Giovanni-Tommaso Minadoi. Часть I.
Научный комментарий R.Matthee к переизданному в 2019-м английскому переводу книги Минадои.
Giovanni-Tommaso Minadoi. The War between the Turks and the Persians: conflict and religion in the Safavid and Ottoman worlds. Translated by Abraham Hartwell. 2019
Сам перевод выполнен еще в конце 16 века. Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi. The history of the vvarres betvveene the Turkes and the Persians. 1595. Еще - тут.
Surely the most detailed account of the sixteenth-century Ottoman-Safavid military encounter is the monographic work of Giovanni Tommaso (Thomaso) Minadoi. Minadoi was a renowned Italian physician who in the 1570s spent some seven years in Aleppo and Istanbul serving the consuls of Venice and who in this period collected a great deal of material on what would be the longest of the conflicts between Muslim powers: the war that broke out in 1578 and that would continue until 1590, when Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587-1629) decided to accept the humiliating terms of a peace proposal offered to him by his opponent, Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-95).
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Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi graduated from the University of Padua in 1574. Two years later, he went to Syria as resident physician to the Venetian legation, to serve Teodoro Balbi (1542-1619), the newly appointed consul to Aleppo (served 1578-81).
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Minadoi remained in Ottoman territory, mostly in Aleppo, with various stays in Istanbul, for a full decade. In this period he went back to Italy only once. Upon his return to the Levant, he was asked to enter the service of Balbi’s successor, Giovanni Michele (Michiel) (served c. 1582-4). Following his definitive return to Italy in 1586, he became medico condotto (i.e. community physician) in the town of Udine, the capital of Friuli, located some hundred kilometres northeast of Venice.
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To most historians, Minadoi is best known as the author of a substantial work on the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that had broken out while he resided in Ottoman territory. Minadoi published the result of his research on this conflict shortly after his definitive return to Italy, having spent a brief two months preparing the manuscript. In 1587 the first edition, consisting of four ‘books’ or chapters, appeared under the title Historia della guerra fra Turchi et Persiani, descritta in quattro libri in Venice published by Andrea Muschio and Barezzo Barezzi, and in Rome published by I. Tornerio and B. Donangeli. In spite of the hasty final preparation, the book must have been years in the making, since as early as 1583 the Italian Pietro Bizarri appended part of a manuscript version of the work to his own Persicarum rerum historia, the first comprehensive history of Persia to appear in Europe. Minadoi, now having access to proper libraries, kept adding material to his research, as a result of which a new, expanded version of his book saw the light of day in 1588. Titled Historia della guerra fra Turchi et Persiani di G. T. Minadoi … dall’istesso riformata, e aggiuntivi i successi dell’anno 1586, this second edition was published in Venice by Andrea Muschio and Barezzo Barezzi, and in Turin by Giovanni Battista Bevilacqua.
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Minadoi’s work was quickly translated into various languages.
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Minadoi’s account has to be read in the context of the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, and by extension between Islam and Christendom. The author makes it clear that the research he conducted for his work did not just receive encouragement but had actual material support from the Venetian authorities. In collecting the information that he used for his account, he stood in a century-old Venetian tradition of gathering intelligence about the Ottomans and their enemies, especially those who might become allies with the Christian nations in a common anti-Turkish front. Like Balbi and Michele, as well as the well-known (Flemish) Austrian ambassador Oghir Ghiselin de Busbecq, Minadoi never visited Persia itself. This tradition goes back at least as far as the days of Uzun Hasan (r. 1453-78), the ruler of the west-Persian Aq-Qoyunlu (White Sheep) dynasty, who in the mid-fifteenth century had requested assistance from the Venetians in his own struggle against the Turks. The Aq-Qoyunlu were defeated by the Ottomans in 1473 and faded soon after Uzun Hasan’s death five years later. Less than a quarter of a century later, the rise to political power of a new dynasty - the Safavids - rekindled hopes that relief from the Turkish scourge might finally be at hand. The Diarii of the panoptic Venetian annalist Marin Sanudo and the account of Giovanni Rota, a physician stationed in Aleppo, which came out in 1508 in the form of a letter to the doge, portray the phenomenal rise of Shah Esma‘il Safavi in 1501 as the parousia of a messianic saviour.
