Machiavelli, Islam and The East: Reorienting The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Machiavelli, Islam and the East
Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought
Edited by Lucio Biasiori

and Giuseppe Marcocci
Machiavelli, Islam and the East
Lucio Biasiori · Giuseppe Marcocci
Editors
Machiavelli, Islam
and the East
Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political
Thought
Editors
Lucio Biasiori Giuseppe Marcocci
Scuola Normale Superiore Exeter College, University of Oxford
Pisa, Italy Oxford, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-53948-5 ISBN 978-3-319-53949-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937936
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
A one-day workshop entitled ‘Machiavelli, Islam and the East’ was held
at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, on 6 May 2013, when a group
of colleagues gathered to celebrate the fifth centenary of The Prince by
discussing overlooked features of its author’s contribution to the founda-
tion of modern political thought. The event was organized in the frame-
work of the FIRB-Futuro in Ricerca 2008 research project ‘Beyond the
Holy War’ (2010–2014), of which Giuseppe Marcocci was the Principal
Investigator, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities
and Research.
We are grateful to the staff of the Scuola Normale Superiore for mak-
ing the workshop possible. Its success was ensured by the active pres-
ence of a number of scholars who do not contribute to this volume, but
presented or commented on papers, chaired sessions, or took part in the
general discussion. They are: Silvia Berti, Giancarlo Casale, Valentina
Lepri, Michele Olivari, Géraud Poumarède, Adriano Prosperi, Maria
Elena Severini, Vasileios Syros, Alberto Tonini and Andrea Trentini.
At the same time we also wish to express our gratitude to Muzaffar
Alam, Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu, Carlo Ginzburg, Kaya Şahin and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, who joined this book project at a later stage.
We owe the opportunity and honour to publish this volume with
Palgrave Macmillan to the generous interest of Peter Cary and Molly
Beck, Commissioning Editors for History. We could not have desired
v
vi Preface
better support than that Jade Moulds and Oliver Dyer, Assistant Editors
for History, provided, or for greater patience on their part. They all
made our editorial work a real pleasure.
The reference edition used in this volume for Machiavelli’s writings in
English translation is The Chief Works and Others, edited and translated
by Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1989). Transliteration of Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian fol-
lows the Library of Congress system, except Muzaffar Alam’s and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam’s chapter, which uses the Steingass system. Conversely,
Aydoğdu’s chapter opts for modern Turkish orthography. Special thanks
to Elisabetta Benigni, Yasemin Köle and Kaya Şahin for their linguistic
assistance.
Pisa, Italy Lucio Biasiori

Oxford, UK Giuseppe Marcocci
Contents
1 Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli 1

Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part I From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince

and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad
to Florence and Back 17
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio

and the Sixteenth-Century Debate About War 37
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians 61

Carlo Ginzburg
Part II Religions and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the

Lawgiver Before and After Machiavelli 79
Pier Mattia Tommasino
vii
viii Contents
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a

Mughal Emperor 105
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli, the Iberian Explorations and the Islamic

Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India
(Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) 131
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part III Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde

Muṣṭafā and Connected Political Cultures in the
Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century 157
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction

of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century
Ottoman World 177
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the

Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the
Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean 199
Elisabetta Benigni
Bibliography 225
Index 253
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Lucio Biasiori is Balzan Prize Post-Doc Fellow at the Scuola Normale

Superiore, Pisa, and a former Fellow at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard
University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2014–2015). His
research encompasses the cultural and religious history of early modern
Europe. He is the author of a number of articles in international scien-
tific journals on the exiling of Italian heretics in the sixteenth century,
and Machiavelli. His last book is Nello scrittoio di Machiavelli: Il Principe
e la Ciropedia di Senofonte (2017).
Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History (European
and Extra-European, 1450-1800) at the University of Oxford and a
Fellow at Exeter College. He was visiting professor at the University of
Lisbon (2009), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
(2013) and the European University Institute, Florence (2016). His
research focuses on the Iberian world and Renaissance historiography.
His most recent book is Indios, cinesi, falsari: Le storie del mondo nel
Rinascimento (2016).
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian

Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His main
research interests are the history of religious and literary cultures in
pre-colonial northern India, the history of Indo-Persian travel accounts
and the comparative history of the Islamic world. His most recent
monographs are The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–
1800 (2004) and, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in
the Age of Discovery, 1400–1800 (2007). He is also editor (with Sanjay
Subrahmanyam) of the volume Writing the Mughal World: Studies on
Culture and Politics (2011).
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu is Assistant Professor of Political History at the
Kırklareli University. She is a specialist in the late Ottoman period and mod-
ern Turkey, with a particular interest in the history of political thought and
military history. She is the editor of Ferit Kam, Avrupa Mektuplari (2000),
as well as (with İsmail Kara) of Namık Kemal, Omanlı modernleşmesinin
meseleleri: Siyaset, hukuk, din, iktisat, matbuat, vol. I (2005).
Elisabetta Benigni is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Mediterranean
Literature at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on intellec-
tual and literary contacts between the Arabic and southern European cul-
ture, with a specific interest in the modern period. She was a fellow at the
Italian Academy at Columbia University (2015), as well as at the Forum
Transregionale Studien in Berlin (2012). She is the author of Il carcere
come spazio letterario: Ricognizioni sul genere dell’adab al-suğūn nell’Egitto
tra Nasser e Sadat (2009), and the editor (with Michael Allan) of “Lingua
Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”, a special issue of Philological
Encounters (2017).
Carlo Ginzburg is Professor Emeritus of Italian Renaissance Studies
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of
History of European Cultures at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.
His scholarly interests range from art history to literary studies, and the
theory of historiography. His publications include classics such as The
Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980)
and The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth &
Seventeenth Centuries (1983), as well as collection of essays like Clues,
Editors and Contributors xi
Myths and the Historical Method (1989), History, Rhetoric, and Proof
(1999), Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (2012).
Vincenzo Lavenia is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at
the University of Macerata. He is a specialist of early modern Catholic
Europe, especially Italy and Spain, with a particular interest in religious
and church history, the Inquisition, theology and the justification of war.
He is the author of the monograph L’infamia e il perdono: Tributi, pene
e confessione nella teologia morale della prima età moderna (2004), and
the editor (with Adriano Prosperi and John Tedeschi) of the Dizionario
storico dell’Inquisizione, 4 vols. (2010) and of the Storia del cristianesimo,
vol. III, L’età moderna (2015).
Kaya Şahin is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at the Indiana
University Bloomington. He is a scholar of the early modern Ottoman
Empire, with a particular interest in history writing, governance, reli-
gious and confessional identity, as well as cross-cultural exchanges.
His first book is entitled Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman:
Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (2013).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed
Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He
is also long-term visiting professor of Early Modern Global History at the
Collège de France in Paris. A specialist in Eurasian history, early modern
empires and, more generally, forms of ‘connected histories’, his publica-
tions include Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early
Modern World (2011) and Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness
and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (2012). His last book is Europe’s
India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (2017).
Pier Mattia Tommasino is Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia
University, New York. His research focuses on the linguistic, textual,
bibliographical and religious relations between southern Europe and
the Muslim World, especially on the Italian and Latin translations of
the Qur’ān, as well as on the diffusion of Italian language and books in
the early modern Muslim Mediterranean. An English translation of his
first book, L’Alcorano di Macometto: Storia di un libro del Cinquecento
europeo (2013), is under preparation.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
One day, sometime in the second half of the sixteenth century, the
Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) was presented with a
dilemma. The arrival of a tall, blond young man from Europe did not
pass unnoticed in Fatehpur Sikri, the city in which the Mughal court was
located at that time. Somehow, the stranger managed to gain access to
Akbar, telling him an extraordinary tale. The emperor found himself in
a quandary: should he believe the unexpected guest, or put him to death
as an insolent trickster? It was not only the letter that the visitor bore, in
which Queen Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603) proposed an alli-
ance with the Mughal emperor in order to put a stop to the spread of
Spanish Jesuits in Asia, that unsettled Akbar; even more disturbing was
the stranger’s claim to be the emperor’s very own relation. It was on that
occasion that Akbar learnt that, in fact, his grandfather Bābur (1483–
1530), the first Mughal emperor (r. 1526–1530), had a sister, whose
trace had been lost, and then even her memory. This sister’s name was
L. Biasiori (*) 
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
G. Marcocci (*) 
Exeter College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Biasiori and G. Marcocci (eds.), Machiavelli, Islam and the East,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_1
2 L. Biasiori and G. Marcocci
Qara Köz, but the European young man, who was actually a Florentine
by the name of Niccolò Vespucci, knew her as Angelica. Qara Köz/
Angelica had been kidnapped by an Uzbek warlord and, after various
vicissitudes in which she changed hands, brought to the court of the shah
of Persia. From there she was sent to Istanbul, after which she had been
accompanied to Florence by Antonino Argalia, a condottiero who had
made his fortune in the service of the Ottoman Empire under the name
of Pasha Avcalia the Turk. As a young man in his native city of Florence,
Argalia had been close friends with Niccolò “il Machia”—Machiavelli,
the future author of The Prince—and Ago (Agostino) Vespucci, a cousin
of the celebrated Amerigo, from whom the New World discovered
by Christopher Columbus was to take its name a few years later. This
very Niccolò Vespucci, who in the second half of the sixteenth century
entwined the threads of this account before a disoriented Akbar, was the
son of Angelica and her last lover, Ago Vespucci. Thus, the double life of
Qara Köz directly linked the greatest Mughal emperor to Machiavelli’s
Florence and, through Amerigo Vespucci, to the discovery of America.
This bizarre story does not originate from some archival source. It is
actually the web of relations that provides the basis for the plot of Salman
Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008), a title that alludes
to Qara Köz, alias Angelica.1 The work blends fictional and factual
elements, in a continuous flow of names, pseudonyms, places, digressions
and fragmentary tales.2 A case in point is Niccolò “il Machia”, a c haracter
modelled on the historical figure of the famous Florentine secretary—
including his daily tiffs with his wife Marietta. Niccolò is presented
as a man who fully identifies with the political life of his city, which
Rushdie reveals chiefly through his eyes. Here we have a sympathetically
portrayed Machiavelli, the author aiming to redeem his image from the
centuries-old stratification of stereotypes that have made his name a
“synonym for deviousness, cynicism and realpolitik”.3
Rushdie’s is only one of a long series of representations of Niccolò
Machiavelli (1469–1527) that have moulded his myth. At the same time,
the novel outlines a framework of increasing exchanges and connections
on a Eurasian scale, with significant links to America, which has been
neglected as a means of more adequately situating Machiavelli’s writ-
ings in the historical context of their production and reception. Clearly,
Rushdie is interested in finding a literary device to establish a relation
between two ideal settings for his postmodern novel: the Mughal court,
which was famous for its religious tolerance at the time of Akbar, and
1 INTRODUCTION: REORIENTING MACHIAVELLI 3
Renaissance Florence. The present volume, by contrast, while offer-

ing a reconstruction that considers the premises and circulation of
Machiavelli’s literary output in a geography of cross-cultural interactions
not so different from Rushdie’s, replaces fiction with philology and his-
torical research.
Reorienting Machiavelli entails restoring the centrality of his encoun-
ter with Islam and the East, a term packed with implications. Here,
we use the phrase to refer to the productive intersection of the physi-
cal and political reality of Asia with the vague knowledge of it shared
by many, although not all, of the Europeans who wrote about it in the
early modern period. In those centuries of broadening geographical per-
spective, Machiavelli’s works emerged as a much more effective tool to
compare events and processes on a world scale than has been previously
recognised. Furthermore, comparison with other cultures and traditions
increasingly helped those writings to escape the “black legend” surround-
ing them and, among other things, make their way in eighteenth century
Europe. As this volume demonstrates, reflection on Machiavelli himself
was transformed by the contact of his writings with Islam and the East.
Taking into account these features of the Machiavellian legacy allows us
to understand in a less linear and teleological way his crucial contribu-
tion to the foundations of modern political thought, which is typically
reduced to a process entirely limited to the West.4 Moreover, careful
scrutiny of evidence found in Machiavelli’s work of interest in Islam and
the East, as well as a recreation of significant fragments of their reception,
demonstrate the extent to which The Prince and Machiavelli’s other com-
positions can be read as pieces of a wider Eurasian mosaic. Between the
late Middle Ages and the early modern period, this mosaic was already
characterised by incessant political communication across linguistic,
cultural and religious borders.
We seek to reclaim the complex and multiform nature of Machiavelli’s
works, with respect to their origins, targets and spread. Moreover, we
wish to bring to light the multiplicity of possible readings that his pages
have suggested over the centuries. To do so, we must move beyond
the simplifications that even today reduce Machiavelli’s thought to a
flat anthology of maxims for governance, or, worse still, wrongly pre-
sent him as a theorist of the supposed superiority of western values now
threatened by an unavoidable “clash of civilizations” whose ugliest face is
Daesh.5
Hence, this volume takes a different tack. The substance of

Machiavelli’s ideas cannot be encapsulated in phrases and slogans, and
the rich reserve of references found on his pages has hardly been fully
exploited. Moreover, if his writings quickly circulated round the globe,
albeit through tortuous paths that, in the main, await reconstruction,
this was partly due to his claims concerning Muslim powers. These are
discussed here as manifestations of a shared political and cultural space
with the Mediterranean at the centre, but also encompassing the main
states and kingdoms in Europe. In other words, we aim to rethink
Machiavelli within an open and global Renaissance, which was the out-
growth of interactions with a variety of cultures excluded from the tradi-
tional interpretation of it as a quintessentially European movement.6 We
also hope to re-establish the connections between Machiavelli’s reflec-
tions and the Islamic world, which predate by several centuries the trans-
lation of his compositions in north Africa, the Middle East and south
Asia.7
Recent scholarship has signalled the continuity that existed between
Renaissance Europe and the Islamic world.8 Yet this important revi-
sion has thus far failed to assign a place either to political thought or to
Machiavelli, who lived in an epoch marked by the Ottoman advance in
the Mediterranean and the emergence of two other Muslim empires—
the Safavid Empire in Persia and the Mughal Empire in India.9 As
Margaret Meserve has aptly observed, “thinking about Turks with-
out thinking of and objecting to their religion was something that few
humanists were willing or even able to attempt. Machiavelli was probably
the first to do so in total seriousness”.10 Indeed, Machiavelli does this
with every political configuration pertaining to the Muslim world.
Meserve rightly considers Chapter  4 of The Prince.11 There we find
a comparison between the Ottoman Empire and France, significantly
inserted after mention of the eastern conquests of Alexander the Great,
a key figure in the pantheon of shared political references in Eurasian
culture. Machiavelli contrasts the “monarchy of the Turk”, “governed by
one ruler” while “the others are his servants” and therefore more dif-
ficult to gain but easier to hold, with the French Kingdom, whose ruler
“is placed amidst a long-established multitude of lords acknowledged by
their own subjects and loved by them”, making it a princedom easy to
gain but difficult to hold.12 And if the alliance between these two pow-
ers in the following decades may also be seen as transferring to reality
Machiavelli’s pragmatic approach to the Ottoman Empire, without any
negative connotation as a religious enemy, it is no accident that original

readings of references to the Islamic world found in The Prince and the
Discourses on Livy emerged in sixteenth century French culture.13
More generally, despite an intermittently intense military confronta-
tion between Christian Europe and the new Ottoman power, from the
sixteenth century on the calls for crusading became more and more
rhetorical, leading to a reshaping of relations in ways that usually went
beyond religious war.14 This shift as regards the Islamic world is also
demonstrated by Machiavelli’s treatment of the Mamluk Sultanate,
which was to collapse before the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. In
Chapter 19 of The Prince, concerning the manner in which its ruler was
elected, the Mamluk regime is considered together with “the Christian
papacy, which cannot be called either a hereditary princedom or a new
one, because the descendants of the old prince are not his heirs and do
not rule by inheritance”.15
Religion is without question a major preoccupation in Machiavelli’s
political thought, both as an instrument of rulership (in The Prince) and
for its contribution to civic cohesion and the impulse to perform valor-
ous acts in war (especially in the Discourses). Yet rather than Christianity,
Machiavelli had in mind the ancient religion of the Romans. Partly for
this reason, it was the Discourses, thanks to the continuity it suggests
between ancient Romans and modern Ottomans, that was a watershed in
European thinking on the Islamic empires and, in particular, “the ruler
of Turkey” who, as Machiavelli writes in a poem written around 1522,
“sharpens his weapons (auzza l’armi)”—a reference to the threaten-
ing intentions of Sultan Süleymān (r. 1520–1566), who in the next few
years laid siege to Vienna (1529), after inflicting severe defeats on the
army of the Holy Roman Empire.16 More than in The Prince, which does
however show admiration for the unity of the Ottoman army (“anyone
who assails the Turk”, one reads in Chapter 4, “must reckon on finding
a united country and must depend more on his forces than on revolt by
others”), it is in the Discourses that the description of the wars waged
by the Ottomans, reinforced by detailed reference to recent episodes,
thanks to the information that Machiavelli gathered from some “who
come from his land”, gains in depth.17 Specifically, the idea of continu-
ity between the military valour of the Romans and the Ottomans was
plainly advanced. This notion was especially shocking in the context of
Renaissance competition among the major European powers for the
legacy of the greatness of Rome. For instance, in Chapter 30 of Book
I it is said that “a prince (…) should go personally on his campaigns,

as at first the Roman emperors did, as in our times the Turk does, and
as prudent rulers always have done and now do”.18 Or, Chapter 19 of
Book I praises the alternation of princes who love war or peace, embod-
ied by the succession of the Ottoman sultans Meḥmed II, Bāyezīd II
and Selīm I, “the present ruler”, because it would confirm that “after an
excellent prince a weak prince can maintain himself. (…) So those princes
are weak who do not give constant attention to war”: it was the same
model, Machiavelli argues immediately after, that had made the birth of
the Roman power possible, since “the ability (virtù) of Romulus” was
followed by “the arts of peace” of Numa Pompilius, and then by the
“courage (ferocità)” of Tullus Hostilius.19
The association between the Romans and the Ottomans, particularly
between their military successes, was picked up in the Commentario de le
cose de’ turchi by the Italian humanist Paolo Giovio, issued in 1532, the
year after the Discourses, by the same publisher, Antonio Blado in Rome.
Machiavelli’s dig about the religion of the Romans that, though false
and contrary to Christianity, led their captains and soldiers to esteem
“the honor of the world” and to be “fiercer in their actions” (Book II,
Chapter 2) and Giovio’s on “military discipline”—“regulated with such
justice and severity by the Turks that we may say that theirs surpasses
that of the ancient Greeks and the Romans”, thus making them “bet-
ter than our soldiers”—provoked irritated responses and vibrant debate.
This association of the Ottomans with the Romans was also taken up by
other authors in sometimes surprising ways.20 More generally, it left a
lasting mark on the political culture of the early modern world, reveal-
ing, as John Najemy noted several years ago, how unfounded are those
interpretations that highlight the supposedly central role of Machiavelli
in elaborating an idea of Europe by contrast with Asia, fostered by the
opposition between the historical trajectory of the former, characterised
by the presence of many small states fighting each other, and the latter,
distinguished by the appearance of great empires.21
If it was precisely the positive opinion on the Ottoman Empire and its
association with ancient Rome that caused intense and contrasting reac-
tions, that is because it hit where it hurts those Iberian humanists who
were celebrating the construction of the global empires of Portugal and
Spain.22 Readers of this volume need not, then, be surprised to learn that
the earliest documented reading and possession of Machiavelli’s work
in America, in the late sixteenth century, was profoundly related to the
debate about the “Turk”, which in the following decades was to become
the main term of reference through which the other Islamic empires
were observed and understood—and sometimes openly admired—by
European authors. In this way, Machiavelli’s writings, and The Prince in
particular, started circulating across the Islamic world well before their
earliest translations, from the late eighteenth century on, with notable
results on both the glossary and the categories adopted to express his
ideas, as well as their effects on the making of modern Muslim political
thought.
The current volume is divided into three sections, each of which con-
sists of three chapters. The contributing authors, who were given wide
latitude with regard to approach, produced a compelling range of stud-
ies, from the history of reading to the analysis of the translations, the
investigation of the textual interpolations and reversals, but also exercises
of comparison between Machiavelli and his contemporaries.
The first section of the volume (From Readings to Readers) probes
the link between some Arabic backgrounds of Machiavelli’s education
and the reception of his writings by authors who dealt with Islam and
the Ottoman Empire after him. The Prince was greatly indebted to the
most widespread Pseudo-Aristotelian work in late medieval Europe, the
Kitāb sirr al-asrār, written in eighth century Syria and translated into
Latin and many European languages under the title Secretum secreto-
rum (Secret of Secrets). Unlike the European tradition of the “mirror for
princes” (specula principum) and similarly to The Prince, in the Kitāb
sirr al-asrār Aristotle offers to his pupil, the future Alexander the Great,
pragmatic advice on the decisions to be made in concrete situations. As
Lucio Biasiori demonstrates in his chapter, the presence of this Muslim
source in Machiavelli explains some similarities between The Prince and
Arab political thought, and might also have paved the way for an eas-
ier and more penetrating reception of his writings in the Islamic world,
where they were not perceived as a radical novelty. In the meantime,
they became a point of reference for interpreting and describing the
Ottoman Empire and other Muslim powers, interacting with works that
seemingly belonged to very different cultural and political traditions. If
we follow this thread, moving from Machiavelli’s readings to the writ-
ings by readers of Machiavelli, we can observe to what extent they recov-
ered and developed the cross-cultural comparative potential of The Prince
and the Discourses. Machiavelli’s brief but insightful remarks on politi-
cal, administrative and military aspects of the Islamic world provoked
lively debate and sharp reactions in Italy and Spain—a land where a
deadly attack on the medieval coexistence among the three religions of
the Book (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) had been launched by King
Ferdinand II of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), whom Machiavelli famously
describes as the boldest monarch of his times, acting under the “cloak
of religion”, as he stresses in Chapter  21 of The Prince.23 In his chapter,
Vincenzo Lavenia investigates this line in the sixteenth century reception
of Machiavelli by the Italian humanist Paolo Giovio. A possible acquaint-
ance of the Florentine secretary, Giovio allows us to connect the histori-
cal context in which Machiavelli lived with the earliest reaction to his
writings. Giovio’s importance consists in having grasped Machiavelli’s
ambivalent attitude regarding the Ottomans, which he transformed into a
more general position towards the complex relations between politics and
religion, as well as between just war and empire, in early modern Europe.
There were also a number of Italian and French readers of Machiavelli
who variously readapted his teachings to many questions. In his chapter,
Carlo Ginzburg tracks the re-appropriation of The Prince and, above all,
of the Discourses by sixteenth century French antiquarians, establishing
how their study of classical antiquity—considered as early ethnography,
following in the footsteps of Arnaldo Momigliano—extensively drew on
Machiavelli’s comparative approach. Although its specific focus is not the
Islamic world, this chapter is a cornerstone of the volume, since it dem-
onstrates that the intersection of Machiavelli’s writings with the reflec-
tion on the New World shaped a fresh attitude towards cultural diversity,
which also encompassed the Muslims. This new trend was characterised
by the use of Machiavelli’s remarks on the Romans as a term of com-
parison not only for judging and, sometimes, condemning or rejecting
political and religious novelties emerging from the newly explored lands,
but also for deciphering beliefs and customs in empires with which cen-
turies-old relations, more or less hostile, existed. The creative recovery
of Machiavelli’s writings by European humanists, missionaries and trav-
ellers, in order to establish comparisons, particularly with Islamic pow-
ers, is the main topic of the second section of the volume (Religions
and Empires). The application of quotations and the rephrasing of
Machiavelli’s statements and themes to the Muslim world are considered
as manifestations of the global spread of his works and ideas. An early
example concerns the first translation of the Qur’ān in a European ver-
nacular language by Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, which is included in
the Alcorano di Macometto, published in Venice by Andrea Arrivabene
in 1547. In his chapter, Pier Mattia Tommasino assesses the influence

of the portrait of Muḥammad as an ‘armed prophet’, derived from a
particular reading of The Prince, on this version of the Qur’ān, under-
standing it as a more general turning point in the European representa-
tion of the founder of Islam. Such a process, which involved humanists
and translators before and after Machiavelli, paralleled the assimilation
of Ottoman sultans to Roman emperors, which marked some political
circles at the time of Süleymān, reaffirming significant cultural connec-
tions across the Mediterranean. While in Istanbul the Caesarisation of
the sultan became a tool of legitimation for the Ottoman power, in the
Italian peninsula Muḥammad’s assimilation to a wise lawgiver prepared
the ground for a new, more positive attitude towards the figure of the
prophet, who had hitherto been considered either a trickster or a heretic.
The Machiavellian Muḥammad marked a turning point in the long
tradition of his legend in Europe, intersecting themes and aspirations cir-
culating at the court of the Ottoman sultan. But when Jesuit missionaries
appeared before the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early seventeenth
century, they could not resist the temptation to insert a substantial num-
ber of passages from the dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Duke of Urbino, in the Persian version of a political treatise that one of
them, Jerónimo Xavier, wrote in collaboration with Mulla ‘Abdus Sattar
ibn Qasim Lahauri. As Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam reveal
in their chapter, that work, titled Ādāb al-Saltanat (“Manual for Kings”)
and replete with references to episodes of Eurasian history, then follows
a path very different from that of Machiavelli, trying to provide Jahangir
with an exemplar of a pious prince. This treatise contains our first evi-
dence of passages derived from The Prince in a text written in a Muslim
land. Therefore, it can be seen as a variation on the equivocal literature
produced at the time in Europe by prominent members of the Society of
Jesus, who were engaged in confuting Machiavelli without wholly repu-
diating the ideas and questions on which he had so deeply left his mark
in the political culture of the period.
The dissemination of Machiavelli’s writings following the threads of
their multiple connections with the Islamic world was not restricted to
north Africa and Asia, but took on a global character as early as the six-
teenth century, again by virtue of the magnetic attraction of their pages
on the Turk. In his chapter, Giuseppe Marcocci determines that it was
precisely the association of Machiavelli’s scattered reflections on the
colonies and his insights into the Ottoman Empire that facilitated the
recovery of his works along the itineraries of the Iberian explorations.

Thus, after the early debate in the 1530 and 1540s about the provocative
statement that the Romans owed their greatness to their “false religion”
and the modern heirs of their military valour were not the Christian, but
the Turkish soldiers, we can track traces of the reading of Machiavelli’s
works on a global scale. These range from the peculiar ideas about the
Ottoman sultan expressed by Raffaele Olivi, a Florentine settler in late
sixteenth century Brazil, to the Venetian Nicolò Manuzzi’s intimate
description of the Mughal court, along the lines of the pages in The
Prince on the “monarchy of the Turk”, provided in the various drafts of
the Storia del Mogol, which he composed in India in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries.
Not only European authors, however, used Machiavelli to interpret,
or misinterpret, Islam and the East, as the third and final section of this
volume (Beyond Orientalism) posits, offering a major contribution to
the study of cross-cultural political thought in the early and late modern
period. A bureaucrat and author of historical works, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā
(ca. 1490–1567) was a contemporary of Machiavelli, and together they
can be considered as a case of early modern “parallel lives”. This is what
Kaya Şahin affirms in his chapter. The similarities (and differences)
between these two figures have escaped the notice of those who study
them separately, confining them to distinct cultural traditions. But a
comprehensive exploration of individual trajectories as a special resource
for global history makes it possible to restore many connections between
the topics discussed by Muṣṭafā and Machiavelli, as well as the solutions
they proposed.
The rapid circulation of Machiavelli’s writings across the Islamic world
was followed by their translation into Ottoman Turkish and Arabic from
the second half of the eighteenth century on, thus contributing to the
emergence of a new political vocabulary in the modern Islamic world. In
her chapter, Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu presents the results of her discov-
ery of the first translation of The Prince into Ottoman Turkish among
the manuscripts of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library (Istanbul). The
probable fruit of collaboration between a dragoman called Herbert (to
be identified with Thomas Herbert, a descendant of a Catholic fam-
ily long since emigrated from the British Isles to Constantinople) and
a Turkish assistant, the work was written in a period of crisis for the
Ottoman Empire, which had been weakened by the war against Russia.
The quest for political and military renewal drove Sultan Muṣṭafā III
(r. 1757–1774) to encourage a version of Anti-Machiavel (1740),

a refutation of The Prince written by King Frederick II of Prussia with
Voltaire’s help. The fact that Anti-Machiavel includes the text it criticises
made its translation Machiavelli’s official entrance to the Ottoman world.
A close reading of this manuscript discloses a complex adaptation of The
Prince to the Ottoman political reality: the effort to make this treatise
comprehensible to its new Turkish readers is evident in the translation of
keywords such as “prince”, “state”, or virtù.
A second, fundamental step was the first Arabic translation of The
Prince, conceived in 1832 at the court of Muḥammad ‘Alī (r. 1769–1849)
in Cairo, which was still under Ottoman authority. According to Elisabetta
Benigni’s reconstruction, the translation was connected to Muḥammad
‘Alī’s effort to modernize Egypt through a series of economic, political
and cultural reforms that aimed to emulate those witnessed by Europe,
and ought to be understood in the context of the current Mediterranean
spread of discourse about the idea of the nation in the aftermath of
Napoleonic expeditions. A careful analysis of this translation reveals that
the attempt to adapt The Prince to the first half of nineteenth century
was less determined than in the Ottoman Turkish case, although Islamic
political thought in Arabic confronted completely new concepts, starting
from that of “nation”, which Machiavelli himself contributed to circulat-
ing. In so doing, the basis was also laid for the rise of nationalism across
the Muslim world, which in the past century has contributed to the
emergence of an anti-colonial resistance, but also to the return to the
rhetoric of clash between West and East, whose effects are before us.
Our proposal to reorient Machiavelli, thus, can be read as an invita-
tion to recover historical knowledge concerning the constitutive con-
tribution made by the author of The Prince to the emergence of a new
approach to political and military issues in the Islamic world. Such an
inquiry will take the many divergent directions of a largely forgotten cir-
culation and reception.
Notes
1. S. Rushdie (2008), The Enchantress of Florence (London: Random House).
2. For a short analysis of the novel see D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke (2010),
Salman Rushdie, 2nd ed. (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan): 177–184.
3. We quote Rushdie’s words from an interview about his novel, by J. Kidd,
“A Machiavellian obsession”, The Jerusalem Post, 13 June 2008, 26.
4. The reference is to Q. Skinner (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political

Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press). On this point see also D. Armitage (2013), Foundations of Modern
International Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press), 3–8.
5. Samuel P. Huntington never actually quotes Machiavelli in The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), but the title of
the book review by W. Gungwu, “A Machiavelli for Our Times”, The
National Interest, 46, Winter 1996–1997, 69–73, is telling.
6. Rather than stretching improperly the problematic notion of Renaissance,
as suggested by J. Goody (2010), Renaissances: The One or the Many?
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), we aim to
show that its historical manifestations owe many features to the interac-
tion with non-European cultures.
7. This volume is also a contribution to the study of the translations of The
Prince. On this issue see R. De Pol (ed.) (2010), The First Translations of
Machiavelli’s Prince: From the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi).
8. Among the others, see G. MacLean (ed.) (2005), Re-Orienting the
Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (Houndmills and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan), N. Matar (2009), Europe through Arab Eyes,
1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press), and A. Contadini
and C. Norton (eds) (2013), The Renaissance and the Ottoman World
(Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate). For an overview with a special
focus on Italy see F. Trivellato (2010), “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim
Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work”, Journal of Modern History 82,
no. 1, 127–155.
9. A case in point is the presentation of Machiavelli’s thought along-
side that of Erasmus and Luther, in A. Pippidi (2012), Visions of the
Ottoman World in Renaissance Europe (London: Hurst): 65–118.
Despite its recent publication, the book is heavily indebted to the old
literature about European representations of the Turk. On the three
Islamic empires see D.E. Steusand (2011), Islamic Gunpowder Empires:
Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Boulder: Westview Press).
10. M. Meserve (2008), Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press): 9. See also N. Bisaha
(2004), Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman
Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press): 177–178.
11. It is the author herself who clarifies it in the endnote. See ibidem, 261:
“In his account of Ottoman governance in The Prince, Chapter 4”.
12. N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan
Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London; Duke University Press): Vol. I, 21.
13. For a general overview see S. Anglo (2005), Machiavelli, the First
Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press): 325–373. Machiavelli’s name does
not appear in the recent book by P. Barthe (2016), French Encounters
with the Ottomans, 1510–1560 (London and New York: Routledge).
14. G. Poumarède (2004), Pour en finir avec la croisade: Mythes et réali-
tés de la lutte contre les Turcs aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France). Of course, a fundamental sphere was that of
the relations with the Ottoman Empire, which contributed to the emer-
gence of a new diplomacy in Europe: D. Goffman (2007), “Negotiating
with the Renaissance State: The Ottoman Empire and the New
Diplomacy”, in: V.H. Aksan and D. Goffman (eds), The Early Modern
Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press): 61–74.
15. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 76.
16. Ibidem, Vol. II, 880. The translation has been slightly modified.
17. Ibidem, Vol. I, 21 (The Prince) and 508 (Discourses), respectively.
Machiavelli’s informant is likely to be identified with his nephew
Giovanni Vernacci.
18. Ibidem, Vol. I, 260.
20. P. Giovio (2005), Commentario de le cose de’ turchi, ed. L. Michelacci
(Bologna: Clueb): 169: “La disciplina militar è con tanta giustitia
et severità regulata da’ turchi che si può dir che avanzino quella de gli
antichi greci et romani”. Machiavelli is quoted from his The Chief Works,
Vol. I, 331.
21. J.M. Najemy (2009), “Machiavelli between East and West”, in: D.
Ramada Curto et al. (eds), From Florence to the Mediterranean and
Beyond: Essays in Honour of Anthony Molho (Florence: Olschki): 127–145:
128–129. In particular, Najemy is thinking of the arguments presented
by F. Chabod (1961), Storia dell’idea d’Europa, ed. E. Sestan and A.
Saitta (Bari: Laterza): 49–52, and, more recently, by T. Hentsch (1992),
Imagining the Middle East, trans. F.A. Reed (Montreal: Black Rose
Books): 63–65.
22. A. Prosperi (2010), “La religione, il potere, le élites: Incontri italo-spag-
noli nell’età della Controriforma”, in his Eresie e devozioni, 3 vols. (Roma:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura): Vol. I, 61–85.
Authors’ Biography
Superiore, Pisa, and a former Fellow at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2014–2015). His research encompasses
the cultural and religious history of early modern Europe. He is the author of a
number of articles in international scientific journals on the exiling of Italian her-
etics in the sixteenth century, and Machiavelli. His last book is Nello scrittoio di
Machiavelli: II Principe e la Ciropedia di Senofonte (2017).
Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History (European and

Extra-European, 1450-1800) at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at Exeter
College. He was visiting professor at the University of Lisbon (2009), the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2013) and the European
University Institute, Florence (2016). His research focuses on the Iberian world
and Renaissance historiography. His most recent book is Indios, cinesi, falsari: Le
storie del mondo nel Rinascimento (2016).
PART I
From Readings to Readers

CHAPTER 2
Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought?

The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār
from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
“The Most Popular Book of the Middle Ages”?

Many scholars have speculated on the resemblance between Islamic and
Machiavellian political thought. Answers have been quite varied, how-
ever. Some historians have been satisfied with nationalistic ones: for
instance, translating into French the Raqā’iq al-hilāl fī daqā’iq al-ḥiyal
(“Book of Stratagems”, late thirteenth century), the French-Lebanese
intellectual René Khawam has stated that this work proves the political
ability of Arabic politicians one century before Machiavelli.1 Others, like
Jocelyne Dakhlia, have simply dismissed the problem, deciding “not to
dwell on the pertinence of such an assimilation”.2 More usefully, Antony
Black has looked for “Machiavellian ideas in the Muslim Advice to Kings
literature”, assuming that they “derived from Indo-Iranian sources”, but
has concluded that they were unknown to Machiavelli.3 More recently,
Linda Darling has tried to overcome the impasse by attributing the simi-
larities between western and eastern mirrors for princes—as works giving
L. Biasiori (*) 

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_2
18 L. Biasiori
advice to kings were called in Europe—“to their common origins and

trajectory, however improbable that may be”.4 This chapter will take up
her invitation by tracking as accurately as possible one of these trajec-
tories. It will show that Machiavelli came into contact with the Islamic
political tradition, since one of the Arab mirrors for princes, the Pseudo-
Aristotelian Kitāb sirr al-asrār, was extremely popular in Europe, under
the Latin title Secretum secretorum and left significant traces both in The
Prince and in its reception.5
Thanks to the works of Mahmoud Manzalaoui, Mario Grignaschi,
Charles B. Schmitt, and Steven Williams, we are well informed as to the
intricate process that turned the Kitāb sirr al-asrār into the Secretum
secretorum. From an Aristotelian bedrock, a first version was prob-
ably written in eighth-century Syria under the Umayyad dynasty. Then,
between 850 and 900, Yaḥyá (or Yūḥannā) ibn al-Biṭrīq, a scholar from
Baghdad of likely Byzantine descent—his name meaning John the son of
the Patrician or of the Patriarch, as in the church hierarchy—and belong-
ing to a circle of translators of Greek philosophical works for Abbasid
sultans in Baghdad, wrote a translation “from yunani (Greek) into rumi
(Syriac?) and then finally into Arabic”.6 This version contained political
advices purportedly given by Aristotle to his pupil Alexander the Great
in the form of a letter.7 For the next two centuries, this stage of the text
was continuously reworked and transfigured by the insertion of pieces
concerning a great number of topics, and in particular physiognomy,
medicine and occult science. The Kitāb sirr al-asrār thus became some-
thing more than a mirror for princes: it was a sort of encyclopaedia of the
pseudo-sciences that Arabs attributed to Aristotle.8
It was in this form that the work reached European readers: a short
version was translated into Latin around 1125 by John of Seville
(Johannes Hispalensis), probably a Mozarabic clerk, who dedicated it
to Queen Teresa of Portugal. Almost a century later, the clerk Philip of
Tripoli translated it in its entirety. From that moment on, the Secret of
Secrets became, if not “the most popular book of the Middle Ages”,9
surely “the most widely distributed of all spurious Aristotelian works”,10
with over 500 manuscript copies in European vernacular languages and
34 printed editions between 1472 and 1540 in Latin, Italian, German,
English and French. In this second life, the work had a very intricate
philological transmission, circulating as it did in different languages and
forms. This is particularly true for its Italian reception, which is charac-
terised by an extreme variety of versions and contents.11
2 ISLAMIC ROOTS OF MACHIAVELLI’S THOUGHT? 19
In Renaissance Florence, where Machiavelli lived and wrote, the Secret

of Secrets was extremely widespread: today 23 manuscripts are preserved,
although they were undoubtedly more numerous at the time. Besides
the variety in content, the work often circulated with a different title: De
regimine principum or regum.12 Far from referring only to the political
dimension of the work, the word regimen also comprises medical pre-
cepts, for “no object of this world or of the next can be obtained without
strength and strength depends upon health”.13 The Latin word regimen
could actually refer both to a political order and to an alimentary diet, a
dual meaning that the Italian regime and the French régime still cover.14
Although its fortune declined towards the mid-sixteenth century,15 the
great number of topics that were tackled in the work continued to influ-
ence generations of readers at every social level: some elements of it
were, for instance, incorporated into the books of secrets, collections of
recipes to produce medicines, heal diseases and, more generally, control
the forces of nature.16
From the Reception to the Texts: Connecting

The Prince and Kitāb sirr al-asrār
The decline of the Secret of Secrets and the synchronous rise of The Prince
made the comparison between the two works virtually impossible for
almost four centuries, until the beginning of the last century, when Allan
Gilbert wrote an essay on the general influence of the former text.17
Ten years later, Gilbert published his book on the forerunners of The
Prince, where he rapidly postulated an indirect influence of the Secret of
Secrets on Machiavelli.18 This brilliant hypothesis was rejected the year
after by another Gilbert, Felix, who maintained the idea of an influence
of the Secret of Secrets on medieval mirrors for princes, but ruled it out
from Machiavelli’s horizon on account of the frequent criticism of its
Aristotelian paternity, which eventually undermined its authority.19 One
could have objected that Machiavelli was a man who did not care about
the intellectual origin of an argument. Writing to his friend Francesco
Vettori, he metaphorically answered against every authority principle, “io
non beo paesi”—literally “I do not drink lands”, meaning that he cared
about the content of a bottle of wine rather than about its provenance
(in a letter dated 29 April 1513). Nonetheless, Felix Gilbert’s authori-
tative statement led to an almost total avoidance of any connection
20 L. Biasiori
between the two texts in scholarly works and commentaries. As a result,

it is nowadays unusual to entertain the possibility that Machiavelli might
have read the Secret of Secrets, for it implies situating the roots of a mile-
stone of western political thought in an unfamiliar milieu and thus it
could appear pointlessly provocative or anachronistic. Instead, the pres-
ence of this Islamic contribution in Machiavelli’s works simply places him
in a historically consistent context and at the same time appears to cast
doubt on the idea that his thought had exclusively European origins.20
Consider a man from a generation close to Machiavelli’s, the Florentine
Migliore Cresci. He dedicated to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany,
the Vita del Principe, a patchwork of two works that he evidently con-
sidered perfectly compatible, namely The Prince and the Secret of
Secrets.21 In the Vita del Principe, one could find biblical figures (Moses
and Melchizedek), and political men of ancient (Lycurgus, Numa) and
medieval times (Constantine, Charlemagne) compared with “the false
Muhammad” leader of “the Turks”.22 How was this comparative use of
Machiavelli possible?
During the period that has recently been dubbed the “first global
age”, Machiavelli, before being turned into either a monster of iniq-
uity or a brilliant discoverer of political truths, could be read as an
author having significant connections with a multiplicity of cultures.
For instance, the first generation of European readers of his works was
ready to interpret some passages for understanding and supporting the
contact of Europe with the New Worlds.23 This is particularly evident
in the country where Machiavelli’s works aroused the most vivid reac-
tions, namely France.24 The first French translation of the Discourses
on Livy, that by Jacques Gohory, bears visible traces of this overlapping
between the reflection on Machiavelli and European overseas explora-
tion. Not only did Gohory translate the Historia general y natural de las
Indias (1535) by the Spanish imperial official and chronicler Gonzalo
Fernández de Oviedo,25 but, when dedicating, in 1544, the translation
of the first book of Machiavelli’s Discourses to the bishop of Évreux,
Gabriel Le Veneur, he also points out the potential of this work for a
comparative approach to politics:
Firstly, he reports in a few words the singularity of Roman history accord-

ing to Livy’s description. Then he vividly discusses, on the one side and
on the other, the deepest matters concerning it, finally solving them with
some high political paradox. By doing so, he completely discovers the
secrets of this great government that has conquered and subjugated the
world. But, when the occasion is offered, he talks about Egyptians, Greeks,
Turks, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Englishmen and especially about
the Italian principalities, declaring virtues and vices of all these famous
kingdoms and republics. Therefore, these adages are a true mirror of uni-
versal history (ces devis sont un vray miroir de l’histoire universelle).26
From “the singularity of Roman history”, Machiavelli, dealing with a

“government that has conquered and subjugated the world”, moves
towards a comparative approach to politics with no spatial or chronologi-
cal limits. This cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparatism is an atti-
tude that is extensively exploited in the Secret of Secrets. The fact that the
work was purportedly addressed to Alexander the Great, a king who had
extended his conquest on a quasi-universal scale, was of course an impor-
tant element in this global dimension of political advice. For instance, the
Secret of Secrets often refers to “the books of the kings of India” , where “it
is said that the cause of a monarch ruling his subjects, or being ruled by
them, is merely a strong or a weak mind”.27 In other passages, this Asiatic
element has a still more Machiavellian aspect: “Know that fear of the king
is the peace of the realm. And it is said in the book of the Indians: ‘Let thy
fear in their souls be worse than thy sword in their hearts’”.28 Elsewhere,
the Secret of Secrets—born as it was from “the caliphal elite’s desire to
create as comprehensive as possible an account of the world it ruled, its
causes and its potentialities”29—explicitly suggests the very same compari-
son that shaped Gohory’s reading of Machiavelli’s works:
The Rumi say that there is no harm if a king is miserly to himself but
liberal to his people. And the Indians say that it is right for a king to be
miserly to himself as well as to his people. The Persians contradict the
Indians and say that a king ought to be liberal to himself as well as to
his people. But all of them agree to this, that to be liberal to himself and
miserly to his people is vicious for a king and corrupts his kingdom.30
In Gohory’s interpretation, Machiavelli’s comparative approach exists

side by side with his discovery of the secrets of government. Gohory’s
words are not just a simple reference to the Tacitean tradition of arcana
imperii, but they have naturalistic and scientific implications, being
rooted in the author’s own interest in alchemy and natural philosophy.31
This is evident from Gohory’s dedicatory letter of the French translation
22 L. Biasiori
of The Prince (1571) to the Italian merchant Giovan Francesco Affaitati

from Cremona, a sugar trader between Lisbon and Madeira, also men-
tioned by him in the Instruction sur l’herbe petum (1572), one of the
first European treatises on tobacco.32 Differently from the preface of
the translation of the Discourses, in the dedicatory letter of Le prince de
Nicolas Machiavel secretaire et citoyen florentin, the secret is no longer
that of government but of man, since Machiavelli “seems to have done
much more to describe the secrets of the microcosm (as the ancient wise-
men called man) in his different humours and in all of his passions and
fantasies, than Pliny did in his natural history of the world”. What is, in
Gohory’s view, the ingredient allowing Machiavelli to move from the
secrets du gouvernement—as in the French translation of the Discourses of
1544—to the secrets du microcosme? Gohory identifies it in Machiavelli’s
insistence on free will, “since man by this gift of reason is so subtle that
he frustrates the celestial influences and by his free will he frustrates
physiognomy, of which I have an ancient book attributed to Aristotle
and commented upon by an Arab”.33
We can be certain that Gohory’s book on physiognomy “attributed
to Aristotle and commented upon by an Arab” was precisely the Secret
of Secrets, which devotes many chapters to the scientia magna (“great
science”) that infers the character of a man from his external traits.34
Thanks to his insistence on free will, Machiavelli was therefore able to
build “an art of the interior anatomy of human behaviors (un art de
l’anatomie interieure des moeurs humaines)” avoiding that kind of deter-
minism which the Secret of Secrets conveys. A mirror for princes with
astrological and physiognomical inserts, the Secret was read together with
The Prince, which in turn was considered a sort of modern version of the
Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. Was this interpretation legitimised by the
fact that The Prince bears visible traces of Machiavelli’s meditation on the
Secret of Secrets?
As noted by Gohory, Machiavelli’s defence of man’s free will in
Chapter 25 of The Prince emerges from a close confrontation with the
Secret that strongly recommends paying attention to astrology, “for
although man cannot avoid his fate, yet by knowing it beforehand he
prepares himself for it and makes use of the remedies calculated to avert
it. As people provide themselves with shelter, fuel, furs, and so on, to
defend themselves against the rigours of coming winter”.35 Although
Machiavelli slightly changes the example, to that of man damming up
the river of Fortune, he agrees with the Secret, albeit with that small
difference emphasized by Gohory though: whereas the latter states that

“man cannot avoid his fate”, Machiavelli almost equally separates the
sphere of human liberty from that of necessity:
As I am well aware, many have believed and now believe human affairs so
controlled by Fortune and by God that men with their prudence c annot
manage them (…). Nonetheless, in order not to annul our free will,
I judge it true that Fortune may be mistress of one half our action but that
even she leaves the other half, or almost, under our control. I compare
Fortune with one of our destructive rivers which, when it is angry, turns
the plains into lakes, throws down the trees and the buildings (…) Yet
though such it is, we need not therefore conclude that when the weather is
quiet, men cannot take precautions with both embankments and dykes, so
that when waters rise, either they go off by a canal or their fury is neither
so wild nor so damaging.36
The dialogue between Machiavelli and the Secret continues throughout

Chapter 25 of The Prince:
Limiting myself more to particulars, I say that such princes as I have

described live happily today and tomorrow fall without changing their
natures or any of their traits (…). We find also that of two cautious men,
one carries out his purpose, the other does not. Likewise, we find two men
with two different temperaments equally successful, one being cautious
and the other impetuous. This results from nothing else than the quality of
the times, which is harmonious or not with their procedure.37
Besides the aforementioned necessity for providing shelters against

adversity, the distinction between the two temperaments of the prince
is also present in the Secret and the resemblance between the two texts
clearly appears on reading one Italian manuscript version of the Secret
circulating in Machiavelli’s Florence:
The king must think about the future and prudently arrange for cases that
are going to happen, so that he can more easily handle adverse events.
When the king sees something good or useful, he must do it with discre-
tion, so that he does not appear either lazy or impetuous.38
The choice of a middle way between being lazy and impetuous appar-
ently situates the Secret in the Aristotelian tradition, according to which
virtue is the composition of two extremes. As we have seen, however,
24 L. Biasiori
Alexander’s advisor is not who he purports to be, and thus he distances

himself from the real Aristotle not only for the boldness of his counsels,
but also because he ultimately breaks with the peripatetic golden mean.
In fact, he suggests a behavior that is designed to change according to
the nature of the adversaries and—exactly as does Machiavelli—the
“quality of the time (qualità de’ tempi)”:
Indians are traitors and deceivers and they have no qualms about it.
Persians and Turks are too daring people and highly presumptuous. Fight
therefore with each one of these people according to your capacities (…)
and show or conceal your works following my advices and according to the
quality or disposition of the science of the stars.39
The Secret and the Secretary

Machiavelli’s contemporaries therefore explicitly considered the Secret a
relevant interlocutor of the Florentine secretary and recognised in The
Prince the mark left by this work. But why might Machiavelli have been
attracted by a work entitled Secret of Secrets and circulating under the
name of Aristotle?40 At first glance, the answer may seem simple: a man
who is considered as being the discoverer of the arcana imperii could
not escape the influence of a book in which the author “darkly allude[s]
to certain prohibited and profound mysteries”.41 On 12 July 1513, a
few months before writing The Prince, he wrote to his friend Vettori that
“because it is impossible for us to know the secret of princes (il segreto
loro), we have to judge it from their words, from their actions, and some
part of it we imagine”.42 Therefore, Machiavelli was fascinated by the
presence of a hidden sphere in political actions and a work that promised
to reveal it could have been congenial to him.
There was, however, another aspect that might have aroused
Machiavelli’s interest in the work. The Secret was the only book de
regimine principum that, to borrow Machiavelli’s words in Chapter 15
of The Prince, places emphasis on the “truth of the matter (verità effet-
tuale della cosa)” rather than on “any fanciful notion (immaginazi-
one di essa)”. Apart from some passages that aimed at recommending
to Alexander the ideal goals of rulership, Aristotle was more concerned
with concrete indications for gaining and keeping health and power. The
Secret of Secrets therefore ought not to be considered strictly as a mir-
ror for princes, but rather an epistolary handbook in which a learned
man explains to a young ruler the secrets of power. Similarly, The Prince
can be read as “a confidential document which Machiavelli presented
to a member of the Medici family” bearing significant traces of a quasi-
epistolary form of communication, given the more than 30 times the
author appeals to the dedicatee using the second person singular.43 Just
one example will be sufficient to demonstrate this family resemblance
between the Secret and The Prince:
How praiseworthy is the method of the Indians, who say in the admoni-
tions to their kings: “The appearance of a king before the common people
is detrimental to him and weakens his power”. Therefore, a king should
show himself to them only from afar, and always when surrounded by
a retinue and guards. Once a year, when the season of assembly comes,
he appears before all his people. One of his eloquent ministers stands up
before him and delivers a speech in which he praises God and thanks Him
for their allegiance to their sovereign. Then he says how well pleasing they
are, and how much care is taken on their behalf, and exhorts them to be
obedient and warns them against disobedience. He reads their petitions,
hears their complaints, dispenses justice, and grants gifts to them. He par-
dons their sins and makes them feel how near he is to the highest and low-
est among them. As he comes out among his people only once in a year
and does not obtrude upon them, they remember that as a great event
which gave them joy and pleasure. They relate it to their relatives and chil-
dren, so that their little ones grow up to obey and love him. So he is well
spoken of in private and in public, and thus he becomes safe from the ris-
ing of parties against him and from the intrigues of the seditious.44
From the Indian kings through Pseudo-Aristotle, Machiavelli’s “politics

of appearance” came from afar.45
“Let All Thy Affairs Be Strategetic

and Cunning”: War and Politics
Allan Gilbert identified the relationship between war and politics as the
closest similarity between The Prince and the Secret. His intuition is right,
but since he included the latter in the tradition of the mirror for princes,
whose goal was to depict an ideal ruler, the substance of his statement
is no longer valid. According to Gilbert, “from the Secretum secretorum
onward the book of advice to princes assumes that the prince will act
as his own general”.46 In this regard, The Prince is indeed “the typical
26 L. Biasiori
book de regimine principum”—as the subtitle of Gilbert’s book states—

since it insists that, in battle, “the wise prince goes in person and him-
self performs the duties of a general”.47 On the Secret of Secrets, however,
Gilbert is wrong, for Aristotle exhorts Alexander “not to take part in
battles in person”.48 Therefore, if Machiavelli ever took the Secret into
account for this statement, as Gilbert pointed out, he completely turned
its source upside down.
Notwithstanding its brilliance, Gilbert’s interpretation may now
appear flawed because in the 1930s the Arabic origins of the Secret of
Secrets had not yet been scrutinised. If we encompass the work as part
of a larger picture, however, its connection to Machiavelli will appear
in a totally different light. Let us take, for instance, the relationship
between cruelty and politics—a crucial issue in comparative studies of
Eurasian political thought. According to Antony Black, “there are paral-
lels between Irano-Islamic courtly culture and Machiavellism, but their
basic approach was different. Sultans might be permitted to use all kinds
of deceit and violence, but this was not necessarily perceived as contrary
to religion, a deviation from moral norms. Killing and trickery were
legitimised in the Quran”.49 The analysis of the similarities between the
Secret and The Prince provides a different conclusion: the former does
not bear any traces of the legitimization of trickery by the Qur’ān (as it
purports to be a work by Aristotle); the latter is not necessarily outside
of the Christian tradition when it encourages the use of malice. Does not
Christ himself recommend being “simple as dove and wise as snake”?50
Thinking outside the box, a reader familiar with The Prince will recog-
nise the striking similarity between the exhibition of cruelty that Aristotle
suggests to Alexander and Machiavelli’s description of Cesare Borgia’s
actions. The family of Machiavelli’s friend and mentor Giovanni Gaddi
owned a manuscript copy of the Secretum, a shorter version of the work
containing only moral chapters.51 Let us read how the lines immediately
following the aforementioned passage on a king’s exposition in front of
the people sound in that version:
And when the people have done such things, the king introduces some
wicked men deserving to die and here he let them cruelly be killed so that
the people can take example from it and then he pardons the people by
lowering taxes and releasing part of their debts. All the people thus run to
be under such a king and his realm expands.52
Half a millennium later, on the other side of the Mediterranean,

Machiavelli recounts that Cesare Borgia did exactly the same to his min-
ister Ramiro de Lorca:
Because he knew that past severities had made some men hate him, he
determined to purge such men’s minds and win them over entirely by
showing that any cruelty which had gone on did not originate with himself
but with the harsh nature of his agent. So getting an opportunity for it, one
morning in Cesena he had Messer Remirro laid in two pieces in the public
square with a block of wood and a bloody sword near him. The ferocity of
this spectacle left those people at the same time gratified and awe-struck.53
How can one explain this resemblance? Apparently, there is no need to

assume that Machiavelli read something on the subject, instead of put-
ting down on paper what he saw in person. But this approach does not
do justice to the Florentine secretary, whose direct experience was always
filtered through his readings. In the opening sentences of his three major
works, it is easy to notice a recurrent overlapping between “long expe-
rience of the modern things” and “a continual reading of the ancient”
(The Prince), “what I have seen and read” (The Art of War), and even
a “continual reading of worldly things” (the Discourses), as if the world
itself were readable in a way no different from that of a book. The polit-
ical use of executions is part of what Machiavelli calls the “experience
of modern things”. The case of Cesare Borgia itself shows, however,
that for Machiavelli everyday materials need to be interpreted through
“the reading of ancient things” to become part of a political reflection:
right after his first meeting with his hero Cesare Borgia on 21 October
1502, Machiavelli asked his best friend Biagio Buonaccorsi for a copy of
Plutarch’s Lives. Biagio replied in harsh terms, telling him to “go to hell”
for his continual requests, which were difficult to meet.54 But what he
mistook for a bibliographical caprice was actually the only way in which
his friend could make sense of the extraordinary experience of facing his
new prince, attempting to read Cesare Borgia’s action in the mirror of
his forerunners, including Alexander the Great.
The presence of Aristotle behind Machiavelli’s description of the
reaction of the people to the execution of Ramiro de Lorca by Cesare
Borgia has been correctly emphasized, with a particular focus on the
medico-poetical notion of catharsis.55 Like spectators of a tragedy, people
28 L. Biasiori
watching Ramiro’s death experienced an aesthetic and moral purification

“through piety and fear” (Politics, VI, 1449b). To remain “at the same
time gratified and awe-struck”, however, was only the first reaction of
the spectators, who from that moment on became Borgia’s most faith-
ful subjects. In the face of the threat of death, “all the people run to
be under such a king” (Secret of Secrets), for “each man, seeing himself
perishing, lays aside all ambition and gladly runs to obey one he thinks
can by means of his ability rescue him” (Discourses on Livy, Book III,
Chapter 30).56
With Aristotle Beyond Aristotle

Chapter 22 of The Prince deals with “a prince’s confidential officers”, or,
according to its Latin title, De his quos a secretis principes habent (literally
“About the people whom princes have for their secrets”). The Secret and
The Prince start from the same universal truth:
It is written in one of the books of the Persians: A king advised his son say-
ing: ‘Always take counsel’(Secret of Secrets).57
A wise prince, then, seeks advice continually (The Prince).58
Machiavelli and Aristotle also share the consequences of such a gen-

eral assumption, which are analysed not from the point of view of the
ministers, but from that of the prince. Aristotle exhorts Alexander to
“never put a minister in the government in your place, for its counsel
can ruin and corrupt your regime”.59 Machiavelli agrees as to the danger
of the prince “turning himself over to a single person—a very prudent
man—who entirely controls him; in this case he really could get good
advice, but not for long, because that tutor in a short time would take
his position away from him”.60 Then, Aristotle and Machiavelli explain
to Alexander and Lorenzo, respectively, “the methods of trying thy min-
ister” and “how a prince can find out about any minister”61:
Give him to think that thou standest in need of money – says Aristotle – if
he offer to thee his own wealth, and entreat thee to make use of it, be
certain that he is truly loyal to thee (…) for verily money is loved by all
souls, and no one is willing to sacrifice it for thee unless he prefer thee to
himself.62
Also for Machiavelli the love of the minister for the prince has to
overcome his self-love.63 He also shares with Aristotle the litmus test
for the reliability of the minister, namely the irresistible force of money,
“because men forget more quickly the death of a father than the loss
of a father’s estate”.64 In this matter, however, Machiavelli differs from
Aristotle: whereas the latter’s advice is to “examine thy ministers by giv-
ing them gifts and presents and whomsoever thou findest greedy thereof
he shall be of no good to thee”, Machiavelli advises Lorenzo that “the
wise prince, in order to keep the minister good, always has him in mind,
honors him, makes him rich, puts him under obligation, gives him his
share of honors and offices, so that the minister sees he cannot stand
without the prince”.65 In this case, Machiavelli is more realistic than
Aristotle, who suggests preventing any contact between the minister and
money in order to avoid the rise of greed in him. In The Prince, the min-
isters are not to be kept away from money. To hope that they do not
want to get wealthy is in vain. The only thing a ruler can do is to show
that the ministers are enriched thanks solely to the prince.
Another aspect in which Machiavelli undoubtedly draws on the Secret
of Secrets is the discussion on generosity or avarice of the prince. As is
well-known, the Aristotelian tradition identifies virtue as a middle way
between two vices and emphasized the necessity for a balance between
two extremes. Consistently with this approach, the aim of the work is
“to explain liberality and avarice, and to describe the evils of excess in
liberality and those of deficiency in it”.66 Pseudo-Aristotle, however, dif-
fers from the real Aristotle and soon abandons this middle path, deal-
ing with the risk that an excess of liberality might lead the king to take
“what is in the hands of the people”. However, being liberal is always
better than being stingy, since avarice is “a name which is unworthy of
kings and of a state”. Although the tone of the argument is ultimately
moralistic, the author of the Kitāb sirr al-asrār has an original position in
the peripatetic tradition, since he focuses on the flaws of excessive liberal-
ity, but completely rejects avarice for reasons which have to do with the
reputation of the ruler. Machiavelli goes a step further in this progressive
erosion of Aristotelianism and in Chapter 16 of The Prince completely
breaks with it:
Since, then, a prince cannot, without harming himself, make use of this
virtue of liberality in such a way that it will be recognised, he does not
worry, if he is prudent, about being called stingy; because in the course of
30 L. Biasiori
time he will be thought more and more liberal, since his economy makes
his income adequate; he can defend himself against anyone who makes war
on him; he can carry through enterprises without burdening his people
(…). So it is wiser to accept the name of niggard, which produces reproach
without hatred, than by trying for the name of free-spender to incur the
name of extortioner, which produces reproach with hatred.67
As is unanimously recognised by commentators, Machiavelli here is tar-

geting the typically Aristotelian concept of metriotēs (balance) between
two despicable extremes. In changing the Aristotelian paradigm, he is
probably drawing on the figure referred to as Aristotle in the Secret. In
other words, the reference to the Secret can explain Machiavelli’s ago-
nistic relationship with Aristotelianism. While the Secret starts to erode
the Aristotelian paradigm, Machiavelli radicalizes what he read: on the
one hand, he agrees as to the necessity of not burdening the people for
the sake of liberality; on the other, although he follows Aristotle in the
reflection on what “the name of niggard” implies for the relationship
between prince and subjects, he turns it upside down: whereas Aristotle
judges it unworthy of a ruler, Machiavelli exhorts the prince not to care
about it and even to accept it willingly.
Mirrors for Princes, Mirrors for Cultures

Like every study of the sources of a literary work, Machiavelli’s crea-
tive re-appropriation of a Pseudo-Aristotelian work such as the Secret of
Secrets, risks being considered nowadays as a peripheral exercise in the
field of humanities.68 What is then the sense of picking up a hypothe-
sis that Allan Gilbert already put forward 80 years ago and which was
soon rejected? First of all, we have tried to do what Gilbert—in a totally
different political and scholarly climate—could not do: firstly, the tex-
tual tradition of the Secret of Secrets has been scrutinised as thoroughly
as possible, drawing on the vast number of studies published in the last
30 years; in addition, the Islamic roots of the work have been brought
to the surface, as well as the ways in which this element could—con-
sciously or not—have affected Machiavelli and his readers. And yet, all of
this could still appear irrelevant for the global reception of Machiavelli’s
work, which is the topic of this book. Instead, as authors like Jacques
Gohory or Migliore Cresci noticed, a part of the content of the Secret
is incorporated into The Prince and is consequently, in a more or less
hidden way, conveyed between the lines of Machiavelli’s writings.

