Introduction for Merchants of Knowledge

INTRODUCTION

The years between 1450 and 1550 witnessed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and an increasing awareness of the West as a distinct entity. Because of the formidable cultural and military strengths of the Ottoman Empire and because the Renaissance is seen as the beginning of the rise of the West, the extent and impact of transregional intellectual exchange during these years may come as a surprise. Yet intellectual exchange in Eurasia occurred at other unexpected times. The amazing efflorescence of science in Islamic societies began at the end of the first Islamic century (730 CE), just as the Islamic Empire was rapidly expanding and just when one might think that Muslims would have felt that they had little to learn from the Byzantine and Sassanian societies that they conquered. But the passage of knowledge into Arabic through profuse translations from Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit is indisputable. Though the reasons why victors appropriated the cultures of the vanquished remain contested, there is a consensus that the reasons for the translations must be sought in the culture of the nascent Islamic Empire because knowledge has never been fated to travel. Hence, a principal goal of this book is to search in Mediterranean societies for the causes of the transregional intellectual exchange occurring between 1450 and 1550. The specific motivations of the scholars I study are different from the motivations of the scholars involved with the rise of science in Islamic societies, but, in both cases, identifying their exact motivations is the key to understanding why exchange occurred.

My concern with the motives of the historical actors explains why I prefer to write of intellectual exchange than of the transmission of ideas. The term “transmission” connotes a teleology and unidirectionality that does not suit the facts of this book.¹ I call the most prominent scholars merchants of knowledge because they recognized the concrete social and economic benefits of all sorts of exchange, intellectual and commercial. Exchange happened because exchange benefited the merchants of knowledge and their contacts, not because of the exigencies of the present.

Appreciation of the dynamics of exchange depends on a full awareness of what was exchanged in this economy of knowledge. In the century I study, many different commodities, such as wine, animal skins, and wool, traveled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean between Candia (present-day Heraklion) on the island of Crete, the Veneto (Venice and its environs, which include Padua), and the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the expansion of the Renaissance economy meant political expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean.² Payments for goods were sometimes transferred by chirographs, documents that could be authenticated by matching both halves on the wavy line along which they were torn. Payments were recorded with officials in multiple languages in multiple locales. Letters of exchange, a way to draw on a distant bank, were another means of payment. All this commercial exchange depended also on shipping, and shipments needed to be insured against loss and piracy. Insuring boats was a way for Candiote Jews to forge relationships with Christians. Since some of the Jewish scholarly intermediaries were also businessmen and most others were related to commerçants, trade was the background for the intellectual exchange that is the focus of the book. Transregional contacts were the rule, not the exception. These connections were facilitated by the increased rationalization of banking and trade in Europe.³ Recordkeeping and financial instruments became remarkably sophisticated.⁴ Translation facilitated payments and records just as translation was a mode of intellectual exchange. Both scholarly and commercial translation—e.g., of chirographs or of letters of exchange—brought economic benefits.

Most important, intellectual exchange was transactional. A scholar gave in one field and took in another. Trading also provides a conceptual model for my study of the intellectual exchanges. For the Venetians and Ottomans, trade was almost as much of a priority as political dominance.⁵ Just as one cannot understand an economy without considering all of the goods and services transacted, one cannot understand some intellectual developments, such as the critical advances in theoretical astronomy, without studying all of the intellectual life, including Qabbalah and astrology, of the time.

There were relevant population shifts within Asia Minor as well. Mehmed II initiated his sürgün (resettlement) policy in 1456 in order to repopulate Istanbul after the devastation of his 1453 conquest of the city.¹¹ The sürgün had a massive impact on Romaniot Jews, the Jews of the former Byzantine lands. Talented Romaniot Jews came to Istanbul from Anatolia. Romaniot Jews have not received the scholarly attention bestowed upon Sephardic Jews, but Romaniots play the more significant role in this book. And Jews were not the only ones uprooted. Due to the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, Christian scholars from Asia Minor departed Constantinople, sometimes for Crete.¹²

