Journal of early

modern history 22 (2018) 411-420

brill.com/jemh

Book Reviews

∵
Tobias P. Graf
The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the
Ottoman Elite, 1575-1610, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 261 pp. ISBN
978-0-198-79143-0. $100.00.

The early modern Ottoman Empire has long been hailed both by contempo-
raries and modern historians as an empire of renegades. However, a detailed
prosopographical study on these renegades who played a pivotal role in the
governing of the empire until the seventeenth century is still lacking, mostly
due to the dearth of Ottoman sources providing personal information.
Tobias Graf’s thorough study tries to solve this problem, at least for the
time period between 1575-1610. Building upon his dissertation defended
in 2012 at the University of Heidelberg, the book consists of five chapters.
Chapter one concentrates on the child levy (devşirme) system through which
the renegades were incorporated into the Ottoman governing elite (‘askerî)
and the gradual change in their political relevance in the empire. Chapter
two focuses on the act of conversion, the farsi turco of contemporary Western
sources, which the author sees as a change of identity rather than a sudden
spiritual transformation in the Pauline sense. Whether forced or voluntary,
“turning Turk” is thus like changing a passport, a shift from one jurisdictional
status to another, communicated to people from different linguistic, religious,
and ethnic groups through a rite of initiation in which the neophyte assumes
his new identity by changing his headgear, i.e. donning the turban.
Chapter three focuses on the curious case of Ladislaus Mörth, a.k.a. Ali Beg,
an employee in the Austrian embassy whose treason and conversion to Islam
resulted in serious political ramifications on the eve of an Ottoman-Austrian
war. Following Krstić’s footsteps, Graf demonstrates how Mörth fell back on
confessionalization rhetoric in his kisve bahası petition to the Ottoman Sultan,
self-fashioning himself with a convenient narrative that embellished his self-
interested act of conversion, triggered in fact by his punishment at the hand of
the Austrian ambassador because of a homosexual relationship with a kitchen

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700658-12342587

412 book reviews

boy. Some of Graf’s conclusions make this chapter the most interesting one
in the book. According to him, the Ottomans were more tolerant of deviant
religious attitudes among renegades because conversion was the beginning,
not the end as was the case in Catholic Europe, of one’s journey towards salva-
tion. Also eye-catching is his controversial case for religious indifference, an
attitude prevalent among early modern renegades as a by-product, ironically,
of confessionalization.
Chapter four delineates the processes through which converts were inte-
grated into Ottoman society, not necessarily seeking material benefits as usual-
ly assumed. Furthermore, in painstaking detail, he underlines the importance
of tight networks among renegades sharing a common language, territorial af-
filiation and religious leanings. These commonalities among the shared cins,
according to him, show us the resilience of previous connections and the lim-
its of Ottomanization.
The final chapter deals with renegades’ relationships with the families that
they had to leave behind and sheds lights on the dilemma that they faced be-
tween their past and present. Still, these ties could also be an asset; the same
oscillating renegades extensively used familial and kinship networks for re-
cruiting loyal supporters for their households, forming political alliances, gath-
ering intelligence from their fatherlands and even entering into clandestine
negotiations of bribery and defection with ambassadors and spies, most of the
time their compatriots.
Graf’s methodological rigor can hardly be exaggerated. First of all, he bases
his conclusions on a solid documentary base, some drawn from the Austrian
archives while others based on his meticulous mining of secondary literature,
always carefully noted in footnotes. Moreover, the numerous primary sources
that constitute the core of his conclusions are novel for the English-speaking
audience. While there has been a growing interest in Ottoman converts in re-
cent years, covering more or less the same time period as Graf’s, most of these
works rely on Ottoman, Italian, Spanish, French and Latin sources. Through
an adroit use of German sources, the author succeeds in complementing their
findings and giving us a complete picture of the renegades’ social milieu in
the Ottoman capital. These sources moreover allow him to concentrate on
renegades of lesser political relevance, i.e. those like Ladislaus Mörth and
Adam Neuser, who were not officially incorporated into the Ottoman ruling
class but rather acted as unofficial intermediaries between Ottoman digni-
taries and European ambassadors. Finally, it should be underlined that the
failure to use Ottoman sources does not constitute a serious problem for
this particular study since Ottoman sources tell us very little about the per-
sonal thoughts and social connections of Ottoman renegades, and what little

