Abstract
The chapter deals with Erasmus’ notion of an issue which was debated by Italian humanists during the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries: the origin of the Turks. Two theories were dominant in this regard: the theory of the Trojan origin and the theory of the Scythian origin of the Turks. Scythian was a synonym for inhuman, uncivilized, and cruel society. These alleged Scythian characterizations were ascribed to the Turks. Erasmus did not express himself in support of either theory. Yet, it seems that he was leaning toward the Scythian origin, which was upheld by the prominent cosmographer Piccolomini (=Pope Pius II). Piccolomini and Francesco Filelfo had a considerable influence over Erasmus’ rhetoric concerning the Turks.
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Notes
- 1.
CWE 64, 219; ASD V-3 37: “Gens barbara, obscurae originis, quod cladibus afflixit populum Christianum, quid immanitatis in nos non exerunt.”
- 2.
CWE 64, 220–221 and notes 62–64; ASD V-3 38: “Primum enim Turcarum nomen adeo fuit ignobile, ut vix apud ullum veterum reperiatur, nisi quod Plinius Libro vi. capite vii. inter Thussagetas et Arimphaeos, qui ad Rhiphaeos pertinent montes, commemorat Turcas, qui tum incoluerint, usquead solitudines saxosis vallibus affines. Nec Pomponius Mela illos aliud quam nominat. Tanta erat illius nationis obscuritas, a qua profectos probabile est, qui nunc per tot opulentas ac spatiosas regiones ambitiosae crudelitatis pomeria protulerunt. Nominat illos et Cyprianus in libro De Duplici Martyrio, veluti jam tum Caesariani nominis devotos hostes. Sunt eruditi quidam, qui pro Tuscis, quos Ptolemaeus in Asiatica Sarmatia recenset, existimant legendum Turcos sive Turcas. Quis enim Scriptorum alius Tuscos posuit in Asia?”
- 3.
CWE 64, 221, n. 21.
- 4.
The literature which served me: Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk 1453–1517 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists, and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008); Margaret Meserve, “Medieval Sources for Renaissance Theories on the Origins of the Ottoman Turks,” in B. Guthmüller and W. Kühlmann (eds.), Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000; repr. Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 409–426; Malcolm, Useful Enemies, 19–29; James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 49, Symposium on Byzantium and the Italians, 13th–15th Centuries (1995), 128–130. Reprinted in idem, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. I. (Roma: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 293–426. Hankins studied the writings of Italian humanists who advocated a crusade against the Turks and he reports on more than 400 different texts written by more than 50 humanists. For useful explanations, aside a translation, see Michael v. Cotta-Schönberg (translator and editor), Oration “Audivi” of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Basel, 16 November 1436), 24–27, https://hal-hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-00683151.
- 5.
See Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent, 31–32, 148–149, 188–189, 204–205; Bisaha, Creating East and West, 75–76, 89–90; Meserve, “Medieval Sources for Renaissance Theories on the Origins of the Ottoman Turks,” in Guthmüller and Kühlmann (eds.), Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, 419–425; and idem, Empires of Islam, 41–43.
- 6.
Meserve, Empires of Islam, 22–35, 47–51, 56–57. See also John Victor Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens, Europe and the Islamic World: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 173.
- 7.
Meserve, Empires of Islam, 44; Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 76–103; and Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders,” 137–139.
- 8.
Meserve, Empires of Islam, 45–46; Amnon Linder, “Ex Mala Parentela Bona Sequi Seu Oriri Non Potest: The Troyan Ancestry of the Kings of France and the Opus Davidicum of Johannes Angelus De Legonissa,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance XL (1978): 502–512.
- 9.
Ibid., 45. Beside the Turks, the idea of a Trojan origin was adopted by the Franks, the Gallo Belgians, the Germans, the British, the Danes, the Poles, the Austrians, and the Italians. It was also claimed by several dynasties, such as the Merovingians, the Carolingians and their successors, the house of Luxemburg, the ducal family of Lower Lorrain, the families of the Counts of Louvain, Namur, Boulogne, and many others. See Linder, “Ex Mala Parentela Bona Sequi Seu Oriri Non Potest,” 497–498.