Crete was another destination for Jewish immigration from the continent. There had been a Jewish community on Crete since the first century BCE. The historian Socrates of Constantinople (d. ca. 450 CE) took note when a messianic figure prompted the conversion of some Cretan Jews to Christianity after he failed to lead them “through a dry sea to the land of promise,” i.e., to Palestine.¹³ Following the temporary, partial conquests of Crete by Umayyad armies, Muslims conquered the island completely under the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn (d. 833).¹⁴ The city of Candia, the name of which derives from the Arabic khandaq (trench), was founded by Muslims in the ninth century. Armies of the Byzantine Empire reconquered Crete from the Muslims in 961. Crete began to be ruled by Venice from a base at Candia in 1204. Under Venetian rule, Cretan Jews enjoyed the commercial privileges of Venetian citizens without being full citizens of the Venetian Republic.¹⁵ By the thirteenth century, Jews from Europe were coming to Crete, sometimes on journeys further east.¹⁶

Jewish migration to Candia from the west increased due to the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. The arrival of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula intensified after 1391 and transformed the Candiote Jewish community.¹⁷ In notarial records, some Jews on Candia were identified with the terms Spagnolo or Sefaradi, indicating their ongoing identification with Iberia. By the end of the fourteenth century, Jewish physicians who were on Venetian Crete had diverse backgrounds, hailing from the West, Arab lands, and the Byzantine Empire.¹⁸ In 1536, there were four synagogues on Candia, one of which was Ashkenazic.¹⁹ Jews came to Candia from as far afield as the land of the Tatars,²⁰ as well as from Italy and Arabic-speaking lands.²¹ Greek was the lingua franca of the Candiote Jews, despite their diverse origins, though they usually composed texts in Hebrew.²²

Venice has a reputation as an important city for transregional exchange, but it was not a flourishing center of Jewish life between 1450 and 1550. Nearby Padua, however, had a venerable community of Jewish merchants and scholars. The flight of Jews from persecution related to the Black Death led to the earliest Jewish settlement in Padua no later than 1369. These first Jewish residents were mandated to establish pawnshops.²³ The earliest Candiote Jew known to have resided in Padua was Musetto b. Judah Malbiegonato da Candia in 1402.²⁴ Within a few decades, Jews from Candia arrived in Padua for business, the university, and the yeshivah, a school of Jewish learning.²⁵ The faculty of medicine at the University of Padua graduated its first Jewish physician in 1409.²⁶ Sometimes an individual working in Padua was a businessman and a scholar. For example, between 1426 and 1433, Salamon of Candia possessed shares in lending institutions of credit (banchi feneratizi) while he resided in Padua as a student of arts and medicine.²⁷ Members of distinguished Candiote families studied at the Padua yeshivah,²⁸ and famous Ashkenazic rabbis from the yeshivah in Padua traveled to Candia.²⁹ Connections between Padua and Candia were foundational for the intellectual and commercial activities I examine in this book.

Others have researched transregional intellectual exchange and networks in the premodern Islamic world. In The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1732-91): Life, Networks and Writings, Stefan Reichmuth described intricately the social and intellectual networks of an eighteenth-century South Asian scholar who adopted a Yemeni identity and moved to the Middle East. The notes of interactions that Zabīdī kept are one of Reichmuth’s main sources. Zabīdī, like many figures I study in this book, excelled in multiple disciplines and took approaches that paralleled those current in Europe. Samer Akkach examined a similar time period in ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment. Like the merchants of knowledge, Nābulusī (d. 1731) lived during a transitional period, during the Scientific Revolution and before the nahḍa.

Concentrating on the seventeenth century, Khaled El-Rouayheb demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt in Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb that not only were scholars in the Maghrib and the central Ottoman lands connected but that these scholarly exchanges invigorated Sufism, kalām (Islamic philosophical theology), and the study of logic. Sometimes scholars in different regions disagreed with each other, and regional schools of thought endured. In Merchants of Knowledge, we will see that the specifics of astrology, philosophy, and Qabbalah varied regionally. With regard to the sixteenth century, Helen Pfeifer, in Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands, found that men’s literary salons were sites of intellectual exchange between the Arab lands recently conquered from the Mamlūks and the Persianate realms of the Ottoman Empire.³³ In Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, Evrim Binbaş has uncovered an entire network of fifteenth-century scholars who pursued occult sciences. He found cases in which one member of the network shaped the career of another member.³⁴ As was true for the figures studied in this book, political upheavals enhance intellectual connections.³⁵ Sites of intellectual exchange were where social status was flaunted and negotiated.³⁶