Therefore, its presence in the background of Machiavelli’s work is an
element which contributed to the reception of The Prince in the Islamic
world. This phenomenon was prepared by some textual elements of
The Prince itself, which appeared familiar to readers of the Kitāb sirr
al-asrār, a book first written in Arabic and then translated into both
Persian—which also helped its diffusion in the Indian world, as well—
and Ottoman Turkish. The Prince was a seed filled with Islamic ele-
ments, which fell on a soil that was already fertilised, having produced
the Kitāb sirr al-asrār. Therefore, the problem of the well-known simi-
larity between Machiavellian and Islamic political thought must not be
resolved through a chronological—and axiological—pre-eminence, or
by means of dismissing the possible historical contacts among cultures.69
Emphasizing the importance of this “Eurasian Pseudo-Aristotelianism”
and its most widespread product, we are able to find another reason why
Machiavelli and Islamic political thinkers often appear as being very simi-
lar: not only did they face the same problems, but they also looked at
them through the same lenses. Against the influential opinion that “jux-
taposition of statecraft and piety became typical of the Advice genre
and it rendered Machiavelli superfluous in the Islamic world”,70 these
pages—and this book—tell a completely different story, in which the
Islamic political tradition fed Machiavelli, in the same way that the latter
would eventually feed the former.
Notes
1. R. Khawam (ed.) (1976), Le livre des ruses: La stratégie politique des
Arabes (Paris: Phébus): 450: “Ce livre, écrit cent ans avant Machiavel,
est à sa façon (non la moins divertissante) la meilleure réponse aux
Occidentaux étonnés qui découvrent aujourd’hui l’extraordinaire habileté
politique des responsables du monde musulman”.
2. J. Dakhlia (2002), “Les Miroirs des princes islamiques: Une modernité
sourde?”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 57, no. 5, 1191–1206: “Ne
pas s’attarder sur la pertinence d’une telle assimilation” (p. 1191).
3. A. Black (2008), The West and Islam: Religion and Political Thought in
World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 5, that quotes but does
not consider the Secret of Secrets, with which this chapter will deal, since
“it seems to have had virtually no influence on western political thought”
(p. 102).
32 L. Biasiori
4. L.T. Darling (2013), Mirrors for Princes in Europe and the Middle East:
A Case of Historiographical Incommensurability, in: A. Classen (ed.), East
Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural
Experiences in the Premodern World (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter):
223–242.
5. S.J. Williams (2003), The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of
a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press), deals only with the academic reception
of the work in the Middle Ages, but provides an excellent list of bib-
liographic references. Therefore, I refer to it also for secondary litera-
ture. On the medieval circulation of the Secret see also S.J. Williams
(2004), “Giving Advice and Taking It: The Reception by Rulers of the
Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum as a Speculum principis”, in:
C. Casagrande, C. Crisciani and S. Vecchio (eds), Consilium: Teorie e
pratiche del consigliare nella cultura medievale (Florence: Edizioni
del Galluzzo): 139–180. I will use the following English edition:
Secretum Secretorum, ed. A.S. Fulton, trans. I. Ali, included in R. Bacon
(1909–1940), Opera hactenus inedita, ed. R. Steele, 16 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press): Vol. V (henceforth Secretum). Since this version is
from the Arabic text, whose textual transmission in the Europe was, as
we will see, highly heterogenous, translations, when needed, will be of
my own doing and the original text will be always quoted.
6. Rumi usually means the language of Rum, Eastern Rome, that is, the
Byzantine Empire. The most accepted view is that, in that context, Rumi
could have meant Syriac, given that some works of Aristotle first had a
Syriac version before being translated into Arabic. See Williams, The
Secret of Secrets, 18. For the context see also D. Gutas (1998), Greek
Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in
Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (London and New York: Routledge).
7. Therefore, when I mention “Aristotle”, I am always referring to the char-
acter who is writing the letter to Alexander and by no means to the real
historical figure (unless otherwise specified).
8. M. Grignaschi (1980), “La diffusion du Secretum Secretorum (Sirr-Al-
’Asrar) dans l’Europe occidentale”, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et
Littéraire du Moyen Age, 55, 7–70: 7.
9. L. Thorndike (1923–1958), A History of Magic and Experimental
Science, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan): Vol. II, 267.
10. C.B. Schmitt (1986), “Pseudo-Aristotle in the Latin Middle Ages”, in: J.
Kraye, W.F. Ryan and C.B. Schmitt (eds), Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle
Ages: The Theology and Other Texts (London: The Warburg Institute): 4.
11. M. Milani (2001), “La tradizione italiana del Secretum secretorum”,
La parola del testo, 5, 209–253; S.J. Williams (2003), “The Vernacular
Tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the Middle Ages:

Translations, Manuscripts, and Readers”, in: N. Bray and L. Sturlese
(eds), Filosofia in volgare nel medioevo (Turnhout, Brepols): 451–482;
I. Zamuner (2005), “La tradizione romanza del Secretum secretorum
pseudo-aristotelico: Regesto delle versioni e dei manoscritti”, Studi
Medievali, 46, 31–116.
12. To mention one printed exemplar, published after 1503: Philosophorum
maximi Aristotelis secretum secretorum alio nomine liber moralium de
regimine principum ad Alexandrum (Venice: Bernardino Vitali).
13. Secretum, 193.
14. The medical roots of the notion are oddly neglected in M. Senellart
(1995), Les Arts de gouverner: Du regimen médiéval au concept de gou-
vernement (Paris: Seuil).
15. C.B. Schmitt (1982), “Francesco Storella and the Last Printed Edition
of the Latin Secretum secretorum (1555)”, in: W.F. Ryan and C.B.
Schmitt (eds), Pseudo-Aristotle, The Secret of Secrets: Sources and Influences
(London: The Warburg Institute): 124–131.
16. W. Eamon (2005), Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in
Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
17. A.H. Gilbert (1928), “Notes on the Influence of the Secretum
Secretorum”, Speculum, 3, 84–98.
18. A.H. Gilbert (1938), Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners: The Prince
as a Typical Book de Regimine Principum (Durham: Duke University
Press): 88–89: “Even if, notwithstanding the wide circulation of the
Secretum Secretorum for centuries, he had not read it, he can hardly have
escaped by indirect influence”.
19. F. Gilbert (1939), “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince
of Machiavelli”, Journal of Modern History, 11, 449–483.
20. On the ethnocentric limits of contextualism see Kaya Şahin’s chapter in
this volume.
21. See L. Biasiori (2015), “Tra Machiavelli e Reginald Pole: Migliore Cresci e la
Vita del Principe (1544)”, Bollettino della società di studi valdesi, 217, 5–26.
22. Ibidem, 9. On the figure of Muḥammad in late Italian Humanism, see
Pier Mattia Tommasino’s chapter in this book.
23. G. Marcocci (2008), “Machiavelli, la religione dei romani e l’impero por-
toghese”, Storica, XIV, nos. 41–42, 35–68.
24. L. Biasiori (2013), “Comparaison comme estrangement: Machiavel,
les anciens, les modernes, les sauvages”, Essais. Revue interdisciplinaire
d’humanités, hors série no. 1, 151–169.
25. W.H. Bowen (1938), “L’histoire de la terre neuve du Peru: A Translation
by Jacques Gohory and The Earliest Treatise on Tobacco”, Isis, 28,
34 L. Biasiori
330–363. See also E. Balmas (1982), “Jacques Gohory traduttore del

Machiavelli (con documenti inediti)”, in his Saggi e studi sul rinascimento
francese (Padua: Liviana): 23–73 and R. Gorris Camos (2008), “Dans le
labyrinthe de Gohory, lecteur et traducteur de Machiavel”, Laboratoire
italien, 8, 195–229.
26. N. Machiavelli (1544), Le premier Livre des Discours de l’Estat de Paix et
de guerre (Paris: Denis Janot): fol. A4v.
27. Secretum, 186.
28. Ibidem, 188.
29. G. Fowden (2012), “Pseudo-Aristotelian Politics and Theology in
Universal Islam”, in: P.F. Bang and D. Kołodziejczyk (eds), Universal
Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation
in Eurasian History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press): 132.
30. Secretum, 180. On the Persian influences on Islamic mirrors for princes
see P. Crone (2004), Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press): 148–164.
31. Gohory also translated De Occultis Naturae Miraculis (1559), a book of
secrets by the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius. See D.P. Walker (2003),
“Paracelsus and Jacques Gohory”, in his Spiritual and Demonic Magic
from Ficino to Campanella (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press):
96–106.
32. Balmas, Jacques Gohory, 52.
33. N. Machiavelli (1571), Le prince (…) dedié au magnifique Laurens fils
de Pierre des Medicis traduit d’Italien en François avec la vie de l’auteur
mesme par Iaq. Gohory Parisien, (Paris: Robert le Mangnier): fol. A4r.
34. Some manuscript copies of the Secret, like the Florentine manuscript in
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (henceforth BNCF), II. I. 363,
contain only the section on physiognomy. The Physiognōmicon, the other
Pseudo-Aristotelian work dealing with physiognomy, had no circulation
in the Arabic world.
35. Secretum, p. 192.
36. N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan
Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London; Duke University Press): Vol. I,
89–90.
37. Ibidem, Vol. I, 90–91 (slightly revised).
38. BNCF, Magliabechiano, XXX 181, Segreto de’ segreti, fol. 10v: “Conviensi
al re pensare le cose che hanno a venire, e i casi che possono avvenire pru-
dentemente provedere, acciò che possa più legiermente sostenere le cose
averse. Quando il re vede alcuno bene ovvero utile, faccialo fare con dis-
cretione, non troppo tardi né troppo tosto, acciò che non paia pigro né
impetuoso”. According to A.J. Parel (1993), “Ptolemy as Source of The
Prince 25”, History of Political Thought, 14, 77–83, “there can be little
doubt that in The Prince 25 ‘impetuous’ stands for ‘choleric’” and that,
therefore, Machiavelli “restands the general Ptolemaic notion” (p. 81).
But since Machiavelli actually uses the word impetuoso, the problem is to
understand to what philosophical tradition he was referring, in this case
not Ptolemy but Aristotle.
39. BNCF, Magliabechiano XXX 181, fols. 55r–55v: “La schiatta di quegli
d’India (…) sono huomini traditori e ingannatori e non è in loro questo
obrobio. Quegli di Persia, o vero i Turchi, (…) sono uomini troppo ani-
mosi e di grande presuntione. Combatti adunque con l’una gente e con
l’altra di queste come si confà al tuo lavorio (…) e fia l’opere tue mani-
feste e occulte secondo il modo premesso e secondo la qualità overo dis-
positione della scienza delle stelle”.
40. For other aspects of Machiavelli as a reader of Aristotle, see C. Ginzburg
(2015), “Intricate Readings: Machiavelli, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas”,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78, 157–172.
41. Secretum, 178.
42. N. Machiavelli (1996), Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal
Correspondence, ed. and trans. J.B. Atkinson and D. Sices (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press): 242 (slightly revised).
43. The definition comes from P. Burke (2000), A Social History of
Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.:
Polity and Blackwell): 28.
44. Secretum, 176.
45. L. Vissing (1986), Machiavel ou la politique de l’apparence (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France).
46. Gilbert, The Prince and its forerunners, 63.
48. Secretum, 247.
49. Black, The West and Islam, 107.
50. Matthew 10:16.
51. For the relationship of Machiavelli with the Gaddi family, see L. Biasiori
(2017), Nello scrittoio di Machiavelli: Il Principe e la Ciropedia di
Senofonte (Rome: Carocci).
52. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Gaddiano 92, fol 31r: “Et
quando il popolo ae facte queste cose, lo re si fa venire dinanci huomini
scelerati et degni di morire e quivi li fae crudelmente uccidere acciò che ‘l
popolo ne pigli exemplo e poscia fae gratia al popolo alleviando i trebuti e
rimettendo loro parte de debiti, per la quale cosa la gente tutta corre per
essere tutta socto cotale re e’l suo reame moltiplica”.
54. Machiavelli, Machiavelli and his friends, 55: “We have tried to locate
some Lives of Plutarch, and there are none for sale in Florence. Be
36 L. Biasiori
patient, because we have to write to Venice; to tell you the truth, you can
go to hell for asking for so many things”.
55. S. Landi (2014), “Per purgare li animi di quelli populi: Metafore del vin-
colo politico e religioso in Machiavelli”, Storia del pensiero politico, 2,
187–212: 205.
57. Secretum, 235.
59. BNCF, Magliabechiano, XXX 181, fol. 45r: “Mai tu ordini uno tuo bai-
ulo nel reggimento nel luogo di te, imperò che il suo consiglio può guas-
tare e corrompere il regime tuo”.
61. Secretum, 236; Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 85.
62. Secretum, 236.
63. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 85–86: “When you see that a minis-
ter is thinking more about himself than about you, and that in the course
of all his actions he is seeking his own profit, such a man as this never is a
good minister; never can you rely on him; because he who has your exist-
ence in his hands should never think of himself but of his prince”.
64. Ibidem, 63.
65. Ibidem, 86.
66. Secretum, 180.
68. G.W. Most (2016), “The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung”, in: A. Blair
and A.-S. Goeing (eds), For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of
Anthony Grafton, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol. II, 933–954.
69. As done by R.H. Dekmejian and A.F. Thabit (2000), “Machiavelli’s Arab
Precursor: Ibn Ẓafar al-Ṣiqillī”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies,
27, no. 2: 125–137, and C. Colmo (1998), “Alfarabi on the Prudence of
Founders”, The Review of Politics, 60, no. 4: 719–741, respectively.
70. Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, 52.
Author Biography
Superiore, Pisa, and a former Fellow at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2014–2015). His research encompasses
the cultural and religious history of early modern Europe. He is the author of a
number of articles in international scientific journals on the exiling of Italian her-
etics in the sixteenth century, and Machiavelli. His last book is Nello scrittoio di
Machiavelli: Il Principe e la Ciropedia di Senofonte (2017).
CHAPTER 3
Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli,

Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate
About War
Vincenzo Lavenia
This chapter examines the genesis of Turkophilia in the sixteenth century,

linking it to the reception of Niccolò Machiavelli and of the humanist
Paolo Giovio, in particular the latter’s Commentario de le cose de’ turchi
which was published in 1532 by the same Roman printer as Machiavelli,
Antonio Blado. Through the analysis of a number of texts, mainly Italian
and Spanish, published before and after the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury, which in some cases fed into the collection of the scholar Francesco
Sansovino, the chapter will show how Machiavelli’s and Giovio’s approach
influenced a realistic view towards, and the possibility of a comparative
analysis of, the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, it focuses on the issue of mil-
itary discipline and the relationship between religion and war, which had
taken centre stage thanks to Machiavelli’s dissection of the Roman Empire.
Machiavelli soon became an author vilified by both the Catholics and
the Protestants, but his dispassionate analysis of armies, civil religion and
political freedom had made its mark. His charge that Christianity was a
V. Lavenia (*) 
University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_3
38 V. Lavenia
faith incapable of mobilising for war and celebrating worldly glory pro-
voked a polemical debate; but Giovio was no less a realist, who, even
while avoiding a similar ostracism, was himself a controversial writer,
above all in the view of Spanish authors. Giovio, although wary of their
military strength, did not see the Ottomans as barbarians and simply
“the enemy”, but tried to understand what was the basis of their mili-
tary potency, pinpointing religion as the backbone of the armies of the
Sublime Porte.Many who wrote after him on the Ottomans not only
took their cue from his pages, but appropriated a Machiavellian language
without actually citing the author of the Discourses on Livy and freely
intermixed his political insights with Giovio’s.
After the 1560s the writings on Islam and the Ottomans published
by Francesco Sansovino prompted a sort of fashion for Turkish materi-
als (turcica), but authors, particularly in Catholic areas, quickly became
more cautious in suggesting that Ottoman military discipline was supe-
rior to that of Christian armies thanks to their religion. It was one
thing to plagiarise Machiavelli’s Discourses or Giovio’s Commentari, but
another to openly quote from them. Furthermore, by the end of the
sixteenth century Turkophilia had begun to ebb, its place being taken
by a more aggressive military discourse announcing the decline of the
Turks and lauding the presumed superiority of Christian forces, founded
on religion and an improved discipline. As René de Lucinge, a friend of
Giovanni Botero, wrote, the Ottomans could be beaten by improving
western armies’ religious preparedness, distributing printed books and
fomenting uprisings among the Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte
and discord among the Muslims.1 His thesis was lucid and relatively real-
istic, but, like those who had written before him, Lucinge could hardly
have composed his treatise without digesting the teachings of Giovio and
Machiavelli, which, as we shall see, had a profound impact on political
analysis and the sixteenth century’s fascination with Islam.
Faith, Arms and Discipline

The Oratorian Father Tommaso Bozio was a soldier of the Counter-
Reformation. A prolific writer, his chosen battleground was historical
controversy where he aimed to demonstrate which was the true church
and the earthly signs that proved it so. The heft of the Iberian empires
was, in his eyes, the clear proof that Catholicism guaranteed, above all
other denominations, the stability of regimes, favouring their armed
3 TURKOPHILIA AND RELIGION 39
superiority in Europe and the world. Who could think otherwise before
the visible triumphs of the Spaniards and the Portuguese in Asia and
America?2
Bozio’s target was anything but generic. From the 1530s on, in
regard to the relationship between Christianity and the force of arms, an
opposite reading to the Bozio’s had enjoyed currency, which was cor-
rosive, disturbing and potentially explosive. As Machiavelli had argued,
since war was a fact of life, Christianity’s fault consisted in enfeebling
the spirit by substituting humility for glory as an immanent religious
goal. Christianity was not a civil creed capable of mobilising citizens
and subject peoples as had, among the Romans, the rites and oracles
established by Numa Pompilius (or by Moses among the Jews). And
this was a major factor in the decline of the Italian peninsula, weak-
ened by the ubiquity of popes and friars incapable of understanding the
new significance of war for the dominance of Europe. “Ancient reli-
gion—Machiavelli maintains in Chapter 2 of Book II of the Discourses—
attributed blessedness only to men abounding in worldly glory, such as
generals of armies and princes of states. Our religion has glorified hum-
ble and contemplative men rather than active ones”.3
It was a theory, at once new and venerable, that revived imputations
made again topical by the resurgence, in the second half of the fifteenth
century, of speculation over the decline of Rome, led by the humanist
Biondo Flavio. That theory however contained an unacceptable kernel:
the finger pointed at the unresolved tension between the exercise of arms
and the religion of Christ, between the stoic virtues of glory and forti-
tude and those extolled in the Beatitudes.4 Intending to confute such
imputations, Bozio drafted in 1593 his De robore bellico, in which he
lauds Catholic might as a proof of the falsity of Machiavelli’s arguments.
There are some, he writes, who have had the temerity to claim that not
only the Roman, but even the Turks surpassed Christians in warfare
because of their religion, and that they were more valorous than the sol-
diers of Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth: the Ottoman
Empire had wrought destruction on an area of the world hostile to the
papacy (the Byzantine schismatics’) and had been elsewhere success-
ful only where the Habsburgs were weakened by Lutheran heresy, thus
proving to be a divine scourge punishing a divided Europe. The soldiers
of the sultan had never faced a great Christian army, Bozio continues;
and furthermore, the recent victory at Lepanto (1571) showed that
when that occurred, the Catholic armies would prevail over those of the
40 V. Lavenia
Sublime Porte. The Ottoman Empire could not then emulate ancient
Rome, still less the preceding Arab empires or the Iberian ones, now
stretching over the known world.5
What induced Bozio to bring the “Turks” into a work taking issue
with Machiavelli? Who had thought to compare them to the ancient
Romans, holding them up as an example to be imitated? Machiavelli had
touched on the ferocity, the political acumen and the discipline of the
Ottomans in a few brief passages of his work, but a comprehensive sur-
vey of Turkish military organisation is nowhere to be found in his pages.6
Nonetheless Bozio was right to feel that a certain strand of writing on
the Turks had become enmeshed with the reaction to Machiavelli’s ideas
in so far as the latter’s emphasis on the connection between religion and
a disciplined success on the battlefield found many echoes in the pages of
a well-known contemporary of the author of the Discourses. And that was
Paolo Giovio, who had feared and at the same time admired the Porte,
inspiring, from the end of the sixteenth century onward, a revitalisation
of writing on the Turks during the extended Habsburg-Ottoman wars.7
So much was understood by a friend of Bozio’s, the Jesuit Antonio
Possevino. After having dusted off the old model of the Christian Soldier
in a bestselling catechism (1569) that was even distributed to the troops
embarking for Lepanto, in the process inventing a genre, and after hav-
ing also published under his own name a (not very sophisticated) attack
on Machiavelli (1592), Possevino offered the world a Bibliotheca selecta
(1593) listing, in a sort of reverse image of the Index of Prohibited
Books, all the books that a pious Catholic ought to read (or could read
with appropriate safeguards).8 A paragraph of this monumental work
is dedicated to writings on the Ottomans. It mentions texts by Andrea
Cambini, Giovanni Antonio Menavino and Hans Böhm, but when
Govio’s name appears it is only beside his Historiae Sui Temporis (1550–
1552) and the Elogia virourm bellica virtute illustrium (1551), “where
he deals with the vices (vizi) of the Turkish emperors”. Possevino goes
on to take issue with those heretical authors who have attributed the
superior potency of the Turks to a “shortage of God’s Word (defectus
Verbi Dei)” among Christians. “It is ungodly (impium) to read of the
achievements and rituals of the Turks”, he asserts, and uses the same
arguments deployed by Bozio to counter admiration for Ottoman suc-
cesses (and too-detailed description of their religion).9
Possevino’s list however passes over in silence the title of the most
widely read work on the Ottomans of the entire sixteenth century: the
Commentario de le cose de’ turchi by none other than Giovio, which

was not placed on the Index, went through dozens of editions and was
speedily translated throughout Europe.10 We can read in Possevino’s
silence an acute awareness of how the discussion of Ottoman discipline
had evolved in the sixteenth century, since the printing of the Discourses
and the Commentario.
The first thing to note is that Machiavelli and Giovio shared publish-
ers: one outside Italy (the exiled Pietro Perna, who published Machiavelli
and also Giovio’s Elogia)11 and another in. Like the Commentario,
which appeared in 1532 but was drafted in the two preceding years, the
Discourses, The Prince and the Florentine Histories were first published
between 1531 and 1532 by Antonio Blado, a printer active in Rome.
Blado’s catalogue—he had previously published all kinds of works—dis-
plays a discernible choice of field only in the second half of the 1530s,
when he acquired the title of stampatore camerale, and dedicated himself
to a full schedule of editions of the classics.12 Furthermore, in the same
period many texts also came from his workshop on the war against the
Turks and many works emanating from a politico-religious faction oper-
ating partly from within the Curia, which might be defined imperial and
cautiously in favour of the convocation of an ecumenical council.13
Giovio presented his Commentario to Pope Clement VII on the occa-
sion of accompanying him to Bologna to meet the Emperor Charles
V. On that excursion the Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
was also of the party, and was also well aware of Giovio’s thoughts on
the Turks: that they enjoyed a particular advantage in warfare thanks
to the strength of their faith, not unlike that of Machiavelli’s Romans,
and superior to the Christians’. These dispassionate assessments of the
Ottoman soldiers’ discipline were not however a novelty: the humanist
Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) had addressed this aspect of Turkish power
in a series of letters that were still being read in Florence in the early
sixteenth century.14 Furthermore, political detachment was an approach
to the Ottoman world that went back to the fifteenth century.15
Turkophilia was always a litmus paper for European discontent, and with
papal Rome especially, so we need not be surprised by its ubiquity in the
Protestant world. None the less, even in pre-Tridentine Italy, the spell
cast by the Turks played a role. As Francesco Vettori wrote to Machiavelli
on 27 June 1513: “let the Turk come with all of Asia” to humble cor-
rupt and fratricidal Christendom.16 A frequent omen, in many cases
interwoven with millenarian expectations and religious pessimism.
42 V. Lavenia
The Florentine historian and humanist Francesco Guicciardini was

among the first to accuse Giovio of over-enthusiasm for the Turks,
in Bologna in fact, where they met in 1532.17 But the key question
remains: did Giovio and Machiavelli know one another? In his Dialogus
de viris litteris illustribus, published in the eighteenth century by
Girolamo Tiraboschi, but written in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome
(1527), Giovio extols Machiavelli as playwright.18 A better known por-
trait is that of the Elogia, where Machiavelli is defined as “a mocker
and an atheist (derisore e ateo)” and The Prince, the Art of War and the
Discourses are cited in that order.19 After all, as Giovio, a frequenter of
the Orti Oricellari circle and a Florence resident from 1520 to 1522,
himself admitted, having Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici as his patron he
was a stranger to little of the cultural life of Machiavelli’s city: “there is
nowhere I know better or am more familiar with”.20 However that may
be, the Commentario is something of an exception in Giovio’s oeuvre
(not least because written in the vernacular) and displays a degree of
family feeling with Machiavelli’s pages on religion and war.
As he writes in the dedication to Charles V, Giovio had been moved
to draft this text by the urgent need to provide “Christian soldiers (sol-
dati cristiani)” with “examples from the past (essempi delle cose passate)”
so that they could ultimately achieve “a superior and more appropriate
discipline (a migliore e più accomodata disciplina)” with which to repel
and then defeat the Turks.21 And the word “discipline” is the leitmo-
tif that helps us understand its success. “Military discipline—we read—is
regulated with such justice and severity by the Turks that we may say
that theirs surpasses that of the Greeks and the Romans”. Quarrels and
duels are unheard of in the Ottoman ranks, as are episodes of insubor-
dination; and furthermore their health and dietary regimes are among
the best. Giovio emphasises the absence of alcohol, but also their con-
trolled consumption of bread and their cleanliness, which gave the
Turkish armies a rather different appearance to those of the Christians,
with their wagonloads of foodstuffs and prostitutes. What is more the
Turks went to war accepting the risk of dying, furnished by their reli-
gion “with a mad conviction that every man has the time and manner of
his death inscribed on his countenance”.22 In short, Islam exercised for
the Ottomans the same function that, according to Machiavelli, the love
of glory and their oracles had for the Romans. Alongside its objective
analysis of the Ottoman world without religious preconceptions, and its
series of medallions depicting the Turkish sultans (of whom his museum
at Como boasted eleven portraits), Giovio’s work also lauds the Janissary
system and suggests that, in some circumstances, the Ottoman soldiers
conducted themselves “like so many Observant friars”.23
But particularly indigestible after the Tridentine revolution would
have been the passages dedicated to the sultans: the praise awarded to
Meḥmed II, who believed in nothing, broke his pledged word and stud-
ied the ancients24; the “feigned piety (simulata pietà)” of Selīm I (r.
1512–1520) “who was in no way a barbarian (che non aveva nulla del
barbaro)” despite being a “cruel master (Signore crudele)”, a parricide
and a destroyer, ever averse to “dawdling (indugiare)” for fear of miss-
ing an opportunity25; or the “religious and liberal (religioso e liberale)”
Süleymān, who had spared the lives of the defeated Christian Knights
of Rhodes, abjuring useless atrocities “with great piety and human-
ity (con somma religione e umanità)”; a gesture which, as we read, “our
own soldiers might not have made (forse non arebbero fatto e nostri sol-
dati)”. Furthermore, Süleymān laid claim with good reason to the leg-
acy of Rome and its empire: “I have often heard it said by trustworthy
men (…) that the mantle of the Roman Empire is his by right, and over
the whole of the West, as the legitimate successor of Constantine”.26
Giovio writes in genuine awe of the power of the Turks, but no less with
a barely concealed admiration which leads him to express daring judge-
ments. Should an open confrontation occur, he maintains, the Christian
infantry and cavalry might well be able to prevail over their adversary
thus concluding “the contest for control of the whole world”. But none
the less, it would be necessary to “prepare timidly and fearfully, and not
listen to the vain and dangerous words of those who underestimate the
Turks and boast without ever having faced them”.27 It is clear here what
a gulf separates Giovio from Spanish and crusader stereotyping: they
were not dealing with effeminate sodomites, or with easily defeated bar-
barians, but with disciplined soldiers and able statesmen whose organisa-
tion and prowess in the field was to be feared and respected.
Imperialist Responses
It was the Iberian worldview transplanted to Italy that first reacted to
this image of the Turk and to Giovio’s alleged falsehoods. The religious
scholar and polemicist Girolamo Muzio, inciter of inquisitorial incur-
sions, placed him next to Machiavelli in a list of enemies of the Roman
Curia (1550).28 But it is once again the publisher Blado to whom we
44 V. Lavenia
should look, having a few years earlier printed a notable work by Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda, best known as the apologist of Spanish imperial-
ism in the Americas, whose humanist education had been acquired in
his years at the College of Spain in Bologna, later to be itself the tar-
get of the Inquisition. While there, he aligned himself with the teach-
ings of Pietro Pomponazzi, corresponded and later crossed swords with
Erasmus, wrote commentaries on Cicero and Aristotle, became part of
Giulio de’ Medici’s circle and published a first dialogue Gonsalus seu de
appetenda gloria (1523).29 A champion of the natural consonance of
Christian ethics and classical Stoic philosophy, in that work he nominates
the Spaniards as the authentic heirs of the Romans, and after the Sack of
Rome and the subsequent reconciliation of the empire and the papacy,
turned his attention eastward, dedicating to Charles V his Cohortatio ut
bellum suscipiat in Turcas (1529), in which he attacks Erasmus’s accom-
modating pacifism. This was no mere occasional tract written in celebra-
tion of the Emperor’s coronation. The Turkish assault, Sepúlveda writes,
threatened Christian “life and liberty”; the Turks (Asiatics and barbar-
ians) had no philosophers, no theologians, no orators: they had no polis.
The Turks, in the last resort, offered the same choice that confronted
the Greeks with the Persian invasions: to stand and fight for civilisation
or succumb to the most despotic of tyrannies. The Turks were sodo-
mites and cowards, and if they relied on the Janissaries it was because
these were converted Greek Christians. They had no respect for prop-
erty, the cornerstone of all liberty. Europe had opposed Asia since the
Greeks had waged war with the Trojans (Sepúlveda rehearsed the imagi-
nary Trojan-Turk line of descent, which enjoyed a long currency).30 And
the legitimate and sole heirs of Greek culture were the Christians. It was
the task of Charles V, more as King of Spain than as emperor, to emulate
Alexander the Great and create an alternative world empire to that of the
unmartial, beatable Turks.31
It was from this kind of effusion that Giovio was distancing himself;
but Sepúlveda was not going to follow his lead. Returning to Rome in
1533, and before going back to Spain to become a court chronicler,
he put his pen to a dialogue entitled Democrates—published by Blado
two years later—in which revisited the issue of the congruence of clas-
sical glory with Christian virtue, taking issue with Erasmus on the one
hand, and on the other—precociously—with those who maintained
that faith in Christ rendered men “indolent (ignavi)” and soldiers infe-
rior. This had been Machiavelli’s thesis, and that this passage refers to
him specifically is confirmed by a manuscript of Sepúlveda’s work in the

Vatican Library where Machiavelli is mentioned by name.32 In the open-
ing pages of the dialogue Sepúlveda exults over the news of the Turks
having fled in terror at the threatened approach of Charles V’s army,
mobilised in 1532. This incipit recycles the stereotype of Turkish cow-
ardice, setting against a supposed Ottoman discipline the representative
figure of the Stoic, but also Christian, soldier.33
A few years later it was the turn of a Portuguese humanist, educated
in Bologna like Sepúlveda, with whom he had contact, to rekindle the
debate on military discipline. This is Jerónimo Osório, who in his De
nobilitate civili libri duo, De nobilitate Christiana libri tres, published in
Lisbon in 1542, attacks the “wicked (nefarius)” Machiavelli, opposing
his thesis belittling Christian military valour with the example of ardent
battles of the Iberian Reconquista and the victories of the Portuguese
Empire in Ottoman, or, more broadly, Islamic Asia.34 As far as Spain is
concerned, a Castilian translation of Giovio’s book appeared in 1543
and was followed by an intermittent cult of Turkophilia, which can be
discerned more in the literary tradition than in political or military trea-
tises.35 To outline the reactions provoked by Giovio’s essay, I will limit
myself here to three examples.
The first concerns Vasco Díaz Tanco de Fregenal and his Palinodia de
la nephanda y fiera nación de los turcos y de su engañoso arte y crudel modo
de guerrear (1547), dedicated to Prince Philip (the future King Philip
II). As the author recounts in the book, “I came across in Bologna a
book in the Tuscan tongue called Comentario de las guerras de los Turcos
(…). The which book (…) seemed to me a work of the highest regard”.
But this praiseworthy work, as Tanco testifies, was criticised by experts in
the Turkish matter for its “imperfections and rash judgements (imperfec-
tiones y ymmoderaciones)”; to the extent that that the author had decided
to contribute to the debate, focusing on the key issue of the time: that of
military discipline. Albeit in a book infused with anti-Turkish hatred, the
allure of Giovio’s pages continually gets the better of the writer’s pious
aims, as can be seen in the near word-for-word translations of passages
from the Commentario we keep coming across in the text: from the por-
trait of Selīm I—who, on a par with Caesar, liked to read histories, and
had them translated for him into Turkish—to that of Süleymān “so gen-
erous towards his soldiery that with this admirable quality he won their
hearts”. The Turks are further compared to the “Macedonian phalanxes
with which Alexander the Great conquered the East (…), although of
46 V. Lavenia
course—Tanco hurries to cover himself—with this great difference: that

the ancient kings of Macedonia were noble and virtuous by birth, while
the Turks are cowardly and cruel”.36
Such a generous (if cautious) approach soon ceased. In 1556 there
appeared in Valencia an Hystoria en la qual se trata de la origen y guer-
ras que han tenido los turcos (…) y de las costumbres y vidas dellos by one
Vicente Roca, who had also been in Italy. With the approval of the
Inquisition, this work aimed to alert “simple souls, who are given to
trembling if they hear anything of the Turks”. Such a reaction, according
to Roca, was the fault of those who, instead of illustrating their tyranny,
extolled their military discipline, without making clear “that those infidels
are not so courageous as they are painted”. The butt of this brief polemi-
cal passage is revealed a few pages later, and it is Giovio, who “was not so
devout as to live himself in his own diocese, but was always running after
popes and cardinals in Rome”. This acid vignette is followed by a heavy
indictment of France, guilty of an alliance with the Ottomans. The Turks,
the author reminds us, are first and foremost infidels, who, were it not
for the Janissaries, would have long ago yielded to Spain; even if, Roca is
forced to admit, while “depraved and barbarous in many respects, in oth-
ers are good-mannered and well-trained”. In fact, they were most strict
in their punishments, neither gambled nor drank, did not blaspheme and
would not allow the Christians under their yoke to do so.37
Some years later, far from his homeland, the conquistador of Colombia,
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada drafted his Antojovio, a confutation of
Giovio’s Historiae, which would remain in manuscript until 1927. A
veteran of the Italian wars (1522–1530), he sets down his own view of
recent times and accuses Giovio of being hostile towards Spain and of
writing pages comparable less to Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita than to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Quesada goes on to claim that the Italian was given to
“eulogising the Turk” in many passages of his work, a recurrent accusation
against Giovio.38 Whatever his intentions, he came over as a friend of the
Ottomans, and in some senses, a true comrade to the ungodly Machiavelli.
In Giovio’s Wake
In the sixteenth century political and military realism was not the only
prism through which the Ottoman world was examined; and dealing
with religion in relation to the Turks did not automatically entail con-
cerning oneself with military discipline in Giovio’s wake. A Florentine
contemporary of Machiavelli, ex-infantry-officer and ex-Savonarolian,

Andrea Cambini, in his Libro della origine de turchi et imperio degli
ottomani, published posthumously in 1529, dedicates a few asides to the
Jews that fled the Iberian peninsula to the relative freedom of worship
allowed by the Ottomans, who permitted the subjects of their empire to
observe “the ceremonies and practices of the faith into which they were
born”; and to the achievement of the Franciscan John of Capestrano,
who, a “defenceless mendicant (poverello disarmato)” (like Machiavelli’s
Savonarola), managed with the promise of paradise to mobilise a cru-
sader army composed not of “powerful or rich men but plebeians and
the poor, who, armed with the zeal of faith, had been ready to face the
perils of death (…), while only with the greatest difficulty can preachers
convince princes and the powerful of this world to do as much”.39
Different again was the cosmopolitan approach of Guillaume Postel.40
In his République des Turcs (1560) he examines Ottoman discipline and
doubts whether the Christians would then be up to defeating them. He also
draws a picture of a calculating Muḥammad, as an imposter who founded a
religion, pretending for the good of his people to speak with God.41
Meanwhile, Giovio’s thinking was mixed in with a reading of
Machiavelli (and Pomponazzi) in Benedetto Ramberti’s Libri tre delle
cose de turchi, published five years after the author’s journey through
Ottoman territories, made in 1534. In the eyes of Muḥammad, “that
most astute of men”, “who affected holy and moderate behaviour”, war
was the remedy for the idleness of a people naturally inclined to that
vice; and the Turks, following the Arabs, had interjected thanks to Islam
the virtues of blind obedience, rejection of blasphemy and contempt for
death. But it was above all in his political and military practice that the
Ottoman sultan revealed, in Ramberti’s view, his ability to conduct him-
self as a “New Prince”:
When My Lord Turk acquires a province, he immediately reduces to rub-

ble all or most of those fortresses that do not seem essential to preserve,
and destroys the cities, reducing them to sad little scatterings of houses. As
well as which he snuffs out and extinguishes all the nobles and great men
to be found therein.
The Machiavellian echo is obvious.42 But there is another more

nuanced passage: “(the sultan) allows that everyone live with his ancient
beliefs, because forcing them to embrace a new religion, apart from
48 V. Lavenia
driving them to desperation, would forfeit the hope of acquiring their loy-
alty”. None of which is to suggest that the Turks do not have their limita-
tions in warfare: the inadequacy of their infantry, the absence of a naval
policy and their dependence on ex-Christian militias are for Ramberti the
weak points of that empire, as elsewhere mercenary armies proved to be;
in this context the author sounds a warning note that suggests the pos-
sible future ruin of the Porte: “the subject peoples, who unarmed can
do nothing and are forced to submit (…), had they weapons, and could
believe themselves strong enough, might well aspire to freedom”.43
Giovio’s and Machiavelli’s dispassionate realism in relation to the
Ottomans came ever more to the fore after the printing, in 1573, of
Paragone della possanza del gran turco, et di quella del catholico re Filippo
first published in a miscellany by the polymath Antonino Danti. The text,
as we read, takes its inspiration from Comentarii ne quali si descrive la
guerra ultima di Francia, la celebratione del Concilio Tridentino, il soc-
corso d’Orano, l’impresa del Pignone e l’historia dell’assedio di Malta
(1567) by the Corsican diplomat and writer Antonio Francesco Cirni.
Thus, after Lepanto, there appeared immediate reflections on the vulner-
ability of the Turks, together with a detailed calculation of their reve-
nues (and those of the Habsburgs) and the weak points of their power at
arms, such as their lack of fortresses. The Ottomans, we read, have “nei-
ther commanders nor many experienced sailors” and their “innate cow-
ardice and weakness” was revealed at Malta in 1565. Furthermore, the
Achilles heel of the empire needs considering, a fifth column ready to rise
up against its immoral tyranny: in the event of a Christian victory “every
Turk at home or in battle would have a Christian servant would willingly
kill him, or abandon him on the field, even if he had earlier renounced
his faith”. There follows a second text Del modo d’assaltar l’imperio
turchesco inspired by Guicciardini, as well as a miscellany of religious and
moral precepts, into which merge, skilfully plagiarised, extended quotes
from Giovanni Boccaccio and Machiavelli, filtered through such proto-
libertine and jaundiced works as the Tuscan geographer and humanist
Tommaso Porcacchi’s Paralleli (…) cavati dagl’historici (1567).44
Nonetheless, from the papacy of Paul IV (1555–1559) onwards, with
the church’s condemnation of Machiavelli, the climate was changing and
Giovio too was regarded with increasing suspicion, to the extent that,
following the pontiff’s demise, Girolamo Ruscelli was moved to add to
his Sopplimento nell’Istorie di monsignor Paolo Giovio (1572) an edition
of a Consiglio di monsignor Giovio raccolto dalle consulte di papa Leone
Decimo per far l’impresa contra infedeli (1560), which is in effect a repu-
diation of the defamatory accusation of Giovio’s having been bribed by
the Turks to write up their empire. The Consiglio, reproposed various
decades after its first drafting, recommends that Christians formulate, on
the Ottoman model, ordinances against gambling and blasphemy and
severe measures for the religious and military discipline of Christian sol-
diers. Among the Turks, we read, “gambling is unheard of, armies never
take the field if not for battle, blasphemy is never encountered, let alone
thefts and rapes, which are unknown in living memory”.45 The model
of the Christian soldier would soon greet the world, in the time of
Pope Pius V (1566–1572), but without reference to the vigorous works
of Giovio, who had spoken ill of the warlike propensities of Christians
and had written in an atmosphere alien to that breathed by the Catholic
world of the Counter-Reformation.
Admiring the Turks, Beating the Turks

The fashion for Turkophilia was prolonged, indeed relaunched by
the non-partisan publishing initiatives of the man of letters and poly-
math Francesco Sansovino with his Venetian anthology Dell’Historia
universale dell’origine et imperio de’ turchi, first issued in 1560, with
subsequent internal rearrangements and successive additions and dele-
tions.46 The volume enjoyed considerable success and repeated for the
Turkish world the more global reach of Giovan Battista Ramusio’s cel-
ebrated collection of travel literature, published from 1550 onwards.
Introducing his anthology, Sansovino gives prominence to the Giovian
and Machiavellian nexus of “army discipline”, employing it as an inter-
pretive key to the Ottoman world which, with a dose of exoticism added,
emphasises its more strictly political and civil aspects in relation to reli-
gion, as against what Sansovino dubbs the “notuptomuchness” (dappoc-
aggine) of the Christians. The Turks, he points out, are the worthiest
heirs of the Romans, they are “disciplinable people” and “in matters of
arms they are so superior that the world marvels at them to its cost (…).
The real and principal backbone of their sultan consists in his expectation
of obedience, because as his subjects adore their prince and believe him
little less than a God, they think it a special favour to die, if not at his
hands, then at least by his will”.47 Again, in 1571, Sansovino uses similar
terms in his opening to Annali overo le vite de’ principi et signori della
casa othomana, which eulogise Süleymān as an exemplary religious and
50 V. Lavenia
peace-loving prince “who always kept his word and was a great respecter
of religion”.48 And he sticks to his viewpoint in successive editions of
Dell’Historia universale even when, as the title-page alerts, they have
been emended by order of the Inquisition.49
When? It is the 1580 Parma Index (as indeed those of 1590 and 1593)
that registers the inclusion of Dell’Historia universale among the prohib-
ited books donec expurgantur; but its examination had taken place earlier
and been recorded in the Roman Congregation of the Index’s papers.50
The censors were irked in particular by the Life of Muḥammad prefacing
the collection, and in fact from then on it would disappear and reappear
(only mildly retouched) in various subsequent editions. This censorship
occurred at the same time that Fabio Benvoglienti’s Per qual cagione per
la religione, non si sia fatta guerra fra gentili, et per che si faccia tra chris-
tiani (1570) also ended on the Index.51 This was the only printed text to
be circulated following a debate held in Rome in 1567 in response to a
troubling question put by Erasmus in his Dulce bellum inexpertis: why was
war between Christians more vicious and inhuman than wars between the
ancients? Together with Benvoglienti himself, Fabio Albergati, Rinaldo
Corso, and Gianfrancesco Lottini had gathered in the house of Cardinal
Marcantonio Da Mula to discuss the issue; and on the basis of what we
know, it seems that those present advanced cautiously Machiavellian
answers to this unimpeachably Christian question.52 Erasmus’s writings,
like those of Machiavelli, were banned, and so the minutes of the debate
were also proscribed and forbidden from circulating.
Also present at the 1567 debate was the Ligurian historian Uberto
Foglietta. His contribution, in which Machiavelli is specifically cited,
extols the civil benefits of religions even where they are utter hocus-
pocus, attacks Spanish forced baptisms, accuses monotheisms of
fomenting massacres and commends the Turks for their almost Roman
respect for religious differences, only to then turn the opinion upside
down and, citing the Portuguese Osório, to justify wars promoted by
Christians against their eternal enemies.53 In those years Foglietta also
drafted a De causis magnitudinis Imperii Turcici & virtutis ac felicita-
tis Turcarum in bellis perpetuae which eventually came out in Germany
(but not in Italy) in 1592. Dedicated to Prince Marcantonio Colonna,
one of the Christian condottieri at Lepanto, after Venice had deserted
the anti-Turkish alliance, signing a separate peace with Istanbul, the trea-
tise interweaves passages from Giovio and Machiavelli in the attempt to
explain how their military discipline and the worldly function of religion
had enabled the Turks to get back on their feet after Lepanto without
suffering mass desertions and apostasies similar to those suffered by
Christendom (an observation underlining the strong allure of Islam). For
Foglietta, whose reading of the Chapter 2 of Book II of the Discourses is
quite literal, the culprits for Christian weakness are an excess of priests,
cultural exhaustion, a justice system that encouraged litigation and a
hedonism that sapped the spirit to the detriment of martial discipline.54
Twenty years on, the historian and jurist Lazzaro Soranzo in his
L’ottomanno, first published in 1598, took a completely different line.
Basing himself on a close reading of the Venetian sources, Soranzo anal-
yses the state of the Habsburg Empire during the Langer Türkenkrieg.
He concludes that the enemy’s discipline was slipping under the pressure
of “comfort (commodità)” and “pleasure-seeking (delizie)”, turning the
Turkophile lexicon around to extoll the superiority of the Christians. The
only valiant soldiers available to the Ottomans were converts because the
Asiatics were “soft and effeminate (molli et effeminati)”—an expression
of Machiavelli’s—and confirmed the prejudices the ancient Greeks had
entertained about them. Furthermore, the Turkish population had now
to retire to the mountains to be safe from “thefts and murderers (assas-
sinamenti e ladrarie)”; and if the Ottoman soldier had once been a para-
gon of virtue, it was now—Soranzo writes, citing Bozio—the Christians,
redeemed by the new catechisms, that deserved first place.55 The Turks,
he goes on, “in combat rely more on numbers, on their belief in destiny,
on the panic sown by their war-engines and the hideous shouting of their
barbarous voices, than in orderliness and true discipline”. The Europeans
therefore should cease instructing the Turks in the use of firearms and
put an end to an illicit trade condemned by more than one papal bull,
remembering that the Turks, masters of deception “as commanded by
their lawgiver Muḥammad”, would use that gunpowder against the
Europeans.56 Soranzo thus distances himself from Giovio, calls for a
recognition of the supposed new disciplined strength of Christian arms
and outlines a strategy for fomenting revolt inside the Ottoman Empire,
employing spies and circulating printed texts abhorred by the Turks: out-
right war should be followed by rebellion and the conversion (or rather,
reconversion) of the forces subject to the Turkish yoke, which was now
in his view, as previously in Lucinge’s, from whom he had taken a large
part of his argument, weakened and dissoluble.57
The same ideas were also entertained by an Italian living in reli-
gious exile in Germany, a translator into Latin and annotator of
52 V. Lavenia
Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1582) and brother of the

well-known jurist Alberico Gentili, author of De iure belli (1598). In
1600, in Altdorf, Scipione Gentili delivered an oration De re militari
romana et turcica, in which, following the teachings of Machiavelli,
Giovio, his own master, the Neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius, and his brother
Alberico—the last two both authors of essays on the military virtues of
the Romans58—compared, in a complex style worthy of Machiavelli,
the relative strong points of the Roman and the Ottoman empires. He
emphasised their religion, their discipline, the frequency with which the
Ottomans breached agreements and the extent to which Muḥammad
resembled Numa, with literal borrowings from Machiavelli.59 Again
in the following year Gentili had a hand in the publication of a collec-
tion entitled Turca NIKETOS, bringing together a brief Dissertatio de
statu imperii Turcici, a Latin translation of Soranzo’s L’Ottomanno and
another of Il Turco vincibile in Ungheria (1597), an advisory paper
from the pen of the military engineer Achille Tarducci da Corinaldo. On
the subject of religion and martial toughness Tarducci almost explicitly
cites Machiavelli and recalls the example of Cyrus, who in Xenophon’s
account, conquered Armenia and Media using cunning and deceit. In his
ability to combine stratagem, military organisation and caution, Tarducci
maintains, “the Turk seems a good deal less barbarian than Greek”. It
was from the Greeks, in fact, that the Turks—who seemed to him now
beatable with a proper combination of discipline and means—had
learned to violate pacts and sworn oaths, none the less utilising religion
to keep the army in line as Giovio had described years earlier.60
The unbeatable Turk had become the beatable Turk, the emblematic
Ottoman soldier the Christian soldier, following a trajectory in which the
pages of Machiavelli and Giovio always remained intermingled and cen-
tral. None the less the cultural ambience had been altered by the influx
of Neo-Stoicism, and the military context by a new balance of forces.
Thus Giovanni Botero, in his Discorso della lega contra il turco al serenis-
simo prencipe Mauritio cardinal di Savoia (1614), could write that the
argument for the supposed superiority of the Ottoman military discipline
was perhaps valid before the death of Süleymān: because up until then the
sultan going in person to the wars (…), was able to maintain the disci-
pline of his troops (…). But since Süleymān’s successors never moved
from their hearths, (…) those same troops, imbued with the pleasures of
Constantinople and enfeebled thereby, have become more desirous of ease
than of effort, and of mutinying in their own city than of taking war to the
enemy (…). From which has followed the defeats of the Turkish armies in
Persia, the repeated debacles in Hungary and the uprisings in Anatolia and
Arabia. Today, therefore, we can no longer discuss the Turkish forces in
the same terms as forty or fifty years ago.61
Comparison with Asia had helped Christians to reflect on the civil uses
of religion and to acknowledge the limits of their martial discipline. But
by the end of the sixteenth century, with the at once mythical and real-
istic figure of the disciplined soldier on the wane, all that was left of the
Turk was the image of the despot, the barbarian, the enemy of the faith,
while that of the envied empire-builder faded away. It was the Europeans
that were surely to be emulated now, who saw themselves as lords of all
the world. The times of Giovio and Machiavelli seemed distant for sure.
Notes
1. R. de Lucinge (1984), De la naissance, dureé et chute des estats, ed. M.J.
Heath (Geneva: Droz): Book I, Chapters 8–9; Book II, Chapter 1; Book
III, Chapters 14–15.
2. S. Suppa (1997), “L’antimachiavelisme de Thomas Bozio”, Corpus, 31,
145–173; A. Biondi (2008), “Aspetti della cultura cattolica post-tri-
dentina”, in his Umanisti, eretici, streghe, ed. M. Donattini (Modena:
Assessorato alla Cultura): 121–164; A. Prosperi (2010), “La religione,
il potere, le élites: Incontri italo-spagnoli nell’età della Controriforma”,
in his Eresie e devozioni, 3 vols. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura):
Vol. I, 61–85.
3. N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. A.
Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke University Press): Vol. I,
331.
4. E. Cutinelli-Rendina (1999), Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli (Pisa and
Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali); M. Viroli (2010),
Machiavelli’s God, trans. A. Shugaar (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press); D. Cantimori (2013), Machiavelli, Guicciardini, le idee
religiose del Cinquecento (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale).
5. T. Bozio (1593), De robore bellico diuturnis et amplis Catholicorum regnis
liber unus: Adversus Machiavellum (Rome: Bartolomeo Bonfadino): 22,
29, 42.
6. See The Prince, Chapters 3–4 and Discourses, Book I, Chapter 19, and
Book II, Introduction.
54 V. Lavenia
7. C. Goellner (1961–1978), Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrucke des

XVI. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Bucarest, Berlin and Baden Baden: Editura
Academiei and Akademie Verlag-Heitz).
8. A. Biondi (1981), “La Bibliotheca Selecta di Antonio Possevino: Un pro-
getto di egemonia culturale”, in: G.P. Brizzi (ed.), La ‘Ratio studiorum’:
Modelli culturali e pratiche dei gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento
(Rome: Bulzoni): 43–73; L. Balsamo (2006), Antonio Possevino S.I. bib-
liografo della Controriforma e diffusione della sua opera in area anglicana
(Florence: Olschki).
9. A. Possevino (1603), Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum (…)
recognita novissime ab eodem, et aucta, tomus secundus, 2 vols. (Venice:
Altobello Salicato): Book XVI, Chapter 21.
10. L. Michelacci (2005), “Introduzione: La nostalgia dell’altro”, in: P.
Giovio, Commentario delle cose de’ turchi (Bologna: Clueb): 8–67. See
also F. Chabod (1967), Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin, Einaudi): 241–
267, who repeatedly insists on the breadth of Giovio’s geographical
horizons, and T.C.P. Zimmermann (1995), Paolo Giovio: The Historian
and the Crisis of Sixteenth Century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press): 122–123, 155. On Giovio see also E. Pujeau (2015), L’Europe
et les Turcs: la croisade de l’humaniste Paolo Giovio (Toulouse: Presses
Universitaires du Midi).
11. L. Perini (2002), La vita e i tempi di Pietro Perna (Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura).
12. G. Fumagalli, G. Belli and E. Vaccaro Sofia (eds) (1981–1961), Catalogo
delle edizioni romane di Antonio Blado asolano ed eredi (1516–1593) pos-
sedute dalle Biblioteche di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: Presso i principali librai
and Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato).
13. A. Prosperi (1998), “Il principe, il cardinale, il papa: Reginald Pole let-
tore di Machiavelli”, in: Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli (Rome:
Salerno editrice): 241–262; G. Procacci (1995), Machiavelli nella cultura
europea dell’età moderna (Rome and Bari: Laterza): 85–86; S. Anglo
(2005), Machiavelli, the First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility
and Irrelevance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press): 117,
168; A. Petrina (2013), “Reginald Pole and Reception of the Principe in
Henrician England”, in: A. Arienzo and A. Petrina (eds), Machiavellian
Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England (Farnham: Ashgate): 13–27.
14. N. Bisaha (2008), Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the
Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press): 54–58
and 178.
15. L. D’Ascia (ed.) (2001), Il Corano e la tiara: L’epistola a Maometto di
Enea Silvio Piccolomini (papa Pio II) (Bologna: Pendragon): 40–52.
16. Ibidem, 53: “venga il Turco con tutta l’Asia”.
17. P. Moreno (2002), “Paolo Giovio e Francesco Guicciardini”, in: E.

Pasquini and P. Prodi (eds), Bologna nell’età di Carlo V e Guicciardini
(Bologna: Il Mulino): 93–104.
18. E. Raimondi (1972), Politica e commedia dal Beroaldo a Machiavelli
(Bologna: Il Mulino): 235–252.
19. P. Giovio (2006), Elogi degli uomini illustri, ed. F. Minonzio (Turin:
Einaudi): 258–261. The suggestion of contact is pursued by C.
Dionisotti (1980), Machiavellerie: Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli (Turin:
Einaudi): 416, and by E. Travi (1983), “Giovio, gli Orti Oricellari e
Machiavelli”, Testo, 5, 53–61.
20. Ibidem, 54: “niente mi è più conosciuto e familiare”.
21. Giovio, Commentario, 69. The dedication is dated 22 January 1531.
22. Ibidem, 169: “La disciplina militare è con tanta giustizia e severità regu-
lata da Turchi che si può dire che avanzino quella de gli antichi Greci
e Romani”; “con una pazza persuasion ch’ognuno abbia scritto in faccia
come e quando abbia da morire”.
23. Ibidem, 151: “come fossero tanti frati dell’osservanza”. On the portrait
collection see G. Le Thiec (1992), “L’entrée des grands Turcs dans le
Museo de Paolo Giovio”, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et
Méditerranée, 104, no. 2, 781–830.
24. Giovio, Commentario, 97–98.
25. Ibidem, 128, 130, 144.
26. Ibidem, 150–151 (concerning the conquest of Rhodes), 156–157 (“ho
inteso da uomini degni di fede (…) che spesso dice che a lui tocca di
ragione l’Imperio di Roma e di tutto il Ponente per essere legittimo suc-
cessore di Costantino”). On claims to be the heirs of Rome at the court
of Süleymān, particularly in the time of the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha,
executed in 1536, see K. Şahin (2013), Empire and Power in the Reign of
Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth–Century Ottoman World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press): 49–87. See also Pier Mattia Tommasino’s
chapter in this volume.
27. Giovio, Commentario, 171: “il dado de l’Imperio di tutto il mondo”;
“fare le provesioni da timidi e da paurosi, né attendere alle vane e dan-
nose parole di quelli che non istimando li Turchi braveggiano avanti che
vengano alla prova”.
28. E. Valeri (2007), “‘Historici bugiardi’: La polemica cinquecentesca contro
Paolo Giovio”, in: A. Merola et al. (eds), Storia sociale e politica: Omaggio
a Rosario Villari (Milan: FrancoAngeli): 115–137: 129.
29. L. Hanke (1959), Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race
Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter); F. Castilla
Urbano (2013), El pensamiento de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Madrid:
Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales).
56 V. Lavenia
30. M. Meserve (2008), Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
31. J.G. de Sepúlveda (1995–2012), Obras completas, 17 vols. (Pozoblanco:
Ayuntamento de Pozoblanco): Vol. VII, 329–346.
32. A. Coroleu (1992), “Il Democrates primus di Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda:
una nuova prima condanna contro il Machiavelli”, Il Pensiero Politico, 25,
263–268.
33. J.G. de Sepúlveda (1535), De convenientia militaris disciplinae cum chris-
tiana religione dialogus, qui inscribitur Democrates (Rome: Antonio
Blado), introduction. See Sepúlveda, Obras, Vol. XV, 80–192.
34. J. Osório (1542), De nobilitate civili libri duo: De nobilitate Christiana
libri tres (Lisbon: Luís Rodrigues): fols. 98r, 106r–119v. See also J. Osório
(1549), De gloria libri V (Coimbra: Francisco Correia), in which issue
is taken with Machiavelli even in a work heavily influenced by the same,
dating back to his Bologna period. For the Turks, see fols. 70v–71r. This
author is also discussed in Giuseppe Marcocci’s chapter in this volume.
35. A. Mas (1967), Le Turcs dans la littérature espagnole du Siècle d’or, 2
vols. (Paris: Centre de Recherches Hispaniques): Vol. I, 124–129; Vol.
II, 177–188; A. Merle (2003), Le miroir Ottoman: Une image politique
des hommes dans la littérature géographique espagnole et française, XVIe–
XVIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne).
36. V. Díaz Tanco de Fregenal (1547), Libro intitulado Palinodia de la
nephanda y fiera nacion de los Turcos (Orense: Author’s edition): “estando
en Bolonia vi un librezillo en lengua toscana llamado Comentario delas
guerras delos turcos (…). El qual libro (…) me parecio obra de mucha
estima” (Dedication, fol. 2r); “tan liberal con los soldados que les compra
con esta gran virtud los animos” (fol. 53r); “falange macedonica conque
Alexandro Magno conquisto todo el Levante (…), aunque hay gran dif-
ferencia. Porque los reyes antiguos de Macedonia eran nobles y virtuosos
de nacion, y los turcos son viles y crueles” (fols. 55v–56r).
37. V. Roca (1556), Hystoria en la quel se trata de la origen y guerras que
han tenido los turcos (Valencia: s.n.): “hombres simples, los quales suelen
maravillarse y temblar de loque oyen dezir delos Turcos”, “y que no son
aquellos infieles tan bravos como se pintan” (Dedication, fol. 2v); “no era
muy devoto de residir personalmente en su obispado, si no que se andava
siempre en Roma tras los papas y cardenales” (fol. 88r); “en muchas cosas
viciosos y barbaros, pero en otras tienen buenas costumbres y criança”
(fol. 132v). See also fol. 152r.
38. G. Jiménez de Quesada (1991), El antiJovio, ed. G. Hernández Peñalosa, 2
vols. (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo): Vol. II, 193: “alabar al turco”. For
further accusations of Turkophilia aimed at Giovio see his letter of 1551 to
Ippolito d’Este the Younger, published in P. Giovio (1956–1958), Lettere,
ed. G.G. Ferraro, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato): Vol. II,
189–191.
39. A. Cambini (1529), Libro della origine de turchi et imperio degli ottom-
ani (Florence: Heirs of Filippo di Giunta): “le cerimonie et riti della
fede nella quale erano nati” (fol. 25r); “non di huomini potenti, o ricchi,
ma di plebei et poveri, che per il zelo della fede armati si erano voluti
esporre al pericolo della morte (…), il che difficilmente da predicatori
si può persuadere à principi, e altri potenti del seculo” (fol. 28v). On
the author see E. Guerrieri (2008), “Fra storia e letteratura: Andrea di
Antonio Cambini”, Medioevo e Rinascimento, n.s., 22, no. 19, 375–420;
L. D’Ascia (2010), “L’impero machiavellico: L’immagine della Turchia
nei trattatisti italiani del Cinquecento e del primo Seicento”, Quaderns
d’Italià, 15, 99–116.
40. F. Lestringant (1985), “Guillaume Postel e l‘obsession turque’”, in:
Guillaume Postel 1581–1981: Actes du Colloque International d’Avranches
(Paris: Éditions de La Maisnie): 265–298; I. McCabe Baghdiantz (2008),
Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the
Ancien Régime (Oxford and New York: Berg): 15–36.
41. G. Postel (1560), De la république des Turcs, et là où l’occasion s’offrera,
des moeurs, loy de tous les Muhamédistes (Poitiers: Enguibert de Marnef):
89 (on religion). The third part is dedicated to the issue of Ottoman
strength and discipline. Giovio’s name appears on p. 22, and from him
are derived a number of opinions on the conduct of war (p. 44).
42. See The Prince, Chapters 4, 7 and 19, and Discourses, Book I, Chapter 26.
43. B. Ramberti (1539), Libri tre delle cose de turchi (Venice: The Sons of
Aldo): “astutissimo huomo” (fol. 26v); “che fingeva et costumi santi
et moderati” (fol. 27r); “Quando che il Signor Turco s’impatronisce di
alcuna provincia, di subito rovina dalle fondamenta tutte o la maggior
parte di quelle fortezze, che non gli paion molto necessarie da esser con-
servate, et disfa le cittati, riducendole in tristi et piccioli casali. Oltra di
ciò spegne, et estingue del tutto gli grandi et nobili che in esse vi ritrova”
(fol. 31v); “permette che viva ogn’uno nella fede ch’era, perciò che sfor-
zandoli a nova relligione, oltra che li metteria in disperatione, perderia
anco la speranza di farseli fedeli” (fols. 31v–32r); “gli popoli sudditi,
che disarmati non possono, et convengono per forza star soggietti (…),
quando havessero le armi in mano, et si sentissero gagliardi, aspirariano
alla libertà” (32v).
44. A. Danti (1573), Osservationi di diverse historie et d’altri particolari degni
di memoria (Venice: Matteo Boselli): “api né tanti marinari d’esperienza”
(fol. 2r); “naturale viltà et debolezza” (fol. 4r); “ogni turco in casa sua, o
in campo havrebbe un christiano suo servo, che l’ucciderebbe, et che nella
battaglia, se ben rinegato fosse, l’abbandonerebbe” (fol. 4v). See also fols.
58 V. Lavenia
5r–5v and 12v–13v. On this work see P. Cherchi (1988), Polimatia di riuso:
Mezzo secolo di plagio, 1539–1589 (Rome: Bulzoni): 77–83. On Danti and
Porcacchi see P. Cherchi (ed.) (1999), Ricerche sulle selve rinascimentali
(Ravenna: Longo).
45. G. Ruscelli (1572), Sopplimento nell’Istorie di monsignor Paolo Giovio
(…) et un consiglio di monsignor Giovio raccolto dalle consulte di papa
Leone Decimo per far l’impresa contra infedeli, di nuovo ristampato et
con somma diligenza corretto (Venice: Altobello Salicato): 99: “mai non
si sentì giuoco, non si vide arma sfodrata se non in battaglia, né mai si
udì bestemmia, per non dir de’ furti e sforzamenti de’ quali errori non
è memoria tra di loro”. See also pp. 5 (defence of Giovio) and 89–100
(Consiglio).
46. S. Yérasimos (1988), “De la collection de voyages à l’histoire universelle:
La Historia Universale de’ Turchi de Francesco Sansovino”, Turcica, 20,
19–41; E. Bonora (1994), Ricerche su Francesco Sansovino imprenditore
librario e letterato (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti):
97–137.
47. F. Sansovino (1560), Dell’historia universale dell’origine et imperio de’
turchi parte prima (Venice: Francesco Sansovino and Co.): “disciplina
della militia” (Dedication, fols. 2r); “dapocaggine” (Dedication 2v);
“genti disciplinabili (…) nella militia sono tanto eccellenti, che il mondo
con suo gran danno se ne maraviglia (…). Il proprio e principal nervo
della potenza di quel signore consiste nella predetta obedienza. Conciosia
ch’adorando coloro il suo principe, et credendo ch’egli sia poco inferiore
alla grandezza di Dio, si reputano per segnalato favore il morire, se non
per le sue mani, almeno per la sua volontà” (fol. 16v).
48. F. Sansovino (1571), L’Annali overo le vite de’ principi et signori della casa
Othomana (Venice: Giacomo Sansovino), fol. 134r (“faceva professione di
mantener la parola et d’osservar grandemente la fede”).
49. F. Sansovino (1582), Historia universale dell’origine et imperio de’ turchi
raccolta et in diversi luoghi di nuovo ampliata; et riformata in molte sue
parti per ordine della Santa Inquisitione (Venice: Altobello Salicato).
50. J.M. De Bujanda (ed.) (1984–2002), Index des livres interdits, 11 vols.
(Sherbrooke and Geneva: Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance and
Droz): Vol. 10, 350; Vol. 11, 124, 415; Vatican City, Archivio della
Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Index, Protocolli 0, Antonio
Posio secretarius (1571–1580), Additiones Romae 1579, fols. 379v and
550r.
51. F. Benvoglienti (1570), Discorso per qual cagione per la religione non si
sia fatta guerra fra’ Gentili, & perche si faccia tra Christiani (Florence:
Bartolomeo Sermartelli).
52. M. Catto (2012), Cristiani senza pace: La Chiesa, gli eretici e la guerra
nella Roma del Cinquecento (Rome: Donzelli).
53. The work De causis bellorum religionis gratia excitatorum: Liber ad M.
Antonium Amulium cardinalem is published in U. Foglietta (1838),
Anecdota, ed. V. Alizeri (Genoa: Officina Ferrandiana): 137–190.
54. U. Foglietta (1595), De causis magnitudinis Imperii Turcici & Virtutis
ac Felicitatis Turcarum in bellis perpetuae (Lipsia: Michael Lantzenberger
and Henning Grosse): fols. B1r–B3v. In this edition the work is followed
by other treatises on Turkish matters.
55. L. Soranzo (1600), L’Ottomanno, 4th ed. (Naples: Costantino Vitale):
Part I, 35–37 and 57.
56. Ibidem, Part I, 60: “secondo il comandamento del loro legislator
Mehemeto” and “più si confidano combattendo nella moltitudine,
nell’opinione c’hanno del Fato, e nello strepito de’ loro bellici stromenti,
e nell’horribil grido delle barbare voci, che non fanno nel buon’ordine, e
nella vera disciplina”.
57. Ibidem, Part III, 168–201. For a more thorough analysis see V. Lavenia
(2015), “I libri, le armi e le missioni: Conversione e guerra antiot-
tomana in un testo di Lazzaro Soranzo”, in: V. Lavenia and S. Pavone
(eds), Missioni, saperi e adattamento tra Europa e imperi non cristiani
(Macerata: Eum): 165–202.
58. J. Lipsius (2002), De militia Romana libri quinque: De constantia libri
duo, facsimile reprint, ed. W. Weber (Hildesheim: Olms); A. Gentili
(2011), The Wars of the Romans (De armis Romanis), ed. B. Kingsbury
and B. Straumann, trans. D. Lupher (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press).
59. The oration is published in S. Gentili (1763–1769), Opera omnia, 8 vols.
(Naples: Giovanni Gravier): Vol. V: 263–278.
60. Anglo, Machiavelli, 485–490.
61. “(…) fu forse vera fino alla morte di Solimano: perché sino allora,
andando i gran Signori personalmente alla guerra (…), mantenevano
viva la disciplina della loro militia (…). Ma, non si essendo i successori
di Solimano mossi mai di casa, (…) quella militia, intrisasi delle delitie
di Constantinopoli, e in quelle avvilitasi, n’è diventata più vaga d’otio,
che di travaglio, e di ammutinamenti nell’istessa città di Constantinopoli,
che di guerra co’ nimici (…). Quindi son nate le sconfitte de gli esser-
citi Turcheschi in Persia, e le tante rotte, ricevute in Ongheria, e le ribel-
lioni della Natolia, e dell’Arabia. Si che, non si deve discorrere delle forze
turchesche hoggidì, come quaranta, o cinquanta anni sono, si discorreva”,
G. Botero (1614), Discorso della lega contra il turco al serenissimo prencipe
Mauritio cardinal di Savoia (Turin: Giovanni Domenico Tarino): 21–23.
60 V. Lavenia
Author Biography
Vincenzo Lavenia is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the
University of Macerata. He is a specialist of early modern Catholic Europe, espe-
cially Italy and Spain, with a particular interest in religious and church history,
the Inquisition, theology and the justification of war. He is the author of the
monograph L’infamia e il perdono: Tributi, pene e confessione nella teologia morale
della prima età moderna (2004), and the editor (with Adriano Prosperi and John
Tedeschi) of the Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, 4 vols. (2010) and of the
Storia del cristianesimo, vol. III, L’età moderna (2015).
CHAPTER 4
Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
I
In an illuminating essay, the Italian historian Adriano Prosperi demon-
strated how the English cardinal Reginald Pole, the early champion of
anti-Machiavellianism, made broad use of Machiavelli in his De summo
Pontifice Christi in terris vicario, a treatise on the authority of the pope
written in 1549, while its author was running for that office, and pub-
lished in Leuven twenty years after his defeat in Conclave.1 Similar cases,
concerning less known figures, illustrate the often unpredictable direc-
tions of Machiavelli’s reception. Yet even Machiavelli read by the anti-
quarians, of whom we shall speak here, is closely tied to the political
writer we are most familiar with, who ponders over “all the dominions
that have had or now have authority over men”.2
This is a revised version of an essay originally published in Italian, in 2011, as

“Machiavelli e gli antiquari”, in: M. Donattini, G. Marcocci and S. Pastore (eds),
Per Adriano Prosperi, 3 vols. (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale): Vol. II, 3–9.
C. Ginzburg (*) 
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
C. Ginzburg 

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_4
62 C. Ginzburg
II
These pages are a small fragment of an ongoing project dedicated to
the emergence, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, of a
comparative approach to religions—an approach far older than the late
nineteenth-century codification of the history of religion as an academic
discipline. Older, yes, but how much older? Philippe Borgeaud has
repeatedly emphasised that this comparative approach has its origins in
the Greco-Roman world, where myths and gods were easily translated
and assimilated from one culture to another.3 However, this apparent
continuity conceals some crucial discontinuities. Guy G. Stroumsa listed
four of them: (a) relations between Christians and Jews, and between
their respective sacred texts; (b) the discovery of New World popula-
tions; (c) the Protestant Reformation; (d) the Renaissance.4 In each of
these cases religious comparison was used to aggressive ends, marked
by polemics, persecution, forced conversion and massacres. Unlike the
interpretatio Romana (Roman interpretation), which flowered in the
welcoming imperial pantheon, the comparative approach to religion
established itself in the Christian context as an instrument of battle. A
critically detached attitude toward religious pluralism was born of vio-
lent, bloody roots.
I intend to qualify the fourth of these elements listed by Stroumsa,
dwelling on the work of Machiavelli and its reception.5 This reception
made a finite, though not negligible contribution to the elaboration—
again, in a polemical tone—of the comparative approach to religion.6
III
To speak of “the work of Machiavelli” in this context means to implic-
itly evoke some well-known passages, such as the juxtaposition of Moses
with Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus in Chapter 6 of The Prince, or those
chapters of the Discourses on Livy, which deal with religion in Ancient
Rome and its social and political implications (Book I, Chapters 11–15).
Less known, in fact escaping (if I am not mistaken) the attention of
modern readers, is the incipit of The Life of Castruccio Castracani,
the biography of the Lucchese condottiero (1281–1328) written by
Machiavelli in 1520 and published for the first time along with the first
edition of The Prince by the Roman printer Antonio Blado in 1532:
4 MACHIAVELLI AND THE ANTIQUARIANS 63
Those who consider it, my dearest Zanobi and Luigi, think it wonder-
ful that all, or the larger part, of those who in this world have done very
great things, and who have been excellent among the men of their era,
have in their birth and origin been humble and obscure, or at least have
been beyond all measure afflicted by fortune. Because all of them either
have been exposed to wild beasts or have had fathers so humble that, being
ashamed of them, they have made themselves out sons of Jove or of some
other God.7
The readers of Machiavelli, beginning with Zanobi Buondelmonti and

Luigi Alamanni, to whom The Life of Castruccio Castracani is dedicated,
as well as their friends, would have caught the impious allusion implicit
in the words “or of some other God”.8 It is an allusion highlighted by
the preterition which immediately follows: “Who these are, since many
of them are known to everybody, would be boring to repeat and little
acceptable to readers; hence, as superfluous, I omit it”.9
Perhaps in writing these sarcastic words Machiavelli was reminded of
an equally scandalous passage (this too escaping the attention of mod-
ern commentators) from the Declamatio (1440) of Lorenzo Valla on
the supposed “donation of Constantine”. Among the arguments used to
demonstrate the falsity of that document, Valla quotes the passage which
deals with its physical location: “on the venerable body of the blessed
Peter”. And he comments:
When I was a boy, I remember asking someone who had written the Book
of Job. When he answered, “Job himself”, I asked the further question of
how therefore he managed to mention his own death. This can be said of
many other books, although it is not appropriate to discuss them here.10
By way of an implicit reference to the death of Moses at the end of

Deuteronomy (34:5), Valla makes it clear that Moses himself could not
have authored the Pentateuch. Through the implicit comparison of
Moses to figures such as Theseus, Cyrus or Romulus, Machiavelli makes
a mockery of the divine nature of Christ.
It is a passage that illustrates what might be the aggressive potential
of a comparative approach to religion in a Christian context. The roots
of this attitude can be seen in the environment in which Machiavelli
came of age: his father Bernardo appears among the interlocutors in
the dialogue De legibus et iudiciis, composed in 1483 by the Florentine
64 C. Ginzburg
chancellor Bartolomeo Scala, and in which are named Moses, Zoroaster,

