’ in which French was ‘only one of many competing languages’. ‘Linguistic plurality’ represented the norm, and the French kings harboured no proto-nationalist desire for linguistic unification, but rather held that ‘linguistic abundance’ was desirable.18 In the Cerdagne, it was only in the nineteenth century that political ideologies severed the region along linguistic lines.19 The Netherlands was noted for its ‘prevalence’ of polyglot individuals, and the multilingual make-up of Denmark and the Baltic town of Vyborg posed ‘no problems’ for their inhabitants or rulers.20 Nowhere was multilingualism more widespread than in the early modern Mediterranean, however.21 Venice never sought to impose its language on its stato da mar subjects, and in many contexts the linguistic divisions between rulers and ruled became quickly blurred. On Sardinia, Italian, Spanish and Catalan competed with Sardinian, and in Rome the linguistic diversity of its many pilgrims and expatriates generated regular comment.22

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(n. 22 cont.)

Communication for the Catholic World, 1550–1650’, in Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester (eds.), From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca.1550–1650 (Leiden, 2002), 254. 23 For general treatments, see Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors (New Brunswick, 1994); Andreas Ho¨fele and Werner von Koppenfels (eds.), Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin and New York, 2005), 6–9 (editors’ intro.); Peter Burke and R. Pochia Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2009). On the Mediterranean, Natalie Rothman’s work is essential: E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, 2012); and her ‘Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, li (2009). Also Gilles Veinstein, ‘The Ottoman Administration and the Problem of Interpreters’, in Kemal C ¸ ic¸ek (ed.), The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilization, 4 vols. (Ankara, 2000), iii; Giorgio Vercellin, ‘Mercanti turchi e sensali a Venezia’, Studi veneziani, iv (1980); Fre´de´ric Hitzel (ed.), Enfants de langue et drogmans (Istanbul, 1995); Kemal C ¸ ic¸ek, ‘Interpreters of the Court in the Ottoman Empire as Seen from the Sharia Court Records of Cyprus’, Islamic Law and Society, ix (2001). 24 Barbara Johnstone, ‘Communication in Multicultural Settings: Resources and Strategies for Affiliation and Identity’, in Torben Vestergaard (ed.), Language, Culture and Identity (Language and Cultural Contact, xxvii, Aalborg, 1999), 25–34. 25 Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between’, in Ho¨fele and von Koppenfels (eds.), Renaissance Go-Betweens, 18. 26 Wansbrough, ‘Diplomatica siciliana’, 16–18.

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This situation has given rise to a variety of questions, including how language functions in a multilingual setting such as the early modern Mediterranean, and how individuals negotiate such a diverse linguistic environment. One approach has focused on interpreters, translators, brokers and mediators.23 To be sure, such individuals played an important role in navigating the region’s many languages, but focusing on them alone, however, poses the real risk of reifying the Mediterranean into linguistically isolated blocks.24 In addition, as Peter Burke has warned, the notion of the go-between is ‘slippery’ because of the ‘danger of the concept expanding to include virtually everyone’.25 Whilst intermediaries are essential for understanding the early modern linguistic world, they should not obscure the multilingual character of the Mediterranean and the other means of communication utilized by contemporaries. This article argues that the wide linguistic variety of the Mediterranean was less destabilizing and disorienting to its inhabitants than it seemed to contemporary observers. Although intermediaries played an important role, the linguistic environment created a situation in which multilingualism was both the norm and essential to communication.26 Because of the

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ephemeral nature of quotidian speech — words are elusive witnesses that are uttered and then disappear immediately, rarely leaving a trace — we can only approach the issue obliquely through archival hints; thus, my case will necessarily be impressionistic.27 Nonetheless, an examination of the linguistic ecology of the Mediterranean provides evidence of widespread individual and societal multilingualism, which was an essential component of the spectrum of early modern communication.28

I begin with the Ottoman Empire. The myth that the Ottomans were uninterested in language is rooted in an earlier historiography. Robert Mantran held that the ‘Turk’ completely ignored all European languages,29 and Bernard Lewis has argued that ‘apart from some sailors and traders and other men of low estate’, few Muslims spoke or understood European languages until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.30 This wrongheaded depiction ignores the empire’s ‘polyglot and polyethnic’ character.31 The Ottoman Empire was linguistically more diverse than any other early modern state: the sultans ruled over sixty ethnic and linguistic groups, and made no effort to impose linguistic homogeneity on their vast state.32 The result was ‘a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-linguistic entity held together by a complex bureaucratic apparatus which harmonized the identity and interests of various groups with its own authority’.33 Whilst certain subject communities did adopt Turkish, more preserved 27 Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 79. 28 Calvet, Towards an Ecology of World Languages, 8–13. 29 Robert Mantran, Istanbul au sie`cle de Soliman le Magnifique (Paris, 1994), 88. 30 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford, 1993), 34. Also Maria Pia Pedani, In nome del Gran Signore: inviati ottomani a Venezia dalla caduta di Costantinopoli alla guerra di Candia (Venice, 1994), 29; E. S. Bates, Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education (Boston, 1911), 193–4. 31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. xi. 32 Kemal H. Karpat, The Ottoman State and its Place in World History (Leiden, 1974), 2; Peter Trudgill, ‘Greece and European Turkey: From Religious to Linguistic Identity’, in Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe (Oxford, 2000), 261–2. 33 Kemal H. Karpat, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays (Leiden, 2002), 676.

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II

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34 Kemal H. Karpat, ‘A Language in Search of a Nation: Turkish in the NationState’, in Aldo Scaglione (ed.), The Emergence of National Languages (Ravenna, 1984), 190; Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (New York, 1982), i, 27–8 (editors’ intro.). 35 M. S¸u¨kru¨ Haniog˘lu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008), 33; Jocelyne Dakhlia, Lingua franca: histoire d’une langue me´tisse en Me´diterrane´e (Arles, 2008), 282–9. 36 Veinstein, ‘Ottoman Administration and the Problem of Interpreters’, 607–8; Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, ed. William C. Hickman, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton, 1978), 44; Ottoman Diplomacy in Hungary: Letters from the Pashas of Buda, 1590–1593, ed. Gustav Bayerle (Bloomington, 1972), 3, 5. 37 Nicolas Vatin, ‘L’Emploi du grec comme langue diplomatique par les Ottomans (fin du XVe–de´but du XVIe sie`cle)’, in Fre´de´ric Hitzel (ed.), Istanbul et les langues orientales (Paris, 1997); Johann Strauss, ‘The Greek Connection in NineteenthCentury Ottoman Intellectual History’, in Dimitris Tziovas (ed.), Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2003), 49. 38 Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany, 1994), 14; Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Cenni di diplomatica ottomana’, Archivi per la storia, iii (1990), 159; Haniog˘lu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 33–5; Karpat, ‘Language in Search of a Nation’, 189–93.

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their own languages. Turkish was not regarded as the empire’s official language, and the teaching and usage of Turkish were not actively encouraged. Language was a way of communicating, not distinguishing or differentiating, among peoples.34 This linguistic farrago produced an environment in which multilingualism, both informal and official, was widespread.35 Until the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, official documents were composed in ‘Greek, Slavic, Italian, Latin’, German and Hungarian.36 Greek was commonly used as a diplomatic lingua franca, and functioned as a bridge language amongst many Ottomans.37 The empire’s elite was multilingual, often fluent in a minimum of three languages: Arabic and Persian were considered the erudite languages of religion and culture, whereas Turkish was the language of the common people. During the sixteenth century, a formal, official idiom called elsine-i-selaˆse (the three languages) evolved, which combined elements of Arabic and Persian with the Turkish vernacular, and became the ‘language of bureaucracy and ceremony’. This high Ottoman was known only to the cultural and political elite, and differed significantly from Turkish, which was considered ‘rough and vulgar’. It served as a means of distinguishing the ruling class from common Turks, who were generally excluded from high office.38

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39 Paolo Giovio, Commentario de le cose de turchi (n.p., 1538); Bernard Doumerc, ‘L’Adriatique du XIIIe au XVIIe sie`cle’, in Pierre Cabanes (ed.), Histoire de l’Adriatique (Paris, 2001), 302. 40 Stephen Clissold, ‘Christian Renegades and Barbary Corsairs’, History Today, xxvi (1976), 508. 41 Metin I. Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment’, Internat. Jl Middle East Studies, v (1974), 235–7; Maria Pia Pedani-Fabris, ‘Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy’, Turcica, xxxii (2000), 28; Orhan Kolog˘u, ‘Renegades and the Case Uluc¸/Kilic¸ Ali’, in Rossella Cancila (ed.), Mediterraneo in armi (secc. XV–XVIII), 2 vols. (Palermo, 2007), ii, 518, 525. 42 Ottoman Diplomacy in Hungary, ed. Bayerle, 3, 5; Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity’, 235–7. 43 Viaggio di un ambasciatore veneziano da Venezia a Costantinopoli nel 1591 (Venice, 1886), 75–7; Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Senato DispacciCostantinopoli (hereafter SDC), b. 33, fos. 257r–260v, 26 June 1591; Federico Stefani (ed.), Viaggio a Costantinopoli di Sier Lorenzo Bernardo (Venice, 1887), 42; Antonio Fabris, ‘Hasan ‘‘Il Veneziano’’ tra Algeri e Costantinopoli’, Quaderni di studi arabi, suppl., xv (1997), 54.

