"The Other Slaves of Livorno: Slavic Women Before the Inquisition", paper delivered at the international workshop "Gender and Enslavement in Early Modern Mediterranean Europe, 1250-1800" (Jerusalem, 10-13 September 2023) (original) (raw)

Enslavement, Religion, and Cultural Commemoration in Livorno

Religions, 2023

This essay critically reexamines the career of Bernardetto Buonromei (d. c. 1616), a physician who is celebrated today as one of Livorno’s founding fathers. It argues that Buonromei’s expertise as a medical practitioner was instrumental for turning the Tuscan port city of Livorno into a major stronghold of the early modern Mediterranean slave trade. Buonromei’s fame in the early seventeenth century, it proposes, reflected the high esteem with which the Medici Grand Dukes held his contribution to the Tuscan state’s involvement in religiously justified slaving. The essay analyzes documentary evidence regarding Buonromei’s exceptionally cruel treatment of enslaved Jews and Muslims who were placed under his care while he was serving as the physician in charge of Livorno’s slave prison. It demonstrates that Cosimo II continued to back Buonromei despite repeated complaints about the physician’s excessively ruthless conduct. The final part of the essay delineates the varied manifestations of Buonromei’s cultural commemoration from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The continuous textual, artistic, and performative celebrations of Buonromei’s accomplishments, it concludes, complements the erasure of the suffering he had inflicted on enslaved non-Catholics in Livorno.

The Florentine Alessandro Pini (1653–1717): From Able Scientist and Failed Spy to Man Hypnotized by Turkey

"In 1681 Doctor Alessandro Pini (Firenze 1653–1717 Kostantiniyye) was sent by Cosimo III Grand Duke of Tuscany (r. 1670–1723) to Egypt. He disembarked in Alexandria and primarily had the task of making discoveries, but also some other commissions which could be summarized as ‘secret diplomacy’: he had to bring Domenico Cartieri, head of the Pages of Egypt’s Great Pasha to Florence. When Pini came to Cairo, he was received by the Grand Visir Chiuperlì and he cured him for a thrombosis in the leg. He also observed the customs and everything around him, copied documents and noted as much as possible about, for example, monuments, antiquities, scientific observations; he made exact drawings, collected Arabic manuscripts about mathematics and medicine. He then sent all this material to Italy on a Greek ship that unfortunately sank. In 1683 Pini returned to Tuscany, to the Grand Duke’s disappointment he had not been successful in bringing Cartieri to Italy. Pini left for Venice where he met Cartieri again, who had fled from the Turks with whom he worked in Egypt, when they attempted the siege of Vienna. Pini, glad to hear of Cartieri’s good fortune, did not want to return to Florence with the latter, being offended by and disappointed with the rumors about himself. After numerous requests to the Grand Duke Pini was allowed to be engaged (in 1684) on a Venetian ship as a doctor. Held this position; from 1699 to 1703 he lived in Venice working for the Serenissima. In 1703 the Bailo of Kostantiniyye, Giulio Giustinian (1640–1715), called him to follow him as a doctor in Turkey. There, Pini married an Italian lady (Elena Masselini, and took up residence in the district of Pera. He lived there until 1715 and then went to Nafplio (Greece) where he was enslaved. He eventually died in 1717 in the prison of Kostantiniyye. During his stay in Kostantiniyye he had the opportunity to study and described several aspects of life on the Bosphorus. Pini left a description, written in Latin, of the world that fascinated him: De moribus Turcarum (‘On the Customs of the Turks’) (written probably during his stay in Kostantiniyye and Nafplio). He says: “the customs of the Turks were observed by me in such a way that they could be described as an example, because not everyone is allowed to travel in those regions. It was easy for me to penetrate their secret places, since I was not driven by injury, benefit, hate, or by any other feeling, but I was particularly attentive to the common advantage of men, of humankind.” Pini describes various aspects of social life such as education of children, the separation between men and women, the condemnation of idleness, the great generosity towards the poor, and the numerous rules of behaviour and eating habits. He also provides an aesthetic and architectural description of Kostantiniyye with information useful for reconstructing the appearance of the city at that time. His treatise presents an enthusiasm for the Turkish society and customs Pini became acquainted with during his stay; as doctor in Egypt (1680–1683) and later on in Turkey (Pera of Constantinople, 1703–1715) as spouse, and in Greece (Nafplio, 1715–1717) as slave–he consciously decided to apologetically describe a world that the West saw as its negative ‘alter ego’. When Alessandro’s son, Antonio Pini, went from Kostantiniyye to Florence in 1740, he took his father’s treatise with him. In Florence, he gave the manuscript to Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758), a well-known erudite doctor and bibliophile: Cocchi’s library today is incorporated in the Fondo Magliabechiano of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. There, Alessandro Pini’s manuscript was rediscovered recently by the author of the present abstract. ""

