Page 72 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

disturbances to shipping in the northern Medi-
terranean also occurred. Venetian hostilities
with Bayazid n in the 14905 led to the virtual
suspension of the spice trade: in 1500 so many
ships had been diverted to the defense of the
Venetian possessions in the eastern Mediterra-
nean that only three ships to Beirut and three to
Alexandria could be raised, and that only on
condition that the Serenissima, already almost
bankrupted by the cost of equipping galleys,
provide armed convoys at its own expense. In
Mamluk Egypt the increasingly heavy commit-
ments in the east and the shortage of silver
from the north brought catastrophic inflation,
which was an obvious cause of Mamluk weak-
21
ness that made Egypt such an easy prey to the
Ottoman Sultan Selim i in 1516.
The Mamluk spice monopoly confined for-
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eign merchants to Alexandria, and only excep-
tionally did foreign embassies reach Cairo.
Among these were embassies from the Bahma-
nids, the Muslim rulers of the Deccan, who
also maintained diplomatic relations with the
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Aqqoyunlu and the Ottomans. The purpose
of the Bahmanid embassy received at Tabriz in
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1471 was evidently commercial, for from the
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Bursa archives we learn that in 1479 the Bah-
manid vizier, Mahmud Gavan Gilani (executed
1481) had three agents in Bursa and that in 1481
there were another six. Some of these were fig. 3. Fragment of Printed Cotton. The Textile Museum, Washington
from Gilan, a principal producer of raw silk for
export to Europe on the Bursa market, and may
well have been wholesale merchants; but some
had come from the Hijaz, where they had dred pieces of artillery, and powder, ropes, oars, Marco Polo, whose account of his travels was, as
doubtless traded at the great fairs attending the and rigging to re-equip the fleet. Strangely, the Paul Pelliot demonstrated, an attempt to follow
annual pilgrimage to Mecca. This may well Mamluks did not think to use this arsenal in the legendary journeys of Alexander the Great
explain Ludovico di Varthema's observation 26 their own defense against Selim i in 1516, and it in the Alexander Romance, the persistence of
that the Hijaz in 1503 abounded in cottons, as remained to be used by the Ottoman governors books of travelers' tales and marvels of the East,
well as the appearance of fine Indian cotton of Egypt, who continued the Mamluks' anti- the science fiction of the time, demonstrates the
stuffs in early sixteenth-century Ottoman Portuguese struggle in the Red Sea and the extreme disinclination of the Renaissance public
palace inventories. Indian Ocean. 30 to abandon its view of the East as a source of
Mamluk relations with the Indian sub- For the Italian trading republics diplomatic entertainment.
continent were, however, much stronger with relations with the Mamluks and Ottomans were Reality also nourished fiction. The magnif-
Gujarat, an important entrepot and textile man- no sham, for they guaranteed the security of icence of Qa'it Bay's embassy to Florence in
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ufacturing center. Abundant finds of Gujarati their shipping, which had a virtual monopoly in 1487 with a draft treaty was still vividly
block-printed cottons at Fustat and Qusayr al- the eastern Mediterranean and was the main- remembered when Vasari depicted it sixty years
Qadim on the Red Sea also argue for large-scale stay of their economies, and of the Italian fac- later in the Palazzo Vecchio. It brought balsam,
imports for a mass market, and popular Gujarati tories at Alexandria and Beirut, Damascus, and musk, benzoin, and aloeswood; finer porcelain
figural scenes also evidently found a ready Aleppo. War, like the sixteen-year Venetian than any hitherto seen in Florence; colored
27
sale. In the general panic in the Mediterranean War with Mehmed n (1463-1479), was a catas- stuffs, cottons, and muslins; sweetmeats, myro-
following the Portuguese discovery of the Cape trophe, permanently weakening Venetian power balans, and ginger; and a grand ceremonial tent.
route to India, which briefly united the Mam- overseas and fatally depriving the Republic of Lorenzo de' Medici's secretary, Pietro di Bibbi-
luks, the Ottomans, and the Italian trading European allies, who had always piously repre- ena, also lists a bay horse, long-haired goats,
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republics, embassies from Cambay in Gujarat hended its accommodations with the Infidel. 31 and a fat-tailed sheep, to which Landucci adds
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were also received in Cairo, and in 1505 Sultan animals that even the Mamluks would have
Qansuh al-Ghawri dispatched an expeditionary found exotic, a lion and a giraffe. Although, to
force to drive the Portuguese out of Gujarat. On Magnificent diplomacy: from Italy to China judge from the final text of the treaty, it was
its annihilation by the Portuguese he ordered Despite the Muslim threat, the East in the Ital- not intended as a move against the Ottomans,
munitions and timber from Turkey, and in ian Renaissance remained the land of the Magi, the lavishness of the gifts certainly might have
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i5ii Bayazid n presented him with three hun- of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Long after suggested an ulterior motive, and it was the

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 7*