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Other languages were also common: Paolo Giovio reported that in the divan ‘many varied languages are spoken . . . the principal one is Turkish which the Lord speaks, the second is Arabic, . . . the third is Slavonic familiar to the Janissaries because it is the most widely known language in all the world, the other is Greek’.39 Such linguistic diversity was characteristic of the Ottoman ruling elite, which was populated through the devs¸irme (levy of Christian children). Into the seventeenth century, almost all high officials came from non-Turkish backgrounds: for example, over two-thirds of grand viziers between 1453 and 1623, and almost half the kapudanpas¸as (admirals of the fleet) before the mid nineteenth century, were not Turkish.40 The devs¸irme recruits were usually in their teens, and whilst all were trained in Ottoman and Turkish, they also retained their native languages.41 The result was that the Porte was more multilingual than other early modern courts. For instance, Mehmed Sokullu treated with a Habsburg representative in Slavonic to eliminate the need for interpreters, Mere Hu¨seyin Pas¸a occasionally gave orders in his native Albanian, and Seydi Ahmed Pas¸a uttered oaths in Circassian. All three served as grand viziers.42 A late sixteenth-century kapudanpas¸a, Hassan, was born Venetian, and when he met with a Venetian diplomat, ‘he spoke for a bit in Turkish for appearance’ sake, in which language it appears he is not very prepared, then he spoke in Frankish [Italian] very comfortably, inserting many Spanish words’.43 Another apologized that he

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ASV, SDC, b. 18, fos. 202r–206v, 29 Nov. 1583; SDC, b. 52, fo. 281r, 2 Jan. 1600 more veneto. 45 Bruno Simon, ‘Les De´peˆches de Marin Cavalli, bayle a` Constantinople (1558– 1560)’, 2 vols. (E´cole des hautes e´tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, Ph.D. thesis, 1985), ii, 145; ASV, SDC, b. 38, fo. 188r, 21 Nov. 1593; SDC, b. 22, fos. 279v– 280r, 8 Dec. 1585; ASV, Capi del consiglio di dieci — Lettere di ambasciatori (hereafter CapiXLett), b. 2, no. 141, 24 Feb. 1559 more veneto. 46 ‘Relazione di Antonio Foscarini’, in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, i, Inghilterra, ed. Luigi Firpo (Padua, 1965), 646; ‘Sommario della Relazione di Germania di Vincenzo Tron’, 497, 502, and ‘Relazione di Zuan Michiel e Lunardo Donato’, both in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, iii, Germania, ed. Luigi Firpo (Padua, 1970); Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 2. 47 Christos G. Patrinelis, ‘Mehmed II the Conqueror and his Presumed Knowledge of Greek and Latin’, Viator, ii (1971); Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, 111–12. 48 Philippe du Fresne-Canaye, Le Voyage du Levant (1897), ed. and trans. M. H. Hauser (Ferrie`res, 1986), 147. 49 Giovanantonio Menavino, I cinque libri della legge, religione, et vita de’ turchi (Venice, 1548), 14; Manlio Cortelazzo, ‘Il veneziano, lingua ufficiale della repubblica?’, in his Venezia, il Levante e il mare (Pisa, 1989), 110. 50 William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe (Chicago, 1974), 293.

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‘did not speak [Italian] much, because . . . he often got stuck without being able to express his ideas’.44 In addition to high officials’ records, diplomatic and notarial sources contain significant anecdotal evidence of multilingual ability amongst many other Ottomans.45 Like many of their Christian counterparts — including Charles V, who famously said ‘I speak Spanish with God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse’ — Ottoman sultans were often multilingual.46 This resulted from their dealings with a polyglot soldiery, but even more so from exposure to the polyglot women of the harem. Mehmed II was widely held to speak as many as five languages,47 whilst Selim II was said to be ‘lord of three languages . . . Greek, Slavonic and Turkish’.48 When Giovanantonio Menavino was presented to Bayezid II, the sultan communicated ‘with signs, and with a few Italian words that he knew’, while Venetian officials sent to the Porte were advised, ‘if you see the Grand Turk speak to him in Venetian’.49 During Suleiman I’s reign, there were so many Serbs in the Porte that their language functioned as a sort of ‘private patois’, which even the sultan was said to speak.50 Multilingualism was common in many other Mediterranean contexts as well. The everyday language of Istanbul’s Latin-rite

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those of them who left Spain, Germany, Hungary and Bohemia have taught the languages [of those countries] to their children; and their children have learnt the languages of the nations in which they have to live and speak . . . The Jews who live in Turkey ordinarily speak four or five languages: and there are several who know ten or twelve.57 51 Braude and Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, i, 27–8; Benedetto Ramberti, Libri tre delle cose de Turchi (Venice, 1539), 37r. 52 McKee, Uncommon Dominion, 115–20; also Chryssa A. Maltezou, ‘The Historical and Social Context’, in David Holton (ed.), Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (Cambridge, 1991), 33–5; Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, 2000), 108; David Jacoby, ‘Multilingualism and Institutional Patterns of Communication in Latin Romania (Thirteenth– Fourteenth Centuries)’, in Alexander G. Beihammer, Maria D. Parani and Christopher D. Schabel (eds.), Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication (Leiden, 2008), 43. 53 Greene, Shared World, 79, 178, 207; Paul Saint Cassia, ‘Religion, Politics and Ethnicity in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878)’, Archives europe´ennes de sociologie, xxvii (1986), 24. 54 William Miller, The Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece (1204–1566) (New York, 1908), 542; William Miller, ‘The Ionian Islands under Venetian Rule’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xviii (1903), 222. 55 Girolamo Marafioti, Croniche et antichita` di Calabria (Padua, 1601), 61r; Bernhard Bischoff, ‘The Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, xxxvi (1961), 212; Wansbrough, ‘Diplomatica siciliana’. 56 C ¸ ic¸ek, ‘Interpreters of the Court in the Ottoman Empire’, 4; Veinstein, ‘Ottoman Administration and the Problem of Interpreters’, 612. 57 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, ii, 809.

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community was Greek, Italian was its administrative language, and both Italian and Turkish were widely spoken. A leading member of the community in the first half of the sixteenth century, Alvise Gritti, spoke ‘with great eloquence in the Turkish, Greek, Latin, and Italian languages’.51 Crete was another linguistically mixed society: under Venetian rule many Latins spoke Greek and Cretans learned Italian or Latin,52 and following the Ottoman conquest Turkish was added to the mixture.53 On Corfu, Italian was the administrative language throughout the period of Venetian rule, and was ‘readily spoken’ in the main urban centres and amongst ‘good society’.54 In southern Italy and Sicily, Greek was still spoken, along with Italian.55 Even in the landlocked Anatolian town of Kayseri, non-Muslim Ottomans ‘had sufficient knowledge of Turkish to understand what was being said in court and to make themselves understood’, which seems to have been common throughout the empire.56 Mediterranean Jewish communities were also known for their linguistic diversity. Pierre Belon reported of the Jews:

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58 Doumerc, ‘L’Adriatique du XIIIe au XVIIe sie`cle’, 300–2; Paloma Dı´az Ma´s, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain (Chicago, 1992), 72–101; Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages, revised edn (New York, 2004), 294. 59 K. E. Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton, 2008), 40; Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (Madison, 2000), 25. 60 Ugo Tucci, ‘The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century’, in J. R. Hale (ed.), Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), 361; ASV, SDC, b. 55, fo. r–v 232 , 19 July 1602; ASV, Bailo a Costantinopoli (hereafter BAC), b. 263, reg. 372, fos. 93r–101v, 2 Dec. 1581; BAC, b. 333-I, 1 Sept. 1636; BAC, b. 347, 11 Oct. 1627; ASV, CapiXLett, b. 1, no. 134, 17 Sept. 1538; ASV, SDC, b. 51, fo. 87r–v, 7 Apr. 1600. 61 ASV, BAC, b. 264, reg. 424, fo. 17r, 5 July 1584; ASV, SDC, b. 39, fo. 1r–v, 12 Mar. 1594. 62 _ Halil Inalcik, ‘The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300–1600’, in Halil _ Inalcik and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, i, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 1994), 235–6, 240–1; Renata Segre, ‘Sephardic Settlements in Sixteenth-Century Italy: A Historical and Geographical Survey’, in Alisa Meyuhas Ginio (ed.), Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean World after 1492 (London, 1992), 118. 63 The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602, ed. Sir William Foster (London, 1931), 38, 59–61, 189, 225; Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, ed. Brennan, 104.