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

book reviews 413

they said has already been studied by competent Ottomanists such as Anton
Minkov and Tijana Krstić.
Graf tries his hand at quantitative methods, even though he himself ac-
knowledges the pitfalls of operating with such an unrepresentative sample,
consisting of 137 Christian-European converts, for sure only a fraction of many
others whom the documents do not deign to mention. Still, always choosing
to err on the side of caution, he skillfully analyzes the data at his disposal in
order to show the commonalities and differences with other renegade groups
studied in works such as Bennasars’ Les chretiens d’Allah.

Emrah Safa Gürkan

Istanbul 29 Mayıs University
emrahsafagurkan@gmail.com
doi:10.1163/15700658-12342587-01

Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic
World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 384 pp., ISBN 978 0 674 04551 4.
$45.00.

Speaking of Spain provides an intellectual and political history of how early

modern Spaniards conceived of themselves. It also covers how these per-
ceptions became bound up in the idea of nation building and in developing
conceptions of race. Feros delivers broad chronological coverage as well as in-
sightful and cogent analyses of a number of complex debates that took place
as people living in the Iberian Peninsula and the overseas kingdoms of the
Spanish monarchy sought to define and structure their changing society.
The study is organized chronologically and thematically. Feros begins with
an inquiry into the ways Iberians thought and wrote about particular catego-
ries and concepts, such as Spain, nation, and patria. He turns to the works of
advisors, ministers, and intellectuals. Speaking of Spain draws a distinction
between the history of dynasties and that of territorial communities. Feros ar-
gues that, even as the Hapsburg monarchy of the sixteenth century became
Hispanicized and drawn to ideas about sanctified patriotism and about its sub-
jects as providential and truly Catholic, particular patriotisms and regionalism
remained. Whether or not this was a good thing was a source of contention
among intellectuals and advisors.
The book then takes up the issue of identity and how conceptions of iden-
tity and ethnicity tracked with understandings of lineage. Over the course of

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

414 book reviews

several chapters, Feros elegantly summarizes and critically interrogates the

theories early modern writers devised in order to explain difference and to
justify themselves to other Europeans. He observes that this was partly in reac-
tion to groups these elites saw as internal “others” with religious impurities.
In these chapters, he emphasizes both the disputes about how to determine
belonging and the ways these debates changed over time. By providing paral-
lel treatments of peninsular anxieties about Jewish and Muslim communities,
he clearly delineates both the different treatment of minority groups and the
differing responses of minority groups to the challenges of the process of what
might be called Hispanicizing Spain.
One of Feros’ major claims is that national identity developed slowly and,
in part, as a series of responses to social conditions that emerged within an
imperial context. In the Indies, populations of Amerindians and Africans drew
the interest of authors who speculated about the reasons behind physical and
cultural differences. Contradictory theories abounded, and there were many
inconsistencies. However, these debates brought forth “a proto-racialist dis-
course” that was mirrored by petitions and seventeenth-century cases (113).
Feros reads these instances as demonstrating an increasing awareness of skin
color that then became crystalized in eighteenth-century writings that divided
humans into discrete races. New discourses about race led to retellings of the
Spanish conquests of the Americas that painted indigenous peoples as inferior
and to new debates about whether colonial conditions had failed indigenous
subjects of the Republic of Indians or whether they lacked capacity due to
“their physical and mental constitution” (210). Many historians of Spain and
colonial Latin America will be familiar with these issues, but scholars of vast
early America and broader audiences would gain a more nuanced understand-
ing of the complex ways identity and race operated in the Spanish imperial
system from reading this book.
The final chapter of Speaking of Spain examines the Cortes of Cádiz and the
debates over the constitution it produced as a case of “Sattelzeit” (235). Feros
provides both a brief political and military backdrop to the Cortes before cov-
ering the intense debates about the constitution’s proposed provisions as well
as the arguments about what was at stake and what would actually change.
Again, Feros stresses the diversity of opinion among the representatives.
Regionalism in places like Catalonia and Valencia led their delegates to oppose
dividing Spain into new departments that would break up their old kingdoms
and territories. American deputies thought only those born in a place could
be elected its representatives. Some delegates questioned creole suitability for
citizenship. There were conflicts about how to and to what extent the Republic