- 10.
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1909–1914; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1974), vol. 7, 202, n. 87; Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent, 148–149, 204.
- 11.
Ibid., 60–68; Meserve, Empires of Islam, 99–116. Weinstein stresses that the humanists who defined the Turks as Scythians adopted the Byzantine practice to name as Scythians all tribes that invaded Europe from the steppes of Russia, such as Mongols, Tatarians, and Turkmens (who were named “Eastern Scythians” or “Persian Scythians”). See Tolan, Veinstein, and Laurens, Europe and the Islamic World, 174.
- 12.
Michael J. Heath, “Renaissance Scholars and the Origins of the Turks,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 41 (1979): 453–471; Meserve, Empires of Islam, 25.
- 13.
Meserve, ibid., 15, 47–64, 149–151, 238–245. On the Scythians in the ancient world and their presentation by Herodote, and especially on how the Athenians perceived them as the embodiment of the ultimate “other”: François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
- 14.
Meserve, Empires of Islam, 22, 99.
- 15.
Ibid., 22, 68.
- 16.
Ibid., 68–69, 95, 115.
- 17.
COE, I, 424.
- 18.
See notes 1–2.
- 19.
H. Ehrenfried, Türke und Osmanenreich in der Vorstellung der Zeitgenossen Luthers. Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung des deutschen Türkenschrifttums, unpublished PhD dissertation (The University of Freiburg Br., 1961); A. G. Weiler, “The Turkish Argument and Christian Piety in Desiderius Erasmus’ ‘Consultatio de Bello Turcis inferendo’ (1530),” in J. Weiland Sperna and W. T. M. Frijoff (eds.), Erasmus of Rotterdam the Man and the Scholar (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 30–39; and J. B. Ross, “Venetian Schools and Teachers Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century: A Survey and a Study of Giovanni Battista Egnazio,” Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1976): 521–566.
- 20.
Michael J. Heath, in CWE 64, 204 (De bello Turcico—introductory note).
- 21.
Opera, 307: “[…] comedit quae caeteri abominantur, iumentorum, luporum, ac vultorum carnes, et quod magis horreas, hominum abortive […].” See Bisaha, Creating East and West, 76, n. 231. A somewhat less horrible description is to be found in Piccolomini’s letter of July 1453 to Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. See Margaret Meserve, “From Samarkand to Scythia: Reinventions of Asia in Renaissance Geography and Political Thought,” in von Martels and Vanderjagt (eds.), Pius II—‘El Pìu Expeditivo Pontifice’. Selected Studies on Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464), 26.
- 22.
For example, CWE 64, 221; ASD V-3 38; on which: Timothy Hampton, “‘Turkish Dogs’ Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 62. See also n. 52, Chapter 1.
- 23.
James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 49, Symposium on Byzantium and the Italians, 13th–15th Centuries (1995), 128–130, reprint in idem, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. I (Roma: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 309–310; the last quote: Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 135–136.
- 24.
Zweder von Martels, “‘More Matter and Less Art.’ Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini and the Delicate Balance Between Eloquent Words and Deeds,” in von Martels and Vanderjagt (eds.), Pius II—‘El Pìu Expeditivo Pontifice’. Selected Studies on Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464), 220–222 (the quote is on p. 222). Alternatively, Nancy Bisaha, in Daniel Ethan Bornstein and David Spencer Peterson (eds.), Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 124, emphasizes “his personal commitment to halting Turkish advance as his major crusading motivation.”
- 25.
See Florence A. Cragg (trans.) and Leona C. Gabel (ed.), The Commentaries of Pius II: An Abridgement (New York: Capricorn, 1962), 25. These aspects has been further researched by Nathan Ron, “The Influence of Italian humanists on Erasmus’ De bello Turcico’,” in Nicholas Terpstra (ed.), Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures (London: Routledge, 2019).
- 26.
Michael J. Heath, Crusading Commonplaces: La Noue, Lucinge and Rhetoric Against the Turks (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1986), 28–30.
- 27.
