friendship, and many verses testifying to this are recited.”^14 No doubt many
humanists in Ludovico’s employ were kept busy writing the verses.
THE OTTOMAN COURT
Some of Ludovico’s dinner presentations acted out a different preoccupation—the
power of the new Ottoman state. When a whole roasted capon was brought in for
each guest, it was accompanied by a little drama:
A bull is presented by Indians and brought in by slaves of the Sultan in a
most elaborately decorated procession of gold and silver with two little
moors who sing very elaborately and an ambassador with an interpreter,
who translates the words of the embassy.^15
Here the Ottoman sultan was depicted as the lackey of Duke Ludovico, in a pageant
that was meant to be very exotic and in need of “translation” (even though Ludovico
himself was dubbed “il Moro,” the Moor, because of his swarthy complexion). But
imagine that the real sultan—the Ottoman ruler—held his own banquet at the same
time: at his dinner, the lackey would be an Italian, and the sultan would have
understood his language. For the Ottomans considered the Renaissance court to be
their own as well. They had taken Byzantium, purified it of its infidel past (turning its
churches into mosques), and reordered it along fittingly traditional lines. Although in
popular speech Constantinople became Istanbul (meaning “the city”), its official
name remained “Qustantiniyya”—the City of Constantine. The Ottoman sultans
claimed the glory of Byzantium for themselves.
Thus Mehmed II continued to negotiate with Genoese traders, while he
“borrowed” Gentile Bellini (c.1429–1507) from Venice to be his own court artist. In
1479, he posed for his portrait (see Plate 8.7), only a few decades after the genre of
portrait painting itself had been “invented” in Europe. On the walls of his splendid
Topkapi palace, he displayed tapestries from Burgundy portraying the deeds of
Alexander the Great, each no doubt something like the tapestry illustrated in Plate
8.8, discussed below. Just as a statue of Judith gave glory to the Medici family, so
Alexander burnished the image of the sultan. The tapestries were themselves trophies
of war: a failed Burgundian crusade against the Ottomans in 1396 had ended in the
capture of Duke John the Fearless; his ransom was the Alexander tapestries.