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The hybrid Judaeo-Castilian dialect called variously Ladino, Spanyol or Judezmo was spoken by Sephardim throughout the Mediterranean, and served as a sort of ‘passport’ language in the Balkans, where it was widely understood.58 Amongst the Corfiote Jews, Greek, Ladino, Hebrew and Italian mixed in the synagogue’s services and prayer books, and the community’s everyday communications were in a ‘local Judeo-Italian patois’.59 Multilingualism was also common amongst certain groups within early modern Mediterranean society. Merchants, for example, were broadly proficient in languages. The records of the Venetian nation in Istanbul identify numerous polyglot merchants in the sixteenth century, including Tommaso de Freschi, who learned Turkish so well he became a dragoman.60 Doge Andrea Gritti learned Turkish during a decade trading in the Levant, as did another patrician, Piero Bragadin, who ‘was intimate with many Grandees of the Porte’ because he spoke ‘the Turkish language with confidence, as well as reading and writing it’.61 Florentine and Sienese merchants are also recorded as speaking Turkish, Slavonic and Greek.62 English merchants were polyglots by necessity: most learned Italian, and some learned Turkish, most notably Edward Barton, who mastered it before becoming ambassador.63 There is also evidence of Ottoman

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64 Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006), 172–3. See, for example, ASV, SDC, b. 69, fo. 443r–v, 23 July 1610; Archivio IRE (Istituzioni di Ricovero e di Educazione), Venice, DER E, 125:1, fo. 45r–v; ASV, Senato-Mar, b. 21, 21 Oct. 1559; ASV, BAC, b. 313, fo. 28v, 10 Oct. 1591. 65 Calvet, Towards an Ecology of World Languages, 96. 66 Murat C ¸ izakc¸a, ‘Ottomans and the Mediterranean: An Analysis of the Ottoman Shipbuilding Industry as Reflected by the Arsenal Registers of Istanbul, 1529–1650’, in Rosalba Ragosta (ed.), Le genti del mare mediterraneo, 2 vols. (Naples, 1981), ii, 776, 784; Robert Mantran, ‘Arsenali di Istanbul dal XV al XVII secolo: Qasim Pascia e Top-Hane`’, in Ennio Concina (ed.), Arsenali e citta` nell’occidente europeo (Rome, 1987), 104. 67 ASV, BAC, b. 368, 12 Jan. 1595 more veneto; BAC, b. 329, 4 Aug. 1597. 68 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, i, The Structure of Everyday Life, revised trans. Siaˆn Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992), 54–5; Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, 80–1.

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merchants speaking Italian and other European languages.64 Based on numerous clues across a wide range of sources, there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that many, perhaps most, merchants were multilingual and able to negotiate many of their dealings without intermediaries. Multilingualism was common in some heterogeneous social and economic micro-communities submerged within the broader ‘linguistic ecosystem’.65 The Mediterranean’s arsenals, for instance, employed a highly diverse cross-section of individuals.66 In 1596, a group of caulkers and carpenters working on a Venetian merchant ship in Istanbul included Slavs, Messinese, Genoese, Neapolitans, French, Romans, Greeks, Germans, Puglians, Corsicans, Portuguese, Spaniards, Venetians, Rhodiots and six Muslims of unspecified provenance. The same was true of the crews of mercantile ships that plied the seas: a partial list of the crew of the Martinella in 1597 included men from Venice, Dalmatia and several Greek islands.67 Labour migration produced multilingualism as well: Greek was widespread in Istanbul’s shipbuilding and woollen industries because of the many immigrants from Venice’s Aegean islands, and there were so many French workers in Saragossa that a visiting French cardinal found that ‘everyone’ spoke his language.68 Christian ecclesiastics in the Mediterranean emphasized the importance of language acquisition to further their evangelical efforts. The Capuchins were especially committed to providing education in local languages, including Italian, but also Greek,

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69 Pe`re Bruno, ‘Ambassadeurs de France et capucins franc¸ais a` Constantinople au XVIIe sie`cle d’apre`s le journal du P. Thomas de Paris’, E´tudes franciscaines, xxix (1913), 236; Guillaume de Vaumas, ‘L’Activite´ missionaire du P. Joseph de Paris’, Revue d’histoire des missions, xv (1938), 350; P. Rocco da Cesinale, Storia delle Missioni dei Cappuccini, i (Paris, 1867), 65. 70 Guy Turbet-Delof, ‘Un je´suite a` Constantinople (1609–1612): le pe`re Franc¸ois de Canillac’, XVII e Sie`cle, xxxix (1987), 428; Documents ine´dits pour servir a` l’histoire du Christianisme en Orient (XVI–XIX sie`cle), ed. Antoine Rabbath, 2 vols. (Paris, 1905– 10), i, 380; ii, 317–27; Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothe`que de la Compagnie de Je´sus, pt 1, vi (Brussels, 1895), 1342. 71 Giuseppe Ellero, L’archivio IRE: inventari dei fondi antichi degli ospedali e luoghi pii di Venezia (Venice, 1984), 210; E. Natalie Rothman, ‘Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xxi (2006), 42; ASV, SDC, b. 57, 7 Mar. 1603. 72 Charles H. Carter, ‘The Ambassadors of Early Modern Europe’, in Charles H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingly (New York, 1965), 279–80; Gino Benzoni, ‘A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli: qualche spunto, qualche osservazione’, Studi veneziani, xxx (1995), 72–6; Paolo Preto, Venezia e i turchi (Florence, 1975), 100. 73 Monsieur de Callie`res, De la manie`re de ne´gocier avec les souverains (Amsterdam, 1716), 62; Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London, 1963), 186; Robert Leo Ferring, ‘The Accomplished Ambassador by Christopher Varsevicius and its Relation to Sixteenth Century Political Writings with a Translation of the Treatise from Latin’ (Notre Dame Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1959), 164.

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Arabic and Turkish, which missionaries studied in France.69 Jesuits were well known for their linguistic prowess: in the seventeenth century Jerome Queyrot preached for forty years in Greek, Italian, French and Arabic throughout the Levant, and Walred Bangen spoke seven languages, including Arabic and Greek.70 The Franciscan chaplain to the Venetian embassy, Antonio da Pera, knew Greek and Turkish so well that he substituted as a dragoman, and in Venice’s catechumen house, clerics who knew ‘oriental languages’ were preferred as they ‘could understand, and instruct, similar infidels’.71 Whilst there is a notion that diplomats in the Mediterranean were entirely dependent on linguistic intermediaries, many were in fact polyglots.72 Theorists agreed that languages were essential: the French ambassador Franc¸ois de Callie`res wrote in 1716 that diplomats ‘should know the German, Italian, and Spanish languages as well as Latin’. No one was expected to know English, but some writers recommended learning Greek and Turkish. Without languages, an ambassador risked being ‘exposed to the bad faith or the ignorance of interpreters . . . the embarrassment of using them in audiences with princes, and . . . letting them in on important secrets’.73 The noted Venetian diplomat Marino