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

book reviews 415

of Indians should be integrated into the nation. Dionisio Inca Yupanqui was
the sole representative of indigenous origins at the Cortes of Cádiz, and some
claimed this reflected “Indian indifference to the nation’s political process”
(263). Debates about slavery got swayed by the need for the support of Cuban
elites. In other words, the Constitution was ultimately produced by compro-
mises made between ideological forces. Yet, Feros argues, it symbolically trans-
formed “an empire—the Spanish—into a nation—Spain” (277).
The nature of the approach Feros takes leads to a generally top-down his-
tory. He examines a range of treatises and decrees and occasionally court cases
and petitions. More use of sources such as sermons, plays, and novels could
allow the author to track how the debates about patria and lineage gained
currency in broader networks and popular culture. Since most of the essays
and treatises and works of history with which Feros engages were authored
by men, it is perhaps not surprising that women receive little attention in this
examination of ideas. He does allude to the ways biological theories on differ-
ences between sexes changed in the eighteenth century, and he notes the par-
ticipation of women in the defense of patria against the Napoleonic invasions.
However, there could easily be more recognition of the roles of women and
of gender in the debates about lineages and miscegenation. Feros takes an
approach that is European and Atlantic World in scope. There is not much
coverage of how Pacific holdings and peoples shaped the debates and concep-
tualizations discussed. Nonetheless, Speaking of Spain is a rich study that has a
great deal to offer scholars of early modern thought, identity, and race.

Rachael Ball
University of Alaska Anchorage
rball11@alaska.edu
doi:10.1163/15700658-12342587-02

Miguel Martínez, Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic
World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 309 pp.,
ISBN 978 0 812 24842 5. $59.95.

For the Spanish soldier Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, a veteran of the wars in Italy
and the Low Countries, the pen was a natural extension of the sword. When
he finished his epic poem La inquieta Flandes in 1594, he claimed the text had
been “watered with the blood of my veins, and written among the arms and the

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

416 book reviews

furor of death” (31). Rodríguez Alva was not alone in combining military and lit-
erary pursuits. Decades earlier, on the other side of the globe, Alonso de Ercilla
wrote his famous La Araucana (1589) by his own account “amid the very war,
in the very marches and sieges” of the Spanish campaigns in Chile (29). Alonso
de Salamanca, a soldier who had been captured after the Ottoman siege of La
Goleta near Tunis in 1574, wrote a war diary in verse of his experiences while
in captivity in Constantinople’s bagnios. Baltasar del Hierro in turn published
an epic poem on the mutiny of a Spanish garrison at the Tunisian coast. Many
other literary soldiers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries fill the
pages of Front Lines, the felicitously titled study of Miguel Martínez, Assistant
Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Chicago. His highly original
and well-researched monograph provides a fascinating and thought-provoking
overview of the many ways in which Spanish soldiers experienced and experi-
mented with reading and writing on the global battlefields of Spain’s early-
modern empire.
Rodríguez Alva’s epic from 1594 on the war in the Low Countries illustrates
how writing practices in the Spanish army crossed frontiers and oceans, ap-
propriating and reshaping literary genres in the process. Written in Turin, his
La inquieta Flandes was one of the many examples of the importance of Italy
for the development of Spanish soldierly writing in the sixteenth century. As
Martínez shows, Italian literary models (especially Ariosto and Petrarch) pro-
vided templates of heroism and suffering—but Italy also formed the scene
where existing genres were redefined in the wake of the military revolution.
Following the battle of Pavia, the traditional narrative of epic was transformed
into various examples of gunpowder epic that favored the truthfulness of au-
tobiographical eyewitness accounts over chivalric romance, positioning the
infantry soldier on the battlefield against the aristocratic knight at the court.
This development was consolidated with La Araucana, which in its depiction
of the Mapuche fighters at the Chilean frontier called into question the very
limits of the Spanish empire, thereby “Americanizing” soldierly writing about
war in Europe. The popularity of this new form of epic is evident from La in-
quieta Flandes, which in its mimicking of La Araucana shows how Rodríguez
Alva projected the war in Chile upon the war in the Low Countries in which
he participated.
Martínez excels in discussing the multi-layered connections between, and
intricacies of, these various texts. With a sharp eye for the ambiguities of lit-
erature and the multiple perspectives of killers and survivors, of the victor and
the defeated, he shows how soldierly writing tried to make sense of the irratio-
nality and contingency of war. Particularly convincing is his analysis of how

