Reviewed by:
Paolo Giovio . Commentario de le cose de' Turchi. Quaderni di Schede Umanistiche 10. Ed. Lara Michelacci. Bologna: CLUEB, 2005. 190 pp. illus. bibl. €18. ISBN: 88-491-2570-4.

Paolo Giovio wrote his Commentario de le cose de' Turchi for Emperor Charles V in the wake of the devastating Ottoman victory at Mohacs in 1526. The text was completed in 1530, first published at Rome in 1532, translated into Latin, German, and other vernaculars, and reprinted in numerous editions both in Italy and north of the Alps, often accompanied by other compilations of Turkish history or contemporary reportage. The text is short, lively, and readable, being written (as [End Page 158] Giovio explains in his preface) without "tediosi proemi" (71) or flowery Tuscan verbiage. Hoping to reach the widest possible audience, Giovio wrote instead in the "semplice lingua comune a tutta Italia" (71), a stylistic choice which made the Commentario one of the most influential texts in the vast corpus of sixteenth-century Turcica. Later, Giovio himself reused material from the Commentario in his Elogia, where his capsule biographies of Ottoman sultans are paired with striking engraved portraits of the rulers in profile — an act of prudent recycling which carried the fruits of his researches to an even wider readership.

The text of the Commentario is closely related both to the Elogia and to Giovio's later (and longer) Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV but, unlike these works, the Commentario has yet to be published in a modern edition, making its appearance here especially welcome. Taken from the Roman edition of Antonio Blado, the text covers the history of the Ottoman dynasty from its origins under Osman to the most recent exploits of Süleyman the Magnificent, followed by thoughtful observations on the current state of Turkish military, political, and bureaucratic organization. Giovio's ostensible purpose was to encourage Charles to lead a new crusade against this impressive and formidable enemy, but his historical and anthropological instincts quickly led him to a consideration of the cose de' Turchi for their own intrinsic interest.

Giovio came by his information from a variety of sources. He read through a substantial library of humanist histories of the Turks, echoes of which resound throughout his text. Moreover, unlike many of his predecessors, Giovio also paid attention to other kinds of expertise. He read carefully the account of the escaped captive Gian Maria Angiolello (98) and interrogated various veterans of Turkish campaigns ("ho odito dire da uomini degni di fede quali si trovorno in questa battaglia," 134). His informants also included illustrious captains like Giovan Paolo Manfron and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, and the Venetian ambassador Luigi Mocenigo and Doge Andrea Gritti. His work thus points to a fascinating moment in the history of European history-writing, when longstanding traditions of universal history and formulaic ethnography butted up against newer and increasingly influential forms of eyewitness reportage. Proceeding sultan by sultan — a format that reflects the influence of Plutarchan biography and the imperial histories of ancient Rome, as well as more recent impulses of antiquarian collezionismo — Giovio's Commentario presents, somewhat paradoxically, both a clarion call to crusade and a sort of textual museum of Ottoman oddities. In the process, the author manages both to address traditional anxieties about the Turkish menace and to satisfy certain newer, and rather milder, forms of interest in the remote past and exotic present of the Islamic East.

The editor thoroughly sets the text in its varied contexts in a substantial and eloquent introduction, which treats the history of the text and its composition, various literary themes (for example, "la nostalgia dell'altro"), and the impact of the Commentario on later European scholarship on the Turks. Below the text itself, extensive notes identify the events and personalities in Ottoman history to which Giovio refers. The apparatus is less thorough when it comes to explaining how the [End Page 159] historian came by his information. Despite a brief discussion of Giovio's use of written sources in the introduction, there is no note, for instance, to indicate that the opening two-and-a-half sentences of the Commentario are more or less a direct quotation of Niccolo Sagundino's 1456 treatise De origine Turcarum. Other instances of his borrowing from earlier humanist historians, including Flavio Biondo and Filippo Buonaccorsi, might also have been documented in the text itself, where they could shed light on Giovio's methods of reading and compilation.

These few points aside, however, this is an attractive and useful edition of an important text which deserves to be better known by students of Italian humanism, Renaissance history-writing, and European relations with the Islamic East.

Margaret Meserve
University of Notre Dame

Share