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Simon, ‘Les De´peˆches de Marin Cavalli’, ii, 77 n. 93. Tommaso Bertele`, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli e le sue antiche memorie (Bologna, 1932), 136 n. 81; Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte (Ithaca, 1993), 18–19; Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), 270; Preto, Venezia e i turchi, 97–8; ASV, CapiXLett, b. 1, no. 167, 9 Sept. 1544. 76 Gio. Battista Donado, Della letteratura de’ Turchi (Venice, 1688); Benzoni, ‘A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli’, 76–7. 77 Eric R. Dursteler, ‘The Bailo in Constantinople: Crisis and Career in Venice’s Early Modern Diplomatic Corps’, Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xvi (2001). 78 Mary Neff, ‘Chancellery Secretaries in Venetian Politics and Society, 1480– 1533’ (Univ. of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 37, 140, 152 n. 58; ASV, SDC, b. 55, fo. 88r, 14 Apr. 1602. 79 Ge´rard Tongas, Les Relations de la France avec l’Empire Ottoman durant la premie`re moitie´ du XVIIe sie`cle et l’Ambassade a` Constantinople de Philippe de Harlay, Comte de Ce´sy (1619–1640) (Toulouse, 1942), 9, 12, 21, 39. 80 ‘The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599–1600’, in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, ed. J. Theodore Bent (London, 1893), p. xlii. 75

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Cavalli believed that ambassadors sent to Istanbul should be acquainted with ‘the Slavonic language, Greek and Turkish’.74 Some of Venice’s representatives spoke Turkish, including Andrea Foscolo, Antonio Barbarigo and Andrea Gritti, who was a friend of Bayezid II. As late as 1544 we have a record of Vincenzo Zantani ‘having learned some words . . . in Turkish’.75 After him, however, no Venetian diplomat learned the language, except Giovanni Battista Dona`, who published Della letteratura de’ Turchi in 1688.76 This trend was a result of the rationalization of Venice’s diplomatic service: unlike ambassadors from other polities, Venice’s diplomats spent only a short time in post. From 1573 to 1645 they averaged two and a half years of service in Istanbul, which made it difficult for them to learn Turkish and meant they were heavily dependent on dragomans.77 Other members of the mission were more likely to know Turkish, however, including secretaries, who were chosen for their linguistic abilities, and accountants, who had regular dealings with Ottoman merchants and authorities.78 Knowledge of Turkish was more common amongst nonVenetian ambassadors, in part because of their longer terms of service. Seventeenth-century French ambassadors in Istanbul served on average fourteen years, and two served for over twenty years.79 During the same period, English ambassadors often served for eight to ten years, and many had extensive previous experience as Levantine merchants.80 Dutch ambassadors also

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81 A. H. de Groot, ‘The Dutch Nation in Istanbul, 1600–1985: A Contribution to the Social History of Beyog˘lu’, Anatolica, xiv (1987), 132–3, 137–9. 82 Andre´ Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant (1556), ed. Frank Lestringant (Geneva, 1985), 76–7. 83 Pietro della Valle, De’ Viaggi di Pietro della Valle il Pellegrino, i (Rome, 1650), 268–9. 84 M. de Hammer, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, trans. M. Dochez, ii (Paris, 1844), 287; Viorel Panaite, ‘A French Ambassador in Istanbul, and his Turkish Manuscript on Western Merchants in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries)’, Revue des e´tudes sud-est europe´ennes, xlii (2004), 7–9. 85 ASV, SDC, b. 37, fo. 500v, 3 Aug. 1593; Museo Correr, Venice, Dona` delle Rose, b. 23, fos. 67v–68v; Travels of John Sanderson, ed. Foster, 126; Ambassade en Turquie de Jean de Gontaut Biron, Baron de Salignac, 1605 a` 1610, ed. The´odore de Gontaut Biron, 2 vols. (Paris, 1883–9), ii, 401; Charles Hughes, Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (London, 1903), 27–8. 86 ASV, SDC, b. 122, fos. 293v, 296r, 13 May 1641; Hammer, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, ii, 496; Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Jack, 75, 103; Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge, 1999), 125.

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served long terms, though less consistently, for example Cornelius Haga, (1612–39), Henrico Cops (1639–47) and Justinus Colyer (1668–82).81 Long-term ambassadors, not surprisingly, often acquired languages: Gabriel d’Aramon ‘made a singular effort to learn, and to know how to speak the common languages of the land, Turkish, Arabic, and vulgar Greek’.82 Achille Harlay-Sancy spoke Italian, Spanish, German, French, Latin, some Dutch and Greek, and studied Hebrew several hours daily whilst in Istanbul.83 The linguistic skills of Franc¸ois Savary de Bre`ves, who spent twenty-two years in the Levant in the second half of the sixteenth century, were legendary: the Ottoman historian Selaniki reported that de Bre`ves ‘spoke Turkish so well, and wrote [it] so easily’ that he did not need an interpreter, and he later established an Arabic printing house and published one of the first Turkish books printed in France.84 Fynes Moryson believed that Edward Barton’s linguistic skills ‘made him respected of them, so as I thinck no Christian ever had greater power with any Emperor of Turkye or the officers of his state, and Court, then he had in his tyme’.85 Ambassadors’ family members also learned Turkish: Harlay’s son was raised in Istanbul and mastered eight languages, while Lady Montagu studied Turkish every Wednesday so that she could converse with harem women that she called on.86 Military forces were also ‘international organizations’, and represent another form of polyglot institution. Philip II’s armies in both Flanders and Hungary included men of ‘all nations’ —

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87 Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2004), 23–35; Burke, Languages and Communities, 129–30. 88 M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice, c.1400 to 1617 (Cambridge, 1984), 313–30. 89 Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (New Brunswick, 1999), 35–49; Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Military Campaigns in Hungary, 1593–1606 (Vienna, 1988), 97–107; C. F. Finkel, ‘French Mercenaries in the Habsburg–Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600’, Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, lv (1992), 451–3. 90 Burke, Languages and Communities, 129; Burke, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 87; P. Matkovic, ‘Itinerario di Marc’ Antonio Pigafetta’, Starine, xxii (1890), 88–9. 91 Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, ed. Brennan, 69; Robert C. Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian–Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean (Santa Barbara, 2009), 72; Calvet, Towards an Ecology of World Languages, 94–5. 92 Joa˜o de Carvalho Mascarenhas, Esclave a` Alger: re´cit de captivite´ de Joa˜o Mascarenhas (1621–1626), ed. and trans. Paul Teyssier, 2nd edn (Paris, 1999), 74–5; Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage, 64.

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English, Irish, German, Italian and Spanish. Venice, too, relied heavily on a diverse international array of soldiers and oarsmen, including many Ottomans.88 Similarly, the sultans recruited soldiers from throughout their vast empire, along with many non-Ottoman mercenaries and technicians, including Tatars, Circassians, Moldavians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, and even Poles and Frenchmen.89 These mixed armies gave rise to an ‘international military language’. In Italy, where German mercenaries were common, a German–Italian pidgin developed, and Marcantonio Pigafetta reported that Slavonic served a similar role amongst Ottoman ‘men of war’.90 Similarly, Mediterranean corsair communities were, by necessity, multilingual: one traveller noted of corsairs that ‘the bravest Rogues amongst them have learned at home the Turkish Language, & Italian’, and the famous Kheireddin Barbarossa spoke Arabic, Turkish, Italian and French.91 Mediterranean slavery was another vector for multilingualism. From 1500 to 1800 perhaps up to three million slaves were taken, with Christians outnumbering Muslims two to one. These unfortunate individuals came from across the globe: as one slave reported, the Algiers bagnio housed ‘Flemish, English, Danish, Scots, Germans, Irish, Poles, Muscovites, Bohemians, Hungarians, Norwegians, Burgundians, Venetians, Piedmontese, Slavs, Syrians from Egypt, Chinese, Japanese, Brazilians, inhabitants of New Spain [and] of the lands of Prester John’.92 This tower of Babel necessarily functioned as a sort of language school: Diego

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93 Natividad Planas, ‘L’Usage des langues en Me´diterrane´e occidentale a` l’e´poque moderne’, in Jocelyne Dakhlia (ed.), Trames de langues: usages et me´tissages linguistiques dans l’histoire du Maghreb (Paris, 2004), 243, 248, 250; Clissold, ‘Christian Renegades and Barbary Corsairs’, 513. 94 Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London, 2008), 81; Kenneth M. Setton, Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies of Turkish Doom (Philadelphia, 1992), 29–31. 95 Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999), 28. 96 Giovanni Ricci, ‘Crypto-Identities: Disguised Turks, Christians and Jews’, in Anthony Molho and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds.), Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images (New York, 2007), 40. 97 National Archives, London, Public Record Office (PRO), State Papers Foreign, Turkey 97/16, fo. 133r–v, 4 Nov. 1637; Bibliothe`que nationale, Paris, MS Franc¸ais 16149, fo. 333r, 13 Mar. 1622. 98 Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, ed. Sir Richard Carnac Temple, i (Cambridge, 1907), 13–14; Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, ed. Brennan, 15. 99 Della Valle, De’ Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, i, 140–1, 218, 256–61; Ettore Rossi, ‘Versi turchi e altri scritti inediti di Pietro della Valle’, Rivista degli studi orientali, xxii (1947); Ettore Rossi, ‘Poesie inedite in persiano di Pietro della Valle’, Rivista degli studi orientali, xxviii (1953); Rubie´s, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 354–7.