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

book reviews 417

the highly organized military apparatus of the Spanish monarchy provided the
material conditions for the constant production, circulation and distribution
of literary culture among the soldiers—a global Renaissance that pervaded
the barracks and battlefields from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and
the Pacific. Less convincing are the conclusions he draws on the social dimen-
sions of this literary culture. Martínez aims to show how soldierly literature
not only narrated the experiences of soldiers, but also constituted the social
structures in which these experiences took shape. In other words, he aims to
identify a specific “society of soldiers” or even a “soldiers’ republic of letters”
based on a “collective ethos” that could be mobilized against the very struc-
tures of Spanish imperial rule.
To reach this conclusion, Martínez interprets the texts he discusses as to-
kens of an evolving class identity. In their writings about the horrors of war,
Spanish soldiers are said to have established a sense of “class solidarity” and
“subaltern camaraderie” that defined them as a specific social group and as a
“political subject” that resisted the fundamental assumptions of the Spanish
empire. The Gramscian phrasing reveals how Martínez wants to turn Spain’s
early-modern soldiers into actors of a different struggle—as is also revealed
by his incidental remark that they remind him of Marx’s description of the
Parisian proletariat. This analysis in terms of class is however not elaborated
in detail, and therefore it remains a somewhat superficial argument, which,
as the conclusion shows, is especially directed against the legacy of Franco in
contemporary Spain.
More relevant, but also more problematic, is Martínez’ use of the concept
“republic of letters.” That concept suggests a transnational and trans-literary
community of individuals engaging in disinterested cultural exchange, but it
is difficult to apply this framework to the material Martínez discusses, which
is all in Spanish and which he interprets as being highly politically loaded.
To pay the metaphor of a “republic of letters” justice, it would therefore have
been worthwhile to look into the possible trans-literary and intertextual con-
nections between soldiers’ writings in different languages. Spain’s armies were
constituted by soldiers from various nationalities and linguistic communities,
so the question arises to what extent the literary culture central to Martínez’
analysis traveled between these communities, for example between Italian,
German, French and Dutch soldiers in the Low Countries’ wars. On one occa-
sion Martínez mentions the Dutch appropriations of Spanish writing on the
Mapuche in Chile; he unfortunately does not engage in a detailed compari-
son of different soldiers’ writings from various linguistic backgrounds to test
his hypothesis of a transnational “republic of letters.” But, despite this missed

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

418 book reviews

opportunity, Martínez’ study offers much insight into a fascinating subculture

of soldierly writing, and it provides inspiration for extending his approach to
early-modern literary culture more broadly.

