Hello, I am Borja
Franco Llopis associate professor at the art history department, UNED.
And I am Rubén Gonzalez Cuerva,
tenured scientist at the Spanish National Research Council.
Welcome to this panel devoted to the public celebration in
early modern period.
The study of these events has been the constant object of
academic interest since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt pioneering work,
with spectacular pageantry, finely decorated archs, dance, mock battles
theatre and music, public celebrations
were more than a cultural phenomenon and a means of public communication.
They had a profound social impact, and they sought to construct
imagined communities to shape collective mentalities.
Festive events also functioned as mediators in the construction
of the social system.
Symbols used in these events helped to shape and domesticated viewers'
perception of the world, stirring emotions such as fear,
hatred, affection and sorrow.
The aim of these celebrations was not to gather support
for specific political or religious positions.
Rather, the objective was to inculcate
specific values intended to shape a mindset
that would guarantee full adherence to the prevailing system.
This happens in both sides of the Mediterranean basin,
as well as in the different cultural policies
of the Christian and Islamic kingdoms.
Which events could be included within this framework?
Especially we are talking about Royal and
viceregal entries into different cities of the Empire.
royal weddings, funeral procession and catafalques
celebration of military victories,
canonization of saints, Corpus Christi celebrations
and events organized to celebrate the transfer of relics
and the arrival of bishops. In the Ottoman court
some categories are similar, such as sultans' daughter weddings,
or military celebrations, especially spectacular
arrival of triumphant fleets to Istanbul, showing the war trophies
and other celebrations are more peculiar.
The circumcision feast of the sultan's sons were major
occasions, as well as the elaborated rituals for new sultan
succesion including sword-girding
ceremonies or the weekly Friday processions in which the sultan
went on horseback to Friday prayers at a mosque, escorted by
a magnificent retinue.
Both in Christian and Muslim cases
we can also include the embassies as a part of this kind of celebrations,
because despite some of them were only enjoyed by the King or Sultan,
in his court,
in other cases, the celebrations included a public parade
before arriving to the palace in which musicians, dancers
and other kind of ephemeral objects were used as a visual of propaganda
from both sides of the embassy, the receiver and the visitor.
We passed to the question of sources
which are the available sources for the study of this kind of events?
It's necessary to combine some different kind of sources.
First, the Chronicles, also known in Spanish as relaciones,
are the most useful text in which a public event is described.
Some of them have illustrations, and we shall have into account
that many relaciones were written by people
related to their political power and can have a biased approach.
In the Ottoman case, surname deserves a special mention.
These illustrated albums
commissioned by the Sultans between the 16th and 18th centuries,
depict imperial celebrations in lavishly detailed miniatures
and created a powerful official image of the Sultan's might.
We have
also another literary account by the spectators
who enjoyed the event, a type of text especially relevant
for the Ottoman court, where the lack of local sources
explains that European diplomats and travelers reports constitute
the only available version for many public celebrations,
although their actual understanding of the events
and their biased interpretations are subject to debate,
though important and not always studied.
are the archival and legal sources in which the payment for the erection
of ephemeral structures, some objects, dresses, canvasses, tapestries,
the salaries of musicians and dancers are described carefully.
The protocol records are also crucial
as they reconstruct the court rituals and ceremonial order
although the available documentation is much more detailed
in the Christian side, at least for the 16 and 17 centuries.
Instead,
Ottoman masters of protocol in the 18th century were compelled
to meticulously register the ceremonies they designed
because they lacked previous documentation,
or it was very difficult to find in the enormous
sultanic archives.
Now we are talking about the problem related to the study
of Islam from a Christian perspective through these events.
The iconographical programs created for these public celebrations
were especially studie trough a monolithic point of view,
not from a bottom-up perspective. Taking into account
who the Muslim other were represented through ephemeneral sculptures,
paintings, battles and allegories.