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For a more sympathetic view of the Ottomans, one has to look for countries that were not directly at war with them or that competed with the Hispano-Portuguese Empire, such as France and England. Whereas Minadoi had dedicated his work to Pope Sixtus V (r. 1585-90), Hartwell in turn dedicated his translation to the Archbishop of Canterbury. England at this point occupied a peculiar position in this struggle. Not directly involved, it was relatively favourably inclined to the Ottomans, seeking their support, if only because its own arch-enemy, Spain, was a sworn enemy of the Turks. The English Levant Company understandably also had considerable interest in maintaining good relations with Istanbul. This may have been the reason why Hartwell cryptically refers to the secrecy he chose to keep with regard to some of the reasons why he had decided to undertake the translation of Minadoi’s work.
Minadoi, meanwhile, shows some sympathy for the Safavids - whom various European nations had continued to court as potential allies against the bellicose Ottomans. Indeed, following a venerable Western tradition, he views Persians as a sophisticated and cultured people, as opposed to the Turks, whose reputation was that of primitive and predatory brutes.
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Yet Minadoi’s work is no ode to the Persians. Unlike Hartwell, who had a mostly negative view of Persia, Minadoi was ambivalent about the Safavid realm. If in many passages in his work he seems to tilt towards Persia, this is less from a love for the Safavid state than from fear of the greater evil: the Turks. At the same time, he voices the stereotypical views of Persia and Persians expressed by many before and after him, conflating, in the antiquarian fashion current at the time, the ancient inhabitants of the country and the modern ones, calling the Persians ‘great deceivers, full of craftie Stratagemes, unconstant, and breakers of their word’. Yet, referring to a perceived anarchic disposition, he also claimed that they were ‘never content with any mans governement’. Alluding to a presumed creative spirit, he further insisted that they were ‘lovers of novelties’ (p. 74). Yet on balance, not yet seduced by the wonders of Isfahan as fashioned and embellished by Shah ‘Abbas I a generation later, and not having set foot in Persia and thus unable to report on the cultural sophistication and hospitality of its people from first-hand experience, Minadoi classified the Persians as barbarians, just like the Turks.
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Superimposing the Catholic-Protestant rivalry onto the Sunni-Shi‘i conflict that suffused the enmity between the Ottomans and the Safavids, Minadoi ultimately argued that they were both believers in the same prophet, that the Persians were just as inveterately inimical to Christianity as the Turks. In his account, the conflict between these two states thus becomes part of a providential plan designed to weaken the major Muslim powers and, therefore, Islam. In keeping with a sentiment that would long persist, the war, in his words, although ‘long and bloudie’, was also ‘very commodious and of great opportunitie to the Christian Common-wealth’. Minadoi hoped that his book would ‘animate Christian princes to take up arms against barbarians under whose rule famous and once powerful nations are reduced’. He thus advocated a strategy that today we would call ‘dual containment’.
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What is perhaps most striking about Minadoi’s work is its break with past custom. Histories of Persia written by Europeans, before and after him, tended to make connections between Persians in the present with their forebears in antiquity in ways that Persians themselves came to do only in the late nineteenth century and under the influence of European practice. His work is pragmatic in character and purpose: rather than engaging in historical digressions about the presumed origins of the Persians and the Turks, Minadoi keeps the war he describes in focus, providing a wealth of detail about its origins, its landmark events, battles and skirmishes. He also pays much attention to the terrain, the topography and especially place names, seeking to give their accurate rendering. In this, he represented a new trend among scholars, who relied less on ancient nomenclature than their forebears in their attempt to find accurate current names for topographical places. In the process, Minadoi also provides a great deal of information about other aspects of the Safavid polity, much of it remarkably accurate, given his lack of direct access to the country. He thus touches on the formidable Pari Khan Khanom, Shah Tahmasb’s daughter, her role in the successive enthronement of her two brothers, Isma‘il II in 1576 and Mohammad Khodabanda two years later, and how she was sidelined and killed by the Qezelbash shortly thereafter. Further, he was the first European to give a detailed and informed overview of the Sunni-Shi‘i divide in Islam.
Minadoi’s narrative was not above controversy. He made the mistake of identifying Tabriz with Ecbatana, the capital of the Medes, most likely present-day Hamadan, and got into a dispute with Paulo Giovio, a contemporary Italian historian who had written on the Turks, concerning Giovio’s argument that Tabriz was to be equated with ancient Terva (Yerevan in Armenian) - hence the letter to Mario Corrado.
