Ottoman History Podcast - Venetian Physicians in the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: March 18, 2016

with Valentina Pugliano hosted by Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise.   Download the seriesPodcast Feed | iTunes | H...ipcast | Soundcloud Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Valentina Pugliano discusses the experiences of these travelling doctors both in the Italian peninsula and in the Middle East. We explore their interactions with the local population and their effect on the medical ecology of the Middle East as well as the sources we use to write such histories. Together, the experiences of these doctors point to the connected histories of medicine and science in the early modern Mediterranean. « Click for More »

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shafir, and today we have with us Valentina Pugliano. She is a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the late medieval and early modern history of medicine, pharmacy, and natural history, specifically in the Republic of Venice. And today what we'll be talking about is Venetian doctors and Levantine doctors working in the Ottoman Empire. This is a topic that we really don't know very much about, not at all even kind of in general about the history of science in the Ottoman Empire, much less about a lot of these
Starting point is 00:01:09 foreign doctors who are a crucial part of these embassies. So often we tend to think about these, the Mediterranean is split into different cultural zones, the Ottoman Islamic part of it, and the kind of Christian European zone of Spain and Italy. part of it and the kind of Christian European zone of you know Spain and Italy but here we have a set of actors a set of people moving through the Mediterranean connecting these two areas and drawing all sorts of locals both merchants and commoners but also notables and various governors into their medical networks into, into their world.
Starting point is 00:01:45 So we'll be talking about this medical infrastructure today and the Venetian doctors that enabled it. So welcome to the podcast. Hi, Neil. Thank you. So let's just start. Can you describe who are these Venetian doctors or these Levantine doctors? What are they doing?
Starting point is 00:02:00 How did they decide to come over? What cities were they living in? doing how did they decide to come over what cities were they living in okay so one thing that i should say is that this um information shall we say this knowledge comes out of the project that i started around two years ago and it's still very much in progress um these people were individuals salaried paid by the venetian government the venetian republic to staff the consulates the diplomatic bases in eastern mediterranean and the levant the levant sort of broadly conceived i guess egypt syria where venice had a number of diplomatic bases in commercial centers such as Damascus, Aleppo, Alexandria, Cairo and then also in Constantinople how they describe it sort of Istanbul where they kept also a resident embassy. So what's
Starting point is 00:02:57 particularly interesting is that we didn't know this medical infrastructure existed and it turns out from doing archival field work primarily that it wasn't just a question of the 16th century, which is, if you think about it, you know, the century of heightened connection between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. But it goes back much further. So the first evidence that I found of it was from the 1380s, so the end of the 14th century. was from the 1380s, so the end of the 14th century. And this individual seems to be there in the Venetian consulates until the 1670s, 1680s, after the War of Candia, so that Venice fought with the Ottoman Empire.
Starting point is 00:03:37 During the War of Candia and at the end of it, Venice decided to close down its consulates in the Levant. You know, keep the embassy in Istanbul, but close down the consulates. And this meant, in practice, also an end to this series of appointments of doctors, apothecaries, and surgeons to mount the consulates. So we're looking at a period of kind of the late medieval, from the late medieval to kind of the middle of the Ottoman Empire's reign, in which we have these doctors and these embassies and consulates in both the Mamluk and the Ottoman realms. Exactly. So you're basically looking at a medical infrastructure that survived for three centuries.
Starting point is 00:04:25 three centuries. And when I talk about a medical infrastructure, I do so because we're not just talking about an isolated diplomatic base. As far as I can tell from the evidence, you basically have, as I mentioned, the embassy in Istanbul, then you have a base in Alexandria, one in Cairo, one in Damascus, one in Aleppo, one in Tripoli, one in Beirut. And for each of those, you would find at least one doctor, and then probably an apothecary. Occasionally, you also have a third person in the form of a surgeon or a barber. So you're basically dealing with, I guess, around 20 medically trained individuals at any one time during this period, salaried by Venice to do certain things. So can you give us examples of some of these people?