Hermes Trismegistus, Numa, Zalmoxis, Muḥammad and so forth.11 The
importance attributed to the religion of the Romans in Chapter 11 of
Book I of the Discourses on Livy, developed further in the subsequent
chapters, immediately lays the premise for a generalisation: “And truly
no one who did not have recourse to God ever gave to a people unusual
laws, because without that they would not be accepted”.12
The reference to “God”, without further qualification, allows, after
the rapid evocation of Lycurgus and Solon, for an immediate shift of the
discussion to “the present”.13 For Machiavelli, the possibility of compar-
ing different religions was absolutely obvious.
IV
Machiavelli’s comparison was fed by a wide variety of readings, reflec-
tion and a most vigorous imagination—not by scholarly study. Even
if Machiavelli was neither erudite nor an antiquarian, his pages on the
religion of the Romans attracted the attention of the antiquarians.14 As
Sydney Anglo has noted, two works by the Lyonese noble Guillaume Du
Choul demonstrate this: the Discours sur la castrametation et discipline
militaire des Romains (…) des bains et antiques exercitations grecques et
romaines and the Discours de la religion des anciens Romains, published
in Lyon in 1555 and in 1556, respectively, and promptly translated by
the Florentine Gabriele Simeoni, a well-learned antiquarian himself, in
1556 and 1557, respectively.15 Both works are accompanied by illustra-
tions which would have a long influence and be copied often (Nicolas
Poussin made use of them, for example). Some of them were inspired
by the drawings—now lost—that the Italian painter Jacopo Ripanda had
made of Trajan’s column.16 Du Choul repeatedly drew upon documen
tation he had collected in 1538–1540 to compose a work of which only
a fragment remains, preserved in a splendid manuscript that was dedi-
cated to Francis I and is now kept at the Royal Library of Turin. It is
titled Des antiquités romaines. Premier livre.17 So the image of two box-
ers, portrayed in the Turinese manuscript and taken from an engraving
by Marco Dente, re-emerges in the illustration which accompanies the
Discours (…) des bains et antiques exercitations grecques et romaines.18
Other examples could be made as well.19 But the intention to publish the
work Des antiquités romaines, continually expressed by Du Choul after

the death of King Francis I of France (1547), remained unrealised.20
In Du Choul’s works, the reproductions of medallions, or other vari-
ous objects, alternate with transcriptions of epitaphs. In a passage from
the Discours de la religion des anciens Romains, Du Choul speaks of an
“epitaph now in Turin, which I have drawn from my book On the epi-
grams of all Gaul” (this work has not been preserved).21 The Italian
translation is slightly different: “an epitaph which one sees in Turin,
already shown to me by Simeoni”.22 The translator, Gabriele Simeoni,
punctiliously asserted his priority, as is confirmed some years later in his
Illustratione de gli epitaffi et medaglie antiche:
This epitaph recalled to my mind a greater and nicer one, which, com-
ing back from Piedmont, I borrowed to the Lord of the mountains of
Dauphiné [i.e., Du Choul himself], who used it in his book on the ancient
religion of the Romans, printed in French in Lyon by Guillaume Rouillé
and translated into Italian by me. I attached again this epitaph, as it is mine
and concerns my argument.23
This insistence should not be taken for granted, given the social distance
that separated Simeoni and the noble Du Choul. One catches a glimpse
of a close relationship, though perhaps not free of tensions.24 Upon close
examination, an element emerges which fed the antiquarian passions of
both men.
In the Discours sur la castrametation, after quoting a passage from
the De haruspicum responsis in which Cicero attributes Roman m ilitary
supremacy to their piety, Du Choul observes: “Religion in an army is
certainly a necessary thing to govern it, and to govern a kingdom or
a republic, as well, for religion is the cause of good order, and good
order makes for good fortune, and from good fortune lucky enterprises
come”.25
In his version, Simeoni renders the implicit reference to the chapter
“On the religion of the Romans” in the Discourses (Book I, Chapter 11),
with words nearly identical to those of Machiavelli: “This [religion]
is cause of good order, and the good order in turn the cause of good
fortune, and upon good fortune the happy outcomes of enterprises
depend”.26 At the beginning of the passage just cited, Simeoni inserts a
further Machiavellian touch, absent in the text of Du Choul: “Certainly
66 C. Ginzburg
religion is very useful to an army, as well as a militia of its own soldiers is

necessary to safeguard a kingdom or a republic”.27
The subject of armi proprie (“own arms”) was particularly meaning-
ful for the Florentine exile Simeoni, who discusses it more broadly in
his Illustratione de gli epitaffi et medaglie antiche, contrasting legionari
(“legionaries”) and mercennari (“mercenaries”). Among the examples
illustrating the superiority of the “legionaries”, that is, the non-mer-
cenary militias, Simeoni refers to the unfortunate result of the 1530
siege of Florence.28 From a very young age Simeoni had been con-
nected to Donato Giannotti, one of the major figures in the defense of
Florence, who was in France from 1550, in the service of the cardinal of
Tournon.29
V
Du Choul could have arrived at Machiavelli independently of Simeoni.
Nevertheless, some passages from Du Choul’s original seem a mere
shell—a faint echo of the Italian translation. Let us take the beginning of
the previously mentioned section of Discours de la castrametation:
We know this from the noblest sentence of Cicero’s On the Response of the
Haruspices, when he told us that the Romans, though they were not as
numerous as the Spaniards, as strong as the Gauls, as astute as the Africans,
as learned as the Greeks, or as spiritual as the Latins, with piety and reli-
gion and aided only by their wisdom (through which they had seen that
all things are governed by the immortal Gods) have overcome all kinds of
people and foreign nations.30
In his translation from French to Italian Simeoni turned Cicero’s sed (but)—
“sed pietate ac religione atque hac una sapientia” (On the Response of the
Haruspices, 19, 23)—into a very Machiavellian nondimeno (nonetheless):
“nonetheless, through their piety, religion and singular wisdom (…)”.31
Du Choul’s translation was preceded by a dedication to Catherine
de’ Medici, the Florentine noblewoman raised to the throne of France,
and was signed by the printer Guillaume Rouillé: “The purity and sweet-
ness of the Tuscan language seems to be (…) held in the highest esteem
after Greek and Latin, the Tuscans themselves strive every day to make
it more beautiful; the foreign literates admire it, and just as Ariosto,
Bembo and Sannazzaro have done, try to imitate it in their writings”.32
Behind the printer, who is a transparent figurehead, once again the voice
of Simeoni appears: the Discours de la castrametation allows for “know-
ing that the greatness and prosperity of the Roman Empire derived from
nothing but the virtue of its own army, its justice, and frequent worship
(though just as false as ours, ordained by the Catholic church, is redeem-
ing and true)”.33
For Machiavelli, the armi proprie had to draw inspiration from the
fierce religion of the Romans, as opposed to the meek Christian faith. Yet
in the writings of Du Choul, this juxtaposition opens the door to con-
frontation and comparison:
After having discussed it at length, I often wondered how the Gentiles

dwelled so enduringly in their false, superstitious and erroneous religion,
leaving ours which is true and sent by God (…). The Romans could as
well believe that IESUS CHRIST had made the dead come back to life,
like their Asclepius, whom they made rise, full of light, to the heavens and
thought that he was born from a virgin, as they believe that Vesta was the
virgin mother of Gods. And while they were refused to believe that our
Lord gave sight to the blind, they were sure that the Emperor Vespasian
performed the same miracle in Alexandria.34
Pagan superstitions are similar to Christian rites, Asclepius and Vespasian

are comparable to Christ, and so forth. A poisonous analogy, as it is
reversible.35 The uniqueness of the Christian religion was being under-
mined. All of this paved the way to the conclusion of Du Choul’s
Discours:
And if we look with curiosity, we will find that many institutions of our
religion have been taken and translated from Egyptian and Gentile cer-
emonies, such as tunics and gowns, crowns of priests, inclinations of the
head around the altar, the rite of sacrifice, the music of temples, adora-
tions, prayers and supplications, processions and litanies, and many
other things that our priests usurp and refer to an only God, IESUS
CHRIST, whereas the ignorance of Gentiles, false religion and mad
superstition, attributed them to their Gods and to mortal men after their
consecrations.36
Simeoni’s translation differs slightly: “(…) and many other things that a
good spirit can easily compare, after having well considered the former
and the latter ceremonies”.37 The “good spirit” capable of grasping all
68 C. Ginzburg
of this would not have been misled by the predictable sentence which
immediately follows: “The only difference is that those of the Gentiles
were false and superstitious, while ours are Christian and Catholic, since
they are in honor of God, the omnipotent Father, and Christ, his son, to
whom be eternal glory”.38
VI
Direct or indirect echoes of Machiavelli can often be discerned in
sixteenth-century comparisons of pagan and Christian rites, made through
a perspective of veiled hostility to the latter.39 But this antiquarianism,
born of robust political origins, was open to a much broader compari-
son, stimulated by the first contact between Europeans and New World
populations.40 Among the many examples of the slow transformation of
antiquarianism into ethnography, one might mention the work of another
Lyonnaise antiquarian, the jurist Claude Guichard’s Funerailles et diverses
manieres d’ensevelir des Romains, Grecs et autres nations, tant anciens que
modernes, published in Lyon in 1581 by Jean de Tournes, the same pub-
lisher as Simeoni’s treatise on ancient medals and epitaphs. Guichard,
who had attended the University of Turin, dedicated the book to Duke
Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy (r. 1580–1630), remembering that he
had offered him a translation of Livy some years earlier.41 Guichard, too,
begins his treatise with an exaltation of the “civility, military art and reli-
gion (police, art militaire et religion)” of the Romans: “Furthermore, of
these three things not only do the establishment, greatness and safety of
every well-ordered republic consist, but from the awareness of them the
entire and perfect knowledge of history and antiquities of the Romans
also depends”.42
The first two books, which treat the funerary rites of the Romans
and the Greeks respectively (Guichard declares that he is not follow-
ing a chronological order), are followed by a great comparative survey
of funerary rites across the entire world. Guichard acknowledges those
who had preceded him: the historian Biondo Flavio, the jurist Alessandro
d’Alessandro, the humanist Celio Rodigino, the cartographer Wolfgang
Lazius, and Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, author of De sepulchris et vario
sepeliendi ritu, published in Basle in 1539.43 However, Guichard breaks
from his predecessors in dedicating a section to funerary rites in the New
World: “We will find all things new and they will be no less pleasant for
their novelty than the previous for their antiquity”.44 From Guichard’s
perspective, the New World is not inferior to the Old, but rather the
inhabitants of the West Indies, and in particular those of Peru, “have
done better than all other nations in sumptuousness of tombs and sep-
ulchres”.45 Guichard does not hesitate in comparing the funeral chants
of Béarn and Gascony to those of “these poor Americans (ces povres
Américaines)”.46 After concluding the “universal discourses on funer-
als (discours universel des funerailles)”, he moves on to the Egyptians,
ancient and modern Jews, and Christians.
VII
Here New and Old Worlds are juxtaposed; however, in the climate of
religious war French Protestants and Catholics insistently and recipro-
cally accused one another of barbarism. We call “barbarous and savage”
the Margajas and the Tupinambás, a Protestant libel wrote: but at least,
those savages only devour each other; the Catholics who defile tombs
are far worse than the Margajas or the Tupinambá. The Catholic Henri
de Sponde, referring to the “erudite treatise Des Funerailles written by
Claude Guichard”, objected: cemeteries are sacred places, which are pro-
tected from heretical contamination.47 The unquenchable mutual hatred
which burns among the “savages” of Brazil, wrote the Protestant Jean
de Léry, is imitated by “those atheists such as Machiavelli and his dis-
ciples (of whom France is to its detriment full) who against Christian
doctrine teach and practice that new services may never efface old inju-
ries”.48 “Never have new benefits erased old injuries”, writes Machiavelli
(Discourses, Book III, Chapter 4).49 A cold remark, which Léry turns
into a vehemently anti-Christian homily. The New World was seen
through the lens of the Old, and vice versa. A detached approach to
religions fed antiquarianism, which in turn fuelled the polemic between
them. What we call a comparative history of religion emerged, labori-
ously and painfully, from this bloody tangle.
(Translated by Peter L.K. Lieberman)
Notes
1.
A. Prosperi (1998), “Il principe, il cardinale e il papa: Reginald Pole
lettore di Machiavelli”, in: Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli (Rome:

Salerno editore): 241–262. The essay is not cited by S. Anglo (2005),
70 C. Ginzburg
Machiavelli, the First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and

Irrelevance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press): 115–142.
2. N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, transl. A. Gilbert,
3 vols. (Durham and New York: Duke University Press), Vol. I, 11.
3. P. Borgeaud (2009), “Observe, Describe, Compare: A Small Meditation”,
Historia Religionum, 1, 13–20: 15. And see also by P. Borgeaud (2004),
Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil).
4. G.G. Stroumsa (2010), A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the
Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press): 5–6 (but
the book focuses on the following, seventeenth-century phase).
5. Machiavelli’s name is only briefly mentioned in Stroumsa’s book. See
ibidem, 150–153.
6. Here I develop some themes pointed out in another essay of mine:
C. Ginzburg (2010), “The Letter Kills: On Some Implications of 2
Corinthians 3, 6”, History and Theory 49, 71–89.
7. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. II, 533.
8. L. Strauss (1952), “Persecution and the Art of Writing” [1941], in his
Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press): 22–37, is
still fundamental.
9. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. II, 533. In the introduction to
N. Machiavelli (1986), La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. R. Brakkee
(Naples: Liguori), 27–28, fn. 34, P. Trovato comments on the passage,
without understanding its implications. Similarly, J.H. Whitfield (1953),
“Machiavelli and Castruccio”, Italian Studies, 8, 1–28: 12–13; L. Green
(1987), “Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani and its Lucchese
Model”, Italian Studies, 12, 37–55: 48–50; M. Palumbo (1998), “Storia
e scrittura della storia: La vita di Castruccio Castracani”, in: Cultura e
scrittura di Machiavelli (Rome: Salerno editore): 145–164: 152–153.
Palumbo, however, apropos of another passage, which follows shortly
after—“In Castruccio charm increased with the years, and in everything
he showed ability and prudence” (Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. II,
535)—asks himself, doubtingly, if it were not an echo of Luke 2, 40:
“And the child grew, waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the
grace of God was upon him”.
10. L. Valla (2008), On the Donation of Constantine, transl. Glen W. Bowersock
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press): 56.
11. A. Brown (1979), Bartolomeo Scala, 1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence:
The Humanist as Bureaucrat (Princeton: Princeton University Press). On
that passage see C. Ginzburg (2012), “Machiavelli, the Exception and the
Rule: Notes from a Research in Progress”, in: D. Knox and N. Ordine
(eds.), Renaissance Learning and Letters: In memoriam Giovanni
Aquilecchia (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino
Aragno, 2012): 73–91. See also R. Fredona (2008), “Carnival of Law:

Bartolomeo Scala’s Dialogue de legibus et iudiciis”, Viator, 29, 193–214:
209.
13. Ibidem.
14. In the seminal essay by A. Momigliano (1979), “Ancient History and the
Antiquarian” [1950], in his Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, 2nd
ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura), 67–106, Machiavelli’s name
is absent.
15. R.A. Cooper (2003), “L’antiquaire Guillaume Du Choul et son cercle
lyonnais”, in: G. Défaux (ed.), Lyon et l’illustration de la langue fran-
çaise à la Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Éditions): 261–286 (with ample
bibliography). Other information is provided by J. Guillemain (1993),
“L’antiquaire et le libraire: Du bon usage de la medaille dans le publi-
cations lyonnaises de la Renaissance”, Travaux de l’Institut d’Histoire de
l’Art de Lyon, 16, 35–66 (Guillemain is also the author of a yet unpub-
lished doctoral dissertation on Du Choul). On Simeoni see T. Renucci
(1943), Un aventurier des lettres au XVIe siècle: Gabriel Symeoni, flor-
entin, 1509–1570? (Paris: Didier). See also Anglo, Machiavelli, 34 and
passim, which does not dwell on the passages analysed here. On the
reception of Du Choul in Vicenza’s cultural milieu see G. Beltramini
(2009), “Palladio e le storie di Polibio”, in: G. Beltramini (ed.), Andrea
Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia con le illustrazioni inedite alle
Storie di Polibio (Venice: Marsilio), 12–77: 17.
16. G. Agosti and V. Farinella (1984–1986), “Calore del marmo: Pratica e
tipologia delle deduzioni iconografiche”, in: S. Settis (ed.), Memoria
dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi): Vol. I, 375–444:
418 (the date of the first edition of Discours de la religion must be cor-
rected in ‘Lione 1557’).
17. Turin, Biblioteca Reale (henceforth BR), ms. Varia 212, Des antiquités
Romaines. Premier livre faict par le commandement du Roy par M.
Guillaume Choul Lyonnoys, conseiller du dict seigneur et Bailly des
Montaignes du Dauphiné. The importance of this manuscript was
pointed out by F. Haskell (1993), History and Its Images: Art and the
Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press): 16. On
this topic see the excellent essay by M.D. Orth (2003), “Lyon et Rome
à l’antique: Les illustrations des Antiquités romaines de Guillaume Du
Choul”, in: G. Défaux (ed.), Lyon et l’illustration de la langue française à
la Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Éditions): 287–308.
18. BR, ms. Varia 212, fol. 35r: “Combat des cestes entre Dares et Entellus,
selon la description de Virgile”; G. Du Choul (1555), Discours sur la cas
trametation et discipline militaire des Romains (…) des bains et antiques
72 C. Ginzburg
exercitations grecques et romaines. De la religion des anciens Romains

(Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé), 34. See Orth, “Lyon et Rome”, 295, and
the entry by E. Borea (1960–), “Dente, Marco”, in Dizionario biografico
degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana): Vol. XXXVIII,
792, referring to A. Krug (1975), “Ein römisches Relief und Raffael”,
Städel-Jahrbuch, 5, 31–36.
19. In the Discours sur la castrametation a reference to the battle standard is
followed by this comment: “come l’on verra plus amplement au livre des
mes Antiquités de Romme” (“as one will see more amply in my book on
Roman antiquities”). The illustration at p. 15 (“Draconarii, et labariferi,
Porteinseignes du Dragon et du Labarum, cornette de l’Empereur”) is to
be compared with that in BR, ms. Varia 212, fol. 80r.
20. The work should have been divided in three books. See G. Du Choul
(1556), Discours de la religion des anciens Romains (…) et illustré d’un
grand nombre de medailles, et de plusieurs belles figures, retirées de marbres
antiques, qui se treuvent à Rome, et par nostre Gaule (Lyon: Guillaume
Rouillé): 248. On the intention to have the work published, see p. 201.
21. Du Choul, Discours de la religion, 142: “Épitaphe qui se trouve à Turin,
que j’ai retiré de mon livre Des Epigrammes de toute la Gaule”.
22. G. Du Choul (1559), Discorso della religione antica de Romani (…)
insieme con un altro simile discorso della castrametatione et bagni antichi
de Romani tradotti in Toscano da M. Gabriel Simeoni fiorentino (Lyon:
Guillaume Rouillé): 126: “Un epitaffio che si vede in Turino, mostratomi
già dal Symeone”.
23. G. Simeoni (1568), Illustratione de gli epitaffi et medaglie antiche (Lyon:
Jean de Tournes): 9: “Questo epitaffio mi fece ricordare d’un altro simile,
ma più amplo, et più bello, che ritornando di Piamonte io prestai già al
Bagly di Montagna, che se ne servì poi nel suo libro della Religione antica
de Romani, stampato in franzese a Lione da Guglielmo Rovilla, et da me
tradotto in nostra lingua, il quale epitaffio come cosa mia et a proposito
della mia materia io ho voluto di nuovo mettere qui di sotto”. The claim
returns in G. Simeoni (1570), Livre premier de Caesar renouvellé (…)
avec le second de nouveau adiousté par Françoys de S. Thomas (Lyon: Jean
Saugrain): fols. 78r–79r.
24. See the fervent praise of Du Choul, ibidem, fols. 73r–73v.
25. Du Choul, Discours sur la castrametation, fol. 24r: “Certainement c’est
une chose tres necessaire pour maintenir une armee, un Royaume, et une
Republicque, que la religion en un exercite: la quelle est cause de bon
ordre; le bon ordre fait la bonne fortune; et de la bonne fortune suc-
cedent les heureuses enterprises”.
26. Du Choul, Discorso sopra la castrametatione, 42: “Questa [la religione]

è causa del buon ordine: et il buon ordine della buona fortuna, et dalla
buona fortuna dipendono i felici successi delle imprese”.
27. Ibidem: “Certamente la religione è una cosa molto utile in uno essercito
come una militia di soldati proprii è necessaria per guardare un reame, e
una republica”.
28. Simeoni, Illustratione degli epitaffi, 124–126, esp. on p. 125.
29. Renucci, Un aventurier, 6; S. Marconi (2000), “Giannotti, Donato” in:
Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia
Italiana): Vol. LIV, 532.
30. Du Choul, Discours de la castrametation, fol. 24r: “Ce que nous cognois-
sons par la tres noble sentence de Cicero, De haruspicum responsis, quand
il nous dit que les Rommains, encores qu’ils ne fussent de nombre égaux
aux Espaignols, de force aux Gaulois, d’astuce aux Africains, de science
aux Grecs, d’esprit aux Latins, de piété, religion, et avecques la seule
sagesse (par laquelle ils avoyent regardé que toutes choses estoyent gou-
vernées par l’aide des Dieux immortels) avoyent vaincu toutes manieres
de gens et estrangeres nations”.
31. Now Simeoni’s translation: “I Romani, benché non fossero di numero
eguali a gli Spagnuoli, né di forze a i Franzesi, né d’astutia a gl’Africani,
né di scienza a i Greci, né di spirito a i Latini, nondimeno per pietà, reli-
gione et singular sapienza ordinando tutte le loro cose sotto la fede et
aiuto de gli Dii immortali, soggiogarono tutte le sorti de gli huomini et
strane nationi” (Simeoni, Discorso sopra la castrametatione, 41).
32. Ibidem, 3: “La purità et dolcezza della lingua toscana pare che sia di pre-
sente (…) salita in tanto pregio, che doppo la greca et la latina i toscani
medesimi studiandola, s’ingegnano ogni giorno di renderla più bella, i
letterati stranieri l’ammirano et (come hanno fatto l’Ariosto, il Bembo et
il Sennazzaro) nei loro scritti cercano d’imitarla”.
33. Du Choul, Discorso della religione antica de Romani, preface: “Cognoscere
che la grandezza et prosperità dell’imperio romano non nacque d’altro
che dalle virtù delle armi proprie, dalla giustitia e dal culto frequente
(anchora che falso, altrettanto che il nostro ordinato dalla Chiesa cattolica,
è salutifero et vero)”.
34. Ibidem, 263: “Apres avoir longuement discouru, ie me suis souventes-
fois esbahi, comme les Gentils demeurerent si longuement en leur reli-
gion faulse, superstitieuse et controuvée, laissants la nostre qui est vraye
et venue de Dieu. (…) Aussi bien pouvoyent croire les Romains, que
IESUS CHRIST avoit resuscité les morts, comme leur Aesculapius, qu’ils
firent monter au ciel tout fouldroyé, et de penser qu’il estoit né d’une
vierge, comme ils cuyderent que Vesta estoit vierge et mere des Dieux.
74 C. Ginzburg
Et si estoyent bien aveuglez de refuser de croire que nostre Seigneur

avoit rendue la veuë aux aveugles, veu qu’ils asseuroyent que Vespasian
l’Empereur avoit faict un tel miracle en Alexandrie”.
35. Cooper, “L’antiquaire”, 280, defines Du Choul “syncretiste”: a totally
unbefitting characterisation.
36. Du Choul, Discours de la religion, 312: “Et si nous regardons curieuse-
ment, nous congnoistrons que plusieurs institutions de nostre religion
ont esté prises et translatées de ceremonies Aegyptiennes, et des Gentils:
comme sont les tuniques et surpelis, les couronnes que font les prebstres,
les inclinations de teste autour de l’autel, la pompe sacrificale, la musique
des temples, adorations, prieres et supplications, processions et letanies: et
plusieurs autres choses, que noz prebstres usurpent en noz mysteres, et
referent a un seul Dieu, IESUS CHRIST, ce que l’ignorance des Gentils,
faulse religion et folle superstition representoit à leurs Dieux, et aux
hommes mortels après leurs consecrations”.
37. Du Choul, Discorso della religione antica de Romani, 248: “Et molte altre
cose, che un buono spirito potrà facilmente raccorre, havendo bene con-
siderato queste cerimonie e quelle”.
38. Ibidem: “Eccetto che quelle de gentili erano false et superstitiose, ma le
nostre sono christiane et catholiche, essendo fatte in honore di Dio
padre omnipotente, et di Giesu Christo suo figliuolo, a cui sia gloria
eternalmente”.
39. In this vein, one can read the beautiful essay by F. Saxl (1938–1939),
“Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance”, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 2, 346–367, where the author remarks: “The
Stoicism of the Romans was an ideal held in such high esteem by the
thinkers of the Renaissance that they could regard this sacrifice as a wor-
thy parallel to the sacrifice of Christ, the central mystery of their church”
(p. 351).
40. A. van Gennep (1920), “Nouvelles recherches sur l’histoire en France de
la méthode ethnographique: Claude Guichard, Richard Simon, Claude
Fleury”, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 82: 139–162. And see also
A. Momigliano (1969), “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca” [1967],
in his Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico
(Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura): 43–58.
41. A. Rossotto (1667), Syllabus Scriptorum Pedemontii (Mondovì: Francesco
Maria Ghislandi): 160.
42. C. Guichard (1581), Funerailles et diverses manieres d’ensevelir des
Rommains, Grecs et autres nations, tant anciens que modernes (Lyon:
Jean de Tournes): 1: “Et de vray, outre ce, qu’en ces trois consiste
l’establissement, grandeur et asseurance de toute republique bien
instituee, de la notice d’iceux depend encore l’entiere et parfaicte cong-

noissance de l’histoire et antiquité des Rommains”.
43. Ibidem, 12. On Lilio Giraldi, see G. Ricci (2007), I giovani, i morti: Sfide
al Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino): 139–160.
44. Guichard, Funerailles, 437: “Nous troverons toutes choses nouvelles, et
qu’à l’adventure ne seront moins aggreables pour leur nouveauté que les
precedentes pour leur antiquité”.
45. Ibidem, 438: “Ont surpassé toutes les autres nations quelles qu’elles soy-
ent en sumptuosité de tombeaux et de sepulcres”.
46. Ibidem, 463.
47. F. Lestringant (2002), “Anti-funérailles ou la guerre des cimetières (1594–
1598)”, in: J. Balsamo (ed.), Les funérailles à la Renaissance: XIIe colloque
international de la Société Française d’Etude du Seizième Siècle (Geneva:
Droz): 295–317.
48. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called
America, trans. J. Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990): 112.
Author Biography
Carlo Ginzburg is Professor Emeritus of Italian Renaissance Studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of History of
European Cultures at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His scholarly interests
range from art history to literary studies, and the theory of historiography. His
publications include classics such as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980) and The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian
Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries (1983), as well as collection of
essays like Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (1989), History, Rhetoric, and
Proof (1999), Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (2012).
PART II
Religions and Empires

CHAPTER 5
Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar:

Muḥammad the Lawgiver Before and After
Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
Introduction: Momigliano
and the Wise Men of Antiquity
In the spring of 1975 the Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano pub-
lished an article about the “wise-men civilisations” of antiquity, titled
“Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium
B.C.” (later republished as “The Fault of the Greeks”).1 In this arti-
cle, Momigliano focuses on the wise men who emerged in different
cultures between the eighth and the fifth century BCE: Confucius,
Buddha, Zoroaster, Isaiah, Heraclitus and Aeschylus. It is a list that—as
Momigliano observes—would have puzzled his grandfather and his gen-
eration, but made sense to him in the middle of the 1970s.
Momigliano highlights the deep change in historical perspective that
allowed historians of his generation to face cultures which before seemed
apart and to find something in common among them. At the same time,
P.M. Tommasino (*) 
Columbia University, New York, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_5
80 P.M. Tommasino
he asks himself why the civilisations of Persia and India, as well as those
of Egypt and Babylon, did not actively participate in the formation of
what he defines “our tradition” or “the civilisation of Europe”, based
on an “old triangular culture” of “Jewish, Greek and Latin intellectual
products”. According to Momigliano, this collegium trilingue (Greek-
Latin-Hebrew) dates back to Mediterranean Hellenism and dominated
the intellectual and academic life of Europe until the twentienth century.
Momigliano also argues that among Greeks, Latins and Jews, the Greeks
had more tools to know other cultures but they were the most reluctant
to grasp them, especially the “authentic Iranian and Indian thought”.
Their reluctance would be decisive for the development of European cul-
ture. For instance, the Greek tradition of the “seven wise men” insisted
on practical and down-to-earth wisdom. Hence, Isaiah, Zoroaster and
Buddha, “the prophetic men of the East”, did not have any chance to be
part of the cohort of the seven wise men: this exclusion was the fault of
the Greeks.
In this picture, Momigliano leaves no room to Celts, Germans and
Arabs, as none of them “belongs to the privileged list of the original wise
men civilisations”:
The Arabs in fact add to our difficulties. Being themselves the carrier of
a prophetic civilisation – if ever there was one – and therefore uniquely
close to Jews and Christians, they were a menace to the Christians, if not
to the Jews. Serious contacts between Christian and Arab thought mainly
occurred in those areas in which Arab thinkers worked with Greek con-
cepts. We have managed to forget our precise debt to Celts, Germans and
Arabs, so much so that neither Old Irish nor Mittelhochdeutsch nor Arabic
has ever become a regular requirement in our educational establishe-
ments.2
The world has deeply changed since the middle of the 1970s. Nowadays,
Islam is one of the dominant religions of Europe. Twenty millions of
Muslims are living in Europe as European citizens, migrants and politi-
cal refugees. Arabic has become one of the most studied languages in
European and American academic institutions. During the last dec-
ades scholars of ancient history and Islamic studies have been pro-
foundly reexamining the role of Islam in transforming the world since
Late Antiquity, as well as research on early modern Europe has shown
5 ROMAN PROPHET OR MUSLIM CAESAR 81
to what extent the collegium pentalingue (Latin, Greek, Latin, Hebrew,

Arabic and Chaldean), and not the collegium trilingue (Latin, Greek,
Hebrew), was the ideal language requirement in the formation of the
perfect scholar—and the perfect library—from early Humanism to
late Antiquarianism.3 In this very regard, Momigliano’s generational
approach is an example for us today, and I wonder if the following pages
on the image of the prophet Muḥammad as a wise man in the Italian
Renaissance would have puzzled him as much as his list of ancient wise
men would have disconcerted his grandfather.
This chapter focuses on the evolution of the image of the prophet
Muḥammad as a wise man and lawgiver in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century Italy. Even if Machiavelli never refers directly to Muḥammad, the
reception of his political writings in Venice in the 1530s and 1540s, along
with the circulation of the new version of Averroës’s Destructio destruc-
tionum (originally written in Arabic in 1179) and Pietro Pomponazzi’s
De incantationibus (1520) during the same decades, is a pivotal landmark
in the early modern fashioning of Muḥammad as a successful ruler—or as
an “armed prophet”, to borrow a famous image from Machiavelli—who
used both religion and violence as political tools.
Furthermore, I will frame my hypothesis about the flourishing repre-
sentation of Muḥammad in Renaissance Europe within the debate about
the rise of Islam as part of a long Late Antiquity and not as the end of it,
recently reignited after the publication of Before and After Muḥammad
by Garth Fowden.4 To do so, I chose Venice as a case study. Venetian
municipal and universal historians analysed the rise of Islam in relation
to the foundation and early development of their city, while extensively
discussing the reasons of the Ottoman military supremacy in the early
modern Mediterranean. This Venetian focus allows me to argue that
some scholars of the Renaissance considered Islam as one of the essen-
tial elements of Late Antiquity, as well as of their contemporary Eurasian
world.
Muḥammad, Zoroaster and Buddha

The choice of sources deeply influenced the periodisation in the history
of the European representations of Muḥammad. Since the beginning of
Islam, Christian polemicists considered Muḥammad as a pseudo-prophet,
82 P.M. Tommasino
precisely because of his use of violence and forgery. According to

the Gospel of Matthew (24:24) and the Book of Revelation (19:20),
pseudo-Christs and pseudo-prophets act through fake miracles and
tricks: signa (signs) and prodigia (wonders). But if Christ’s prophethood
was confirmed by his miracles—they argued—, Muḥammad was not a
prophet, since he did not work any true miracle and, even worse, he pre-
tended to have been able to do it. As many others, he was a simulator.
During the Middle Ages the fake miracles of Muḥammad, especially the
ones related to nature and animals (the dove whispering in his ears, the
bull holding the Qur’ān between the horns, the ascension of Muḥammad
to Heaven, etc.) circulated throughout Europe across languages and
literary genres creating what was later called the western legend of
Muḥammad: the legend of his religious simulation.
An early example of this polemical argument can be found in the let-
ters of al-Hāshimī and al-Kindī written in Baghdad in the ninth cen-
tury. These letters were the best-known Arabic apology of Christianity
against Islam circulating in Eurasia and north Africa during the Middle
Ages. Their Arabic version was known in Iberia during the tenth and
the eleventh century. But especially since their translation into Latin,
realised in twelfth-century Spain, European readers have been exposed
to a broad comparative history of pseudo-prophecy and religious for-
gery. The author, a Christian Arab identified in the text as ‘Abd al-Masīḥ
al-Kindī, enriches his description of the vicious life and the astonish-
ingly fast career of the pseudo-prophet Muḥammad compairing him
with Zoroaster and Buddha. The Christian al-Kindī wrote to the Muslim
al-Hāshimī as follows:
Since the ancient times there were many heretics, but none of them used
violence and coercion in the formation of his own community of believ-
ers. Of course, they used deception. One of them, a Greek called Daradast
[Zoroaster] said that he had a vision on the mountain of Sīlān. He con-
vinced King Zebeizib [Vištaspa] and its entourage to convert to his faith;
he seduced them performing false miracles and magic tricks: he pre-
tended that he made a horse die in order to resuscitate it right after. He
also feigned to have worked another miracle. (...) Helbidius from India
[Buddha] did not behave differently. He seduced many people – al-Kindī
continues – showing them a big bird flying close to the sunset. This bird
had a girl inside its venter, who screaming at everybody declared: “Know
that Helbidius’ prophecies are truthful”. These are the tricks and the for-
geries of pseudo-prophets, who assumed to be real prophets.5
According to al-Kindī, Muḥammad was a pseudo-prophet just like the

ancient pseudo-prophets of Persia and India. Originating among Arab
Christians in Baghdad, the comparison between Muḥammad, Zoroaster
and Buddha is particularly interesting for us beyond its polemical pur-
poses. Usually attributed to the later tradition of the three impostors
and to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, it already circulated in
Latin throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and the early mod-
ern period. This juxtaposition of pseudo-prophets suggests that we must
analyse the history of the representation of Muḥammad, even in pre-
modern Europe, within “a global framework of inquiry”, as has been
proposed by Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem.6 Furthermore, it
sends us back to Momigliano’s statement that the Arabs “do not belong
to the privileged list of the original wise-men civilisation”.7 Above all,
we shall understand when, why and how European scholars began per-
ceiving the pseudo-prophet Muḥammad as a successful ruler, that is, as a
lawgiver and a wise man, and when and within which intellectual frame
his religious simulation shifted from being considered a sign of felony to
being analysed as an effective strategy of ruling.
In the last decade, extensive research has been carried out on polemi-
cal literature about Muḥammad produced in medieval Europe both
in Latin and in vernaculars. Editions of sources, conferences, col-
lected volumes, repertories and companions have mapped the uses of
Muḥammad’s biography throughout Europe, with a particular focus on
medieval Iberia and continental Europe.8 On the contrary, late medieval
and early modern historiographical sources have been much less inves-
tigated. This lack of research depends on the assumption of a continu-
ity in the medieval and early modern perceptions of Muḥammad across
Europe or, perhaps, the little attention devoted to later texts led schol-
ars to accept this continuity of perceptions. Although the representation
of proto-Islamic societies and the contemporary Ottoman world were,
of course, deeply connected, scholars of early modern Europe focus
mostly on the representation of the Ottomans and their rulers instead
of analysing biographies of Muḥammad.9 Thus, I propose to explore
how Muḥammad’s life was interpreted by fifteenth-century histori-
ans, rewritten before and after the diffusion of Machiavelli’s Prince and
Discourses on Livy (composed between 1513 and 1519 and both printed
posthumously in 1532 and 1531, respectively), and finally received by
Italian scholars of the seventeenth century. This shift of focus from reli-
gious polemic to humanistic historiography, and particularly to universal
84 P.M. Tommasino
history, is methodologically necessary in order to challenge the domi-

nant periodisation of the history of the representation of Muḥammad in
Europe.
For instance, according to John Tolan, one of the leading historian
of the Christian–Islamic relations in pre-modern Europe, the polemical
images forged by Christian polemicists during the Middle Ages “proved
tenacious” and “they provide the dominant European discourse on the
Prophet through the seventeenth century”.10 In his several articles on this
subject, Tolan left no room for humanistic historiography. Very recently,
for example, supposing a linear continuity from late medieval historians to
Martin Luther, he has essentially skipped the role of Islam and Islamicate
societies in fifteenth-century Italian universal history and political theory,
in part already analysed by Margaret Meserve.11 According to this nar-
rative, the place of Islam and its prophet as a lawgiver and a wise man
was considered only in the seventeenth- and especially in the eighteenth-
century northern European historiography and political thought. In this
perspective the discovery of the New World, the new philology and the
multiconfessionalism of northern Europe paved the way to the religious
relativism and skepticism of the Enlightenment: the time was ripe for con-
sidering Muḥammad a lawgiver and an armed prophet—“with the sword
in one hand and the Koran in the other”, as Edward Gibbon presented
him in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.12
Perhaps this narrative also overshadows the complex relation between
religio and lex during the Middle Ages, and does not consider the dis-
cussion about Muḥammad as prophet and lawgiver in Muslim thinkers,
who were well know in Europe, such as al-Fārābī or Averroës, as well as
in the Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Averroistic tradition that reached the
school of Pietro Pomponazzi and his followers. According to the medi-
eval Augustinian theologian Gilles of Rome, Averroës affirmed that “no
religion is true, though it may at best be useful”.13 Keeping in mind that
this philosophical tradition had a strong influence on Italian scholars, I
propose a displacement of focus. We shall challenge the alleged conti-
nuity of the image of Muḥammad forged by medieval polemicisists and
explore instead the underestimated discontinuity of its early modern
reception.
Of course, I am not interested in revendicating the role of Italian
humanists in a teleological history of the secularisation of European or
western societies. My concerns are neither nationalistic, nor discipli-
nary. And, after all, the recent decades have shown us to what extent
the relation between “secularisation” and “modernity” is controver-

sial.14 However, I do think that questioning this widespread narra-
tive is necessary for several reasons. Firstly, since the 1990s the role
of Italian pre-modern intellectuals, gathered together under the ques-
tionable label of “Humanism”, has been underestimated in the his-
tory of the European knowledge of Islamic societies if compared to
the abundant research dedicated to the history of Oriental studies in
early modern Britain, France or the Netherlands. Secondly, during
the same period, scholars of the European and Mediterranean Middle
Ages driven by post-colonial theories and subaltern studies, overesti-
mated the agency of Italian humanists, and primarily of Petrarch, in
the creation of an early Eurocentric version of Saidian Orientalism.15
Both approaches, although based on sharply diverging conceptions of
the intellectual history of Europe, marginalise and misrepresent the
complexity and variety of historiographical and political perspectives
about Islam, its prophet and Islamicate societies, debated in fifteenth-
century Italy. In this regard, Américo Castro’s pages on the recontex-
tualisation of the figure of Saladin and the tale of the three rings across
Iberia, Italy and France, despite their nationalistic approach (Spanish
reception, Italian reception, etc.), reveal an unquestionable awareness
of the complex history of its reception across genres and overlapping
intellectual traditions.16
The Origins of Venice

Bernardo Giustinian was a Venetian nobleman, diplomat and historian
who was born in 1408 and died in 1489. His most famous work, De
origine urbis Venetiarum, divided in 15 books, was published posthu-
mously in early 1493 (more veneto 1492). According to Giustinian and
other contemporary historians, the municipal history of Venice and the
universal history of Eurasia were inseparably intertwined.17 As we read
on the title-page, this work contains not only the deeds of the Venetians,
but also the wars of the Goths (Books IV to VI), the Lombards (Book
VII), the Saracens and the Turks (Books VIII and XI). These were the
powers that the Republic of Venice faced during the first centuries of its
glorious history. Among them, Islam was particularly interesting because
no religious sect or great empire spread so fast and so broadly before,
“a thing which is indeed especially remarkable” to Giustinian and conse-
quently worthy to be analysed.18
86 P.M. Tommasino
Book VIII is devoted to the rise of Islam in its Eurasian context.

Giustinian highlights that the Arab conquests of north Africa and
western Asia had a huge impact on the Italian peninsula. Giustinian
approaches the rise of Islam through both political history and proto-
ethnography: he is interested in the military history of early Islam as well
as in the nature and customs of the Arabs. Moreover, he often reveals his
sources. At the beginning of Book VIII, he admits that he did not find
sufficient information about the origin of “the sect of the Saracens”. He
states that “among our books, however, there are later commentaries
written by scholars devoted to sacred books. But—he continues—they
wrote them with the aim of refuting their errors and not in order to
write history”. Giustinian intentionally “decided not to follow these writ-
ings”: he puts religious polemic aside and uses Strabo and Solinus for the
nature and the customs of the Arabs, and Paul the Deacon for the later
conflicts of Venetians against both Saracens and Lombards.19
Giustinian too, however, has to rely on medieval polemical sources.
But he twists and reframes them. He uses the western legend of
Muḥammad, but he rewrites the latter’s military achievements highlight-
ing “the art” and the political “talent” of the prophet instead of listing
dozens of absurd “fables” as evidence of his pseudo-prophetical nature.
Giustinian’s aim was not to unveil the fakeness of Muḥammad’s mira-
cles, or their exotic and imaginative power. Evidently, Giustinian was
neither a religious polemicist nor a story-teller. He does not interpret
Muḥammad’s fables, his miracles and wonders just as falsity or fiction,
but as a waste of time: “we could not even tell them to children and old
women”—he continues—“so, I did not report them because they are a
waste of time. But if someone wants to read them, then he should read
the Qur’ān”.20
Giustinian essentially focuses on Muḥammad’s “arts” and “methods”
of acquiring and mantaining the power. He discusses the effectiveness
of Muḥammad’s political and military strategies, not the truthfulness
of his prophecy. Thus, he considers Muḥammad’s deeds mainly from
a political and military point of view. According to Giustinian, among
Muḥammad’s political “arts” the use of religion was definitely the most
effective. A skilled humanist, Guistinian enriches his text by inserting
short and elegant orations. He vehiculates his thoughts on the political
use of religion through the speech that the almost legendary Christian
monk Sergius, banned from Constantinople as a heretic by Emperor
Heraclius, addressed to the prophet Muḥammad. Sergius tried to
convince the emerging leader of the Arabs to dethrone Heraclius and

take power over a decaying Roman Empire. In his oration, Sergius sug-
gests to Muḥammad not to disdain a pragmatic use of religion: “you
must blend some of religion” with other tools, and “you must receive
your authority from heaven”—Sergius tells Muḥammad—such as “many
princes already have done”, because “people are moved especially by reli-
gion”.21
During the last decades of the fifteenth-century, Bernardo Giustinian
was not isolated. His version of Muḥammad’s biography is an example of
the complex ongoing process that will converge into Machiavelli’s codifi-
cation of the “armed prophet” and the political use of simulated religion.
Carlo Ginzburg has reminded us that already before the diffusion of
Machiavelli’s Prince and the Discourses, the Florentine Bartolomeo Scala
in his dialogue De legibus et iudiciis (1483) juxtaposed the prophet
Muḥammad with the Roman king Numa Pompilius. The southern
Italian humanist Antonio De Ferrariis, better known as Galateo, did the
same in his sermon in vernacular on the Lord’s prayer Exposizione del
Pater Noster (approx. 1506–1508).22
Muḥammad Among the Caesars

In Giustinian’s De origine urbis Venetiarum Muḥammad is more often
equated to princes than to heretics or heresiarchs. But in medieval
chronicles, and more frequently during the fifteenth century, such a
political approach was increasingly applied to Muḥammad himself, espe-
cially in books of history.
The biography of the prophet moved from religious polemic and the
paratext of Qur’anic translations, to chronicles, universal histories and,
then, to the lives of illustrious military captains. Frequently, Muḥammad
left the company of hideous heresiarchs and beastly pseudo-prophets
to join Roman generals and Ottoman rulers. Many factors contributed
to this displacement. The discussion on the nature of prophets in the
Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Averroism, as well as the affirmation of the
biography of great men (viri illustres) as a new dominant historiographi-
cal genre, which included Arab philosophers and physicians, were fun-
damental elements of this process.23 Also, the debate about the nobility
of the human being helped scholars look at non-Christian wise men.
Galateo himself, for example, in his late fifteenth-century letter on nobil-
ity, addressed to Marco Antonio Tolomei, bishop of Lecce from 1485
88 P.M. Tommasino
to 1498, stated that “among the Arabs in the generations nearest our
own, many who are excellent have flourished in the study of wisdom”.24
Some decades earlier, even the Spanish cardinal and polemicist Juan de
Torquemada admitted that among the “Moors” there were many “kings,
princes and great men”.25
The rise of the Ottoman Empire certainly influenced the refashion-
ing of Muḥammad’s biography in Europe. Especially after the conquest
of Constantinople (1453), Muḥammad found his place in the galleries
of ancient and contemporary Eurasian emperors, mainly introducing the
genealogical series of Ottoman rulers—for instance, a life of Muḥammad
was included in the Enneades, written between 1498 and 1504 by Marco
Antonio Sabellico, as well as in the Vitae Caesarum by the historian
Bernardino Corio from Milan, published in 1503, and among the biog-
raphies published in the De Caesaribus by the Venetian Giovanni Battista
Egnazio in 1516.26 The life of Muḥammad also entered the best librar-
ies of fifteenth-century Italy. A version inscribed on papyrus appears in
the inventory of the books of King Ferdinand I of Naples (1481).27
According to Giovanni Marco Cinico of Parma, the most active copy-
ist of his library, Ferdinand I recognised the importance of the collegium
pentalingue and desired to know the contents of all the books written in
“Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean and in all other languages”.28
During the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century Muḥammad
was moved among the Caesars. Of course, this “Caesarisation” of the
prophet should not be described as a linear process nor as unrelated
to religious polemic. Fifteenth-century historians kept using religious
polemics, but in order to describe Muḥammad as a military captain, and
as the Arab forerunner of the Ottoman emperors. We already know that
this endless rewriting of the same stories and exotic wonders led scholars
to underline the continuity of Muḥammad’s portrait in different genres
and across time, instead of unraveling its discontinuities. But reading the
stories of Muḥammad’s miracles within a collection of military captains of
the world or within a Herodotean investigation about the peoples of Late
Antiquity, is not the same that finding them in a polemical treatise against
Islam. The genre itself legitimises Muḥammad as a political and military
leader. Periodisation, in fact, is not the only issue that is at stake. Indeed,
the displacement of biographical materials from a genre (religious
polemic) to another (historiography) had its consequences. Even when
Muḥammad was portrayed as an anti-Caesar, the references to Greek and
especially Roman antiquity, and the context of publishing itself, made
him gradually lose his alleged savagery (immanitas), and his unreliability
as a prophet, to gain instead some political and military legitimacy.
Reading Valerius Maximus in the Renaissance

Many other examples could be brought forward. But a very impor-
tant one, especially in relation to Machiavelli’s own work—as we will
see later—is the life of Muḥammad included in De Turcorum origine by
the Austrian humanist Johannes Cuspinian, published in 1541 and later
republished in the second edition of his De Caesaribus. Eric Cochrane
already demonstrated that Cuspinian rewrote Venetian sources, essen-
tially the lifes of the emperors anthologised by the Venetian Giovanni
Battista Egnazio.29 As the Venetian Egnazio does in his own De
Caesaribus, published in 1516, Cuspinian introduces the life of Ottoman
kings and emperors with the biography of Muḥammad. Since the sec-
tion’s title, “De Mahomete Saracenorum phylarco et pseudopropheta”,
Muḥammad is identified firstly as a phylarco, that is an “Arab chief, vassal
of the Byzantine Empire”, and only later as a pseudo-prophet.30
This continous process of trasmission and recontextualisation
of Muḥammad’s life added a new Roman flavour to old materials:
Muḥammad became “a new man (homo novus)”, strong as a gladiator,
and brave enough to attack the Byzantine army “in the open field (aperto
Marte)”. The Roman histories, partially filtered through Sabellico
and the Augustinian historian Andrea Biglia, author of De detrimento
fidei Orientis (1433), were the new secret ingredient of this biography.
Moreover, Cuspinian enriches Egnazio’s abridged life of Muḥammad by
using another source that Cochrane did not identify: the epistle that the
humanist Francesco Filelfo wrote in 1451 to King Charles VII of France
to persuade him to attack the Ottomans.31
Filelfo, as usual, presents Muḥammad’s forgeries using the so-called
western medieval legend of Muḥammad: essentially the stories of the
bull offering him the Qur’ān, and of the dove whispering in his ears.
According to this tale, Muḥammad trained a dove pick a grain from
his ear, suggesting that the dove—“that he called the Holy Spirit”—
came whispering the divine word to him. Many traditions identify ani-
mals as mediators between the human and the supernatural world, and
consequently the intimacy with them as a sign of prophecy. We actu-
ally read similar stories in al-Kindī’s passage on Zoroaster and Buddha.
Writing in the ninth century the Arab Christian al-Kindī highlights the
90 P.M. Tommasino
untruthfulness of Muḥammad’s prophecy comparing the pseudo-prophet

of Late Antiquity to the ancient pseudo-prophets of Persia and India.
But Cuspinian describes Muḥammad’s religious simulation through a
very different lens.
Rewriting Filelfo’s version of the tale of the dove, Cuspinian adds
that Muḥammad “learned this trickery (dolus) from the Roman general
Quintus Sertorius who trained a hind in order to convince his soldiers
of his power”.32 Muḥammad’s intimacy with the dove, justaxposed to
Sertorius’s acquaintance with the hind, takes on a very new signifiance.33
The polemical image of the prophet as a worker of bogus miracles con-
tinued to play an important role in European discourse about Islam until
the end of the sixteenth century and even later, but it also acquired,
depending of the context, a very different meaning. Here Muḥammad’s
simulation (simulatio) is no longer the sign of his pseudo-prophecy
but of his successful political and military strategy, legitimised by what
“Roman histories tell us”.34
But which Roman history did Cuspinian read in order to compare
Muḥammad with Quintus Sertorius? This is an important question because
the answer sheds light on Machiavelli’s own use of Roman historiography.
Recently, Carlo Ginzburg has recalled the importance that Roman histo-
rians, especially Valerius Maximus, had on the formation of Machiavelli’s
thought.35 Ginzburg particularly laments that scholars overlooked the
influence of the Facta and Dicta Memorabilia by Valerius Maximus (first
century CE) on the formation of Machiavelli’s thought about religion.
Ginzburg recognises that Leslie J. Walker proposed Valerius Maximus as
one of Machiavelli’s sources in his edition of the Discourses (1975). But he
also pinpoints that the early modern editions of Valerius Maximus iden-
tified by Walker as the possible direct sources of Machiavelli (Strasbourg
1470, Venice 1471 and Venice 1502) lacked a very important section of the
text: the Chapter 2 of Book I, titled “De simulata religione”.36
This section of Valerius Maximus’s book, which includes the exam-
ples of Numa Pompilius speaking with the nymph Egeria and of Quintus
Sertorius taming a hind, was actually found and considered authentic by
Johannes Cuspinian himself at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It
was published by Aldus Manutius in his edition of Valerius Maximus’ work
in 1503, which also includes a letter of thanks by Manutius to Cuspinian.
In Chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli lists Moses, Cyrus, Theseus and
Romulus as the ancient armed prophets that used both armies and religion
to acquire and maintain the power.37 Later, in Chapter 11 of Book I of
the Discourses on Livy, he uses the example of King Numa Pompilius, most
likely quoted from the newly discovered excerpt “De simulata religione”
by Valerius Maximus. In this chapter of the Discourses, Numa is even
more successful than Romulus, because he “turned to religion as some-
thing altogether necessary if he wished to maintain a well-ordered state”
and “pretended (simulò) he was intimate with a nymph who advised him
about which he was going to advise the people”.38 On the contrary, in the
dialogue The Art of War, written in 1519–1520 and published in 1521,
Machiavelli uses the example of the Roman general Quintus Sertorius,
that he possibly read in the passage rediscovered by Cuspinian. In the
Book IV of the dialogue, Fabrizio Colonna states:
Also very powerful in keeping the ancient soldiers well disposed were religion
and the oath sworn when they were taken into service, because in all their
transgressions they were threatened not alone with the ills they could fear
from men but with those they could expect from God. This condition, mixed
(mescolata) with other religious customs,39 many times made every sort of
undertaking easy for the ancient generals, and always will make them so, where
religion is feared and observed. Sertorius availed himself of this, pretending
that he spoke with a deer which, on the part of God, promised him victory.40
Ginzburg suggests that Machiavelli read the stories of Numa and

Sertorius in the new excerpt by Valerius Maximus thanks to Cuspinian.
I add that some years later Cuspinian himself, thanks to his own dis-
covery, compared Muḥammad with Quintus Sertorius in his version of
Muḥammad’s life, later published in De Turcorum origine (1541) and
then in the second edition of De Caesaribus (1561). This example shows
that the rediscovery of the classical past goes along with the rewriting of
the history of Late Antiquity, as well as the Caesarisation of the prophet
Muḥammad, belongs to a broader debate about the relation between
religion and power. At the turn of the sixteenth century, especially within
books of history, Muḥammad, the new prince of Late Antiquity, found
his place among the ancient wise men.
Muḥammad the Lawgiver After Machiavelli

The circulation of Machiavelli’s works during the 1530s and the 1540s
deeply influenced the refashioning of the image of Muḥammad in early
modern Europe. For instance, the comparison between Muḥammad
92 P.M. Tommasino
and Numa Pompilius, that we already found in Bartolomeo Scala and

Galateo, became commonplace among Italian political thinkers after the
diffusion of the Discourses on Livy. The Jesuit Antonio Possevino as well
as the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella used this comparison
for their own political purposes in the second half of the sixteenth cen-
tury.41 But it is a particular example, taken from the 1540s, that sheds
light on the mark that Machiavelli’s ideas on religion and his new politi-
cal vocabulary left on the history of the representation of Muḥammad in
Europe.
Let us stay in Venice together with Sabellico, Egnazio and Giustinian.
Egnazio’s De Caesaribus was translated into Italian in 1540. Giustinian’s
De origine urbis Venetiarum was reprinted in 1534, and eventually trans-
lated into Italian by Ludovico Domenichi in 1545.42 Two years after
Domenichi’s translation, Giovanni Battista Castrodardo from Belluno, a
translator of histories and commentator on Dante’s Comedy, wrote a new
life of Muḥammad in his long introduction to the Alcorano di Macometto.43
This text was published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547.
Arrivabene dedicated the book to Gabriel de Luetz, baron of Aramon,
the fourth French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1547–1553).
Both the ambassador and the publisher were closely linked with Venetian
evangelical circles and Italian reformers, looking with hope at the
Ottoman–French alliance during the Shmalkadic war (1546–1547).
The Alcorano di Macometto was composed as a handy companion to
Islam, more accessible to a large readership. It was written in Italian and
printed in a small and cheap format (quarto). Arrivabene issued a vol
ume aimed at furnishing Italian and Italophone readership with infor-
mation about Islamic history and Islam as the dominant religion of the
Ottoman Empire. The first but not the sole intended audience of this
companion were the political and religious refugees linked with the
French embassies both in Venice and Istanbul, who travelled from Venice
to the Bosphorus during the late 1540s and the beginning of the 1550s.
Among them were anti-Medicean and anti-imperial political refugees,
European and Italian anti-Trinitarians, merchants and gentlemen from
Ferrara, evangelical preachers living in Galata and Pera, as well as Spanish
and Portuguese Jews. For example, a letter from the Hungarian reformer
Zsigmond Gyalui Torda to the German Philip Melanchton, dated
December 1545, provides evidence that the ambassador d’Aramon acco
modated evangelical preachers in his house in Pera:
In Turkey itself many people proclaim Christ. There were Franciscus Picus
and the Hungarian Zegedinus [Stephen Kis of Szeged]. The latter teaches
a large audience, both in Galata and in Istanbul. He is taken care of by the
French ambassador and by other Christians who work and trade here.44
Among the merchants linked to d’Aramon and Arrivabene there were

also Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Both Arrivabene and d’Aramon
had relations with people of the House of Nasi. Beatriz de Luna, alias
Gracia Nasi Mendes, and her nephew João Miquez, alias Joseph Nasi,
were among those supported by the French embassies both in Rome and
on the Bosphorus as they settled in Istanbul in the 1550s.45
Although the Alcorano di Macometto contains many polemical mar-
ginal notes, its originality relies on the anti-Habsburg and pro-Ottoman
political propaganda hidden in the text, especially in its long introduc-
tion. In this section of the book, Castrodardo combines different materi-
als, both contemporary and medieval, taken from the flourishing market
of proto-ethnographical texts on Turkish religion and customs (turcica),
as well as from the less explored but rich literature on and against Islam
produced in early modern Iberia (hispano-arabica). A translator of his-
tories, Castrodardo also uses humanistic historiography and coinciden-
tally the life of Muḥammad rewritten by Giustinian in De origine urbis
Venetiarum and newly translated into Italian by Domenichi in 1545.
Comparing the two texts allows us to understand how Castrodardo
reshapes Giustinian’s biography of Muḥammad and especially the ora-
tion that the monk Sergius addressed him in order to convince him to
dethrone Emperor Heraclius. First of all, Castrodardo uses Domenichi’s
Italian translation. Second, he transforms the brief speech of the monk
Sergius, reported essentially in indirect speech by Giustinian, into a very
long and rich oration. Moreover, this young polymath from Belluno—a
city of the Venetian Terraferma—who studied in Padua in early 1540,
was writing in the second half the 1540s, not in the 1480s. Thus,
Giustinian’s oration on Muḥammad’s successful strategy of ruling is
reformulated through Castrodardo’s readings of Machiavelli, as well as
by Arrivabene’s pro-French and pro-Ottoman agenda.
Many examples could be brought forward. Castrodardo, in fact,
refashioned the image of Muḥammad according to Machiavelli’s politi-
cal terminology. In the new version of the speech, Sergius suggests
Muḥammad to use his virtue (virtù), that is, his skill to understand when
94 P.M. Tommasino
to take advantage of the opportunities (occasioni) that the fortune (for-

tuna) offered him. Castrodardo uses many of Machiavelli’s political
terms, such as modi—the “ways” and “methods” to acquire and main-
tain the power—, while Giustinian and Domenichi uses the term “art”
(ars) that is the Latin translation of the Aristotelian téchne.46 Again,
the same political use of religion as in Giustinian’s text is at the core
of Castrodardo’s version of Sergius’s speech. But here what Giustinian
identifies with Latin religio explicitly becomes the Italian simolata reli-
gione, following Chapter 6 of Machiavelli’s Prince. Thus the Alcorano
di Macometto presents Muḥammad as an “armed prophet” and his use
of “simulated religion” as a political strategy. At the end of his speech,
Sergius suggests Muḥammad to follow the men “who gave new laws
(nuove leggi) to their people”. Especially, Muḥammad should take in
mind the example of the “ancient heroes, kings and legislators” who
“did the same since the beginning of time, because there is no better way
of ruling that the fear and the reverence of simulated religion”.47
Giustinian was interested in understanding the Eurasian political con-
text of the origin of the city of Venice. Conversely, Castrodardo focused
on the present. In 1547, in a book dedicated to a French ambassador
who had a leading role in the Franco-Ottoman collaboration of the
1540s, the prophet Muḥammad, who should have followed the example
of the “ancient heroes, kings and legislators”, works as an early Islamic
or late-antique mask for a contemporary ruler: the Ottoman Sultan
Süleymān, (r. 1520–1566).
Only in Castrodardo’s version of Sergius’s speech, Muḥammad/
Süleymān is described as the “safe harbour” and “the perfect asylum”,
as well as the “refuge for all the people oppressed in the world”.48 The
last expression clearly reminds us one of the honorific titles of Sultan
Süleymān, “the Refuge of the World” (Alem Penah), sometimes formu-
lated as “the Refuge of all the People in the whole World”. As Giancarlo
Casale has recently pointed out, this title is used in an Ottoman map
produced in Venice for the Ottoman market in 1559.49
Italian Pro-Ottoman Propaganda

The Alcorano di Macometto should be read within the flourishing and
still little-known production of Venetian and Italian pro-Ottoman texts.
This literature reemerged every so often depending on the official
diplomatic agenda of the Republic of Venice, as well as on the political

wishes of Italian religious nonconformists, anti-imperial refugees and
pro-French intellectuals living in the city.
Castrodardo’s romanised Muḥammad has more in common with
Numa Pompilius than with the Antichrist, and reminds us the romanisa-
tion of Turkish rulers in Ottoman imperial propaganda. For instance, in
1532, during Süleymān’s third military campaign in Hungary, just after
Charles V was crowned emperor in Bologna (1530), some Venetians
addressed Sultan Süleymān as the emperor of the world. An anonymous
illuminated manuscript, held at the Houghton Library in Cambridge
(Massachussets) and produced in the early 1530s along with a helmet
made by Venetian jewellers as the “ornament” of Süleymān “divine
Caesarship”, preserves a panegyric in honor of the Ottoman sovereign.50
In this text the anonymous author recognises that Süleymān’s “empire
has surpassed in grandeur and longevity all other empires that have ever
existed in the world”, and wishes in Italian for him to “live and conquer
more than Augustus, better than Trajan, more fortunate than Alexander
the Great, with prosperity of body, contentment of soul, and victory in
wars, so that the world can benefit from you longer, and after your death
you will be placed among the number of gods”.51
The comparisons and especially the wish for the divinisation of the
sultan of the Ottomans and the caliph of all believers reminds us of the
imperial cult of Augustus more than that of a Muslim practice. Venetians
produced pro-Ottoman literature along the 1530s and 1540s mirror-
ing and possibly being influenced by the ideological program of trans-
latio imperii that Ibrahim Pasha sponsored when he was grand vizier of
the Ottoman Empire (1523–1536). For instance, a long epic poem in
octaves, held in the Municipal Library of Treviso and written in Italian
in the 1520s or 1530s, celebrates the conquest of Egypt by Sultan Selīm
I (1517).52 According to the hyperbolic praises of the poem, Selīm I
(r. 1512–1520) had more soldiers under his command than Scipio and
Hannibal, and achieved more victories than Caesar. Also, thanks to his
son Süleymān, the Golden Age and Astraea herself will return on Earth:
He will bring back the Golden Age, /he will be the patron of poets, /
he will make the sacred laurel blossom again, /he will made everyone liv-
ing in peace, /he will be the light of the chorus of Pegasus, /he will make
the lions meek, /he will tame the dragons, the bears and the snakes, /the
birds, the fish and the people on earth.53
96 P.M. Tommasino
The Alcorano di Macometto published in Venice in 1547 should be read

within the frame of Italian pro-Ottoman literature. We briefly read across
three examples, dated 1530s, 1532 and 1547, suggesting that the Italian
romanisation of Ottoman rulers mirrors the Ottoman use of the Roman
imperial past. We must add that the romanisation of the Ottoman rulers
dialogues with the Caesarisation of the prophet Muḥammad himself, a
process that started decades earlier and penetrated both Italian historiog-
raphy and political theory.
In Istanbul the assimilation of the Roman imperial past served to
legitimise the Ottoman imperial present. In Italy Roman rulers, both
mythical and historical, served as filters to legitimise Muslim rulers as rul-
ers and Muḥammad as the lawgiver and the wise man of Late Antiquity.
In this regard, Venice represents an excellent case study, because the city
developed along with the diffusion of Islam and its commercial fortunes
were deeply intertwined with the Ottoman empire.
Conclusion: Reading the Alcorano di Macometto

in Seventeenth-Century Florence
In the second half of the seventeenth century the physician Francesco

Redi asked one of his friends in Florence to read the Alcorano di
Macometto for him. As Ann Blair has recently shown, “reading for
others” was a common practice among early modern intellectuals.54

This unknown reader wrote a report of his reading for his friend that is
still preserved among Redi’s papers held in the Biblioteca Nazionale of
Florence.55 The reader found the Alcorano di Macometto very useful as a
manual for political leaders and rulers, in which a select audience of poli-
ticians could learn the secrets of ruling (arcana imperii) of the prophet
Muḥammad.
The reader was perfectly aware of the different levels of reading of
Arrivabene’s companion to Islam and especially of Castrodardo’s version
of the biography of Muḥammad. He reads between the lines of the text
and beyond the polemical marginal paratext. Actually, he explicitly rec-
ognises that the marginal notes seem more “Christian” and “devotional”
than “political”. This sophisticated reader was confortable with leav-
ing the “fake miracles” to the broader public and to recognise instead
Muḥammad’s “art” of ruling and the secrets of his political power. “The
stories narrated in the first book”—the reader writes—are “certainly
fanciful”, but he also added “that we could say the same for the stories of
Romulus, Numa Pompilius and of other lawgivers”.56
In the second half of the seventeenth-century, this reader grasped the
ambivalence of the Alcorano di Macometto and, more broadly, of the
biographies of Muslim and non-Christian rulers as a genre. The reader
went through the surface of the text and reached its political meaning.
Following the tradition that we have illustrated, the reader interpreted the
figure of Muḥammad as the example of ruler, no matter the religion he
professed. In his private report for his friend, in fact, the reader states that
“at first glance Muḥammad appeared as a pseudo-prophet”. But, then,
after a closer look, Muḥammad “seemed to be the same as other pagan
lawgivers, or probably even the best one, because he found the best law
to rule a great monarchy”.57 He questions the text, finding the geneal-
ogy of Muḥammad written by “our historians who dealt with the Turks”
more reliable. Moreover, the reader adds that the Alcorano di Macometto
could be “dangerous for the broad public” because of its “fables”, but
at the same time it is a useful text “for wise and prudent politicians”.
In this regard, the reader agrees with the church of Rome that prohib-
ited the diffusion of the text in 1564, but at the same time recognised
Muḥammad as a model of ruler who introduced “new laws”.58
This twofold interpretation of the Alcorano di Macometto confirms the
diffusion of the image of the prophet Muḥammad as a lawgiver in seven-
teenth-century Italy. Florence, by the way, was the city of Machiavelli, but
also the place where Antonio Magliabechi would discuss the nature and
diffusion of the treatise De tribus impostoribus in the 1690s.59 This reading
shows that elites and political theorists were able to read between the lines
and beyond the surface of the text. A strategy of reading that, as schol-
ars of the early modern period, we should always take into consideration.
Moreover, this reading of the Alcorano suggests that the lines of transmis-
sion of the image of Muḥammad in Europe were complex and overlap-
ping. A late seventeenth-century reader, based in Tuscany and most likely
receptive of the new trends of European libertinism, was able to find it in
Castrodardo’s sixteenth-century companion to Islam (1547). Thanks to
his reading of Machiavelli, Castrodardo reformulated Sergius’s oration to
Muḥammad written by Giustinian, who in turn defended his use of histo-
riographical instead of polemical sources. These are just a few examples of
the early modern tradition within which Muḥammad the pseudo-prophet
became the prince of Late Antiquity and the Arab wiseman of Eurasia.
98 P.M. Tommasino
Notes
1. A. Momigliano (1975), “Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt: Perspective on
the First Millennium B.C.”, Daedalus, 104, 9–19, reprinted as “The Fault
of the Greeks”, in: A. Momigliano (2012), Essays in Ancient and Modern
Historiography, with a new foreword by A. Grafton (Chicago: Chicago
University Press): 9–23. I quote from the reprint.
2. Ibidem, 11.
3. P.M. Tommasino (2013), L’Alcorano di Macometto: Storia di un libro
del Cinquecento europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino): 32–33. See also A.M.
Piemontese (2002), “Lo studio delle cinque lingue presso Savonarola e
Pico”, in: M. Bernardini (ed.), Europa e Islam tra i secoli XIV e XVI, 2
vols. (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale): Vol. I, 179–202.
4. G. Fowden (2014), Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium
Refocused (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press).
5. L. Bottini (2009–2015), “The Apology of Al-Kindī”, in: D. Thomas
(ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 7 vols.
(Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol. I, 585–594; F. González Muñoz (ed.)
(2005), Exposición y refutación del Islam: La versión latina de las epistolas
de al-Hāṡŝimī y al-Kindī (A Coruña: Universidade de Coruña): 92.
6. C. Gruber and A. Shalem (2014), “Images of the Prophet Muhammad in
a Global Context”, in: C. Gruber and A. Shalem (eds), The Image of the
Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation (Boston and
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter): 2.
7. Momigliano, “The Fault of the Greeks”, 11.
8. D. Fabrizio (2011), Il profeta della discordia: Maometto e la polemistica islamo-
cristiana medievale (Rome: Aracne); M. Di Cesare (2012), The Pseudo-
Historical Image of the Prophet Muhammad in Medieval Latin Literature:
A Repertory (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter); C. Ferrero Hernández and
Ó. de la Cruz Palma (eds) (2014), Vitae Mahometi: Reescritura e inven-
ción en la literatura cristiana de controversia (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas); A. Saviello (2015), Imaginationen des Islam:
Bildliche Darstellungen des Propheten Mohammed im westeuropäischen
Buchdruck bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter).
9. Two very good exceptions are M. Meserve (2008), Empires of Islam in
Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press) and M. Dimmock (2013), Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad
in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
10. J.V. Tolan (2010), “European Accounts of Muḥammad’s Life”, in: J.E.
Brockopp (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Muḥammad (New York:
Cambridge University Press): 226–250: 226.
11. See J.V. Tolan (2015), “Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History”,
in: A.J. Silverstein and G.G. Stroumsa (eds) and M. Bildstein (assoc. ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press): 166–188.
12. See, for example, Z. Elmarsafy (2009), The Enlightenment Qur’an: The
Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld).
13. The citation is from Gilles of Rome, Errores Philosophorum (1270).
The original passage reads: “Quod nulla lex est vera, licet possit esse
utilis”. I quote from the free translation provided by G.G. Stroumsa

(2015), “Three Rings or Three Impostors? The Comparative Approach
to the Abrahamic Religions and its Origins”, in: A.J. Silverstein and
G.G. Stroumsa (eds) and M. Bildstein (assoc. ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press): 56–70: 67.
14. An interesting discussion on this topic in A. Sterk and N. Caputo (eds)
(2014), Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of
Objectivity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press).
15. N. Bisaha (2004), Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and
the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); S.C.
Akbari and K. Mallette (eds) (2013), A Sea of Languages: Rethinking
the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Toronto and Buffalo:
University of Toronto Press).
16. A. Castro (1954), “The Presence of the Sultan Saladin in the Romance
Literatures”, Diogenes, 2, 13–36. See also A. D’Ancona (1994), La leg-
genda di Maometto in Occidente, 2nd ed. (Rome: Salerno editrice).
17. B. Giustinian (1493), De origine urbis Venetiarum (Venice: Bernardo
Benaglio). The section on “Saracens” is in Book VIII, fols. 55v–63r.
18. An English summary of Giustinian’s passage on Muḥammad is pub-
lished in P.H. Labalme (1969), Bernardo Giustiniani: A Venetian of the
Quattrocento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura): 291–294.
19. Giustinian, De origine, fols. 57v–58v: “Sarrhacenae autem sectae nihil apud
suos. Apud nostros commentaria reperiuntur nonnulla. Quae deinde pos-
teriores, sacris litteris dediti, non tam sribendae historiae gratia, quam
eius confutandi erroris, memoriae tradidere. Ea prosequi non institui”.
20. Ibidem, fols. 57v–58r: “Addidit ad haec fabulas quasdam, ne pueris quidem,
et aniculis recitandas. In quibus tempus terrere opere praecium non putavi.
Quisquis nosse desiderat legat Alcoranum, generis humani miserebitur”.
21. Ibidem, fol. 57r: “Miscere religionis aliquid opus est, et auctoritatem ex
celo petere. Quod principes multi fecerunt. Moventur populi in primis
religione”.
22. C. Ginzburg (2012), “Machiavelli, the Exception and the Rule: Notes from
Research in Progress”, in: D. Know and N. Ordine (eds), Renaissance Letters
100 P.M. Tommasino
and Learning: In memoriam Giovanni Aquilecchia (London and Turin: The

Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno): 73–91 (the original Italian version
was published in 2003); D. Canfora (2010), Prima di Machiavelli: Politica
e cultura in età umanistica (Rome and Bari: Laterza): 86. On Galateo
see A. Romano (1960–), “De Ferrariis, Antonio”, in: Dizionario biogra-
fico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana): Vol. XXXIII,
738–741.
23. On the biographies of Arab philosophers and physicians in Europe see
D.N. Hasse (1997), “King Avicenna: The Iconographic Consequences of
a Mistranslation”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60,
230–243; D.N. Hasse (2015), “Contacts with the Arab World”, in: S.
Knight and S. Tilg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press), 279–293.
24. Quoted from A. Rabil Jr. (ed.) (1991), Knowledge, Goodness, and
Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists
(Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies): 332. Also
see P.M. Tommasino (2015), “Otranto and the Self”, I Tatti Studies in
the Italian Renaissance, 18, 147–155.
25. Quoted from S.B. Schwartz (2008), All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance
and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University
Press): 52.
26. M.A. Sabellico (1498–1504), Enneades…, 2 vols. (Venice: Bernardino
and Matteo Vitali); G.B. Egnazio (1516), In hoc volumine haec con-
tinentur (…) de Caesaribus libri III (Venice: Heirs of Aldo Manuzio
and Andrea Torresano). The Vitae Ceasarum are included in B. Corio
(1503), Dello eccellentissimo oratore (Milan: Alessandro Minuziano).
27. H. Omont (1909), “Inventaire de la bibliothèque de Ferdinand Ier, roi
de Naples (1481)”, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 70, 456–470: 467.
I thank Jacopo Gesiot, currently a graduate student at the University of
Udine, for sharing this information with me.
28. Vatican City, Vatican Library, ms. Chigi M VIII 159, Elencho historico et
cosmographo di Ioan Marco Cinico, fol. 5r, quoted in A. Petrucci (1988),
“Biblioteca, libri, scritture nella Napoli aragonese”, in: G. Cavallo (ed.),
Le biblioteche nel mondo antico e medievale (Rome and Bari: Laterza):
187–202.
29. E.W. Cochrane (1981), Historians and Historiography in the Italian
Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 329.
30. J. Cuspinian (1561), De Caesaribus atque Imperatoribus Romanis opus
insigne (Basel: Johann Oporinus and Nikolaus Brylinger): 532–538.
31. On the epistle by Francesco Filelfo see M. Meserve (2008–2015),
“Francesco Filelfo”, in: D. Thomas (ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A
Bibliographical History, 7 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol. V, 406–414.
32. Cuspinian, De Caesaribus, 533–534: “Columbam enim (quam Spiritum