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de Hae¨do reported that in Algiers Christian slaves acquired a ‘good knowledge of Arab and Turkish’ over the course of their captivity.93 The over-achieving humanist Bartolomaeus Georgievicz, during his twenty-year enslavement, learned Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to the Latin, Slavonic and Hungarian he already possessed.94 Muslims learned the languages of their captors too: Algerians enslaved in Spain often learned Spanish, and Thomas Phelps met an ‘antient Moor, who formerly had been a slave in England and spoke good English’.95 Gender was no barrier to language acquisition either: during the two years the Ottomans occupied Otranto, ‘many girls . . . easily learned the barbarians’ religion and language’.96 Travellers, scholars, collectors and other transitory individuals also often studied Mediterranean languages.97 In 1613, at the age of 13, Peter Mundy spent a year in France and two more in Spain learning the languages of both countries, and Robert Bargrave grandiosely claimed to have ‘atteind in three weeks time a sufficiency’ in Italian.98 Pietro della Valle studied Arabic, Turkish and Persian and composed poetry in the latter two,99 whilst Guillaume Postel studied language voraciously, including Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, Tatar and Turkish, which he learned so quickly ‘that his teachers in Istanbul called him

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100 Marion Leathers Kuntz, ‘Europa catalizzatrice tra Oriente ed Occidente nel pensiero di Guglielmo Postello’, in Angela Caracciolo Arico` (ed.), Il letterato tra miti e realta` del Nuovo Mondo (Rome, 1994), 241–2. Similarly, Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz, trans. A. H. Wratislaw (London, 1862), 120, 159– 60. 101 Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya C ¸ elebi (Leiden, 2006), 27. 102 Burke, ‘Renaissance Translator as Go-Between’, 17; Burke, Languages and Communities, 114–15, 138; W. Keith Percival, ‘La Connaissance des langues du monde’, in Sylvain Auroux (ed.), Histoire des ide´es linguistiques, 3 vols. (Lie`ge, 1992), ii, 228–30; Maurice Olender, ‘From the Language of Adam to the Pluralism of Babel’, Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xii (1997), 54; Alda Bart Rossebastiano, ‘Antichi vocabolari plurilingui d’uso popolare: la tradizione del ‘‘Solenissimo Vochabuolista’’ ’, De Gulden Passer, lv (1977); Douglas A. Kibbee, ‘Language Instruction for European Travelers’, in John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2000), 330. 103 E. Blochet, ‘Relation du voyage en Orient de Carlier de Pinon (1579)’, Revue de l’Orient latin, xii (1909–11), 359–61; Ste´phane Yerasimos, ‘Les Voyageurs et la connaissance de la langue turque en Europe’, and Michel Balivet, ‘Avant les jeunes de langue: coup d’œil sur l’apprentissage des langues turques en monde chre´tien, de Byzance a` Guillaume Postel (VIe–XVIe sie`cles)’, both in Hitzel (ed.), Istanbul et les langues orientales. 104 An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya C ¸ elebi, ed. and trans. Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (London, 2010); Abou-l Hasan Ali ben Mohammed et-Tamgrouti, En-nafhat el-miskiya fi-s-sifarat et-Tourkiya: relation d’une ambassade marocaine en Turquie, 1589–1591, ed. and trans. Henri de Castries (Paris, 1929), 60. 105 Ste´phane Yerasimos, ‘Turc en occident: la connaissance de la langue turque en Europe, XVe–XVIIe sie`cles’, in Miche`le Duchet (ed.), L’Inscription des langues dans les relations de voyage (XVI e–XVIII e sie`cles) (Paris, 1992), 196–205; Benzoni, ‘A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli’, 70.

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a ‘‘demon’’ ’. Similarly, in the first decades of the seventeenth century the great Ottoman traveller Evliya C ¸ elebi learned Greek and Latin from workers in his father’s goldsmith shop.101 As these experiences suggest, the early modern period was marked by an expanding curiosity about language, and a growing body of linguistic tools became available to meet this demand.102 These included travellers’ personal wordlists, such as Blochet’s ‘Quelques mots et fac¸ons de parler en langue turcque’,103 and those of Evliya and other Ottomans.104 Published works such as the optimistically entitled Opera chi se deletasse de saper domandar ciasceduna cosa in Turchesca (1525), the first Turkish grammar La regola di parlare turco (1533),105 and the popular Vocabulario nuovo (1567), which included Italian, Greek, German and Turkish words and phrases for Mediterranean travellers and merchants,

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106 Vocabolario nuovo. Con il quale da se stessi si puo` benissimo imparare diversi linguaggi; cioe` Italiano Greco. Italiano Turco. Italiano Todesco. Di nuovo stampato, & con diligenza Ricorretto (Venice and Bassano, n.d.); Milan Adamovic´, ‘Vocabolario nuovo mit seinem tu¨rkischen Teil’, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, xxxviii (1976); Christiane Villain-Gandossi, ‘Les De´peˆches chiffre´es de Vettore Bragadin, baile de Constantinople (12 juillet 1564– 15 juin 1566)’, Turcica, ix–x (1978), 79. 107 David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010), 51. 108 Archivio IRE, G 10, ‘Catecumeni vocabolario’. 109 Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds.), Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), 401; HansGeorg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas and Agostino Pertusi (eds.), Venezia, centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV–XVI): aspetti e problemi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1977); Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Presenze islamiche a Venezia’, Levante, xxxv (1993), 16; B. Cecchetti, ‘L’insegnamento del turco e dell’arabo in Venezia’, Rivista orientale, i (1867–8). 110 Burke, ‘Rome as Center of Information and Communication’, 263; P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), 13–14; Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle, 1987), 43. 111 Francesca Lucchetta, ‘La scuola dei ‘‘giovani di lingua’’ veneti nei secoli XVI e XVII’, Quaderni di studi arabi, vii (1989).

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were printed in multiple editions. Similarly, Isaac Luria’s 1660 Safah Berurah (Clear Language), a Hebrew, German, Latin and Italian lexicon, served as a ‘handbook for the Jewish traveler’.107 Institutions, too, developed specialized tools such as the Italian– Turkish vocabulary used in Venice’s catechumen house.108 As the nexus of information on the Ottoman Empire, Venice was also an important centre of language study. In 1519 an Arabic school opened in the Merceria, and there were repeated attempts at opening a Turkish school. An Italian translation of the Koran was published in 1547, followed by an Arabic edition in 1583.109 Counter-Reformation Rome became an important centre for information on all points east, with an Arabic catechism published there in 1566, whilst growing links with the Ottoman Empire led in 1539 to the establishment of the first Arabic chair at the Colle`ge de France. Interest in the Ottomans and Islam gave rise to a growing network of European scholars and manuscript collectors.110 It was also possible to study languages in situ. To end its dependence on Ottoman dragomans, the Venetian Senate in 1551 developed a programme to train young citizens and subjects in Turkish and other eastern languages.111 This school for giovani di lingua (language apprentices) became a model that was much

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112 ˇ ernovic´ ‘‘explorateur secretus’’ a` Constantinople Michel Lesure, ‘Michel C (1556–1563)’, Turcica, xv (1983), 137; Drzˇavni Arhiv, Dubrovnik, ‘Lettere e commissioni di Levante’, b. 27, fo. 7r. 113 Robert Mantran, ‘Venise, centre d’informations sur les turcs’, in Beck, Manoussacas and Pertusi (eds.), Venezia, centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente, ˆ ge des drogmans’, in Istanbul a` la jonction des cultures i, 113; Bedrettin Tuncel, ‘L’A balkaniques, me´diterrane´ennes, slaves et orientales, aux XVIe–XIXe sie`cles (Bucharest, 1977), 367. 114 A. H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610–1630 (Leiden, 1978), 193; Andrei Pippidi, Hommes et ide´es du Sud-Est europe´en a` l’aube de l’aˆge moderne (Bucharest, 1980), 157; A. C. Wood, ‘The English Embassy at Constantinople, 1660–1762’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xl (1925), 540. 115 Ottaviano Bon, The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court (London, 1996), 69–70; Barnette Miller, The Palace School of Muhammad the Conqueror (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 105–10; Louis Mitler, ‘The Genoese in Galata: 1453–1682’, Jl Middle East Studies, x (1979), 86. 116 Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 5th edn (Oxford, 2006), 55; M. Barotchi, ‘Lingua Franca’, in Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (Amsterdam, 2001), 503; C. Meierkord, ‘Lingua Francas as Second Languages’, in Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, vii (Amsterdam, 2006), 163. 117 Henry Kahane and Rene´e Kahane, ‘Lingua Franca: The Story of a Term’, Romance Philology, xxx (1976).

