Approaching Byzantium in Ottoman Istanbul: the Reception of the Byzantine Heritage of Constantinople by Scholars from the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th Century

• Applicant: Dr. Nicholas Melvani
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Art History ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463526198

The study of Byzantium was inaugurated within the context of humanism, after the end of the Byzantine Empire. However, it is unclear what the concept of Byzantium meant during the 16th century, since research in Byzantine history and culture was usually a subsidiary means to investigate other fields of knowledge, such as classical antiquity, Orthodox Christianity, and the geographical space of the Ottoman Empire. The main goal of the proposed project is to study the direct encounter of humanists from the Holy Roman Empire with the capital of the Byzantine Empire itself as an effective way to understand how the idea of Byzantium developed and affected humanist thought; this will reveal crucial links in the relations between East and West. Because these scholars, unlike envoys from other parts of Europe, established firm links with both the Ottomans and local Christians within the context of diplomatic and interconfessional negotiations, they offer a wide range of information on the ways both groups re-used the city’s Byzantine monuments. In order to analyze how visiting the city of Constantinople affected the reception of Byzantium by humanists from the Holy Roman Empire, diverse types of evidence, which reflect the ways visitors experienced the city, will be examined: a. references in texts (mainly travel accounts) and images (e.g. panoramic views of Istanbul) to the Byzantine monuments and landmarks of Constantinople as preserved in the 16th century and b. Byzantine manuscripts transferred from 16th-century Istanbul to collections in Central Europe by humanists from the Holy Roman Empire. I will thus explore how the scholars under investigation made sense of various elements of Byzantine culture and how their concept of Byzantium developed as a consequence of viewing the monuments, collecting the manuscripts, and meeting the Orthodox populations they encountered in the city. By taking into account this array of media it will be possible to follow the multifaceted activity of humanists, which encompassed portraying Byzantine monuments in words and images and collecting Byzantine codices as parts of the same process of discovering Byzantium in 16th-century Istanbul. The project will be structured in two Work Packages: Work Package 1 will entail the creation of a detailed GIS database and multi-layered maps showing all sites attested in the textual sources and depicted in the images, as well as data and statistics about Byzantine manuscripts transferred to cities in modern Germany and Austria during the 16th century. The database, the digital maps, and the resulting quantitative data will enable the interpretation and contextualization of this diverse evidence in a coherent way, in order to produce a monograph (Work Package 2), which will deal with the reception of Constantinople by scholars representing the Holy Roman Empire in Ottoman Istanbul, based on evaluation of the information collected from the texts, images, and manuscripts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants