Review of Mehmed II the Conqueror and the Fall of the Franco-Byzantine Levant to the Ottoman Turks: Some Western Views and Testimonies. Edited, translated, and annotated by Marios Philippides. (Tempe, Ariz., 2007), Renaissance Quarterly. 62, no. 3 (2009): 968-970. (original) (raw)
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Mercenaries and Crusaders (=Memoria Hungariae, 15), ed. Attila Bárány., 2024
Few treatises have attracted the attention received by Giovanni Mario Filelfo’s Amyris (c. 1476). Few errant warrior poets have enjoyed the fame bestowed upon Michael Marullus (1450s-1500). Even though they shared – through warfare and verses – the Eastern reigns of Matthias Corvinus and Mehmed II precisely in the mid 1470s, Amyris (its aim and its impact) and Marullus (his career and his messages) were seldom viewed and analyzed together. Their “official careers” did not give grounds for such togetherness. Their backgrounds and their paths were however quite similar. Giovanni Mario (Gianmario) Filelfo (1426-1480) was the son of the reputed Philorhomaios anthropos Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), […] a clearing house for Greek intellectuals in Quattrocento Italy, second in this role only to Cardinal Bessarion […] (John Monfasani). Michael Marullus, a self-proclaimed Costantinopolitanus, found safe haven on the Ragusan and Venetian shores of the Adriatic after the Ottoman fall of Byzantium. Both Marullus and Filelfo Jr were to return to the East, where Filelfo Jr too had – certainly – been born (to a Byzantine mother, in Genoese Pera). Both served as mercenaries with the sword (Marullus) and the feather (Filelfo Jr) and both then refuted – in written above-all – their masters, Dracula allegedly, in the case of Michael Marullus, and Sultan Mehmed II (via a wealthy merchant from Ancona named Othman Lillo Ferducci), in Gianmario Filelfo’s case). These are some of the documentary grounds that call for a closer inspection of the lives and of the works of the two “Greek-Latin” humanists from the second half of the fifteenth century.
and fifteenth centuries, in Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, and English; and materials on the transformation of the site in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries into a penitential destination. Vernacular adaptations and translations of the Tractatus, such as that by Marie de France, are not included, as they are usually well represented in other forms. In several instances, the editions are reproduced from editions already published by Maggioni. The rest are printed from other existing editions. The Tractatus itself, which does not exist yet in a critical edition based on the entire manuscript tradition, is reprinted from the 1991 edition by Robert Easting. Each text has a thorough introduction by Maggioni, and, in the case of the closure and transformation of the site, by Paolo Taviani. All the sources are provided with Italian translations prepared by Maggioni and Roberto Tinti, except, again, for the section on the closure, which was done by Taviani, who also provided an epilogue.
TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES | Tome XXV/1 | édité par Marie-Hélène Blanchet & Raúl Estangüi Gómez
TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES, 2021
La période dont traite ce volume est encadrée par deux chutes, celle de 1204 et celle de 1453. Ces événements retentissants ont polarisé l’attention des historiens, suscitant des études nombreuses qui sont allées, pour certaines, jusqu’à mettre en doute la pérennité de l’Empire byzantin après 1204, en considérant ces deux siècles et demi comme l’épilogue d’une longue histoire impériale. La prise de Constantinople par les croisés en 1204 a, de fait, ouvert une période marquée par des crises multiples, que la conquête de la capitale en 1261 par la dynastie des Paléologues n’a pas résolues, tandis que d’autres périls se sont surajoutés : rivalités avec d’autres puissances régionales (en Épire, en Bulgarie, en Serbie, dans le Péloponnèse), prosélytisme de l’Église latine d’un côté et conversions à l’islam de l’autre, chute des rendements agricoles, bouleversements démographiques suscités par l’irruption de la peste noire ou l’arrivée de nouvelles populations turques acculées par l’expansion mongole… La conquête ottomane de Constantinople en 1453 a ainsi pu apparaître comme la conséquence logique d’un long processus d’affaiblissement entamé au début du XIIIe siècle.
A Greek translation of the Memorie istoriche de' monarchi ottomani authored by the Venetian diplomat Giovanni Sagredo was produced in the eighteenth century by the grand dragoman and future lord of Wallachia Nikolaos Karatzas. The Greek intellectual made his translation not from the original Italian but from the French translation by Jacques Laurent, which was printed in seven volumes in 1724 (Paris) with a second edition in 1732 (Amsterdam). The Greek translation circulated only in manuscript, and it was considered lost. However, a hitherto unknown miscellaneous Phanariot codex from Princeton University Library (Sarakēnika, Princeton University Library, MS Gr. 112) features a brief fragment from the translation. This paper offers a discussion about the fragment and intends to bring it into the scholarly circuit by providing in the appendices a semi-diplomatic edition of the Greek text in parallel with the corresponding passage from the French edition.
This chapter revolves around the autograph mecmua of Celâlzâde Sâlih (c.1495-1565), compiled by the author towards the end of his life as a selection from his own writings, both literary and epistolary. The Süleymaniye manuscript (called as such to differentiate it from another copy, as discussed below), meant to be a representative summary of the author/compiler's oeuvre, begins with letters sent by Sâlih to the sultan, various officials, and acquaintances (1b-21b; another letter is appended at the end of the following section, in 34a). It continues with a few panegyrics offered to grandees, and a selection of poetry (21b-33a). Next comes an account of the 1532-33 campaign against the Habsburgs, the so-called Alaman seferi (35a-82a). The Süleymaniye manuscript ends with a group of letters sent by Sâlih to Prince Bayezid (d.1561) and two members of his household concerning a translation project commissioned by the prince (82b-88b). The mecmua affords testimony to themes such as the large-scale institutional and cultural transformations of the sixteenth century, the ideological and cultural functions of history-writing, and networks of patronage and solidarity.