Sanctum callidissimus deceptor vocabat) assuefecit in aure sua pasci. Hanc
sibi secretissima Dei consilia nunciare iactitabat mendacissimus nebulo,
quoties ad aures pro nutrimento avis simplex volabat. Forte hunc dolum
a Quinto Sertorio didicit, qui cervam circumduxit, ut milites falleret, que-
madmodum Historiae Romanae prodiderunt”. Compare it with F. Filelfo
(1502), Epistolarum familiarum libri XXXVII ex eius exemplari tran-
sumpti (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de Gregori): fol. 57v: “Cum enim
columbam, quam Spiritum Sanctum, latro callidissimus, esse qui secum
loqueretur iactitabat, assuefecisset in aure sua pasci; ac taurum quondam
ex occulto, eius audita altiore voce, ad se festinare et Algoranum cornibus
alligatum”.
33. P.M. Tommasino (2014), “Muḥammad e la cerva di Quinto Sertorio”, in:
C. Ferrero Hernández and Ó. de la Cruz Palma (eds), Vitae Mahometi.
Reescritura e invención en la literatura cristiana de controversia (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): 207–219.
34. Cuspinian, De Caesaribus, 534.
35. Ginzburg, “Machiavelli, the Exception and the Rule”, 88.
36. Ibidem, 88–89.
37. N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. A.
Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke University Press): Vol. I,
25–26.
38. Ibidem, Vol. I, 224–225.
39. Also Giustinian used the verb “to mix” (miscere) in his De origine urbis
Venetiarum. See the passage quoted at fn. 21.
40. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. II, 661. I have slightly modified the
translation.
41. Tommasino, L’Alcorano di Macometto, 241.
42. G.B. Egnazio (1540), Le vite degl’Imperadori Romani (…) nuovamente
dalla lingua latina tradotte alla volgare (Venice: Francesco Marcolino);
B. Giustinian (1534), De origine urbis Venetiarum (Venice: Antonio
Brucioli); B. Giustinian (1545), Historia (…) dell’origine di Vinegia
(Venice: Bernardino Bindoni).
43. [G.B. Castrodardo (ed.)] (1547), L’Alcorano di Macometto, nel qual si con-
tiene la dottrina, la vita, i costumi, et le leggi sue (Venice: Andrea Arrivabene);
on this text see Tommasino, L’Alcorano di Macometto, 221–255; P.M.
Tommasino (2012), “Leer a Maquiavelo, traducer el Corán: Muḥammad,
príncipe y legislador en el Alcorano di Macometto (Venecia, 1547)”,
Al-Qantara, 33, no. 2, 271–296; P.M. Tommasino (2014), “Sul talento
dei lettori”, Storica, 20, no. 58, 112–122.
44. Tommasino, L’Alcorano di Macometto, 104.
102 P.M. Tommasino
45. H. Den Boer and P.M. Tommasino (2014), “Reading the Qur’ān in the
17th-century Sephardi community of Amsterdam”, Al-Qantara, 35, no. 2,
461–491: 474–476.
46. Tommasino, L’Alcorano di Macometto, 221–255.
47. [Castrodardo (ed.)], L’Alcorano di Macometto, fol. IIIv: “Il che fecero
tutti gli antichi heroi, re e governatori da principio del mondo, non hav-
endo più sicuro modo di signoreggiare che il timore e spavento della loro
simolata religione”.
48. Ibidem, fol. IVr: “securissimo ricetto de’ sgratati, ristoro degli afflitti dalla
tirannia de’ prencipi christiani, ridotto di tutti i cacciati dall’avaritia loro’,
and rifuggio de’ poveri oppressi di tutto il mondo”.
49. G. Casale (2013), “Seeing the Past: Maps and Ottoman Historical
Consciousness”, in: H.E. Çıpa and E. Fetvacı (eds), Writing History
at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 80–99: 83.
50. A. Pulido-Rull (2012), “A Pronouncement of Alliance: An Anonymous
Illuminated Venetian Manuscript for Sultan Süleyman”, Muqarnas,
29, no. 1, 101–150: 144. See also G. Necipoğlu (1989), “Süleyman
the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of
Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry”, The Art Bulletin, 71, 401–427.
51. Pulido-Rull, “A pronouncement of Alliance”, 144.
52. E. Lippi (2001), “1517: l’ottava al servizio del Sultano”, Quaderni veneti,
34, 49–88; E. Lippi (2004), “Per dominar il mondo al mondo nato: Vita
e gesta di Selim I Sultano”, Quaderni Veneti, 40: 17–106. The remaining
text of the poem is published, with the same title, in Quaderni Veneti, 42
(2005), 37–118; 43 (2006), 35–91; 45 (2007), 7–61. See also E. Lippi
(2004), “Born to Rule the World: An Italian Poet Celebrates the Deeds
of the Sultan Selim I”, Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi, 19, 87–92.
53. Lippi, “Per dominar il mondo al mondo nato”, 96: “Costui farà tornar
la età de l’oro, /costui serà sussidio di poëti, /costui farà fiorir il sacro
alloro, /costui serà cagion ch’ogni om s’aqueti (sic), /costui fia il lume
del pegaso coro, /costui farà i lëoni mansüeti, /costui domerà draghi,
orsi e serpenti, /gli uccelli, i pesci e le terrestre genti”.
54. A. Blair (2011), Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information
Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press).
55. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Palatino 1097, Notizie
intorno all’Alcorano, fols. 107r–110v.
56. Ibidem, fol. 109v: “Non vi è dubbio che le cose raccontate nel primo
libro hanno del favoloso, ma il medesimo pare si possa dire di quelle di
Romolo, di Numa Pompilio e di altri legislatori”.
57. Ibidem, fol. 107r: “Alla prima che io ne favelli, dico essere verità infal-
libile che Maometto sia un pseudoprofeta, e che la sua legge sia empia
e falsa, opponendosi alla vera e santa di Cristo. Nondimeno pare a me che

se moralmente parliamo, si possa dire essere egli stato non solo eguale
a tutti gli altri Etnici legislatori, ma di gran lunga superiore, poiché per
fondare una gran Monarchia non poteva a mio giudizio trovar legge che
più gli tornasse in acconcio”.
58. Ibidem, fol. 108v: “Insomma mi pare che a Roma faccino molto bene
a non voler concedere licenza ad alcuno di leggere l’Alcorano perché
potrebbe nelle persone idiote fare qualche non buona impressione”; fol.
107v refers to the “nuova legge” introduced by Muḥammad.
59. G. Totaro (1993), “Da Antonio Magliabechi a Philip von Stosch: Varia
fortuna del De tribus impostoribus e de L’esprit de Spinoza a Firenze”,
in: E. Canone (ed.), Bibliotecae Selectae da Cusano a Leopardi (Firenze:
Olschki), 549–570.
Author Biography
Pier Mattia Tommasino is Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia
University, New York. His research focuses on the linguistic, textual, bib-
liographical and religious relations between southern Europe and the Muslim
World, especially on the Italian and Latin translations of the Qur’ān, as well
as on the diffusion of Italian language and books in the early modern Muslim
Mediterranean. An English translation of his first book, L’Alcorano di Macometto:
Storia di un libro del Cinquecento europeo (2013), is under preparation.
CHAPTER 6
Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political

Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
And therefore the form of writing which of all others is fittest for this variable
argument of negotiation and occasions is that which Machiavel chose wisely and
aptly for government; namely, discourses upon histories or examples. For knowledge
drawn freshly, and in our view, out of particulars, knoweth the way best to
particulars again; and it hath much greater life for practice when the discourse
attendeth upon the example, than when the example attendeth upon the discourse.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605).
Introduction: Jesuits and Mughals

By 1527, the year of the death of Niccolò Machiavelli in Florence,
the two great early modern Iberian imperial and colonial enterprises
were well on their way, that of the Spaniards in the Americas, and that
of the Portuguese in Africa and Asia. The pair of major figures most
M. Alam (*) 
University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
S. Subrahmanyam (*) 
University of California, Los Angeles, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_6
106 M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam
associated with the early versions of these enterprises, Hernán Cortés on

the Spanish side, and Afonso de Albuquerque on the Portuguese one,
have often been loosely termed “Machiavellian” in retrospect, though
neither could have had a direct acquaintance with the writings of the
Florentine thinker in the years before 1527.1 Rather, we are dealing with
some form of broad family resemblance at best, perhaps mediated by a
common reading of classical authors such as Livy and Vegetius. Cortés,
it has been noted in a well-known essay by John Elliott, no doubt
had “an attitude to Fortune not unlike that of Machiavelli”, and fur-
ther “he knew that the man who aspired to master Fortune must pos-
sess innate qualities of resourcefulness and guile—those qualities which
for Machiavelli helped to constitute virtù”.2 But his attitude may have
been no more marked than that of other contemporaries, many of whose
phrases can echo those in Cortés’s celebrated letters from the time of the
conquest of Mexico in a rather uncanny way.
The case of Albuquerque has been less carefully analysed from a
“Machiavellian” perspective. A recent exercise by Ângela Barreto Xavier
has attempted to do so by looking at a series of pointed questions: con-
vergences and divergences in certain themes and their treatment; the
question of Albuquerque’s education and the sources of his thinking.
It is clear, for example, that Albuquerque had a far more marked pre-
dilection in the direction of the eschatological than either Machiavelli
or Cortés, as has been remarked by a number of authors. Yet, Barreto
Xavier also concludes: “This rapid diagnosis shows us that we can estab-
lish points of convergence between Machiavelli and Albuquerque, par-
ticularly in relation to themes such as the connection between force and
political reputation, the best methods of conquest, and the role of set-
tlers in the preservation of territories. At the same time, the divergences
are also clear in regard to other central issues, such as the role that
mercenaries and fortresses can and ought to have in the conquest and
conservation of territories, as well as the place given to Fortune (here
equally translated as Divine Providence), in the success or lack of suc-
cess of projects”.3 A possible line of analysis, which has hitherto received
little attention, is in terms of a close reading of Albuquerque’s vocabu-
lary, which—while using characteristically Christian themes such as of a
guerra justa against “infidels”—also is quite insistent, for example, on
thematising notions such as “dissimulation”, both in its nominal and ver-
bal forms. This concerned both his own behaviour, and that of his ene-
mies and rivals: for example, when reflecting on the elites of the Bijapur
6 MEDITERRANEAN EXEMPLARS 107
Sultanate (from whom he had conquered Goa in 1510), he remarked

that “these Turks are men who work harder to conserve their credit and
fame than any other people whom I have seen, and they dissimulate on
many things (desimulam muitas cousas), in order not to receive a loss [of
face]”.4 At the same time, he also boasted that he had worked hard to
have the Samudri Raja, ruler of Calicut, secretly killed by his own family,
because this would facilitate a treaty between that port and the Estado
da Índia: “I am certain that Nambiadery killed the Çamorym [Samudri
Raja] with poison, because in all my letters I wrote to him that he should
poison the Çamorym, and that I would come to a peace agreement with
him”.5 The ostensible justification for this was that in 1500, the Samudri
had committed an act of betrayal (trayçam) by attacking the Portuguese
factory.
We are aware that by the late 1510s, the reputation of the Portuguese
for dissimulation, chicanery and duplicity had reached some proportions
in the littoral lands of the Indian Ocean. An early Portuguese embassy to
the Husain Shahi court in Bengal in 1521 was thus surprised to be faced
by courtiers, who had built up a veritable dossier concerning their ear-
lier actions in various parts of the Indian Ocean, actions which all alleg-
edly showed their cynicism, and incapacity to live up to the most simple
promises.6 The death by drowning of the Gujarat Sultan, Bahadur Shah,
in February 1537, when he had gone to meet the Portuguese governor
Nuno da Cunha on board his ship off Diu, was often taken as a par-
ticularly flagrant instance of a lack of honourable comportment. In the
last quarter of the sixteenth century, two writers in Arabic from Kerala—
Shaikh Zain-ud-Din and Qazi Muhammad—made a long list of such
actions attributed to the Portuguese, suggesting that they had no ethical
basis for their statecraft, which was seemingly a mere tissue of opportun-
ism and religious bigotry.7
The first Jesuit missions to be sent to the court of the Mughals in
northern India in the late sixteenth century were therefore faced with
something of a quandary. But they were not alone in this. The Jesuits
sent to the Ming court might have been aware that from the early
decades of the sixteenth century, horrible rumours had been put out
regarding the Portuguese, notably that they were kidnappers and can-
nibals, who tortured and ate young Chinese children.8 The first Jesuits
to systematically encounter the Mughals were those dispatched in
1580 to Fatehpur Sikri, Rodolfo Acquaviva, Antoni de Montserrat
and Francisco Henriques. Since none of them was in fact Portuguese,
it may have helped them to keep subjects largely to the (paradoxically)

less controversial sphere of religion, rather than enter into the ques-
tions of statecraft and the comportment of princes. Indeed, the reader of
Montserrat’s account of this mission is struck by several notable features.
First, very little mention is made of European politics, whether in regard
of Portugal or Spain (Montserrat, it may be noted, was not very well-
disposed to the Habsburgs). The Portuguese king Sebastian, who had
died in the recent battle of el-Ksar el-Kebir (1578), is never mentioned
at all, and the brief rule of his successor, cardinal Henry (1578–1580),
is only written about because Akbar apparently sometimes praised his
“sanctity, fortitude and constancy”.9 Secondly, though Montserrat writes
of Akbar’s system of government, and his chief counsellors (including
Shaikh Abu’l Fazl), he seems to have been unaware of the existence of
any Mughal reflections on statecraft as such. He also obviously found
that Muslim ‘ulamā played too important a role in the Mughal dispensa-
tion, even if he recognised that Akbar himself was open to the criticisms
of Islam made by the Jesuits in the course of the debates in court, and in
the so-called ‘ibādat khāna (where representatives of different faiths were
brought together to expound upon and debate their differences).
By the end of Akbar’s reign, and the beginning of that of his son
and successor Nur-ud-Din Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), a good deal had
changed with regard to Jesuit dealings with the Mughals. The third
Jesuit mission to the Mughals was far longer-lasting than its prede-
cessors, and its tone also evolved from the relatively positive one of
Montserrat to a far more sour and dyspeptic register. The chief actors
among the Jesuits were Manuel Pinheiro, Bento de Góis (who eventu-
ally died on an exploratory mission to western China), and above all
the Navarrese aristocrat Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617). A fair amount
has been written about Xavier in particular, and it is equally true that he
was himself a prolific author, both in European languages and in Persian
(although this authorship, as we shall see below, is more problematic
than that in Portuguese, Spanish or Latin). Indeed, in some modern
eyes, he is elevated almost to the status of two of his illustrious Jesuit
contemporaries, the Italians Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Roberto
de’ Nobili (1577–1656).10 Xavier was the great-nephew (on the mater-
nal side) of the famous Jesuit Francis Xavier, among the first members of
the Society of Jesus to reach Asia, and mindful of the considerable pres-
tige of his relative, eventually took on his surname rather than that with
which he began life, namely Jerónimo de Ezpeleta y Goñi. He entered
the Society of Jesus in 1568, at the age of nineteen, and was trained
at the Jesuit establishments in Alcalá and Toledo, before going on to
Portugal. He then arrived in India in 1581, just after the Habsburg take-
over of the Portuguese Crown, and spent the next decade and a half in
Jesuit establishments at Bassein, Cochin and Goa, when he was eventu-
ally chosen—at the age of forty-five—to head the mission to the Mughal
court in Lahore, accompanied initially by Pinheiro and Góis. The Jesuit
party arrived at their destination in May 1595, and as Xavier was to write
soon became “entirely occupied (…) in learning the Persian language”,
in the optimistic hope that would have “mastered it within a year”. By
September 1596, he would claim in a letter to the Jesuit Provincial that
the Mughals were astonished by the level of “our Persian”, to the point
that they had no more need of interpreters. A Jesuit chronicler, Fernão
Guerreiro, would also boast a few years later that even the Persians took
pleasure in “the propriety of his [Xavier’s] vocabulary and the choiceness
of his diction”.11
The reality, however, was rather more complex than this typically
heroic narrative would suggest. In particular, Xavier took pains to dimin-
ish the role played by translators and cultural intermediaries in facilitating
the participation by the Jesuits in the Mughal court. He also somewhat
obfuscated the process by which he produced translations into Persian
of works that he composed or compiled in European languages. These
works were largely religious in nature, and included versions of the lives
of Christ and the apostles. One of them has been recently edited and
translated; this is the Mir’āt al-Quds (“Mirror of Holiness”, also called
the Dāstān-i Masīh or “Story of the Messiah”), completed in 1602, of
which several quite richly illustrated manuscripts exist, suggesting that it
did really attract Mughal curiosity.12 In general, Xavier strove in these
works to present the Mughal elites with accessible and attractive nar-
ratives regarding the Christian faith, based on a mix of textual sources
(such as the writings of Flavius Josephus), and medieval legends and oral
sources that commonly circulated even amongst churchmen. One work
does however represent an exception to this rule, namely the Fuente de
Vida, which is a tripartite conversation between the Philosopher (who
stands in for an imaginary Mughal emperor, largely modelled on Akbar),
the Father, and a somewhat passive Mulla, who is only there as a foil,
while the Father eventually persuades the complaisant Philosopher of
the soundness of the Christian standpoint, as opposed to that of the
Muslims.13 Completed late in the reign of Akbar (in around 1600), this
polemical work was eventually rendered into Persian in around 1609

(thus, during the reign of Jahangir) as the Ā’īna-yi Haqq-numā (or
“Truth-Showing Mirror”) of which an abridgment was also prepared. It
sufficiently annoyed some Muslim readers that a series of refutations and
counter-refutations were produced around it, extending into Iran and
the Mediterranean world, the last in the series being that in around 1700
by a Portuguese convert to Shi‘ism, a certain ‘Ali Quli Jadid al-Islam.14
It is however clear to us that in order to produce these works in
Persian, all before 1610, Xavier wound up depending heavily on a collab-
orator, a certain Maulana (or Mulla) ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri,
himself the author of several interesting works, and who appears peri-
odically in the Mughal court as late as 1619, when he presented the
emperor Jahangir with an album of calligraphic specimens in the hand
of his grandfather, Humayun.15 Sattar seems to have come into contact
with the Jesuits sometime late in the 1590s, and was an active partici-
pant in the production of the Mir’āt al-Quds in 1602. In one of his writ-
ings, he implies that his collaboration with the Jesuits was at the direct
instigation of Akbar himself, who had considered it appropriate that
an ‘ālim in his court should penetrate the “secrets of that community”
(the Franks, or Europeans), and reveal “what had remained hidden from
sight on account of the strangeness of their language, and distance”.
Thus, while Xavier attempted to learn Persian, Sattar seems quite quickly
to have acquired a reading knowledge of Latin, though he cautions his
reader that since “I have spent most of the time in producing transla-
tions, and did not have the opportunity to speak much, I am still not
capable of conversation”. This thus enabled him in 1603 to produce a
rather curious work entitled Ahwāl-i Firangistān, or Samrat al-Falāsifa
(“Account of the Land of the Franks”, or “The Fruits of Philosophers”),
containing inter alia an account of Jesus Christ, the rulers of Greece
and Rome, as well as a depiction of the “celebrated philosophers” of
ancient times.16 The chief sources he employed included the Latin Bible,
as well as the historical works of St Antoninus, a Dominican friar and
archbishop from mid fifteenth-century Florence. In point of fact, Sattar
appears to have collaborated in every one of the Persian works attrib-
uted to Xavier, polishing and correcting them, rendering them culturally
intelligible to Mughal readers, and also placing appropriate Perso-Islamic
references within them which Xavier was himself incapable of doing.
Despite this fact, there has been a certain reluctance in historiography
to give him more than a grudging credit, and to state that “the extent
of this [Sattar’s] assistance remains unknown”.17 Sattar, for his part, is

quite explicit in as late as 1610 about the imperfect knowledge of Persian
(kamdānishī dar Fārsī zabān) that Xavier possessed.
It transpires however that around 1608, the relationship between
Sattar and the Jesuits was turning sour. In Sattar’s own account, at
the time of the initial dealings some years before, he himself had been
quite free of prejudice (ta‘assub). However, with time he had come to
see the falsity (butlān) of the Christians’ ways, despite his feeling that
Xavier himself was quite a truthful man. The problem seems in part
to have been provoked by what he saw as the bigotry of some of the
other Jesuits, as well as the absurdity and disgusting character of their
beliefs. A particular telling confrontation occurred in the Mughal
court in mid-August 1610, and it is reported (albeit in slightly differ-
ent terms) by both Sattar and the Jesuit Manuel Pinheiro. The discus-
sion began with some characteristically provocative assertions on the
part of the Florentine Jesuit Francesco Corsi, regarding the falsity of
Muḥammad’s claims to prophecy. He also stated that given the superior-
ity of the Christian faith, he hoped that Mulla ‘Abdus Sattar, who was a
man of letters and wise (homo litteratus et sapiens), would be prevailed
upon to convert to that religion.18 When publicly pressed by Jahangir,
however, Sattar was sufficiently provoked to respond that he even found
the religion of the Gentiles (ethnicorum or hunūd) preferable to that
of the Christians. So vehement was his assertion that Jahangir seems to
have been left astonished. The Jesuits too were manifestly quite taken
aback by the sustained attack he then mounted on them, complaining
in their letters that he had been no better than Irus (adeo Irus esset)—
a lowly character from the Odyssey—when they had first known him,
but had then been given the command of a hundred horse, and 10,000
gold coins of revenue a year, only because of their doing. It is thus clear
that by the end of 1610, cordial dealings between ‘Abdus Sattar and the
Jesuits had come to an end. So far as we are aware, this also marked the
end of Xavier’s literary production in Persian, even though he remained
in the Mughal court until 1614.
A Jesuit and “His” Text

In the years that he spent in Mughal India, almost all the works that
Xavier wrote (or co-produced) which have come down to us have a
markedly religious character, no surprise in view of the fact that he was
a missionary. The exception to this is a text completed in 1609, belong-

ing to the “Mirrors for Princes” (or specula principum) genre, which
was entitled Ādāb al-Saltanat, a title that Xavier himself rendered
in Portuguese as Directório de Reys, meaning “Manual for Kings”.19
The work exists in two manuscript copies, one addressed to Claudio
Acquaviva, the General of the Society of Jesus (and kept today in
Rome), and the other (today in London) which was given by Xavier to
the Florentine traveller and intellectual Giambattista Vecchietti.20 The
Portuguese summary runs as follows: “Manual for Kings, in which is
treated how a King should behave in his government, composed by the
Father Jerónimo Xavier of the Company of Jesus, addressed to the King
Jahanguir, Great Mogol, done in the Year of Our Lord 1609. It has four
chapters: The 1st deals with how the King should deal with God; the
2nd how he should deal with himself; the 3rd with how he should deal
with his grandees and officials; the 4th with how he should deal with his
people. And with God, it would be with much reverence and obedience;
with himself with a good balance in life in regard of all sorts of virtues;
with his grandees and officials with doctrine and direction; with the peo-
ple with love and providence and support”.
While writing this text, was Xavier even aware that an extensive
body of “advice literature” already existed in Mughal India, to which
Jahangir had access? If he was ignorant of this fact, ‘Abdus Sattar cer-
tainly was not. He would have undoubtedly known of texts going
back at least to the Tahzīb al-Akhlāq (“Refinement of Ethics”) of Ibn
Miskawaih (d. 1030), the Siyar al-Mulūk or Siyāsat Nāma (“Lives of
Kings” or “Book of Government”) of Nizam-ul-Mulk (d. 1092), and
the celebrated and much-cited work of Nasir-ud-Din Tusi (d. 1274),
entitled Akhlāq-i Nāsirī (“Nasirean Ethics”).21 Closer to home, geo-
graphically and chronologically, the Mughals had a deep familiarity with
a whole range of such materials, from Wa‘iz al-Kashifi’s Akhlāq-i Muhsīnī
(“Muhsin’s Ethics”) to Ikhtiyar-ud-Din Husaini’s Akhlāq-i Humāyūnī
(“Royal Ethics”), the latter a work completed in a Timurid political
context and eventually dedicated to the young Mughal prince Babur,
Jahangir’s own great-grandfather.22 In these works, especially those that
derived from Tusi, key concepts included justice (‘adl) and social balance
(i‘tidāl), to be ensured through appropriate regulations (dastūr). To be
sure, these authors argued in an ideal world, cooperative social organisa-
tion could indeed be achieved purely through love and affection (mahab-
bat); but they were well aware that in reality, regular royal coercion
might be necessary to ensure justice. This justice, incidentally, also

implied not distinguishing between Muslim and non-Muslims subjects
(ri‘āyā), both of whom were entitled to compassion in equal measure,
irrespective of their faiths. On the other hand, not all Mughal courti-
ers would have appreciated this “Nasirean” line of reasoning, and some
would certainly have held to a more orthodox view (already popularised
by some Delhi Sultanate ‘ulamā in the fourteenth century), in which the
ruler was meant to uphold the primary place of Islam, and thus also dis-
tinguish between his subjects on the basis of their beliefs. By all accounts,
the Jesuits appear to have doubted that such sophisticated reasoning
as “Nasirean ethics” existed amongst the Mughals. In a treatise on the
Mughal court, authored in about 1610 by either Xavier or Pinheiro,
this was how they characterised Jahangir’s rule: “One could say that this
King is not a Moor, nor Gentile, nor Christian, because he has no law
(ley) in which he believes firmly like other people; he is a barbarian who
lives by fate and fortune (vive ao nasibo), follows his appetites, and is full
of great pride and the vainglory of the world. He thinks that he alone is
lord of all, and he is very cruel, and vengeful—with no mercy at all”.23
The Ādāb al-Sultanat, even if it was addressed then to a “barbar-
ian”, still needed to follow certain conventions. It was written in a
rather simple and straightforward style for a courtly text, which is to be
distinguished somewhat from that which Sattar used in his other writ-
ings; however, its linguistic usages are perfectly correct, indicating that
Sattar had gone over the text with some care. The religious register is
also deliberately ambiguous; while the first page of the manuscript has
a cross, immediately below it there appears the standard Bismillāh invo-
cation, whereas in at least one of his other texts, Xavier has preferred
“in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are one
God”. The text of the Ādāb then continues:
It is a beautiful duty to thank that governor of the world (jahāndār) before

whose threshold (‘utba) hereditary rulers increase the fortune and capital
of their grandeur and majesty by offering obeisance.
How can I even thank Him,
For I don’t have the words.
God’s vase is so full,
And my cup is all-too-small.

And nor am I of the level of Plato,
For God’s glory is even greater than what is commonly said.
It is astonishing – Subhān Allāh – that even a stranger, and humble dervish

who has no interest in the world’s affairs, can presume to place the regula-
tions of empire and the laws of rulership (zawābit-i khilāfat wa qawānīn-i
farmāndihī) before such a ruler of the world who with the help of God’s
grace, and on account of the support of his high fortune, has come to
know the secrets of conquest and governance (jahāngīrī wa jahāndārī).
Yet, this supplicant has for years been studying the accounts of people of
Antiquity, and with the guidance of his intelligence, he has been able to
glean some rules to place before the assembly; may this be taken as an
expression of my devotion to you and as a natural result of what I have
been fortunate enough to gather from the words of the great people of
yore, reading whom gives one intelligence.24
Can we see here already a deliberate but concealed echo of the dedica-
tion of Machiavelli’s Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici, which describes its
author as a “man of low and humble station”, who has nevertheless
engaged in a “continual reading of ancient [matters]” and then pre-
pared a digest of it? This is a point to which we shall return below.25
The text goes on to state that God gives rise to everything on account
of His wisdom (dānish); it therefore follows that God’s creatures will live
in harmony when they too make use of wisdom, which is the measure
of everything, and necessary for all actions. Wisdom, it is noted, is the
moving cause (‘illat) of everything, and it can make a man a craftsman,
a general, a just governor or a perfect king. This is because according
to each man’s capacity, wisdom decides in what way he can be distin-
guished in his skills. A classical example is cited (from the western tradi-
tion) of a philosopher who was enslaved and taken to the slave market.
When a rich man was prepared to buy him, and asked him if he had a
skill, he replied that his real skill was in knowing how to command
free men (mardūm-i āzād). The buyer was so pleased by his quick wit
that he at once freed him and made him the tutor of his sons. The text
then mentions a number of key purveyors of political wisdom from
the Mediterranean: Plato was the master of Dionysius of Syracuse,
Aristotle taught the world-conqueror Alexander, and Solon taught the
residents of Lacedaemonia the regulations of rulership (qawānīn-i sal-
tanat). Still another philosopher, Seneca, had as a disciple the Caesar
Nero, to whom he taught the norms of governance and the rulership
of this world (ādāb-i jahāndārī wa farmāndihī-i ān jahān). The rulers

of Rome engraved his words on a silver tablet, and also carved them on
gold coins, so that they might be known in a stable fashion in the future.
Whenever a new ruler came to the throne, these words would then be
read out to him. Another philosopher called Plutarch had the emperor
Trajan as his disciple. It was in their spirit that the work’s humble author
(bi istita‘at), by name Padre Jerónimo Xavier, who had spent an age
reading the works of the prophets and ancient sages, now had the audac-
ity to bring this work to the Mughal emperor’s majestic presence. Xavier
goes on to note that he should rightly have translated these ancient
authors directly into Persian. But since their works were not available
in India (dar īn diyār), he has instead chosen some selected stories and
reports from their works.
In these early passages, we can already see clear signs of Sattar’s
handiwork, overlaid on Xavier’s concrete examples. The repeated rhe-
torical attention to concepts such as wisdom (hikmat) and rationality
(tadbīr), which are intended to glean important lessons (‘ibrat) is the
work of someone who knows the characteristic Indo-Persian topoi of the
moment. So are flourishes, in which “Xavier” writes of how he has taken
his old and fragile body, read and worked day and night, and placed
some “flowers laden with the breeze of wisdom (gulhā-i dānish-nasīm)”
on his eyelashes.26 There are some characteristic phrases of captatio
benevolentiae that Sattar has used elsewhere, notably the reference to the
author’s feeble command of language (kajmuj zabān). But the struc-
ture of the work, it is claimed, owes itself above all to Plutarch, who had
stated that four things were important for emperors. This then explained
the contents of the book (fihrist-i kitāb), in four parts (or fasl), which
are briefly summarised. The first part deals with the respect (‘izzat)
that the king owes to God, with examples of the punishment to those
unfortunates who have disobeyed. The second part regards the ruler’s
self-improvement, bearing in mind that he ought seek the public good
(bahbūd-i khalā’iq), and not his own benefit. The ruler should be brave
(jawānmard), merciful and kind, avoiding flatterers and back-stabbers.
The third fasl then moves on to the training for officials (‘uhdadārān).
These include favourites, who should be steadfast in friendship and com-
panionship, as well as leaders and generals. The fourth part then deals
with nobles, soldiers, merchants and other common folk. Finally, there is
an epilogue summarising the advice apparently given by Maecenas to the
Caesar Augustus (or “Baukustu”). It is further noted at the very outset
that Persophone readers will notice that the text contains many unfamil-
iar names of prophets, philosophers, kings and nobles. These have there-
fore been especially noted in the text’s margins.
The examples chosen throughout the Ādāb thus vary considerably in
terms of both period and source. The Bible is periodically drawn upon,
as might have been expected, and of the classical authors it is Plutarch
who is the most frequently referred to. Of other authors, Cicero does
find mention in Xavier’s correspondence, notably his De Officiis. It
would appear that the Jesuits, while at Lahore and Agra, did have a mod-
est Latin library at their disposition, but it is also of note that they peri-
odically dipped into the Mughal kitābkhāna (or royal library). However,
we must also not neglect the fact that Xavier had a fondness for oral
materials and stories, and that he therefore did not necessarily use textual
citation as his main source of exempla. Let us turn to some of these lat-
ter cases, to see what materials Xavier used, and how he employed them.
This must of course be done bearing in mind that a brief essay like this
one can hardly do justice to a text which accounts for nearly three hun-
dred pages in manuscript.
Towards the end of the section on the king’s advisers (nāsihān-i
bādshāh), we find the following anecdote:
At the time when Portugal was ruled over a king (shahryār) called Dom
João II [John II], a wise man visited from another kingdom. When he
returned to his country, his king asked him what he had seen in Portugal
which appeared better [than in his own land]. He said: “I saw a man who
ruled over all. No one else could command him”. He said this because that
bādshāh would privately deal with wise people with a great deal of humil-
ity. However, when he was in public, he would appear in all his pomp and
greatness (buzurgī wa sāhibī). He would still be kindly, and would say that
he had done something on the advice of such-and-such a person, and in
this or that manner, so that his commands could appear reliable. Still, in
this way, the other elders (buzurgān) would not become arrogant. The
bādshāh used to say that a man whose decisions are [wholly] dependent on
the opinions of others is not deserving of command and rulership. He also
used to say that such a relationship would lead to the ruin of the country.27
Both the example chosen, and the type of behaviour mentioned, are sig-
nificant. King John II (r. 1481–1495), the so-called “perfect prince”,
was known for his great ruthlessness and personal violence in dealing
with enemies. Further, the quality chosen to be illustrated here is telling:
the monarch accepted advice in private, but when in public made it a

point not to allow his dependence on advice to be apparent. Xavier’s
methods are often somewhat confusing. Thus for example, he is capa-
ble of following the anecdote on fifteenth-century Portugal with another
regarding Moses (on the question of the delegation of power), or the
unwise Absalom, son of David. But soon enough he returns to the king
of Portugal, one of his favourites:
It is reported that the bādshāh of Portugal, Dom João II, kept a list of all
the people capable of holding high office (manāsib-i ‘azīm). Whenever a
post came to be vacant, he would consult his register and take a name to
whom the post would be awarded. The bādshāh of Spain, Dom Felipe II
[Philip II], had deputed some men to the madrasas of his realm, to keep
him informed of who was capable there, to be given appropriate posts. He
kept a list (tūmār) of such people with himself, and whenever he needed it,
he would read the list and take capable men from it, to award them posi-
tions. As a matter of fact, whenever an official (‘uhdadār) dies, this is what
should be done, rather than beginning a search after someone has died.
For, when one is in a hurry, it may be hard to find someone. As a result,
the post is given to someone who happens to be at hand, and those who
are best qualified may be excluded and forgotten.28
Contrasted to wise rulers such as John II and Philip II of Spain 

(r. 1556–1598), is the feckless King Sebastian, concerning whom Xavier
has no great opinion (perhaps because he eventually disregarded the stra-
tegic advice of his Jesuit counsellors). As if to emphasise this, an anec-
dote about the Portuguese king is preceded here by one concerning
Alexander, who is portrayed as always capable of learning from his errors
and improving as a consequence. The hammer then falls, with a story
concerning Sebastian’s fatal expedition of 1578:
The king of Portugal, Dom Sebastião [Sebastian], was going to fight a

war in Africa (Ifrikiyya). First, he went to the king of Castile, Dom Felipe,
and requested him to send one of his experienced generals, the Duke of
Alba, who had won many victories. He asked Alba if he would be willing
to go with him on that war. He replied: “Sire (Sāhib), please don’t ask
me this”. “Why”, said the king? He replied: “You should not take me. It
so happens that whenever the Qaisar, my master, would take me along to
war, he knew my nature. So, he would hand over the entire charge of the
army to me. Not only would the army be under my command, even the
ruler would follow me, even though the ruler knows much about matters
of war”. But, here we had a different ruler, and he [Alba] feared that he
would interfere in matters of war, and not allow him his own initiative as
commander. For he [Sebastian] did not know that capable men should be
left to do their work, and that it would be wrong to interfere.29
The tone here is thus pragmatic and uncomplicated, as opposed to other

parts of the text, where Xavier borders on the sententious. Good rulers
must be proper judges of men, and allow them place to function with-
out undue interference. Delegation, in Xavier’s book, is a hallmark of
proper royal functioning. For him, the efficient working of a sultanate
depends on three or four crucial posts, on which the others were then
dependent. Sometimes officials would fight amongst themselves, and this
should be controlled. So, there would be someone who is just (‘ādil)
to deal with such matters, while those who commit tyrannies should be
punished. A second crucial office was that of a wazīr who knows how
to handle tax-collection and manage the treasury (māl). A third official
should handle matters of war, the frontiers (hudūd-i wilāyat) and peace
and stability inside the realm. These functions are summarised in Persian
then as ‘adālat-i ri‘āya, tahsīl-i māl-i bādshāhī and umniyat-i mulk. To
these ends, officials should receive an education and proper advice from
the emperor, so that they perform in a god-fearing (khudā tarsī) manner.
Xavier is also not above sometimes distorting history to make a strik-
ing point. Thus he recounts the following, deliberately garbled story, in
order to make a point regarding how treasury officials could be miserly
and thereby miss great opportunities:
At the time of the ruler of Portugal, Dom Manuel, a man called Colón
[Columbus] came from another place, about which no information was
known, and which was beyond the inhabited quarter (rūb‘-i maskūn). He
brought news from there that it was called the new world (‘ālam-i nau).
He requested the ruler for some men to accompany him back there, and
bring the people under the obedience of the king. The gold and silver
mines there would come under the king’s treasury. The nobles (arkān-i
daulat) did not believe this news. But the ruler thought it was a good idea,
and said that this man should be kept happy and given what he wanted.
The dīwān was also of the same view that he should be given the supplies
he wanted. But miserliness stood in the way, and he was not given what he
wanted. Not being given what he wanted, the man was not satisfied. Had
another 100 rupiyās been given, he might have been contented. Becoming
disgruntled, he went to the kingdom of Castile, where the ruler gave him
an appropriate reward, and a large force, so that he went back again to that
land and brought a huge territory under his control. Every year, the king-
dom of Castile received something of the order of 20 or 30 millions from
those lands. So, on account of the wickedness of his wazīr, this wealth
slipped from the hands of the king of Portugal. Whereas those who spent
a little, gained a lot. Thus, the dīwān should have the qualities of wisdom,
balance, honesty, and sincerity, but he should also have the courage to
spend at the appropriate time.30
A particularly interesting set of examples concerns the use in statecraft

of stratagems and trickery (hīlā wa tilism) and the extent to which they
can legitimately be considered an aspect of pragmatism and wisdom
(hikmat-o-dānish). An example is used regarding Alexander and Darius in
this regard, which Xavier regards as legitimate, where Alexander allegedly
tied branches on the horns of oxen before his army, so that the enemy
saw them as a forest. Alexander’s army remained concealed, and then
mounted a sudden attack, to gain a victory. He also mentions an unu-
sual anecdote regarding Amir Timur and his deployment of intelligent
trickery (tilism-i ‘āqilāna). However, he insists, Timur always managed
to combine trickery with manliness (mardāngī) and bravery (jalādat) to
score his victories.31 This was even the case when he used a stratagem
(hikmat) against the Tatar ruler Tokhtamysh. The Jesuit here compares
tactics such as these to that of the Trojan horse, which to him can indeed
be justified. At the same time, he hastens to warn, there is a distinction
between trickery, making excuses and outright deceit (be-darogh farīb).
Even if Alexander’s father Philip allegedly used to say that in order to
gain power, any means was permissible, the wise men of that age did not
agree with him, because they rightly felt that truth could not so easily be
sacrificed. This is then illustrated by him at some length using the epi-
sode of Viriatus, the Portuguese general (sipāh-sālār-i Purtugāl), who
fought the Romans in the second century BCE. Because deceit was used
against him, it is claimed that the Roman authorities reprimanded their
army, and the general Galba, saying: “You brought a land under our con-
trol, but you destroyed our good name and honour (neknāmī wa ābrū).
The pride that we had in our truthfulness has been transformed into the
humiliation of treachery (bad-‘ahdī)”.32 Xavier thus underlines that the
Romans were great precisely because they did not usually employ treach-
ery (farīb-o-daghā) in their dealings with enemies. Of course, it was
equally a measure of their intelligence that were not naïve enough to fall
victim to treachery either, as this would have been a sign of their stupid-
ity and humiliation (bi-dānishī wa subkī).
Xavier’s text thus attempts to walk an interesting middle path here.
For example, he states explicitly that every ruler and general should
employ “spies who are curious and reliable (jāsūsān-i mutafahis-i
mu‘tabar)”, using them also to give selected favours to the adversaries
in order to divide them. He even claims that the Habsburg ruler, Philip
II, had bribed several members of the Ottoman ruling council (majlis)
to keep him well-informed. In a similar vein, an anecdote regarding an
expedition by the ruler of Portugal, Dom Afonso V, is used to argue
that “concealment is an important part of war. The general should keep
his thoughts locked in his chest and only an intimate should have the
key”.33 He even implies that Cortés would never have succeeded in the
New World (‘ālam-i jadīd), if he had not tricked his soldiers into fol-
lowing him. Yet, in many circumstances, the two most important quali-
ties are loyalty (wafādārī) and steadfastness (istiqāmat), and the question
remains of how to ensure them. As an example of this, he relates a cele-
brated anecdote concerning Martim de Freitas, commandant of the town
of Coimbra in Portugal under Dom Sancho II, and his brother Afonso
III, who refused to hand over his town until he was satisfied that his
master was dead.34 He further notes that in some cases, truly loyal men
may use ingenious stratagems in pursuit of their loyalty, as was the case
with Don Íñigo López de Mendoza, who had been in charge of the fort
of Alhama de Granada when it was under attack.
A long and rather complex sequence of anecdotes, apparently deriving
in large measure from the romance of El Cid, typifies Xavier’s consider-
able hesitation in dealing with what would soon be thematised in Spain
under the head of razón de Estado.35 These concern the ruler of Castile,
Don Alfonso VI (1040–1109), who when he was a youth, fought with
his brother and took refuge with the ruler of Toledo, ‘Ali Mu’min, who
treated him with great respect and honour. One day, while walking in a
garden, that ruler asked his ministers from which direction the Franks
(or Christians) could attack his city, so that he might strengthen the
defences. They replied that the fortress had no weaknesses, but that if it
were besieged for 7 years, it would eventually run out of supplies. In the
midst of this consultation, they found a youth (in fact Don Alfonso him-
self) apparently sleeping in the garden. They were alarmed, but decided
that he posed no threat as he was asleep. To make sure, however, they
decided to test him by saying that they would melt some mica (shīsha)
and put it on his hand. They began to melt the mica, and eventually
dropped it on his hand. Then, at last, he pretended to awake with a cry.
By this means, he came to know their secret, effectively betraying their
hospitality. After some time, Don Alfonso’s brother died, and he sought
permission from ‘Ali Mu’min to return, and the latter told him to remain
a faithful friend to him and his son. On his return, Don Alfonso then
became the king, and after some years, he learnt that there was a quarrel
between the Muslim rulers of Toledo and Córdoba. Alfonso came to the
aid of the former, and the two gained a victory with extensive plunder.
After this, the ruler of Toledo died, as did his son. Don Alfonso now
considered himself freed from his earlier promise (az ‘uhda-i saugand).
So he attacked Toledo with a large army. On the basis of what he had
overheard, he laid siege to the city for seven years, and at the end of this
time, the city surrendered and the inhabitants gave him the keys, but on
the condition that their chief mosque (masjid-i kalān), which had ear-
lier been the chief church of the Franks (kalīsa-i buzurg), should not be
reconverted into a church.36
Don Alfonso agreed to this condition, entered the city and began to
rule. However, he himself remained disturbed by the fact that the church
was a mosque. But he remained true to his promise, though he was
pressed on the matter by the leaders of his faith (sardār-i dīn). At some
point he had to leave the city for a war and left the queen Constance of
Burgundy with the responsibility of the city. When he was far away, she
took the opportunity, expelled the Muslims and re-established Christian
worship there. Though the Muslims were told that this was done on the
ruler’s orders, they got their elders together and went to plead with the
ruler on his campaign, saying that he had broken his pledge. He was sad-
dened to hear that he was now charged with oath-breaking and faithless-
ness (‘ahd-shikanī wa bī-i‘tabārī). He also feared a rebellion of the large
population of Muslim subjects. Don Alfonso informed the queen and
the archbishop (Bernard de Sedirac) that he would punish them. The
Muslims returned to the town and awaited his return. The queen and
archbishop were aware of the ruler’s nature, and they sent their agents to
the ruler with excuses, but he turned them away. When he approached
the town, they even sent monks (zāhidān wa ‘ābidān) with further pleas,
but that too did not work. The queen then got together a large crowd
with a cross in front and in the Christian manner (rawish-i ‘Isawiyān)
made up a procession. Some of the more cunning priests dressed the
ruler’s daughter in ragged clothes, barefoot, with a rope around her neck
and with her hair in a matted style. Anyone who saw her, no m atter how
hard-hearted, was certain to melt. Even the Muslims who saw the sight
felt sorry. When the ruler heard that such a procession was approach-
ing, at first he was angry. But when he saw the holy cross, he got off
his throne and knelt to pay his respects. The priests were meanwhile
chanting from the Bible and Psalms. Don Alfonso was now quite per-
plexed. On the one hand was the pressure of the godly men, and on
the other side was his promise. When he saw his fifteen-year-old daugh-
ter in that state, his heart did indeed melt. Even the Muslims began to
weep in these circumstances. But Alfonso would still not relent and he
told his daughter not to demand anything for her mother. He swore on
God and on his own crown (tāj-i saltanat) that he would keep his word.
The daughter then pleaded with him saying that she was aware that her
mother had seized the mosque and tarnished his honour. The ruler then
looked to the Muslims expecting them to respond. They thought that
if they obliged him to kill his queen the other Christians would in turn
desire revenge on them and their children. They considered it better to
win over the queen and other leaders. The Muslim leaders asked him
therefore to listen to his daughter and forgive the queen for they were
fully satisfied (taskīn-i kullī) that he was a just ruler. They also agreed
that the mosque could remain converted into a church. Xavier notes
that such an ointment (tūtiya) was needed so that the ruler could retract
his pledge. He could then tell his daughter with affection to inform the
queen that she was forgiven, but that she should never again place him
in such a quandary again. Don Alfonso then went to the church, where
the terrified archbishop was unable to meet his eye. He was well-received
and blessed with holy water and forgave the archbishop as he had also
done the queen. The Christians were satisfied and the Muslims too were
content to see how much a man of his word he was.37
Don Alfonso is presented here as an ideal to be followed by other
statesmen. But the two episodes are in fact deeply ambiguous. In the
first, while enjoying the hospitality of the ruler of Toledo he betrays his
confidence so that he can conquer the city at a later time. In the second,
after having promised the Muslims of Toledo to look after their inter-
ests, he effectively puts them on the spot, so that they are obliged to
release him from his bond out of fear of retaliation and revenge from
the Christians of the town. Was this meant to imply that the Mughals
too should not look to the interests of their non-Muslim subjects and
sacrifice them at the altar of expediency? This could hardly have been
what Xavier had in mind. Perhaps what mattered in the end was not
what Don Alfonso had done, but the fine reputation he maintained in
spite of what he did.
Xavier would eventually close his work (the so-called khātima-yi
kitāb) in a far more sententious style. This was with the advice allegedly
given to Augustus Caesar by his adviser, Mæcenas. Xavier reports that
Augustus had thought of giving up the emperorship to retire, and spend
the rest of his life in leisure. He therefore brought all the elders together,
in order to hand power over to them, and gave them a brief speech of
advice (nasā’ih ba tarīqa-i ījāz). He told them to keep alive the old reg-
ulations of rulership and not make any changes in them. Wise persons
should be placed in charge of the cities both in peace and in war. There
should be no envy amongst the rulers and government should be for the
welfare of the people. They should respect those who were faultless and
appropriately reward those who did their duty well. They should also
respect the property (māl) of others and not covet it. One should not
harass one’s enemies without reason and not fear them either. Romans
should be prepared to fight, but at the same time when someone wanted
to make peace, accept it. The subsequent advice (pand-hā) of Maecenas
(or rather of Pseudo-Maecenas) is hardly more than a tissue of clichés
and nostrums either. Rome, he says, needs a far-sighted planner (mud-
abbir-i sāhib-i tadbīr) to guide it, to navigate the waves that buffet it and
the winds that blow over it. The desire for peace (sulh) should be upper-
most in the ruler’s mind. The weak should be protected from the strong
and the strong should be kept to the path of justice. And so on. The
Ādāb al-Saltanat then concludes:
The request of this slave is that the things that have been written in this
book may be weighed in the balance of noble reason, and the points that
at this stage could be useful may be chosen. In the court of that Ruler,
who is the King of Kings (Shāh-i Shāhān), I constantly pray that He may
guide His Majesty (hazrat) with His grace and mercy so that he may rule
well over the kingdom. Further, that the Master of all hearts may incline
the hearts of all the humble folk to the service of the king. And that the
heart of the Shadow of God (Hazrat-i Zill-i Subhānī) may be attentive to
the care and protection of the subjects. May the Emperor, Refuge of the
Caliphate, and his followers and associates be in peace and happiness in
this world, and acquire the highest state in the next world, which is the
assembly of all virtues.38
Conclusion
Educated in Iberia in the 1560s and 1570s, it is certainly possible that
the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier would have read and indirectly come across
the texts of Machiavelli’s Prince or Discourses, or other works. Indeed,
in the Ādāb, there is even a brief and enigmatic passage regarding a
certain “Nikolayu” of Florence, who is said to have declared: “Other
things can be compensated for. But if an error is made in war, there
is no way to repair it. The loss of honour is permanent, resulting in
death and destruction”.39 Could this be a coy and cryptic reference to
Machiavelli’s Art of War? To be sure, some contemporary members of
the Jesuit order knew these texts because they then wrote strongly anti-
Machiavellian works—meaning men like Juan de Mariana (1536–1624)
and Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526–1611), who were responsible for pro-
hibiting Machiavelli’s works in Spain in 1583–1584. Even in Portugal,
where Machiavelli’s work was prohibited in 1559, it has been shown that
it nevertheless continued to circulate thereafter.40 The sort of “Mirrors
for Princes” from the sixteenth century that contemporaries could also
have read might have been works like Erasmus’s Institutio Principis
Christiani, written around the same time as The Prince, and addressed
to the future Charles V, but we should note that Erasmus had fallen into
disfavour in Spain by Xavier’s time.41 It is striking to us that Xavier, when
deciding to produce his Ādāb or Directório, turned—like Machiavelli—to
a deliberately archaic model, as if the world of the Romans rather than
that of his contemporaries was of the greatest relevance.42
However, when it came to executing his task, Xavier’s strategy turned
out to be far more incoherent (or at least eclectic). Given his liking for
narrative and anecdotes drawn from the oral sphere, already rather evi-
dent in his other works, he produced a work that was far closer in both
tone and content to Machiavelli rather than Erasmus. Further, many of
his examples did not come from the safe spheres of Antiquity (whether
the Bible or the Greek and Roman worlds), but from medieval and con-
temporary times. By directly addressing such issues as stratagems, trick-
ery and deceit, he also brought his work within touching distance of
considerations of a consideration of Realpolitik. This was a rather dif-
ferent tone than that adopted in standard works of “Nasirean ethics”
popular at the Mughal court, to which his collaborator ‘Abdus Sattar’s
own language took him; ironically, they carried a far greater echo of the
vernacular traditions of nīti that were popular in India at that time, but
which Xavier was almost certainly unfamiliar with.43 In short, Xavier did
not introduce openly Machiavelli to Mughal India for the most obvious
reasons: he could not for political reasons and he probably would not
have wished to anyway. But it appears that some traces of the odour (and
perhaps even the words) of the Florentine nevertheless slipped in one
way or another through the cracks.
Notes
1. G. Bouchon (1992), Albuquerque, le lion des mers d’Asie (Paris: Editions
Desjonquères): 222; B. Pastor Bodmer (1992), The Armature of
Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans.
L. Longstreth Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press): 82–83.
2. J.H. Elliott (1989), “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés”, in his Spain
and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University
Press): 34–35.
3. Â. Barreto Xavier (2014), “‘A maior empresa que nunca um príncipe cris-
tão teve nas mãos’: Conquistar e conservar territórios no Índico nos tem-
pos de Maquiavel”, Revista Tempo, 20, 1–27: 19.
4. Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (henceforth ANTT),
Corpo Cronológico (henceforth CC), I–10–113, Afonso de Albuquerque
to King Dom Manuel, on the ship Santo António before Bhatkal, 18
October 1512, published in: R.A. de Bulhão Pato and H. Lopes de
Mendonça (eds) (1884–1935), Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque segui-
das de documentos que as elucidam (henceforth CAA), 7 vols. (Lisbon:
Academia das Ciências): Vol. I, 92: “estes turcos sam homeens que mais
trabalham por comservar ho credito e sua fama que nenhũa outra jemte
que tenha visto, e desimulam muitas cousas, por nam receberem qebra”.
5. ANTT, CC, I–13–112, Albuquerque to Dom Manuel, Kannur, 30
November 1513, published in CAA, Vol. I, 131: “eu ey por certo que o
Nambiadery matou o Çamorym com peçonha, porque em todalas minhas
cartas lhe esprevi que matase ele ho Çamorym com peçonha, e que na
paz eu me comcertaria com ele”.
6. G. Bouchon and L.F.F.R. Thomaz (eds) (1988), Voyage dans les Deltas
du Gange et de l’Irraouaddy: Relation portugaise anonyme (1521) (Paris:
Centre Culturel Portugais): 242–245 (text); 286–290 (translation).
7. Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum (2006), Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn: A Historical
Epic of the Sixteenth Century, trans. S.M.H. Nainar (Kuala Lumpur and
Calicut: Islamic Book Trust and Other Books); Qadi Muhammad (2015),
Fat’h al-Mubin: A Contemporary Account of the Portuguese Invasion on
Malabar in Arabic Verse, ed. K.S. Shameer (Calicut: Other Books).
8. K.C. Fok (1987), “Early Ming Images of the Portuguese”, in: R. Ptak
(ed.), Portuguese Asia: Aspects in History and Economic History (Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries) (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag): 143–155.
9. A. de Montserrat (1922), The Commentary (…) on His Journey to the
Court of Akbar, ed. and trans. S.N. Banerjee and J.S. Hoyland (London:
Milford): 128–129.
10. Á. Santos Hernández (1962), Jerónimo Javier, apóstol del Gran Mogol
y arzobispo electo de Cranganor en la India (Pamplona: Príncipe de
Viana); H. Didier (2011), “Jerónimo Javier, un Navarro en la India”,
in: V. Maurya and M. Insúa (eds), Actas del I Congreso Ibero-asiático de
Hispanistas: Siglo de oro e Hispanismo general (Pamplona: Publicaciones
de la Universidad de Navarra): 147–158.
11. See the discussion in M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam (2012), Writing
the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia
University Press): 261–263.
12. P. Moura Carvalho (2012), Mir’āt al-quds (Mirror of Holiness): A Life of
Christ for Emperor Akbar: A Commentary on Father Jerome Xavier’s Text
and the Miniature of Cleveland Museum of Art, Acc. 2005. 145, trans.
W.M. Thackston (Leiden and Boston: Brill).
13. J. Xavier (2007), Fuente de vida: Tratado apologético dirigido al Rey Mogol
de la India en 1600, eds. H. Didier, I. Cacho Nazábal and J.L. Orella
Unzué (San Sebastián: Universidad de Deusto).
14. F. Richard (1984), “Un augustin portugais renégat, apologiste de l’Islam
chiite au début du XVIIIe siècle”, Moyen Orient et Océan Indien, I,
73–85.
15. For a full discussion, see the editors’ introduction to ‘Abdus Sattar ibn
Qasim Lahauri (2006), Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: Majlis-hā-yi shabāna-i
darbār-i Nūr al-Dīn Jahāngīr az 24 Rajab 1017 tā 19 Ramazān 1020,
eds. ‘A. Naushahi and M. Nizami (Tehran: Miras-i Maktub): 23–85.
16. No edition currently exists of this widely-dispersed text, and we have
consulted the manuscript in New Delhi, National Archives of India, Ms.
2713. Other manuscripts may be found in the British Library, Cambridge
University Library, John Rylands Library (Manchester), etc.
17. Carvalho, Mir’āt al-Quds, 12.
18. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Ms. 4156, letter from Manuel
Pinheiro in Agra, 9 September 1610, 217–230: “Occasione data Pater
Regem affatur: Mula Abducetar Christianae aptus est legi, quippe homo
litteratus est et sapiens” (p. 221) Our thanks for help in reading this
text to Daniele Conti and Giuseppe Marcocci. Compare the account in
‘Abdus Sattar, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, 70–75.
19. See a brief description of the text in A. Sidarus (2011), “A Western Mirror
for Princes for an Eastern Potentate: The Ādāb al-saltanat by Jerome
Xavier S.J. for the Mogul Emperor”, Journal of Eastern Christian Studies,
63, no. 1–2, 73–98, with some images of the manuscript. Also see the
discussion in C. Lefèvre (2012), “Europe-Mughal India-Muslim Asia:
Circulation and Political Ideas and Instruments in Early Modern Times”,
in: A. Flüchter and S. Richter (eds), Structures on the Move: Technologies of
Governance in Transcultural Encounter (Berlin: Springer Verlag): 127–146:
131–137.
20. We have used the manuscript in Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense (hereafter
BC), Ms. 2015 (267 ff.), which we cite with the folio number hereaf-
ter. Sidarus has used the manuscript in the London, School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, Ms. 7030 (286 ff.). Both date
from 1609.
21. For the early part of this tradition, see the discussion in N. Yavari (2014),
Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval
Islam (New York: Oxford University Press). This work however almost
entirely ignores the Indo-Persian tradition.
22. M. Alam (2004), The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800
(Delhi: Permanent Black): 46–80.
23. J. Flores (2016), The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor
Jahangir’s Court and Household (Leiden and Boston: Brill): 94–95 (trans-
lation); 135 (text).
24. BC, Ms. 2015, fols. 1b–2a.
25. Relevant passages from The Prince’s dedication include: “I have found
among my treasures nothing I hold dearer or value so high as my under-
standing of great men’s actions, gained in my lengthy experience with
recent matters and my continual reading on ancient ones. My observa-
tions—which with close attention I have for a long time thought over
and considered, and recently have collected in a little volume—I send to
Your Magnificence. (…) No one, I hope, will think that a man of low
and humble station is overconfident when he dares to discuss and direct
the conduct of princes (…)”, N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and
Others, ed. and trans. A Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke
University Press): Vol. I, 10.
26. BC, Ms. 2015, fol. 4b.
27. Ibidem, fol. 181a.
28. Ibidem, fol. 183b.
29. Ibidem, fol. 184b.
30. Ibidem, fols. 193a–193b.
31. Ibidem, fol. 201b. It may be noted here that the juxtaposition of trickery
and force was also central to Machiavelli. See, for instance, Discourses on
Livy, Book II, Chapter 13 (Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 357–358).
32. BC, Ms. 2015, fol. 205a.
33. Ibidem, fols. 209a–210a.

34. Ibidem, fols. 222b–223a.
35. H. Puigdomènech (1988), Maquiavelo en España: Presencia de sus obras
en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española) and
K.D. Howard (2014), The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern
Spain (Woodbridge: Tamesis). See also R.A. Stradling (1988), Philip IV
and the Government of Spain, 1621–1665 (New Haven: Yale University
Press): 11–22.
36. See C. Lowney (2005), A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews
in Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford University Press): 139–141. A key
work on the subject is Juan de Mariana, S.J., Historiæ de rebus Hispaniæ
(1592), which Xavier may or may not have known in India.
37. BC, Ms. 2015, fols. 126a–130a.
40. See G. Marcocci (2008), “Machiavelli, la religione dei romani e l’impero
portoghese”, Storica, 14, nos. 41–42, 35–68.
41. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1997), The Education of a Christian Prince, trans.
N.M. Cheshire and M.J. Heath, ed. L. Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press). Also see the useful comparative discussion in T.
Hampton (1990), Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in
Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
42. We may compare Xavier’s approach to that of M. Ricci (2009), On
Friendship (Jiaoyou lun): One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince,
trans. T. Billings (New York: Columbia University Press).
43. See V. Narayana Rao and S. Subrahmanyam (2008), “An Elegy for Nīti:
Politics as a Secular Discursive Field in the Indian Old Régime”, Common
Knowledge, 14, no. 3, 396–423.
Acknowledgement We are grateful to Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci for

their perceptive comments and suggestions, which helped us in revising this text.
Authors’ Biography
Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and
Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His main research interests are the his-
tory of religious and literary cultures in pre-colonial northern India, the history of
Indo-Persian travel accounts and the comparative history of the Islamic world. His
most recent monographs are The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800
(2004) and, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery,
1400–1800 (2007). He is also author (with Sanjay Subrahmanyam) of the volume
Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2011).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed

Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. He is also
long-term visiting professor of Early Modern Global History at the Collège de
France in Paris. A specialist in Eurasian history, early modern empires and, more
generally, forms of ‘connected histories’, his publications include Three Ways to
be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (2011) and Courtly
Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia
(2012). His last book is Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800
(2017).
CHAPTER 7
Machiavelli, the Iberian Explorations and the

Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil
to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Scholarly tradition has given us a detailed account of influence of Niccolò

Machiavelli’s works in the two centuries following their publication,
making of them one of the great symbols of the confrontation between
power and religion in early modern Europe. The readings of The Prince
and of other of Machiavelli’s writings have been investigated in very dif-
ferent cultural and confessional contexts, tracking how they circulated
through a less than impenetrable censorship, hidden quotations and ref-
erences to them, and other techniques of dissimulation.1 In recent years,
Carlo Ginzburg has indicated a new path, showing how the compari-
son between moderns and ancients—the Romans, above all—that is at
the center of Machiavelli’s thought was the origin of a specific trend in
comparing customs and religions, particularly among some Renaissance
antiquarians.2 Ginzburg pays special attention to the indigenous peoples
of the Americas, and rightly. This chapter, too, looks at the New World
and, more generally, Machiavelli’s importance for sixteenth-century
G. Marcocci (*) 
Exeter College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_7
132 G. Marcocci
thought on Iberian explorations, but to show how the outcomes of this

attitude were much more general: one of the most recurrent character-
istics in the early readings of Machiavelli are the recovery and develop-
ments of the brief comments on the Ottoman Empire in his writings.3
One may, indeed, suppose that, if the circulation of Machiavelli’s work
already had a global reach in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this
was largely due to his observations on the “Turk” and their application
to the other great Islamic empires of the time. That is why this chap-
ter will explore, above all, some effects of Machiavelli’s thought on the
colonies and the empire building that, despite the (more or less early)
rebuttals and bans, contributed to making him a significant author in the
Iberian world. I shall therefore be concentrating on two surprising tropi-
cal readers of the Discourses on Livy and The Prince—two Italians (one
a Florentine and the other a Venetian). From mid-sixteenth-century
Brazil and early-eighteenth-century northern India respectively, they put
us in touch with hitherto-unknown fragments of the exchange between
the Islamic world and Machiavelli’s writings—an exchange that was
much richer than is suggested by the conventional Eurocentric image of
Machiavelli as one of the founders of modern political thought.
Machiavelli, Ancient Rome and a New Age of Empires

In November 1502, while in Imola on a diplomatic mission to Cesare
Borgia on behalf of the Florentine Republic, Machiavelli learnt from “a
letter from Venice”, which was shown him by Gabriello da Bergamo,
who was a post master, “that they have news (nuove) there of the return
to Portugal from Calicut (Galigutte) of four caravels laden with spices.
This news”, he added, “had caused a great drop in the price of their
spices, which was a very serious loss to that city”.4 Machiavelli was, then,
aware of important events involving Iberian explorations, particularly
those that might have economic repercussions on Italian communities.
One of these was the damage done by the Portuguese to Venice’s role
in the spice trade from Asia, which was a delicate and much-discussed
subject in the early sixteenth century. Yet, in his political writings,
Machiavelli never hints at this question, nor at other aspects connected
with the sudden broadening of the perspectives of European culture in
an age marked by the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama.
One might, following in the footsteps of John Elliott’s classic study,
merely note that Machiavelli fully shared a widespread attitude in the
7 MACHIAVELLI, THE IBERIAN EXPLORATIONS AND THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE 133
culture of the Old World, which required decades to absorb and articulate
the discovery of the New.5 But the point is not so much Machiavelli’s
silence on America or Portuguese Asia. His works that are so alert to the
underlying dynamics of an age of political change, which was moving from
clashes between cities or regions to the success of the great monarchies on
the European scene, simply do not focus on the genesis of a new politi-
cal form such as the transoceanic empires of Portugal and Spain.6 His own
experience was completely different, and during his most fertile period as
a writer in the 1510s and 1520s, it would not have been easy for him to
acquire detailed reliable information, not so much on the voyages, but on
the actual political configurations that the Iberians were then setting up
across the globe.
Nevertheless, Machiavelli’s works contain passages and reflections
that could not, for the most varied reasons, leave indifferent readers who
were interested in Portugal’s and Spain’s global empire building. On
various occasions, however, these powers were and would continue to be
described by comparison with the model of the Roman Empire. And it is
precisely through the events of ancient Rome that Machiavelli works out
what we might identify as a colonial doctrine. They are expressed in the
form of scattered comments, but Machiavelli explicitly states that a single
thread links these hints in Chapter 1 of Book II of the Discourses, where,
evoking “the method used by the Roman people in entering into the lands
of others”, he refers to the “tractate On Princedoms” in which “this matter
is amply discussed”.7 The reference is to Chapter 3 of The Prince, where
the question is tackled in relation to “mixed princedoms”—so-called
because they had been enlarged by a “recent conquest”.8 In this chapter,
Machiavelli discusses examples both ancient and modern, including that
of the Ottoman Empire, confirming the fact that on this question too his
reflections were considered a lesson for current affairs.
When the conquered province is “different in language, customs and
institutions”—as was the case for the Iberian possessions in south Asia
and America—their new ruler, writes Machiavelli, has two ways to avoid
losing it. The ruler can either establish himself there physically, “as it has
done for the Turk in Greece”, since “if he had not gone to Greece to
dwell, he could not possibly have held her”, or “send colonies into one
or two places to be like fetters for that state [of the new lord], because
a prince must either do this or keep there many men-at-arms and infan-
try”.9 Machiavelli has no doubt which to choose, between a light colo-
nial presence and a dominion founded on a heavy presence of military
134 G. Marcocci
garrisons in the subject lands, as we see from a passage in Chapter 19 of

Book II of the Discourses, dealing with the “true way to give greatness to
a republic and to gain power (imperio)”:
(…) to increase the inhabitants of their city, to get for themselves associ-
ates and not subjects, to send colonies to guard countries conquered, to
make capital of the spoil, to overcome the enemy with raids and battles
and not with sieges, to keep the treasury rich, the individual poor, to sup-
port military training with the utmost zeal.10
The strategy described here refers to an economic principle also

expressed in Chapter 6 of Book II of the Discourses (“both in the gaining
and in the keeping, take care not to spend, but rather to do everything
to the profit of the public”), and already analysed in Chapter 3 of The
Prince:
On colonies a prince does not spend much, so without expense to him

or with but little he sends them and keeps them there. He damages only
those inhabitants (and they are unimportant in that state) whose fields
and houses he confiscates to make provision for the colonists. Moreover,
those damaged, being scattered and poor, never can harm him: all the rest
on the one hand are undamaged (hence are likely to be quiet) and on the
other hand are in terror of making some mistake, and therefore like those
whose property has been confiscated. I conclude that such colonies are not
expensive, are more loyal than a garrison and cause less damage.11
Profoundly unlike what the Spanish were to set up in America, the type
of colonial empire Machiavelli seems to have in mind, based on con-
taining military expenditure, reveals some similarities with what the
Portuguese—adapting to variable circumstances and power relations—
were then founding from north to southeast Asia. This is the framework
in which, in opposition to the prevailing line, the aged Vasco da Gama
would come to a favourable view of a light imperial structure, aimed at
protecting the private interests of traders and costing the Crown little.
As Duke Jaime of Bragança recalled in 1529, Gama’s “vote” was that
Malacca, Hormuz “and all the other fortresses in India should be lev-
elled, except Goa and Cochin”, and that the Moroccan strongholds
of Ceuta, Ksar el-Seghir, Tangier and Asilah be ceded to the Emperor
Charles V (r. 1516–1556), keeping only Azemmour and Safi, “for which
a means could be found to support them very easily and honourably, and
they would cost very little money, and profit (proveito) could come from
them to the kingdom [Portugal]”.12
I am not suggesting an influence of the contemporary writings of
Machiavelli, which were still unpublished when these positions were for-
mulated. But the Duke of Bragança, who died the same year that the
Roman printer Antonio Blado brought out the first edition of The Prince
(1532), would very probably have shared the ideas in Chapter 3 on the
uselessness of military garrisons “in a conquered land”, because “[the
prince] spends more by far, since he uses up the income from that state in
holding it; thus his gain becomes a loss”.13 The mistrust for this option is
accompanied by the suggestion, advanced in Chapter 1 of Book II of the
Discourses, “to have in a new province some friends who would be a lad-
der or a gate for them to climb there or go in there, or a means by which
to hold it”, to ensure “supports with which they could make their under-
takings easy, both in gaining their provinces and in holding them. Those
people who are careful about this”, concludes Machiavelli, “seem to have
less need of Fortune than those who do not observe it well”.14
“As in Our Time the Turk Does”: Competing for the

