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O is for Ottoman

The signature of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1512. From wikipedia.

The Renaissance seems to involve a lot of maps.

For some reason, ignorance being the most likely explanation, I always thought the Ottomans were Arabs. They were not; they were Muslims, but mixing up Ottoman and Arab is like mixing up French and German. Just because they share a religion didn’t make them the same. Different language, different customs, different leaders, entirely different culture.

The Ottomans were a major power during the Renaissance, controlling access to trade and threatening the Mediterranean and Western Europe. They held some of the most venerated cities: Constantinople, Athens, Baghdad, and Damascus. They were deadly serious about conquest, and they didn’t particularly have respect for the classics. Unlike the Arabs at their cultural peak, the Ottomans burned libraries. They were the reason Philip the Navigator went looking for trade routes to India going west.

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N is for Navigators

1400 map of the Atlantic, from Treaty of Tordesillas. Photo by kajmeister in Lisbon.

Have you ever wondered why the Brazilians speak Portuguese? All of South and Central America were overrun with Spanish colonizers–except for Brazil.

The pope brokered a deal with the countries on the Iberian Peninsula to split the world in two halves. The Portuguese got everything to the east, and the Spanish got everything to the west. Easy peasy. The Treaty of Tordesillas.

The Royal Bastard of Fond Memory

Portugal is the stubborn left arm of land on the Iberian Peninsula, never willing to be absorbed. They have their own language, distinctive music, and naval heroes. They timed their independence well, coming together as a country when Spain was still a shattered group of provinces. It helped to have a royal bastard who reigned for nearly half a century.

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M is for Marble

The marble-tiled floor of St. Marks in Venice. Photo by kajmeister.

It’s just rock. A geological anomaly of a particular type of creature squeezed in a certain way than pushed out of place by a few tectonic events. Voila! A sculptor’s paradise; an architect’s dream. Imagine the floor! They did…

What Is that Stuff?

Ever since Italians noticed that they had mountains full of this really pretty stone, they’ve been sending blocks of it over to wherever sculptors are drooling. Lots of sculpture is carved from granite, which is cheaper and does last, but not as smooth. Marble forms because limestone is getting heated to “really extreme temperatures” so that minerals within the rock get fused together. In a purty way!

More marble flooring in St. Mark’s. Photo by KK.

Why Is It There?

As Luca Lotelli and Sam Anderson explained in a fascinating NY Times piece, the Italian Apuan alps is the site of one of the oldest quarries of white marble in the world. Cosimo de Medici extracted stone here for marble that the Renaissance artists used.

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