Multispecies Diplomacy: Ottoman Horses, Mantuan Buyers, and Renaissance Equestrianism (1489-1600)

Abstract

This dissertation examines how politics, knowledge production, and material culture linked the Ottoman Empire to Renaissance Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the lens of horsemanship. Because horses acted as ennobled but subordinate partners to humans in military conquest, political image-making, and aristocratic leisure, their movements offer rich opportunities to weave together regionally siloed histories of commerce, diplomacy, culture, and science. It centers upon the 1490s with the brief but consequential imprisonment of the Ottoman prince Cem in Rome from 1489-1495 as a captive in the papal curia. Cem, as a rival claimant to the throne of his elder brother Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512) offered first Pope Innocent VIII and later Alexander VI a compelling figurehead for a long-awaited anti-Ottoman crusade. To prevent Cem’s release, the sultan mobilized a dense network of spies, diplomats, and allies from Naples to Venice. Among his friends was the condottiere, cultural patron, and avid horse-breeder Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua (r. 1484-1519). During repeated diplomatic embassies to Istanbul, Gonzaga offered luxuries like dogs, mules, and Italian-made armor to Bayezid II and his officials to secure permission to export Ottoman horses. Through his efforts, the stables of small and landlocked Mantua became a premier supplier of coveted Turkish horses (It: turco, pl: turchi) in Italy. Undertaking the first comprehensive study of Gonzaga’s Ottoman diplomacy since 1965, this dissertation uses correspondence from the Archivio Gonzaga and the Topkapı Palace Archives to establish a definitive narrative of the envoys and embassies exchanged between the two rulers. It traces how Bayezid II’s envoys in Italy cultivated relationships with Mantuan agents and how Gonzaga in turn learned about the Ottoman court and deepened ties with the empire’s provincial and central office-holders. On this basis, it argues that Francesco II’s horse trade was thoroughly politicized and identifies how Venetian tutelage and papal policies enabled (and eventually foreclosed) opportunities for equine exchange. As a result, it grants the Ottoman Empire a significant place in Francesco II’s dynastic strategies. Furthermore, it begins the important task of re-assessing Bayezid II’s diplomacy with the papacy during his brother’s captivity and demonstrates that these contacts were more substantive than has previously been recognized. Additionally, it examines the broader role of Ottoman horses in Renaissance equestrian culture. As military changes reconfigured the relationship between nobility and horsemanship, Italians increasingly imported and bred diverse horse types suitable for new functions and pioneered a new riding style, maneggio/manège, in the academies of Naples. Historian Donna Landry has hypothesized that these schools played a further role: popularizing Ottoman horse care first in Italy and later in England, where new horse breeds like the Thoroughbred would be developed by importing stock from the Ottoman Levant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By contrast, this dissertation places Mantuan grooms, cavalrymen, and diplomatic agents at the forefront of this trend. It argues that the adoption of Ottoman equine husbandry in sixteenth-century Italy was preceded by a positive re-assessment of the Turks as horse-keepers in the fifteenth century when European authors began to regard Ottoman horsemanship not as neglectful but instead as kindly and effective. These discursive shifts redefined turchi horses as desirable commodities: an element of Ottoman military success that could be replicated at home in novel light cavalry units. By the turn of the century, Ottoman horses were arriving with equipment like shoes, saddles, and bridles suited to a style of veterinary care and riding which differed from Italian practices. Despite this appeal, Ottoman equine pedagogy also challenged Italian notions of good riding: turchi horses suffered injury and illness in their care while their behavior failed to conform to manège standards. In response, equestrian writers developed a heterogeneous repertoire of methods and equipment intended to ‘correct’ their mounts. As a form of both inter-species and cross-cultural translation, this repertoire adopted some Ottoman practices (like shoeing) but rejected others (like bitting). Thus, Italian equestrians’ acknowledgement of Ottoman expertise was tempered by a racialized discourse that stereotyped the Ottoman Turks, their history, and their society in order to categorize (and discipline) their horses in increasingly essentializing ways. Through an enriched understanding of Mantuan-Ottoman diplomacy, this dissertation intervenes in the growing historiography on Renaissance horsemanship. It demonstrates that beyond Naples, the Adriatic acted as a crucial axis of horse exchange between Ottoman southeast Europe and northern Italy. Through these exchanges, a diverse cast of diplomats, viziers, grooms, merchants, popes, and cavalrymen brought Ottoman equestrian material culture and practices to Italy long before the publication of the first printed manège treatise in 1550. In this way, the Ottoman Empire was a vital participant in the innovative and dynamic field of early modern horsemanship whose influence extends through Mantua, Naples, and England to the breeds dominating competitive horse racing today.