These works insisted on framing the enemy as a counterfigure
to the king or the people who was honor in the celebration,
resulting in a simple binary of good versus evil.
This perspective is limited as interpretative tool
because it leaves many unanswered questions.
Two problems are particularly worthy of note.
First, traditionally studies have focused
on particular celebrations with a narrow geographical and
chronological scope, which hinders a long term view.
They adhere to a direct cause and effect relationship
that does not consider
that many of the ideas represented develop over the course
of centuries of conflict in a dense network of meanings.
Second, these studies are based
on the problematic fossilization of the other.
Their conclusions imply that the Turk or North Africa
from 1443, for instance, was the same physically
and conceptually as an Ottoman subject who live in
1571 after the Battle of Lepanto
and that this parallel
can be extended to include converts or captives.
Such ahistorical homogenization leds to stereotyping
in analysis of alterity which render the enemy immutable.
Furthermore, essential questions about cultural exchanges
between East and West and relation between Muslims and Christians
are largely unexplored.
Little has been said for instance, about changes in dress
and description of clothing from one event to the next,
or the subtle distinction that are present in the written
sources about the physical appearance of the embodied
others.
The historiography
of public celebrations has not confronted
the fact that terms such as dressing in Morisco style
or morisco objects which were used in contemporary
sources, contain a group of problems
that transcends the phenomenon of the public celebration itself.
The emphasis on description has caused studies to fall
in the trap of the historical nomenclature itself.
The estatic perspective described above coupled with a literal interpretation
of the historical sources, has resulted in association
of theatrical morisco clothing with the Islamic world,
and in reality, much of the material culture deployed
in public ceremonies was created by and for Christians,
even if it derived from andalusi models.
To date, no consideration has been given
to the process of appropriation and reassignment of meaning,
which foster the construction of cross-cultural identities,
that can only be understood by comparing the account of celebrations
with other sources, legal sources, house inventories, etc.
Historians have resorted to anachronistic terms
such as maurophilia, a maurophobia which were coined in literally studies
to describe attitudes about the other
from admiration to rejection,
as if everything could be attributed to a clash between opposites.
This simplify social relations, as well as the construction
of identities.
Traditional
studies have yet to consider
the important role played by the Muslim population,
whether converts or not, in shaping the celebration
in which they perform as musician, dancers
as well as the creators of artistic objects that dignify the festivities.
Likewise, the role of Muslims as spectators has also been left out
of the analysis. Of a special interest is how their presence and
participation may have determined iconographic choices
since inflaming the
resenments could easily lead to unrest.
Recently, literary specialists
have shed new light troughh the nuanced study of tournaments
juego de cañas, game of canes and other performances.
This seminal research has broken up the monolithic, hierarchical
and standardized view of the public celebrations and material
culture produced for them.
There is a lot of ground to cover.
Above all
it is imperative to move beyond the study of public celebrations
from the unilateral, Christiano-centric perspective
that makes it impossible
to interpret the cultural richness.
Such an approach silences the all-important processes
of perception, assimilation and appropriation upon
which the acts of performance rested.
Finally, we
pass to the main problems related to the study of the image
of Christendom from an Ottoman perspective through these events.
The main problem is the shallow development of this field
in Ottoman studies due to the scarcity or
difficulty of archival sources.
Combining it with the high quality of the Surnames miniatures,
available studies are predominantly descriptive
and uncritical,
a trend that is recently reversing to include wider perspectives
and a better integration
between cultural and socio political research agendas.
In any case, from
there is not consolidated bibliography on the image of Christians
in Ottoman festivals, a task still to be developed.
Preliminary a few differences with Christian festivals easily arise.
Official Ottoman propaganda does not equate Christians
with foreign enemies because Christians constituted
a substantial part of local society and embodied different categories.
First, many of the Sultan's vassals where Orthodox
Armenians or other Oriental churches members,
while Catholic and Protestant foreign communities were also accepted.