Starting point is 00:05:11 Like who were they? Why did they come? Did they circulate amongst the different embassies and consulates or did they just go, you know, Venice, Tripoli, Tripoli, Venice? In general, you can say that the appointments are quite heterogeneous. general you can say that the appointments are quite heterogeneous in istanbul venice tended to draw upon the um sephardic and levantine jews for a very specific reason actually for more than one the main one was for political gain in the sense that jewish doctors had traditionally been employed by the ottoman elites and in this way, Venice hoped to penetrate through them, I guess, administrative network of the empire
Starting point is 00:05:49 and familiarize itself with, you know, hidden councils and hidden information. There's also another reason that Jewish doctors had been migrating forcefully, as we know, forcibly rather than forcefully, from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Italy, towards the Near East, in waves from the late medieval period onwards. But they often passed through Padua, which was the main university of the Republic of Venice,
Starting point is 00:06:19 and they acquired a degree in medicine. They not only acquired a degree in medicine. They not only acquired a degree in medicine, but they also became familiar with the academic and intellectual culture of the Italian peninsula, and particularly of the Republic of Venice. And these were skills that... And Padua was part of Venice back then, right? Exactly, exactly.
Starting point is 00:06:39 They basically acquired skills that the Venetian diplomats could then use for their own ends. So this is what can be said in general for Istanbul. In the provinces, the situation is a bit different. In the sense that generally the Venetians appointed people from Venice or from the contiguous Italian regions, particularly the north of Italy, or they appointed people from their maritime dominion, their colonies, usually Crete and Cyprus, exactly. Particularly surgeons and apothecaries came from there. But we also find locals. I'm saying locals because a lot of the time
Starting point is 00:07:29 I'm dealing with anonymous individuals. I'm not given a name. In the record, I can find something that says, an apothecary from Cairo or a surgeon from Alexandria. So here the situation is a bit more mixed. So the people that were appointed by the Republic of Venice, was this a desirable appointment or were they kind of cajoled or forced to go into this? Did people want to go to these embassies and outposts? I mean, was there money to be made or was there? Yeah, this is an open question. posts i mean was there money to be made or was there yeah this is an open question um as far as i can see this appointment as medico condotto in the condotta medica um was seen by some as
Starting point is 00:08:16 particularly undesirable because it placed them in danger in the sense that the levant was often associated with an idea of unhealthiness plague was considered to be endemic people were afraid also of fevers of dysentery of the fact that foods that often gave the europeans uh stomach aches from which they died. So some of them actually saw this appointment as not desirable and this often had the consequence of the government not being able to find individuals willing to go. At other times, however, particularly in the 16th and the early 17th century, at the height of the craze for natural history and antiquarianism in Europe this type of appointment came to be seen as very desirable because basically you have many individuals with a medical background physicians and apothecaries, but also in studying the canon of Islamic medicine. One way to access
Starting point is 00:09:30 these items in a way and this traditional knowledge was to travel almost back in time, if you like, to the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. So there are individuals like Prospero Alpino and Dural Pago who actually seize upon the opportunity to, you know, be appointed at one of these consulates. Okay, so and once they get there, what kind of different functions are they engaged with? I mean, we've talked a bit about, to some degree, kind of diplomatic work. Presumably they're doing, they're treating people. I mean, what are the various functions that they're engaged with at an embassy or at a consulate? So their contract was basically specified
Starting point is 00:10:17 that they had to take care of the consul or the ambassador in Istanbul and also of the Venetian nation of merchants that surrounded the fundaco, the diplomatic base where this position. So they were in what you call a fundaco, which is I presume like a khan or a sort of trading caravan.
Starting point is 00:10:40 So they all live together in that area and they were there specifically to treat the Venetians residents there yeah generally so the idea is that uh in istanbul the the jewish physicians could not reside in perangalata so where the embassy was based so they would live outside in uh the provinces in um syria and egypt the physicians, who usually were not Jewish physicians, resided in the fundaco, in the diplomatic base, which meant basically that they lived together with the merchants and the pilgrims of the nation, in this case Venice.
Starting point is 00:11:20 So by contract, they had to take care, basically, of this Venetian nation and of the consul in practice however they often extended their medical care to the local communities for a fee i mean they obviously charge for their works. So they cured Jews, they cured Muslims, they cured Orthodox Greeks, they cured Armenians. And what's interesting is that it seems that it was known that a Venetian doctor and apothecary would be in service in the Venetian fondaccio, wherever these fondaccio were located.
Starting point is 00:12:06 And there's an interesting passage in the travel journal of Ambrosio Bembo from the 1670s, I believe, where basically he was traveling. He had moved through the Ottoman Empire going towards India and he's writing from Isfahan in Iran. And he says that basically the moment that he arrived in Isfahan, he was assaulted by everybody in the town because everybody has this, he says, crazy idea that all Italians are doctors. And this is quite interesting because basically it reveals that rather than being an exception these venetian doctors and as i said venetian in the sense that salaried by the republic they could be venetian they could be colonials they could be levantine jews
Starting point is 00:12:59 but these venetians doctors were part of the ecology of Ottoman and before the Ottoman Mamluk medicine. They were not exception, but they were part of a pool of healers that local residents could draw upon. So what was the attraction of these Venetian doctors? What did people try to get treated there? Why did they turn to them instead of local doctors? It is difficult. I mean, I would say that so far I don't have enough evidence to give you the ultimate answer.