Between Lovesickness and Jealousy - The Love of Prophet Muḥammad for the Jewish Woman, Rayḥāna bint Zayd, in the Context of Religious Transformation and the Formation of Islamic Identity, lecture at the University of Leiden 2016

see my article "The Love of Prophet Muḥammad for the Jewish Woman Rayḥāna bint Zayd. Transformation and Continuity of Gender Conceptions in Classical Islamic Historiography and Aḥādīṯ-Literature", in: Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion, and Change. Ed. by Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin. Montreal, Quebec 2020. - - - The primary focus of this paper is on the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and a Jewish woman, Rayhana bint Zayd, who was held captive by Muslims in 627. In the oral traditions from the eighth and ninth centuries, this example of inter-religious relations in Early Islam has received broad historical treatment in numerous conflicting narratives. The historical transformation of this narrative reveals a reversal in gender concepts; Rayhana’s dismissive attitude towards the Prophet, who had begged in vain for her hand in marriage what had made him lovesick for her – depicted in the older texts –, is replaced by a more approachable attitude towards him in newer texts from the ninth century that depict her, for example, as an idealized wife for the Prophet prone to jealousy and ultimately heartbroken by him. This paper illustrates how the interreligious relationship between Muhammad and Rayhana is reconstructed in the historical retrospect of the narrators. By comparing narratives about the Prophet and Rayhana’s relationship in compilations by Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and Ibn Sad, this paper highlights how depictions of their relationship transformed over time. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that religious transformations and the formation of an Islamic identity affected constitutive elements of gender concepts and relationships in early Islamic literature. In its early years, Islam developed material, normative views from which thoughts and actions were derived. This shaped gender concepts considerably, as they were, at the same time, formed during the development and consolidation of an Islamic identity that remains in place today.

Program Interfaith Love - Leiden University International conference

From Wednesday 22 until Friday 24 June 2016, the Leiden University Centre for the study of Islam and Society in cooperation with the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ and the University of Salento is organizing an international conference entitled: Interfaith Love: Love, Sex and Marriage in the Islamicate World from the Middle Ages to the Present.Interfaith love is a compelling topic in societies where faith is a decisive mark of identity, and culture is continuously shaped by interreligious coexistence and conflicts. In Medieval Islamic imagery the ‘religious other’, either boy or girl, has a prominent place in erotic poetry and love romances. The theme went through significant reshaping in the early modern period, when the confrontation between the Ottomans and Europe opened wide spaces for uncertain identities across contested frontiers. Eventually, it has taken on distinctive new forms in contemporary societies within the fragile framework of the Middle Eastern national identities but also in the West where issues related to interfaith love and marriages are increasingly part of the public debate. This international conference seeks to explore, through a diachronic, interdisciplinary and comparative approach, how interfaith love is perceived and represented in historical, religious, legal, literary and artistic sources, both Islamic and non-Islamic. Relevant materials will be approached from multiple perspectives, and preferably in a comparative way, in order to bring out their historical, cultural and societal implications, and to analyse the way they shaped cultural representations both in the past and in the present. Narratives of interfaith love mirror a society’s understanding of cultural cross-influence, with its ‘dangers’ and ‘seductions’. As interfaith love concerns all the religious cultures involved in the process, the Islamic view will be complemented with that of other relevant cultures intertwined with Islam. This conference seeks to bring into focus the many facets of representation of this theme and trace its metamorphoses at turning points in history.