Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.

To the Editor:

In the review of my book, Victory of the West, Professor Gábor Ágoston rightly underscores the need of integrating both Western and non-Western sources to fully comprehend and explain the so-called battle of Lepanto. In doing so, he indirectly gets to the essence of the problem, namely the difficulty of understanding primary sources – especially those removed from one’s everyday cultural milieu. This matter would deserve a book in its own right, but I wish to address it briefly here.

Without falling into the trap of extreme textual criticism – so dear to some of my post-modernist cronies – we often tend to forget that primary sources, manuscript or printed as they may be, are produced by human beings for the benefit of other members of their particular culture; in short, they reflect a specific audience’s wishes. Any reader of this journal who has run the gauntlet of writing and/ or reading job applications will agree that a candidate submitting a strong letter of interest is more likely to get a sympathetic ear than someone producing a bland one. This does not mean that the former individual is being disingenuous; he is simply capable of serving up tastier food for the recipients’ palates. Likewise, the phraseology included in the aforesaid strong letter will conform to a specific style and ritual, universally recognized and accepted by its ultimate readers.

Of course, none of this is new. Anyone who, for example, approaches a Renaissance-period petition, if lacking the necessary interpretative skills, may be left wondering if the author of the document is lying, being truthful, pulling one’s leg, or all three together. An appeal written by a sixteenth-century galley convict is invariably a tale of miseries and woes, even when the petitioner – in spite of all his hand wringing – enjoyed privileges unknown to most of his colleagues. The rhetorical style of the time demanded as much. Likewise, because the Venetian Senate accepted Cristofaro da Canal’s proposal about the need of having galleys rowed by sentenced criminals, rather than by free men, does not mean that the Senators bought their colleague’s flawed and deceptive argument on the matter – it took rather more to bamboozle people with years of administrative and/or naval experience. Since it was directed to a wide readership, Da Canal’s plan simply provided a convenient fig leaf to cover Venice’s acute problem of finding enough free men to row its galleys. The problem lies not with Da Canal, but with those historians who have taken his words at face value.

Such problems become even more acute with cultures removed from ours; even more so when seen through the eyes of our direct forbearers. The reports of the Venetian baili (ambassadors) in Constantinople during the Renaissance era are a case in point. There is no doubt that such documents are usually factually accurate – the security of the Venetian state, not to mention any bailo’s reputation, demanded that; but, at the same time, are they completely “true”? Take for example the fact that the ambassador invariably describes the Ottomans as being incredibly avaricious (avari; I should add that, to complicate matters further, in modern Italian the word avaro has lost its grasping meaning and now simply indicates a tight-fisted individual). The Venetians had been too long in the East not to know that generous gifts to Ottoman officials are not so much bribes, as a customary recognition of an individual’s authority and position. This is a typical “us” vs. “them” situation, and not motivated just by religious differences. The Ottoman Empire, and much of Eastern Europe for that matter, did not conform to the social, legal and political tenets dominating the Latin world. The Venetians, and everyone else, knew perfectly well that many Western nobles and clergymen did not live according to their chivalric and Christian principles, but considered such behaviour reprehensible and used their...