The Renaissance Paradigm: Italian and Ottoman Perspectives

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Metin Mustafa

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Abstract: Appreciating the Ottoman attitude to rebirth is integral to understanding the early modern Mediterranean experience and assists a more global perspective of the Renaissance period. Like their Renaissance counterparts in Florence, Venice and other regions in Italy and Europe at the time, the Ottomans too looked to past exemplars to forge a powerful global identity. They too experienced a rebirth, but with a difference. The Ottomans not only propagated the classical heritage of the West, which they inherited at the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, but also exploited the powerful and enduring legacy they shared with their Islamic, Turkic, Perso-Timurid cousins. In this strategic appropriation of both Eastern and Western legacies, the work argues that the Ottomans fashioned a distinctive Renaissance. It is in interrogating the product of this synthesis that the essay makes its original contribution to global Renaissance studies. This essay expressly tests the question: did the Ottomans have a Renaissance? By giving voice to contemporary Renaissance writers and artists including Giorgio Vasari, Mustafa Ali and Mimar Sinan, the essay demonstrates the emergence of the the notion of multiple renaissances in the early modern Mediterranean basin.