From Avner Ben-Zaken’s Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660, I was inspired to look hard for ways in which Muslim scholars sought out the contents of Latin texts in multiple disciplines and to illustrate how exchange was at least bidirectional, if not multidirectional. I, nevertheless, accept the critiques of that book.³⁷ As I focus in my book on the dynamics of intellectual exchange, my conceptualization of scholarly intermediaries as merchants of knowledge is influenced by E. Natalie Rothman’s Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. In one chapter, Rothman explored how translation was a critical activity of transregional subjects; I explain how some merchants of knowledge were involved with both scholarly translation and written translation for commercial purposes. Merchants of Knowledge is distinct because I focus on a period that is a century earlier and on the details of the scholarly disciplines in which exchange developed.

As the chronological scope of this book is, compared to most of these books, earlier, the sources are different. I have chosen to structure my book around disciplinary conversations, relying on texts composed by the merchants of knowledge and their contacts, rather than around stories about transregional scholars. In that respect, I have been inspired by how, in Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, Ronit Ricci explicated how the translation of a single Arabic book, The Book of One Thousand Questions, into multiple Southeast Asian languages linked Muslims and disciplines of Islamic knowledge. I investigate how intellectual connections between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean facilitated translations. Ricci depicted an “Arabic cosmopolis”; I portray a shared world comprising fields as seemingly far apart as Qabbalah and theoretical astronomy.

Merchants of Knowledge also differs from the aforementioned books because I seek to demonstrate how the Renaissance, often seen as the birth of the West, involved numerous exchanges with Islamic societies. The perception of the Renaissance as a time of rebirth and recovery of the greatness of classical antiquity in the mythology of the modern West obscures the significant role of scholars from the Eastern Mediterranean in Renaissance intellectual life. This is not the first book to redress the impression that the presumed (re)birth of the West did not involve Jews and Muslims from the Eastern Mediterranean. Dag Nikolaus Hasse, in his 2016 Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance, demonstrated that the “win on points” of Renaissance humanists, whose intellectual agenda championed the contributions of classical antiquity, over intellectuals who valued the work of Islamic societies contributes mightily to the aforementioned perception.³⁸ Hasse unpacked the cultural dynamics of when and why Renaissance intellectuals appreciated Arabic knowledge encountered via Latin translations and when and why they preferred what they found in the Greek. The debates were surprisingly nuanced, and compelling arguments for the value of Arabic learning existed. Hasse documented how the win on points came to be perceived as a lopsided tally. In all cases, though, Hasse restricted himself to exchanges that the historical actors acknowledged, most of which depended on texts produced before 1200.

George Saliba, in Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, advanced in unraveling cases of scholarly exchange involving texts produced after 1200 between Renaissance Europe and Islamic societies that none of the historical actors acknowledge.³⁹ Hasse described Saliba’s research as concerned with the “putative subcutaneous impact of Arabic sciences on the West.”⁴⁰ The argument advanced in Islamic Science, however, was that modern claims of Europeans’ independent discovery, not the argument for exchange of Islamic science from after 1200, were what is putative. Once the scope of exchange is widened in this book to include more disciplines and commerce, Saliba’s conclusions become even more difficult to deny. But from the perspective of the historical actors, his claims are decentered. The exchange of theories in astronomy important for the European Scientific Revolution was not the dominant concern of the scholarly intermediaries, the merchants of knowledge.

Moving from the body of the texts to the flyleaves, some manuscripts contain statements of sale that establish the connection between figures. By deciphering statements of sale, Umberto Cassuto uncovered the transaction of 155 Jewish manuscripts around 1540 by Elijah Capsali,⁴¹ who, at the time, was the head of the Candiote Jewish community, to three agents: Azalino, Battista, and Sacellani.⁴² The identity of the purchaser remains unknown.⁴³ These manuscripts ended up in the library of the Fugger family of merchant bankers.⁴⁴ The Fugger mercantile network, by the early 1500s, established branches in both Venice and Padua,⁴⁵ and under Jakob Fugger (d. 1525), the Fuggers’ trading operations reached Istanbul.⁴⁶ The manuscripts purchased by the agents became part of the personal collection of Ulrich Fugger (d. 1584), which was transferred to the Palatine Library in Heidelberg after his death. The Palatine Library suffered from looting during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), so, in 1623, the remaining manuscripts joined the collection of the Vatican Library. This purchase, sale, and transfer of manuscripts exemplifies the intersection of commercial and scholarly exchange.