Roman Legacy
The importance of the colonies for Roman “greatness” leads Machiavelli
to almost always refer to them when providing concrete examples. If
the Ottoman Empire is not included in this model, but presented as the
exact opposite, Machiavelli’s pages on the Turk are muffled by an ambi-
guity that did not escape his readers. Of course, fear of the Ottoman
Empire’s increasing power in the Mediterranean—a widespread topic
in Italian culture after the occupation of Otranto (1480)—is reflected
in some passages of Machiavelli’s literary works, particularly the irrever-
ent comedy Mandragola, in which a woman who asks “Do you believe
the Turk is coming over into Italy this year?”, being “so afraid of that
impaling”, receives a sarcastic answer from Frate Timoteo: “Yes, if you
don’t say your prayers”.15 Other writings, by contrast, recognise the
political and military features of the Ottoman Empire as commensurable
with those of any other European power. In the celebrated passages of
Chapter 4 of The Prince on the comparison between the “monarchy of
the Turk” and the Kingdom of France, the former, introduced by an elo-
quent reference to Alexander the Great’s conquests in Asia, is described
as the mirror image of the other, because it “is governed by one ruler;
136 G. Marcocci
the others are his servants; dividing his kingdom into sanjaks, he sends
them various administrators, and changes and varies these as he likes”.16
If Machiavelli describes a vertical model of empire, in which all the
officials were “slaves and bound” to the sultan, he also gives some atten-
tion to Ottoman expansion, which, as we have seen, was based on vast
military occupations that had first subdued the whole Anatolian penin-
sula until the fall of Constantinople (1453), and then expanded through
the eastern Mediterranean. Machiavelli mentions Meḥmed II (r. 1444–
1446; 1451–1481) and Bāyezīd II (r. 1481–1512), but he is, above all,
attracted by the expeditions of Selīm I (r. 1512–1520) against Safavid
Persia, culminating in the victorious Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and
against the Mamluk Sultanate, which collapsed under the double blow
of the Turkish conquest of Syria (1516) and Egypt (1517). However, he
does not give way to simple-minded extolling of Ottoman power. For
example, in a passage in Chapter 35 of Book III of the Discourses, he
recalls the hardships suffered by the Turks during the invasion of Persia
on “coming to a very level region, where there are many deserts and few
streams”—according to what “some say who come from his land”—as a
warning against following the advice of others in grand, daring actions.17
This episode allows Machiavelli to draw a parallel with “the difficul-
ties that long ago caused the ruin of many Roman armies” against the
Parthians, which reflects a more general comparison that is also advanced
elsewhere in the Discourses. Reading between the lines, we can glimpse
the hypothesis that the Turks were the heirs of the ancient military val-
our of the Romans, consistently with the idea expressed in the Preface to
Book II: “if the Roman Empire was not succeeded by any empire that
lasted and kept together the world’s excellence (virtù)”, this excellence
was, nevertheless, distributed between various powers, “such as the king-
dom of the French, the kingdom of the Turks, and that of the Soldan,
and today the people of Germany, and earlier that Saracen tribe that did
such great things and took so much of the world after it destroyed the
Eastern Roman Empire”.18
In Machiavelli’s eyes, then, the Islamic world is a privileged space
for the emergence of political powers able to compete for the legacy of
ancient Rome’s imperial greatness. That this was so for the Ottoman
Empire, at least in their virtù in arms, can be deduced from an eloquent
judgment at the opening of Chapter 30 of Book I, concerning the direct
involvement of Selīm I in the military campaigns:
A prince, in order to escape the necessity of living in fear or of being ungrate-

ful, should go personally on his campaigns, as at first the Roman emperors
did, as in our times the Turk does, and as prudent rulers always have done
and now do. Because, if they conquer, the glory and the gain are all theirs,
but when they are not present, since the glory goes to another man, they
think they cannot enjoy the gain if they do not destroy for the winner such
glory as they have not been wise enough to gain for themselves.19
Evoking the glory achieved through courage in war as a factor of civic

cohesion (“they cannot enjoy the gain if they do not destroy for the win-
ner such glory”), sounds like an indirect reference to the famous Chapter 2
of Book II of the Discourses on the “difference between our religion and
the ancient”. In Rome, the ancient religion “attributed blessedness only to
men abounding in worldly glory, such as generals of armies and princes
of states”, while Christianity, “because it shows us the truth and the true
way, makes us esteem less the honor of the world”, weakening souls and
encouraging the “worthlessness of men, who have interpreted our religion
according to sloth and not according to vigor (virtù)”.20
Machiavelli does not write that the religion of Islam exhorts its fol-
lowers to bravery in battle, but his idea that it was precisely on the mili-
tary plane that the Ottomans were the new Romans was repeated by the
humanist Paolo Giovio in his Commentario delle cose de’ turchi, published
in 1532 by Antonio Blado, who had brought out the first edition of the
Discourses the previous year. “Military discipline is regulated with such
justice and severity by the Turks”, writes Giovio, “that we may say that
theirs surpasses that of the ancient Greeks and the Romans”, thus mak-
ing them “better than our soldiers”.21 As Adriano Prosperi was the first
to note, what aroused the strongest reactions to Machiavelli’s writings, at
first, were the pages of the Discourses on ancient religion, but their desta-
bilising effect was increased by the association with Giovio’s unequivocal
judgment.22 Instead of the description of the “monarchy of the Turk”
contained in The Prince, it was the few comments by Machiavelli on the
military valour of the Ottomans that set off a passionate debate on reli-
gion and war. The question was a delicate one at a time when the Iberian
powers had been trying to establish themselves as global empires in the
name of Christian primacy—but also against Islam—as well as containing
the Turkish advance in the Mediterranean.
The first to intervene was the Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de
Sepúlveda, who had discussed Machiavelli’s ideas in depth during his
138 G. Marcocci
period at the College of Spain in Bologna. In 1535, the year of the

conquest of Tunis by an army led by Charles V in person, Blado pub-
lished the dialogue Democrates primus, in which Sepúlveda, who makes
various references to the military comparison with the Turks, tries to
overturn the judgment of Machiavelli (and Giovio). He claims that the
“many wars (multa bella)” fought by the Iberians “against the godless
Saracens (cum impiis Saracenis)” from the Reconquista on, showed that
the Christian religion was perfectly compatible with “military discipline
(militaris disciplina)”—Giovio’s expression, which is even evoked in
the title of Sepúlveda’s work—providing the foundations for a “just and
legitimate empire (iusti ac legitimi imperii)”.23
Three years later, the Portuguese Cistercian monk Diogo de Castilho
published in Leuven in Flanders a Livro da Origem dos Turcos, dedicated
to the rich merchant Manuel Cirne, who was in charge of the Portuguese
trading agency (feitoria) in Antwerp, which re-sold in Europe goods
coming from the empire. Addressed to the Portuguese “people (povo)”,
and particularly to those who were to follow Charles V in a crusade to
reconquer Constantinople, the Livro warns against the risks of a war
against the Turk. This takes up the words of Giovio—Castilho’s main
source—on the valour of the Ottoman soldiers (“they seem to surpass the
ancient Greeks and Romans”), in contrast with the imperial rhetoric that
insisted rather on the Portuguese surpassing the ancients. Castilho cor-
roborates his judgment in a passage that is taken from the Omnium gen-
tium mores, leges et ritus (1520) by the Bavarian humanist Hans Böhm
(Joannes Boemus)—an encyclopaedia of the customs of the peoples of the
world, which enjoyed a veritable publishing boom throughout Europe in
the years after 1535. But it could also be read as an extension to Islam of
Machiavelli’s position on the religion of the Romans:
(…) Turkish soldiers are better than our own (…) as they think it happier
to die among their enemies than at home among tears and weeping from
wives and children, and at all meals and meetings pray for their men of
arms, and above all for those who perished for the good of their country,
and write the feats of their ancestors, which they then sing and praise, fir-
ing the spirits of the soldiers greatly.24
Castilho may have been linked to a network at the court of King John
III of Portugal (r. 1521–1557) that was pressing for decisive military
action against Ottoman power, whose fleets were now a threatening
presence in the Indian Ocean and had even intervened on behalf of the
Sultanate of Gujarat during the disastrous siege of the Portuguese for-
tress at Diu in 1538.25 This pressure group was guided by the infante
Luís, who had taken part in the Tunis expedition. In 1542 he was the
dedicatee of the most vehement reply to Machiavelli to appear in the
years following the publication of The Prince and the Discourses, written
by the Portuguese humanist Jerónimo Osório, who had also resided at
the College of Spain in Bologna at the time of Sepúlveda. In De nobili-
tate civili et Christiana, Osório reaffirms the military valour of Christian
soldiers, whose faith in eternal life made them invincible, removing
any fear of death. His open criticism is made ambiguous by the use of
arguments taken from Machiavelli’s own works to confute him, fore-
shadowing the veiled approval shown in later works—for example, De
regis institutione et disciplina (1572), in which, just after the Battle of
Lepanto, he also expressed positive judgments on the Ottoman and
Safavid empires.26 The final section of De nobilitate rejects the superi-
ority of the religion of the Romans over Christianity and takes up the
theme of a planetary war against the Muslims, to be waged by the
Portuguese, who most embodied the warlike virtues of true Christian
nobility, and whose victories had conferred a sacred character on their
empire, which had now subjected an “infinite multitude of foreign peo-
ples (infinitamque alienigenarum multitudinem)”.27
What Osório may not have known when he published De nobili-
tate was that a somewhat different connection between the pages of
Machiavelli on the religion of the Romans and the Portuguese Empire
had been suggested a few years earlier. The humanist João de Barros
delivered a eulogy of John III at Évora in the presence of the court in
1533. We have a manuscript copy of the speech full of citations and para-
phrases of passages from The Prince and the Discourses.28 It shows how
quickly editions of Machiavelli were circulating in the Iberian Peninsula.
Barros would later compose the first official chronicle of the Portuguese
conquests in Asia, sub-divided by decades in the manner of Livy. One of
the passages in the Discourses that struck him was that where Machiavelli
describes Numa Pompilius as the king who had given solid foundations
to Roman society by turning “to religion”, and observes that “where
there is religion, it is easy to bring in arms” (Book I, Chapter 11).29
Barros adds, however, that the “attention (cuidado)” with which the
Romans observed “their false religion (sua falsa religião)” suggested that
“they would have been more observant of the true religion, if they had
140 G. Marcocci
known of it (mais devotos foram da verdadeira, se della teverão conheci-

mento)”.30 Hence the attempt to harmonise that model with the feats of
the Portuguese: “if the religion of the Gentiles, which is censured and
false, had the power to cause such perfection in those who followed it,
setting aside vices and encouraging cleanliness of the spirit, how much
more should we expect this from the true faith in Christ?”31
His sharing Machiavelli’s interpretation of Rome’s imperial greatness
even leads Barros to repeat almost word for word the passage from the
Discourses that has already been cited on the “true way to give greatness
to a republic and to gain power”, or “the paths to conquest (os caminhos
pera conquistar)”, as we can see from his oration:
Do not oppress too much the conquered, order the vassals and natives to
go and live in the lands acquired (and the Romans called those settlements
colonies) treasure the spoils, wear down the enemy with charges, incur-
sions and pitched battles, and do not make agreements, keep the state rich
and the conquered poor, give all power to the captains as the Romans did,
keeping for yourself only the power to wage another war, and so keep with
much diligence the armies and the soldiery.32
The complexity of Barros’ eulogy emerges in all its implications if we

consider that his oration contains praise for the Ottoman Empire,
whose system of justice is celebrated as a legacy of the Eastern Roman
Empire.33 Positively or negatively, Machiavelli changed forever how to
look at the Islamic powers in the Iberian world.34
Thinking of the Ottoman “Great Lord” from the

New World
In the same year that he gave the eulogy to John III, João de Barros
began directing the Casa da Índia, a sort of ministry of trade with Asia,
the part of the Portuguese Empire with which his name remained tied
for posterity. Meanwhile, however, Barros was involved shortly after in
organising an expedition to Brazil, which the Portuguese had not yet
begun to colonise in any significant way. This initiative was certainly a
response to the threat to Portugal’s imperial interests from the settle-
ments that some French explorers, with the consent of their Crown, had
established along the Brazilian coast. The words pronounced by Barros,
under the influence of his early reading of Machiavelli, might belong to
the debate that must have accompanied John III’s decision to change
strategy over the possessions in the New World. In a letter of 1533, the
king wrote to one of his ministers that he did not want to “send people,
or anything else, to Brazil, until a decision has been taken on what is
needed to populate that land and make it safe, which, if our Lord is will-
ing, will soon happen”.35
In fact, in 1534 the Portuguese Crown began its first difficult cam-
paign of colonial penetration in Brazil, dividing up the coast in twelve
hereditary captaincies, each entrusted to a donee with full powers, who
in turn had to meet all the costs of the enterprise. The model applied on
a vast scale the seigniorial system of late-medieval Portugal, also entail-
ing the faculty of giving land to colonists in exchange for their duty to
cultivate it.36 This project of extending the empire, based on savings
for the Crown and on the profit that could be extracted from work in
the fields, recalls the Roman pattern as described by Machiavelli. In
Chapter 3 of The Prince he recommends “send[ing] colonies”, partly
so as “not [to] allow influence there to be grasped by powerful foreign-
ers”—the French, in the case of Brazil—and, in Chapter 6 of Book II of
the Discourses, he underlines that the colonies “became a guard of the
Roman boundaries, with profit to the colonists who received those fields
and with profit to the Roman public, which without expense kept up this
garrison”.37
The passages just cited do not appear in Barros’ oration, but may
have contributed to inducing him to invest in the Brazilian adventure,
obtaining the concession of a stretch of coast from the Rio Grande to
Maranhão. The undertaking lasted from 1535 to 1536, but was a fiasco,
from which Barros emerged heavily indebted.38 The whole operation
proved, in any case, to be a limited success. Only in the captaincies of
Pernambuco and São Vicente were there satisfactory results, and more
than a decade had to pass before the Portuguese Crown instituted a
central governorship (1549), based in Salvador da Bahia, and commit-
ted itself with men and means to colonise Brazil, though no further than
the coast. Partly due to the armed resistance of the indigenous people,
it remained a secondary front for a whole century, as the Portuguese
Empire’s barycenter was still in south Asia.
In this context of great uncertainty and insecurity, there was no short-
age of foreigners who, under license of the Portuguese Crown, tried
their fortune in Brazil. These included various Tuscan subjects, whose
presence was to contribute to developing in the court of the Grand Duke
142 G. Marcocci
Ferdinand I de’ Medici (r. 1587–1609) a failed colonisation project in

the Brazilian captaincy of Espírito Santo in the early seventeenth century,
as well as an expedition along the Rio of the Amazons.39 Before then, a
good number of engineers and Florentine merchants’ agents had reached
Portuguese America. Among those who successfully settled there was
Raffaele Olivi. His story is known to us in part because he was one of the
first settlers to be tried by the Portuguese Inquisition in the New World.
In February 1574 he was arrested in his estate in São João, not far from
the small town of São Jorge de Ilhéus, a few hundred kilometers south of
Salvador da Bahia. Olivi had been living there for years after long serv-
ing the trading interests of the owner of the local captaincy, Luca Giraldi,
a powerful Florentine banker and the principal creditor of the Crown of
Portugal, where he had long been living and where he had ties with the
Gama family through his daughter’s marriage to one of Vasco’s nephews.40
Olivi was accused of making various suspicious claims: these included
that “religion had been invented to subject people and the population
at large”, and that “the Turks certainly lived well” because “they had no
obligation to go to mass, or to accept the sacraments”. These were dan-
gerous words, especially if pronounced freely in the presence of others.
Olivi was now a rich and respected landowner, as well as sufficiently edu-
cated to back up his ideas: he knew Latin, he was said to have studied
philosophy, and, above all, he owned various books. The impious opin-
ions he sustained included the suggestion that “above the heights of the
empyrean there was another universe like this, where there was earth
and water and other elements like these and other peoples”. In addition,
he had suggested calling the Ottoman Sultan “great lord” as a mark of
respect, for his power and the many lands he had subjugated.41
These were surprising judgments, considering the latitude where they
were formed, but perhaps not so very much, if we bear in mind that they
were formulated by the oldest reader of Machiavelli in the New World
known to the sources. Among the books found in Olivi’s house when
he was taken prisoner were works of ancient and modern literature, his-
tory, politics and science, but also a copy of the Discourses, a work that
was then on the Index of Prohibited Books in Portugal. Worse still: there
was also a copy of Giovio’s Commentario, the work that had transformed
the idea of the Ottomans as modern heirs of the ancient Romans, which
Machiavelli had barely hinted at, in a laconic remark that had created
scandal and debate in Europe. Olivi’s insistence on the superiority of
the Turks, as well as his conducting a life contrary to Christian morals
(as could be seen in his behaviour—the chapel in his estate, for example,
had become a meeting-place for sexual encounters between slaves) show,
perhaps, the most extreme features of a tropical reader of the works of
Machiavelli and Giovio, who dreamt of being able to rebuild in Brazil a
corner of the Ottoman world he had idealised.42
This episode does not only show one of the many surprising links
between the Islamic world and sixteenth-century America, which has
already been brought out by other scholars.43 It confirms, rather, an
association between the Ottoman Empire and the early reading of
Machiavelli connected to Brazil, which can also be seen in Les singu-
laritez de la France antarctique (1557) by the Franciscan friar André
Thévet, written on his return from the colony that the French had set
up in mid-century, in the site of the future Rio de Janeiro. Consider
the pages on the wars carried out by the Tupinambá people, who were
described most strikingly by another protagonist of this experience, the
Calvinist Jean de Léry, himself a reader of Machiavelli, who is openly
cited in his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578). A
possible reader of the French translation of the Discourses by Jacques
Gohory, printed in 1544, Thévet often mentions Livy and, just like
Machiavelli, compares the customs of the ancients and those of modern
non-Christian peoples, following a scale of well-defined values, however:
“it is a strange thing that these Americans do never make amongst them
any paction or concorde, though that their hatred be great, as other
nations do be they never so cruel and barbarous, as the Turkes, Moores
and Arabians”. And, a few pages later, after indicating the exhibition of
courage—sometimes through cries and frivolous threats—as the cause of
the constant wars between the Tupinambá people, he comments:
In this they observe (in my iudgement) the ancient custome that the
Romaynes used in their warres, who before they entred into battell
made greate boastes and crakes, with greate cryes and larums, the which
since hath bene used among the Galles in their warres, as Titus Livius
reharseth.44
The tendency to describe the indigenous peoples of the Americas

using a comparative method, which is partly influenced by the circula-
tion of Machiavelli, saw further developments in the following dec-
ades. Meanwhile, however, the Discourses provide a further example of
Machiavelli’s influence in the New World: during an inspection in the
144 G. Marcocci
Mexican diocese of the Yucatan in 1585, a copy of the work was seized,
shortly after it had been put on the Index in Spain (1583–1584). There
seems to have been a remarkable circulation of Machiavellian and anti-
Machiavellian writings and themes in the American territories of the
Spanish and Portuguese empires in the two centuries that followed.
In the main, it reflected the dynamics that were then registered in the
Iberian peninsula, starting from a growing interest in The Prince, which
contributed to modelling the political culture of the Iberian elites that
were either born or came to live in the New World in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.45
Living at the Court of a Machiavellian Empire

Another direction of Machiavelli’s global circulation in the early modern
period was that which led from the Iberian Peninsula to south Asia. At
first, men and books travelled along the routes of the Portuguese naviga-
tions. The municipal councillors of Chaul, a city on the north-west coast
of India, may have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by Machiavelli
when they responded to the request for help from the governor of
Portuguese Asia, João de Castro (g. 1545–1548), against the Sultan of
Bijapur. They not only accepted his request, but extolled Castro, a vet-
eran of the Tunis expedition (1535), as another Scipio Africanus, who
was one of the models indicated in Chapter 11 of Book I of the Discourses
as continuing the example of Numa Pompilius, and had also been recalled
through literary citations by João de Barros in his oration di John III.46
Later, in the 1580s, Machiavelli’s writings would serve the Florentine
merchant Filippo Sassetti as a guide in describing to his correspondents
the customs of the inhabitants of Portuguese India. For Sassetti, like many
of his fellow-citizens, the reading of The Prince and the Discourses, though
forbidden, was an obligatory part of their humanist training. The echo of
a passage on the sacrifice of the Roman consul Publius Decius (341 BCE)
in Chapter 16 of Book II of the Discourses is clear, for example, in the
portrait Sassetti makes of the military temperament of the “Indians” in
a letter written from Cochin, in January 1584, to his friend Pietro Spina:
They are all a warlike people and when their captain or king dies in battle,
they are obliged to die by will of their lord: and these people who are now
destined to die are called amocchi, and the more of them a king has, the
more powerful he is, because, when obliged to fight a war, he sends to die
against the enemies some of these people, as he pleases, who, not wanting
to die without revenge, and having to die at all costs are most extremely
violent. Similar to this way of behaving, at least in the intention, was a sac-
rifice of himself that one of the Roman consuls made in the war with the
Latins, while his wing [of the army] was already retreating from the bat-
tlefield.47
Meanwhile, with the passage of time, more and more attention was given
to The Prince, as is already clear in the echoes of Machiavelli’s dedicatory
letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici in a treatise written in Persian at the court
of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) by the Jesuit Jerónimo
Xavier.48 An indirect trace of this increasing interest for The Prince can
also be found in a collection of aphorisms clearly modelled on Tacitus,
presented as if taken from the chronicle of Portuguese Asia by João de
Barros, and published in Lisbon in 1621. Its author, Fernando Alvia
de Castro, was a magistrate of Castilian origin, who, in the context of
the dynastic union between the two Iberian crowns (1580–1640), was
then serving as General Superintendent of the armed and naval forces in
Portugal. The proposal of an unheard-of but telling association between
Scipio Africanus and Vasco da Gama, the idea that pacts and alliances
were worth less than the threat of brute force, or the suggestion to “dis-
simulate trickery (dissimular engaños)” can be seen as signs of a possi-
bly attenuated but still substantial Machiavellianism, similar to the loss
of reputation by Asian rulers being indicated as a possible explanation of
their supposed decadence. Alvia de Castro writes: “A new prince should
not boast of the favor he enjoys and the success he obtains to the point
of losing all esteem for his neighbouring kings and proceeding harshly,
because this will certainly bring his downfall”.49
Though no longer enjoying the subversive charge they aroused in
the central decades of the sixteenth century, such attestations show how
popular Machiavelli’s works were becoming as a tool for interpreting or
judging even the complex political situations of south Asia. In an age
when the Safavid and Mughal powers were pressing upon that part of the
world, it was predictable that the question of the Islamic empire emerged
in the way it had been treated by Machiavelli in The Prince with reference
to the “monarchy of the Turk”, in terms that were somewhat different
from how the Florentine Olivi had described it from Brazil.
It was another Italian who suggested a direct link with Machiavelli.
We do not know exactly when and where the Venetian Nicolò Manuzzi
146 G. Marcocci
read his works. Manuzzi was an enigmatic figure who lived in India
for almost 70 years, from the mid-seventeenth century until his death
around 1720. He combined activity as a doctor at the Mughal court
in Lahore with his role as an agent of the European powers (Portugal,
France and Britain) in their enclaves. He also composed an original his-
torical-descriptive work on the Mughal Empire at the time of the power-
ful ruler Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707): entitled Storia del Mogol, it had a
complex textual history, and to this day there is still no critical edition
that describes its stratifications.50
Power politics and military customs—and, still more, the intrigues
that he noted during his stay at the Mughal court—induced Manuzzi
to include references to Machiavelli, which were probably recollections
of a possibly distant reading of The Prince, to interpret the attitudes
and inclinations of emperors and princes. This use is combined with
genuine admiration for the Mughals’ power, which, in a late draft of
the Storia del Mogol becomes a warning about European presumption:
“the Europeans should not think”, Manuzzi writes at the outset of
the third part of the work, as it has reached us in the manuscripts in
Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, “that there is grandeur and
wealth only in Europe and that grandeur reigns only at the court of
Savoy, France, Spain and Germany, because I assure my readers that
no one will live with more grandeur, pomp and majesty than the
Mughal kings, nor can their wealth be compared with that of these
lords of the Indies”.51
Aurangzeb is, in turn, presented as a ruler who was able to conquer
power by calculation, cunning and trickery, without sparing his dearest
ties. This follows a tradition that Machiavelli does not describe, although
he mentions in The Prince that Ottoman power was wholly concentrated
in the “prince’s family (sangue del Principe)” (Chapter 4) and that the
sultan was forced to always keep “around him twelve thousand infantry
and fifteen thousand cavalry, on whom depend the security and strength
of his kingdom” (Chapter 19).52 Manuzzi, however, seems to spell out
clearly what Machiavelli avoids. Thus, he recalls that Aurangzeb was seen
as a “tyrant (tiranno)”, although he wanted to “acquire a reputation
for fairness (acquistar nome di giusto)”.53 There emerges a portrait of a
ruler who “with pity and justice was always able to reward and punish
the obedient and disobedient”, which recalls the subjects of the Turk,
who are described as “servants” by Machiavelli in The Prince. Manuzzi
also underlines “the special energy of his self-control, without which the
Crown of his kingdom could not have been preserved against the will of
so many malcontents, above all his own sons, of whom he is more suspi-
cious than of anyone else”.54 It is no surprise, then, that, in the oldest
version of the Storia del Mogol that has come down to us, and which is
now in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, Aurangzeb is directly mentioned as
“that Machiavelli”.55 And, referring to the treatment meted out to the
subjects of Hindu or Islamic powers that had made their conquest eas-
ier, and whom Aurangzeb dismissed as traitors, “while he has promoted
their descendants in the hope of gaining their friendship and affections”,
Manuzzi recalls that the Mughal Emperor “knows, as says Machiavelli,
that he who desires to obliterate injuries past and done cannot resort to
a more effective medicine that the prescribing of silver”.56 The quotation
here is not literal, but seems to re-express an idea in Chapter 3 of The
Prince, which advises that “you cannot retain as friends those who put
you there, since you cannot give them such satisfaction as they looked
forward to, and since you cannot use strong medicines against them
because you are indebted to them”.57
Therefore, Manuzzi is not just offering a vague echo of themes attrib-
uted to Machiavelli, an author he also openly refers to when writing of
Aurangzeb’s sons. It was the world he knew most closely, as, during his
stay at the Mughal court, he had long been in the service of the eldest of
them, Shāh Alam, who later became emperor with the name of Bahādur
Shāh (r. 1707–1712):
The policy of these princes of the royal house of the Mogol is more than
Macchiavelli’s (sic) while they are in private, as they leave no way untried
to be pleasing to the great men and the generals, to the court and to the
kingdom. They seek to conquer their souls and the wish to have them on
their side in time of necessity, and then in private they display only amena-
ble, civil and courteous qualities, with much gallantry and urbanity, speak-
ing and conversing familiarly with all; but all their familiarity aims only to
entice the souls not only of the great, but also of the rabble.58
Though Manuzzi does not quote any specific passage of The Prince here,
the explicit mention of Machiavelli’s name brings out how his writings
had inspired so many of his readers to use comparisons in their writ-
ings. This encouraged an interchangeability of political connotations that
made it possible, for example, to interpret the Mughal court in the light
of the description of the Ottoman court as described by Machiavelli.
148 G. Marcocci
Concluding Remarks
The sequence of readings, citations and reinterpretations in this chap-
ter is still pretty fragmentary. But it is already enough to show that
Machiavelli made a decisive contribution to shaping an image that
was anything but compact and consistent, but, in the main, new, of
the Islamic world and its empires. Reconstructing this influence forces
us to follow many often diverging directions, which in part is due to
the extension of geographical, cultural and political perspectives that
were typical of the early modern world. A part of the European impe-
rial elites—and not only in Iberia—shared a heritage of political cul-
ture that was nourished by an ambivalent, but powerful, relation with
Machiavelli’s writings. But, alongside it, there emerged a tradition that
was easily identifiable despite the changes it went through. It was able to
apply the Discourses or The Prince to a tropical context by re-directing or
developing through other authors (Giovio in particular), the few remarks
Machiavelli makes about the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world,
which were particularly striking for the comparisons with ancient Rome.
Reconstructing this tradition is all the more interesting as, so far as
we know, though it did start there, it was certainly closely related to
America, and to the colonisation of Brazil in particular. This is an unex-
pected thread in Machiavelli’s influence that already in the early modern
period abetted his varying circulation beyond the confines of Europe,
and that was potentially global in its reach.
Notes
1. G. Procacci (1995), Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna
(Rome and Bari: Laterza)‚ and S. Anglo (2005), Machiavelli, the First
Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility and Irrelevance (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press).
2. C. Ginzburg (2011), “Machiavelli e gli antiquari”, in: M. Donattini,
G. Marcocci and S. Pastore (eds), Per Adriano Prosperi, 3 vols. (Pisa:
Edizioni della Normale): Vol. II, 3–9, now republished in English transla-
tion in the present volume.
3. The importance of Machiavelli’s works for European thought on the
Ottoman Empire (particularly in Italy) has been shown in great detail by
L. D’Ascia (2010), “L’impero machiavellico: L’immagine della Turchia
nei trattatisti italiani del Cinquecento e del primo Seicento”, Quaderns
d’Italià, 15, 99–116, to which should now be added the chapters by
Vincenzo Lavenia and Pier Mattia Tommasino. None of this work, how-
ever, considers the echoes of this subject outside Europe.
4. Letter to the Florentine authorities, Imola, 16 November 1502, in
N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan
Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London; Duke University Press): Vol. I,
134–135.
5. I refer, of course, to J.H. Elliott (1970), The Old World and the New,
1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
6. M. Hornqvist (2004), Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press), who suggests we reconsider The
Prince and the Discourses as a reflection on an imperialist Florentine
republicanism. Attributing the title of empire to every power that has
been increased by conquest, seems, however, improper.
11. Ibidem, Vol. I, 341 (Discourses) and 14–15 (The Prince), respectively.
12. Letter to King John III of Portugal, 12 February 1529. I quote from the
English translation provided by S. Subrahmanyam (1997), The Career
and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press): 303. Note, however, that there are also similari-
ties regarding the advisability of using fortresses, which was criticised
by Machiavelli in The Prince, Chapter 20, and Discourses, Book II,
Chapter 24. A rather different exercise has been tried in relation to the
supposed similarities between Machiavelli and Afonso de Albuquerque,
governor of India from 1509 to 1515. See Â. Barreto Xavier (2014), “‘A
maior empresa que nunca um príncipe cristão teve nas mãos’: Conquistar
e conservar territórios no Índico nos tempos de Maquiavel”, Revista
Tempo, 20, 1–27.
15. Ibidem, Vol. II, 880 (Carnival Songs) and 796 (Mandragola), respectively.
18. Ibidem, Vol. I, 322. On this important passage see also J.M. Najemy
(2009), “Machiavelli between East and West”, in: D. Ramada Curto
et al. (eds), From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond: Essays in
Honour of Anthony Molho (Florence: Olschki): 127–145: 133–134.
150 G. Marcocci
21. P. Giovio (2005), Commentario de le cose de’ turchi, ed. L. Michelacci

(Bologna: Clueb): 169: “La disciplina militar è con tanta giustitia
et severità regulata da’ turchi che si può dir che avanzino quella de gli
antichi greci et romani”.
22. A. Prosperi (2010), “La religione, il potere, le élites: Incontri italo-
spagnoli nell’età della Controriforma”, in his Eresie e devozioni, 3 vols.
(Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura): Vol. I, 61–85. On the main
consequences in Italian and Spanish culture of the association between
this idea of Machiavelli’s and Giovio’s Commentario, see now the chapter
by Vincenzo Lavenia in this volume.
23. J.G. de Sepúlveda (1535), De convenientia militaris disciplinae cum chris-
tiana religione dialogus, qui inscribitur Democrates (Rome: Antonio
Blado): fols. 25r–25v and 80r, respectively. On this treatise, see A. Coroleu
(1992), “Il Democrates primus di Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: una nuova
prima condanna contro il Machiavelli”, Il Pensiero Politico, 25, 263–268.
24. D. de Castilho (1538), Livro da Origem dos Turcos (Leuven: Rutger
Rescius): fols. Yiv–Yiir: “Segundo diz Paulo Iovio, os Turcos guardaom
ha ordem militar com tanta iustica he gravidade que sem duvida parece
sobrepuiarem os antigos gregos e romaõs, ho que afirma Ioanne Aubano
em ho livro segundo da sua Historea, os quaes daom tres causas por que a
gente militar turca e milhor que naõ a nossa, (...) ha segunda porque naõ
temem nenhum manifesto perigo (...) por terem por mães bem aventura-
dos aquelles que entre os imigos moreram, que naom hos que em suas
casas emtre ho prantos he choros de suas molheres he filhos feneceraom,
hem todos ho convites he aiuntamentos oraõ pola gente de gerra mas
principalmente por aquelles que polo proveito da comum patria fenecer-
aom, os feitos de sues ante pasados escrevem os quaes depois cantaõ he
louvão, com ho que em grande maneira acende os animos da gente de
gerra”. On Castilho and his work, see C. Bettini (2009–2015), “Frei
Diogo de Castilho”, in: D. Thomas (ed.), Christian–Muslim Relations:
A Bibliographical History, 7 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol. VI,
328–331. For a general interpretation of Böhm’s treatise, see K.A. Vogel
(1995), “Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes Boemus
on ‘The Manners, Laws and Customs of All People’ (1520)”, in: H.
Bugge and J.-P- Rubiés (eds), Shifting Cultures: Interaction and Discourse
in the Expansion of Europe (Münster: Lit Verlag): 17–34.
25. The hypothesis is presented with valid arguments in a working paper by
R.M. Loureiro (2013), A Rare Sixteenth Century Imprint: The Livro da
origem dos Turcos (Portimão: ISMAT): 15–16.
26. Osório’s treatise was first noted in Prosperi, “La religione”, 76–78. On
the author’s non-linear relation with Machiavelli, see Anglo, Machiavelli,
142–163.
27. J. Osório (1542), De nobilitate civili libri duo: De nobilitate Christiana

libri tres (Lisbon: Luís Rodrigues): fols. 116r–118r (quotation at fols.
117v–118r).
28. On this manuscript and the many itineraries of the circulation of
Machiavelli in Portugal, see G. Marcocci (2008), “Machiavelli, la reli-
gione dei romani e l’impero portoghese”, Storica, 14, nos. 41–42,
35–68.
29. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 224. Compare this chapter with
Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (hencefort BNP), cod. 3.060,
J. de Barros, Ao mui alto e muito poderoso Rey de Portugal D. João 3° deste
nome, fols. 39r–39v.
30. Ibidem, fols 37v–38v.
31. Ibidem, fol. 36v: “Se a religião dos gentios, reprovada e falsa tinha poder,
pelo apartamento dos vícios e limpeza do espírito, de causar tanta per-
feição a quem a seguia, quanto mais se deve isto esperar da verdadeira
fé de Cristo?”. A similar conclusion seems to have been reached by
J. Osório (1571 [1572]), De regis institutione et disciplina (Lisbon: João
de Espanha): 212r, and, before him, as Carlo Ginzburg shows in his
chapter in this volume, by Guillaume Du Choul nel Discours de la region
des anciens Romains (1556).
32. BNP, cod. 3.060, fols. 100v–101r: “aos vencidos não dar muita opressão,
mandar que os vassalos e naturais vão morar nas terras ganhadas, as quaes
povoações os romãos chamavão colonias, dos despojos fazer tesouro, affa-
digar ao imigo com cavalgadas, entradas e batalhas campaes, e não con-
certos, ter rico o pubrico e pobres os vencidos, dar aos capitaes inteiro
poder como faziam os romãos, não rezervando pera sy mais que o mover
nova guerra, e assi manter com muita diligencia os exercitos e gente
d’armas”. It should be added that Barros, like Machiavelli, also argues
against fortresses in a passage that draws abundantly on Chapter 24 of
Book II of the Discourses: see ibidem, fols. 55v–56r.
33. Ibidem, fols. 10v–11v.
34. See B. Fuchs (2009), Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction
of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press),
which underlines the solidity of pro-Turkish tendencies in Iberian cul-
ture, but without ever mentioning the connection with the circulation of
Machiavelli and Giovio.
35. Letter to António de Ataíde, Count of Castanheira, Évora, 3 February
1533, published in J.D.M. Ford (ed.) (1933), Letters of John III, King of
Portugal, 1521–1557 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press): 83:
“Eu averya por mais meu serviço nõ mandar ao Brasyll gente, nem outra
cousa, ate tomar asento no que deve de ir pera se a terra povoar e asegu-
rar, que, prazendo a Noso Senhor, sera cedo”.
152 G. Marcocci
36. H.B. Johnson (1972), “The Donatory Captaincy in Perspective:

Portuguese Backgrounds to the Settlement of Brazil”, Hispanic
American Historical Review, 52, 203–214, and A. Vasconcelos de
Saldanha (2001), As capitanias do Brasil: Antecedente, desenvolvimento e
extinção de um fenómeno atlântico (Lisbon: CNCDP): 95–105.
37. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 16 (The Prince) and 342 (Discourses),
respectively.
38. J. Couto (1996), “João de Barros e a estratégia lusitana de colonização
do Brasil”, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 157, no.
391, 245–273.
39. R. Ridolfi (1962), “Pensieri medicei di colonizzare il Brasile”, Il Veltro, 6,
705–712, and S. Buarque de Holanda (2000), “Os projetos de coloni-
zação e comércio toscanos no Brasil ao tempo do Grão Duque Fernando I
(1587–1609)”, Revista de História, 142–143, 95–122. Also see now B.A.
Brege (2014), “The Empire that Wasn’t: the Grand Duchy of Tuscany
and Empire, 1547–1609” (PhD Dissertation: Stanford University).
40. Olivi’s case is described, among others, by S.B. Schwartz (2008), All Can
Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World
(New Haven: Yale University Press): 182–183; on Giraldi, see V. Rau
(1968), “Um grande mercador-banqueiro em Portugal: Lucas Giraldi”,
in her Estudos de História (Lisbon: Verbo): 75–129.
41. Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (henceforth ANTT),
Inquisição de Lisboa, Proc. no. 1682: “a religião fora emventada para
sogeitar a gente he o povo” (fol. 2v); “ouvio dizer ao dito Rafael Olivi
que a vida dos turquos que era boa e louvalla pollas tais causas dizendo
que ellas não obrigavão a missa nem a sacramentos” (fol. 2r); “arriba das
allturas do ceo jmpirio avia outro oniverso como este ando avia terra e
agoa e outros alementos como estes e outras gentes” (fol. 5v); “gram sen-
hor” (fol. 3r). Interestingly, Jean Bodin uses the same expression, “Grand
Signior” (grand seigneur) for the Ottoman sultan in Book III of Les six
livres de la Republique (1576). I quote from the following English ver-
sion: J. Bodin (1606), The six bookes of a Common-weale, trans. R. Knolles
(London: Adam Islip and George Bishop): 263.
42. The list of books seized from Olivi can be read in ANTT, Inquisição de
Lisboa, Proc. no. 1682, fols. 14v–15r. It includes “Comentari delas cou-
sas de torquia” and “Discorsi di Nicolo”. The denunciations of Olivi
were passed on to Lisbon, where the Inquisition absolved him.
43. S. Gruzinski (2010), What Time Is There? America and Islam at the Dawn
of Modern Times (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press).
44. A. Thévet (1568), The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike, trans. T. Hackett
(London: Henry Bynneman): fols. 57r and 59r, respectively.
45. D.A. Brading (1991), The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole
Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press) lists a series of cases for Spanish America.

There is interesting new information on Brazil in the recent work by R.
Bentes Monteiro and S. Bagno (eds) (2015), Maquiavel no Brasil: Dos
Descobrimentos ao século XXI (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio
Vargas).
46. Letter dated 29 July 1547, published in E. Sanceau (ed.) (1973–1983),
Colecção de São Lourenço, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos
Ultramarinos): Vol. III, 281–283. It also compares Castro with Furius
Camillus, another figure to whom Machiavelli gives much space in the
Discourses.
47. F. Sassetti (1970), Lettere da vari paesi, 1570–1588, ed. V. Bramanti
(Milan: Longanesi): 409: “Sono tutti gente di guerra e quando il loro
capitano o re muore nella battaglia, sono obrigati a morire a volontà del
lor signore: e chiamansi questi tali già destinati alla morte amocchi, e quel
re che più ne tiene è più possente perché, stretto nella guerra, manda
a morire contro ai nemici una banda di questa gente, qual pare a lui, i
quali, non volendo morire senza vendetta, e avendo a morire a tutti i
partiti fanno impeto terribile. Non fu dissimile a questo modo di fare, o
almeno all’intenzione, un sacrifizio che di se stesso fece uno de’ consoli
romani nella guerra de’ latini, ritirandosi già il suo corno della battaglia”.
This passage has already been noted by L. Biasiori (2013), “Comparaison
comme estrangement: Machiavel, les anciens, les modernes, les sauvages”,
Essais. Revue interdisciplinaire d’humanités, hors série no. 1, 151–169.
For a discussion of the etymology and meaning of amocchi, see H. Yule
and A.C. Burnell (2013), Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British
India, ed. K. Teltscher (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 58–62.
48. On this treatise, see the chapter by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam in this book.
49. F. Alvia de Castro (1621), Aphorismos y exemplos politicos y mili-
tares: Sacados de la primera Decada de Iuan de Barros (Lisbon: Pedro
Creasbeeck): fol. 96r: “Un principe nuevo no se ensoberbezca tanto
con el favor que tiene, y buenos successos que alcança, que desestime a
los reyes sus vezinos, y proceda con aspereza; que esto será causa de su
ruyna”. The other quotation is taken from fol. 40v.
50. On Manuzzi and his work, see S. Subrahmanyam (2011), Three Ways to Be
Alien: Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, Mass.:
Brandeis University Press): 133–172.
51. N. Manuzzi (1986), Storia del Mogol, ed. P. Falchetta, 2 vols. (Milan:
Franco Maria Ricci): Vol. II, 14: “né si giudichino gl’europei che le gran-
dezze e ricchezze sijno solamente nell’Europa e che regnino le grandezze
solamente nella corte di Savoia, Francia, Spagna e Alemagna, ch’assicuro
agli lettori che nissuno viverà con più grandezza, pompa e maiestà
154 G. Marcocci
ch’il re mogolo, né le ricchezze loro si possono ugualare a questi delle

Indie”. In a previous version, drafted in French and held in the Berlin
Staatsbibliothek, the passage is slightly different. See N. Manuzzi (1907–
1908), Storia do Mogor, or, Mogul India, 1653–1708, ed. and trans. W.
Irvine, 4 vols. (London: John Murray): Vol. II, 330: “Most Europeans
imagine that the grandeur of kings and princes in other parts of the world
cannot compare with what is found at the courts of their sovereigns.
Excluding the principal ones—those of the Emperor, the King of France,
and the King of Spain—nowhere else can be found, as they think, those
airs of grandeur and of majesty which follow in a sovereign train”.
52. Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 22 and 75, respectively.
53. Manuzzi, Storia del Mogol, Vol. I, 162–163.
54. Ibidem, Vol. II, 13 and 76, respectively: “con pietà e con giustitia ha
saputo e sa dare premij e castighi all’obbedienti e agli disobbedienti”;
“particolar’industria con la quale si governò e si governa, senza la quale
non si poteva conservare la corona del suo regno contro la volontà di
tanti mal contenti e principalmente d’i suoi proij figlij, dagli quali dubita
più che di nissun’altro”.
55. Manuzzi, Storia do Mogor, Vol. I, 293.
56. Ibidem, Vol. III, 253–254. The passage seems out of its proper place in
the account.
58. Manuzzi, Storia del Mogol, Vol. II, 88: “La politica di questi principi della
casa reale del Mogol è più che di Macchiavelli mentre che sono privati,
perché non lassano modo intentato per aggradare a gli grandi e generali,
cossì della corte come del regno, procurando di cattivargli l’animo e la
volontà per haverli in tempo di necessità della loro parte, e poi privata-
mente non rappresentano altro se non che qualità docili, civili e cortesi,
con molta galantaria e urbanità, parlando e conversando con tutti famil-
iarmente; ma tutta la loro familiarità sta fundata ad allettare gl’animi non
solo d’i grandi ma ancora della plebe”.
Author Biography
Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History (European and
Extra-European, 1450-1800) at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at Exeter
College. He was visiting professor at the University of Lisbon (2009), the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2013) and the European
University Institute, Florence (2016). His research focuses on the Iberian world
and Renaissance historiography. His most recent book is Indios, cinesi, falsari: Le
storie del mondo nel Rinascimento (2016).
PART III
Beyond Orientalism
CHAPTER 8
A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli,

Celālzāde Muṣṭafā and Connected Political
Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri
Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) never failed to elicit strong reactions

from his readers. Throughout the early modern period, commentators
heaped abuse on the works and their author. The tide turned after the
mid-nineteenth century, when the negative interpretations evolved into
intense academic attention and indeed admiration. Passions often over-
came academic rigor, however, and Machiavelli was hailed as the founder
of modern political realism, the herald of Italian nationalism or the father
of modern revolutionary movements.1 Another century went by until
Quentin Skinner proposed to read the Machiavellian corpus within “the
intellectual context of classical and Renaissance philosophy, as well as
the political context of Italian city-state life at the start of the sixteenth
century”.2 Since then, Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock and other members of
the Cambridge School fused history, philosophy and literary criticism to
K. Şahin (*) 
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_8
158 K. ŞAHİN
successfully evade the a-historical “perennialism” of an old-fashioned his-

tory of ideas.3
Despite its sophisticated critical apparatus, the Cambridge School
did not address the question of Eurocentrism, or felt the need to step
outside the contexts determined by Skinner. An edited volume on
Machiavelli, Islam and the East may be an appropriate venue for widen-
ing those frames towards a more comprehensive understanding of early
modern political thought. In this chapter, I propose to discuss European
and Ottoman history together, as constituent parts of a global early
modernity that led, among other things, to new ideas about the everyday
management of human communities, the rights and duties of monarchs
and the role of religion in political and social life. As a case study, I place
Machiavelli side by side with an Ottoman career bureaucrat and author,
Celālzāde Muṣṭafā (ca. 1490–1567). Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
notion of connected histories, and the histoire croisée approach, the aim
here is to go beyond a simple comparison of Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s
lives and works4; instead, their opinions and arguments will be treated as
reactions to specific cultural and political dynamics that were felt across
early modern Eurasia.
Connecting Machiavelli with Celālzāde Muṣṭafā

Early modern authors from different parts of the globe are typically
locked within specific intellectual and scholarly traditions that deter-
mine the interpretation of their works. The modern scholarly literature
on Machiavelli, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, firmly situ-
ates him within a very European, not to say Eurocentric, historical nar-
rative that culminates in the establishment of nation-states and liberal
democracies; an author who was once reviled as a defiler of morality and
religion is now celebrated as the defender of civic humanism and the har-
binger of modern republicanism. On the other hand, despite a plethora
of recent works that emphasise the vitality of early modern Islamic lit-
erate cultures, the likes of Muṣṭafā continue to be relegated to a grey
zone between classical Islamic political thought and modern political
Islam. They are seen as unoriginal commentators of earlier works, and
patronage-bound imperial servants whose writings are largely irrelevant
for the problems of the modern period. If we adhere to either one of
these two traditions, it becomes impossible to evaluate Machiavelli and
Muṣṭafā together, or even imagine that they were responding to similar
8 A TALE OF TWO CHANCELLORS 159
political and cultural challenges. This is where the importance of a con-

nected reading within a wider historical context comes to the fore. Such
a reading may at times over-emphasise the weight of historical context,
or de-emphasise the impact of genuine differences in language, genre
and tradition. However, it deserves to be attempted, on a limited scale
such as this, if the alternative is to essentialise difference and turn it into
an explanatory category for incommensurability among putative “civilisa-
tions”.
The formative political events of Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s lives
began to unfold in the second half of the Quattrocento/the Hijri
ninth century. The invasion of the Italian Peninsula by Charles VIII
(r. 1483–1498) in 1494 turned a region already characterised by local
and international competition into a stage for direct and proxy wars.
These wars pitted the French monarchy, buoyed by a period of recon-
struction after the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, against the
Habsburgs, whose domains fused post-Reconquista Spain with holdings
throughout Europe, and who established control over the imperial title
after the mid-fifteenth century. The Ottoman capture of Constantinople
in 1453, on the other hand, inaugurated new notions of Ottoman impe-
rial authority, and signalled a new wave of expansion supported by a
more efficient central control over financial resources. By the time they
reached the walls of Vienna two years after Machiavelli’s death, in 1529,
the Ottomans had doubled the empire’s holdings, which now extended
alongside two frontiers. In the east, the Ottoman zone of control and
influence extended roughly from present-day Romania through eastern
Hungary into Dalmatia; in the east, it descended from the eastern end
of the Black Sea coast through eastern Anatolia into the border between
the modern nation-states of Syria and Iraq. On the north–south axis,
the Ottoman presence was felt from the northern shores of the Black
Sea to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. This expansion positioned the
Ottomans as the main rivals of the Habsburgs in Central Europe and the
Mediterranean, while the rise of the Safavid dynasty in eastern Anatolia,
Iraq and Iran on the strength of nomadic elements and a political theol-
ogy that used messianic elements posed a tremendous logistical and cul-
tural challenge to Ottoman imperialism.5
Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā lived through the birth pangs of a global
early modernity that radically disrupted their ancestors’ world through
rapid, often violent political, economic and cultural transformations.
One reaction to these disruptions was the search for more centralised
160 K. ŞAHİN
political and military power, a topic that would figure predominantly

in the works of both authors. As Linda Darling has noted, the Islamic
polities of western Asia “faced the need to consolidate power in order
to reduce the autonomy of the great men—military leaders, statesmen,
and religious leaders—to standardise landholding and taxation (that is,
military funding); and to develop a new relationship with trade and com-
mercial wealth”. In Europe too, there was an increasingly prominent
trend towards the “transition from hired armies led by potential rivals
to military forces composed of the prince’s own retainers and subjects,
as well as from shared or disputed sovereignty to an authority seeking
predominance over all other sources of power”.6 These developments
led to “territorial consolidation; firearms-aided intensification of warfare;
more expansive, routinized administrative systems”, while they were also
accompanied by “growing commercialization [and] wider popular lit-
eracy, along with a novel proliferation of vernacular texts”,7 which sig-
nalled the emergence of new political constituencies, and underwrote the
formation and spread of new political ideas, some of which are found in
Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s writings.
While Machiavelli and his corpus have benefited from popular and
scholarly attention for half a millennium, Muṣṭafā and his works are
not widely known outside the confines of Ottoman history. The Prince
and Discourses on Livy are among the most popular reference works in
modern debates on political thought and Renaissance history. Muṣṭafā’s
only political treatise, Mevāhibu’l-ḫallāḳ fī merātibi’l-aḫlāḳ (“Gifts of the
Creator on the Levels of Morality”, hereafter Mevāhib), remained under
the shadow of his historical output, and was forgotten soon after its com-
position.8 Machiavelli’s biography received several treatments that offer
a veritable kaleidoscope, thanks to the existence of myriad sources that
extend from his father’s diary to his correspondence with friends and
associates, his diplomatic reports, documents in the Florentine archives
and the material culture of the period.9 The paucity of personal docu-
ments from Muṣṭafā’s time, and the taciturn pose he adopted vis-à-vis
his personal life, hindered the emergence of such rich narratives.10 While
Muṣṭafā enjoyed a certain reputation as a secretary and historian dur-
ing his life and following his death, this reputation eventually dwindled
to a footnote in Ottoman history. Moreover, Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā
observed developments from different vantage points. Machiavelli’s
Florence was “a régime that was universally regarded as feeble, dilatory,
and deliberately evasive”.11 While Muṣṭafā was aware of the challenges
posed by endemic warfare, resource management, and the resilience of

the Habsburgs and the Safavids, he served a militarily and financially
strong empire with an elaborate claim to universal rule.
Despite the obvious disparities, there are several “commensurable”
elements in their lives and works to warrant a “connected” reading (such
a reading could obviously bring together several other literati-secretar-
ies from East and West, whose presence became ubiquitous from Tudor
England to Mughal India with the onset of early modernity).12 Both
served at a time when secretaries with classical educations (a human-
ist university training for Machiavelli, and a long madrasa training for
Muṣṭafā) came to the fore as the managers of increasingly sophisticated
economic and diplomatic networks. Their works teem with anecdotes
and observations about new men of action who dwell in an increasingly
violent world dominated by gunpowder weapons. They saw history as
an endless struggle between rival forces and a repository of positive and
negative examples. They both riled against human folly, and sought to
manage the chaos they witnessed, even though they admitted the inscru-
table power of fate; in the process, they promoted the secretary/advisor
as an indispensable ally to the rising political classes. Both authors recog-
nised the role of religion as a political instrument; at the same time, they
developed a more complicated understanding of religion as the foun-
dation of morality, a cohesive political community and a source of law.
Finally, Machiavelli transformed the ancient Roman virtù into a form of
practical and pragmatic rationality, while Muṣṭafā similarly turned ʿaḳl (a
philosophical concept that was the subject of much debate about the lim-
its and possibilities of the human intellect) into a political/bureaucratic
instrument.13
Connected Lives: From Secretary to Litterateur
Machiavelli entered the Florentine chancery at a moment of transforma

tion, following the departure of the Medici in 1494, the interlude
(1494–1498) of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), his execution, and
the restoration of the Florentine Republic in 1498. Muṣṭafā became
secretary of the imperial council in 1516, at a time when the Ottoman
Empire was expanding against the Safavids in eastern Anatolia and the
Mamluks in Syria and Egypt. As the secretary of the Second Chancery,
an office focused on domestic affairs, Machiavelli initially composed and
dispatched documents and letters; soon after, he was sent to various
162 K. ŞAHİN
courts on behalf of the First Chancery (which dealt with the city’s exter-
nal affairs) and the Ten of War. His career was practically ended after the
restoration of the Medici rule in Florence in 1512; accused of taking part
in an anti-Medici conspiracy, he was tortured and briefly imprisoned.
Like Machiavelli, Muṣṭafā’s secretarial career initially involved the com-
position of documents and letters on behalf of the sultan and the grand
vizier. Unlike Machiavelli, however, his political flair, coupled with con-
siderable secretarial skills, helped him survive the fall of close collabora-
tors and patrons; he remained chancellor (nişāncı) from 1534 until his
retirement in 1557. In a Machiavellian sense, Muṣṭafā displayed enough
virtù to defeat fortuna.14
Throughout their careers, both were privileged observers of the
major developments of their time. As Machiavelli’s remarks about
the Ottomans in The Prince show, like so many others in the Italian
Peninsula, he was knowledgeable about Ottoman expansion in south-
eastern Europe and the foundations of the Ottoman political system
(incidentally, his nephew Giovanni Vernacci resided in Pera, across the
Golden Horn from Constantinople, and they corresponded in 1513–
1518).15 The political and military problems of Florence lent a particu-
lar urgency to his diplomatic missions, during which he visited, in search
of alliances and compromises, the courts of King Louis XII of France
(r. 1498–1515), the Duke of Valentinois Cesare Borgia (r. 1498–1507),
Pope Julius II (1503–1513) and Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1486–1519).
The events and personalities encountered throughout his career would
later serve as exemplars that helped illustrate his thoughts on history,
politics and human nature. As secretary, Muṣṭafā worked in close proxim-
ity to Süleymān (r. 1520–1566) and his grand viziers, attended imperial
council meetings, and wrote imperial correspondence; after becoming
chancellor, he helped supervise the Ottoman military-fiscal system, con-
tributed to Ottoman law, and interacted with French, Habsburg and
Safavid envoys. Like Machiavelli, these secretarial experiences resonate
throughout his writings.
Muṣṭafā and Machiavelli left behind very similar pictures about the last
years of their lives. In tune with their self-consciousness as secretaries and
literati, they presented themselves conversing with ancient authors, shar-
ing their works with the members of their social and cultural networks,
and writing, almost obsessively.16 They were obviously motivated by the
expansion in vernacular modes of writing, and the popularity of histori-
cal and political works among the new reading publics. Patronage was
important to Machiavelli, while Muṣṭafā, as a wealthy imperial servant,

could afford to eschew it. It is also likely that both felt a particular con-
cern about leaving behind a legacy in the form of the written word.
In his retirement, Muṣṭafā set out to write a panorama of the
Ottoman Empire as he had witnessed its recent expansion. He brought
together earlier writings, composed on the occasion of Süleymān’s mili-
tary campaigns; he developed them and composed additional chapters.
In his table of contents, he announces a work that would have 30 sec-
tions, focusing on the sultan and his palace household, the fortresses
and military forces of the empire, the city of Constantinople, the
20 governorates-general, and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.
Only the last sub-section of the work was composed, however: an
account of most of Süleymān’s reign (from 1520 to 1556–1557),
extending over several hundred folios, called Ṭabaḳātü’l-memālik ve
derecātü’l-mesālik (“Echelons of the Dominions and Hierarchies of the
Professions”, hereafter Ṭabaḳāt).17 There, he narrates the unfolding of
a new empire under Süleymān, while carefully avoiding Süleymān’s final
years, during which the ailing sultan strived to maintain peace among
his warring sons. In his second historical work, Selīmnāme (“The Life of
Selīm”), also composed during his retirement, Muṣṭafā revisits the reign
of Selīm I (r. 1512–1520), which he portrays as a simpler time where
heroism and individual merit helped the ruler defend and expand the
Ottoman polity against internal and external rivals.
In both works, Muṣṭafā insists that he writes on the basis of informa-
tion he gleaned through his unique access to Süleymān, his career as a
secretary under him and, in the case of Selīm, through the testimonies
of his mentors who conveyed their unique experiences to Muṣṭafā.18
These claims echo Machiavelli’s statement, in the letter of dedication to
Lorenzo de’ Medici preceding The Prince, that he writes on the basis of
knowledge acquired “in [a] lengthy experience with recent matters and
my continual reading on ancient ones”.19 Muṣṭafā’s historical works
can be read as ruminations on ʿaḳl in military and political affairs, since
individual actors are often evaluated according to their success or fail-
ure in displaying it.20 His focus on the near past is significant, since it
erases not only pre-Ottoman Islamic history, but the history of the
Ottoman dynasty before the large transformations of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Machiavelli’s corpus reflects a much deeper engagement with the
distant Roman past, as seen in The Prince and the Discourses on Livy. In
Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, on the other hand, the reinterpretation
164 K. ŞAHİN
of the near past is enmeshed with an attempt at personal rehabilitation in

the eyes of the Medici.21 In Muṣṭafā’s case, while political redemption is
not a motive, the urge to promote the omniscient secretary as an active
contributor to the imperial edifice adds a prominent personal dimension
to his historical output.
Muṣṭafā’s only work dedicated to politics and ethics is Mevāhib, a
creative translation and re-writing of a Persian treatise, Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī
(“Muḥsin’s Ethics”) by Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshif ī (d. 1504–1505).22 In
Mevāhib, the flowery language of Muṣṭaf ā’s historical works leaves its
place to an accessible Ottoman Turkish. Muṣṭafā prefaces the political/
ethical sections with a lengthy section on the 99 names of Allah, which
gives the work a strong devotional quality. He then uses Kāshif ī’s origi-
nal as a template upon which he inserts chapters on human morality and
a chapter on ʿaḳl; perhaps most notably, he divides the original’s final
chapter, “On the Servants of a Ruler”, into two sections. He renames
these sections “On the Sultanate” and “On the Vizierate”, where he
expounds his ideas on the function of the advisers and the duties of the
rulers.23 Mevāhib is the locus for Muṣṭafā’s emphasis on morality and
piety as personal and communal ideals. Perso-Islamic history, presented
through several anecdotes that illustrate virtues and vices, is used as a
background. At the same time, Muṣṭafā’s views on political advice and
rulership are anchored in his personal experiences, and reflect the values
and expectations of the secretarial cadres. In a sense, The Prince predates
Mevāhib as the work of a retired secretary and a litterateur whose self-
appointed task is to help create an empire-builder, while Mevāhib emerges
as the cultural and political statement of the secretary who desires to
regulate the powers of the prince, and offer a set of political and moral
principles after the much-desired empire is established.
Rather than interpreting the disparities between Machiavelli and
Muṣṭafā as the signs of a civilisational difference between East and
West, it is possible to see them as variations on similar themes. Some
of these themes were provided by the emerging early modern world
of political, cultural and religious tensions. Others were supplied by
their respective intellectual traditions (it is also possible to argue that
Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s intellectual legacies stemmed from very simi-
lar origins: Christian and Muslim interpretations of ancient Greek political
thought).24 In Machiavelli’s case, the history and culture of the Greco-
Roman past, filtered through the works of medieval Christian writers, and
subjected to intense scrutiny and interpretation from the late medieval
period into early European humanism, played an important role as inspira-

tion, model and sometimes foil.25 As Carlo Ginzburg discusses in a recent
article on Machiavelli’s reading of Aristotle, the classical legacy was not a
seamlessly transferred body of knowledge on which there was an intellec-
tual consensus; rather, Machiavelli arrived at Aristotle through commen-
taries and translations, which he supplanted with his own interpretation.26
In Muṣṭafā’s case, the Arabo-Persian tradition of political and moralistic
writings exerted an important influence.27 At the same time, Muṣṭafā and
generations of early modern Ottoman authors had inherited a re-reading
of this tradition, through works produced after the fall of the Abbasid
caliphate to the Mongols in 1258, particularly in Timurid Central Asia.28
Like the European humanists, authors in different parts of the Islamic
world engaged in a creative work of re-interpreting the intellectual legacy
of the past and adopting it to the political realities of the time they lived
in.29 Through these creative re-readings, the authors’ agendas focused on
the identity and attributes of the rulers, the relationship between religion
and politics and the function of laws in the creation and management of a
harmonious society.
Convergences and Divergences: Virtù and ʿAḳl

Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s works present several convergences in their
treatment of some of these general themes. Perhaps the most striking
parallel is their search for a central principle that would guide human
action. For Machiavelli, as is well known, this is virtù, “that quality
which enables a prince to withstand the blows of fortune, to attract the
goddess’s favour, and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely
fame, winning honour and glory for himself and security for his gov-
ernment”.30 Less romanticised definitions present virtù as “the idea of
strength, efficiency, power, or efficacy in particular circumstances for
particular purposes”.31 It is a form of ongoing, focused, flexible pro-
cess of reflection that prepares the individual for difficult circumstances
that seem beyond human control, and sometimes allows him to bend
them to his will.32 In Muṣṭafā’s case, ʿaḳl is a God-given quality that
separates man from Satan.33 In his Mevāhib, harkening to his madrasa
education, Muṣṭafā provides a “classical” definition of ʿaḳl by dividing
it into two forms: a pure form and an experiential/practical one. The
recipient of ʿaḳl will be known through his rhetorical talents, the qual-
ity of his writing, the gifts he chooses for others, the ability to establish
166 K. ŞAHİN
social relationships, and indeed his outward look and cleanliness.34 ʿAḳl
is one of the keys to salvation, since it deflects individuals from worldly
pleasures and directs them towards good deeds and prayer.35 The com-
bination of knowledge (ʿilm), ʿaḳl and prudence (ḥilm) culminates in a
perfect individual.36
The practical aspects of virtù and ʿaḳl are amply demonstrated in both
corpuses through specific historical examples. Both authors use these
concepts with a sense of urgency, indeed emergency. To secretaries who
witnessed the intensity of early modern imperial rivalries, virtù and ʿaḳl
are not mere moral or philosophical principles, but political instruments.
For instance, Ottoman viziers serving the Ottoman sultans are often
evaluated according to their recourse to ʿaḳl. Indeed, ʿaḳl is made part
and parcel of the Ottoman official’s toolkit, since its absence does not
merely lead to individual misfortune, but the oppression of the empire’s
subjects. The deployment of virtù and ʿaḳl is related to the authors’
wariness of fortuna (which can, although not always, be overcome
through virtù) and simple human nature (whose animalistic tendencies
are bridled through ʿaḳl). The secretary, on the basis of his observations,
believes that passions may erupt at all times, and that the true motiva-
tions of the actors involved cannot be ascertained until they display their
level of virtù/ʿaḳl.37
Despite their emphasis on individual initiative and pragmatic action,
both authors approach virtù and ʿaḳl through an elitist lens, even
though Machiavelli’s elitism is tempered by his references to popular/
plebeian virtù. Machiavelli, as Skinner argues, claims that the masses may
not display virtù consistently, and thus have to be guided by a leader,
at least initially until a functioning polity is established. A more intran-
sigent elitism defines Muṣṭafā’s approach to ʿaḳl, to the extent of pre-
cluding any form of popular political action. In Mevāhib, he argues that
the subject population is unable to distinguish between good and evil,
due to their state of ignorance.38 In another passage, while he admits
that some members of the subject population may display ʿaḳl, piety and
righteousness, others are said to vacillate between good and evil, and
still others engage in vile deeds.39 Muṣṭafā’s worldview envisages “an
abstract hierarchy of intellects affiliated to a scale of spiritual and political
authority”. “[S]ince the proper qualifications for the exercise of political
power are knowledge and wisdom, those possessed of a lower degree of
intellectual aptitude have commensurately less authority”.40 As a result,
the subject population has to be led by a ruler, who in turn has to be
assisted by virtuous secretaries and servants. The Greco-Roman tradi-

tion, as reinvented by the humanists and reread by Machiavelli, allows
a discussion of different forms of rule that include monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy; especially in Discourses, the monarchic imperative of The
Prince leaves its place to the promotion of urban autonomy. In Muṣṭafā’s
case, however, Ottoman imperialism emerges as the sole desirable and
indeed possible form of rule. While libertà is the antithesis of tyranny in
Machiavelli,41 Muṣṭafā argues that oppression of the subjects (ẓulm) can
only be remedied through the ruler’s—and his servants’—dedication to
justice (‘adl), which regulates the relationship between the ruler and the
ruled through a mixture of the sharī‘ah and the sultanic law (ḳānūn).
Convergences and Divergences: Political Leadership

There are several convergences and divergences in the portrayal of politi-
cal leadership in Muṣṭafā and Machiavelli, and the authors are not always
consistent about its attributes. While Machiavelli searches for a saviour,
Muṣṭafā writes from the position of someone who has already identi-
fied that figure: Süleymān. Machiavelli’s “Exhortation”, at the end of
The Prince, predicts the emancipation of Italy “under the guidance of a
great political founder not only sent by God but also a friend of God,
just like Moses”.42 Indeed, Machiavelli, who lived through Savonarola’s
“New Jerusalem”, attributes the friar’s fall to his failure to become an
armed prophet like Moses.43 In the earlier sections of Muṣṭafā’s Tabaḳāt,
Süleymān is indeed an armed prophet whose exploits are compared to
those of Prophet Solomon; he is also the “master of the auspicious con-
junction” (ṣāḥib-ḳırān), the divinely—and cosmically-sanctioned ruler
who distinguishes himself through his struggles with the Habsburgs and
the Safavids over universal monarchy and the leadership of the Muslim
community.44
Machiavelli’s prince, trailing behind Süleymān, is initially tasked with
“recognizing the force of circumstances, accepting what necessity dic-
tates, and harmonizing one’s behaviour with the times”.45 After the
initial momentum of empire building, on the other hand, the ruler is
tasked with the maintenance of the state (mantenere lo stato) through the
establishment of armies and the provision of justice. Taken as a whole,
Machiavelli’s corpus thus seems to navigate between two poles: on the
one hand, in order to exist and survive in a violent world, the prince
has to jettison all moral qualms and adopt a form of practical rationality
168 K. ŞAHİN
whose ultimate objective is a form of imperial rule. On the other hand,

in a fashion that belies the representation of Machiavelli as the theoreti-
cian of brute force, the author recognises the value of an established sys-
tem that would sustain a polity, even in the form of a republic of citizens
who may not need a sole ruler after a while.
A similar shift is observed in Muṣṭafā’s additions to his Ṭabaḳāt dur-
ing his retirement, and particularly in the Mevāhib, where the imperial
polity itself becomes a more distinct creation, a geographical entity and
a political system whose ruler is tasked with several duties in order to
ensure its good management. Rulership in Mevāhib becomes a duty that
requires constant vigilance. The ruler has to supervise the affairs of the
realm, investigate the condition of the subject population, gather and
direct armies, ensure the well-being of the ruling elite through the dis-
tribution of land grants, pursue mischief makers and oppressors, follow
divine guidance in the form of personal piety as well as the application
of the sharī‘ah and seek counsel.46 The figure of the secretary/advisor
lurks behind these lines and his weight increases exponentially, especially
as the polity settles down. In the earlier, violent stages of the march to
power, the secretary is still useful in an advisory capacity. After the impe-
rial enterprise matures, however, tasks such as the drafting and appli-
cation of just laws, and indeed the business of government itself, can
best be achieved through the actions of knowledgeable individuals. In
Machiavelli, these can be virtuous citizens; in Muṣṭafā’s more elitist char-
acterisation, the secretaries will help guide the polity.47
Convergences and Divergences: Religion

Next to the debates on political leadership, the early modern era wit-
nessed several changes in the understanding of religion and ritual and
the relationship between religion and politics. In this environment, reli-
gione, for Machiavelli, and dīn, for Muṣṭafā, gained different meanings
and functions, extending from simple adherence to a set of beliefs and
rituals to a political and cultural instrument used to regulate commu-
nal life. In terms of individual piety, Muṣṭafā portrays himself as a pro-
foundly devout Muslim in the prefaces to his various works. Written in
his retirement, the tone of these passages may have been exacerbated by
late-life ruminations and regrets; this does not change the fact that his
writings are traversed by a strong dedication to Sunni Islam, as belief and
ritual, moral code and imperial identity marker. In Machiavelli’s case, the
scholarship vacillates between the portrait of a profoundly irreligious,

immoral, quasi-Faustian figure à la Leo Strauss, and the recent attempts
by Sebastian de Grazia and Maurizio Viroli at reclaiming Machiavelli as a
Christian believer.48
Muṣṭafā and Machiavelli were both influenced by their careers and
circumstances in their approach to religion. Machiavelli’s critique of
organised religion relies on his observations of contemporary Italian
politics, and the divisive role played by the Papacy as a political institu-
tion. Particularly in Discourses, Roman Christianity emerges as a bar-
rier in front of a more active civic life, and it is contrasted with ancient
Roman religion, defined as a political and cultural instrument that builds
and perpetuates political and cultural cohesion, and fosters virtù.49
Beyond ancient Roman religion, a form, seemingly any form of reli-
gion is necessary in order for a prince or a republic to keep their polity
“uncorrupted”.50 This instrumentalist understanding of religion finds its
most extreme demonstration, in The Prince, in the case of Ferdinand II
of Aragon (King of Castile and León, r. 1475–1504; King of Aragon,
r. 1479–1516). Machiavelli notes the “pious cruelty” he exhibited when
“availed himself of religion” to expropriate and expel the Marranos,
even though he also registers his discontent with the king’s actions by
observing that “no memorable act could be more pitiable than this or
more extraordinary”.51 The idea that some monarchs rule by divine
decree, regardless of the moral quality of their actions, is also present
in Machiavelli, just as Muṣṭafā portrays Süleymān as both motivated by
a wish to fulfil God’s will, and supported by God against his rivals.52
Machiavelli’s idea of religion thus reflects the concept’s myriad uses and
interpretations in the Renaissance.53 While his views are closely bound by
historical and political context, the particular dynamism of his approach
stems from his attempt at interpreting and discussing religion at every
turn, within the scope of politics, instead of taking it for granted, in the
form of a frozen institution and a body of strict rituals.54
In Muṣṭafā’s case, one factor that gave a particularly political dimen-
sion to his understanding of religion was the rise of the Safavid dynasty
from the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards, and the Safavid
espousal of a millenarian ideology based on the tenets of Twelver
Shiism.55 While the Ottoman ruling elite had been usually staffed by
the adherents of the Sunni Hanafi school, this adherence gained a more
political character, and was better defined theologically as well as cultur-
ally, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the
170 K. ŞAHİN
Safavid challenge in mind. In his historical works, and the correspond-

ence he wrote in the name of the sultan, Muṣṭafā emerged as one of the
vocal defenders of Ottoman Sunnism against a rival empire.56 Indeed, he
saw religion as a major identity marker for the Ottoman imperial enter-
prise, by positing Ottoman Sunnism against Safavid Shiism, and Islam
tout court against the empire’s Christian rivals.
Next to this politicised understanding of religion, Muṣṭafā’s writings
present Islam as a source of law in the form of the sharī‘ah; together
with sultanic law, ḳānūn, sharī‘ah is promoted as one of the foundations
of good government.57 Religion is also useful, in Muṣṭafā’s Mevāhib, as
a set of limitations on the ruler, where he equates the ruler’s religious
duties with his duties vis-à-vis the subject population; the subjects have
to receive the bounty of justice, and they have to be free from oppres-
sion and corruption. This subject population included Muslims as well
as Christians and Jews, as Muṣṭafā was well aware: unlike Machiavelli, he
worked for a political centre whose subjects belonged to a variety of reli-
gious communities, and he admitted that the subjects, regardless of their
religion, had to be treated fairly in order to preserve the order. At the
end, religion always meant something more than simple belief and ritual,
and was always tinged with politics and pragmatism.
Concluding Remarks
Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā inhabited violent worlds, full of war, politi-
cal strife and religious controversy. Machiavelli advocated for the estab-
lishment of a viable polity in the midst of corruption and chaos, while
Muṣṭafā sought to protect an imperial edifice from turmoil. They lived in
different geographies, and wrote within what they saw as distinct politi-
cal and cultural traditions; yet, their works display enough similarities to
warrant a connected and contextual reading, as I suggested throughout
this chapter. Such a connected reading exposes a few fault lines in our
established scholarly traditions.
First of all, such a reading invites us to think of a global early moder-
nity that did not only consist of economic exchanges, but of paral-
lel intellectual currents as well. Muṣṭafā never read Machiavelli, but he
would have identified a number of familiar themes in his writings, as
suggested above. Their main difference stemmed from the nature of the
polities within which they lived. Muṣṭafā’s imperialism belonged to a
post-Machiavellian moment, where a redeemer had been able to establish
an empire that was shored up through military might, economic power

and political/legal institutionalisation. The role of the courtier or the
royal favourite in the early modern period has been convincingly estab-
lished; the examples of Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā invite us to the study
of another ubiquitous, and fairly global, social type that played a crucial
role in early modern political cultures: the secretary. A secretary was not
a scholar, despite his frequent claims to be the holder of a specific type
of knowledge; he was not a military man, either, but a figure proposing
to manage the chaos to which military men often contributed. The sec-
retary wielded his pen throughout his eventful career, and well into his
retirement, leaving behind a legacy on the written page, as seen in the
case of Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā.
Second, a joint reading problematises the sea change of the nine-
teenth century, when western capitalist modernity overtook the rest of
the globe through the dual forces of economic domination and mecha-
nised warfare, and ended a multi-centred early modernity that had deter-
mined economic exchange and international political relations since the
mid-fifteenth century. On the cultural side of this process, authors like
Machiavelli were rehabilitated as the harbingers of modern nationalisms
and the nation-states, while authors like Muṣṭafā, associated with the
once-glorious past of the now declining empires, receded into the back-
ground. Any joint reading of Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā thus becomes an
attempt at peeling back the readings imposed by modernity, and seeking
for the genuine voices of the Cinquecento/the Hijri tenth century.
Machiavelli and Muṣṭafā’s dilemmas remain unresolved. What is the
weight of religion in political affairs? What is the relationship between
individual piety and the political/instrumental use of religion? Is it pos-
sible to maintain a polity without recourse to violence? Is a supreme
ruler needed, as an arbiter of all things? What do we do when laws
fail to underwrite justice and harmony? Who will be the guarantor
of that justice? The community itself, an oligarchy of knowledgeable
citizens/secretaries or an absolute ruler? More importantly, is it possi-
ble to preserve personal integrity in the middle of a turbulent world? At
the same time, they remain unified through their belief in human action
as the foundation of political life, as long as that action is informed by
virtù/ʿaḳl. That, together with the global early modern world in which
they lived, provides us with a strong element of commensurability that
defies essentialist readings of European and Islamic political cultures.
172 K. ŞAHİN
Notes
1. M. Viroli (2014), Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s
Masterpiece (Princeton: Princeton University Press): 1–20.
2. Q. Skinner (2000), Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press): 2.
3. For the Cambridge School’s approach see two collections of articles:
Q. Skinner (2002), Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press): Vol. 1, Regarding Method; J.G.A. Pocock (2009),
Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
4. S. Subrahmanyam (1997), “Connected Histories: Notes towards a
Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia”, Modern Asian Studies, 31,
no. 3, 735–762; M. Werner and B. Zimmermann (2006), “Beyond
Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity”, History
and Theory, 45, no. 1, 30–50.
5. This short historical sketch is provided on the basis of R. Bonney (1991),
The European Dynastic States, 1494–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press): 79–99; C. Finkel (2005), Osman’s Dream: The History of the
Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books): 48–125.
6. L.T. Darling (2008), “Political Change and Political Discourse in the
Early Modern Mediterranean World”, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 38, no. 4, 521.
7. V. Lieberman (1999), “Introduction”, in: V. Lieberman (ed.), Beyond
Binary Histories: Re–Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor and
Richmond: University of Michigan Press): 14.
8. The copy I use is the manuscript kept in Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library,
Fatih 3521.
9. For a few biographical works that reflect different styles and approaches,
see S. Anglo (1969), Machiavelli: A Dissection (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World); S. de Grazia (1989), Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton:
Princeton University Press); M. Viroli (2000), Niccolò’s Smile: A
Biography of Machiavelli, trans. A. Shugaar (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux); C. Vivanti (2013), Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual
Biography, trans. S. MacMichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press);
R. Black (2013), Machiavelli (New York: Routledge).
10. For recent studies see M.Ş. Yılmaz (2006), “‘Koca Nişancı’ of Kanuni:
Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi, Bureaucracy and ‘Kanun’ in the Reign of
Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566)” (Ph.D. dissertation: Bilkent
University), where Muṣṭafā’s Mevāhib is not discussed in detail; K. Şahin
(2013), Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the
Sixteenth–Century Ottoman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
11. Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection, 38. For the events of the troubled time
during which Machiavelli served Florence, see J.M. Najemy (2006), A
History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden: Blackwell): 375–445.
12. For the concept of commensurability as a critical tool in the search for
global connections in early modernity, see S. Subrahmanyam (2007),
“Par–delà l’incommensurabilité: Pour une histoire connectée des empires
aux temps modernes”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54, no.
5, 34–53; for an application of the concept see K. Şahin and J. Schleck
(2016), “Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’s Relation of His Trauels
(1613) in a Global Context”, Renaissance Quarterly, 69, no. 1, 80–115.
13. On ʿaḳl in classical Islamic philosophy, see H.A. Davidson (1992),
Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories
of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford
University Press). I thank Yasin Ramazan for bringing this work to my
attention.
14. A concise account of Machiavelli’s secretarial career is in Skinner,
Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, 3–22. For more details see Anglo,
Machiavelli: A Dissection, 13–57; Vivanti, Niccolò Machiavelli, 3–67;
Viroli, Niccolò’s Smile, 29–130. For Muṣṭafā’s career see Şahin, Empire
and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 28–145 passim.
15. The letters are in N. Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed.
and trans. A. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke University
Press): Vol. 2, nos. 146, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167–169.
16. For Machiavelli’s activities in his retirement, see Vivanti, Niccolò
Machiavelli, 3–67; Viroli, Niccolò’s Smile, 71–191. For Muṣṭafā, see
Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 145–154.
17. Celālzāde Muṣṭafā (1981), Geschichte Sultan Süleymān Ḳānūnīs von 1520
bis 1557, oder, Ṭabaḳāt ül–Memālik ve Derecāt ül–Mesālik, ed. P. Kappert
(Wiesbaden: Steiner).
18. For an analysis of Muṣṭafā’s historical output, see Şahin, Empire and
Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 157–185.
20. Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 233–238.
21. For Machiavelli’s use of the past see Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection,
238–269; for his views on, and treatment of the history of Florence,
see J.M. Najemy (1982), “Machiavelli and the Medici: The Lessons of
Florentine History”, Renaissance Quarterly, 35, 551–576.
22. Kāshifī completed his work in Herat in 1501–1502 and dedicated it to the
Timurid ruler of Central Asia, Sulṭān–Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (r. 1469–1506).
The Muḥsin of the title is a reference to Abū al–Muḥsin Mīrzā (d. 1507),
Bāyqarā’s son and the work’s addressee. A partial English translation is
Ḥ.V. Kāshifī (1850), Akhlak–ı Muhsini, or, the Morals of the Beneficent,
174 K. ŞAHİN
trans. H.G. Keene (Hertford: Stephen Austin). For a discussion of the

work, see M.E. Subtelny (2003), “A Late Medieval Persian Summa on
Ethics: Kashifi’s Akhlāq–i Muḥsinī”, Iranian Studies, 36, no. 4, 601–614.
23. Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 232–233.
24. For the development of an Islamic Aristotelianism in political thought,
see G. Fowden (2012), “Pseudo-Aristotelian Politics and Theology in
Universal Islam”, in: P.F. Bang and D. Kołodziejczyk (eds), Universal
Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation
in Eurasian History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press): 130–148. For a discussion of the joint intellectual origins, see Lucio
Biasiori’s contribution to this volume. For readings of Machiavelli and his
near-contemporaries within larger intellectual and historical contexts, also
see V. Syros (2015), “All Roads Lead to Florence: Renaissance Jewish
Thinkers and Machiavelli on Civil Strife”, Viator, 47, no. 1, 349–364; V.
Syros (2015), “Behind Every Great Reformer There is a ‘Machiavelli’:
Al-Maghīlī, Machiavelli, and the Micro-Politics of an Early Modern African
and an Italian City-State”, Philosophy East and West, 65, no. 4, 1119–1148.
25. The weight of this tradition is particularly emphasised in an old yet
still intriguing work: A.H. Gilbert (1938), Machiavelli’s Prince and
Its Forerunners: The Prince as a Typical Book de Regimine Principum
(New York: Barnes & Noble). A recent and detailed re-assessment of
Machiavelli’s classical legacies is in Black, Machiavelli, 99–176 passim.
26. C. Ginzburg (2015), “Intricate Readings: Machiavelli, Aristotle, Thomas
Aquinas”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78, 157–172.
27. For an account of the formation of Islamic political thought in the Near
East from ancient Mesopotamia to the fifteenth century, see L.T. Darling
(2013), A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle
East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (London:
Routledge): 15–125.
28. See C.H. Fleischer (1986), Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman
Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton: Princeton
29. For the rise of a new Ottoman political thinking in the sixteenth cen-
tury, see H. Yılmaz (2005), “The Sultan and the Sultanate: Envisioning
Rulership in the Age of Süleymān the Lawgiver (1520–1566)” (Ph.D.
dissertation: Harvard University). For the Indian subcontinent, see
M. Alam (2004), The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200–1800
(London: Hurst & Company).
30. Skinner, Machiavelli, 40.
31. Anglo, Machiavelli: A Dissection, 233.
32. E. Benner (2013), Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (Oxford: Oxford
University Press): 69–87; H.C. Mansfield (1998), Machiavelli’s Virtue
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 6–52.
33. Mevāhib, fol. 82a.

