Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans by Carina L. Johnson (review)

This monograph explores perceptions of Ottomans and Mexicans in Habsburg Europe, illuminating the forces that affected European evaluations of non-European cultures and situating these views convincingly within the shifting landscape of court and religious politics. As indicated by the titles of the book’s two parts, what had begun as “categories of inclusion” had by the end of the sixteenth century become “experiments of exclusion.” Focusing on ritual practices such as circumcision, child sacrifice, idolatry, and sacred display, Johnson argues that the Reformation and the subsequent establishment of confessional orthodoxy played the central role in fixing this new cultural hierarchy.

Johnson first positions initial impressions of the Mexicans and Ottomans within medieval ethnographic traditions, which “supported a stance of religious relativism” (29). Nicolas of Cusa’s positive evaluation of the diversity of religious rites thus frames the early descriptions of the Aztec Empire, which celebrated its wealth and sophistication, and Georgius de Hungaria’s Tractatus, which presented Turkish customs as perilously attractive to thoughtful Europeans. More negative portrayals of these cultures developed, however, in the charged atmosphere of the Reformation, with German pamphlet illustrations linking the Mexicans visually to reviled groups: to the Jews through circumcision and child sacrifice (the myth of ritual murder) and to Catholics through the devouring of the dead. For the Turks, Martin Luther’s turn toward unflattering equations of the Pope and the Sultan and the sensationalized news that accompanied the Ottomans’ increasing military pressure on the eastern border likewise foregrounded negative representations.

The remaining sections of the first part examine the role Mexico played in Charles V’s plans for a universal empire that, into the 1520s, was envisioned as religiously inclusive. Johnson tracks changes in the treatment of Nahua nobles and Aztec treasure: the former were first welcomed and then increasingly marginalized in court practices, while the latter was first displayed triumphantly only to be melted down later for specie. In each case, a new emphasis on right belief and practices in the 1530s and 1540s diminished the political usefulness of embracing cultural diversity. The debates at the Spanish court over the status of Charles’s Indian subjects, even at their most generous, set orthodox faith as the sine qua non of incorporation. Meanwhile, reformers’ attacks on sacred objects as gateways to idolatry drained the display of imperial regalia and treasure of its previous legitimating power. Mexican people and objects remained symbols, but no longer symbols of the Habsburgs’ triumphant rule over a diverse global empire.

Instead, as Johnson argues in the second part of Cultural Hierarchy, Mexican and Turkish people and objects became symbols of demonic influence and cultural inferiority within a new ethnographic regime. A comparison of works by Sebastian Franck and Bartolomé de las Casas with subsequent ethnographies by Sebastian Münster and Hieronymo Román y Zamora reveals the shift from a comparative, relativist view of religious practices to one that placed “increasing importance on doctrine when assessing culture and religious practice, . . . note[d] the devil’s influence in idolatry outside of Latin Christian Europe or even Catholic Europe, and [relied on] strategies of distancing” (158).

Johnson then shows this European superiority complex at work, first in the new narratives coming out of the Ottoman-Habsburg border regions, which combined Turkish violence and religious error into a horrifying ordeal for the captives whose plight filled numerous publications. As unwilling, and thus untainted, cultural go-betweens, repatriated captives became sought-after translators at the Austrian Habsburg court, where they were seen as more reliable than the merchants, Jewish physicians, and renegades preferred by the Ottoman Sultan. One such renegade, Ibrahim Bey, served as Ottoman ambassador to Maximilian’s coronation as Roman king in 1562. Both the ceremony itself and later published descriptions of it highlighted the difference between Christian religious and ruling practices and those of the “deviant” Turks, thus uniting a confessionally divided Empire against an exotic despot...