The intellectual exchanges documented in manuscripts transpired in the context of the extensive commercial activities of the families of the scholarly intermediaries. The principal primary source for these activities is the records of the court of the Venetian Duke of Candia, as well as the notarial records, both available at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV). These records tell us a great deal about the social conditions in which intellectual exchange occurred. The court functioned as a shared space because Jews and Muslims and Christians from outside the Venetian Republic were willing to use it. The two key archival collections for this book are the Notai di Candia (NDC), the records of the Venetian notary, and Duca di Candia (DDC), the records of the court of the Duke of Candia. When Candiote Jews resorted to the court to resolve communal and familial matters, the issues were no longer purely intramural. Most important, copious records of business transactions demonstrate that meaningful contact between Jews and non-Jews was unexceptional and happened more frequently than evidence from the discrete episodes of intellectual exchange found in manuscripts alone suggests. The records remind us that books and manuscripts, the stuff of intellectual exchange, were objects of purchase and sale in the milieux of the merchants of knowledge.

The archival documents offer up fascinating details about how translation mattered for commercial exchange.⁴⁷ Chirographs were not necessarily in languages known to court officials. For example, in May 1526, Moses Mavrogonato gave an oath before the ducal court in Candia, in Latin, to corroborate a Hebrew chirograph in the hand of Samuel b. Jonathan Romano.⁴⁸ The resolution of questions about estates also involved documents in multiple languages. In 1540, Levi Mavrogonato appeared before the ducal court in order to resolve a dispute about the will of his brother David.⁴⁹ He petitioned a certain Mechir Sacerdote, a Jew who was previously an agent for the deceased. According to Levi, Mechir was obligated for claims on his late brother’s estate. Levi, to support his own case, brought a will written in Greek, by the imperial notary George Lima, on May 28, 1538. In response, Mechir furnished a later will, from February 1539, which was in the hand of Bernolai Bonbari, the consul of Alexandria, who was a resident of Constantinople at the time. The will presented by Mechir was validated (roborato) by Jacob Canalis, the baylo of Constantinople in June 1540. Thus, the competing claims of the creditors could be evaluated. Either documents were translated, or, if the absence of a reference to translation is significant, then the Mavrogonatos were proficient in multiple languages. Linguistic proficiency mattered in other areas. In 1469, David Mavrogonato (d. 1470), a translator for Greek priests,⁵⁰ became an envoy from the Venetian Republic to Istanbul.⁵¹ Commercial and political relations would have ceased without translation.⁵²

Trust between the families, their business contacts, and the court was crucial for this commercial exchange beyond confessional lines.⁵³ Jews were not of equal status with Christians in the Venetian Republic. Jews complained that they were taxed like foreigners, though they felt that they deserved to be treated like Venetian subjects.⁵⁴ Even someone like David Mavrogonato, whose taxes were minimized due to his exceptional service to the Venetian Republic, gained only the trappings of citizenship on Crete, but not the title.⁵⁵ Jews were resented by the Christian population on Crete, which was frequently in their debt, and, in 1449, Jews were accused of crucifying Christians’ sheep.⁵⁶ Nonetheless, the recourse of Candiote Jews to the secular Venetian court allowed them “to function as a traditional Jewish community without the anxieties and reservations of other medieval Jewish communities.”⁵⁷

Jews on Candia turned to the court even for matters of Jewish family law, an arena in which they were not obligated to access the court. Conflicted marriages were not kept under wraps. For instance, we read that, in 1515, Hestera, the wife of Lazarus Salonichico (who was said to be of North African origin)⁵⁸

needs to go to a house with the aforesaid Lazarus, her husband, and to obey the commands of the husband, according to what Jewish laws say about this . . . according to the customs of husbands with wives, and through this it can be known if she becomes pregnant.⁵⁹

In another case, in 1514, agents of the late wife of Elia (Liacho, i.e. Elijah) Nomico, probably the son of the famous book collector Levi b. Elijah Nomico (fl. fifteenth century), went before the ducal court to secure rights for her daughter, Sarulla, who had fallen out with her stepmother, Elia’s current wife.⁶⁰ Sarulla, having reached the age of maturity, wished to take possession of one of Elia’s houses as provided for in the will (testamentum) of her late mother. Elia contested the claim.