34. Ibidem, fols. 119a–120a.
35. Ibidem, fols. 82a, 329a.
36. Ibidem, fols. 272b–273a.
37. Viroli, Redeeming the Prince, 81–91.
38. Mevāhib, fols. 174b–175a.
40. L. Marlow (1997), Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 49–50.
41. Machiavelli’s works exhibit several different understandings of libertà,
extending from the use of personal legal rights to the exercise of com-
munal political will. See M.L. Colish (1971), “The Idea of Liberty in
Machiavelli”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 32, no. 3, 323–350.
42. Viroli, Redeeming the Prince, 15. See ibidem, 23–65, for a discussion
of the prince as redeemer. The text of the passage is in Machiavelli, The
Chief Works, 92–96.
43. Viroli, Redeeming the Prince, 26–27.
44. For the Ottoman ideas of messianic leadership see C.H. Fleischer (1992),
“The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the Imperial Image in the
Reign of Süleymân”, in: G. Veinstein (ed.), Soliman le magnifique et
son temps (Paris: La Documentation Française): 159–177. Also see A.A.
Moin (2012), The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in
Islam (New York: Columbia University Press).
45. Skinner, Introduction, 43. For messianic speculations around early mod-
ern European rulers, see F.A. Yates (1975), Astraea: The Imperial Theme
in the Sixteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul).
46. Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 238–242. For the
political and cultural “settling” observed at the end of Süleyman’s reign,
also see G. Necipoğlu (1992), “A Kânûn for the State, a Canon for the
Arts: Conceptualizing the Classical Synthesis of Ottoman Arts and
Architecture”, in: G. Veinstein (ed.), Soliman le magnifique et son temps
(Paris: La Documentation Française): 195–216.
47. The inflated ideas of secretarial merit, and the failure of these ideals to
materialise, would eventually push several Ottoman secretaries to argue
that the Ottoman system had entered a period of decline after Süleymān.
See D. Howard (2007), “Genre and Myth in the Ottoman Advice for
Kings Literature”, in: V.H. Aksan and D. Goffman, The Early Modern
Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (New York: Cambridge University
Press): 137–166.
48. For a romanticised yet still intriguing approach to Machiavelli’s sup-
posed search to define Christianity as a civic and republican religion,
see M. Viroli (2010), Machiavelli’s God, trans. A. Shugaar (Princeton
176 K. ŞAHİN
and Oxford: Princeton University Press); for a reading of Machiavelli

that gives a central place to Christian beliefs and notions, see de Grazia,
Machiavelli in Hell.
49. The reference is to Chapters 11–12 of the Book I of the Discourses. See
Machiavelli, The Chief Works, Vol. I, 223–229.
50. Ibidem, 226.
51. Ibidem, 81.
52. C.J. Nederman (1999), “Amazing Grace: Fortune, God, and Free Will in
Machiavelli’s Thought”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60, no. 4, 617–
638: 636; Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, 187–193.
53. M.L. Colish (1999), “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s
Savonarolan Moment”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60, no. 4, 597–
616: 597–608.
54. J.M. Najemy (1999), “Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the
Necessity of Interpreting Religion”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60,
no. 4, 668–681.
55. For the religious environment in the Middle East in relation to the
rise and establishment of the Safavid dynasty, see K. Babayan (2002),
Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern
Iran (Cambridge, Mass: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard
University).
56. For his views on the Safavids, see Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of
Süleyman, 205–213.
57. For the relationship between sharī‘ah and ḳānūn, see Fleischer,
Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire, 261–267.
Acknowledgements I thank Julia Schleck, Ralph Walter, Hall Bjørnstad and

Vasileios Syros for their comments. Lucio Biasiori’s and Giuseppe Marcocci’s
insightful suggestions helped shape the final version of the manuscript.
I completed the work during a yearlong leave supported by a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Office of the Vice Provost
for Research at Indiana University.
Author Biography
Kaya Şahin is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at Indiana University,
Bloomington. He is a scholar of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a par-
ticular interest in history writing, governance, religious and confessional identity,
as well as cross-cultural exchanges. His first book is entitled Empire and Power in
the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (2013).
CHAPTER 9
Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte:

The Introduction of The Prince to the
Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
This chapter aims to revise common ideas about the circulation of

Niccolò Machiavelli’s writing in the Islamic world by presenting and
discussing a manuscript containing the most ancient Ottoman Turkish
translation of The Prince that is known today, recently discovered at the
Topkapı Palace Museum Library (Sarāy-i Humāyūn), Istanbul. A prelimi
nary aspect to consider is that this celebrated work by Machiavelli did
not go through an autonomous reception in the Ottoman culture. Only
a translation of the treatise titled Anti-Machiavel, written in 1739 by
King Frederick II of Prussia (r. 1740–1786), made it possible to have
The Prince also available in Ottoman Turkish. Famously supported by
Voltaire, who encouraged its publication (1740) and extensively revised
the text, Anti-Machiavel was a sharp critique of Machiavelli’s The Prince,
but also promoted its circulation since it included the entire text in order
to refute it passage by passage.1
N.Y. Aydoğdu (*) 
Kırklareli University, Kırklareli, Turkey

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_9
178 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
Since this was the indirect way in which Machiavelli entered the
Sublime Porte, the first part of my analysis focuses on the main formal
characteristics of the manuscript and provides a possible date for it, as
well as a conjecture about the identity of its anonymous translator. This
brings us to the delicate situation of Ottoman political culture in the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century, when the translation of The Prince,
associated with Anti-Machiavel, saw the light. In the second section of
this chapter special attention is given to the meaning of its appearance
for the more general question about European literature’s influence on
Ottoman thought, which has long been a matter of discussion in relation
to the problem of so-called Ottoman modernisation (1718–1920). No
doubt, in this context, European political culture has long been regarded
as the source of a period of reformation in the mid-nineteenth century,
known as the Tanẓīmāt, which attempted to reorganise the institutional
structure of the Ottoman Empire.2 Yet scholars have rarely considered
concrete interactions with specific ideas and writings. Therefore, the
study of the translation of European works into Ottoman Turkish is par-
ticularly important for understanding the mind-set and the intellectual
issues of the period.
Consequently, the final part of the chapter explores the possible
implications of the real choices made to adapt The Prince to the expec-
tations of its readers, starting with Sultan Muṣṭafā III (r. 1757–1774),
who had ordered its translation together with Anti-Machiavel. Looking
at the specific notions and the vocabulary used by the translator discloses
orientations and concerns surrounding Machiavelli’s text and its refuta-
tion. More broadly, it sheds light on unknown features of the intense but
nonlinear exchanges between Ottoman culture and the European politi-
cal tradition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Enigma of a Manuscript

There is no consensus of opinion in the scholarly tradition about when
Machiavelli was introduced into Turkish culture. Some records can be
regarded only as unverified narratives: a case in point is the statement
made by the Venetian Giovanni Sagredo in his Memorie istoriche de’
Monarchi Ottomani (1673), suggesting that Sultan Murāt IV (r. 1623–
1640) used to read The Prince.3 Whatever the truth of the matter, an
open dialogue with Machiavelli is generally accepted as having taken
place through the translation of The Prince (Ḥukumdār) by Ḥaydār Rifat
9 MACHIAVELLI ENTERS THE SUBLIME PORTE 179
in 1908, issued in a magazine called Zakā. The work was then published
as a whole in Ottoman Turkish for the first time by Mehmet Şarīf in
1919, while the first translation of The Prince in the Latin alphabet by
Ḥaydār Rifat appeared in 1932.4
A recent discovery allows us to reconsider the whole question of,
and to backdate by at least one and a half centuries, the acquaintance of
Ottoman culture with Machiavelli. The starting point is a passage from
the Letteratura turchesca (1787) by the Venetian abbot Giovanni Battista
Toderini (1728–1799), a former Jesuit, who lived in Istanbul from 1781
to 1786, being a member of the Venetian bailo Agostino Garzoni’s reti-
nue. A collector of books and works in oriental languages, Toderini
reports that Muṣṭafā III owned a translation of The Prince and adds that
the sultan “also ordered the refutation of that perverse politics, that is
Anti-Machiavel by the king of Prussia to be translated into the Turkish lan-
guage”.5 Many scholars have repeated Toderini’s account, without provid-
ing any information about where and when this translation was made and
to whom it was addressed.6 What is more, nobody has found the supposed
translation mentioned by Toderini, which I now propose to identify as an
anonymous manuscript held at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library, under
the classification Ḫazīnah 372, containing Frederick II’s Anti-Machiavel in
Ottoman Turkish, wrongly recorded as a text translated by a Spinozist.7
Substantially unknown and never studied until recently, this
226-page-long manuscript is the only known copy of the work.8
Numbered by pages in the index and not by foils, the manuscript is in
the Ta‘līk style of calligraphy and contains twenty-one lines per page.
Being 215 mm high and 120 mm wide, the book is of pocket size.
Considering the gold illumination of the front page, maroon leather
bound cover, gilded calligraphy, ornamented page layout and other simi-
lar features, the manuscript was probably prepared for, and presented to,
the sultan. The handwriting follows eighteenth-century standards, a fur-
ther aspect that is consistent with Toderini’s report. However, the manu-
script offers no explicit or implicit references to the identity of the latter,
when he did his work, or the language he translated from. Therefore, if
we want to make some conjectures about these aspects, we must turn to
other contemporary sources.
First of all, we should consider to what extent Toderini provides us
with entirely reliable clues to solve the enigma of this manuscript. He
tells us that he was informed about the work “by the translator in per-
son, a dignitary who wants to stay hidden. Sultan Muṣṭafā sent him the
180 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
Machiavelli with its refutation in the French language, so that he trans-

lated both of them, and he made it arrive leaf after leaf into the emperor’s
hands”.9 It is not certain that we should give full credit to this account,
since in the original French version of Anti-Machiavel, Machiavelli’s work
and the refutation go together, while Toderini indicates them as two
separate texts. More generally, this passage is also problematic because,
being based on oral, anonymous information, it recounts facts that had
occurred more than ten years before, Muṣṭafā III having died in 1774
and the Letteratura turchesca being published in 1787.
An earlier source that should be considered is an account attributed
to a Florentine abbot, the traveller and antiquarian Domenico Sestini
(1750–1832), who started to visit Istanbul regularly in 1768 as well as
the rest of Turkey, the Levant and Mesopotamia. It is on his authority
that the Jansenist abbot Reginaldo Tanzini (1746–1825) confirms in
his preface to an edition of Machiavelli’s complete works, published in
Florence by Gaetano Cambiagi in 1782–1783, that “the book of The
Prince was even translated into Turkish by order of Muṣṭafā III, to edu-
cate him and his sons, and the Turks know his author, whom they call
Muchievel”.10 After rejecting Sagredo’s account about Sultan Murāt IV,
a footnote explains that Sestini “speaks of this fact in many of his let-
ters to Mr Giovanni Mariti, in which he maintains that Doctor Gobbis,
physician of the Great Lord [i.e., the sultan], told him that the transla-
tion of The Prince and Anti-Machiavel was made, by order of Muṣṭafā
III, by a talented dragoman, with the assistance of a Turkish learned
man, provided by Muṣṭafā himself, and that this translation exists in the
Library of the Great Lord, in the Seraglio”.11 Interestingly, this edition
was dedicated to the art collector and patron of arts and science, George
Nassau Clavering-Cowper, an English nobleman who then lived in
Florence. He had been able to combine his status as a peer and earl in
Great Britain with the new title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire, an
association that might be relevant to the context in which the Topkapı
Palace manuscript was produced, as we will see. At the same time, the
reference to the translation of Anti-Machiavel invites us to establish a
connection between the information attributed to Sestini and a passage
included in the issue of the periodical L’Esprit des Journaux, François et
Étrangers, published in September 1783, which, after insinuating that the
Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) had some sympathy
for the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reports that “a part of his writings
was translated into Turkish by Mr Herbert, dragoman of the emperor”.12
The identification of the translator of Boerhaave’s Institutiones medi-

cae (1708) into Ottoman Turkish as Thomas Herbert (1738–1775), a
dragoman of the Holy Roman imperial embassy in Istanbul, was already
an established fact in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was mentioned
in his published biographies.13 To be more precise, he just assisted the
court physician Ṣubḥīzādah ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Efendi, who made the version
of both Institutiones medicae and Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curan-
dis morbis (1709).14 Herbert belonged to a noble family of Catholics,
who had emigrated from the British Isles to Istanbul in the aftermath
of the deposition of King James II (r. 1685–1688) in the context of the
Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). Thanks to the efforts of his father,
John Herbert, Thomas and his two younger brothers, Peter Philip and
John, started to serve the Holy Roman Empire, their Catholic faith pre-
sumably being no disadvantage in this. Unlike Peter Philip and John,
however, Thomas Herbert continued to live in Istanbul, where he culti-
vated his interest in oriental languages and literature, and acted as diplo-
matic mediator between Europeans and Ottomans.
Was he the “talented dragoman” mentioned by Sestini, according
to the 1782 Florentine edition of Machiavelli’s works? According to
Toderini, Muṣṭafā III “ordered the Aphorisms by Boerhaave to be trans-
lated into Ottoman Turkish by Mr Herbert, brother of the current impe-
rial inter-nuncio to the Porte”—a reference to Peter Philip Herbert,
who served as imperial ambassador in Istanbul from 1780 to 1789, after
being granted the title of baron (Freiherr) von Rathkeal by Empress
Maria Theresa of Habsburg (r. 1740–1780) in 1779. Yet Toderini makes
no connection between this activity and the translation of Machiavelli,
which he ascribes to “a dignitary who wants to stay hidden”, as if he
were still alive in the 1780s, unlike Thomas Herbert.15 The fact is still
more surprising if we note that Toderini quotes “Doctor Gobis, a medi-
cal physician”—that is, Filippo Gobbi from Trieste16—who was also
Sestini’s informant about the Ottoman version of The Prince and Anti-
Machiavel existing in the Seraglio.17 Be that as it may, the translator of
these works is explicitly identified as Thomas Herbert in a new edition of
Machiavelli’s works, published in Florence in 1813. The editor Francesco
Tassi modifies the text of Tanzini’s preface here and there, including the
footnote concerning Sestini, whose letters are now recalled as evidence
that “the translation of The Prince and Anti-Machiavel was made, by
order of Muṣṭafā III, by Mr d’Herbert, then dragoman, with the assis-
tance of a Turkish learned man”.18
182 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
There is no doubt that the “Mr d’Herbert” mentioned here is Thomas

Herbert, since he was the only one of the three brothers living in Istanbul
at the time of Muṣṭafā III, where he was dragoman of the Holy Roman
imperial embassy and a renowned translator of European writings into
Ottoman Turkish. This identification would support us in dating the anon-
ymous Topkapı Palace manuscript to the reign of Muṣṭafā III. However,
one must admit that, no matter how probable it is, the recognition of
Thomas Herbert as the translator of The Prince and Anti-Machiavel is only
conjecture, since there is no direct evidence. The alleged letters by Sestini
are unknown, since they are not included in the collection of his corre-
spondence published from 1779 to 1784, containing missives sent from
Istanbul to his cousin and master, the Florentine antiquarian Giovanni
Mariti, in 1778. It is, however, noteworthy that not only was part of this
collection published—and possibly selected—by Cambiagi, the publisher
of the 1782–1783 edition of Machiavelli’s works that first spread the news
of the translation of The Prince into Ottoman Turkish, but that Sestini
dedicated the seventh and last volume to the ambassador Herbert Freiherr
von Rathkeal, Thomas’s brother.19 What we can say with certainty is that
between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century some scattered
news circulated across Europe about an Ottoman version of The Prince
ordered by Sultan Muṣṭafā III, gradually converging on the name of the
late Thomas Herbert as its translator, with the assistance of a “Turkish
learned man”. Doctor Gobbi presumably gave this information to Sestini,
who in turn transmitted it to his correspondents in Florence. We cannot
exclude the possibility that, once he had returned to his native city, Sestini
reaffirmed it to the French diplomat and learned man Jean-Alexis-François
Artaud de Montor (1772–1849), who lived for a long time in Italy. In fact,
in a work on Machiavelli published in 1833, Artaud repeats almost word-
for-word the passage from the 1813 preface about the Ottoman translation
of The Prince by Herbert, adding that “Abbot Sestini, with whom I talked
about this first fact in Florence, confirms its existence”.20
This information clearly originated from the milieu of the European
residents in Istanbul, which contrasts with the silence of Ottoman sources.
Therefore, we should take into account that the voices spreading across
Europe might involve some distortion, or embellishment, of the facts, as
in the case of Toderini’s report about Herbert’s role in the translation of
Boerhaave’s medical writings. As in this circumstance, in which he was
not the real translator but only the assistant of court physician Ṣubḥīzādah
‘Abd al-‘Azīz Efendi, the relationship of Herbert with the “Turkish
learned man” might need to be inverted with respect to the version pro-
vided by Sestini, at least according to Tanzini’s preface to the 1782 edi-
tion of Machiavelli’s works. In both instances, Doctor Gobbi might
have preferred to attribute the merit of translating The Prince to a man
of European origin, instead of acknowledging that Herbert, a native of
Istanbul who mastered Ottoman Turkish, was just collaborating with local
interpreters, who were certainly more able to adapt these versions to the
interests and concerns of Muṣṭafā III and his court. This hypothesis might
be corroborated by the fact that, while Toderini says that the translator
was still alive during his stay in Istanbul, he does not clarify where he was
from, thus making it possible that he is referring to a Turk. A close read-
ing of the translation must take into account all these possibilities about
its authorship. In any case, this analysis also requires a better understand-
ing of the Ottoman political and cultural context, in which the idea of
reading The Prince, or rather its refutation by Frederick II, was emerging.
The next section is meant to shed light on some relevant aspects of this.
Translating Anti-Machiavel as a Response

to Stagnation?
According to Toderini, Muṣṭafā III was so familiar with the personal-

ity of Frederick II—who was highly regarded in Istanbul’s political and
intellectual milieus for having established the “Great Prussia”—that he
considered his refutation a reliable antidote to Machiavelli’s “perverse
politics”, something that strongly attracted the sultan as well, evidently.
Significantly, Toderini stresses that, “if the books of Turkish politics
are not contaminated by so wicked doctrines”, their political attitude is
“wholly Machiavellian, even before Machiavelli rose up, and so masterly
that the Ottomans could make it a lesson for him”.21
However we are to use the evidence provided by an author like
Toderini, who clearly adhered to the eighteenth-century leitmotiv of
Turkish despotism, there is no doubt that Frederick II’s popularity at
the Ottoman court was first of all connected to his renown as a military
genius and a great statesman. One should remember that his commands
to soldiers, originally written in German, were later translated from a
French version by the historian Şānizādah Maḥmad ‘Aṭāllāh Efendi into
Ottoman Turkish, under the title Tanbīhāt-i Ḥukumrān bā Sar’askarān
(“The Ruler’s Warnings”), and then presented to Sultan Selīm III
184 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
(r. 1789–1807).22 A work about the principles of war, written by one

of Frederick II’s commanders, was also translated and the king’s secret
orders to his soldiers were added in the footnotes.23 Finally, as a result of
the interest in Frederick II, all his books are said to have been eventually
sent to the Ottoman state in 1872.24
We should understand all this in the light of the fact that in the eight-
eenth century the Ottoman Empire had to face military and diplomatic
challenges against European powers in the west, and Russia and Iran in
the east. These difficulties changed its self-perception as a world power,
especially in the period from the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718) to the
French invasion of Egypt (1798). While the political atmosphere and
discussions that were generated by these events brought deep change to
Ottoman political thought, bureaucrats gained more power and influ-
ence as a result of the military defeats.25 Thus, the need to renovate the
military system became more and more apparent, and there was lively
discussion as to how to achieve this.26 Ottoman statesmen were consid-
ered unable to run state affairs effectively, senior military officers were
accused of being the only cause of administrative problems, and scholars,
who were supposed to warn and guide the statesmen, were sharply criti-
cised. Sultan Muṣṭafā III himself, who reigned during the third quarter
of the eighteenth century, took a negative view of the power of the state,
its administration, and the skills of statesmen, and complained about this
situation in a poem written in the first year of his reign.27
In the following years, interpretations about the Ottoman state as
entering an “era of stagnation” (sinn-i vuḳūf) and ideas about how to
save it from dissolution started to appear in statesmen’s books.28 For
instance, writings on the defeat of the Ottomans in the Russian war
(1768–1774) include suggestions and recommendations for a new
military order and a claim for reforming the administrative and politi-
cal structures. However, while stressing the need to reform the military
system, including the assignment of posts and duties to qualified peo-
ple, real observation of sharī ‘ah, prevention of bribery, regular inspec-
tions of provincial institutions, and finally a fair and not arbitrary use
of appointments, dismissals, and property confiscations, these writings
did not envisage a transformation in the political role of the sultan, but
only insisted on vague concepts such as the “re-observation of sharī ‘ah
principles (şarʻ-i şarīfa dönüş)”,29 “establishment of a worldwide justice
(niẓām-i ‘ālamin ta’sīsi)”, “military order”, and “social welfare”.30
While European political literature inspired some of these claims,

reformists adopted the idea that translations from European languages
were useful, but should be limited to the search for practical responses
and solutions to current issues. It was no accident that most translations
were either about mathematics, astronomy, or medicine, whereas military
books were mainly either regulations and instructions, or biographies of
successful military people and statesmen. Ragib Paşa (1699–1763), the
Grand Vizier of the period of Sultan Muṣṭafā III, owned some transla-
tions from European languages, by means of which he aimed at follow-
ing innovations in the military field. One of the most significant was the
translation of the British Regulations for the Royal Navy, but that of the
Artillery Manual of Prussia was also in Ragib Paşa’s library.31 It is also
reported that he wished to have a version of Voltaire’s Éléments de la phi-
losophie de Newton mis à la portée de tout le monde (1738).32
The interest in Voltaire’s thought on the one hand, and in the figure
of King Frederick II of Prussia on the other, was widely shared among
the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, they prepared the
cultural background for the translation of Anti-Machiavel, which was
associated with that of The Prince. British influence is also relevant in
this context, at least if we are to believe that the translator (or assistant
translator) of Machiavelli and its refutation—a book written by a German
monarch and revised by a French philosophe—was Thomas Herbert,
whose family kept alive the connection to its land of origin, as we shall
see. This Pan-European influence must be emphasised, since reformist
statesmen were aware that the European powers had outperformed the
Ottoman Empire in terms of military technology, forcing them to reor-
ganise the army and modernise its weapons.
It was in the context of this debate that Ottoman statesmen started
to look at the European political system and technology as a model for
their efforts to solve their internal problems. Rather than a merely edi-
torial enterprise, their familiarity with Frederick II’s Anti-Machiavel was
the result of a practical effort to acquaint themselves with the most recent
findings of European political and scientific thought. Therefore, instead
of assuming, like Toderini, that Sultan Muṣṭafā III had a genuine interest
in The Prince, which would have been followed by the request to have a
refutation of it after realising how immoral the work was, we should sup-
pose that its translation was an unintended consequence of the circulation
of Anti-Machiavel, which in turn was based on Frederick II’s endur-
ing fortune and prestige in the Ottoman world. On the other hand, the
186 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
fact that the latter is barely mentioned in the tradition inaugurated by

Tanzini’s preface to 1782 Machiavelli’s edition, on the basis of alleged let-
ters by Sestini, is consistent with the pro-Machiavellian inclination of this
Florentine milieu.33 Be that as it may, it is now time to abandon interpre-
tation of these sources and to look at the Topkapı Palace manuscript.
Ottoman Words for European Classics

The Topkapı Palace manuscript consists first and foremost of a transla-
tion of Anti-Machiavel, though without Voltaire’s preface. This ver-
sion consists of twenty-four chapters, numbered and titled according
to the French edition, which is accurate with respect to the Italian text
of The Prince. An exception is Chapter 4, whose original title—“Why
the kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebel against
the successors of Alexander at his death”—is changed into “Comment
on conserve le Trône” (“How to maintain the throne”), then translated
into Ottoman Turkish as “Protecting the state (Vach-i muḥāfaẓa-yi
davlat bayānindandir)”.34 Following the French original, each chap-
ter is divided in two parts: the words of mus ̣annif (‘the author’,
i.e., Machiavelli) and those of mumayyiz (‘the person distinguishing
between the right and the wrong’, namely Frederick II). Although nei-
ther Machiavelli nor Frederick II is mentioned by name, each chapter of
The Prince is followed by the Prussian king’s criticism, with a heading
entitled Cavāb-i Mumayyiz (‘The critic’s answer’).
Interestingly enough, the description of the work in the Topkapı
Palace Museum Library Turkish Manuscripts Catalogue reads as follows:
‘it is a refutation of a book, written in one of the European languages,
by a person belonging to the school of a Jewish Dutch philosopher,
called Spinoza, and it contains advice to rulers’.35 Such a reference prob-
ably misinterprets the comparison between Spinoza and Machiavelli that
opens Anti-Machiavel, according to which The Prince does for ethics
what Spinoza’s work does for faith—it overturns traditional ideas com-
pletely.36 However, it is worth mentioning that an indirect association
between this translation and a Spinozist emerges from the passage in the
periodical L’Esprit des Journaux, which as early as 1783, as noted above,
spread the information that Herbert had translated Boerhaave’s medical
writings into Ottoman Turkish, wrongly suggesting that the latter was
somehow favourable to Spinoza.
Although the Topkapı Palace manuscript does not explicitly mention

the title of The Prince, there is a translation for it—“Fann-i Ḥukūmāt
ve Siyāsat” (“Science of government and politics”)—that we could adopt
for this version.37 This is a striking parallel with the European reception
of Machiavelli’s work. When the Aristotelian philosopher Agostino Nifo
plagiarised The Prince in 1521, the title he used for his Latin rewriting
of the work was De regnandi peritia. Whereas this choice was always
regarded as no more than a trick to avoid the suspect of plagiarism,
Sydney Anglo has correctly pointed out that Nifo’s subject “is, specifi-
cally, peritia—the skill, the practical knowledge, which is gained only
by experience”.38 Thus both Nifo and the translator of the Ottoman
Turkish version emphasised the practical character of The Prince and
consequently paved the way for a long-term reception of the book as
a handbook for statecraft. In accordance with this practical aim of the
translation, the French word politique is rendered by “Fann-i Tadbīr ve
Siyāsat” (“the art of government matters and politics”) in the part of the
manuscript containing Anti-Machiavel,39 and by “tadābīr va ḥukūmāt”
(“measures and governments”) in the section containing The Prince.40
This translation, far from betraying Machiavelli’s text, grasps its original
conception of the politician as a “good surveyor” and the importance of
measuring the balance of forces in a given situation.41
Determining the main characteristics of the Ottoman Anti-Machiavel
is possible only by comparing its manuscript with the original French
text. Moreover, we have to take into account that its final form might
have been the product of discussions between Thomas Herbert and an
Ottoman scholar appointed by the sultan. Therefore, their choices might
have conveyed the intellectual constraints at the sultan’s court, as well
as the influence of some specific input from European political culture,
including Britain’s. Indeed, neither their Catholic faith nor their serving
the Holy Roman Empire prevented the Herbert brothers from keeping
in contact with their fellow countrymen living in Istanbul, as is perfectly
shown by the marriage between the daughter of Peter Philip Herbert
Freiherr von Rathkeal, Constance Catherine, and Spencer Smith, secre-
tary of the British embassy and then chargé d’affaires, in 1798.42 A pos-
sible sign of this British influence is that the translation excludes some
of Frederick II’s worst statements about Machiavelli, like the passage in
Chapter 7 in which the Prussian monarch refers to the Florentine secre-
tary as ‘a monster not even hell can bring out’. In accordance with the
mid-eighteenth-century reception of Machiavelli’s works in the British
188 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
Isles—where they had become a key reference point for the Republican
tradition—some of Frederick II’s harsh comments about Machiavelli are
translated by toning them down.43
Conversely, we can explain the choice to eliminate Chapter 11 on
the ecclesiastic principalities and Chapter 24 on why Italian princes lost
their states as an attempt to adapt the text to the expectations of the
Sublime Porte. No doubt, both chapters could have been removed for
their strictly Italian tone, as might be proved by the fact that, at least in
the case of Chapter 24, a summary of one and a half pages is provided.
Yet, this is not so for Chapter 11, which deals with the effects of reli-
gious institutions on states, and is not included in the translation at all.
Considering that religious hierarchy was part of the Ottoman adminis-
tration, one might wonder whether this delicate aspect, too, might have
played a role in the removal of this part from the translation. More inter-
estingly, the translation omits a paragraph of Chapter 12 of The Prince
dealing with the Greek city-states, and the heroism and war stories of
their rulers, which clearly might have displeased the sultan.44
Some parts within the text are also left out and several names and
place names are excluded, while some sections, which include com-
ments by Frederick II about western thought and philosophy, are sim-
ply not translated. In some very limited cases, Herbert and his Turkish
assistant, if they really were responsible for this work, add their own
views and occasionally make substantial changes to the text, by including
their own opinions and thoughts directly. In particular, they intervene in
Machiavelli’s ideas on the political tradition of the Ottomans. For exam-
ple, in Chapter 13, on auxiliaries and soldiery, they portray Istanbul’s
capture by the “Turk” as “fatḥ va tasḥīr” (“conquest and subjection”).45
Conversely, Machiavelli presented the Ottoman conquest of Greece
as a historical process that was initiated by the Byzantine emperor—or
the “emperor of Constantinople”—who, “to resist his neighbors, put
ten thousand Turks in Greece; when the war was over they would not
leave; this began Greek servitude under the infidels”.46 Evidently, the
translator—or, perhaps, his assistant, if he existed and was a Turk—did
not want to undermine the active role of the Ottomans in the conquest
of the Eastern Roman Empire and therefore insisted on the fact that it
was by no means caused by the poor political wisdom of the Byzantines.
Incidentally, we should note that the translation renders the word “Turk”
with “davlat-i islāmī” (“Islamic state”) in all the relevant sections where
Machiavelli comments on the political structure of the Ottoman state.47
As far as the text of The Prince is concerned, we observe very little

intervention, beyond the occasional change to a paragraph, sentence,
or word. A partial exception is Chapter 12, where the translation sum-
marises a long section of five paragraphs concerning the harm caused
by mercenaries. It also omits a paragraph in which Machiavelli, recom-
mending the use of one’s own soldiery, says that when the Renaissance
condottiero Cesare Borgia made use of mercenaries, he was less respected.48
Finally, after this section, the Ottoman version sums up Machiavelli’s exam-
ples of bad outcomes that can arise when a commander treats his soldiers
too softly, implicitly anticipating Şānizādah Maḥmad ‘Aṭāllāh Efendi’s
Tanbīhāt-i Ḥukumrān bā sar’askarān, which, as said above, was presented
to Muṣṭafā’s successor, Sultan Selīm III.49 In other instances, some private
names and names of places and of books are omitted.50
As the examples discussed above already show, the interventions on
the original text, including the removal of sections, are all but coinci-
dental or random. Usually, the translation omits passages that are found
objectionable or unnecessary. In some places, it summarises sections
that might have been regarded as too detailed. For instance, the substi-
tution of the original text of Chapter 24 with a summary is justified by
the claim that its full content would appear useless or inessential.51 Much
more than Machiavelli’s text, the translation manipulates Frederick II’s
refutation of it. Privileged targets of interventions are thoughts about
European philosophy, but sometimes comments about ancient philoso-
phy or criticism of medieval political thinking are excluded as well, or
replaced by notes that follow the translator’s (or his assistant’s) own
view. In short, he rewrote the text while translating it into Ottoman
Turkish, and took local politics and thought into consideration, so as to
reflect some of the choices and orientations of their representatives.
The protection of tendencies in the Ottoman political world lies
behind the attitude of the translator and his possible assistant. At the
same time, they are very diligent in trying to make European concepts
and terms comprehensible to another culture. In this respect, their inter-
action might have been crucial. For instance, the words “principality” and
“government” are translated as davlat, davlat-i mustaḳilla, and ḥukūmāt,
and the word “state” as davlat and duval (plural).52 These translations
should not be taken for granted: the word ḥukūmāt, for instance, was
generally used for the “governing body” in Ottoman political terminol-
ogy.53 It also had specific uses in the administrative and judicial context.
It is noteworthy that, until the eighteenth century, ḥukūmāt was also
190 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
adopted in reference to central organisation and administration, as well as

the tasks fulfilled by them, including the definition of the exact scope of
the authority of governors (beylerbeyis) and military judges (kaz‘askars).
However, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, in
the same period as the translation of Anti-Machiavel—the word ḥukūmāt
took on a new meaning, expressing the functions of the state.54 Besides
a certain overlapping between the two words, which in some instances
appear to be interchangeable, the word davlat is preferred for the powers
that had some tradition and had ruled a territory for a long time, whereas
the word ḥukūmāt is used for newly established and small states.55
However, we also find it in relation to the sphere of power of the ruler, or
just to mean administration and power.56
For obvious reasons, the ways in which the word “prince” is translated
in the manuscript are of particular interest here. While ḥukūmāt covers a
semantic sphere that goes from “owner of the throne” to “ruler”, there
are a number of different solutions for “prince”, running from ḥakīm
(“sovereign”)—the most recurring one—to ūlūl al-amr (“those who have
authority”), valiyyu ni‘mat s ạ̄ ḥib-i taḫt (“he who is blessed with owner-
ship of the throne”), ḥakīm-i mustaḳil (“independent sovereign”), kral
(“king”), or s ạ̄ ḥib-i davlat (“owner of the state”).57 On the other hand,
while the word “king”, which is not very much used in The Prince, is
translated as malik,58 the title “sultan” is never adopted for Machiavelli’s
prince, except in one general statement, in the sentence “ḫurūc ‘alá al-
Sulṭān” (“revolting against the sultan”).59 In so doing, the translation
respected the Ottoman political tradition, which tended to restrict the
word to Muslim rulers, but at the same time reflected the transition in
course in the Ottoman conception of European rulers who, instead of
inferior powers, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards were increas-
ingly considered worthy of respect and, sometimes, emulation.60
This choice shows us an important limitation to Machiavelli’s recep-
tion at the Ottoman court: some sense of political distance between
Europe and the Islamic world. For instance, the term pādişāh is never
used at all in Anti-Machiavel’s translation. The title referred to the “cus-
tomary power” of the Ottoman sultans and was used for Muslim rul-
ers only, especially emperors ruling over vast lands.61 The same occurs
with a number of other titles, from ḫ udāvandigar,62 generally used for
Ottoman rulers and emperors, to amir, ġazī (ghazi), hān, and kağân
(khan). Even the term ūlūl al-amr (“those in authority”), which recurs
in the first part of the text to describe the ruler in general, as we have
already seen, is not meant to specify a particular ruler. It is tempting to

imagine these choices as the result of debates between Herbert and his
associate on the best solutions to translate European words, concepts,
and expressions.
Conclusion: From Anti-Machiavel to Machiavelli

The translator of Anti-Machiavel tried to find original usages of tra-
ditional concepts by interpreting them in a new way. If we are to give
credit to the European sources, it was a four-handed work. A native of
Istanbul with British origins, who spoke Ottoman Turkish so fluently
as to serve as dragoman, Thomas Herbert was surely aware of the main
political concerns of the Sublime Porte. He might well have been the
person to whom Sultan Muṣṭafā III entrusted the translation of Anti-
Machiavel, possibly with the assistance of a ‘Turkish learned man’ who
could help him to avoid words and expressions that might irritate the
Ottoman court. However, the reverse might be true as well, suppos-
ing that, as for the version of Boerhaave’s medical writings, the trans-
lator was a trusted courtly scholar who benefitted from Herbert’s
collaboration. For sure, the result reveals an advanced knowledge of both
European languages and Ottoman political culture, the eighteenth cen-
tury terminology of the text reflecting its own period.
The translation of Anti-Machiavel into Ottoman Turkish during the
reign of Muṣṭafā III, when negative thoughts about Ottoman politi-
cal and military power and the search for solutions peaked, mirrors the
interest of Ottoman thinkers in European political literature as a source
of alternative and effective practical solutions. The fact that chronicles
and safarnāmahs—memoirs written by Ottoman ambassadors—consid-
ered Frederick II of Prussia a military genius certainly played a role in
the translation of Anti-Machiavel in those circumstances.63 This admira-
tion soon turned into a concrete effort of imitation, when, from 1790
to 1792, the ambassador Azmi Efendi was sent to Berlin and wrote
a memorial in which he gave voice to his admiration for the Prussian
administrative and military system and explicitly suggested that it ought
to be imitated.64 The political end of the translation of Anti-Machiavel
was therefore accomplished. In a broader chronological frame-
work, however, this translation introduced Machiavelli and his most
famous work, The Prince, albeit via a refutation, to Ottoman culture.
Moreover, we must acknowledge that this entry was a concealed one
192 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
for a further reason: the Topkapı Palace manuscript of Anti-Machiavel

does not reveal any information about the identity of the author of the
rejected work (except that he was an Italian), or that of the person who
refuted it. As had been the case in Europe for a long time, Machiavelli
could circulate only in hidden form without mentioning his name.
Nonetheless, despite prohibition, his works made their way even in the
Ottoman Empire.65
Notes
1. For a short account of the intricate publishing history of Anti-Machiavel
see K. van Strien (2011), Voltaire in Holland, 1736–1745 (Louvain:
Edition Peters): 103–134, 391–440. For a critical edition of the work,
see Frederick II of Prussia (1958), L’Anti-Machiavel: Édition critique
avec les remaniements de Voltaire pour les deux versions, ed. C. Fleischauer
(Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire); an English translation is also availa-
ble: Frederick II of Prussia (1981), The Refutation of Machiavelli’s Prince:
or, Anti-Machiavel, ed. and trans. P. Sonnino (Athens: Ohio University
Press).
2. R.H. Davison (1963), Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876
(Princeton: Princeton University Press): 5.
3. M.K. Bilgegil (1973), Rönesans Çağı Edebiyatında Türk Takdirkârlığı
(Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi Basımevi): 53. See also P. Preto (2013),
Venezia e i turchi, 2nd ed. (Rome: Viella): 261, fn. 66; and Z. Yılmazer
(1988–2013), “IV. Murāt”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi,
44 vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı): Vol. XXXI, 177–183: 182.
4. For other possible translations of The Prince, see H.Z. Ülken (1997), Uyanış
Devirlerinde Tercümenin Rolü, 3rd. (Istanbul: Ülken Yayınları): 334.
5. G. Toderini (1787), Letteratura Turchesca, 3 vols. (Venice: Giacomo
Storti): Vol. I, 75: “Finalmente se sultan Mustafá volle vogarizzato
il Principe del Machiavelli, ordinò pure, che in lingua turchesca si vol-
tasse la confutazione di sì guasta politica, o l’Anti-Machiavello del re
prussiano”.
6. N. Machiavelli (1919), Ḥukumdār, trans. M. Şerif (Istanbul: Hukuk
Matbaası): 32; Preto, Venezia e i turchi, 294–295.
7. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library (henceforth TPML), Ḫazīnah
372. For its description, see the catalogue of the library: F.E. Karatay
(1961), Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe Yazmalar (Istanbul:
Topkapı Palace): 513.
8. Recent studies of this manuscript include N.Y. Aydoğdu (2008),
“Makyavelist Düşüncenin Türkiye’ye Girişi-Onsekizinci Yüzyıl Osmanlı
Siyaset Felsefesi” (Ph.D. dissertation: Marmara University), and C.B.

Akal (2013), “Les traductions du Prince en Turquie”, Synergies Turquie,
6, 135–139: 137–138.
9. Toderini, Letteratura Turchesca, Vol. I, 75: “Il fatto è certo, e l’ebbi dal
traduttore medesimo, signor d’alto stato, che vuole starsi nascosto. Da
sultan Mustafá gli fu mandato il Machiavello unito alla confutazione in
lingua francese, acciocchè dell’uno e dell’altra ne desse la traduzione, che
di foglio in foglio faceva arrivare alle mani dell’imperatore”.
10. N. Machiavelli (1782–1783), Opere, 6 vols. (Florence: Gaetano
Cambiagi): Vol. I, 50*: “Fino in lingua turchesca fu tradotto il libro
del Principe per ordine di Mustafà III per servire d’istruzione ad esso,
ed a suoi figliuoli, ed i turchi ne conoscono l’autore, chiamato da
essi Muchievel”. For the identification of Reginaldo Tanzini as the
author of the preface, see G. Procacci (1965), Studi sulla fortuna del
Machiavelli (Rome: Istituto Italiano per la Storia dell’Età Moderna
e Contemporanea), 401fn; and S. Bertelli and P. Innocenti (1979),
Bibliografia Machiavelliana (Verona: Edizioni Valdonega), 145*–146*.
11. Machiavelli, Opere, Vol. I, 50*fn: “Noi abbiamo nel testo preferito l’autorità
del sig. abate Sestini nostro insigne viaggiatore, il quale più distintamente
parla di questo fatto in più sue lettere al sig. Giovanni Mariti, nelle quali
afferma avergli detto il sig. dottor Gobbis, medico del Gran Signore, che
la traduzione del Principe, e dell’Anti-Machiavello, fu fatta per ordine di
Mustafá III da un valente dragomanno, insieme coll’assistenza di un dotto
Turco, aggiuntogli dall’istesso Mustafá, e che questa traduzione esiste
nella Libreria del Gran Signore nel Serraglio”. A general introduction to
Sestini, with an emphasis on his numismatic interests, is L. Tondo (1990),
Domenico Sestini e il medagliere toscano (Florence: Olschki). For the drago-
mans’ activities as official interpreters serving European embassies, see E.N.
Rothman (2009), “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings
in the Early Modern Mediterranean”, Comparative Studies in Society and
History 51, no. 4, 771–800.
12. L’Esprit des Journaux, François et Étrangers, 12, no. 9 (1783): 150: “Une
partie des ses ouvrages a été traduite en turc par feu M. Herbert, drago-
man de l’empereur”. The passage about Boerhaave and Spinoza reads as
follows: “un jour qu’il s’étoit embarqueé sur un bateau, il y rencontra un
homme qui damnoit Spinosa, & se livroit aux dernieres imprecations con-
tre lui. Boërhaave ayant écouté tranquillement ces transports de zele, à la
fin fit cette question à l’orateur: Avez vous lu Spinoza? Non, répondit-
il. Et toute la compagnie éclata de rire. L’anti-Spinoza n’eut pas plutôt
abordé à terre qu’il alla dénoncer Boërhaave comme un défenseur de la
doctrine de Spinoza” (pp. 149–150). For a description of this periodical,
see P. Vanden Broeck (1991), “L’Esprit des Journaux (1772–1818)”, in:
194 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
J. Sgard (ed.), Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789 (Paris and Oxford:

Voltaire Foundation), 396–397.
13. See C. von Wurzbach (1856–1891), “Herbert, Thomas von”, in:
Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, 60 vols. (Wien: K.K.
Hof- und Staatsdruckerei): vol. VIII, 352.
14. F. Günergun (2007), “Ottoman Encounters with European Science:
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Translations into Turkish”, in: P.
Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation in Early Modern
Europe, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 192–
211: 209. See also E. Savage-Smith (1997), “Europe and Islam”, in: I.
Loudon (ed.), Western Medicine: An Illustrated History (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press), 38–53: 53.
15. Herbert died in Istanbul on 6 March 1775. See Istanbul, Archives of the
Church of St Mary Draperis, Register of Deaths, book 3, record no. 403.
16. For a contemporary biographical sketch see Notizie del mondo 77 (24
September 1785), 1.
17. Toderini, Letteratura turchesca, Vol. I, 134–135: “È certo che sultan
Mustafá III amico e protettore dell’ottomana letteratura fece volgarizzare
in lingua turchesca gli Aforismi del Boerave dal signor Herbert fratello
dell’attuale internunzio cesareo alla Porta. L’opera, come mi disse il dottor
Gobis medico fisico, trovasi nel Seraglio”. Also see ibidem, Vol. II, 151.
18. N. Machiavelli (1813), Opere, 8 vols. (Italy [Florence: Guglielmo Piatti]):
Vol. I, XLIII. For the identification of the editors and the publisher, see
M. Parenti (1951), Dizionario dei luoghi di stampa falsi, inventati o sup-
posti in opere di autori e traduttori italiani: Con un’appendice sulla data
“Italia” e un saggio sui falsi luoghi usati all’estero, o in Italia, da autori
stranieri (Florence: Sansoni Antiquaria), 214.
19. D. Sestini (1779–1784), Lettere (...) scritte dalla Sicilia e dalla Turchia
a diversi suoi amici in Toscana, 7 vols. (Florence; Livorno: Gaetano
Cambiagi et al.). As the preface to the first volume shows, the publish-
ers Cambiagi and Pagani had Sestini’s original letters in hand and were
authorised by him to publish them. Each volume, starting from the sec-
ond one, is dedicated to a different European ambassador in Istanbul.
The letters sent to Mariti in 1778 are published in the sixth and seventh
volume. On Mariti see the entry by R. Pasta (1960–), “Mariti, Giovanni”,
in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia
Italiana): Vol. LXX, 592–595.
20. A.-F. Artaud (1833), Machiavel, son génie et ses erreurs, 2 vols. (Paris:
Firmin Didot frères): Vol. 2, 433: “A peu près vers cette époque, on
suggéra à Mustapha III l’idée de faire traduire en turc le livre appelé
Del Principe, pour l’usage, disait-on, du Grand-Seigneur et de ses fils.
Sagredo assure, dans ses Mémoires sur les princes ottomans, qu’Amurat
IV avait aussi fait faire cette traduction. Les Turcs appellent le Florentin
Muchievel. L’abbé Sestini à qui j’ai parlé de ce primier fait à Florence,
en confirme l’existence. Il a même déclaré dans ses lettres à Jean Mariti
que la version entreprise pour Mustapha est dans la bibliothèque du
sérail: le traducteur, auquel fut adjoint un litterateur turc fort savant, est
M. Herbert, drogman. Sestini ajoute que la traduction de l’Anti-Mach-
iavel de Frédéric accompagne celle du Prince. Le même fait est énoncé
dans la preface de la Grammair turque de M. David”. The last reference
is to A.L. Davids (1832), A Grammar of the Turkish Language with a
Preliminary Discourse on the Language and Literature of the Turkish
Nations (London: Parbury & Allen), 49*.
21. Toderini, Letteratura turchesca, Vol. I, 73 and 70, respectively: “I libri
della Turca politica non sono contaminati da tanto inique dottrine”;
“politica tutto machiavelliana, prima ancor che sorgesse il Machiavello, e
così maestra che potrebbero gli ottomani a lui farne lezione”.
22. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, Hüsrev Paşa 805, 145. For another copy
of the work, titled Tarcuma-yi Kānūn-i Ḫarp, see Istanbul Archaeology
Museum, manuscript no. 513. There are two separate copies called
Vas ̣āyā-yi Safarī in the Istanbul University Library, nos. 6920 and 2677,
respectively.
23. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, Hüsrev Paşa 817–1 ve 817–2. The name of
the translator is unknown.
24. A note dated 1872 states that all of the books of Frederick II were sent to
the Ottoman state on the orders of King Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia
(r. 1840–1861). See Istanbul, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, İrade Hariciye,
no. 254/15084. See also A. Cevdet Paşa (1891), Tārīḫ-i Cevdet, 12
vols., 3rd. (Istanbul: Maṭba’a-yi Osmaniye): Vol. VIII, 148–149.
25. T. Naff (1970), “Ottoman Diplomatic Relations with Europe in the
Eighteenth Century: Patterns and Trends”, in: T. Naff and R. Owen
(eds), Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale:
Southern Illionis University Press): 88–107: 89.
26. A. Black (2001), The History of Islamic Political Thought : From the
Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press): 273.
27. M.Ş. Hanioğlu (2008), A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press): 6.
28. T. Naff (1970), “Introduction”, in: T. Naff and R. Owen (eds), Studies
in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale: Southern Illionis
University Press): 3–14: 4. See also E. Afyoncu (1990), “Tarih-i Kırım-
Rusya Sefaretnamesi” (MA Thesis: Marmara University): 56–63, and
M. Öz (1997), Osmanlıda Çözülme ve Gelenekçi Yorumcuları (İstanbul:
Dergah Yayınları): 88–91.
29. Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, 264.
196 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
30. The political texts written in the eighteenth century have been the subject
of many discussions. See V.H. Aksan (1993), “Ottoman Political History,
1768–1808”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25, no. 1, 53–69.
31. Istanbul Archaeology Museum, manuscript no. 502, İngiltere Kavānīn-i
Baḥriyesi Tercümesi; N. Öztürk (1990), “İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri
Kütüphanesindeki Tarih Yazmaları”, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları, 63,
129–175: 148–149.
32. B. Lewis (1961), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London and New
York: Oxford University Press): 48.
33. On Tanzini’s inclination see Procacci, Studi, 372–380. After moving to
Rome, in 1800 Tanzini formally recanted the ideas that had led him to
edit Machiavelli’s works (pp. 387–388).
34. Compare TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 30, with Frederick II of Prussia (1740),
Anti-Machiavel, ou Essai de Critique sur le Prince de Machiavel, ed. M. de
Voltaire (The Hague: Pierre Paupil): 21.
35. Karatay, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, 513: “Spinoza adındaki
Hollandalı Yahudi Feylesofun mektebine müntesip bir zat tarafından
Avrupa dillerinden birinde yazılmış olan ve memleket idare eden hüküm-
darlara dair nasayihi ihtiva eden bir eser için yazılmış reddiyedir”. See also
the original passage in the manuscript, TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 1.
36. M.Ş. Hanioğlu (1995), The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford
University Press): 13. Because of this false attribution to a Spinozist, the
author considers the work a refutation of Spinoza (see p. 222, fn. 55). On
Machiavelli and Spinoza see E. Haitsma Mulier, A Controversial Republican:
Dutch Views on Machiavelli in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in:
G. Bock, Q. Skinner and M. Viroli (eds), Machiavelli and Republicanism
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press): 247–263.
37. TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 95 and 212.
38. S. Anglo (2005), Machiavelli, The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm,
Hostility, Irrelevance (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 48.
39. TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 1; Anti Machiavel, VI. Similarly, the first Arabic
translation of The Prince is entitled al-Amīr fī ‘Ilm al-Tarīkh was al-
Siyāsah wa al-Tadbīr (“The Prince: The Science of History, Politics and
Governance”). See A. El Ma’ani (2010), “The first Arabic Translation”,
in: R. De Pol (ed.), The First Translations of Machiavelli’s Prince: From
the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi): 279–304: 289. On this translation, see now
Elisabetta Benigni’s chapter in this book.
40. Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, 64: “politique moderne”. See
also TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 95: “tadābīr va ḥukūmātin ṭarz-i cedīdi”.
41. On this expression and its meaning see the First Decennale, 379–380, in N.
Machiavelli (1989), The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. A. Gilbert,
3 vols. (Durham and London: Duke University Press): Vol. III, 1453.
42. A.H. de Groot (2000), “Dragomans’ Careers: The Change of Status

in some Families connected with the British and Dutch Embassies at
Istanbul, 1785–1829”, in: A. Hamilton, A.H. de Groot and M.H. van
den Boogert (eds), Friends and Rivals in the East: Studies in Anglo-
Dutch Relations in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth
Century (Leiden: Brill): 223–246: 226.
43. TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 66; Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel,
39. See also TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 42; Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-
Machiavel, 27. On Machiavelli and the British Republican tradition see
J.G.A. Pocock (1975), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press). The epitaph of Herbert Freiherr von Rathkeal recalls
that he was “descended from a British stock of noble and illustrious par-
entage, an origin and connexion he was proud to acknowledge and to
justify by an almost patriotic attachment to our common country and
countrymen, cemented still farther by the marriage of his second daugh-
ter, Miss Constance Herbert, to our last worthy and most respected chief
in the Levant, John Spencer Smith”. See The Gentleman’s Magazin and
Historical Chronicle, 77 (1802), 912. A genealogy of the Herbert family
is published ibidem, 1012.
44. Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, 75; TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 104.
45. Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, 85; TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 108.
47. See, for instance, TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 15, 32, 35, 37, and 158.
48. Ibidem, 109; Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, 87.
49. Ibidem, 76–83. See also TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 103–104.
50. Examples include Pope Alexander VI in Chapter 3 (ibidem, 21), Pyrrhus
in Chapter 4 (p. 35), Thebes and Numantia in Chapter 5 (p. 40), Theseus
in Chapter 6 (p. 46), Ionia and Hellespont in Chapter 7 (p. 55), Nabis in
Chapter 18 (p. 149), or Antonio da Venafro in Chapter 22 (p. 185).
51. Ibidem, 212. In the early nineteenth century the Egyptian Khedive
Muḥammad ‘Alī extended this opinion to the whole work by saying:
“This book [The Prince] is completely useless. These are all things that I
already know”. See El Ma’ani, “The first Arabic Translation”, 281.
52. TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 7.
53. M. Akif Aydın (1988–2013), “Hükümet”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm
Ansiklopedisi, 44 vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı): Vol. XVIII, 468.
54. M. İpşirli (1988–2013), “Hükümet”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm
Ansiklopedisi, 44 vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı): Vol. XVIII, 470.
55. TPML, Ḫazīnah 372, 7.
56. Ibidem, 8, 11, and 19.
57. Ibidem, 5, 10, 31, 36, 49 and 51.
58. Ibidem, 80 (mulūk ve salāṭīn).
198 N.Y. AYDOĞDU
59. Ibidem, 10.
60. For the use of the word in the early ages of Islam, see B. Lewis (1988),
The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1988): 35 and 51–53.
61. H. İnalcık (1940–1988), “Padişah”, in: Islam Ansiklopedisi, 20 vols.
(Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı): Vol. IX, 491–495: 491; A. Taneri
(1978), Osmanlı Devleti’nin Kuruluş Döneminde Hükümdarlık
Kurumunun Gelişmesi ve Saray Hayatı-Teşkilatı (Ankara: A.Ü. Dilve
Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları): 220. See also Lewis, The Political
Language of Islam, 98.
62. İnalcık, “Padişah”, 492.
63. See V.H. Aksan (1999), “An Ottoman Portrait of Frederick the Great”,
Oriente Moderno, n. s., 18, no. 79, 203–215.
64. B. Lewis (1982), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W.W.
Norton): 201–220.
65. On the circulation of Machiavelli’s Prince in the nineteenth-century
Ottoman culture, see On the importance and typology of translation
activity in the Ottoman imperial context see A. Meral (2013), “A Survey
of Translation Activity in the Ottoman Empire”, The Journal of Ottoman
Studies, 42, 105–155: 141.
Acknowledgements I thank my colleagues Mahmut Erbay, Erhan Özşeker,

Muharrem Öztel,and Serdar Bekar, as well as the two editors of this volume, for
their assistance during the preparation of this chapter.
Author Biography
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu is Assistant Professor of Political History at the

Kırklareli University. She is a specialist in the late Ottoman period and modern
Turkey, with a particular interest in the history of political thought and military
history. She is the editor of Ferit Kam, Avrupa Mektuplari (2000), as well as
(with İsmail Kara) of Namık Kemal, Omanlı modernleşmesinin meseleleri: Siyaset,
hukuk, din, iktisat, matbuat, vol. I (2005).
CHAPTER 10
Translating Machiavelli in Egypt:

The Prince and the Shaping of a New
Political Vocabulary in the
Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
In a chapter of his famous book Islam et modernité (1986), the

Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui compared the philosophy of
history in the writings of the Arab jurist and historian Ibn Khaldūn
(1332–1406) with the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli.1 This
comparison, which was and still is unusual to western readers, fol
lowed in the wake of debates dating back to the previous century. A
popular anecdote about the Egyptian Khedive (viceroy) Muḥammad ‘Alī
(r. 1805–1848) tells that when reading the translation of The Prince he
had commissioned, he commented:
You, Italians, loudly praise your Machiavelli (…). For my part, I was
more intrigued by the reading of another book (…) the History of Ibn
Khaldūn. Compared to your Machiavelli, he is much more independent
E. Benigni (*) 
University of Turin, Turin, Italy

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2_10
200 E. Benigni
and relevant. You say that Machiavelli is banned in several states of Europe.
Ibn Khaldun would have been even more.2
Whether the anecdote attributed to Muḥammad ‘Alī is authentic or not,

it shows how debates about the reading of Machiavelli in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were not confined to Europe but extended to the
Ottoman Empire, being rooted in local societies, as the comparison with
Ibn Khaldūn demonstrates.
This chapter examines the unique manuscript copy of the first Arabic
translation of The Prince, produced at the court of Muḥammad ‘Alī in
1832, and currently preserved in the Egyptian National Library and
Archives in Cairo.3 In addressing the transformation of the language and
the interpretation of key political concepts in Machiavelli’s text, the pri-
mary aim of my study is to examine this translation as an illustration of
nine teenth-century Italian-Arabic cultural exchanges. Furthermore, this
chapter reveals how the Arabic translation of Machiavelli relates to texts
that were circulating in the same time period, against the background
of nineteenth-century ideas about language and state reforms and the rise of
nationalism in the eastern Mediterranean. In doing so, it aims at challenging
the conventional understanding of the reception of European texts within
the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, offering a view that recon-
nects the Arab nineteenth-century Renaissance (al-Nahḍah) to an idea of
“Mediterranean Risorgimento”. The first translation of 1832 will therefore
be discussed in comparison with a second translation completed in 1912
within the context of Egyptian anti-colonial nationalism.
The manuscript has never been accurately analysed, probably because
of the lack of communication between Europe and the Arab world as
concerns philology and intellectual history.4 Scholarship dealing with
Arabic translations of major European texts in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries usually focuses on the reception of European culture dur-
ing al-Nahḍah. The point of departure in this scholarship is that this
encounter, and the resulting translations, contributed to the formation
of Arab “modernity”.5 A number of recent works have offered a more
nuanced interpretation of this historical phenomenon, showing how
emerging ideas in philosophy, science and literature were not passively
received, but creatively re-forged by a wide range of actors, including
translators, literati and communities of readers.6 However, conventional
interpretations of Arab translations are still premised on the assumption
that translation and cultural reform projects in the nineteenth century
10 TRANSLATING MACHIAVELLI IN EGYPT 201
were a direct response to European influence, merely reproducing the

“original” model.7 On the other hand, western studies investigating the
circulation of Machiavelli’s work have emphasised the continuity of her-
meneutic engagement with the text in different historical contexts, but
have overlooked the Islamic reception of this work, only focusing on its
European and Atlantic reception.8 This means that a more global under-
standing of the circulation of Machiavelli is still awaited. A transnational
re-reading of the Arab Machiavelli, therefore, offers an opportunity to
explore unconventional interpretations produced by a different reader-
ship, and to challenge the common wisdom about the formation of west-
ern and non-western modern political thought.
Mediterranean Connections
In approaching the immense bibliography on Machiavelli’s Prince, one
cannot fail to notice that the text has commonly been read as a foundation
of the “canon” of modern western political thought. As a way to debunk
this conventional wisdom, I will begin from the following question: What
happens when a “canonical” text such as The Prince is read through the
lens of Arabic, a language commonly identified with a culture located out-
side of the western teleology of modern political thought? My analysis will
show how Machiavelli’s translator imported concepts which were unknown
in the Ottoman public sphere, but also drew upon Islamic semantics
through a set of linguistic negotiations. This process demonstrates how
in the nineteenth century Machiavelli was read in a global and local vein
at the same time. Machiavelli was translated into Arabic in a specific phase
of Egypt’s cultural history which followed the Napoleonic expeditions.
Consequently, the translator interpreted the text through the lenses of sup-
posedly universal values originated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe, primarily in France, and as such disseminated in colonial contexts.
Yet he also reinterpreted its content against the background of place-spe-
cific cultural and political processes and regional networks of the circulation
of ideas which were part of what could be defined as a nineteenth-century
“Mediterranean Renaissance”, an expression used here with reference to
al-Nahḍah and the “Risorgimento” together, thus encompassing a cross-
cultural space comprising Italy and the eastern Mediterranean in the after-
math of the Napoleonic expeditions.
With a few exceptions, even the emerging scholarship that deals with
the notion of “Mediterranean Risorgimento” has not sufficiently taken the
202 E. Benigni
Ottoman Empire into account. Scholars who have related the rise of nation-
states to the Mediterranean circulation of ideas include the work of French
historian Gilles Pécout. His studies have approached the nineteenth-cen-
tury Italian Risorgimento in a transnational perspective, identifying the
Mediterranean as a space of flows and mobility witnessing the intermin-
gling of different experiences and ideas of nationalism and independence.9
Maurizio Isabella has also interpreted the Italian Risorgimento within the
context of a wider “Mediterranean regeneration”, which was affected by
nineteenth-century British and French political thinking, but at the same
time gave rise to a distinctive set of ideas.10 However, mainstream histori-
ography fails to recognise the fact that during the nineteenth century several
regions of the Ottoman Empire experienced cultural and political move-
ments that can be equated with those commonly included in the idea of
“Risorgimento”.11
The significance of this historical conjuncture has been emphasised
by Peter Gran in a comparative study of Egypt and Italy in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries.12 In analysing the cultural scene in both
areas at the time of the late Enlightenment, Gran identifies a number of
parallels, such as the resurgence of the classics and the perceived decline
in language, the dominance of prose over poetry, the new wave of lexi-
cographical and grammatical studies. Despite some obvious differences,
according to Gran a parallel reading of the cultural history of Italy and
Egypt from 1760 to 1850, namely during the advent of the modern
nation-state, is highly illustrative of the benefits of comparative analy-
sis. Drawing on Gran’s work and on recent studies that reconsider the
conventional ideas of the “Risorgimento”, nationalism and revolutions
from a southern perspective,13 I will argue that the circulating version
of The Prince in nineteenth-century Cairo should be viewed as part of
a trans-regional “Mediterranean Renaissance” in which ideas about lan-
guage, political reform, national identity and sovereignty were passion-
ately debated. In the first half of the century in particular, such debates
were nurtured by commissioned translations, the publication of journals,
pamphlets and editions of literary texts.
Travelling to the East

Before looking at the first translation of 1832, it is worth assessing
the geographical and cultural reach of the Arabic translation of The
Prince. A number of questions arise: Was this a belated and peripheral
phenomenon of reception, or was it part of a larger cultural process of

the circulation of knowledge in the eastern Mediterranean? In order to
answer this question, it is useful to consider the Ottoman reception of
The Prince before the Arabic translation. In a book titled Letteratura
turchesca (1787), Abbot Giambattista Toderini (1728–1799) offers
a vivid representation of the “atrocity” of Ottoman political behaviour
mobilising the notion of “Machiavellianism”. He refers to Ottoman
politics as “Machiavellian, even before the rise of Machiavelli”. Despite
their unscrupulous conduct, Toderini concedes that the Ottomans
were not guided by “Machiavellianism”: The Prince was translated
(“vulgarised”) shortly before his stay (1781–1786) in the Ottoman
Empire, commissioned by Sultan Muṣṭafā III (r. 1757–1774).14 The
abbot, who was a strong anti-Machiavellian, also points out that the
sultan commissioned a translation of Anti-Machiavel by King Frederick
II of Prussia (r. 1740–1786) along with the text by Machiavelli
contained in it to reinforce its confutation.15
Toderini’s account is only one of a larger number of reports inform-
ing european readers about “oriental” translations of The Prince. The
high number of accounts of this kind suggests that anecdotes about the
circulation of Machiavelli’s book in the Ottoman Empire became a cli-
ché among travellers crossing the eastern Mediterranean during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The translation commissioned by
Muṣṭafā III, for instance, is mentioned in a letter of the traveller and
antiquarian Domenico Sestini (1750–1832). Sestini confirms Toderini’s
account by writing to his friend Giovanni Mariti (1836–1806) that a
dragoman, called d’Herbert, translated The Prince along with Frederick
II’s Anti-Machiavel at the sultan’s request. Muṣṭafā III asked for this
translation with the purpose of educating himself and his children.16 The
manuscript, currently preserved at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library
(Hazine 372), is undated. We can only conjecture that it was completed
before 1786, prior to the departure of Toderini from Istanbul.17
When The Prince was translated into Arabic in 1832, there was there-
fore already one Ottoman Turkish translation of the text produced at the
end of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the parallel translation of
Machiavelli’s Prince and Frederick II’s Anti-Machiavel suggests that the
Ottoman Empire was not alien to eighteenth-century European debates
about Machiavelli. The fact that the Ottoman court was already familiar
with Machiavelli—and the arguments of anti-Machiavellianism—in the
204 E. Benigni
eighteenth century through the dissemination of Anti-Machiavel leads to

a further exploration of the commissioned translation in Cairo.
The Ottoman Empire was a rich and complex political-cultural entity,
characterised by a variety of regional dynamics. The territories of the
empire were characterised by the convergence of different languages and
literary traditions, by a lively circulation of books, and by a readership
acquainted with different languages.18 From the beginning of the nine-
teenth century onwards, a large number of translations from European
languages became available in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and
Armenian. This multilingual configuration was dominated by Arabic
and Turkish as prestige languages. There was also a significant presence
of Italian as the language of diplomatic affairs and cultural exchanges. It
is within the context of such multiplicity of languages and ideas that an
Arabic version of The Prince first appeared at the court of the Khedive
Muḥammad ‘Alī, a local governor of Albanian origin who dreamt about
turning the Egyptian Wilāya (the administrative division of the Ottoman
Empire) into an independent state with imperial ambitions. Widely
known for his idea of transforming Egypt through a series of economic,
political and cultural reforms, Muḥammad ‘Alī was a prominent figure
as a commissioner of translations and printing of technical, historical and
military treatises written in European languages, as well as of new editions
and prints of classical Islamic books, thus making a decisive contribution
to the adoption and spread of the printed press in Egypt and beyond.19
Therefore, the gap between the translation requested in Istanbul by
Muṣṭafā III and that produced in Cairo for Muḥammad ‘Alī is not just
chronological, but cultural and political as well. By the time the second
translation was completed, Egypt was gaining independence from the
Ottoman authority, constructing its identity as a centralised and inde-
pendent state. As a result, there was no longer any need to devote atten-
tion to the reading of Anti-Machiavel; on the contrary, Machiavelli’s
ideas were explicitly regarded as a role model rather than an anti-model
for good governance. Machiavelli, however, did not stand alone. A careful
look at the early nineteenth-century Egyptian manuscript opens a win-
dow onto the way Machiavelli was received and read in Cairo.
The Dragoman and The Prince