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What is especially important for the modern reader is that neither Minadoi’s anti-Turkish bias nor his qualified sympathy for the Persians stands in the way of his search for the ‘truth’. He goes to great lengths emphasizing that he has made great efforts to find the truth behind the story he is telling. This is a trope, to be sure, but in Minadoi’s case, it is more than that: as he himself states, he interviewed many people and double- and triple-checked facts in the face of many inconsistencies with regard to place names. In his preface, Minadoi insists that he has done everything possible to collect and collate information from various sources, most notably by consulting eyewitnesses, ‘men of great authority who were present for the most part at these actions’ (author’s epistle to the reader). He mentions how his medical knowledge has helped him gather his information. In this he was heir to another tradition with a long pedigree: in Islamic lands, Westerners were (until quite recently) often automatically credited with medical knowledge, and their (presumed) knowledge of illnesses and curative skills literally opened doors for European physicians, even to the inner sanctum of the homes of the elite. Their access to the royal palace was one of the reasons why Jewish doctors serving the bailo in Constantinople were highly prized by the Venetians.
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Aleppo, the terminus for a branch of the silk trade originating in Persia, was an ideal venue to collect information on the Safavid state. Minadoi in particular invokes as informants the two successive Venetian consuls to Aleppo under whom he served, Teodoro Balbi and Giovanni Michele, calling them ‘two most noble, prudent and valorouse subiectes of the State of Venice’, and who ‘most magnificently without sparing of any costes did favour me herein’ (author’s epistle to the reader). Balbi in turn benefited from Minadoi’s knowledge. Upon his return to Venice in 1582, Balbi gave testimony on Persia to the Venetian Senate, and the similarities between his text and that of Minadoi makes it likely that the latter actually wrote Balbi’s report to the Senate. Minadoi also mentions a Venetian named Cristoforo de Boni, who served as interpreter to these diplomats.
Most valuable for the information Minadoi offers on the Safavids, especially on their administrative system, must have been his other, ‘native’, informants. One was the renegade Scipione, the son of a nobleman from Genoa who had fought as a corsair until he was captured by the Ottomans, at which point he had converted to Islam. Upon his release, now known as Sinan Pasha, he had made a career for himself in the Ottoman army, to the point of assuming the function of commander-in-chief in the war against the Safavids. Eventually, suspected of plotting against the sultan, he had been dismissed and sent into exile. Minadoi mentions how he had treated him, curing him of a ‘certain illness’, most likely venereal disease. Equally important as a source of information was an official named Maqsud Khan, who came to the Ottoman Empire as an envoy from Shah Mohammad Khodabanda seeking peace, and who upon his return was made governor of Tabriz. He next had a falling-out with the shah, causing him to take refuge with the Ottomans, to be appointed governor of Aleppo. Minadoi specifically notes how he met with Maqsud Khan’s son after the latter’s father had been made governor of Aleppo.
Minadoi’s work, in its original version as well as its various translations, would have considerable influence on the image of Persia, its political system and its confrontation with the Ottomans in seventeenth-century Europe. The best illustration of such influence is Oruch Beg, better known as Don Juan of Persia, the secretary of an embassy sent to Spain by Shah ‘Abbas I who, having arrived in Valladolid in 1601, converted to Christianity and chose to remain in Spain. He, or rather his Spanish mentor and translator, Alfonso Remón, followed Minadoi’s account of events and made extensive use of his work. Another example is the English historian Richard Knolles ( c. 1545-1610), who copied the parts of Minadoi’s work that deal with the Sunni-Shi‘i schism verbatim for his own acclaimed work, Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603-4). The information contained in Knolles’s book, the first major work in English on the Ottoman Empire, was further publicized by Paul Rycaut’s highly influential The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1665), which rivalled Knolles’s account as the standard work on the Ottomans in Europe well into the eighteenth century. The information Minadoi provided shows up as well in the works of John Cartwright and Samuel Purchas, two authors who reached a mass audience in seventeenth-century Europe by being included in the exceedingly popular Hakluyt series. Some of the various anonymous manuscripts on the Persian-Turkish wars that appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century are undoubtedly based in part on his work as well. The information offered by Minadoi thus long reverberated, helping to shape and solidify opinions about Persia and its inhabitants, separately and in relation with the Ottomans, that would have enormous staying power.
О Синан-паше - тут и тут.