Sometimes Candiote Jews assisted the court in factfinding. In 1525, Immanuel Ḥen and Menasheh Delmedigo collaborated as the deputies (legati) of the Duke of Candia in civic matters. Both men, who were identified as physicians, were directed to intervene in the case of a woman, Plecti, married to a Jew, Sabathi Balaza.⁶¹ Ḥen and Delmedigo reported the wife’s complaints about his awful activities and clothes (pessimae operationae et costumi), which made it impossible for the married couple to cohabit. The duke enjoined a payment from Sabathi to Plecti of three ducats per month for three months and recommended that Sabathi send her a petition for divorce according to Jewish law.

Though the focus of this book is Jewish scholarly intermediaries who were linked to Candia, they inhabited an island with a diverse population. In addition to Jews from North Africa, such as the aforementioned Lazarus Salonichico, we read frequently in the ducal court documents about Jews from Ottoman lands. For example, among the ranks of Jewish taxpayers in a 1505 census found in the ducal court’s records, there was a Lazari Turco and his son Acharos, as well as a Jocuda filio Michael Turco.⁶² In these cases, the term turco denoted connections to the Ottoman Empire⁶³ and comprised non-Muslim Ottoman subjects and converts to Islam from Christianity.⁶⁴ For example, a document dated February 13th, 1453, tells of calfskins that were to be sold to benefit some orphans under the supervision of a noble.⁶⁵ One of the signatories of the document was a certain Michael Vrachuli, who was identified as a Turk (turco). Some Turks became official residents of Candia; Manoli, a Venetian who converted to Islam, was one.⁶⁶

Muslims interacted with the Venetian government in a variety of ways. In a straightforward sense, Muslims trusted the ducal court to record business agreements. For example, in 1504 or 1505, a Turk named Mustapha Celichi, who became an adopted citizen of Candia (adoptus Candidae), concluded an agreement with a boat owner, Stamtio Grina of Corfu (though residing in Candia), who was shipping honey water and other commodities.⁶⁷ Venetians likewise trusted Turks; In May 1488, Marinus Signolo appeared at the court and approved of (probo) Mustafa Cana, a boat owner identified as a Turk, about to pilot a ship to Chios.⁶⁸ In 1554, the Duke of Candia paid a Turk named Zafer, who was the captain of a schirazzo (a square-rigged cargo vessel) traveling to Rethymno.⁶⁹ The court attempted to accommodate linguistic differences with Muslims as it did with Jews. On May 20, 1540, a Turkish schirazzo captain named Mehmed appeared in the chancellery and requested an interpreter, Jemalio Schrenza.⁷⁰ And sometimes, social relations developed between Turks and Christians on Candia. A certain Turk, probably a non-Muslim Ottoman, named Zammis entrusted his twelve-year-old son Giorgio to a Christian resident of Candia, Michaele Plaidemo, in 1501–2. Plaidemo was obligated to provide footwear, clothing, food, and shelter. If Giorgio absconded, Zammis would be obligated to pay a penalty.⁷¹ The court of Candia helped make the city into an entrepôt where Jewish and Christian merchants and Muslim sailors benefited from relationships with each other. The Fuggers’ agents would have no trouble locating prominent families with manuscripts.

In each of the other six chapters of the book, I describe exchanges between the merchants of knowledge and their contacts in a particular field. In chapter 2, I investigate how scholars from across the Mediterranean shared both technical information about judicial astrology and a discourse about astrology as a cultural hermeneutic. Astrology was widely practiced even though some of the merchants of knowledge and their contacts took positions in other disciplines that militated against acknowledging the practicability of astrological forecasting. Then, in chapter 3, on practical astronomy, I cover the production and exchange of tables, which were necessary for astrological forecasting. The merchants of knowledge and other Jewish scholars conveyed information from late medieval Islamic tables to Christian scholars. Conversely, a Muslim scholar relied on a merchant of knowledge to slake his thirst for tables published in European languages. Also in this chapter, I link the less visible exchange of information in tables with the documented, transregional passages of astronomical instruments.