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copied: Ragusa followed suit in 1566, France in 1669, along with the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland. The English tried a different approach and brought several Greeks to Oxford to learn English, who then returned to Istanbul to serve as dragomans.114 Ottoman language instruction took place in a dragoman school in Galata, and especially in the sultan’s palace, where students drawn from the devs¸irme were said to learn ‘the Turkish tongue . . . their prayers in the Arabian tongue . . . the Persian, Arabian, and Tartarian tongues; and take great pains in reading divers authors, that they may be the better able to speak the Turkish elegantly’.115 A final component of the linguistic ecology of the early modern Mediterranean is the phenomenon of lingua franca. Linguists refer to the somewhat imprecise UNESCO definition of a lingua franca as ‘a language which is used habitually by people whose mother tongues are different in order to facilitate communication between them’.116 In the Mediterranean the concept of lingua franca must be understood on two levels. First, there is the famous Mediterranean mixed language, a simplified hybrid Romance pidgin with significant borrowings from several regional languages, known as Lingua Franca (upper case), literally the language of the Franks.117 Second, lingua franca (lower case)

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is known, loved, and cherished by a great many people in France . . . I hear that it is rather well known in Spain, and that on the island of Majorca there are public schools where it is taught. And I also hear that in Germany, and even in England, one finds more cognoscenti of Italian than of Latin.121 118 William J. Samarin, ‘Lingua Francas of the World’, in Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language (The Hague, 1968), 661–2; Raymond Cohen, ‘Speaking the Same Language: The Benefits and Pitfalls of English’, in Stefania Panebianco (ed.), A New Euro-Mediterranean Cultural Identity (London, 2003), 153–4; Wardhaugh, Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 59. 119 Laura Minervini, ‘La lingua franca mediterranea: plurilinguismo, mistilinguismo, pidginizzazione sulle coste del Mediterraneo tra tardo medioevo e prima eta` moderna’, Medioevo romanzo, xx (1996), 245–6; Keith Whinnom, ‘The Context and Origins of Lingua Franca’, in Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact — Pidgins — Creoles (Tu¨bingen, 1977), 14. 120 Bates, Touring in 1600, 49–50; Anthony Pagden, ‘Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge, 2002), 44–5. 121 Alessandro Citolini, Lettera in difesa de la volgar lingua (Venice, 1540), 4r; Bertele`, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli, 226.

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refers to any language used to facilitate communication between speakers of different mother tongues. In this latter sense, a lingua franca is a vehicular language, a contact language, an international language (and in certain circumstances an interlanguage), that is a language that is used ‘beyond its home base and traditional linguistic boundaries’ as a ‘common medium of communication’.118 It is important to distinguish between these two types of lingua franca, though medieval and early modern sources rarely do. Indeed, there are repeated references in Mediterranean documents to a lingua franca or franco generically, which refers not to the pidgin Lingua Franca, but rather to some variant of Spanish or Italian, such as the ‘colonial Venetian’ that was a by-product of the city’s influence in the eastern Mediterranean.119 I shall begin with lingua franca as a vehicular language. Latin had functioned for centuries as the scholarly, diplomatic and ecclesiastical lingua franca of western Christendom. Whilst Latin retained importance as an ecclesiastical and intellectual language, and was occasionally still used in diplomacy, European vernaculars had triumphed by the early modern period. French and, even more, Italian came to supplant Latin as the lingua franca: an English book of 1578 reported, ‘Once every one knew Latin . . . now the Italian is as widely spread’.120 Alessandro Citolini wrote in 1540 that Italian

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122 ‘Relazione di Giacomo Soranzo’, 293, 303, ‘Relazione di Giovanni Michieli’, 405, 411–12, ‘Relazione di Francesco Contarini’, 159, and ‘Relazione di Marcantonio Correr’, 590, 593, all in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, i, Inghilterra, ed. Firpo. 123 Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge, 2005), 163–70, 210–18; Manfred Pfister, ‘Inglese Italianato — Italiano Anglizzato: John Florio’, in Ho¨fele and von Koppenfels (eds.), Renaissance Go-Betweens, 41–2; Jason Lawrence, Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian? Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). 124 Paola Subacchi, ‘Italians in Antwerp in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’, in Hugo Soly and Alfons K. L. Thijs (eds.), Minderheden in Westeuropese steden (16de–20ste eeuw) (Brussels, 1995), 74; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, ii, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siaˆn Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992), 165. 125 Francesco Bruni, ‘Italiano all’estero e italiano sommerso: una lingua senza impero’, Nuova rivista di letteratura italiana, iii (2000), 231–2; Bruno Dudan, Il dominio veneziano di Levante (1938; Venice, 2006), 148–9. 126 Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago (Oxford, 1687), 32–4; Francesco Piacenza, L’egeo redivio (Modena, 1688), 273–4. 127 Nereo Vianello, ‘ ‘‘Lingua franca’’ di Barberia e ‘‘lingua franca’’ di Dalmazia’, Lingua nostra, xvi (1955), 67–8; Gianfranco Folena, ‘Introduzione al veneziano ‘‘de la` da mar’’ ’, Bolletino dell’Atlante linguistico del Mediterraneo, x–xii (1968–70), 357–8.

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Evidence of Italian’s broad popularity in the early modern period abounds. In England, Italian was regularly used at the royal court since few Europeans knew English,122 and was studied widely in Tudor and Stuart England.123 It was in use in Rudolph II’s court, was the language of commerce in sixteenthcentury Antwerp, and in distant Poland it functioned as a bridge language.124 In the eastern Mediterranean the use of Italian was widespread, because of both the long-standing commercial and political importance of peninsular states in the region, and its status as the most ‘precocious and stable’ print and literary language. This was particularly true in areas that had been ruled by Venice and Genoa. On Corfu public and commercial affairs were conducted in Italian into the mid nineteenth century, and on Zante in the seventeenth century it was reported that ‘the Italian language is almost as common as the Greek’.125 Even on the Ottoman island of Milos, it was reported that ‘most’ women both spoke and instructed their children ‘in the Italian language’.126 An Italian variant strongly inflected by Venetian was well established in the eastern Adriatic. Sixteenth-century Venetian reports on Dalmatia claimed that ‘all the citizens speak lingua franca’, and that ‘every young man ordinarily knows the Italian language, which they call Franco’.127 In sixteenth-century Ragusa,

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128

Nicolas de Nicolay, The Navigations into Turkie (1585; Amsterdam, 1968), 136r; Ramberti, Libri tre delle cose de Turchi, 4v; also Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, i, 131. 129 Commissiones et relationes Venetae, ii, 1525–1553, ed. Simeon Ljubic´ (Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum meridionalium, viii, Zagreb, 1877), 208; Vianello, ‘ ‘‘Lingua franca’’ di Barberia e ‘‘lingua franca’’ di Dalmazia’, 67–8. 130 Joe Cremona, ‘ ‘‘Accioche´ ognuno le possa intendere’’: The Use of Italian as a Lingua Franca on the Barbary Coast of the Seventeenth Century. Evidence from the English’, Jl Anglo-Italian Studies, v (1997), 52–9; Ettore Rossi, ‘La lingua franca in Barberia’, Rivista delle colonie italiane, ii (1928), 146, 149. 131 Francesco Bruni, ‘Lingua d’oltremare. Sulle tracce del ‘‘Levant Italian’’ in eta` preunitaria’, Lingua nostra, lx (1999), 75, 78. 132 Laura Minervini, ‘L’italiano nell’impero ottomano’, in Emanuele Banfi and Gabriele Ianna`ccaro (eds.), Lo spazio linguistico italiano e le ‘lingue esotiche’ (Rome, 2006); Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), 84; Isabella Palumbo Fossati Casa, ‘Venise, Porte du Levant: aspects linguistiques et e´chos d’Orient a` travers les objets pre´sents dans la maison ve´nitienne au XVIe sie`cle’, in Michel Bozde´mir and Sonel Bosnali (eds.), Contact des langues II: Les mots voyageurs et l’Orient (Istanbul, 2006), 336; Henry Kahane, Rene´e Kahane and Andreas Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (1958; Istanbul, 1988).

