Italy and Its Invaders by Girolamo Arnaldi (review)

REVIEWS 212 without mentioning the possible relevance of the approaching Muslim millennium (October 1591) for the Ottomans. The list of monarchs could have included the Mughal emperor Akbar and his claim to semi-divinity, closely tied to the thousand-year anniversary of the rise of Islam. The point here is not simply to demand the inclusion of narrative and erotic poetry by Muslim writers of western Asia, but rather to show that the absence of these examples actually represents a fundamental conceptual flaw of conceptualization: the authors ignore relevant phenomena occurring east of Istanbul while stressing continuities with the western Eurasian worlds. This is not an uncommon trend in recent Ottoman studies. Perhaps to reverse the Orientalist treatment of the history of the house of Osman as a manifestation of a monolithic Islam, some contemporary scholars go to the other extreme by neglecting to investigate the connections with, say, the late Timurids or the Mughals. The trouble is that both approaches take for granted the implicit otherness of East to West. (“It should be some comfort, in this latter age when we are haunted by seemingly insurmountable difference, to know that East and West were once so close, that, at the dawning of the modern world, Muslims, Christians, and Jews were united in a desire for a unique and powerful beloved” [353]). Indeed, Andrews and Kalpakli chide early twentieth-century Turkish scholars for their rejection of Ottoman history and culture as they tried to participate in the modernizing project of the West, which viewed the empire with contempt (11). But Andrews and Kalpakli stand in the same problematic relationship vis-à-vis Europe, on the one hand, and the Ottoman past on the other. If one way to incorporate modern Turkey into the “West” was to reject the history that prevented its full integration into Europe, another is to render this past acceptable and “Western,” and thus to anticipate the historical argument against its integration. This, and not the topic of investigation, is what should offend readers. ALI ANOOSHAHR, Young Research Library, UCLA Girolamo Arnaldi, Italy and Its Invaders, trans. Anthony Sugaar (Cambridge , MA and London: Harvard University Press 2005) x + 229 pp. Giralamo Arnaldi’s Italy and Its Invaders takes as its subject the many invasions of Italy, beginning with the Sack of Rome in 410 A.D. by Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, and ending with the so-called liberation of Italy during World War II by the Allied Forces. At first glance, such a wide-ranging, eclectic survey might seem an exercise in pedantry, yet Arnaldi’s motivation is clear: he asks the reader to take a few steps back from the canvas of history in order to reveal the broad and persistent motifs that often go unnoticed when considering the shorter historical periods on which most historians typically concentrate. From such a viewpoint, one can consider, for example, the evolution of a sense of Italian national identity. Arnaldi quotes from a letter, written by the Milanese to the Bolognese after the battle of Legnano in 1176, in which the plunder won from the German Emperor Barbarossa is “the shared patrimony of the pope and the Italians” (87). Just as the reader is about to commit this date to memory as an early example of Italian identity, Arnaldi points out that we should not be so quick to “speak of Italian communes battling the German emperor … because many of the communes … took sides with the emperor … They knew that putative Italian national feeling would do little to protect them” REVIEWS 213 (87). Arnaldi complicates the idea of national identity by distinguishing between its use in writing and its existence in action. His strategy of examining the evolution of Italian national identity by considering the invasions of the Apennine Penninsula and those who eventually voice and act upon their collective experience of being invaded, sheds much light on this complicated issue. Arnaldi considers other far reaching motifs, such as the influence of Christianity on Italy, the wax and wane of papal power, and the enduring and not-so-enduring legacies of various invaders, from the Ostrogoths to the Muslims to Napoleon. Arnaldi is professor emeritus of Medieval History...