498 edward muir
mountain territories as inscrutable as the portuguese found the hindus
of india, they were unwilling to credit the most inflammatory misinter-
pretations of their practices. The record is foggy about exactly what the
alleged witches themselves believed and did.30
Venetians need not search their mountain dominions to find the cul-
tural other. living alongside Sanudo and his peers in Venice itself and
appearing on a regular basis in foreign embassies were peoples who did
not fit into the elite Venetian scheme of things.
Encounters with the “Other”The Venetians’ relationship with the ottoman Turks was perhaps the
most ambivalent and carefully orchestrated, simply because the Turks
were both a trading partner and a potential threat to Venice’s maritime
empire.31 Despite a series of conflicts, Venice’s attitude toward the otto-
mans was far less hostile than those of any other catholic power, save
perhaps france. like the french, Venice needed the ottomans, if for no
other reason than as a counterweight to the holy roman empire and the
kingdom of hungary. The arrival of an ottoman ambassador was always
a noted event. in 1516 the ambassador of the sultan arrived with an atten-
dant carrying a pole with a human head stuffed with straw at the end.
The ambassador presented the head, which had belonged to the defeated
egyptian captain, to the Signoria as a memento of the ottoman victory.
Another Turkish ambassador created a diplomatic incident when he com-
plained that he had not been given the same quality of gifts as his prede-
cessor. Sanudo was especially diligent in recording the dress of the Turks,
always noting their turbans.32 except to record that Sultan Suleiman per-
secuted Jews in his territories and rigidly followed Muslim laws, Sanudo
has little to say about islam.33 The religion of others just did not engage
him beyond the recognition that other faiths were clearly wrong in com-
parison to christianity. The fact that during Sanudo’s lifetime the Turkish
ambassador was not resident but only an occasional emissary meant that
30 See carlo ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne c. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983), for a simi-
larly obscure agrarian cult the inquisitors considered witchcraft.
31 paolo preto, Venezia e i Turchi (florence, 1975).
32 Sanuto, I diarii, 22:460; 14:410–11; 19:331; 53:253.
33 Sanuto, I diarii, 33:315–16.