Starting point is 00:13:32 What I can definitely say is that the type of medicine that they dispensed was the Hippocratic-Alenic medicine that was a medical framework shared across the Mediterranean. So they weren't necessarily offering novelty. They were offering something that was a medical framework shared across the Mediterranean. So they weren't necessarily offering novelty. They were offering something that was already available on the ground. So then you have to ask, in a way, how the contacts between the physician and the patient are formed. And it seems that, as far as I could see, actually,
Starting point is 00:14:04 I've worked on this individual, Cornelio Bianchi who has left us the only so far extant account of this Condotta Medica and basically he tended to cure individuals he knew so he's not going to out into the community fishing for people uh what happens is that he's going to cure the muslim craftsman who's who he has met in the bazaar and who is doing preparing some silver work for him or he's going to cure the um syriac jew naz, Nazine, the dragoman, the interpreter that he has been using
Starting point is 00:14:45 as part of the consular staff. So this, you know, you have to sort of rethink in a way. Yeah, so there's already contacts being established and then they're turning to him as a doctor rather than people all over thinking that Venetians, you know, have this special expertise. I think you have both, but it's more difficult to give you
Starting point is 00:15:05 a reason of you know why the venetian and not somebody else it might just have been a question of convenience right you know that the doctor is there available and then you know you go get him yeah um so in some some of your research you also talk about these venetian doctors treating notables governors so forth so forth. Could you tell us about that? Like, I mean, so we have, you know, you've mentioned kind of the craftspeople, their local context, but what about higher-ups? Yeah, so what happens is that when the physician joins
Starting point is 00:15:37 the consular staff in the Fondaco, he becomes part of this called Famiglia Alta, this high family, which means basically the inner circle of the consul. And his position as consular doctor, this type of office holding, gives him a type of visibility both inside the consular base and also outside. And often the physician is taken by the consul on visits to the local notables and this is how he's able to establish contacts also with this administrative class contacts that then are quite important when
Starting point is 00:16:13 the physician comes to i guess uh exploit different functions for the venetian colony so i mean did the consul see medical services as a sort of something that they could offer to local notables and to governors? Why did they bring them along? Yeah, I wouldn't put it in terms of charity or generosity necessarily. They brought them along for their own health, first of all.
Starting point is 00:16:41 And then they knew that basically medicine often opened more doors than diplomacy. first of all. And then they knew that basically medicine often opened more doors than diplomacy. And we have, Tomaso Minnadoi, for example, was active in Aleppo in the 1570s, says quite clearly that behind the screen of a visit basically could penetrate the most hidden councils. And the Venetian councils were traders
Starting point is 00:17:04 in information ultimately i mean they wrote weekly dispatches back to the senate and they were very invested in finding individuals who would be well located to procure such information and the physician was a good partner to have particularly because you have to remember that physicians were literate rather well educated compared to the average so they could sustain a conversation they were interlocutors that the consul would have in the fondaco just for his own leisure if you will
Starting point is 00:17:40 but they could also interact on a different level also with the notables although you have to remember that in general when we're not dealing with individuals already resident in the levant these physicians were working through translators so you know in as the research progresses this type of mediated interaction will have to be taken into account could you expand on that i mean so you're having mediated interact i mean they're speaking to the locals through these translators uh do we have any examples of how that worked with like in the process of treating patients how that influenced the cultural encounter did they ever ever become fluent in Arabic or Turkish?
