material Culture 287phenomenon of Ottoman-era rugs in Transylvania is a practical example of cultural
hybridity and cultural convergence born from the unique political climate of the east-
ern Mediterranean region in the sixteenth century. This example also exposes the
reasons why we need to look outside of the Mediterranean to make sense of material
culture from the region. After the Ottoman defeat of the Hungarian kingdom in
1526, Transylvania remained independent under the Turkish sovereign. The mainly
Saxon traders from this multicultural and multi-faith region treated the Black Sea as a
Greater Mediterranean, and maintained historic exchange patterns previously estab-
lished with Byzantium. This has resulted in the extraordinary statistic that the largest
collection of small fifteenth to eighteenth-century Ottoman rugs outside Turkey is
held in churches, stores, homes and museums in Transylvania, central Romania
(Ionescu, 2005: 33).
Remarkably, about one-third of these Anatolian Mediterranean rugs adorn the
interiors of Evangelical and Reformed churches, altering our assumptions of the
whitewashing of church interiors following the Lutheran Reformation. While in other
parts of Europe ownership of Ottoman and other oriental rugs remained the preserve
of aristocratic households, the Transylvanian rug inscriptions and documentary evi-
dence show that rugs were objects of investment and suitable pious donations for
families of the well-to-do Saxon mercantile and guild classes, just as they were for
eleventh- to thirteenth-century Apulians and Arab Jews. The rugs were kept as deco-
rative soft furnishings and as wall hangings but never used on the floor, as they were
in large parts of the Islamic Mediterranean. This led to the unique consequence of
their survival, most strikingly seen in Braşov’s Black Church with over 100 examples
giving this unmistakably Lutheran church the air of an early Christian basilica in Rome
or Ravenna. The conclusion of an object biography of an Ottoman rug in Transylvania
would stress the greater influence of culture over commerce in its survival today, and
the importance of looking outside an object’s original geo-cultural context when
assessing its historical significance.
These Braudelian evocations are intended to paint a picture of Mediterranean
material culture that is based on contrasts of experience. Sleeping and eating are two
human activities which have generated a range of distinctive object cultures across the
Mediterranean. The expectation of historical change has also been challenged when
the material experiences of generations living centuries apart are compared. The fea-
tures of material culture that were shared with, or absorbed into, other places were in
many instances more enduring outside the Mediterranean area from which they orig-
inated. There remains the opportunity to select some object-orientated journeys to
reveal how material culture has been used to characterize different periods and ideas
in Mediterranean history, and then review what the Mediterranean can bring to the
study of objects.Prehistoric and ancient things: pots and copper
The study of prehistory is the study of material culture par excellence. The Mediterranean
has provided a wealth of information to scholars searching for the origins of commer-
cialized societies that commoditized everything from alum to wine. Ceramics have
materially defined entire cultures and been used as a basis for proposing patterns of
migration, settlement and conquest. But metals such as copper, bronze and iron have
become the arbiters of defining social, cultural and even political change.0002063960.INDD 287 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM