mediterranean literature 323
Byzantine forces of the emperor of Nicaea, who are described as a motley host
“recruited from here and there and speaking many tongues” (Shawcross, 2012: 151).
A Mediterranean perspective also brings into view historical figures such as Umur Bey
(c. 1309–1347), emir of Aydin, one of the Anatolian principalities to emerge out of
the collapse of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the wake of the Mongol conquest of
1243 before the expansion of the Ottoman state in the later fourteenth century. Umur
Bey commissioned Kelile ve Dimne, an Old Anatolian Turkish translation (from a
twelfth-century Persian version) of Kalila and Dimna—part of a cluster of transla-
tions commissioned by the emirs of Aydin and their neighbors in an ideological effort
to distinguish themselves from the Seljuk sultans, whose court language was Persian
(Paker and Toska, 1997: 82–84). Moreover, he himself became the subject of an epic
poem (preserved in the Düsturname, a fifteenth-century Ottoman chronicle of the
history of the world through the reign of Mehmet II) recounting his exploits as a
maritime raider—ostensibly as a Muslim gazi warrior, despite his close alliance with
Byzantine emperors Andronicos III and John VI Cantacuzenos (Kinoshita, 2009:
605–606).
In the early modern period (the “age of Philip II” of Braudel’s subtitle [1972–3]),
the increase in piracy and corsairing following the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto (1571)
is reflected in the proliferation of narratives of captivity. Examples include Los baños de
Argel (The Prisons of Algiers) and La gran sultana (The Great Sultana)—two plays by
Miguel de Cervantes, better known to literary history, of course, as the author of Don
Quijote (one of the candidates for the first modern novel) and, famously, a veteran of
Lepanto. On the one hand, these plays (published in 1615 but never performed)
present a fictional rendition of the age-old dynamics of Mediterranean piracy, inti-
mately linked, as we have seen, to the slave trade. On the other hand, both dramas
repeatedly highlight both religious and national difference, their captives identified
not just as Christian but specifically Spanish. Los baños gives little hint of the religious
and ethnic diversity of contemporary Algiers (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 116), where
Turks “by birth” (either “Anatolian” or “Romanian”) mingled with Turks “by profes-
sion”—Christian renegades who could be anything from Muscovite to Mexican to
East Indian (de Sosa, 2011: 124–125: Cervantes, 2010: 41n). As for The Sultana, its
representation of a Turkish sultan in love with a reluctant beauty from Oviedo (one of
the few parts of the Iberian peninsula never subject to Muslim rule) reads like a com-
pensatory fantasy of the power that foreign-born imperial favorites (haseki), consorts,
and queen mothers (valide sultan) like Hurrem (consort and political confidante of
Suleiman I) or Fatima Hatun (sister of the Venetian-born official Gazanfer Aga)
wielded at the contemporary Ottoman court (Peirce, 1993; Dursteler, 2011).
In the late sixteenth century, the “Northern Invasion” of the Mediterranean by
French, Dutch, and British interests (Braudel, 1972–2: 615–642; Greene, this vol-
ume) was one aspect of the transformation of the world economy that brought about
the “relative decline” of the Mediterranean in the centuries after 1450 (Burke, 2013:
917). One literary echo of this development was the appearance of English plays pre-
occupied by the question of “turning Turk.” In these works, the trope of conversion
directly addressed some of the ambiguities triggered by Mediterranean encounters
with Islamic culture (represented as “powerful, wealthy, and erotically alluring”)
while simultaneously exploring a wider “variety of transformations, including the
shifting of political, religious, sexual, and moral identities” at a moment when religious