Arthur Weststeijn
Leiden University/Utrecht University
a.v.weststeijn@hum.leidenuniv.nl
doi:10.1163/15700658-12342587-03

James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of
the British Museum, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 504pp.,
ISBN 978 0 674 73733 4. $35.00.

In the last decade or so, such surveys as Arthur MacGregor’s Curiosity and
Enlightenment (New Haven, 2007) and the essay collections, Early Modern
Things (New York, 2013) and The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and
Sciences (London, 2016) have probed the role of objects in constructing individ-
ual and national identities, as well as the practices of collecting and museum-
formation as they embed scientific and economic discourse. In 2003, the British
Museum opened its new permanent display, Enlightenment: Discovering the
World in the Eighteenth Century. Reintegrating objects that have fallen out
of the history of the British Museum and reuniting some of the objects that
once formed the nucleus of the British Museum but now reside in different
institutions (the British Library, the Natural History Museum), the new gal-
lery both rehearses and challenges assumptions embedded in the freighted
term “Enlightenment.” Collaborative projects based at the British Museum—
Reconstructing Sloane (2010) and Enlightenment Architectures (2017)—have
continued the project of the Enlightenment Gallery. Exploiting the tools of
digital humanities, these projects are sharpening our understanding of the role
of the museum’s founder, Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) in shaping the institu-
tion’s collections and are exploring what his manuscript catalogs can tell us
about the organization of information in the eighteenth century.
As scholars seek to delineate the roles of key figures associated with the
Royal Society and who assembled important collections of books and ob-
jects, and as the British Museum grapples with the legacy of their founder
Sloane and with what are now recognized as the problematic “ideals” of the
Enlightenment, the appearance of James Delbourgo’s biography Collecting the
World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum is particularly timely.

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

book reviews 419

While facets of Sloane’s collecting practices and career have been treated in the
essay collections Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary (London, 1994)
and From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections (London, 2012),
Delbourgo’s study represents the first modern biography, informed by the most
recent scholarship on colonialism and science, of this celebrated figure.
Delbourgo’s account of Sloane proceeds chronologically with part one of
the biography, “Empire of Curiosities,” focused on the physician Sloane’s voy-
age to Jamaica in 1687 with the Duke of Albermarle. The compilation of 128
medical case histories by Sloane, his observations of trees and plants on the is-
land that had commercial or medicinal value (cacao, Peruvian bark, Jamaican
pepper), and his visits to slaves’ provision grounds (where he procured a speci-
men of Guinea corn, 99) all fed the compilation of his lavishly illustrated two
volume Natural History of Jamaica (1707; 1725). Delbourgo is particularly good
on the range of “invisible assistants” that enabled Sloane to collect animal and
plant specimens for his natural history researches. Rarely does Sloane assign
credit in his volumes to the slaves who gathered specimens for him (98), and it
was only African and Indian hunters, fisherman, and divers, Delbourgo points
out (118), that could have supplied Sloane with birds, fish, and corals that fig-
ured in the Natural History. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the portrait of Sloane that
emerges in this part of the biography is not flattering. A Baconian with an eye
towards the commercial exploitation of species he observed on the island and
the augmenting of his own private collections, the physician Sloane dismissed
the accounts by slaves of their own health (50) and showed scant curiosity
and, at times, contempt for African herbalism (52, 95). Returning with him to
London were skin specimens from Jamaica listed in his “Humana Catalogue.”
Part two of Delbourgo’s biography, “Assembling the World,” traces the ways
in which the socially mobile Sloane exploited the contacts he made through
his work as a physician to aristocratic clients at Bloomsbury Square in order to
generate the income and the intelligence network requisite for compiling his
vast museum of natural and artificial rarities. In acts of quid pro quo, Sloane
received curiosities in return for medical advice (153). Delbourgo charts for us
the substantial income generated by Sloane through his marriage to the widow
Elizabeth Rose, who inherited an annual income from Jamaican plantations.
The degree to which the formation of Sloane’s museum was contingent on
“sugar money” and the collector’s ongoing involvement in the slave trade is laid
bare by the author (186-90). Thus it was the combination of his professional
income and plantation income that permitted Sloane to acquire en bloc the
natural history collections of other naturalists and virtuosos (William Courten,
James Petiver, Christopher Merrett, Nehemiah Grew, and Leonard Plukenet)—
to become, in Delbourgo’s words, “cannibalistic about the way he swallowed