Therefore, several Christian groups
took part in distinctive and natural way in many lavish parades
as a testimony of a multicultural and harmonic society
under the Sultan's protection. The processions of the guilds
offered a good example, held on very important occasions
every several decades, they were a peripatetic exhibition of
and social competition
between the skilled artisans and traders of Istanbul.
Some guilds were ethnically and religiously dominated by one
group, like the Greeks, among fish cookers sable merchants or furriers
In the 1638 parade, tavern
keepers were included among the 735 guilds,
and this men mainly Greek, Armenians and Jews,
slyly drunk and served alcohol during the event.
By comparison to European festivals,
there was no centralized organization because each guild's group
organized its own spectacles and some shows were even spontaneous.
On other occasions
Christians did not take part as community or guild members,
but performing salient skills like theatrical or pantomime ballets.
In those cases, they used to be enslaved
individuals mixing religious and mythological motifs,
like Georgians performing a play of and George and the Dragon,
or Italians representing scenes of Diane and the Amazons.
Furthermore, Christian clergy
was entitled to publicly celebrate processions and rituals.
Remarkably, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople.
As depicted in contemporary Greek icons and frescoes,
the Orthodox Church progressively adopted Ottoman trends in textil
elements, thus making publicly compatible
Christian dogma and Ottoman esthetics.
Despite the syncretic phenomena existed in festival culture,
religious difference mattered. On solemn
Islamic festivities, such as Eid
al-Adha, the festival of the sacrifice, Muslim population celebrated day and night,
while Christians and Jews
would encounter some difficulties on the streets during those days.
Apart from
Christian vassals, slaves and religious clergy,
the other European group with a relevant
presence in festival culture was the diplomatic community.
Their official court receptions are not depicted
in miniatures or travelog drawings as those of vanquished figures,
but of humble envoys presenting tributes and thus acknowledging
a global order under the Sultan's superior and peaceful dominion.
The same symbolism dominates the painstaking descriptions
of ceremonies of giftgivings included in several Surname
where everyone from the Grand Vizier and European ambassadors
to the humble servant, presented something to the Sultan.
Until well into the 18th century.
Western diplomats
deserved a secondary status at the Ottoman Imperial Court,
far behind the position of allied Muslim rulers
like the Khan of Crimea. In official ceremonies
these ambassadors humiliatingly sat
on uncomfortable and low stools
while the Grand Vizier received them on Magnificent sofas.
Finally, it seems that
only one type of celebration was comparable to European binary
representation of religious political alterity.
The spectacular mock battles arranged during big festivals,
designed to prove the sultan's imperial grandeur
and to intimidate potential Eastern or Western foes.
These war games were both on land and at sea.
For example, after Suleiman the first failed to conquer Vienna
in 1529,
a great festival was arranged in Istanbul the next year to enhance
his self-representation and legitimacy.
The celebration had as central element a mock battle
in which the famous polymath, Matrakçı Nasuh designed
two wooden models of fortresses, one in Ottoman style
and the other in Hungarian style, each defended by 100 soldiers.
Obviously the Ottoman conquered and set fire to the Hungarian citadel
as a proof of military superiority.
For its part, in the aforementioned guild procession of 1638,
the Mediterranean Sea captains and shipmates performed a small play
showign a fake battle between themselves and the infidels,
including dancing boys, singing and cannons.
The show ended with the Ottomans capturing
a mock European vessel and dragging it to the shipyard.
Regrettably, the scarcity of available
sources precluded further detail on these shows.
In conclusion,
Christians are secondary actors in the Ottoman festival culture
and their military failure
did not constitute the axis of the Sultan's official representation.
His self-image was that of a benefactor ruler
taking care of the established order
and not seeking to destroy Christians,
but to integrate them into his vast empire as dominated people.
As vassals, slaves, clergy or diplomats.
Christians could be a colorful ingredient in festivities
in a dismissive rather than a hostile light.
Thank you very much.