In chapter 4, devoted to philosophy, I commence by covering exchange between the merchants of knowledge and Jews and Christians in the Veneto, where Jews were in demand as instructors. Philosophy was central to Romaniot Jews’ own intellectual life and was a field in which they relied on both Latin and Arabic sources. Philosophy became the context for the exchange of discrete texts in other fields. In chapter 5, then, I examine exchange in the field of Qabbalah. By broadening the examination of the conversation to comprise Qabbalah, I clarify how Qabbalah both impinged on philosophy and astrology and was a field in which Jews and Christians came together. In these exchanges between the merchants of knowledge and their Christian contacts, Hebrew and even Arabic sources were taken seriously. These were disciplines in which the historical actors acknowledged exchange. In all four of these chapters, I present extensive evidence that both Christians and Muslims were interested in Romaniot Jewish intellectual life and that the contributions of the merchants of knowledge depended heavily on Arabic, Turkish, and Latin knowledge. Given all these motivations for multidirectional intellectual exchange, the documented exchange of texts in the aforementioned areas is not surprising.

Some of the information studied in chapter 3 came from the same astronomers of Islamic societies who produced theories whose exchange has been harder to document. In chapter 6, where I focus on the passage of advanced theoretical astronomy from Islamic societies to the Veneto, the explanation of exchange unacknowledged by the historical actors culminates. We learn that a merchant of knowledge who knew of these sophisticated theories of Islamic astronomy voyaged from Istanbul to Venice during the years when Copernicus studied medicine at the University of Padua. These innovative Islamic theories were relevant to another debate in astronomy, informed by the exchange of philosophy covered in chapter 4, in which European scholars connected to the merchants of knowledge were clearly involved and for which there was more evidence of transfer. Thus, exchanges in some fields set the stage for exchanges in other fields. Although Copernicus was not a named contact of the merchants of knowledge, building blocks of his theories clearly arrived in Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean because of the merchants of knowledge.

In chapter 7, I analyze exchange that mostly followed the passage of theoretical astronomy to the Veneto. For example, sometime after 1507, the same merchant of knowledge who traveled to Venice authored, in Ottoman Turkish, a text on pharmacology. In that text, there are descriptions of pharmacological computations from Latin medical texts previously unknown to readers of Islamic languages. The merchant of knowledge must have learned about Latin pharmacological computus in the Veneto. The same scholar recalled, in a different text, a handheld device that aided transcription. This device was first encountered at the Ottoman sultan’s court, but only while visiting Venice in 1500 did the merchant of knowledge encounter someone who could explain its operation. Devices were transregional, and the mastery of devices combined intellectual and material exchange with the accrual of social capital from demonstrating the device before the sultan’s court. Multidirectional exchange was contingent upon the prerogatives of the merchants of knowledge and their contacts, not the mythology of Renaissance humanists or a whiggish history of science. A complete understanding of intellectual exchange requires recognizing how translation and the demystification of technology were transactional.

Notes

1. For examples of the use of “transmission.” see, e.g., Ragep and Ragep, Tradition, Transmission, Transformation and Wallis and Wisnovsky, Medieval Textual Cultures.

2. Marino, “Economic Encounters,” 282–83.

3. Appuhn, “Tools for the Development,” 270–75.

4. Marino, “Economic Encounters,” 281.

5. Howard, “Cultural Transfer,” 152–53.

6. Rozen (A History of the Jewish Community, 38) called Bayezit II’s welcoming of the Jews “a myth” unconfirmed by any other source. See also Shmuelevitz, “Capsali as a Source,” on Capsali’s subjective position. Shmuelevitz did not mention Capsali’s account of Bayezit II.

7. Hacker, “The Rise of Ottoman Jewry,” 79–81.

8. See Jacoby, “David Mavrogonato from Candia” (Heb.), 391 on how the Venetian Republic attempted to intervene with the Sublime Porte through Mehmed the Conqueror’s personal physician, Yacup Pasha. See İhsanoǧlu, “Some Remarks on Ottoman Science,” 64–65 on Yacup’s conversion to Islam.

9. Jacoby, “Production et commerce,” 253.

10. Norton, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 10. See also Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism.”

11. See Galante, Türkler ve Yahudiler, 22. Galante wrote that a synagogue in Istanbul came to be known as the Sürgün Synagogue.