The Arabic version of Machiavelli’s Prince, whose first page is signed by
its translator Rāfā’īl Zakhūr, is followed in the manuscript by another
translation, in the same handwriting and entitled Muqaddimāt fī ḥaqq
al-umam (“Introduction to the Right of the Nations”). This work is a

partial translation of the Le Droit des gens (1758) by the Swiss philoso-
pher Emer de Vattel. Despite the absence of the date of publication and
any information regarding the translation, the popularity of Emer de
Vattel during the eighteenth century and the fact that an Italian transla-
tion was available since the 1780s hint at the fact that the same person
may have translated both texts together.20 As a matter of fact, the choice
of translating Machiavelli and Emer de Vattel, who advocate the embrace
of non-theological constitutional principles based on the rule of law and
social contract, seems consistent: the experience of the French occupa-
tion of Egypt and the process of reforming Egypt aroused interest in both
Machiavelli’s and de Vattel’s theory of power and natural law.
The ideological implications behind this attempt to reconcile Machiavelli
with Emer de Vattel within the narrative framework of the al-Nahḍah
through the translation process deserve closer scrutiny. The production
of a growing number of translations of European texts into Arabic, as
well as of editions of Islamic treatises and works of Adab (the Arabic term
encompassing various literary genres, such as belle-lettres, history, geogra-
phy, advice for kings), marked the Arab al-Nahḍah particularly in Egypt.21
Machiavelli and de Vattel were read along with translations and editions of
texts dealing with the art of government, philosophy of law, history and
the decline and fall of empires, from both European languages and the
Islamic tradition, such as the first printed version of the Muqaddima by Ibn
Khaldūn, and the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et
leur decadence (1734) by Montesquieu.22 Machiavelli’s and other European
historico-philosophical writings were thus introduced into the variegated
landscape of the late Ottoman philosophy of history and advice to kings
(Nasīḥat al-mulūk). Many of these literary enterprises were undertaken
under the patronage of a political authority, reflecting the governmental
project to assert a new conception of authority and to respond to emerg-
ing debates on laws and rights. In the case of The Prince, the active role of
Muḥammad ‘Alī in commissioning the translation of the text is acknowl-
edged in the introduction. The translator, Rāfā’īl Zakhūr, writes that he
translated the book “for the benefit of those wielding political power”,
drawing the attention of the readers to Muḥammad ‘Alī as the viceroy
(nā’ib) of the Kingdom of Egypt, the patron of the work and the commis-
sioner of the translation.
A glimpse into the life of the translator, Rāfā’īl Zakhūr, helps us
understand Cairo’s multifaceted cultural scene in the early nineteenth
206 E. Benigni
century. Details about the translator’s life can be found in different

sources from the period.23 The sources convey the typical picture of a
dragoman of the Ottoman Empire, incessantly moving across different
religious and cultural contexts, and strongly connected to the established
authorities, both colonial and local. He was a mediator who, thanks to
his knowledge of French and Italian, entered positions of prestige in
Italy, France and Egypt. Rāfā’īl Zakhūr, also known as Rāfā’īl al-turjumān
(“Rāfā’īl the interpreter”), was a Greek Catholic priest who belonged to
the Basilian Salvatorian Order.
Born in Cairo in 1759, probably from a Syrian family whose origins
were from Aleppo, Rāfā’īl Zakhūr studied in Rome at the Greek College
of St. Anastasius where he learned Italian. After his studies in Italy and a
short period in Sidon, he went back to Cairo shortly before the French
occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). During the years of the occupation, he
worked for the French administration.24 His name is mentioned three times
in the famous chronicle entitled ‘Ajā’ib al-āthār fī al-tarājim wa al-akhbār
(“The Marvels of the Works on Biographies and Histories”) written by the
shaykh of al-Azhar and historian ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī (1754–1822).
According to al-Jabartī, Rāfā’īl was the “first translator” of the court dur-
ing the Napoleonic expedition,25 where he was in charge of translating into
Arabic documents produced by the French administration.26 Rāfā’īl was also
included among the few Arab members of the Institut d’Égypte, the cultural
institution founded by Napoleon to conduct archaeological, scientific and
philological research during the Egyptian campaign.27
When Bonaparte left Cairo, Rāfā’īl’s desire to return to Europe led
him to send two letters to Napoleon in Italian. In the first, he expresses
his aspiration to spend his life at the service of the French Republic28; in
the second, he encloses a short poem in Arabic devoted to the French
ruler.29 It is probably thanks to these letters that he attained his goal:
Rāfā’īl Zakhūr became professor of Arabic language at the École spé-
ciale des Langues orientales in Paris from 1803 to 1816, as mentioned
in the preface of an unfinished book about Egypt and the Jebal Druze
(“Druze Mountain”) dedicated to Bonaparte.30 However, at some point
he returned to Egypt, putting an end to his career in Paris: perhaps he
felt that his expectations about his life in France were unfulfilled by the
current political situation and, most likely, he saw Muḥammad ‘Alī’s rise
to power as an opportunity for a better career in a new state.
We learn about his arrival in Egypt from a note in the diary of the
Italian scientist Gian Battista Brocchi (1772–1826). In 1822 Brocchi
recorded his meeting in Cairo with the dragoman “Don Rāfā’īl, a teacher
of Arabic language in the school founded by Muḥammad ‘Alī in the Būlāq
district”.31 In the eyes of Muḥammad ‘Alī, the Būlāq area was a “labora-
tory” for the newly created Egypt: in the district he introduced in 1822
the first printing press in Egypt, along with new training schools designed
to provide the new state with civil servants and army officers. The school
offered courses in several fields, including mathematics, medicine, mili-
tary and languages (mainly Italian, French and Arabic). The purpose of
the printing workshop was primarily to produce textbooks for the nearby
school, and they were largely translations from the European languages.
Gian Battista Brocchi also notes that “Don Rāfā’īl” was commissioned
to translate Machiavelli’s Prince into Arabic by Muḥammad ‘Alī, who
“was told about the usefulness of the book teaching eminent principles
for the art of government to despotic sovereigns”.32 The manuscript is
dated 1832, which means that Zakhūr probably devoted his efforts to
“Arabicising” Machiavelli’s work between 1822 and 1832.
Was Rāfā’īl Zakhūr’s translation successful? One likely answer is that it
was not. The translation of The Prince is only partial, and it never reached
the printing stage, despite the fact that works of its genre were widely
printed.33 The text is poorly written and replete with colloquial expres-
sions, due to the fact that it was still in draft form, yet to be Arabicised
and domesticated by the editors. The syntax is heavily influenced by the
Italian, which was very familiar to the translator, to the extent that it is diffi-
cult to understand the Arabic without looking at the original Italian.34 The
translation process at the time of Muḥammad ‘Alī consisted of different
stages: the translator, usually someone educated as a Christian like Rāfā’īl
Zakhūr, acted as the initial “mediator” between European languages and
Arabic. A further probable reason is that Zukhūra’s classical Arabic (fuṣhā)
was weak. As he did not have an Azhari education and did not have an
accurate knowledge of classical Arabic (fuṣḥā), he was unable to render the
text in elegant and refined Arabic.35 A further explanation for the colloquial
and literal translation is that it was a first draft meant for further editing. In
order to finalise the text, the translation bureau appointed Azhari shaykhs
as editors and correctors working along with the translators: the editor
(muḥarrir) oversaw the first round of revisions and the refinement of the
Arabic, the corrector (muṣaḥḥiḥ) was in charge of improving the literary
accuracy of the language.36
The draft format of the manuscript of the translation of The Prince
does not allow us to carry out an analysis of the translation in terms of
208 E. Benigni
syntax and style, which were of essential importance to the original text.
Nonetheless, this draft version raises many questions about the immedi-
ate reception of Machiavelli’s political vocabulary. As we shall see, the
translator’s work is ostensibly influenced by the adoption of new vocabu-
lary, whose rendering into Arabic was still at an early stage, shaped by the
conditions of colonial rule and by the increasing number of translations,
the editing of Islamic medieval books of history, belle-lettres and political
treatises.
Creating the Language, Creating the State

Machiavelli’s political thought should not have appeared radically
new. Some of the concepts presented in The Prince were already famil-
iar to Arabic readers well before the advent of Machiavelli, as the Latin
Christian genre of “mirror for princes” is based on Aristotelian principles
that are also at the heart of the Islamic treatises providing advice for rul-
ers. These principles include the virtues of fortuna (destiny, good for-
tune) and prudenza (prudence). The mutating fortuna, impinging on
human life, is translated into Arabic as sa‘d or ḥaẓẓ. Both terms indicate
“fate” or “chance”, however the translator Rāfā’īl Zakhūr prefers sa‘d for
Machiavelli’s fortuna when used in a positive sense, while he prefers ḥaẓẓ
when fortuna is used to indicate destiny, regardless of whether this des-
tiny is deemed positive or negative.37 The notion of prudenza is mostly
translated using the root of fiṭnah (astuteness), as in Chapter 15 when
Machiavelli advises the prince about the need to be prudent (faṭin) enough
“to know how to avoid the infamy of those vices that would take his state
from him”.38 The translation of political terms related to the sphere of
governance raise interesting questions. The concept of stato (state) is ren-
dered with the Arabic ḥukm (pl. aḥkām).39 The meaning of the word ḥukm
and its cognates are related to wisdom, order, power, authority, differing
from the word dawlah, dynasty, which stands for “state” in current politi-
cal Arabic vocabulary.40 However, current Arabic language uses ḥukūma
for “government”. The translation of The Prince is one of the first exam-
ples of the nineteenth-century use of the root ḥ-k-m to signify “state” in
the political-legal lexicon.41 The notion of repubblica (republic) is even
more intriguing. This term was first introduced in the Arabic language
and standardised during the nineteenth century, but was variously trans-
lated until the final jumhūriyya. The translation of The Prince provides
documentary evidence about this process: Zakhūr translates repubblica as
mashyakhah, which is related to the word shaykh meaning “old, noble”.42

At the time of the Napoleonic invasion, the term mashyakhah for repub-
lic, whose usage will eventually be replaced by the word jumhūr (ordinary
“group of people” and then used from the nineteenth century on with the
meaning of “republic”), was used in official communiqués of the French
occupation army in Egypt, as well as being listed in the first French-Arabic
dictionary compiled by J.F. Ruphy (1802).43 Since Rāfā’īl Zakhūr was pre-
viously working in the office created by Napoleon, it is likely that he bor-
rowed some terms from Ruphy’s dictionary.
The translation of words related to faith and religion is less problematic,
given the richness of Arabic in this domain. Religion is mostly rendered
with the word dīn and its plural adyān (faith, cult) or amānah (honesty,
integrity). In Chapter 18, “How princes should keep their promises”, the
“promises” in the title (la fede in the Italian original) is rendered with the
combination of two terms “covenant” (‘ahd) and “integrity” (amānah).44
In the same chapter, when Machiavelli refers to “two ways of fighting: one
according to the laws, the other with force”, Zakhūr interestingly uses
“bi- al- sharā’i‘” to translate “with laws”. The root sh-r-‘ is the basis of the
word sharī‘ah, the Islamic law. With the introduction of the Napoleonic
codes and translations from French, the term “law”, particularly with ref-
erence to non-Islamic legislation, was translated with other terms, such
as Qānūn (from the Latin Canon, a term already used for the ruler’s law
to differentiate its meaning from sharī ‘ah).45 A similar tendency to use
more immediate Islamic political vocabulary is also evident in the use of
sulṭān for imperatore (emperor). The concept of “free will” in Chapter 25
is rendered with the Arabic construction Irādatinā al-muṭlaqah.46
The translator makes no reference to the Islamic tradition of debates
about freedom and free-will related to the terms ḥurr and ḥuriyyah.47
However, the word ḥurr is used in Chapter 5 when the translator refers
to the acquisition of “those states (…) accustomed to living under their
own laws and in liberty” with the Arabic “bi-mūjibi sharā’i‘ihā wa ‘ala
al-ḥurriyyah”.48 As for the concept of “civil principality” (Chapter 9),
Zakhūr interprets it as “al-amriyyāt al-madaniyyah”, with reference to the
root m-d-n of “city”, “civilisation”. The same chapter also contains two
interesting notions: privato cittadino (private citizen) and patria (coun-
try). The first is translated with the periphrasis “ahālī al-balad” (“people
of the country”), with no reference to the concept of citizenship, and the
second with “waṭan”, a term which has a long history in medieval Arabic
with the Latin sense of patria, which will become synonymous with
“nation” in the nineteenth-century. As for “ecclesiastical princedoms”
210 E. Benigni
in Chapter 11, the translator used “al-amriyyāt al-kanā’isiyyah”,49 with

direct reference to the church (in Arabic Kānisa, pl. Kanā’is). In the same
chapter, however, religion is translated as diyāna (religious practice) with
no specific reference to Christianity.50
These and other linguistic features of the text should be seen in the
context of a more general reshuffling of the Arabic vocabulary fac-
ing the challenges of nineteenth-century colonial impact and the rise
of an increasingly global space of legal and political thought. Issues
relating to the translation of terms from European languages were
first addressed by the translator Rifā‘ah Rāfi’ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801/2–
1873) coping with French. Upon the request of Ibrahīm Pasha, son
of Muḥammad ‘Alī, he undertook the project of compiling an Arabic–
French dictionary that would include all the specialised terminology
and translatable terms.51 Even though this project failed, al-Ṭahṭāwī was
highly motivated by his conviction that foreign European words were
bound to become part (dakhīl) of the Arab vocabulary, as had hap-
pened with Greek and Persian at the time of the Abbasids. Therefore,
he chose to continue to add glossaries at the end or the beginning of
the books he translated.52 Almost one decade before working on the
translation of The Prince, Rāfā’īl Zakhūr also embarked on the first
Italian-Arabic dictionary, printed in Būlāq in 1822.
For al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rāfā’īl Zakhūr and other leading translators and literati
of the schools founded by Muḥammad ‘Alī the introduction of foreign
terms was a major concern and was intensively discussed. As a result of the
many possibilities debated and put forward, there was not only one way
to “absorb” foreign language into Arabic. As the translation of The Prince
demonstrates, a translator could apply different strategies in the same text.
In some cases, foreign names were “Arabicised” through transliteration;
this was so for many proper names of historical or mythological figures
present in Zakhūr’s Prince.53 In other cases, the meaning of French or
Italian terms was re-formulated according to the Arabic and Islamic liter-
ary traditions, for instance, diyānah (faith), waṭan (fatherland) or sharī‘ah
(Islamic law). Sometimes translators also resorted to the genitive case
when no direct correspondence could be found: “ahālī al-balad” for “pri-
vate citizen”, or “irādatinā al-muṭlaqah” for “free-will”.
In the following decades, the increasing number of translations rein-
forced the relationship between language and national identity. Debates
over the need to revise or purify the Arabic language turned out to be
a fundamental part of al-Nahḍah discourse.54 Grammarians and literati
argued for a purification of Arabic (like Nāṣif al-Yāzijī, 1800–1871, and

his son Ibrāhim, 1847–1906) and for a simplification of the grammar
(like Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, 1805–1887, Yūsūf al-Asīrm 1815–1889 and
Jurjī Zaydān, 1861–1941) stimulated by emergent ideas about language
reform and its relation to national identity.
The “Risorgimento” atmosphere which took shape after the
Napoleonic invasion in different areas of the Mediterranean was not alien
to Egypt or Syria, where nineteenth-century debates about the Arabic
language were marked by the slow emergence of nationalist claims.
Debates within the Arab provinces, therefore, present many commonali-
ties with those that were taking place in Italy, almost at the same time,
as concerns the introduction of neologisms, the question of the purity
of grammar and the need to reform language. The discussions stimu-
lated by the translator and linguist Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808),55
and then by the novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873),56 and the
linguists Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874)57 and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli
(1829–1907),58 clearly illustrate these parallelisms.
As demonstrated by the fact that all leading al-Nahḍah figures came
from different regions and belonged to different confessions, this was a
cultural and political movement with a trans-regional and trans-confes-
sional character. Arabic language was, in this sense, a particularly sensi-
tive issue for Christians and Muslims, as it provided common ground for
a trans-regional insurgence at a time in which the threat of colonialism
and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire made the search for a unifying
identity of paramount importance. Since almost all the protagonists of
both the Arabic Nahḍah were multilingual and thus belonged to different
“nations”—akin to some of the leading figures of the Italian Risorgimento
such as Ugo Foscolo and Niccolò Tommaseo—the essence of the debates
was not related to the exclusiveness of a language confined within national
borders. In both Arabic and Italian contexts, the discussion focused on the
pursuit of a unified and simplified language, leaving aside local variants in
order to lay the foundations for an ideal unity.59
The Prince Outside the Court:

Anti-Colonial Readings
The Prince’s travelling to Egypt, however, did not end at the time of
Muḥammad ‘Alī. In 1912, almost one century after the first translation
by Rāfā’īl Zakhūr, a second version appeared in Cairo. The translator was
212 E. Benigni
the nationalist intellectual, lawyer and writer Muḥammad Luṭfī Jum‘ah

(1886–1953). Compared with the first translation, this second Arabic
version of The Prince reached a larger public of readers as it was pub-
lished by the newly established publisher Dār al-Ma‘ārif. The work is
preceded by a long introduction which also includes an essay entitled
Tazkār Mākyāvīllī (“A memory of Machiavelli”), where the translator
describes in a passionate tone his first encounter with the work of the
Florentine secretary. Moreover, he adds a short fictional story, al-Laylah
al-akhīra (“The Last Night”), in which he showcases his creativity, locat-
ing Machiavelli’s death in Florence’s gloomy and decadent atmosphere.60
The long introduction unveils the specific purpose of this translation.
Unlike Rāfā’īl Zakhūr’s Prince, this work is not the product of a patron-
age-based relationship. Rather, it is the outcome of a personal interest,
and is addressed to a broader audience. A century after Muḥammad ‘Alī’s
rise to power, the cultural and political purpose of translations in Egypt
was very different. Muḥammad ‘Alī’s interest in Machiavelli stemmed
from the pragmatism of the Khedive, who looked at the Florentine sec-
retary as a source of inspiration in the larger process of the reform of
state institutions and the army. The renewed interest in Machiavelli at the
beginning of the twentieth century arises from a different context. The
economic collapse during the reign of Khedive Ismā‘īl (1863–1879),
nephew of Muḥammad ‘Alī, along with the failure of the ‘Urābī revolt
against the Khedive and the British occupation (1879) and the con-
sequent establishment of the veiled British protectorate led by Evelyn
Baring (1882–1914), first Earl of Cromer, aroused a strong national-
ist sentiment among Egyptian literati. Intellectuals such as translator
Luṭfī Jum‘ah, who in different ways participated in the protest against
the British protectorate, were in search of a definition of what a “nation”
is and the role citizens should play in it.61 Most particularly, they were
rethinking the sovereign-subject relation, reflecting on the potential and
the limits of this power relationship.
Luṭfī Jum‘ah’s political engagement clearly emerges in the above-men-
tioned introductory essay to his translation. His reading of The Prince
is motivated by his curiosity about Machiavelli, which he discov ered
through political activist friends. After a long and frantic search, he finds
the work in the Cairo book market of Ezbekiyya. Years later, inspired by
his travels across Europe, he decides to translate it.62 During his travels
he visits Florence, described as an earthly paradise, as well as Machiavelli’s
family house and his tomb.63 He romanticises Machiavelli by reading his

political work along with a text that he defines the “spiritual” and “ori-
ental” counterpart of the rationality of Machiavelli, the famous four-line
verses by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (Rubayat)64: “I read Khayyam
in moments of sadness and anguish of my spirit in order to purify my
soul drinking his sacred wine. I read The Prince when I want to recover
from the intoxication of my fantasy and to come back to the difficult
arena of reality”.65 Machiavelli is, in the eyes of Luṭfī Jum‘ah, the western
rational spirit as opposed to the oriental wisdom, the victim of political
disgrace, the exiled free intellectual mind. He sees his political misfortune
and exile as a symbol of perennial political injustice. In speaking about
Machiavelli’s imprisonment and exile he dwells upon the idea of intel-
lectual solitude, referring to medieval Arab philosophers who suffered
exile and political disgrace (al-Ghazālī, al-Fārābī, al-Kindī).66 According
to Luṭfī al-Jum‘ah, despite the fact that Machiavelli was a “western”67
author, whose soul is characterised by the inclination toward movement
and activity, during his seclusion he embodied the typically oriental dis-
tinguishing features of calm, reflexion and solitude.68 In short, through a
language characterised by Orientalist tropes and essentialist dichotomies,
he presents the figure of Machiavelli as an Italian political hero, whose
universal message deserves to be incorporated into Islamic reformist
thought and national discourse.
As far as the translation is concerned, the rendering into Arabic is fluid,
showing the translator’s mastery of language skills. The Italian language
and structure are transformed in order to adapt to Arabic syntactic and
lexical forms. Luṭfī Jum‘ah uses a rich vocabulary, avoiding some of the
terms used by Zakhūr and replacing them with more current terminol-
ogy. The disappearance of terms like Zakhūr’s mashyakhāt (“republics”)
and ḥukm (“governance”) and their replacement with the currently used
notions of jumhūriyyāt and dawlah are illustrative of this emergent trans-
lation ethos. Most notably, Luṭfī Jum‘ah uses the word waṭan in order to
render the Italian “patria”. Zakhūr’s translation displays the same choice
for the rendering of the Italian “patria”. However, Luṭfī Jum‘ah charges
the word waṭan with a different political significance as compared with
his predecessor. In the introduction, he often refers to the importance
of the concept of “Italian” waṭan in Machiavelli. It should be pointed
out that at the time of Luṭfī Jum‘ah’s process of translation, waṭan was
undergoing a significant semantic shift from the original Islamic notion
of a place of origin to the contemporary meaning of territorial national
214 E. Benigni
identity.69 The use of the term in the two translations testifies to this shift
in meaning: Zakhūr’s waṭan is probably closer to Machiavelli’s meaning
of “patria”, while in Luṭfī Jum‘ah waṭan is understood as nation state
in the meaning prevailing after the nineteenth century. This enthusiastic
nationalist reading of The Prince is evident in Chapter 26, which contains
the famous appeal to Italy’s liberation. Here Luṭfī Jum‘ah uses the voice
of the Florentine secretary to address the people of Egypt, calling for
them to continue their struggle against British colonialism and its alliance
with local Egyptian rulers.70
Luṭfī Jum‘ah domesticates The Prince in form and content, and his
translation does not aim to be transparent. Rather, the long introduc-
tion and the personal memoirs of his “encounter” with Machiavelli’s
thought emphasise the strong individual and political commitment of
the translator, underscoring the potential of his political interpreta-
tion. It is in fact more than a translation: it is an attempt to integrate
Machiavelli into the current debate, approaching the text from his ideo-
logical standpoints, namely nationalism and reformed Islamic ideology,
thanks to the use of a political vocabulary which makes him compara-
ble to other reformers and political thinkers of his time. The “national”
Machiavelli thus became an advocate for the legitimacy of the citi-
zens’ rebellion against the foreign occupation of the country. Seen in
this light, this Egyptian nationalist and revolutionary interpretation of
Machiavelli closely resembles the use of this text by Italian intellectuals
like Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci during the first decades of
twentieth century.
The Lezione Degli Antichi: A Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that politics of translation, language reform
and nationalist ideas are key contextual factors in translating Machiavelli in
Egypt and in the wider Mediterranean space. In Italy, studies and editions
of Machiavelli witnessed a widespread diffusion with the rise of republican-
ism and later with nationalism and the Risorgimento. Rather than being
interpreted as marginal receptions, the Ottoman Turkish translation and
the subsequent Arabic versions should be interpreted as important frag-
ments in the larger picture of the Mediterranean circulation of Machiavelli
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet the reasons that are behind
the first (unfinished) Egyptian translation are still unknown. On the one
hand, Muḥammad ‘Alī, a homo novus who greatly invested in the estab-
lishment of an Egyptian army, perfectly embodies Machiavelli’s principe
nuovo (new prince). Even his attitude towards the ‘ulamā’—the “aristoc-
racy-like” class of judges and theologians—was ambivalent and unstable
to the extent that a direct inspiration by The Prince appears plausible. In
this sense, the most likely hypothesis is the Khedive commissioning the
translation for his own personal use, reflecting his image on the “mirror
for prince” and even using the text in his own political activity.71 On the
other hand, the Khedive’s joint reading of Machiavelli and Ibn Khaldūn,
his negative judgment and the fact that the text was never printed, allow
us to give an alternative interpretation. The 1832 translation of The Prince
was an attempt to integrate a book that was central to contemporary
political debates in Egypt. This project was due not only to Muḥammad
‘Alī’s willingness, but it also resulted from a wider context of burgeoning
interest in law, governance and the concept of authority. This version of
de Vattel’s Law of Nations accompanying The Prince, as well as the linguis-
tic process of adaptation, illustrate the extent to which the translation is
part of the construction of an Egyptian cultural and political identity. In
this framework, The Prince’s first translation did not encounter the same
fortune as, for instance, Rousseau or Montesquieu, which were more ele-
gantly “Arabicised” and printed. Machiavelli’s translation remained hidden
in a manuscript until the nationalist activist Luṭfī Jum‘ah discovered it in
the wake of the anti-colonial political struggle of the first decades of the
twentieth century.
Machiavelli’s work, therefore, was radically reinterpreted in Arabic
within the space of one century: first, it served as a “mirror for prince”
for Muḥammad ‘Alī; subsequently, it became the manifesto of nationalist
anti-colonial discourse. During the first decades of the twentieth century,
The Prince was not only reinterpreted and re-translated, but it was also
incorporated into the new public discourse as a way to convey reflections
on the legitimacy of the ruling power.
In many respects, from the standpoint of Islamic medieval politi-
cal ideas, Machiavelli might have appeared superfluous because many
of the tenets at the core of The Prince were already present in Islamic
treatises on the art of government.72 However, during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the reading of works of political theory such as
216 E. Benigni
Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldūn and de Vattel and Montesquieu, was part of

the current discourse of the crisis and renaissance of society. The trans-
lation of Machiavelli contributed to the process of reformulating the
concepts of power and citizenship following the impact of the colonial
power. In this sense, rather than looking at the translation of Machiavelli
as a way to introduce ground-breaking ideas about power and politics
in the Islamic context, this chapter suggests an opposite reading, which
takes into consideration the set of challenges posed by the nineteenth-
century “Mediterranean Renaissance” in territories like Egypt and
Italy. These challenges created the conditions for the rediscovery of
Machiavelli as a contribution to linguistic, political and social reforms. It
was this rediscovery that prepared the ground for the subsequent politi-
cal appropriations of the work in the twentieth century, when the Arab
Machiavelli powerfully contributed to the formation of contemporary
political discourse about the nation and the right of citizens to resist
colonial hegemony.
Notes
1. A. Laroui (1986), Islam et modernité (Paris: La Découverte). More
recently, this comparison has been made by A. Black (2008), The West and
Islam: Religion and Political Thought in World History (Oxford: Oxford
2. The words of Muḥammad ‘Alī are quoted by the Austrian consul in Cairo,
Giuseppe Acerbi. He describes his conversation with Muḥammad ‘Alī
about Ibn Khaldūn and Machiavelli in a letter that he published as G.
Acerbi (1831), “Lettera del signor Cons. Acerbi”, Biblioteca Italiana, 61,
289–298: 289.
3. See the National Library of Cairo’s catalogue of books: Fahras al-kutub
al-‘arabiyyah al-mawjūdah bi dār al-kutub al-miṣriyyah, 9 vols. (Cairo:
Maṭba‘at dār al-kutub, 1924–1959): Vol. V, Tārīkh 435. Until 1876, this
manuscript was property of the waqf (mainmort property) at the Mosque
of Sayyidnā al-Ḥusayn.
4. A first analysis of the translation was offered by M. Nallino (1931),
“Intorno a due traduzioni arabe del Principe del Machiavelli”, Oriente
Moderno, 11–12, 604–616, and E. Benigni (forthcoming), “When the
Prince travelled to Egypt. Mehmed Ali, Machiavelli and the story of an
unfinished translation project”, in: C. Mayeur Jaouen (ed.), Adab et
modernité: Un processus de civilisation? (Leiden and Boston: Brill).
5. See A. Hourani (1983), Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 52, and I. Abu-Lughod (1963),
Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
6. See M. Elshakry (2014), Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago:
Chicago University Press); P. Hill (2015), “The First Arabic Translations of
Enlightenment Literature: the Damietta Circle of the 1800s and 1810s”,
Intellectual History Review, 25, no. 2, 209–233.
7. For a critique, see S. Sheehi (2012), “Towards a Critical Theory of al-
Nahḍah: Epistemology, Ideology and Capital”, Journal of Arabic
Literature, 43, no. 2–3, 269–298: 271.
8. For instance, G. Procacci (1995), Machiavelli nella cultura europea
dell’età moderna (Rome and Bari: Laterza); J.G.A Pocock (1975), The
Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press); A. Prosperi
(2013), “Il Principe e la cultura europea”, in: N. Machiavelli, Il Principe:
Saggi e commenti (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana): 41–65.
9. G. Pécout (2012), “Pour une lecture méditerranéenne et transnationale du
Risorgimento”, Revue d’histoire du XIX siècle, 44, 29–47.
10. M. Isabella (2012), “Liberalism and Empire and the Mediterranean:
The case of the Risorgimento”, in: S. Patriarca and L. Riall (eds), The
Risorgimento Revisited (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan):
232–254.
11. More recently, Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou have underlined
the importance of the contacts between southern Europe and the
Ottoman Empire in order to look at the development of political ideas
during the long nineteenth century. See M. Isabella and K. Zanou (eds)
(2016), Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas the Long 19th Century
(London and New York: Bloomsbury).
12. P. Gran (2005), “Egypt and Italy, 1760–1850: Toward a Comparative
History”, in: N. Hanna and R. Abbas (eds), Society and Economy in Egypt
and the Eastern Mediterranean 1600–1900: Essays in Honor of André
Raymond (Cairo: AUC Press): 11–35.
13. See as a way of example: R.M. Dainotto (2007), Europe (in theory) (Durham:
Duke University Press); N.J. Moe (2002), The View from Vesuvius: Italian
Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press);
L. Riall (2013), Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford:
Oxford University Press); L.T. Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (eds), with the collabo-
ration of R. Ilbert (2002), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to
the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press); I. Coller (2012),
“The Revolutionary Mediterranean”, in: P. McPhee (ed.), A Companion to
the French Revolution (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons): 419–434.
218 E. Benigni
14. G. Toderini (1787), Letteratura turchesca, 3 vols. (Venice: Giacomo Storti):

Vol. I, 69.
15. Ibidem, Vol. I, 75. On this Ottoman Turkish translation of Anti-Machiavel,
see Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu’s chapter in this volume. The habit of
publishing The Prince accompanied by Anti-Machiavel is also attested by
other coeval editions like: N. Machiavelli (1768), Il Principe (…) e l’esame
e confutazione dell’opera scritto in idioma francese ed ora tradotto in toscano
(Cosmopoli [Venice: Giambattista Pasquali]).
16. Preface to N. Machiavelli (1782–1783), Opere, 6 vols. (Florence: Gaetano
Cambiagi): Vol. I, 50*. Some scholars refer to previous translations of The
Prince into Turkish on the basis of Giovanni Sagredo’s Memorie Istoriche
de’ Monarchi Ottomani (1673) and Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique
et Critique (1697). According to P. Preto (2013), Venezia e i turchi, 2nd
ed. (Rome: Viella), 305, Bayle argues that translations were commissioned
already under the reign of Murāt III (1574–1595), Meḥmed III (1595–
1603) and Murāt IV (1623–1640). See also C.B. Akal (2013), “Les traduc-
tions du Prince en Turquie”, Synergies Turquie, 6, 135–139: 136.
17. Ibidem, 137. For subsequent translations into Turkish completed in 1834,
1869 and 1880, see A. Meral (2013), “A Survey of Translation Activity
in the Ottoman Empire”, The Journal of Ottoman Studies, 42, 105–155.
On Turkish printing and translations in nineteenth-century Egypt, see
the comprehensive study by E. İhsanoğlu (2011), al-Atrāk fī Miṣr wa
Turāthihim al-Thaqāfī, trans. Ṣ. Sa‘dāwī (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq) and J.
Strauss (2000), The Egyptian Connection in Nineteenth Century Ottoman
Literary and Intellectual History (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft).
18. J. Strauss (2003), “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th and
20th Centuries)?”, Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures, 6, 39–76; Meral, A
Survey of Translation Activity.
19. On the book printed or translated in Cairo in Muḥammad ‘Alī’s time see,
among others, C. Van Allen Van Dyck (1896), Iktifā’ al-Qunū‘ bi-mā huwa
maṭbū‘ (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir); J. al-Dīn al-Shayyāl (1951), Tārīkh al-tarjamah
al-thaqāfiyyah fī Miṣr (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-‘Arabī); J. Heyworth-Dunne
(1940), “Printing and Translation under Muḥammad ‘Alī of Egypt: The
Foundation of Modern Arabic”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 72,
no. 4, 325–349; M.H. ‘Abd al-Raziq (1922), “Arabic Literature since the
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century”, Bullettin of the School of Oriental
Studies, 2, no. 2, 249–265.
20. Le droit des gens by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel was translated into
several European languages. The first Italian translation is: Il diritto
delle genti, ovvero Principii della legge naturale, applicati alla condotta e
agli affari delle nazioni e de’ sovrani: Opera scritta nell’idioma francese
dal sig. di Vattel e recata nell’italiano da Lodovico Antonio Loschi 3 vols.
(Lyon: s.n., 1781–1783). On the Ottoman reception of de Vattel see M.S.

Palabiyik (2014), “The Emergence of the Idea of ‘International Law’ in
the Ottoman Empire before the Treaty of Paris (1856)”, Middle Eastern
Studies, 50, no. 2, 233–251.
21. J. Dakhlia (2002), “Les Miroirs des princes islamiques: Une modernité
sourde?”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 57, no. 5, 1191–1206: 1203.
22. The Kitāb al-‘Ibar (“Book of Example”) by Ibn Khaldūn, containing the
famous Muqaddimah (“Prolegomena”), was printed in Būlāq in 1857,
while the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur decadence were translated as Burhān al-bayān wa bayān al-burhān
fī ikhtilāl dawlat al-Rūmān by Ḥasan al-Jubaylī in 1842. Several transla-
tions of historical and philosophical books were produced during the same
period. Notably: Tārīkh Dawlat Iṭālīyā (“History of Italy”) by Mario Botta
was translated by ‘Abdullah ‘Azīz and Ḥasan Effendi in 1833; Bidāyat al-
Qudamā’ wa Hidāyat al-Ḥukamā’ (“The Origins of the Ancients and the
Guidance of the Sages”), an ancient history of Greece, Rome and the Near
East, was translated by Muṣṭafā al-Zarābī in 1836 as a compendium of
several works; Qurrat al-Nufūs wa al-‘Uyūn bi-siyar ma tawassaṭ min al-
Qurūn (“Comforts of the Souls and Eyes in Events in Medieval Times”), a
history of the Middle Ages in three volumes, also an assimilation of several
works, was translated by Muṣṭafā al-Zarābī in 1840; Maṭāli‘ Shmūs al-Siyār fī
Waqā’i‘ Kārlūs al-Thāni ‘Ashar (“Histoire de Charles XII, Roi de Suède”),
written originally by Voltaire, was translated by Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Bayyā‘
in 1841; Tārīkh al-Falāsifah (“History of the Philosophers”) was trans-
lated by ‘Abdullah Ḥusayn in 1836. See Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery,
63–67; Heyworth-Dunne, “Printing and Translation” al-Shayyāl, Tārīkh
al-tarjamah; A. Perron (1843), “Lettre sur les écoles et l’imprimerie du
pacha d’Égypte”, Journal Asiatique, s. 4, 2, 5-61.
23. On Zakhūr see: C. Bachatly (1931), “Un manuscrit autographe de Don
Rapaël, member de l’Institut d’Égypte (1798)”, Bullettin de L’Institut
d’Égypte, 13, 27–35; S. Moussa (2012), “Le mythe des Bédouins a l’aube
du XIXe siecle: l’exemple de Dom Raphael de Monachis”, in: G. Ferreyrolles
and L. Versini (eds), Le Livre du monde et le monde des livres (Paris: Presses
de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne): 847–857; I. Coller (2010), Arab France:
Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University
of California Press): 112–113; F. Pouillon (ed.) (2008), Dictionnaire des
orientalistes de langue française (Paris: Karthala): 307–308; P.C. Sadgrove
(1998), “Zakhur, Pere Rufa‘il”, in: J. Scott Meisami and P. Starkey (eds),
Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols. (London: Routledge): vol. II, 820.
24. Bachatly, “Un manuscrit authographe”, 30.
220 E. Benigni
25. ʻA. al-R. al-Jabartī (1888–1896), Merveilles biographiques et historiques,

ou, Chroniques, trans. C. Mansour Bey et al., 9 vols. (Cairo: Imprimerie
nationale): Vol. VI, 269.
26. Ibidem, Vol. VI, 279, and Vol. VII, 26.
27. Décade Égyptienne, an VII [1799–1800], 10. In the same journal Rāfā’īl is
mentioned among those members commissioned to make an almanac of
the seventh year of the French revolutionary calendar suitable for French,
Copts and Muslims. See Décade Égyptienne, an VII [1799–1800], 66–67.
28. Letter dated 14 March 1802, quoted in Bachatly, “Un manuscript
autographe”, 30.
29. Letter dated 20 November 1802, quoted ibidem.
30. Ibidem. According to Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl, during his sojourn in Paris
“Don Raphael” wrote several works and translations from Arabic, including
a guide to teach Arabic. The book was titled Marj al-Azhār wa Bustān al-
ḥawādith wa l-akhbār and remained in manuscript form. See al-Shayyāl,
Tārīkh al-tarjamah, 76.
31. G.B. Brocchi (1841–1843), Giornale delle osservazioni fatte ne’ viaggi in
Egitto, nella Siria e nella Nubia, 5 vols. (Bassano: Antonio Roberti): Vol.
I, 159.
32. Ibidem, Vol. II, 369.
33. Chapters 23 and 26 are missing, while Chapters 24 and 25 are only partially
translated.
34. See the translation of the Dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and also the
incipit of Chapter 1: “All the states, all the dominions that have had or now
have authority over men have been and now are either republics or prince-
doms”; it is translated literally as “Inna kulla al-aḥkām wa kulla al-siyādāt
tilka allatī qad malakat wa tamlikat sulṭantan ‘alā al-nās kānat wa lam tazal
immā mashyakhātin wa immā amīriyyāt”. A comparison with the translation
of the same sentence proposed by Muḥammad Luṭfī Jum‘ah provides an idea
of the distance between the two versions. See N. Machiavelli (1912), Kitāb
al-Amīr wa huwa tārīkh al-imārāt al-gharbiyyah fī l-qurūn al-wusṭá, ed. and
trans. M.L. Jum‘ah (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-ma‘ārif).
35. When the translation was produced, al-Azhar was still the most prestigious
school in Egypt and perhaps in the entire Islamic world. The al-Azhar cur-
riculum included disciplines such as Fiqh (Islamic law), grammar, linguistic-
related disciplines. See A.L. al-Sayyid Marsot (1972), “The Ulama of Cairo
in the eighteenth and the nineteenth Centuries”, in: N.R. Keddie (ed.),
Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East
since 1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press): 149–165; M.K. al-Fiqī
(1965), Al-Azhar wa-athāruhu fī al-nahḍah al-adabiyyah al-ḥadīthah 2nd
ed. (Cairo: Maktabat nahḍah miṣr); G. Delanoue (1982), Moralistes et poli-
tiques musulmans dans l’Egypte du XIXème siècle, 1798–1882 (Cairo: Institut
Français d’Archéologie Orientale).
36. Heyworth-Dunne, “Printing and Translation”, 341.

37. Cairo, National Library and Archives of Egypt (henceforth NLAE),
manuscript Tārīkh 435, 8 and 142 (for sa‘d), 6 (for ḥaẓẓ).
38. Ibidem, 87.
39. See A.-M. Goichon (1954–2005), “Ḥukm”, in: P.J. Bearman et al. (eds),
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol.
III, 549. The modern word for government, ḥukūmah, derives from the
same root. See B. Lewis (1954–2005), “Ḥukūma”, in: P.J. Bearman et al.
(eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill):
Vol. III: 551–552.
40. See F. Rosenthal (1954–2005), “Dawla”, in: P.J. Bearman et al. (eds),
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol.
II, 177–178.
41. We find similar use in other contemporary translations as well. Lewis,
“Ḥukūma”, 552, reports that in the Turkish translation of Botta’s Storia
d’Italia (see endnote 22) ḥukūmet, which is “commonly used in the sense of
rule, political authority (…) has the same meaning in the Arabic translation
of the first part of William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles
V (Būlāq, 1842)”. However, the use of the root was not common. At
the time of Zakhūr’s translation of The Prince, Shaykh Rifā‘ah al-Ṭahṭāwī’s
translated French state as “tadbīr al-dawlah” or “tadbīr al-mamlakah”
(“government of the kingdom”). See R. al-Ṭahṭāwī, Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz, now
translated into English as: R. al-Ṭahṭāwī (2011), An Imam in Paris, trans.
D.L. Newman, (London: Saqi): 192, fn 2.
42. NLAE, manuscript Tārīkh 435, 8.
43. Al-Ṭahṭāwī, An Imam in Paris, 307, fn 3. On the term “republic”, see
Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery, 33–36; A. Ayalon (1989), “Dimuqratiyya,
Hurriya, Jumhuriyya: The Modernization of the Arabic Political
Vocabulary”, Asian and African Studies, 23, 5–17.
45. On the translation of the Arabic sharī ‘ah with “law” and the implica-
tions arising from the demarcation between the legal and the moral, see
W.B. Hallaq (2013), The Impossible Islamic State (New York: Columbia
University Press): 112. See also: T. Asad (2003), Formations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press):
205–256.
46. NLAE, manuscript Tārīkh 435, 142. On the possible influence of Islamic
Pseudo-Aristotelianism on Machiavelli’s conception of will see Lucio
Biasiori’s chapter in this volume.
47. F. Rosenthal (1960), The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth
Century (Leiden: Brill).
222 E. Benigni
49. Ibidem, 60.
50. Ibidem, 61.
51. M. Sawaie (2000), “Rifa a Rafi al-Tahtawi and His Contribution to the
Lexical Development of Modern Literary Arabic”, International Journal
of Middle East Studies, 32, 395–410.
52. Ibidem, 400.
53. In the manuscript, the foreign proper names of people and places
are underlined, probably awaiting a second revision. The choice of
transliteration was not shared among all translators: in the translation
of Fénelon’s Les Adventures de Telemaque (1699) by al-Tahṭawī, French
names are changed into Arabic. See S.M. Tageldin (2017), “Fénelon’s
Gods, al-Tahṭawī’s Jinn: Trans-Mediterranean Fictionalities”, in M. Allan
and E. Benigni (eds.), “Lingua Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”,
special issue of Philological Encounters, 2, no. 1–2: 139–158.
54. See A. Patel (2013), The Arab Nahḍāh: The Making of Intellectual and
Humanist Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press): 102–126.
55. Melchiorre Cesarotti was an academic at Padua and the translator of such
literary masters as Ossian, Aeschylus, Pindar, Voltaire, and Homer. In
his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (1788), he theorises the need for a
renewal of the Italian language via translations and the acquisition of a
new vocabulary. The renewal would be achieved, according to Cesarotti,
through the knowledge of classical tradition combined with that of modern
European languages. Due to his beliefs he was accused of “corrupting” the
Italian language.
56. Alessandro Manzoni, the author of I Promessi Sposi (1827; 1840 and
1842), is considered to be the forefather of Italian historical novel. In his
essays on language he claimed the need for a unified language based on the
Florentine dialect.
57. A linguist and writer of Dalmatian origin, Niccolò Tommaseo wrote
about the Italian language, and authored the monumental Dizionario
della lingua italiana (1865–1874). Tommaseo’s ideal of a unified Italian
language followed in the wake of Manzoni’s ideas on the prominence of
the Tuscan dialect.
58. A linguist and founder of the scientific journal Archivio glottologico italiano,
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli refused the artificiality of the Florentine dialect as
a language for Italians, and put forward the idea of language reform that
would take into account the different regional variants.
59. In view of the fact that the translation of Machiavelli was carried out within
a context of rise of nationalist ideals all over the Mediterranean, it could
have been interesting to look at the translation of Chapter 26, namely, the
appeal to Italy to rise against foreign oppression. The translation, however,
ends dramatically at Chapter 25, suggesting that Chapter 26 was cut off or
removed.
60. Machiavelli, Kitāb al-Amīr, 40–50.

61. Born in Alexandria in 1886, Luṭfī Jum‘ah received a higher degree of stud-
ies in law from the Khedival School in Cairo and at the Syrian Protestant
College in Beirut. He travelled to Europe between 1908 and 1912 and
received his doctorate degree in Law from the University of Lyon in 1911.
From 1906 onwards he was associated with the National Party, after his
encounter with the two nationalist leaders Muṣṭafā Kāmil and Muḥammad
Farīd. In Lausanne he joined the editorial staff of the nationalist news-
paper al-Liwā’ (“The Banner”). During his European years he devoted
himself to the study of western philosophy and literature, learning Italian,
English and French. He was a passionate disciple of the Islamic reformist,
pan-Islamist and anti-colonial thinker Muḥammad ‘Abdu (1849–1905),
with whom he corresponded for years. At this time, he campaigned inten-
sively for Egyptian independence, giving talks in several European cities
and founding two journals based in western Europe: Ṣawt al-sha‘b (“The
People’s Voice”), published in Geneva in Arabic, and Miṣr (“Egypt”),
published in Geneva, Florence, Lyon and London in English. In short, his
life was infused with twentieth-century notions of modernisation (tama-
ddun), a combination of nationalist political activism, a fascination with
western culture, and the ideals of a reformed Islam.
62. Ibidem, 34.
63. Ibidem, 37.
64. It might be of interest to note that the “oriental” poet Omar Khayyam was
probably better known in Europe than in the Arab world, after his work
was introduced to the English-speaking world through the translations by
Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883).
65. Ibidem, 40.
66. Ibidem, 15.
67. Ibidem.
68. Ibidem, 15–16.
69. C. Wendell (1972), The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image: From Its
Origins to Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid (Berkeley: University of California Press).
70. Machiavelli, Kitāb al-Amīr, 193–198.
71. As reported by Giuseppe Acerbi, Muḥammad ‘Alī, who did not know
written Arabic, commissioned the translation of the text into Turkish. At
the time, the Arabic translation was identical to a Turkish one that has since
been lost. See Acerbi, Biblioteca Italiana, 289.
72. A. Black (2011), The History of Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press): 56.
224 E. Benigni
Author Biography
Elisabetta Benigni is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Mediterranean Literature
at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on intellectual and literary
contacts between Arabic and southern European cultures, with a specific inter-
est inthe modern period. She was a fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia
University (2015), as well as at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin
(2012). She is the author of Il carcere come spazio letterario: Ricognizioni sul
genere dell’adab al-suğūn nell’Egitto tra Nasser e Sadat (2009), and the editor
(with Michael Allan) of “Lingua Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”, a spe-
cial issue of Philological Encounters (2017).
Bibliography
Sources
‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: Majlis-hā-yi shabāna-i
darbār-i Nūr al-Dīn Jahāngīr az 24 Rajab 1017 tā 19 Ramazan 1020, eds.
‘Arif Naushahi and Mu‘un Nizami (Tehran: Miras-i Maktub, 2006).
Acerbi, Giuseppe, “Lettera del signor Cons. Acerbi”, Biblioteca Italiana, 61
(1831): 289–298.
Alvia de Castro, Fernando, Aphorismos y exemplos politicos y militares: Sacados de
la primera Decada de Iuan de Barros (Lisbon: Pedro Creasbeeck, 1621).
Archives of the Church of St Mary Draperis (Istanbul), Register of Deaths, book
3, record no. 403.
Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (Vatican City), Index,
Protocolli 0, Antonio Posio secretarius (1571–1580), Additiones Romae 1579,
fols. 379v and 550r.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), Inquisição de Lisboa, Proc. n°
1682, Processo de Rafael Olivi.
Artaud [de Montor], [Jean-]Alexis-François, Machiavel, son génie et ses erreurs, 2
vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1833).
Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Istanbul), İrade Hariciye, no. 254/15084.
Benvoglienti, Fabio, Discorso per qual cagione per la religione non si sia fatta
guerra fra’ gentili, & perche si faccia tra christiani (Florence: Bartolomeo
Sermartelli, 1570).
Biblioteca Casanatense (Rome), Ms. 2015: J. Xavier, Ādāb al-saltanat.
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence), Gaddiano 92, Segreto de’ segreti.
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Lisbon), cod. 3.060, J. de Barros, Ao mui alto e
muito poderoso Rey de Portugal D. João 3° deste nome.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 225

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2
226 Bibliography
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence), II. I. 363, Liber Alexandri.

Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence), Magliabechiano, XXX 181, Segreto de’
segreti.
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence), Palatino 1097, Notizie intorno
all’Alcorano.
Biblioteca Reale (Turin), ms. Varia 212, Des Antiquités Romaines. Premier livre
faict par le commandement du Roy par M. Guillaume Choul Lyonnoys, con-
seiller du dict seigneur et Bailly des Montaignes du Dauphiné.
Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels), Ms. 4156, Letter from Manuel
Pinheiro in Agra, 9 September 1610, 217–230.
Bodin, Jean, The six bookes of a Common-weale, trans. R. Knolles (London: Adam
Islip and George Bishop, 1606).
Botero, Giovanni, Discorso della lega contra il turco al serenissimo prencipe
Mauritio cardinal di Savoia (Turin: Giovanni Domenico Tarino, 1614).
Bouchon, Geneviève, and Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz (eds), Voyage dans les Deltas
du Gange et de l’Irraouaddy: Relation portugaise anonyme (1521) (Paris:
Centre Culturel Portugais, 1988).
Bozio, Tommaso, De robore bellico diuturnis et amplis Catholicorum regnis liber
unus. Adversus Machiavellum (Rome: Bartolomeo Bonfadino, 1593).
Brocchi, Giovanni Battista, Giornale delle osservazioni fatte ne’ viaggi in Egitto,
nella Siria e nella Nubia, 5 vols. (Bassano: Antonio Roberti, 1841–1843).
Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques, Principi del diritto della natura e delle genti, ed. B.
de Felice, 8 vols. (Siena: Luigi and Benedetto Bindi and Francesco Rossi,
1780–1782).
Cambini, Andrea, Libro della origine de turchi et imperio degli Ottomani
(Florence: Heirs of Filippo di Giunta, 1529).
Carvalho, Pedro Moura, Mir’āt al-quds (Mirror of Holiness): A Life of Christ
for Emperor Akbar: A Commentary on Father Jerome Xavier’s Text and the
Miniature of Cleveland Museum of Art, Acc. 2005.145, trans. W.M. Thackston
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015).
Castilho, Diogo de, Livro da Origem dos Turcos (Leuven: Rutger Rescius, 1538).
[Castrodardo, Giovanni Battista (ed.)], L’Alcorano di Macometto, nel qual si con-
tiene la dottrina, la vita, i costumi, et le leggi sue (Venice: Andrea Arrivabene,
1547).
Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, Geschichte Sultan Süleymān Ḳānūnīs von 1520 bis 1557, oder,
Ṭabaḳāt ül-Memālik ve Derecāt ül-Mesālik, ed. Petra Kappert (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1981).
Cevdet Paşa, Ahmed, Tarih-i Cevdet, 12 vols., 3rd ed. (Istanbul: Matbaa-i
Osmaniye, 1891).
Corio, Bernardino, Dello eccellentissimo oratore (Milan: Alessandro Minuziano,
1503).
Cuspinian, Johannes, De Caesaribus atque Imperatoribus Romanis opus insigne
(Basel: Johann Oporinus and Nikolaus Brylinger, 1561).
Bibliography 227
Danti, Antonino, Osservationi di diverse historie et d’altri particolari degni di

memoria (Venice: Matteo Boselli, 1573).
Davids, Arthur Lumley, A Grammar of the Turkish Language with a Preliminary
Discourse on the Language and Literature of the Turkish Nations (London:
Parbury & Allen, 1832).
De Bujanda, J.M. (ed.), Index des livres interdits, 11 vols. (Sherbrooke and
Geneva: Centre d'Etudes de la Renaissance and Droz, 1984–2002).
Décade Égyptienne, an VII [1799–1800].
Díaz Tanco, Vasco (1547), Libro intitulado Palinodia de la nephanda y fiera
nacion de los Turcos (Orense: Author’s edition, 1547).
Du Choul, Guillaume, Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des
Romains (…) des bains et antiques exercitations grecques et romaines. De la reli-
gion des anciens Romains (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1555).
Du Choul, Guillaume, Discours de la religion des anciens Romains (…) et illustré
d’un grand nombre de medailles, et de plusieurs belles figures, retirées de mar-
bres antiques, qui se treuvent à Rome, et par nostre Gaule (Lyon: Guillaume
Rouillé, 1556).
Du Choul, Guillaume, Discorso della religione antica de Romani (…) insieme con
un altro simile discorso della castrametatione et bagni antichi de Romani tradotti
in Toscano da M. Gabriel Simeoni fiorentino (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1559).
Egnazio, Giovanni Battista, In hoc volumine haec continentur (…) de Caesaribus
libri III (Venice: Heirs of Aldo Manuzio and Andrea Torresano, 1516).
Egnazio, Giovanni Battista, Le vite degl’Imperadori Romani (…) nuovamente
dalla lingua latina tradotte alla volgare (Venice: Francesco Marcolino, 1540).
Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. N.M.
Cheshire and M.J. Heath, ed. L. Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
Esprit (L’) des Journaux, François et Étrangers, 12:9 (1783).
Fahras al-kutub al-‘arabiyyah al-mawjūdah bi dār al-kutub al-miṣriyyah, 9 vols.
(Cairo: Maṭba‘at dār al-kutub, 1924–1959).
Filelfo, Francesco, Epistolarum familiarum libri XXXVII ex eius exemplari tran-
sumpti (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de Gregori, 1502).
Flores, Jorge, The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court
and Household (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016).
Foglietta, Uberto, De causis magnitudinis Imperii Turcici & Virtutis ac
Felicitatis Turcarum in bellis perpetuae (Lipsia: Michael Lantzenberger and
Henning Grosse, 1595).
Foglietta, Uberto, Anecdota, ed. V. Alizeri (Genoa: Officina Ferrandiana, 1838).
Ford, Jeremiah D.M. (ed.), Letters of John III, King of Portugal, 1521–1557
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).
Frederick II of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, ou Essai de Critique sur le Prince de
Machiavel, ed. Monsieur de Voltaire (The Hague: Pierre Paupil, 1740).
228 Bibliography
Frederick II of Prussia, L’Anti-Machiavel: Édition critique avec les remaniements

de Voltaire pour les deux versions, ed. Charles Fleischauer (Geneva: Institut et
Musée Voltaire, 1958).
Frederick II of Prussia, The Refutation of Machiavelli’s Prince: or, Anti-Machiavel,
ed. and trans. Paul Sonnino (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981).
Gentili, Alberico, The Wars of the Romans (De armis Romanis), ed. Benedict
Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, trans. David Lupher (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Gentili, Scipione, Opera omnia, 8 vols. (Naples: Giovanni Gravier, 1763–1769).
Gentleman’s (The) Magazin and Historical Chronicle, 77 (1802).
Giovio, Paolo, Lettere, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferraro, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto
Poligrafico dello Stato, 1956–1958).
Giovio, Paolo, Commentario de le cose de’ Turchi, ed. Lara Michelacci (Bologna:
Clueb, 2005).
Giovio, Paolo, Elogi degli uomini illustri, ed. Franco Minonzio (Turin: Einaudi,
2006).
Giustinian, Bernardo, De origine urbis Venetiarum (Venice: Bernardo Benaglio,
1493).
Giustinian, Bernardo, De origine urbis Venetiarum (Venice: Antonio Brucioli,
1534).
Giustinian, Bernardo, Historia (…) dell’origine di Vinegia (Venice: Bernardino
Bindoni, 1545).
Guichard, Claude, Funerailles et diverses manieres d’ensevelir des Romains, Grecs
et autres nations, tant anciens que modernes (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1581).
Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo, El antiJovio, ed. Guillermo Hernández Peñalosa,
2 vols. (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1991).
Kāshifī, Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i, Akhlak-ı Muhsini, or, the Morals of the Beneficent, trans.
Henry George Keene (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1850).
Istanbul Archaeology Museum, manuscript no. 502, İngiltere Kava‐ānīn-i
Baḥriyesi Tercümesi.
Istanbul Archaeology Museum, manuscript no. 513, Tercüma-i Kanun-ı Ḫarp.
Istanbul University Library, no. 2677, Vaṣa‐ya‐-yi Safarī.
Istanbul University Library, no. 6920, Vaṣa‐ya‐-yi Safarī.
Léry, Jean de, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called America,
trans. J. Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Lippi, Emilio (ed.), “Per dominar il mondo al mondo nato. Vita e gesta di Selim
I Sultano”, Quaderni Veneti, 40 (2004): 17–106; 42 (2005): 37–118; 43
(2006): 35–91; 45 (2007): 7–61.
Lipsius, Justus, De militia Romana libri quinque: De constantia libri duo, fac-
simile reprint, ed. Wolfgang Weber (Hildesheim: Olms, 2002).
Lucinge, René de, De la naissance, dureé et chute des estats, ed. Michael J. Heath
(Geneva: Droz, 1984).
Bibliography 229
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Le premier Livre des Discours de l’Estat de Paix et de guerre

(Paris: Denis Janot, 1544).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Le prince (…) dedié au magnifique Laurens fils de Pierre
des Medicis traduit d’Italien en François avec la vie de l’auteur mesme par Iaq.
Gohory Parisien, (Paris: Robert le Mangnier, 1571).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Il Principe (…) e l’esame e confutazione dell’opera scritto in
idioma francese ed ora tradotto in toscano (Cosmopoli [Venice: Giambattista
Pasquali], 1768).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Opere, 6 vols. (Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1782–1783).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Opere, 8 vols. (Italy [Florence: Guglielmo Piatti], 1813).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Kitāb al-Amīr wa huwa tārīkh al-imārāt al-gharbiyyah fī
l-qurūn al- wusṭā ed. and trans. M.L. Jum‘ah (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-ma‘ārif, 1912).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Ḥukumdār, trans. M. Şerif (Istanbul: Hukuk Matbaası,
1919).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. R. Brakkee (Naples:
Liguori, 1986).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. A. Gilbert, 3
vols. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence,
ed. and trans. J.B. Atkinson and D. Sices (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1996).
Manuzzi, Nicolò, Storia del Mogol, ed. Piero Falchetta, 2 vols (Milan: Franco
Maria Ricci, 1986).
Manuzzi, Nicolò, Storia do Mogor, or, Mogul India, 1653–1708, ed. and trans.
William Irvine, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1907–1908).
Montserrat, Antoni de, The Commentary (…) on His Journey to the Court of Akbar,
ed. and trans. S.N. Banerjee and J.S. Hoyland (London: Milford, 1922).
National Archives of India (New Delhi), Ms. 2713: ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim
Lahauri, Samrat al-Falāsifa.
National Library and Archives of Egypt (Cairo), manuscript Tārīkh 435,
Nīqulāūs Mākiyāfāllī (Niccolò Machiavelli), al-Amīr.
Notizie del mondo 77 (24 September 1785).
Omont, Henri, “Inventaire de la bibliothèque de Ferdinand Ier, roi de Naples
(1481)”, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 70 (1909): 456–470.
Osório, Jerónimo, De nobilitate civili libri duo: De nobilitate Christiana libri tres
(Lisbon: Luís Rodrigues, 1542).
Osório, Jerónimo, De gloria libri V (Coimbra: Francisco Correia, 1549).
Osório, Jerónimo, De regis institutione et disciplina (Lisbon: João de Espanha,
1571 [1572]).
Pato, Raimundo António de Bulhão and Henrique Lopes de Mendonça (eds),
Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque seguidas de documentos que as elucidam, 7
vols. (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências, 1884–1935).
230 Bibliography
Perron, A. “Lettre sur les écoles et l’imprimerie du pacha d’Égypte”, Journal

Asiatique, s. 4, 2 (1843): 5–61.
Philosophorum maximi Aristotelis secretum secretorum alio nomine liber moralium
de regimine principum ad Alexandrum (Venice: Bernardino Vitali, after 1503).
Possevino, Antonio, Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum (…) recognita novissime
ab eodem, et aucta, tomus secundus, 2 vols. (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1603).
Postel, Guillaume, De la république des Turcs, et là où l'occasion s'offrera, des moe-
urs, loy de tous les Muhamédistes (Poitiers: Enguibert de Marnef, 1560).
Qadi Muhammad (2015), Fat’h al-Mubin: A Contemporary Account of the
Portuguese Invasion on Malabar in Arabic Verse, ed. K.S. Shameer (Calicut:
Other Books).
Rabil Jr., Albert (ed.), Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility
among Quattrocento Italian Humanists (Binghamton, NY: Medieval &
Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991).
Ramberti, Benedetto, Libri tre delle cose de turchi (Venice: The Sons of Aldo,
1539).
Ricci, Matteo, On Friendship (Jiaoyou lun): One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese
Prince, trans. Timothy Billings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Roca, Vicente, Hystoria en la quel se trata de la origen y guerras que han tenido los
turcos (Valencia: s.n., 1556).
Rossotto, Andrea, Syllabus Scriptorum Pedemontii (Mondovì: Francesco Maria
Ghislandi, 1667).
Ruscelli, Girolamo, Sopplimento nell'Istorie di monsignor Paolo Giovio (…) et un
consiglio di monsignor Giovio raccolto dalle consulte di papa Leone Decimo per
far l'impresa contra Infedeli, di nuovo ristampato et con somma diligenza cor-
retto (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1572).
Rushdie, Salman, The Enchantress of Florence (London: Random House, 2008).
Sabellico, Marco Antonio, Enneades…, 2 vols. (Venice: Bernardino and Matteo
Vitali, 1498–1504).
Sanceau, Elaine (ed), Colecção de São Lourenço, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Centro de
Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1973–1983).
Sansovino, Francesco, Dell’Historia universale dell'origine et imperio de’ turchi
parte prima (Venice: Francesco Sansovino and Co., 1560).
Sansovino, Francesco, L’Annali overo le vite de’ principi et signori della casa
Othomana (Venice: Giacomo Sansovino, 1571).
Sansovino, Francesco, Historia universale dell'origine et imperio de' turchi rac-
colta et in diversi luoghi di nuovo ampliata; et riformata in molte sue parti per
ordine della Santa Inquisitione (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1582).
Sassetti, Filippo, Lettere da vari paesi, 1570–1588, ed. Vanni Bramanti (Milan:
Longanesi, 1970).
Secretum Secretorum, ed. A.S. Fulton, trans. I. Ali, in: Roger Bacon, Opera hacte-
nus inedita, ed. Robert Steele, 16 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1909–
1940): Vol. V.
Bibliography 231
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, De convenientia militaris disciplinae cum christiana

religione dialogus, qui inscribitur Democrates (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1535).
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, Obras completas, 17 vols. (Pozoblanco: Ayuntamento
de Pozoblanco, 1995–2012).
Sestini, Domenico, Lettere (…) scritte dalla Sicilia e dalla Turchia a diversi
suoi amici in Toscana, 7 vols. (Florence; Livorno: Gaetano Cambiagi et al.,
1779–1784).
Simeoni, Gabriele, Illustratione de gli epitaffi et medaglie antiche (Lyon: Jean de
Tournes, 1568).
Simeoni, Gabriele, Livre premier de Caesar renouvellé (…) avec le second de nou-
veau adiousté par Françoys de S. Thomas (Lyon: Jean Saugrain, 1570).
Soranzo, Lazzaro, L’Ottomanno, 4th ed. (Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1600).
Süleymaniye Library (Istanbul), Fatih 3521, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, Mevāhibu’l-
ḫallāḳ fī merātibi’l-aḫlāḳ.
Süleymaniye Library (Istanbul), Hüsrev Paşa 805, [King Frederick II of Prussia]
Tanbīhāt-i Ḥukumrān bā sar’askarān.
Süleymaniye Library (Istanbul), Hüsrev Paşa 817–1 ve 817–2.
al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rifā‘ah, An Imam in Paris, trans. D.L. Newman, (London: Saqi,
2011).
al-Tahṭāwī, Rifā‘ah, L’Or de Paris: Relation de voyage, 1826–1831, ed. Anouar
Louca (Paris: Sindbad and Actes Sud, 1988).
Thévet, André, The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike, trans. T. Hackett
(London: Henry Bynneman, 1568).
Toderini, Giambattista, Letteratura Turchesca, 3 vols. (Venice: Giacomo Storti,
1787).
Topkapı Palace Museum Library (Istanbul), Ḫazīnah 372 [King Frederick II of
Prussia, Anti-Machiavel].
Valla, Lorenzo, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. Glen W. Bowersock
Vattel, Emer de, Il diritto delle genti, ovvero Principii della legge naturale,
applicati alla condotta e agli affari delle nazioni e de’ sovrani: Opera scritta
nell’idioma francese dal sig. di Vattel e recata nell’italiano da Lodovico Antonio
Loschi, 3 vols. (Lyon: s.n., 1781-1783).
Xavier, Jerónimo, Fuente de vida: Tratado apologético dirigido al Rey Mogol de
la India en 1600, eds. Hugues Didier, Ignacio Cacho Nazábal and José Luis
Orella Unzué (San Sebastián: Universidad de Deusto, 2007).
Zainuddin Makhdum, Shaykh, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn: A Historical Epic of the
Sixteenth Century, trans. S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar (Kuala Lumpur and
Calicut: Islamic Book Trust and Other Books, 2006).
232 Bibliography
Secondary Literature
‘Abd al-Raziq, M.H., “Arabic Literature since the Beginning of the Nineteenth
Century”, Bullettin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2:2 (1922): 249–265.
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural
Encounters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
Afyoncu, Erhan, “Tarih-i Kırım- Rusya Sefaretnamesi” (MA Thesis: Marmara
University, 1990).
Agosti, Giovanni and Vincenzo Farinella, “Calore del marmo: Pratica e tipologia
delle deduzioni iconografiche”, in: Salvatore Settis (ed.), Memoria dell’antico
nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1984–1986): Vol. I, 375–444.
Akal, Cemal Bali, “Les traductions du Prince en Turquie”, Synergies Turquie, 6
(2013): 135–139.
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin and Karla Mallette (eds), A Sea of Languages:
Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
Akif Aydın, Mehmet, “Hükümet”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi,
44 vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013): Vol. XVIII, 468–470.
Aksan, Virginia H., “Ottoman Political History, 1768–1808”, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 25:1 (1993): 53–69.
Aksan, Virginia H., “An Ottoman Portrait of Frederick the Great”, Oriente
Moderno, n. s., 18:79 (1999): 203–215.
Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800 (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004).
Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies
on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Anglo, Sydney, Machiavelli: A Dissection (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1969).
Anglo, Sydney, Machiavelli, The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility
and Irrelevance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Armitage, David, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
Ayalon, Ami, “Dimuqratiyya, Hurriya, Jumhuriyya: The Modernization of the
Arabic Political Vocabulary”, Asian and African Studies, 23 (1989): 5–17.
Aydoğdu, Nergiz Yılmaz, “Makyavelist Düşüncenin Türkiye’ye Girişi-
Onsekizinci Yüzyıl Osmanlı Siyaset Felsefesi” (PhD dissertation: Marmara
University, 2008).
Babayan, Kathryn, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of
Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of
Harvard University, 2002).
Bachatly, Charles, “Un manuscrit autographe de Don Rapaël, member de
l’Institut d’Égypte (1798)”, Bulletin de l’Institut d’Égypte, 13 (1931): 27–35.
Bibliography 233
Balmas, Enea, “Jacques Gohory traduttore del Machiavelli (con documenti inediti)”,
in his Saggi e studi sul rinascimento francese (Padua: Liviana, 1982): 23–73.
Balsamo, Luigi, Antonio Possevino S.I. bibliografo della Controriforma e diffusione
della sua opera in area anglicana (Florence: Olschki, 2006).
Barthe, Pascale, French Encounters with the Ottomans, 1510–1560 (London and
New York: Routledge, 2016).
Beltramini, Guido, “Palladio e le storie di Polibio”, in: Guido Beltramini (ed.),
Andrea Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia con le illustrazioni inedite alle
Storie di Polibio (Venice: Marsilio, 2009), 12–77.
Benigni, Elisabetta, “When Il Principe Travelled to Egypt: Translating
Machiavelli in 19th century Cairo and the Cultural Politics of the Nation”, in:
Catherine Mayeur Jaouen and Luca Patrizi (eds). Adab et Modernité: Un pro-
cessus de civilisation? (Leiden and Boston: Brill) [forthcoming].
Benner, Erica, Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Bertelli, Sergio and Piero Innocenti, Bibliografia Machiavelliana (Verona:
Edizioni Valdonega, 1979).
Bettini, Clelia, “Frei Diogo de Castilho”, in: David Thomas (ed.), Christian–
Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 7 vols (Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2009–2015): Vol. VI, 328–331.
Biasiori, Lucio, “Comparaison comme estrangement: Machiavel, les anciens, les
modernes, les sauvages”, Essais. Revue interdisciplinaire d'humanités, hors
série no. 1 (2013): 151–169.
Biasiori, Lucio, “Tra Machiavelli e Reginald Pole: Migliore Cresci e la Vita del
Principe (1544)”, Bollettino della società di studi valdesi, 217 (2015): 5–26.
Biasiori, Lucio, Nello scrittoio di Machiavelli: Il Principe e la Ciropedia di
Senofonte (Rome: Carocci, 2017).
Bilgegil, Mehmet Kaya, Rönesans Çağı Edebiyatında Türk Takdirkârlığı
(Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1973).
Biondi, Albano, “La Bibliotheca Selecta di Antonio Possevino: Un progetto di
egemonia culturale”, in: Gian Paolo Brizzi (ed.), La “Ratio studiorum”:
Modelli culturali e pratiche dei gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome:
Bulzoni, 1981): 43–73.
Biondi, Albano, “Aspetti della cultura cattolica post-tridentina”, in his Umanisti,
eretici, streghe, ed. Massimo Donattini (Modena: Assessorato alla Cultura,
2008): 121–164.
Bisaha, Nancy, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman
Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Black, Antony, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the
Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Black, Antony, The West and Islam: Religion and Political Thought in World
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Black, Robert, Machiavelli (New York: Routledge, 2013).
234 Bibliography
Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the
Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
Bonney, Richard, The European Dynastic States, 1494–1660 (Oxford: Oxford
Bonora, Elena, Ricerche su Francesco Sansovino imprenditore librario e letterato
(Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994).
Borea, Evelina, “Dente, Marco”, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome:
Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ): Vol. XXXVIII, 790–794.
Borgeaud, Philippe, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
Borgeaud, Philippe, “Observe, Describe, Compare: A Small Meditation”,
Historia Religionum, 1 (2009): 13–20.
Bottini, Laura, “The Apology of Al-Kindī”, in: David Thomas (ed.), Christian–
Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 7 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2009–2015): Vol. I, 585–594.
Bouchon, Geneviève, Albuquerque, le lion des mers d’Asie (Paris: Editions
Desjonquères, 1992).
Bowen, Willis H., “L’histoire de la terre neuve du Peru: A Translation by Jacques
Gohory and The Earliest Treatise on Tobacco”, Isis, 28 (1938): 330–363.
Brading, David A., The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots,
and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
Brege, Brian., “The Empire that Wasn’t: the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and
Empire, 1547–1609” (PhD Dissertation: Stanford University, 2014).
Brown, Alison, Bartolomeo Scala, 1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence: The
Humanist as Bureaucrat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
(Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity and Blackwell, 2000).
Canfora, Davide, Prima di Machiavelli: Politica e cultura in età umanistica
(Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2010).
Cantimori, Delio, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, le idee religiose del Cinquecento
(Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2013).
Casale, Giancarlo, “Seeing the Past: Maps and Ottoman Historical
Consciousness”, in: H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds), Writing History
at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013), 80–99.
Castilla Urbano, Francisco, El pensamiento de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Madrid:
Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2013).
Castro, Américo, “The Presence of the Sultan Saladin in the Romance
Literatures”, Diogenes, 2 (1954): 13–36.
Catto, Michela, Cristiani senza pace: La Chiesa, gli eretici e la guerra nella Roma
del Cinquecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2012).
Chabod, Federico, Storia dell’idea d’Europa, ed. Ernesto Sestan and Armando
Saitta (Bari: Laterza, 1961).
Bibliography 235
Chabod, Federico, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin, Einaudi, 1967).