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Nicolas de Nicolay noted that Slavonic was the everyday idiom, whilst a ‘certaine broken Italian’ functioned as the institutional and commercial language: men spoke both, but women only the former.128 This gendered quality of language was noted elsewhere as well: in Dalmatia men were versed in Italian, ‘but in their homes they speak the Slavonic language out of respect for the women because few of them understand the Italian language, and even if some woman understands it, she does not want to speak anything but her maternal language’.129 The use of Italian was not limited to the eastern Mediterranean. A type of ‘Levant Italian’ was used as the lingua franca along the Barbary Coast amongst merchants and consular officials well into the seventeenth century. In Tunis, for example, over two-thirds of the documents from the French consulate are in Italian, and it was also used extensively by the English and Dutch consuls.130 When Michelangelo Tilli passed through Tunis in 1688, he noted that he did not need the services of a dragoman, ‘it being common here to speak Italian, though corrupted and full of Spanish and Sicilian words’.131 Italian was also the most common western language in the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, and contributed a large number of loanwords to Turkish. In return Italian adopted hundreds of Arabic, Persian and Turkish words, particularly in areas of persistent contact, such as maritime industries.132 In

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E. Dalleggio d’Alessio (ed.), Relatione dello stato della cristianita` di Pera e Costantinopoli obediente al sommo pontefice romano (Constantinople, 1925), pp. v, 22 n. 1; Anthony Molho, ‘Ebrei e marrani fra Italia e Levante ottomano’, in Corrado Vivanti (ed.), Storia d’Italia: Annali, 11. Gli ebrei in Italia, 2 vols. (Turin, 1996–7), ii, 5. 134 Relatione di Carlo Ranzo gentil’huomo di Vercelli d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Costantinopoli (Turin, 1616), 28; ASV, Archivio proprio Costantinopoli, b. 16, fo. 172r, 20 Dec. 1619; ASV, BAC, b. 275, reg. 392, fo. 123v, 17 Aug. 1607. 135 ASV, Senato Dispacci-Napoli, b. 15, no. 15, 25 May 1599; Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw, trans. Wratislaw, 112; Pedani, In nome del Gran Signore, 25–30; ASV, SDC, b. 107, fo. 431r, 17 Feb. 1628 more veneto. 136 Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome, Urb Lat, r. 836, fo. 418v. 137 Auguste Carayon, Relations ine´dites des missions de la Compagnie de Je´sus a` Constantinople et dans le Levant au XVIIe sie`cle (Poitiers, 1864), 106. 138 ‘Diary of Master Thomas Dallam’, ed. Bent, 36–8. 139 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617), 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1907), ii, 75–9, 91, 101– 2; Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (eds.), Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (New York, 2001), 82–3.

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Istanbul, the official language of the Ottoman Latin-rite community was Italian until the nineteenth century, and Italian was widely used by Ottoman Jewish merchants throughout the empire.133 Italian was de rigueur amongst the seamen of the empire: in the mid sixteenth century, Uluj Ali was said to have spoken ‘the Italian language very well, but he always preferred to reason in Turkish’. Many subsequent kapudanpas¸as spoke Italian fluently as a result of years of contact with seamen for whom it served as a lingua franca.134 If the sultans’ c¸avus¸ (messengers) spoke another language, it was usually Italian, as was the case with other Ottoman officials.135 Italian was also used inside the imperial palace: Pietro Cedolini reported of Sultan Murad III that ‘inside his own seraglio the Italian language is spoken’.136 Glimpses of common Ottomans using Italian abound in historical sources, as when a ‘civil Turk . . . [who] spoke Italian very well’ came to Father Robert Saulger’s aid.137 Because of its widespread use, Italian became the common language of early modern travellers. In Rhodes, several ‘Turks’ asked Thomas Dallam ‘Can ye speake Ittallian, sinyor?’, and it was the means of communication between Dallam and his companions, and both the Turkish- and Greek-speaking inhabitants of the island.138 Fynes Moryson communicated with the janissary assigned ‘to guide and protect me . . . in the Italian tongue’, and during his Levantine sojourn Henry Blount also regularly communicated in Italian.139

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140 Francesco Bruni, ‘Per la vitalita` dell’italiano preunitario fuori d’Italia: I. Notizie sull’italiano nella diplomazia internazionale’, Lingua e stile, xlii (2007). 141 PRO, State Papers Foreign, Turkey 97/14 and 97/15, passim, 1628–37; Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 2nd edn, 12 vols. (1598–1600; Glasgow, 1903–5), v, 265–6, 316–17; vi, 114–15; Veinstein, ‘Ottoman Administration and the Problem of Interpreters’, 607–8; Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford, 2004), 30. 142 Bibliothe`que nationale, MS Franc¸ais 16154, fo. 268r, n.d.; Bertele`, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli, 246 n. 116. 143 De Groot, ‘Dutch Nation in Istanbul’, 132–7; Frans Alexander Ridder van Rappard, Ernst Brinck: eerst secretaris van het Nederlandsche gezantschap te Konstantinopel (Utrecht, 1868). 144 Bruce Alan Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge, 2004), 8; Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, i, 131. 145 ASV, SDC, b. 50, fo. 100r–v, 16 Oct. 1599; J. E. Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean (Richmond, 1996), 77–9. 146 Dakhlia, Lingua franca, 83–4; Anna Makolkin, A History of Odessa, the Last Italian Black Sea Colony (Lewiston, NY, 2004), 123–8.

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Italian was the language of diplomacy throughout the Levant in the early modern period.140 Letters to the Orthodox patriarch or the prince of Transylvania; correspondence between the sultan and the king of Poland, or between harem women and European potentates; imperial commandments and even the 1774 RussoTurkish treaty of Ku¨c¸u¨k Kaynarca; all were written in Italian.141 French, Dutch, English and imperial ambassadors all relied on Italian for their communications with each other, their dragomans and Porte officials.142 A fascinating Album amicorum kept by a member of the Dutch embassy is full of dedications in Italian by both Ottomans and Europeans that bear witness to its function as the diplomatic lingua franca.143 Because of the centuries-long primacy of Italian commerce in the Levant, Italian also functioned as ‘the lingua franca of Mediterranean trade’.144 When English merchants entered the sea after the battle of Lepanto, they generally conducted their business in Italian. Indeed, in 1599 when the English ambassador considered establishing a Protestant church in Istanbul for the English merchants, he concluded that given their linguistic diversity, preaching would be done in Italian, the only language common to them all.145 Savary de Bre`ves reported that in the merchant towns of Egypt and Syria ‘almost everyone speaks Italian’, and as late as the nineteenth century, Italian was still the language of commerce and business in the Russian port of Odessa.146 Italian as a lingua franca reached beyond the

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147 Tavernier, Les six voyages de Turquie et de Perse, ed. Yerasimos, i, 75; Cemal Kafadar, ‘A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima’, Jl Turkish Studies, x (1986), 191; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Trevisan Manuscript (c.1503), MSS Med. & Ren., 26, fo. 31r. 148 Minervini, ‘La lingua franca mediterranea’, 237–8; Whinnom, ‘Context and Origins of Lingua Franca’, 7, 17; Dakhlia, Lingua franca, 42–3. 149 Miguel de Cervantes, The First Part of the Delightful History of the Most Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (New York, 1937), 405. 150 Minervini, ‘La lingua franca mediterranea’, 231; Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2003), 114–15; Bates, Touring in 1600, 49–50; Whinnom, ‘Context and Origins of Lingua Franca’, 8; Manlio Cortelazzo, ‘Che cosa s’intendesse per ‘‘lingua franca’’ ’, Lingua nostra, xxvi (1965), 108–9; Hugo Schuchardt, Pidgin and Creole Languages: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Glen G.