12. Lauer, Colonial Justice, 25. The future Cardinal Basilios Bessarion (d. 1472) moved to Italy from Constantinople and also spent time on Crete. On Bessarion’s time on Crete, see Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 353. See also Holton, “The Cretan Renaissance,” 7 on how Bessarion started a Uniate school on Crete soon after the fall of Constantinople. See also Holton, 3 on other Byzantine scholars who fled to Crete after 1453: Michael Apostolis (d. 1480); Apostolis’s son Arsenios (d. 1535), who was an editor and copyist; and Ianos Laskaris (d. 1534).

13. Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, 378–79. See also Marcus, “Crete,” 289–91.

14. Canard and Mantran, “Iḳrīṭish.”

15. Paudice, Between Several Worlds, 32. See also Lauer, Colonial Justice, 85–87 and her citations of David Jacoby’s scholarship on the role of Jews in economic life. For an example from sericulture, see Molà, The Silk Industry, 65.

16. Corazzol, “Gli ebrei,” 56.

17. See Lauer, “Cretan Jews,” 129–30 for information on the movement of Sephardic Jews to Crete before 1391.

18. Jacoby, “Jewish Physicians and Surgeons on Crete” (Heb.), 436.

19. Marcus, “The Composition,” 64–65.

20. ASV, NDC 17, folder 2, 75b. Lyas Thoroz, a Tatar, appeared before the Venetian notary in 1503 to record his sale of abuffalo skins, which he sold for two ducats apiece. See Poliak and Slutsky, “Crimea,” 298–301 for information about how the Genoese conquered some of the Tatar lands in the fifteenth century. The Ottomans took over the Genoese Tatar possessions in 1475.

21. On the presence of Jews from Arab lands on Candia see Marcus, “The Composition” (Heb.), 67. See Marcus, 71 for information about how Italian Jews sometimes came to Crete because they were expelled from other parts of Italy due to the Inquisition.

22. Lauer, Colonial Justice, 30.

23. Malkiel, “The Ghetto Republic,” 120–21.

24. Carpi, L’Individuo, 226. Brief biographical entries of Candiote Jews living in Padua from 1402 to 1508 are found on 225–33.

25. Holton, “The Cretan Renaissance,” 7. Over one thousand Cretans went to Padua for education between 1500 and 1700.

26. Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 35. In note 2, one reads that there were Jewish students studying at the University of Padua in 1501 under assumed names.

27. Carpi, L’Individuo, 209–11, 230.

28. Capsali, Seider Eliyahu Zuṭa, 2:254.

29. Carpi, L’Individuo, 194.

30. These studies include Goldberg, Trade and Institutions. For a later period, see Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers for how reputation and trust carried across linguistic, cultural, and religious borders. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, in Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), studies a more recent period and situated Jewish merchants within global trading and cultural networks. Avner Greif, in Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), investigates the place of trust and reputation in long-distance trade.

31. Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds.

32. García-Arenal, A Man of Three Worlds.

33. Pfeifer, Empire of Salons, 17.

34. Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, 77.

35. Pfeifer, Empire of Salons, 168–69.

36. Pfeifer, 130–31.

37. See, e.g., Brentjes, “Cross-Cultural Exchanges,” 411–14, and Stearns, “Review of Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges,” 760–63.

38. Hasse, Success, xii.

39. Saliba, Islamic Science, 193–232.

40. Hasse, Success, xv.

41. See Cassuto, I manoscritti, and Lehmann, Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken, 1:93. For the list of manuscripts that Elijah Capsali was known to have owned personally, see Benayahu, Rabbi Elijah Capsali (Heb.), 148–52.

42. For the identification of the three agents, see Richler, Hebrew Manuscripts, 71. A third agent is named as Battista. See ASV, ADC 34bis/35, folder 18, 82a for a reference to Azalino, one of the agents. For more references to him, see ASV, NDC 35, folder 4, 53a and ASV, NDC 123, folder 5, 213b–214a. For a reference to Azalino in October 1548, see ASV, ADC 34bis/35, folder 20, 47b. For a reference to Thoma Sacellani, see ASV, NDC 123, folder 3, 82a–b.

43. Steimann, “The Story,” 28.

44. See Paudice, Between Several Worlds, 33 for the suggestion that the agents were working for Ulrich Fugger III (1526–84). See also Cassuto, I manoscritti, 35 for the suggestion that the Jews on Candia sold the books to a bibliophile who, at a later date, sold the books to the Fuggers. See Otto Hartig, Die Gründung, 320 on how, in 1566, the Fuggers needed the help of a Jew for cataloging the Hebrew manuscripts. See also Cassuto, I manoscritti, 38–40 for the argument that the numbering of the acquired manuscripts, which involved numerals in Hebrew, was evidence of a Jewish assistant.

