This collected volume examines diverse examples of contact and conflict between Christian and Muslim societies in the early modern period, focusing in particular on the iconography of Christian–Muslim encounters in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It is the fruit of a two-day conference (“Images and Borderlands: the Mediterranean Basin between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Age”) held in Split, Croatia in September 2020 as part of the EU COST project, “Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350–1750)” (https://is-le.eu). The book, published both in print and online in open access, includes an introduction by the editors plus thirteen chapters, divided into three parts. Part one (on the Mediterranean as a “Borderland”) and part two (on images of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto) include four chapters each, while part three (on the circulation of other early modern iconography) includes the final five chapters. Each chapter includes color images and an individual bibliography, and the volume includes a general index of personal and place names.
The first chapter (based on Peter Burke's keynote address) offers a brief comparison of the impact of the “Arab heritage in Spain and Portugal and the Ottoman heritage in Central and Eastern Europe” (35). While the very limited space can only allow an impressionistic sample of examples – from the neo-Mudéjar train station in Toledo to the town hall building in Sarajevo, among a few others – Burke makes a valuable final point in observing that a comparison between nostalgic “Moorish revivals, West and East” (47) could shed light on the role of cultural hybridity in the expression of a local concept of nation and identity. In chapter two, Ivan Alduk recounts the history of the fortress built in the fifteenth century in the village of Zadvarje (Dalmatia) above the Cetina River canyon, inland from the Adriatic coast. Sitting at a crossroads of Venetian and Ottoman activity, the fortress is a window onto the broader history of the region, through the eighteenth century. In chapter three, Ferenc Tóth considers the French view of the strategic importance of the Dardanelles in the political engagement between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In the last chapter of part one, Ana Echevarría examines various permutations of elite corps of bodyguards and converted royal soldiers. Viewing these figures – Mamluks, Janissaries, Elches, Jenets – as “crossover characters” (75), Echevarría shows how cross-religious bodyguards reflected the multireligious character of Mediterranean battalions and armies.
Echevarría's chapter could easily have been included in the second section, because a focus on the representation of elite corps bodyguards in the iconography of Lepanto makes up the second half of the paper. The following chapter by Laura Stagno examines the memory of the Christian victory at Lepanto in Liguria and Piedmont. In particular, the association of the battle with the power of the Virgin Mary led to the institution of the feast of Our Lady of Victory by Pope Pius V (changed to the Feast of the Holy Rosary by Gregory XIII in 1573), commemorated in abundant iconography. Chiara Giulia Morandi then examines the representation of Christian political and military leaders at Lepanto and after. Juan Chiva and Victor Mínguez focus their chapter on the pro-Christian Lepanto propaganda in Johannes Sambucus's Arcus aliquot triumphal (Antwerp, 1572), while Naz Defne Kut offers the valuable counterpoint of the representation of Lepanto in Ottoman sources.
Part three of the book includes a survey by Angelo Maria Monaco of portraits of Mehmed II, a fascinating study by Cristelle Baskins and Borja Franco Llopis of the image of Africa in the funeral obsequies of King Felipe II, a chapter by Maria Luis Ricci on the representation of Knight Saints by seventeenth-century artist Mattia Preti in Malta, and Francisco Sorce's analysis of the anti-Turkish elements in the frescos by Giovanni Mannozzi (d. 1636) painted in the “Salone degli Argenti” (in the Treasury of the Grand Dukes) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.
While each study offers interesting observations and valuable scholarship on the iconography of Christian–Muslim relations in the wake of Lepanto, the volume strives to be more than a rich conference volume with the addition of a reflective theoretical introduction. The editors here aim to examine the concept of the “borderland” in light of recent scholarship on the “frontier,” which signifies “not a line delineating a distant land, but a dual periphery, that is, an osmotic barrier characterized by a strong and peculiar cultural and artistic communication” (23). By theorizing the Mediterranean and Adriatic “as dynamic areas of confrontation, and not as borders or limits” (23), the editors provide a useful lens through which to read together the diverse case studies.
Equally fruitful is the theorization of images as “monuments” rather than indexical representations, allowing for a historical analysis of Christian–Muslim confrontation and encounter in terms of a rhetoric of propaganda rather than simply a chronicle of events. In light of this thoughtful presentation, it is unfortunate that many of the volume's seventy-eight images are too small in the printed copy to be useful to the reader, especially in the case of reproductions of large canvases. The problem is somewhat ameliorated by the open-access pdf version of the book online, although individual image files are not provided there either. Nevertheless, for a project that has made the substantial investment needed to offer the chapters in open access, it would make sense to ensure that the quality of the material provided matches the sophisticated thinking they accompany. Despite this editorial shortcoming (on the part of Brepols, not the individual editors), the book is a rich source of scholarship and reflection on the representation of Christian–Muslim encounters in the early modern Mediterranean and a commendable example of the theoretical possibilities for framing this material in the context of current work on both early modern iconography and border studies.