Cherchi, Paolo, Polimatia di riuso: Mezzo secolo di plagio, 1539–1589 (Rome:
Bulzoni, 1988).
Cherchi, Paolo (ed.), Ricerche sulle selve rinascimentali (Ravenna: Longo, 1999).
Cochrane, Eric W., Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Colish, Marcia L., “The Idea of Liberty in Machiavelli”, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 32:3 (1971): 323–350.
Colish, Marcia L., “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s Savonarolan
Moment”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60:4 (1999): 597–616.
Coller, Ian, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Coller, Ian, “The Revolutionary Mediterranean”, in: Peter McPhee (ed.), A
Companion to the French Revolution (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons,
2012): 419–434.
Colmo, Christopher, “Alfarabi on the Prudence of Founders”, The Review of
Politics, 60: 4 (1998): 719–741.
Contadini, Anna and Claire Norton (eds), The Renaissance and the Ottoman
World (Farnahm and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
Cooper, Richard A., “L’antiquaire Guillaume Du Choul et son cercle lyon-
nais”, in: Gérard Défaux (ed.), Lyon et l’illustration de la langue française à la
Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2003), 261–286.
Coroleu, Alejandro, “Il Democrates primus di Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: una
nuova prima condanna contro il Machiavelli”, Il Pensiero Politico, 25 (1992):
263–268.
Couto, Jorge, “João de Barros e a estratégia lusitana de colonização do Brasil”,
Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 157:391 (1996): 245–273.
Crone, Patricia, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Cutinelli-Rendina, Emanuele, Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli (Pisa and Rome:
Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1999).
Dainotto, Roberto M., Europe (in theory) (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).
Dakhlia, Jocelyne, “Les Miroirs des princes islamiques: Une modernité sourde?”,
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 57:5 (2002): 1191–1206.
D’Ancona, Alessandro, La leggenda di Maometto in Occidente, 2nd ed. (Rome:
Salerno editrice, 1994).
Darling, Linda T., “Political Change and Political Discourse in the Early Modern
Mediterranean World”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38 (2008):
505–531.
Darling, Linda T., Mirrors for Princes in Europe and the Middle East: A Case of
Historiographical Incommensurability, in: Albrecht Classen (ed.), East Meets
236 Bibliography
West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in
the Premodern World (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013): 223–242.
Darling, Linda T., A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle
East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (London:
Routledge, 2013).
D’Ascia, Luca (ed.), Il Corano e la tiara: L’epistola a Maometto di Enea Silvio
Piccolomini (papa Pio II) (Bologna: Pendragon, 2001).
D’Ascia, Luca, “L’impero machiavellico: L’immagine della Turchia nei trattatisti
italiani del Cinquecento e del primo Seicento”, Quaderns d'Italià, 15 (2010):
99–116.
Davidson, Herbert A., Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their
Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Davison, Roderic H., Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1963).
De Grazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989).
Dekmejian, Richard Hrair and Adel Fathy Thabit (2000), “Machiavelli’s Arab
Precursor: Ibn Ẓafar al-Ṣiqillī”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 27:2
(2000): 125–137.
Di Cesare, Michelina, The Pseudo-Historical Image of the Prophet Muhammad
in Medieval Latin Literature: A Repertory (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter,
2012).
Delanoue, Gilbert, Moralistes et politiques musulmans dans l’Egypte du XIXème
siècle, 1798–1882 (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1982)
Den Boer, Harm and Pier Mattia Tommasino, “Reading the Qur’ān in the
17th-century Sephardi community of Amsterdam”, Al-Qantara, 35 (2014):
461–491.
De Pol, Roberto (ed.), The First Translations of Machiavelli’s Prince: From the
Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi, 2010).
Didier, Hugues, “Jerónimo Javier, un Navarro en la India”, in: Vibha Maurya
and Mariela Insúa (eds), Actas del I Congreso Ibero-asiático de Hispanistas:
Siglo de oro e Hispanismo general (Pamplona: Publicaciones de la Universidad
de Navarra, 2011): 147–158.
Dimmock, Matthew, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern
English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Dionisotti, Carlo, Machiavellerie: Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli (Turin: Einaudi,
1980).
Eamon, William, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval
and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Elliott, John H., The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Bibliography 237
Elliott, John H., “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés”, in his Spain and Its
World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989):
27–41.
El Ma’ani, Arap, “The First Arabic Translation”, in: Roberto De Pol (ed.), The
First Translations of Machiavelli's Prince: From the Sixteenth to the First Half of
the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010): 279–304.
Elmarsafy, Ziad, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the
Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009).
Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: Chicago
Fabrizio, Daniela, Il profeta della discordia: Maometto e la polemistica islamo-cris-
tiana medievale (Rome: Aracne, 2011).
Fawaz, Leila Tarazi and C.A. Bayly (eds.) with the collaboration of Robert Ilbert,
Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Ferrero Hernández, Cándida and Óscar de la Cruz Palma (eds), Vitae Mahometi:
Reescritura e invención en la literatura cristiana de controversia (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2014).
Finkel, Caroline, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York:
Basic Books, 2005).
Fiqī, Muḥammad Kāmil al-, Al-Azhar wa-athāruhu fī al-nahḍah al-adabiyyah
al-ḥadīthah 2nd ed. (Cairo: Maktabat nahḍah miṣr, 1965).
Fleischer, Cornell H., Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The
Historian Mustafa Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
Fleischer, Cornell H., “The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the Imperial
Image in the Reign of Süleymân”, in: Gilles Veinstein (ed.), Soliman le mag-
nifique et son temps (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1992): 159–177.
Fok, Kai Cheong, “Early Ming Images of the Portuguese”, in: Roderich Ptak
(ed.), Portuguese Asia: Aspects in History and Economic History (Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries) (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1987): 143–155.
Fowden, Garth, “Pseudo-Aristotelian Politics and Theology in Universal Islam”,
in: Peter F. Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (eds), Universal Empire: A
Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian
History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012):
130–148.
Fowden, Garth, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Fredona, Robert, “Carnival of Law: Bartolomeo Scala’s Dialogue de legibus et
iudiciis”, Viator, 29 (2008): 193–214.
Fuchs, Barbara, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern
Spain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2009).
238 Bibliography
Gennep, Arnold van, “Nouvelles recherches sur l’histoire en France de la méth-

ode ethnographique: Claude Guichard, Richard Simon, Claude Fleury”,
Revue de l’histoire des religions, 82 (1920): 139–162.
Gilbert, Allan H., “Notes on the Influence of the Secretum Secretorum”,
Speculum, 3 (1928): 84–98.
Gilbert, Allan H., Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners: The Prince as a
Typical Book de Regimine Principum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938).
Gilbert, Felix, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of
Machiavelli”, Journal of Modern History, 11:4 (1939): 449–483.
Ginzburg, Carlo, “The Letter Kills: On Some Implications of 2 Corinthians 3,
6”, History and Theory, 49 (2010): 71–89.
Ginzburg, Carlo, “Machiavelli e gli antiquari”, in Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe
Marcocci and Stefania Pastore (eds), Per Adriano Prosperi, 3 vols (Pisa:
Edizioni della Normale, 2011): Vol. II, 3–9.
Ginzburg, Carlo, “Machiavelli, the Exception and the Rule: Notes from
a Research in Progress”, in: Dylwyn Knox and Nuccio Ordine (eds),
Renaissance Learning and Letters: In memoriam Giovanni Aquilecchia
(London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno, 2012): 73–91.
Ginzburg, Carlo, “Intricate Readings: Machiavelli, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas”,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78 (2015): 157–172.
Goellner, Carl, Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 3
vols. (Bucarest, Berlin and Baden Baden: Editura Academiei and Akademie
Verlag-Heitz, 1961–1978).
Goffman, Daniel, “Negotiating with the Renaissance State: The Ottoman
Empire and the New Diplomacy”, in: Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman
(eds), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007): 61–74.
Goichon, A.-M. (1954–2005), “Ḥukm”, in: P.J. Bearman et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia
of Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill): Vol. III, 549.
González Muñoz, Fernando (ed.), Exposición y refutación del Islam: La versión
latina de las epistolas de al-Hāṡŝimī y al-Kindī (A Coruña: Universidade de
Coruña, 2005).
Goody, Jack, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A., Salman Rushdie, 2nd ed. (Houndmills and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Gorris Camos, Rosanna, “Dans le labyrinthe de Gohory, lecteur et traducteur de
Machiavel”, Laboratoire italien, 8 (2008): 195–229.
Gran, Peter, “Egypt and Italy, 1760–1850: Toward a Comparative History”, in:
Nelly Hanna and Raouf Abbas (eds), Society and Economy in Egypt and the
Eastern Mediterranean 1600–1900: Essays in Honor of André Raymond (Cairo:
AUC Press, 2005): 11–35.
Bibliography 239
Green, Louis, “Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani and its Lucchese

Model”, Italian Studies, 12 (1987): 37–55.
Grignaschi, Mario, “La diffusion du Secretum Secretorum (Sirr-Al-’Asrar) dans
l’Europe occidentale”, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen
Age, 55 (1980): 7–70.
Groot, Alexander H. de, “Dragomans’ Careers: The Change of Status in some
Families connected with the British and Dutch Embassies at Istanbul, 1785–
1829”, in: Alastair Hamilton, Alexander H. de Groot and Maurits H. van
den Boogert (eds), Friends and Rivals in the East: Studies in Anglo-Dutch
Relations in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 2000): 223–246.
Gruber, Christiane and Avinoam Shalem, “Images of the Prophet Muhammad
in a Global Context”, in: Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (eds), The
Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation
(Boston and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014): 1–12.
Gruzinski, Serge, What Time Is There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern
Times (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2010).
Guerrieri, Elisabetta, “Fra storia e letteratura: Andrea di Antonio Cambini”,
Medioevo e Rinascimento, n.s., 22:19 (2008): 375–420.
Guillemain, Jean, “L’antiquaire et le libraire: Du bon usage de la medaille dans le
publications lyonnaises de la Renaissance”, Travaux de l’Institut d’Histoire de
l’Art de Lyon, 16 (1993): 35–66.
Günergun, Feza, “Ottoman Encounters with European Science: Sixteenth-
and Seventeenth-Century Translations into Turkish”, in: Peter Burke and
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe,
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 192–211.
Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation
Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998).
Haitsma Mulier, Eco, A Controversial Republican: Dutch Views on Machiavelli in
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in: Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and
Maurizio Viroli (eds), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 247–263.
Hallaq, Wael B., The Impossible Islamic State (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013).
Hampton, Timothy, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in
Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford
Universty Press, 1995).
Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008).
240 Bibliography
Hanke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in
the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959).
Haskell, Francis, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Hasse, Dag N., “King Avicenna: The Iconographic Consequences of a
Mistranslation”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60 (1997):
230–243.
Hasse, Dag N., “Contacts with the Arab World”, in: Sarah Knight and Stefan
Tilg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015): 279–293.
Hentsch, Thierry, Imagining the Middle East, trans. F.A. Reed (Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1992).
Heyworth-Dunne, James, “Printing and Translation under Muḥammad ‘Alī
of Egypt: The Foundation of Modern Arabic”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, 72:4 (1940): 325–349.
Hill, Peter, “The First Arabic Translations of Enlightenment Literature: the
Damietta Circle of the 1800s and 1810s”, Intellectual History Review, 25:2
(2015): 209–233
Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de, “Os projetos de colonização e comércio toscanos
no Brasil ao tempo do Grão Duque Fernando I (1587–1609)”, Revista de
História, 142–143 (2000): 95–122.
Hornqvist, Mikael, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge and New York:
Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge:
Howard, Douglas, “Genre and Myth in the Ottoman Advice for Kings
Literature”, in: Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (eds), The Early
Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007): 137–166.
Howard, Keith D., The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain
(Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014).
İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin, al-Atrāk fī Miṣr wa Turāthihim al-Thaqāfī, trans. Ṣ.
Sa‘dāwī (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2011).
İnalcık, Halil, “Padişah”, in: Islam Ansiklopedisi, 20 vols. (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim
Bakanlığı, 1940–1988): Vol. IX, 491–495.
İpşirli, Mehmet, “Hükümet”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 44
vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013): Vol. XVIII, 468–471.
Isabella, Maurizio, “Liberalism and Empire and the Mediterranean: The
case of the Risorgimento”, in: Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds), The
Risorgimento Revisited (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012):
232–254.
Bibliography 241
Isabella, Maurizio and Konstantina Zanou (eds.), Mediterranean Diasporas.

Politics and Ideas the Long 19th Century (London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2016).
al-Jabartī, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān, Merveilles biographiques et historiques, ou, Chroniques,
trans. C. Mansour Bey et al., 9 vols. (Cairo: Imprimerie nationale, 1888–1896).
Johnson, Harold B., “The Donatory Captaincy in Perspective: Portuguese
Backgrounds to the Settlement of Brazil”, Hispanic American Historical
Review, 52:2 (1972): 203–214.
Karatay, Fehmi E., Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe Yazmalar
(Istanbul: Topkapı Palace, 1961).
Khawam, René (ed.), Le livre des ruses: La stratégie politique des Arabes (Paris:
Phébus, 1976).
Krug, Antje, “Ein römisches Relief und Raffael”, Städel-Jahrbuch, 5 (1975):
31–36.
Labalme, Patricia H., Bernardo Giustiniani: A Venetian of the Quattrocento
(Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969).
Landi, Sandro, “Per purgare li animi di quelli populi: Metafore del vincolo polit-
ico e religioso in Machiavelli”, Storia del pensiero politico, 2 (2014): 187–212.
Laroui, Abdallah, Islam et modernité (Paris: La Découverte, 1986).
Lavenia, Vincenzo, “I libri, le armi e le missioni: Conversione e guerra antiot-
tomana in un testo di Lazzaro Soranzo”, in: Vincenzo Lavenia and Sabina
Pavone (eds), Missioni, saperi e adattamento tra Europa e imperi non cristiani
(Macerata: Eum, 2015): 165–202.
Lefèvre, Corinne, “Europe-Mughal India-Muslim Asia: Circulation and Political
Ideas and Instruments in Early Modern Times”, in: Antje Flüchter and
Susan Richter (eds), Structures on the Move: Technologies of Governance in
Transcultural Encounter (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2012): 127–146.
Lestringant, Frank, “Guillaume Postel e l‘obsession turque’”, in: Guillaume
Postel 1581–1981: Actes du Colloque International d’Avranches (Paris: Éditions
de La Maisnie, 1985): 265–298.
Lestringant, Frank, “Anti-funérailles ou la guerre des cimetières (1594–1598)”,
in: Jean Balsamo (ed.), Les funérailles à la Renaissance: XIIe colloque interna-
tional de la Société Française d’Etude du Seizième Siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2002):
295–317.
Le Thiec, Guy, “L’entrée des grands Turcs dans le Museo de Paolo Giovio”,
Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 104:2 (1992):
781–830.
Lewis, Bernard, “Ḥukūma”, in: Peri J. Bearman et al. (eds),Encyclopaedia of
Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1954–2005): Vol. III:
551–552.
Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1961).
242 Bibliography
Lewis, Bernard, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton,

1982).
Lewis, Bernard, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1988).
Lieberman, Victor, “Introduction. Eurasian Variants”, in: Victor Lieberman
(ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor
and Richmond: University of Michigan Press, 1999): 1–18.
Lippi, Emilio, “1517: l’ottava al servizio del Sultano”, Quaderni veneti, 34
(2001): 49–88.
Lippi, Emilio, “Born to Rule the World: An Italian Poet Celebrates the Deeds of
the Sultan Selim I”, Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi, 19 (2004): 87–92.
Loureiro, Rui Manuel, A Rare Sixteenth Century Imprint: The Livro da origem
dos Turcos (Portimão: ISMAT, 2013).
Lowney, Chris, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval
Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
MacLean, Gerald, (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with
the East (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
Marcocci, Giuseppe, “Machiavelli, la religione dei romani e l'impero por-
toghese”, Storica, 14:41–42 (2008): 35–68.
Marconi, Sergio, “Giannotti, Donato” in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani
(Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ): Vol. LIV, 527–533.
Marlow, Louise, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge:
Mas, Albert, Le Turcs dans la littérature espagnole du Siècle d’or, 2 vols. (Paris:
Centre de Recherches Hispaniques, 1967).
Matar, Nabil, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia
McCabe Baghdiantz, Ina, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade,
Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008).
Meral, Arzu, “A Survey of Translation Activity in the Ottoman Empire”, The
Journal of Ottoman Studies, 42 (2013): 105–155.
Merle, Alexandra, Le miroir Ottoman: Une image politique des hommes dans la lit-
térature géographique espagnole et française, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003).
Meserve, Margaret, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought
Meserve, Margaret, “Francesco Filelfo”, in: David Thomas (ed.), Christian–
Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 7 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2008–2015): Vol. V, 406–414.
Bibliography 243
Michelacci, Lara, “Introduzione: La nostalgia dell’altro”, in: Paolo Giovio,

Commentario delle cose de’ Turchi (Bologna: Clueb, 2005): 8–67.
Milani, Matteo, “La tradizione italiana del Secretum secretorum”, La parola del
testo, 5 (2001): 209–253.
Moe, Nelson J., The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern
Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Moin, A. Azfar, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Momigliano, Arnaldo, “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca” [1967], in his
Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Roma:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969): 43–58.
Momigliano, Arnaldo, “Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt: Perspective on the First
Millennium B.C.”, Daedalus, 104 (1975): 9–19 [reprinted as “The Fault of
the Greeks”, in his Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, with a new
foreword by Anthony Grafton (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012):
9–23].
Momigliano, Arnaldo, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” [1950], in his
Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, 1979), 67–106.
Monteiro, Rodrigo Bentes and Sandra Bagno (eds), Maquiavel no Brasil: Dos
Descobrimentos ao século XXI (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio
Vargas, 2015).
Moreno, Paola, “Paolo Giovio e Francesco Guicciardini”, in: Emilio Pasquini
and Paolo Prodi (eds), Bologna nell'età di Carlo V e Guicciardini (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 2002): 93–104.
Most, Glenn W., “The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung”, in: Ann Blair and
Anja-Silvia Goeing (eds), For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony
Grafton, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016): Vol. II: 933–954.
Moussa, Sarga, “Le mythe des Bédouins a l’aube du XIXe siecle: l’exemple de
Dom Raphael de Monachis”, in: Gérard Ferreyrolles and Laurent Versini
(eds), Le Livre du monde et le monde des livres (Paris: Presses de l’Université
Paris-Sorbonne, 2012): 847–857.
Naff, Thomas, “Ottoman Diplomatic Relations with Europe in the Eighteenth
Century: Patterns and Trends”, in: Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (eds),
Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1970): 88–107.
Naff, Thomas, “Introduction”, in Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (eds),
Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Najemy, John M., “Machiavelli and the Medici: The Lessons of Florentine
History”, Renaissance Quarterly, 35:4 (1982): 551–576.
244 Bibliography
Najemy, John M., “Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of
Interpreting Religion”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60:4 (1999): 668–681.
Najemy, John M., A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
2006).
Najemy, John M., “Machiavelli between East and West”, in: Diogo Ramada
Curto et al. (eds), From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond: Essays in
Honour of Anthony Molho (Florence: Olschki, 2009): 127–145.
Nallino, Maria, “Intorno a due traduzioni arabe del Principe del Machiavelli”,
Oriente Moderno, 11–12 (1931): 604–616.
Narayana Rao, Velcheru and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Elegy for Nīti: Politics
as a Secular Discursive Field in the Indian Old Régime”, Common Knowledge,
14:3 (2008): 396–423.
Necipoğlu, Gülru, “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power
in the Context of Ottoman–Hapsburg–Papal Rivalry”, The Art Bulletin, 71
(1989): 401–427.
Necipoğlu, Gülru, “A Kânûn for the State, a Canon for the Arts:
Conceptualizing the Classical Synthesis of Ottoman Arts and Architecture”,
in: Gilles Veinstein (ed.), Soliman le magnifique et son temps (Paris: La
Documentation Française, 1992): 195–216.
Nederman, Cary J., “Amazing Grace: Fortune, God, and Free Will in
Machiavelli’s Thought”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60:4 (1999),
617–638.
Orth, Myra Dickman, “Lyon et Rome à l’antique: Les illustrations des Antiquités
romaines de Guillaume Du Choul”, in: Gérard Défaux (ed.), Lyon et
l’illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Éditions,
2003): 287–308.
Öz, Mehmet, Osmanlıda Çözülme ve Gelenekçi Yorumcuları (İstanbul: Dergah
Yayınları, 1997).
Öztürk, Necdet, “İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri Kütüphanesindeki Tarih
Yazmaları”, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları, 63 (1990): 129–175.
Palabiyik, Mustafa Serdar, “The Emergence of the Idea of ‘International Law’
in the Ottoman Empire before the Treaty of Paris (1856)”, Middle Eastern
Studies, 50:2 (2014): 233–251.
Palumbo, Matteo, “Storia e scrittura della storia: La vita di Castruccio
Castracani”, in: Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli (Rome: Salerno editore,
1998): 145–164.
Parel, Anthony J., “Ptolemy as Source of The Prince 25”, History of Political
Thought, 14:1 (1993): 77–83.
Parenti, Marino, Dizionario dei luoghi di stampa falsi, inventati o supposti in opere
di autori e traduttori italiani: Con un’appendice sulla data “Italia” e un sag-
gio sui falsi luoghi usati all’estero, o in Italia, da autori stranieri (Florence:
Sansoni Antiquaria, 1951).
Bibliography 245
Pasta, Renato, “Mariti, Giovanni”, in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome:
Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ): Vol. LXX, 592–595.
Pastor Bodmer, Beatriz, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the
Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992).
Patel, Abdulrazzak, The Arab Nahḍāh: The Making of Intellectual and Humanist
Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Pécout, Gilles, “Pour une lecture méditerranéenne et transnationale du
Risorgimento”, Revue d’histoire du XIX siècle, 44 (2012): 29–47.
Perini, Leandro, La vita e i tempi di Pietro Perna (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, 2002).
Petrina, Alessandra, “Reginald Pole and Reception of the Principe in Henrician
England”, in: Alessandro Arienzo and Alessandra Petrina (eds), Machiavellian
Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013): 13–27.
Petrucci, Armando, “Biblioteca, libri, scritture nella Napoli aragonese”, in:
Guglielmo Cavallo (ed.), Le biblioteche nel mondo antico e medievale (Rome
and Bari: Laterza, 1988): 187–202.
Piemontese, Angelo Michele, “Lo studio delle cinque lingue presso Savonarola e
Pico”, in: Michele Bernardini (ed.), Europa e Islam tra i secoli XIV e XVI, 2
vols. (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 2002): Vol. I, 179–202.
Pippidi, Andrei, Visions of the Ottoman World in Renaissance Europe (London:
Hurst, 2012).
Pocock, John G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975).
Pocock, John G.A., Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Pouillon, François (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française (Paris:
Karthala, 2008).
Poumarède, Géraud, Pour en finir avec la croisade: Mythes et réalités de la lutte
contre les Turcs aux XVIeet XVIIesiècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2004).
Preto, Paolo, Venezia e i turchi, 2nd ed. (Rome: Viella, 2013).
Procacci, Giuliano, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome: Istituto Italiano
per la Storia dell’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 1965).
Procacci, Giuliano, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna (Rome
and Bari: Laterza, 1995).
Prosperi, Adriano, “Il principe, il cardinale, il papa: Reginald Pole lettore di
Machiavelli”, in: Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli (Rome: Salerno editrice,
1998): 241–262.
246 Bibliography
Prosperi, Adriano, “La religione, il potere, le élites: Incontri italo-spagnoli

nell’età della Controriforma”, in his Eresie e devozioni, 3 vols. (Roma:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010): Vol. I, 61–85.
Prosperi, Adriano, “Il Principe e la cultura europea”, in: Niccolò Machiavelli, Il
Principe: Saggi e commenti (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2013):
41–65.
Puigdomènech, Helena, Maquiavelo en España: Presencia de sus obras en los siglos
XVI y XVII (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988).
Pujeau, Emmanuelle L'Europe et les Turcs: la croisade de l'humaniste Paolo Giovio
(Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2015).
Pulido-Rull, Ana, “A Pronouncement of Alliance: An Anonymous Illuminated
Venetian Manuscript for Sultan Süleyman”, Muqarnas, 29:1 (2012):
101–150.
Raimondi, Ezio, Politica e commedia dal Beroaldo a Machiavelli (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1972).
Rau, Virginia, “Um grande mercador-banqueiro em Portugal: Lucas Giraldi”, in:
Virginia Rau, Estudos de História (Lisbon: Verbo, 1968): 75–129.
Renucci, Touissant, Un aventurier des lettres au XVIe siècle: Gabriel Symeoni, flor-
entin, 1509–1570? (Paris: Didier, 1943).
Riall, Lucy, Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford: Oxford
Ricci, Giovanni, I giovani, i morti: Sfide al Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino,
2007).
Richard, Francis, “Un augustin portugais renégat, apologiste de l’Islam chiite au
début du XVIIIe siècle”, Moyen Orient et Océan Indien, 1 (1984): 73–85.
Ridolfi, Roberto, “Pensieri medicei di colonizzare il Brasile”, Il Veltro, 6 (1962):
705–712.
Romano, Angelo, “De Ferrariis, Antonio”, in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani
(Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ): Vol. XXXIII, 738–741.
Rosenthal, Franz, “Dawla”, in: Peri J. Bearman et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of
Islam, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1954–2005): Vol. II,
177–178.
Rosenthal, Franz, The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 1960).
Rothman, E. Natalie, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in
the Early Modern Mediterranean”, Comparative Studies in Society and History
51:4 (2009): 771–800.
Sadgrove, Philip C., “Zakhur, Pere Rufa‘il”, in: Julie Scott Meisami and Paul
Starkey (eds.), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols. (London: Routledge,
1998): Vol. II, 820.
Şahin, Kaya, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the
Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013).
Bibliography 247
Şahin, Kaya and Julia Schleck, “Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’s

Relation of His Trauels (1613) in a Global Context”, Renaissance Quarterly,
69:1 (2016), 80–115.
Saldanha, António Vasconcelos de, As capitanias do Brasil: Antecedente, desen-
volvimento e extinção de um fenómeno atlântico (Lisbon: CNCDP, 2001).
Santos Hernández, Ángel, Jerónimo Javier, apóstol del Gran Mogol y arzobispo
electo de Cranganor en la India (Pamplona: Príncipe de Viana, 1962).
Savage-Smith, Emilie, “Europe and Islam”, in: Irvine Loudon (ed.), Western
Medicine: An Illustrated History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 38–53.
Saviello, Alberto, Imaginationen des Islam: Bildliche Darstellungen des Propheten
Mohammed im westeuropäischen Buchdruck bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2015).
Sawaie, Mohammed, “Rifa a Rafi al-Tahtawi and His Contribution to the Lexical
Development of Modern Literary Arabic”, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, 32:3 (2000): 395–410.
Saxl, Fritz, “Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance”, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 2 (1938–1939): 346–367.
Sayyid Marsot, Afaf Lufti al-, “The Ulama of Cairo in the 18th and the 19th
Centuries”, in: Nikki R. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim
Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972): 149–165.
Schmitt, Charles B., “Francesco Storella and the Last Printed Edition of the
Latin Secretum secretorum (1555)”, in: William F. Ryan and Charles B.
Schmitt (eds), Pseudo–Aristotle, The Secret of Secrets: Sources and Influences
(London: The Warburg Institute, 1982): 124–131.
Schmitt, Charles B., “Pseudo–Aristotle in the Latin Middle Ages”, in: Jill Kraye,
William F. Ryan and Charles B. Schmitt (eds), Pseudo–Aristotle in the Middle
Ages: The Theology and Other Texts (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986): 3–14.
Schwartz, Stuart B., All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the
Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Senellart, Michel, Les Arts de gouverner: Du regimen médiéval au concept de gou-
vernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
al-Shayyāl, Jamāl al-Dīn, Tārīkh al-tarjamah al-thaqāfiyyah fī Miṣr (Cairo: Dār al-
Fikr al-‘Arabī, 1951).
Sheehi, Stephen, “Towards a Critical Theory of al-Nahḍah: Epistemology,
Ideology and Capital”, Journal of Arabic Literature, 43:2–3 (2012):
269–298.
Sidarus, Adel, “A Western Mirror for Princes for an Eastern Potentate: The Ādāb
al-saltanat by Jerome Xavier S.J. for the Mogul Emperor”, Journal of Eastern
Christian Studies, 63:1–2 (2011): 73–98.
248 Bibliography
Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols.

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Skinner, Quentin, Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002): Vol. 1, Regarding Method.
Sterk, Andrea and Nina Caputo (eds), Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion,
and the Challenge of Objectivity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2014).
Steusand, Douglas E., Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and
Mughals (Boulder: Westview Press, 2011).
Stradling, Robert A., Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621–1665 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Strauss, Johann, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th and 20th
Centuries)?”, Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures, 6:1 (2003): 39–76.
Strauss, Johann, The Egyptian Connection in Nineteenth Century Ottoman
Literary and Intellectual History (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 2000).
Strauss, Leo, “Persecution and the Art of Writing” [1941], in his Persecution and
the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952): 22–37.
Strien, Kees van, Voltaire in Holland, 1736–1745 (Louvain: Edition Peters,
2011).
Stroumsa, Guy G. (2010), A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of
Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Stroumsa, Guy G., “Three Rings or Three Impostors? The Comparative
Approach to the Abrahamic Religions and its Origins”, in: Adam J. Silverstein
and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds) and Moshe Bildstein (assoc. ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford and New York: Oxford
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration
of Early Modern Eurasia”, Modern Asian Studies, 31:3 (1997): 735–762.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Par-delà l'incommensurabilité: Pour une histoire con-
nectée des empires aux temps modernes”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contem-
poraine, 54:5 (2007), 34–53.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails & Encounters in the
Early Modern World (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011).
Subtelny, Maria E., “A Late Medieval Persian Summa on Ethics: Kashifi’s
Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī”, Iranian Studies, 36:4 (2003): 601–614.
Suppa, Silvio, “L’antimachiavelisme de Thomas Bozio”, Corpus, 31 (1997):
145–173.
Bibliography 249
Syros, Vasileios, “All Roads Lead to Florence: Renaissance Jewish Thinkers and
Machiavelli on Civil Strife”, Viator, 47:1 (2015): 349–364.
Syros, Vasileios, “Behind Every Great Reformer There is a ‘Machiavelli’:
Al-Maghīlī, Machiavelli, and the Micro-Politics of an Early Modern African
and an Italian City-State”, Philosophy East and West, 65:4 (2015): 1119–1148.
Tageldin, Shaden M., “Fénelon’s Gods, al-Tahṭawī's Jinn: Trans-Mediterranean
Fictionalities”, in: Michael Allan and Elisabetta Benigni (eds), “Lingua
Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”, Philological Encounters, 2:1–2
(2017): 139–158.
Taneri, Aydın, Osmanlı Devleti’nin Kuruluş Döneminde Hükümdarlık
Kurumunun Gelişmesi ve Saray Hayatı-Teşkilatı (Ankara: A. Ü. Dilve Tarih
Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları, 1978).
Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New
York: Macmillan, 1923–1958).
Tolan, John V., “European Accounts of Muḥammad’s Life”, in: Jonathan E.
Brockopp (ed.), The Cambridgde Companion to Muḥammad (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010): 226–250.
Tolan, John V., “Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History”, in: Adam J.
Silverstein and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds) and Moshe Bildstein (assoc. ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford and New York: Oxford
Tommasino, Pier Mattia, “Leer a Maquiavelo, traducer el Corán: Muḥammad,
príncipe y legislador en el Alcorano di Macometto (Venecia, 1547)”,
Al-Qantara, 33:2 (2012): 271–296.
Tommasino, Pier Mattia, L’Alcorano di Macometto: Storia di un libro del
Cinquecento europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013).
Tommasino, Pier Mattia, “Sul talento dei lettori”, Storica, 20:58 (2014):
112–122.
Tommasino, Pier Mattia, “Muḥammad e la cerva di Quinto Sertorio”, in:
Cándida Ferrero Hernández and Óscar de la Cruz Palma (eds), Vitae
Mahometi. Reescritura e invención en la literatura cristiana de controversia
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2014): 207–219.
Tommasino, Pier Mattia, “Otranto and the Self”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian
Renaissance, 18 (2015): 147–155.
Tondo, Luigi, Domenico Sestini e il medagliere toscano (Florence: Olschki, 1990).
Totaro, Giuseppina, “Da Antonio Magliabechi a Philip von Stosch: Varia fortuna
del De tribus impostoribus e de L’esprit de Spinoza a Firenze”, in: Eugenio
Canone (ed.), Bibliotecae Selectae da Cusano a Leopardi (Firenze: Olschki,
1993): 549–570.
Travi, Ernesto, “Giovio, gli Orti Oricellari e Machiavelli”, Testo, 5 (1983):
53–61.
250 Bibliography
Trivellato, Francesca, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in

Recent Historical Work”, Journal of Modern History, 82:1 (2010): 127–155.
Ülken, Hilmi Ziya, Uyanış Devirlerinde Tercümenin Rolü, 3rd ed. (Istanbul:
Ülken Yayınları, 1997).
Valeri, Elena, “‘Historici bugiardi’: La polemica cinquecentesca contro Paolo
Giovio”, in: Alberto Merola et al. (eds), Storia sociale e politica: Omaggio a
Rosario Villari (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2007): 115–137.
Van Allen Van Dyck, Cornelius, Iktifā’ al-Qunū‘bi-mā huwa maṭbū‘ (Beirut: Dār
Ṣādir, 1896).
Vanden Broeck, Philippe, “L’Esprit des Journaux (1772–1818)”, in: Jean Sgard
(ed.), Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789 (Paris and Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1991): 396–397.
Viroli, Maurizio, Niccolò’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli, trans. Antony
Shugaar (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli’s God, trans. Antony Shugaar (Princeton: Princeton
Viroli, Maurizio, Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s
Masterpiece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Vissing, Lars, Machiavel ou la politique de l’apparence (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1986).
Vivanti, Corrado, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography, trans. S.
MacMichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Vogel, Klaus A., “Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes
Boemus on ‘The Manners, Laws and Customs of All People’ (1520)”, in:
Henriette Bugge and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds), Shifting Cultures: Interaction
and Discourse in the Expansion of Europe (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1995): 17–34.
Walker, Daniel Pickering, “Paracaelsus and Jacques Gohory”, in his Spiritual
and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
Wendell, Charles, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image: From its Origins
to Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
Werner, Michael, and Benedicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire
Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity”, History and Theory, 45:1 (2006):
30–50.
Whitfield, John Humphrey, “Machiavelli and Castruccio”, Italian Studies, 8
(1953): 1–28.
Williams, Steven J., The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-
Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2003).
Williams, Steven J., “The Vernacular Tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret
of Secrets in the Middle Ages: Translations, Manuscripts, and Readers”,
Bibliography 251
in: Nadia Bray and Loris Sturlese (eds), Filosofia in volgare nel medioevo
(Turnhout, Brepols, 2003): 451–482.
Williams, Steven J., “Giving Advice and Taking It: The Reception by Rulers of
the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum as a Speculum principis”, in:
Carla Casagrande, Chiara Crisciani and Silvana Vecchio (eds), Consilium:
Teorie e pratiche del consigliare nella cultura medievale (Florence: Edizioni del
Galluzzo, 2004): 139–180.
Wurzbach, Constant von, “Herbert, Thomas von”, in: Biographisches Lexikon
des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, 60 vols. (Wien: K.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei,
1856–1891): vol. VIII, 352.
Xavier, Ângela Barreto, “A maior empresa que nunca um príncipe cristão teve
nas mãos’: Conquistar e conservar territórios no Índico nos tempos de
Maquiavel”, Revista Tempo, 20 (2014): 1–27.
Yates, Frances A., Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London
and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
Yavari, Neguin, Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in
Medieval Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Yérasimos, Stéphane, “De la collection de voyages à l'histoire universelle: La
Historia Universale de’ Turchi de Francesco Sansovino”, Turcica, 20 (1988):
19–41.
Yılmaz, Hüseyin, “The Sultan and the Sultanate: Envisioning Rulership in the
Age of Süleymān the Lawgiver (1520–1566)” (PhD dissertation: Harvard
University, 2005).
Yılmaz, Mehmet Şakir, “‘Koca Nişancı’ of Kanuni: Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi,
Bureaucracy and ‘Kanun’ in the Reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–
1566)” (PhD dissertation: Bilkent University, 2006).
Yılmazer, Ziya, “IV. Murad”, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 44
vols. (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013): Vol. XXXI, 177–183.
Yule, Henry and A.C. Burnell, Hobson–Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British
India, ed. Kate Teltscher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Zamuner, Ilaria, “La tradizione romanza del Secretum secretorum pseudo-aristo-
telico: Regesto delle versioni e dei manoscritti”, Studi Medievali, 46 (2005):
31–116.
Zimmermann, T.C. Price, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth
Century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Index
A Akhlāq-i Humāyūnī, 112

Abbasid dynasty, 18, 165, 210 Akhlāq-i Muhsīnī, 112, 164
‘Abd al-‘Azīz Efendi, Ṣubḥīzādah, Akhlāq-i Nāsirī, 112
181–182 Alamanni, Luigi, 63
'Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, 9, al-Asirm, Yusuf, 211
110–113, 115, 124 Albergati, Fabio, 50
Absalom, 117 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 106
Ab urbe condita, 46 Alcalá, 109
Abu’l Fazl, 108 Alcorano di Macometto, 8, 92–94,
Acquaviva, Claudio, 112 96–97
Acquaviva, Rodolfo, 107 Aleppo, 206
Ādāb al-Saltanat, 9, 112, 123 Alexander the Great, king of
Aeschylus, 79 Macedonia, 4, 7, 18, 21, 24,
Affaitati, Giovan Francesco, 22 26–28, 44–45, 95, 114, 117,
Afonso III, king of Portugal, 120 119, 135, 186
Afonso V, king of Portugal, 120 Alexandria, 67
Africa, 4, 9, 82, 86, 105, 117 al-Fārābī, 213
Africans, 66 Alfonso VI, king of Castile, 120
Agra, 116 al-Ghazālī, 213
Ahwāl-i Firangistān, 110 al-Hāshimī, 82
Ā’īna-yi Haqq-numā, 110 Alighieri, Dante, 92
‘Ajā’ib al-āthār fī al-tarājim wa al- Ali Mu’min, 120–121
akhbār, 206 Ali Quli Jadid al-Islam, 110
Akbar, Muḥammad Abū l-Fatḥ Jalāl al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, 206
al-dīn, Mughal emperor, 1, 2, al-Kashifi, Husayn Wa‘iz, 112
108–110 al-Kindī, 82–83, 89, 213
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 253

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53949-2
254 Index
al-Nahḍah, 200, 205, 210, 211 Babylon, 80

al-Shidyāq, Aḥmad Fāris, 211 Bacon, Francis, 64
al-Tahṭāwī, Rifā‘ah, 210 Baghdad, 18, 82, 83
Altdorf, 52 Bahādur Shāh, Mughal
Alvia de Castro, Fernando, 145 emperor, 147
al-Yāzijī, Ibrāhim, 211 Baring, Evelyn, 212
al-Yāzijī, Nāṣif, 211 Barros, João de, 139–141, 144–145
Anatolia, 53, 136, 159, 161 Bassein, 109
Ancient religion, 5, 39, 65, 137 Bāyezīd II, Ottoman sultan, 6, 136
Anglo, Sydney, 64, 187 Béarn, 69
Annali overo le vite de’ principi et Belluno, 93
signori della casa othomana, 49 Bengal, 107
Anti-Machiavel, 11, 177–183, Benvoglienti, Fabio, 50
185–187, 190–192 Bibliotheca selecta, 40
Anti-Machiavellianism, 61, 203 Biglia, Andrea, 89
Antiquarianism, 68–69, 81 Bijapur, sultanate of, 106
Antojovio, 46 Biondo, Flavio, 39, 68
Antwerp, 138 Black, Antony, 17, 26
Arabia, 53, 143, 159 Black Sea, 159
Arab nineteenth-century Renaissance. Blado, Antonio, 6, 37, 41, 62,
See al-Nahḍah 135, 137
Arcana imperii, 21, 24, 96 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 48
Aristotle, 7, 18, 22, 24–30, 44, 114, 165 Boemus, Johanes. See Böhm, Hans
Armenia, 52 Boerhaave, Herman, 182, 186, 191
Arrivabene, Andrea, 8, 92–93, 96 Böhm, Hans, 40, 138
Artaud de Montor, Jean-Alexis- Bologna, 41–42, 44–45, 95, 138–139
François, 182 Book of Revelation, 82
Asclepius, 67 Book of Stratagems, 17
Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia, 211 Borgeaud, Philippe, 62
Asia, 1, 3–4, 6, 9, 39, 41, 44–45, 53, Borgia, Cesare, 26–28, 132, 162, 189
86, 106, 108, 132–133, 135, Bosphorus, 92–93
139–140, 144–145, 160, 165 Botero, Giovanni, 38, 52
Asilah, 134 Bozio, Tommaso, 38
Augustus, 95, 115, 123 Brazil, 10, 69, 131–132, 141,
Aurangzeb, Mughal emperor, 143, 148
146–147 Britain, 85, 146, 180, 187
Averroës, 84 Brocchi, Gian Battista, 206, 207
Buddha, 79–83, 89
Būlāq, 210
B Buonaccorsi, Biagio, 27
Bābur, Ẓahīr ud-Dīn Muḥammad, Buondelmonti, Zanobi, 63
Mughal emperor, 1 Byzantines, 21, 188
Index 255
C Cicero, 44, 65–66, 116

Cairo, 202, 204, 206–207, 212 Cinico, Giovanni Marco, 88
Calicut, 107, 132 Cirne, Manuel, 138
Cambiagi, Gaetano, 180, 182 Cirni, Antonio Francesco, 48
Cambini, Andrea, 47 Clement VII, pope (Giulio de’
Cambridge, School of. See Medici), 41
Contextualism Cochin, 109, 144
Çamorym. See Samudri Raja Cochrane, Eric, 89
Campanella, Tommaso, 92 Cohortatio ut bellum suscipiat in
Canfora, Davide, 100 Turcas, 44
Casa da Índia, 140 Coimbra, 120
Casale, Giancarlo, 94 Colombia, 46
Castile, kingdom of, 117, 119, 120, Colonna, Fabrizio, 91
169 Colonna, Marcantonio, 50
Castilho, Diogo de, 138 Columbus, Christopher, 2
Castro, Américo, 85 Comentarii ne quali si descrive la
Castro, João de, 144 guerra ultima di Francia, la cel-
Castrodardo, Giovanni Battista, 8, ebratione del Concilio Tridentino,
92–97 il soccorso d’Orano, l’impresa del
Catholicism, 38 Pignone, e l’historia dell’assedio di
Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, 10, 157–171 Malta, 48
Celts, 80 Comentario de las guerras de los
Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 211 Turcos. See Commentario de le cose
Cesena, 27 de’ turchi
Ceuta, 134 Commentario de le cose de’ Turchi, 37
Chaldiran, battle of, 136 Como, 43
Charlemagne, kings of the Franks and Comparison, 3–4, 7–8, 19, 21, 53,
then Holy Roman emperor, 20 62–64, 67–68, 83, 91–92,
Charles Emmanuel I, duke 95, 131, 133, 135–136, 138,
of Savoy, 68 147–148, 158, 186, 199, 200
Charles V of Habsburg, Holy Roman Confucius, 79
emperor and king of Spain, Connected reading, 159, 170
39–40, 48, 51, 108–109, 120 Considérations sur les causes de la
Charles VII of Valois, king of France, grandeur des Romains et leur
89, 159 decadence, 205
Charles VIII of Valois, king Consiglio di monsignor Giovio rac-
of France, 159 colto dalle consulte di papa Leone
Chaul, 144 Decimo per far l’impresa contra
China, 108 infedeli, 48
Christ, 26, 39, 44, 63, 67–68, 82, 93, Constance of Burgundy, 121
109 Constantine, 20, 43, 63
Christianity, 5–6, 8, 37, 39, 137, 139, Constantinople. See Istanbul
169, 210 Contextualism, 33, 157–158
256 Index
Córdoba, 121 Del modo d’assaltar l’imperio

Corio, Bernardino, 88 turchesco, 48
Corsi, Francesco, 111 Democrates primus, 138
Corso, Rinaldo, 50 Democrates secundus, 54
Cortés, Hernán, 106, 120 De nobilitate, 45, 139
Cosimo I de’ Medici, duke of De origine urbis Venetiarum, 85, 87,
Florence, 20 92–93
Counter-Reformation, 38, 49 De regimine principum. See Secret of
Cremona, 22 Secrets
Cresci, Migliore, 20, 30 De regimine regum. See Secret
Croce, Benedetto, 214 of Secrets
Cunha, Nuno da, 107 De regis institutione et disciplina, 139
Cuspinian, Johannes, 89–91 De regnandi peritia, 187
Cyrus, king of Persia, 52, 62–63, 90 De re militari romana et turcica, 52
De robore bellico, 39, 53
Des antiquités romaines.
D Premier livre, 64
Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 17 Des Epigrammes de toute la Gaule, 72
Dalmatia, 159 De sepulchris et vario
Da Mula, Marcantonio, 50 sepeliendi ritu, 68
D’Ancona, Alessandro, 68 De summo Pontifice Christi in terris
Dante. See Alighieri, Dante vicario, 61
Danti, Antonino, 48 De tribus impostoribus, 97
Daradast. See Zoroaster D’Herbert. See Herbert, Thomas
Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 212 Dialogus de viris litteris illustribus, 42
Darling, Linda, 17, 160 Díaz Tanco de Fregenal, Vasco, 45
Dāstān-i Masīh. See Mir’āt al-Quds Dionysius of Syracuse, 114
De Caesaribus, 88, 91–92 Diplomacy, 13
De causis magnitudinis Imperii Directório de Reys. See Ādāb
Turcici & virtutis ac felicitatis al-Saltanat
Turcarum in bellis perpetuae, 50 Discorso della lega contra il turco al
Decius, Publius, 144 serenissimo prencipe Mauritio
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, cardinal di Savoia, 52
84, 205 Discours de la religion des anciens
De detrimento fidei Orientis, 89 Romains, 72
De Ferrariis, Antonio, 87 Discours sur la castrametation et disci-
De haruspicum responsis, 65 pline militaire des Romains, 64
De iure belli, 52 Dissertatio de statu imperii
De legibus et iudiciis, 87 Turcici, 52
Delhi sultanate, 113 Diu, 107, 139
Dell’historia universale dell’origine et Domenichi, Ludovico, 92–94
imperio de’ turchi, 49–50 Du Choul, Guillaume, 64–67
Index 257
E Foglietta, Uberto, 50–51

Egeria, nymph, 90 Foscolo, Ugo, 211
Egnazio, Giovanni Battista, 88–89, 92 Fowden, Garth, 81
Egypt, 5, 11, 80, 95, 136, 159, 161, France, 4, 20, 46, 65–66
184, 199, 202, 204–207, 209, Francis I of Valois, king of France, 65
211–212, 214 Frederick II of Hohenzollern, king of
Egyptians, 21, 69 Prussia, 177, 179, 183–189, 191
el-Ksar el-Kebir, 108 Free will, 22–23, 209–210
Elliott, John H., 106, 132 Freitas, Martim de, 120
Éléments de la philosophie de Newton Frenchmen, 21
mis à la portée de tout le monde, Fuente de Vida, 109
185 Funerailles et diverses manieres
Elogia virorum bellica virtute d’ensevelir des Romains, Grecs et
illustrium, 40 autres nations, tant anciens que
England, 1, 161 modernes, 68
Englishmen, 21
Enlightenment, 83, 84, 202
Enneades, 88 G
Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius, 128 Gabriello da Bergamo, 132
Espírito Santo, 142 Gaddi, Giovanni, 26
Estado da Índia, 107 Galata, 92–93
Eurasia, 82, 85, 97, 158 Galba, 119
Évora, 139 Gama, Vasco da, 132, 134, 142, 145
Ezpeleta y Goñi, Jerónimo de. See Garzoni, Agostino, 179
Xavier, Jerónimo. Gascony, 69
Gauls, 66
Gentili, Alberico, 52
F Gentili, Scipione, 52
Facta and Dicta Memorabilia, 90 Germany, 50–51, 136, 146
Fann-i Hukūmāt ve Siyāsat, 187 Gerusalemme Liberata, 52
Fatehpur Sikri, 1, 107 Giannotti, Donato, 66
Ferdinand I, grand duke of Tuscany, Gibbon, Edward, 84
141 Gilbert, Allan H., 19, 25–26, 30
Ferdinand I, king of Naples, 88 Gilbert, Felix, 19
Ferdinand II, king of Aragon, 8, 169 Gilles of Rome, 84
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 20 Ginzburg, Carlo, 8, 90–91, 131, 165
Ferrara, 92 Giovio, Paolo, 6, 8, 37–38, 40–42,
Filelfo, Francesco, 89, 90 48–53, 137–138, 142–143, 148
Flavius Josephus, 109 Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio, 68
Florence, 2–3, 17, 19, 23, 41–42, 66, Giraldi, Luca, 142
96–97, 105, 110, 124, 160, 162, Giustinian, Bernardo, 85–87,
180–182, 193–195, 212 93–94, 97
258 Index
Goa, 107, 109, 134 Humayun, Nāṣin al-Dīn Muḥammad,

Gobbi, Filippo, 180–183 Mughal emperor, 110
Gohory, Jacques, 20–23, 30, 143 Hungary, 53, 95, 159
Góis, Bento de, 108 Husain Shahi dynasty, 107
Gonsalus seu de appetenda gloria, 44 Hystoria en la qual se trata de la
Goths, 85 origen y guerras que han tenido
Gramsci, Antonio, 214 los turcos (…) y de las costumbres y
Gran, Peter, 202 vidas dellos, 46
Granada, 120
Greeks, 42, 44, 51, 68, 80, 137–138
Grignaschi, Mario, 18 I
Gruber, Christiane, 83 Iberian empires, 38
Guerreiro, Fernão, 109 Ibn al-Biṭrīq, Yaḥyá, 18
Guicciardini, Francesco, 42, 48 Ibn al-Biṭrīq, Yūḥannā. See Ibn
Guichard, Claude, 68–69 al-Biṭrīq, Yaḥyá
Gujarat, sultan of, 107, 139 Ibn Khaldūn, 199–200, 216
Gyalui Torda, Zsigmond, 92 Ibn Miskawaih, 112
Ibrahim Pasha, 95
Ibrahīm Pasha, son of Muḥammad
H ‘Alī, 210
Habsburg dynasty, 51 Ikhtiyar-ud-Din Husaini, 112
Hannibal, 95 Illustratione de gli epitaffi et medaglie
Helbidius. See Buddha antiche, 72
Henrique (Dom), cardinal infante, Il Turco vincibile in Ungheria, 52
then king of Portugal, 107 Imola, 132
Henriques, Francisco, 107 Index of Prohibited Books, 40–41, 50,
Heraclitus, 79 142, 144
Heraclius, 86, 87, 93 India, 4, 10, 21, 80, 82–83, 90, 107,
Herbert Freiherr von Rathkeal, John, 109, 111–112, 115, 124–125,
181 132, 134, 144, 146, 161
Herbert Freiherr von Rathkeal, Peter Indian Ocean, 139
Philip, 181, 187 Indians, 21, 24–25, 144
Herbert, Thomas, 10, 180–183, Inquisition, 44, 46
185–188, 191, 203 Portoguese, 142
Hermes Trismegistus, 64 Roman, 50
Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre Spanish, 1, 20, 37–38, 41, 43–44,
du Brésil, 143 50, 85, 88, 92, 106, 108, 134,
Historiae sui temporis, 40 137, 144
Historia general y natural de las Institutio Principis Christiani, 124
Indias, 20 Instruction sur l’herbe petum, 22
Hormuz, 134 Iran, 110, 159, 184
Humanism, 81, 85, 158, 165 Iraq, 159
Index 259
Irus, 111 Jum‘ah, Muḥammad Luṭfī, 212–214

Isabella, Maurizio, 202
Isaiah, 79–80
Islam, 3, 7–10, 38, 42, 47, 51, 80–82, K
84–86, 88, 90, 92–93, 96–97, Kerala, 107
108, 113, 137–138, 158, 168, Khawam, René, 17
170, 194, 198–199, 214 Khayyam, Omar. See Rubayat
Islamic Empire Kis, Stephen, 174
Mamluk, 5 Kitāb sirr al-asrār. See Secret of Secrets
Mughal, 1, 4, 109–110, 146 Ksar el-Seghir, 108, 134
Ottoman, 5–6, 132
Safavid, 4, 145, 161
Islamic political thought, 167, 195 L
Ismā‘īl, khedive of Egypt, 212 Lahore, 116, 146
Istanbul, 2, 9, 50, 92–93, 96, Laroui, Abdallah, 199
179–183, 187–188, 191–192, Latins, 66, 80, 145
194–198, 203–204 Lazius, Wolfgang, 68
Italy, 8, 41, 43, 46, 50, 81, 85, 88, Lebanon, 17
96–97, 135, 167, 182, 194, Lepanto, 39–40, 48, 50–51, 139
201–202, 206, 211, 214, 216 Léry, Jean de, 69, 143
Les singularitez de la France antarc-
tique, 143
J Letteratura turchesca, 179–180,
Jahāngīr, Nūr-ud-dīn, Mughal 192–195, 203
emperor, 114 Leuven, 61, 138
Jaime, duke of Bragança, 134 Le Veneur, Gabriel, 20
James II, king of England, Ireland and Libro della origine de’ turchi et imperio
Scotland, 181 degli ottomani, 47
Janissaries, 44, 46 Life (The) of Castruccio Castracani,
Jesuit missions, 107 62–63
Jews, 39, 47, 62, 69, 80, 92–93, 170 Lipsius, Justus, 52
Job, 63 Lisbon, 22, 45, 145
Johannes Hispalensis. See John of Livro da Origem dos Turcos, 150
Seville Livy, 5, 20, 28, 38, 46, 62, 64, 68,
John II of Avis, king of Portugal, 116, 83, 91–92, 106, 132, 139, 143,
117 160, 163
John III of Avis, king of Portugal, Lombards, 85–86
138, 141, 144 Lorca, Ramiro de, 27
John of Capestrano, 47 Lorenzo de’ Medici, duke of Urbino,
John of Seville, 18 9, 114, 145, 163
Julius II, pope (Giuliano della Lottini, Gianfrancesco, 50
Rovere), 162 L’ottomanno, 52
260 Index
Louis XII, King of France, 162 Memorie istoriche de’ monarchi

Lucinge, René de, 38, 51 ottomani, 178
Luetz, Gabriel de, 92 Menavino, Giovanni Antonio, 40
Luís, infante of Portugal, 139 Mendoza, Íñigo López de, 120
Luna, Beatriz de, 93 Meserve, Margaret, 4, 84
Luther, Martin, 84 Metamorphoses, 46
Lutheranism, 39 Mevāhibu’l-ḫallāḳ fī merātibi’l-aḫlāḳ,
Lycurgus, 20, 64 109–110, 160, 204
Mexico, 106
Middle Ages, 3, 18, 82–85
M Ming court, 107
Machiavelli, Bernardo, 63 Miquez, João, 93
Madeira, 22 Mirrors for Princes, 17–18, 112, 124
Maecenas, 115, 123 Mir’āt al-Quds, 109–110, 160, 204
Magliabechi, Antonio, 97 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 8, 79–80, 83
Malacca, 134 Mongols, 165
Manutius, Aldus, 90 Montesquieu, 205, 215
Manuzzi, Nicolò, 10, 145–147 Montserrat, Antoni de, 107–108
Manzalaoui, Mahmoud, 18 Moses, 20, 39, 62–64, 90, 117, 167
Manzoni, Alessandro, 211 Mughal court, 1, 2, 10, 109, 111,
Maranhão, 141 113, 124, 146–147
Margaja people, 69 Muḥammad, 9, 50, 52, 81–84, 87–97,
Mariana, Juan de, 124 197
Maria Theresa of Habsburg, Holy Muḥammad ‘Alī, khedive of Egypt,
Roman empress, 181 212
Mariti, Giovanni, 180, 182, 193, 203 Muqaddimah, 205
Matthew, Saint, 82 Muqaddimāt fī haqq al-umam,
Maximilian I of Habsburg, Holy 109–110, 160, 204
Roman emperor, 162 Murāt IV, Ottoman sultan, 182
Mecca, 163 Muṣṭafā III, Ottoman sultan, 203, 204
Media, 52
Medici, family, 25
Medici, Giulio de’. See Clement VII N
Medina, 163 Nambiadery, 107
Mediterranean Risorgimento, Napoleon, 206
200–201 Nasi, Joseph. See Miquez, João
Mediterranean Sea, 4, 11, 80, 85, 110, Nasi Mendes, Gracia. See Da Luna,
202–203, 211, 214, 216 Beatriz
Meḥmed II, Ottoman sultan, 6, 43, Nassau Clavering-Cowper, George,
136 180
Melanchton, Philip, 92 Nationalism, 157, 171, 200, 202, 214
Melchizedek, 20 Nero, 114
Index 261
Netherlands, 85 Peter, Saint, 63, 202

Nifo, Agostino, 187 Petrarch, 85
Nizam-ul-Mulk, 112 Philip II of Habsburg, king of Spain,
Nobili, Roberto de’, 108 45, 117, 120
Numa Pompilius, 6, 39, 87, 90–92, Philip of Tripoli, 18
95, 97, 139, 144 Physiognomy, 22
Pinheiro, Manuel, 108, 111
Pius V, pope (Michele Ghislieri), 49
O Plato, 114
Olivi, Raffaele, 10, 142, 145 Pliny the Elder, 22
Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus, Plutarch, 27, 115, 116
138 Pocock, John G.A., 157
Orientalism, 10, 85 Pole, Reginald, 61
Osório, Jerónimo, 45, 50, 139 Political vocabulary, 10, 92, 208–209,
Otranto, 135 214
Ottoman court, 147, 183, 187, 190, Pomponazzi, Pietro, 44, 47, 81, 84
191, 203 Porcacchi, Tommaso, 48
Ovid, 46 Portugal, 6, 18, 108–109, 116–120,
124, 132–133, 135, 140–142,
145–146
P Portuguese Empire, 45, 139–141, 144
Palinodia de la nephanda y fiera Possevino, Antonio, 40, 92
nación de los turcos y de su enga- Postel, Guillaume, 47
ñoso arte y crudel modo de guer- Poussin, Nicolas, 64
rear, 45 Prosperi, Adriano, 61, 137
Paragone della possanza del gran Protestant Reformation, 62
turco, et di quella del catholico re Pseudo-Aristotle. See Aristotle
Filippo, 48
Paralleli (…) cavati dagl’historici, 48
Paris, 194, 206 Q
Parthians, 136 Qazi Muhammad, 107
Paul IV, pope (Giampietro Carafa), 48 Quesada, Gonzalo Jiménez de, 46
Pécout, Gilles, 202 Qur’ān, 8–9, 26, 82, 86, 89
Pera, 92, 162
Perna, Pietro, 41
Pernambuco, 141 R
Per qual cagione per la religione non si Ragıp Paşa, Koca, 185
sia fatta guerra fra gentili et per Ramberti, Benedetto, 47
che si faccia tra christiani, 50 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 49
Persia, 2, 4, 53, 80, 83, 90, 136 Raqā’iq al-hilāl fī daqā’iq al-ḥiyal. See
Persians, 21, 24, 28, 109 Book of Stratagems
Peru, 69
262 Index
Reading, 3, 5–7, 10–11, 21, 23, 27, S

39, 47, 51, 64, 88, 93, 96–97, Sabellico, Marco Antonio, 88, 92
106, 110, 114–115, 131–132, Sagredo, Giovanni, 178, 180
136, 140, 143–144, 146, 148, Saint Antoninus (Antonino Pierozzi),
159, 161–163, 165, 170–171, 110
183, 199–202, 204, 212–216 Salutati, Coluccio, 41
Reconquista, 45, 138, 159 Salvador da Bahia, 141–142
Redi, Francesco, 96 Samrat al-Falāsifa. See Ahwāl-i
Religious controversy, 170 Firangistān
Renaissance, 3–5, 19, 62, 81, 131, Samudri Raja, 107
157, 160, 169, 189, 200–202, Sancho II, king of Portugal, 120
216 Şānizādah Maḥmad ‘Aṭāllāh Efendi,
République des Turcs, 47 183, 189
Rhodes, knights of, 43 Sansovino, Francesco, 37–38, 49
Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 124 São Jorge de Ilhéus, 142
Ricci, Matteo, 108 São Vicente, captaincy of, 141
Rifat, Haydar, 178 Saracens, 85–86, 138
Rio de Janeiro, 143 Şarīf, Mehmet, 179
Rio Grande, 141 Sassetti, Filippo, 144
Rio of the Amazons, 142 Savonarola, Girolamo, 161
Ripanda, Jacopo, 64 Savoy, 68, 146
Roca, Vicente, 46 Scala, Bartolomeo, 64, 87, 92
Rodigino, Celio, 68 Schmitt, Charles B., 18
Roman Empire Scipio, 95, 144–145
Eastern, 4, 140 Sebastian of Avis, king of Portugal,
Western, 3 117
Romania, 159 Secretaries, 161–162, 166–168, 171
Romans, 5, 6, 8, 10, 39, 41–42, 44, Secret of Secrets, 18–19, 21–22, 24,
49, 52, 64–68, 119, 123–124, 29, 30
131, 137–140, 142 Secretum Secretorum. See Secret of
Rome, 5, 6, 39–44, 46, 50, 62, 93, Secrets
97, 110, 112, 115, 123, 133, Sedirac, Bernard de, 121
136–137, 148, 192–194, 196, Selīm I, Ottoman sultan, 6, 43, 45,
206 95, 136, 163
Romulus, 6, 62–63, 90–91, 97 Selīm III, Ottoman sultan, 183, 189
Rouillé, Guillaume, 65–66 Selīmnāme, 163
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 209 Seneca, 114
Rubayat, 213 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 41, 44–45,
Rumi. See Byzantines 137–139
Ruphy, Jean-François, 209 Sergius, monk, 86–87, 93–94, 97
Ruscelli, Girolamo, 48 Sertorius, Quintus, 90–91
Index 263
Sestini, Domenico, 180–183, 186 Tangier, 134

Seville, 18 Tanzimât, 178
Shāh Alam. See Bahādur Shāh Ṭarābulus. See Tripoli (Lebanon)
Shalem, Avinoam, 83 Tarducci da Corinaldo, Achille, 52
Sharī ‘ah, 167, 170, 184, 210 Tassi, Francesco, 181
Shi‘ism, 110 Tasso, Torquato, 52
Sīlān, 82 Teresa of León, queen
Siyar al-Mulūk. See Siyāsat Nāma of Portugal, 18
Siyāsat Nāma, 112 Theseus, 62–63, 90, 197
Skinner, Quentin, 157 Thévet, André, 143
Solinus, 86 Timoteo, friar, 135
Solomon, 167 Timur. See Tamerlane
Solon, 64, 114 Timurid empire, 112
Sopplimento nell’istorie di monsignor Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 42
Paolo Giovio, 48 Toderini, Giambattista, 203
Soranzo, Lazzaro, 51–52 Tokhtamysh, 119
Spain, 6, 8, 44–46, 82, 108, 117, 120, Tolan, John, 84
124, 133, 138–139, 144, 146, 159 Toledo, 109, 121
Spaniards, 21, 39, 66, 105 Tolomei, Marco Antonio, 87
Specula principum. See Mirror for Tommaseo, Niccolò, 211, 222
princes Torquemada, Juan de, 88
Spina, Pietro, 144 Tournes, Jean de, 68, 72, 74
Spinoza, Baruch, 180 Trajan, 64, 115
Sponde, Henri de, 69 Translations (of Machiavelli’s works),
Stoicism, 52 4, 7, 10–11, 20–22, 143,
Storia del Mogol, 146–147 177–183, 185–192, 199–205,
Strabo, 86 207–216
Stroumsa, Guy G., 62 Tripoli (Lebanon), 18
Sublime Porte. See Ottoman court Trojans, 44
Süleymān, Ottoman sultan, 5, 9, Tunis, 138–139, 144
94–95, 162–163, 167, 169 Tupinambá people, 143
Sunnism, 170 Turca NIKETOS, 52
Syria, 7, 18, 136, 159, 161, 211 Turkophilia, 37–38, 41, 45
Turks, 4, 24, 38–44, 46–51, 107, 136,
180, 188, 196
T Tuscans, 66
Ṭabaḳātü’l-memālik ve derecātü’l- Tusi, Nasir-ud-Din, 112
mesālik, 163
Tacitus, 145
Tahzīb al-Akhlāq, 112 U
Tanbīhāt-i Hukumrān bā Sar’askarān, Umayyad dynasty, 18
183, 189 Universal history, 21, 83–85
264 Index
V Williams, Steven J., 18, 32

Valerius Maximus, 90
Valla, Lorenzo, 63
Vecchietti, Giambattista, 112 X
Vegetius, 106 Xavier, Ângela Barreto, 106
Venice, 8, 50, 81, 85, 92, 94–96, 132, Xavier, Francis, 108
146, 192 Xavier, Jerónimo, 9, 108
Vernacci, Giovanni, 162
Vespasian, Roman emperor, 67
Vesta, 67, 73 Y
Vettori, Francesco, 19, 41 Yucatan, diocese of, 144
Vienna, 5, 159
Viriatus, 119
Virtue, 9, 29, 44, 47, 51–52, 67, 93, Z
139, 164, 208 Zain-ud-Din, Shaikh, 107
Vištaspa, 82 Zakhūr, Rāfā’īl, 204–212
Vita del Principe, 20 Zalmoxis, 64
Vitae Caesarum, 88 Zaydān, Jurjī, 211
Voltaire, 11, 177, 185–186, 192, Zebeizib. See Vištaspa
194, 196 Zegedinus. See Kis, Stephen
Zoroaster, 64, 79, 82–83, 89
W
Walker, Leslie J., 90

Machiavelli, Islam and The East: Reorienting The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Machiavelli, Islam and The East: Reorienting The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Machiavelli, Islam and the East

Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Edited by Lucio Biasiori

ISBN 978-3-319-53948-5 ISBN 978-3-319-53949-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937936

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: © Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Pisa, Italy Lucio Biasiori

1 Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli 1

Part I From Readings to Readers

2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince

3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio

4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians 61

Part II Religions and Empires

5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the

6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a

7 Machiavelli, the Iberian Explorations and the Islamic

Part III Beyond Orientalism

8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde

9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction

10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the

About the Editors

Lucio Biasiori is Balzan Prize Post-Doc Fellow at the Scuola Normale

Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian

Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli

Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Renaissance Florence. The present volume, by contrast, while offer-

Hence, this volume takes a different tack. The substance of

negative connotation as a religious enemy, it is no accident that original

I it is said that “a prince (…) should go personally on his campaigns,

in 1547. In his chapter, Pier Mattia Tommasino assesses the influence

recovery of his works along the itineraries of the Iberian explorations.

(r. 1757–1774) to encourage a version of Anti-Machiavel (1740),

4. The reference is to Q. Skinner (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political

Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History (European and

From Readings to Readers

Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought?

“The Most Popular Book of the Middle Ages”?

© The Author(s) 2018 17

advice to kings were called in Europe—“to their common origins and

In Renaissance Florence, where Machiavelli lived and wrote, the Secret

From the Reception to the Texts: Connecting

between the two texts in scholarly works and commentaries. As a result,

Firstly, he reports in a few words the singularity of Roman history accord-

From “the singularity of Roman history”, Machiavelli, dealing with a

In Gohory’s interpretation, Machiavelli’s comparative approach exists

of The Prince (1571) to the Italian merchant Giovan Francesco Affaitati

difference emphasized by Gohory though: whereas the latter states that

The dialogue between Machiavelli and the Secret continues throughout

Limiting myself more to particulars, I say that such princes as I have

Besides the aforementioned necessity for providing shelters against

Alexander’s advisor is not who he purports to be, and thus he distances

The Secret and the Secretary

From the Indian kings through Pseudo-Aristotle, Machiavelli’s “politics

“Let All Thy Affairs Be Strategetic

book de regimine principum”—as the subtitle of Gilbert’s book states—

Half a millennium later, on the other side of the Mediterranean,

How can one explain this resemblance? Apparently, there is no need to

watching Ramiro’s death experienced an aesthetic and moral purification

With Aristotle Beyond Aristotle

4. The reference is to Q. Skinner (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political

Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought?

“The Most Popular Book of the Middle Ages”?

From the Reception to the Texts: Connecting

The Secret and the Secretary

Mirrors for Princes, Mirrors for Cultures

Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli,

Faith, Arms and Discipline

7. C. Goellner (1961–1978), Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrucke des

17. P. Moreno (2002), “Paolo Giovio e Francesco Guicciardini”, in: E.

30. M. Meserve (2008), Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought

Machiavelli and the Antiquarians

26. Du Choul, Discorso sopra la castrametatione, 42: “Questa [la religione]

Muḥammad, Zoroaster and Buddha

The Origins of Venice

Reading Valerius Maximus in the Renaissance

32. Cuspinian, De Caesaribus, 533–534: “Columbam enim (quam Spiritum