(cont. on p. 74)

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Mediterranean: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier attended a feast in Iran and conversed with a cleric who ‘spoke Italian very well’; a Dutch merchant in Java spoke Italian with an Ottoman who had traded in Venice; and Vasco da Gama found a pilot in Malindi (Kenya) who spoke Italian.147 In addition to Italian, the much-studied and debated Romance pidgin Lingua Franca was also an important, if more elusive, component of Mediterranean communication. The origins of the Lingua Franca date from the expansion of western European merchants, pilgrims, crusaders and travellers into the traditionally graecophone and arabophone regions of the Mediterranean, but probably did not really take root until after the Fourth Crusade. Though some contemporaries and subsequent scholars held ‘that Lingua Franca was merely Italian, badly spoken’, this view has now been discredited; however, there is ample evidence that reporters did not distinguish clearly between Lingua Franca and Levant Italian.148 Whilst sometimes confused with Italian, Lingua Franca was, as Cervantes described in Don Quixote, ‘a language which in all Barbary and Constantinople, is usually spoken by the Moors to their captives, and is neither Arabian, Spanish, nor of any other nation, but rather a mixture of all languages, wherewith all of us understand one another’.149 Lingua Franca masks several ‘different linguistic realities’: it was a Romance hybrid language characterized by unconjugated verbs and uninflected nouns, with a vocabulary dominated by Italian (particularly Venetian and Genoese) in the eastern Mediterranean, and Spanish (Castilian and Catalan) in the western half of the sea, supplemented with many loanwords from Arabic, Slavonic, Greek and Turkish.150

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III This whirlwind overview raises important questions about communication and the functioning of language in the early modern Mediterranean. Based on impressionistic evidence drawn from numerous archival and published sources, it is clear that one of (n. 150 cont.)

Gilbert (London, 1980), 65–88; Christian Foltys, La Lingua Franca: consideracions crı´tiques, trans. Sybille Hunzinger (Girona, 2006), 44–5. 151 Whinnom, ‘Context and Origins of Lingua Franca’, 12–13. 152 Dakhlia, Lingua franca, 71–8; Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006), 210. 153 Dakhlia, Lingua franca, 70, 199; Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage, 171, 180; Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 114–15.

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Diego de Hae¨do’s early seventeenth-century report on Algiers is one of the first discussions of Lingua Franca. Like all Mediterranean ports, Algiers was characterized by a dizzying array of languages, but Lingua Franca was the only idiom able to bridge the city’s diverse linguistic communities. He writes: ‘This speaking Frankish is so common that there is no house where it is not used. There is no Turk nor Moor, neither big nor small, man or woman, even the children, that more or less (and the majority of them very well), does not speak it’.151 As de Hae¨do suggests, the use of Lingua Franca was not limited to public spaces; it was also essential for domestic communication — women and children used it to communicate with household slaves, and Francisco Delicado describes a similar hybrid language in use amongst prostitutes in Rome’s many brothels.152 Lingua Franca was particularly common in the Mediterranean’s slave bagnios. In 1640, Emanuel d’Aranda reported that there were twenty-two languages spoken amongst his five hundred fellow slaves in Algiers. Despite the fact that their mother tongue may have been Arabic or Turkish, masters used the hybrid language as a means to communicate with their slaves. Slaves learned Lingua Franca quickly since ‘misunderstood instructions’ resulted in ‘three or four bangs with the Crudgel over the back’ or ‘three or four blows over the face with [the master’s] fist’. Since they hailed from all over the Mediterranean, Africa and northern Europe, slaves also communicated amongst themselves in Lingua Franca.153

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154

Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Jack, 122–3. Claire Kramsch, ‘From Communicative Competence to Symbolic Competence’, Mod. Lang. Jl, xc (2006), 249–52; Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 2–4; Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 374. 156 Wansbrough, ‘Diplomatica siciliana’, 16; Marina Rustow, ‘Language, Power, and Cultural Transmission: Sicilian Jews and the Polyglot Phenomenon’, unpubd paper; Claire Kramsch (ed.), Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives (London, 2002), 1–5 (editor’s intro.). 155

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the fundamental elements of the region’s linguistic ecology was its multilingual character. The relatively small stratum of language intermediaries has rightly received much attention for its role in navigating this complex linguistic world. This should not, however, obscure other elements in the Mediterranean’s world of communication. The sea’s fluid boundaries, the widespread mobility of people across its waterways, the intense rhythm and range of exchanges, all created a connected environment characterized by a rich landscape of language. Whilst this could be surprising and even disorientating to travellers and other outsiders unprepared for the level of linguistic variety, it was commonplace to the region’s inhabitants. In the Mediterranean, communities were almost invariably multilingual, particularly on the sea’s islands and along its coastal areas, and many individuals were themselves polyglot. Some clarification is required here. We began with Lady Montagu’s observation of Istanbul’s polyglot population: ‘They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it’.154 This describes a quintessential multilingual environment, with numerous competing languages and varying levels of ability in using them. When speaking of multilingualism, I am not suggesting a modern ideal of language mastery or proficiency. Rather, what is at play is ‘communicative competence’: that is, the process of negotiating effective communication.155 In this multilingual environment, communication was a question not of fluency but rather of necessity, where language was a ‘tool for getting . . . things done’, for addressing the ‘immediate exigencies of communication’.156 This is evident in the famous figure of Christopher Columbus, who ‘was used to speaking a thousand languages badly’, and could ‘not express himself correctly in any of them’, and more prosaically in Hugo of Trimberg’s observation during the

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157 Calvet, Towards an Ecology of World Languages, 96–8; Consuelo Varelo, Cristo´bal Colo´n: retrato de un hombre (Madrid, 1992), 67–8; Bischoff, ‘Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages’, 216. 158 Braunmu¨ller and Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism, 3. 159 Whinnom, ‘Context and Origins of Lingua Franca’, 15.

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thirteenth century that ‘many people whose purse, hand, and stomach are empty are forced to learn’ languages.157 There were many moments when cultural and linguistic clarity were crucial, such as translating a document or interpreting in a formal diplomatic or critical commercial setting. In these instances in which precision was essential, intermediaries were regularly engaged of necessity. Such circumstances were exceptional, however. The more mundane, quotidian reality of communication in an environment characterized by great linguistic diversity was that individuals who might often not be able to pass a simple modern language examination nonetheless developed an ability to bridge these linguistic differences well enough to achieve their primary objective, ‘effective communication’.158 Language ability in the Mediterranean existed along a spectrum: some individuals and communities used multiple languages well and were able to communicate in them with facility; indeed, evidence suggests that this was reasonably common in numerous contexts. Others just got by, which was probably equally characteristic. And there were certainly people who were effectively limited to their birth tongue. Thus individuals in the early modern Mediterranean were multilingual not in the sense that they were polyglots who had mastered multiple languages, but rather that they were able to navigate this vibrant linguistic world through varying levels of ability in one or more regional languages, a lingua franca, or even through the use of gesture.159 One final example may illustrate how the multilingualism I am describing actually functioned on the ground. In 1598 Agostino Anastasio was sent from Venetian Corfu to the mainland near Butrint to investigate rumours of an outbreak of plague. In the course of his inquiry, he encountered ‘a principal Turkish Gentleman’ from the neighbouring Ottoman lands. The two men conversed at some length about reports of plague in the region and in Istanbul, with Anastasio speaking his native Greek, and the Ottoman ‘always responding in the Turkish language’. Each man clearly understood in some fashion his interlocutor’s language, but preferred to speak in his own native idiom,

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

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Brigham Young University

Eric R. Dursteler

160 Genika Archeia tou Kratous, Archeia Nomou Kerkyras, Enetokratia, b. 4, fos. 569r–580r, 1 Aug. 1598.

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until the end of the dialogue, when the Ottoman addressed some final words to Anastasio ‘in the Greek language’.160 Undeterred by their linguistic differences, and notwithstanding their capacity to understand but only limited ability to speak the other’s language, these two men were able to meet the ‘immediate exigencies of communication’ — in this case to establish that there were several cases of plague in the area that were of concern to both Venetian and Ottoman officials. As the heirs of linguistic nationalism, it is difficult for us to conceive of a context in which multilingualism was the norm, where there were no efforts to impose linguistic homogeneity, and in which language was a marker of identity but not to the exclusion of other elements. The early modern world was a linguistically richer and more complex age than our own, and this was accepted and even celebrated as the norm, rather than being perceived as disorientating. Linguistic difference was a fundamental and familiar feature that did not necessarily function as a cultural barrier between the sea’s multiplicity of peoples. This has serious implications for how we conceive of the Mediterranean itself: rather than a space of cultural intersection, where diverse cultures exist to be bridged or mediated, multilingualism helps us to perceive more accurately an early modern Mediterranean world characterized by unity and connectivity.