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

420 book reviews

entire lives’ work” (210). If it has always been challenging to find in Sloane’s mu-
seum many features of this individual collector’s psyche, Delbourgo’s account
makes evident that Sloane’s curiosities represent the efforts of multiple agents
and collectors. Through his web of contacts, which included members of the
Society for the Promotion of the Gospel and the Society for the Promotion of
Christian Knowledge, as well as East India Company surgeons, the character of
Sloane’s collections did become “global.” Still, as Delbourgo underscores, the
global nature of Sloane’s museum was restricted to those regions that served
as Britain’s colonial outposts (257).
A strength of Collecting the World is its synthesis of a great deal of informa-
tion about Sloane’s movements and career into a coherent and nuanced ac-
count of an encyclopedic collector who drew a multitude of curious objects
into his orbit through a blend of polite urging, exchange, and sometimes co-
ercion. Quibbles with Delbourgo’s study include the relatively little attention
paid to the gendering of collecting during the long eighteenth century. One
would have liked to see, for example, a closer engagement with Beth Fowkes
Tobin’s The Duchess’s Shells (New Haven, 2014). Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess
of Portland, provides important context for Sloane’s own collecting prac-
tices and the object-centered approach taken by Tobin might have informed
Delbourgo’s treatment of some of Sloane’s curiosities. Book historical meth-
odologies might have figured more prominently in Delbourgo’s biography, not
least because the production of Sloane’s Natural History occupies so much of
part one of the study. What drove Sloane’s insatiable appetite for acquiring
curiosities was his deep-seated belief that there were no true “duplicates” of
objects (269-70). At the heart of work by book historians, who continue to chal-
lenge the notion of the fixity of print, is that no copy of a book is a duplicate.
The eighteenth-century interplay between books and objects, and between
libraries and museums, for which Sloane serves as such a crucial case study,
might have been drawn out more fully in this biography. That Delbourgo’s
study leaves the reader with additional questions to explore, though, is testi-
mony to the achievement of this important book.

Maria Zytaruk
University of Calgary
mzytaruk@ucalgary.ca
doi:10.1163/15700658-12342587-04

Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018) 411-420

Discover Together
Take a tour of the new brill.com
• Simplicity: clean and easy to use interface
• Ease of Use: content discoverable on one platform
• Integrated Search: integrated search refinement,
 easy use on mobile
Brill MyBook
New, Print-on-Demand Paperback Editions
for Library Patrons
brill.com/mybook

Brill’s MyBook program, available on the
BrillOnline Books and Journals platform,
enables users to purchase a print-on-demand
paperback copy of books of their choosing,
provided they have access to the e-book
version via their institution.*
MyBook has a fixed price of €25 / $25* per
copy, and is printed in black and white. Brill
will ship your copy free of charge, though VAT
will be added where applicable.
The Brill MyBook program is exclusively
available on BrillOnline Books and Journals.
Look for the MyBook purchase option next to
titles of your choice.

How to Order
Ordering is easy:
- Click the MyBook “Buy” button, which appears on the platform for users who have access to
the corresponding E-Book.
- Each order is processed quickly and in a secure environment.
- First time buyers will be asked to register to create a personal account.

Interested?
Visit BrillOnline Books and Journals – booksandjournals.brillonline.com – to find out more, or
purchase your first Brill MyBook!

*All patrons whose library subscribes to a Brill e-book collection can order MyBook of any title from that collection.
The MyBook purchase button will only show for those titles patrons have access to. MyBook is exclusively reproduced for
personal use only. For technical reasons some titles might not be available in the current MyBook program.