45. Forin, “A Padova col Caiado.” On the Fuggers and Venice, see Strieder, Jacob Fugger, 103.

46. Costil, “Le Mécénat,” 27.

47. Eric Dursteler, by researching Venetian merchants’ activities in Istanbul a century later, arrived at a similar conclusion: commerce depended on translation, both written and oral. See Dursteler, Venetians.

48. ASV, DDC 33bis, folder 6a, 286a.

49. ASV, DDC 34, folder 13, 61b–62a.

50. On David Mavrogonato’s role as a translator for Greek priests, see Jacoby, “David Mavrogonato,” 389. See Paudice, Between Several Worlds, 223 for how David and Joseph Mavrogonato appear in a list of taxpayers from 1542 in Candia.

51. Setton, The Papacy, 2:296. See also Jacoby, “Un agent juif,” on how Mavrogonato unveiled an anti-Venetian Greek plot. On David Mavrogonato’s death date, see Manoussacas, “Le recueil,” 363, and Jacoby, “David Mavrogonato,” 394.

52. Dursteler, Venetians.

53. Cf. Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, 156. “Even a global diaspora such as the one formed by Western Sephardic merchants could not count on the presence of coreligionists in every corner of the world.”

54. Paudice, Between Several Worlds, 30. On the tax burden in general, see Lauer, Colonial Justice, 90–92, 168–69. See also Lauer, 176 for how physicians who were paid by the government of Crete were exempt from taxes. See Corazzol, “Gli ebrei,” 42 on how David Mavrogonato and his descendants had to pay only a single iperpera (a Byzantine unit of currency), while the Jews were taxed annually.

55. Lauer, Colonial Justice, 86.

56. Segre, “Juifs à Venise,” 71, and Noiret, Documents inédits, 425n1. See also Lauer, Colonial Justice, 93.

57. Lauer, 5.

58. When he was introduced in the document, we read, “dicti Mauri.”

59. ASV, DDC 33bis, folder 5, 251a.

60. ASV, DDC 33bis, folder 1, 77b–78a.

61. ASV, DDC 33bis, folder 6a, 264a. For more on divorce in the Cretan Jewish community, see Lauer, Colonial Justice, 126–32.

62. ASV, DDC, 33, folder 1a, 37b–38b.

63. For more on how the archival sources referred to Turks, see Corazzol, “Gli ebrei,” 49–51.

64. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, 117–18. See also 119 for a discussion of Ottoman Muslims who converted to Christianity. On Greek Ottoman subjects on Crete, see Noiret, Documents inédits, 182.

65. ASV, DDC 26bis, folder 11, 9a–b. In order to pay for the expenses of storing the calfskins, pledges (plezarie) had to be collected from Jews. On medieval Jews trafficking in furs, see Toch, “Economic Activities,” 377. On Jews engaged in the fur trade in Eastern Europe in the early modern period, see Trivellato, “Jews and the Early Modern Economy,” 147.

66. ASV, NDC 17, folder 2, 25a. “I am Manoli the Turk, son of Xo, an inhabitant of Candia as well.” See Sebastien, “Turkish Prosopography,” 1:291 on how Ottoman ambassadors did not all have Muslim names.

67. ASV, NDC 17, folder 2, 212a.

68. ASV, DDC 32, folder 98, 109b.

69. ASV, DDC, 34bis, folder 23, 14a.

70. ASV, DDC 34, folder 12, 407a. Though the document is smudged, Mehmed may have been complaining of corsairs. On Ottoman corsairs, see Sebastien, “Turkish Prosopography,” 1: 230–33, 236–37, 265–80, 281–89. On the risk of pirates for merchants in the Mediterranean, see Noiret, Documents inédits, 261, 289, 365, 386, 390, 437, 455, 505. In June 1541, the same Mehmed appeared again before the chancellery in Candia. See ASV, DDC 34, folder 13, 209a.

71. ASV, NDC 17, folder 1, 199b.

72. On the sale, see Richler, Hebrew Manuscripts, ix.