Starting point is 00:18:29 So I would say that fluency in Arabic usually rather than Turkish. Okay, you have fluency in Arabic particularly in the 15th century, but it's an exception rather than the rule. So you have individuals such as Andrei Alpago who's a philologist at heart and who's interested in reading Avicenna in the original. And he's able to do so
Starting point is 00:18:49 because he contacts a local physician, Ibn al-Makki, who tutors him in the language and tutors him also in how you read Avicenna. So he helps him with actual passages. Alpago, however, is exceptional in that he stays in the Levant, specifically in Damascus, for 30 years. Now, the normal appointment of a medico condotto or a speciale condotto were two years. These could be renewed, but they're usually renewed perhaps, you know, to four years or six years you normally don't find
Starting point is 00:19:25 someone who stays for three decades it's more of an exception my feeling is that individuals who were instead employed in Istanbul begin learning Turkish but this is more of I guess late 16th century and 17th century phenomenon I mean and most of the consulates are in the Arab provinces, right? Tripoli? Yeah, exactly. Because basically, it's where Venice has its commercial interests. So, the consulates have to deal first with commercial problems and then with political problems. And that is why we find such a multitude of consulates and vice consulates in Egypt and Syria. so so welcome back to the ottoman history podcast we're speaking today with valentina puliano and we're speaking about venetian venetian doctors working in the ottoman empire
Starting point is 00:20:59 in consuls and in embassies um so you have with you a picture of a Venetian fundaco. Yeah. Could you describe it for us? I mean, what are we looking at here? And you can, sorry, we have here a picture of a Venetian fundaco, which the listeners can find on our website. So you can follow along as we're speaking about it. It's a, yeah, It's a picture that was produced
Starting point is 00:21:26 either towards the end of the 16th century or the early 17th century. We don't know exactly by whom, whether it was a European artist adopting Ottoman stylistic conventions or indeed an artist trained in the Ottoman Empire. What you see is, I guess, a scene from the Venetian Fandaco in Istanbul. Now, Fandaci had pretty much a similar structure across the Levant.
Starting point is 00:21:55 They had an inner courtyard, a ground level with vaults where to store merchandise, and an upper level with, i guess an exposed gallery with lodgings for the merchants the pilgrims and the familia of the consul so and this is where the the doctor and the apothecary would have resided as well in this particular picture what you see um in the In the upper levels are three European men. Actually, one of them is dressed in some kind of oriental... Right, some sort of robe, kaftan thing. And at the lower level, instead, you have the inner courtyard with a couple of trees, three Europeans that you know by the ruffles
Starting point is 00:22:48 the white ruffles around their neck who are sitting almost as if having a picnic on wooden structure slightly elevated i guess having some kind of conversation and then a servant on the left drawing water from a well this is quite interesting because it highlights an aspect on which I've been I'm working on at the moment which is that of sociability in the Fondaco and its connection with the production of knowledge knowledge that can be medical but it can also relate to, I guess, natural history, antiquarianism, astronomy. The Fondaco seems to have been a very sociable space. Not only for Europeans, there was a lot of conviviality and sociability going on between diplomatic households, if you like, that of the, for example, in in Istanbul that of the English and of the Venetians
Starting point is 00:23:46 but also there was quite a lot of sociability between Ottoman notables and generally the neighbors who lived around the Fondaco and the the residents of the Fondaco itself. By sociability we mean usually conversations encounters that that happened in the fondaco, but also meals, lunches and dinners. And we know from the extant contracts for the familia of the consul that basically these contracts specify the amount of money that the individuals of the familia were to be paid while in the levant these contracts also specified the amount that the consul could spend annually on entertaining ottoman notables with wine and this is 150 ducats on wine only how much is that in uh it's i wouldn't know the equivalent
Starting point is 00:24:40 but it's quite a lot of money um the physicians were paid for example around i'd say between 70 and 100 ducats a year so you know it's it's a substantial amount to spend on wine and the a couple of venetian diplomats described the fondaco the 16th century Venetian fondaco, as basically a tavern open for all. So there was a lot of coming and going, as I said, not just from Franks and European Christians, but generally from the neighborhood and from the local administration and the local rulers. And this has a number of...
Starting point is 00:25:23 Do we have any specific examples of that? I mean, any stories that you could... There's an interesting episode for me, which is, I guess, a minute episode. But it's when Cornelio Bianchi, the physician I mentioned before, who was in Damascus, not necessarily in this Constantinople Fondaco,
Starting point is 00:25:42 but he was in the Fondaco in Damascus in the early 1540s. One day in 1542, he had a meal with an Ottoman envoy in the fondaco. And this is interesting because what happened is that the Ottoman envoy gave him a recipe for raisins,
Starting point is 00:26:03 which then it looks like um the the doctor actually tried to to replicate um and this is interesting because it highlights how sociability can become of this kind can become a platform not just for content but also for knowledge exchange of some sort, whether it's a recipe or it's a piece of information. And something I've been working on is whether we can create a parallel between the type of sociability that happened in the Fundaco and around it and the type of sociability that happened in Majalis, in the Islamic and Ottoman context. Right, so Majalis for our listeners
Starting point is 00:26:45 essentially mean places of sitting, sessions, in which people would sit together and have long discussions over all sorts of matters, intellectual, political, religious. And what's quite interesting is that the majalis involved the reading of texts, but were also primarily based in an oral type of exchange. So it's about talking and exchanging ideas through speech.