[Francesco Filelfo] Ad Pium Papam Oratio I in Orationes Francisci Philelfi cum quibusdam aliis eiusdem operibus (Basel, 1498) no pagination: “Quis unus omnium Turcos ignoret fugitivos esse Scytharum servos eosque pastores […]”; Bisaha, Creating East and West, 77; Comment. III, 20, 2.
- 28.
CWE, 64, 221–222; ASD V-3 40: “[…] nullo certo duce, sed vagi palantesgue latrociniis verius quam bello prouincias depopulabantur.”
- 29.
CWE 64, 231; ASD V-3 52: “Gens est effeminata luxu, nec alia rem quam latrociniis formidanda.”
- 30.
Hampton, “Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” 67.
- 31.
The passage from the diary is cited from Silke R. Falkner, “Preserved Spaces: Boundary Negotiations in Early-Modern Turcica,” in James Hodkinson and Jeff Morrison (eds.), Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture (New York: Camden House, 2009), 55: “Nach dem Mittag-Essen einen Tanz durch 2 Buben deren die Tuercken zu ihrer Schande missbrauchen, welche verfluchte Unweiss in der Tuercky sehr gemein.”
- 32.
Falkner, “Preserved Spaces,” 55.
- 33.
Opera, 929–930: “Sed quid Graecia, litterarum mater? Inventrix legum, cultrix morum, et omnium artium bonarum magistra? Quem non miseret gentis illius afflictae, oppressae, pessumdatae? Cujus imperium non sub Alexandro Macedone solum suisque successoribus, sed sub Atheniensibus, Thebanis et Lacedaemoniensibus olim et florentissimum et potentissimum fuit, nunc ubilibet effeminatis Turcis servire coacta est?” The English translation of Piccolomini’s orations that I use henceforth is based on Michael von Cotta-Schoenberg’s translations of the Orations of Piccolomini / Pope Pius II, published in the HAL open archives: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01588941/document.
- 34.
Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 98–99.
- 35.
Opera, 685–686: “Solus Mahumetus et quos quindecim milia expediti sunt, quos sonus delectat armorum, et animus in bella paratus exhibet audaces. Caeteros inexpertos, timidos effeminatos nullius pretii judicetis.”
- 36.
Opera, 909: “Nostis quanti faciat Asianos Remus ille Virgilianus, cujus sunt verba: O verae Phrygiae, nec enim Phryges […].”
- 37.
CWE 64, 231; ASD V-3 50: “Gens est effeminata luxu, nec alia rem qua latrociniis formidanda.”
- 38.
James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 64, 235, n. 27.
- 39.
Ibid., 64.
- 40.
Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus, and Vives on Humanism, War and Peace 1496–1535 (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 1962), 263–264.
- 41.
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: University Press, 1960; 2nd edition: Oxford: Oneworld, 1993), 306.
- 42.
Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 231–233.
- 43.
CWE 64, 220; ASD V-3 38: “[…] Turcas non sua pietate, non sua virtute, sed nostra socordia potissimum huc usque crevisse.”
- 44.
CWE, 64, 231; ASD V-3 52: “An pietati Turcarum hic successus tribuetur? Nequaquam. An virtuti? Gens est effoeminata luxu, nec alia re quam latrociniis formidanda […] Nostris vitiis illi debent suas victorias.”
- 45.
Opera, 907–908: “Heu furias, Heu artes, daemonum, pugnare inter se potius Christiani volunt quam Turcos adoriri. Civilia bella magis cupiunt, quam externa, et saepe parvis de causis cruentissima committunt proelia.”
- 46.
CWE 64, 248; ASD V-3 66; Ep 2285 120: “Nihil omissum est, a Bessarione, a Pio secundo.” On Bessarion’s presence in the pre-crusading congress in Mantua: Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant 1204–1571, vol. II: The Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 217–218.
- 47.
Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent, 225; Bisaha, Creating East and West, 175.
- 48.
For Erasmus’ non-pacifist and even pro-war assertions, see Ron, “The Christian Peace of Erasmus,” 27–42.
- 49.
See notes 1–2.
- 50.
See n. 3.
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Ron, N. (2019). The Origin of the Turks. In: Erasmus and the “Other”. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24929-8_4
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