Starting point is 00:27:13 And this is what happens in the Fondaco as well, because ultimately often this contact between the Venetians and the local Ottomans happened through a translator, so through an oral dimension. Not only this, but basically the individuals who frequented the Fondaco were the same intellectuals, the same religious scholars, the same notables, the same merchants who then also participated in the majalis. And is some an area on which i'm currently doing some work great so when we speak about i mean knowledge transfer and kind of the knowledge that was produced out of the sociability in the fundacos do we know anything about when
Starting point is 00:27:59 they went back when these doctors went back to italy what did they bring with them what objects did you know you said that they're involved in natural, in the collection of natural history items, antiquarian items, that they're interested in some of these manuscripts like Avicenna's Canoon. You know, what kind of knowledge and objects did they bring back with them to Italy?
Starting point is 00:28:17 Do we know anything about that? We know that there are certain outstanding examples such as Alpago and Prospero Alpino. Prospero Alpino is notable because he basically went to Egypt in the retinue of Giorgio Emo in the 1580s. He stayed there for three, four years. He talked to local doctors, local physicians. He also herborized, so went to look for plants and specimens along the Nile and when he returned to
Starting point is 00:28:48 Padua where he had obtained his degree he published two volumes one on the medicine of the Egyptians and by Egyptians he means the contemporary inhabitants of Egypt and on the plants of Egypt again on the plant the materia medica and the flora that you could find on his sort of coeval Egypt this experience in the Levant was very fruitful for him because he basically was able through it to secure a lectureship at the University of Padua which had been previously held by Melchiorre Guilandino who also had an experience in the Middle East. So it was a way of creating expertise, of capitalizing the knowledge gained
Starting point is 00:29:30 there into positions in Italy. Yes, that's definitely one aspect of it. Another aspect was to get your hands on actual items and commodities. And these could be plants which could then ship be shipped back to europe or they could be manuscripts now in terms of plants there's a as i mentioned before a revival of the materia medica of the ancients starting in the late 15th century in europe ancients primarily dioscorides theophrastus and pliny Now these people had written about the materia medica that one could find in across sort of around the Mediterranean basin primarily the eastern Mediterranean and also items that arrived that one could find in the Levant but often arrived from India and China. So as I mentioned before this appointment as medico condotto
Starting point is 00:30:26 enabled the physician to go to the Near East and herborize and find these items for himself. There were a lot of problems with identification of botanical specimens at the time because basically, you know, these European scholars begin reading, again, the books of Dioscorides, but Dioscorides is writing about flora that they don't necessarily find in their
Starting point is 00:30:54 fields in Italy and particularly in northern Europe. And he's also using terms that these scholars don't necessarily recognize. So how do you know that the plant that Diascorides is describing is the specific plant that you have, for example, in the apothecary shop? So all these problems can be solved by philological means, but also through experience. By actually trying to find the plant. Exactly. You need to get your hands on the plant. So this is what this experience in the Levant allows a number of scholars to do. So as I mentioned, plants are shaped back, but also books and manuscripts. clear how many of these physicians and apothecaries and surgeons salaried by Venice actually engaged in this type of commodity exchange, shall we say, sort of knowledge or intellectual
Starting point is 00:31:56 commodity exchange. There were definitely a number of them, but we don't necessarily have the evidence to document which specific book they sent back to europe or which specific plants so we know that these activities happened because they commented upon them but they're not necessarily always specific about them and the libraries i mean from my understanding the libraries that they may or may not have collected are not extant in Italy, really. Like, when you go to Venice, there's not that many Islamic manuscripts. There's not... I mean, the great period of kind of collecting these books is kind of the 17th century. You think of, like, Dutch scholars or English or French.
Starting point is 00:32:38 People going to the Levant and buying books and then kind of sending these very large extant collections back to... My feeling is that this starts actually a bit earlier, in the 15th and the 16th century as well. However, it doesn't have, as far as I could see, much to do with this medical network that I'm discussing. Because as we know, there are a number of scholars who fled Byzantium, Constantinople. Yeah, right. So that's, yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:05 Sorry, I was thinking of the scholars kind of. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I guess there are movements in both directions, which happen for different reasons. The scholars in the infrastructure, the physicians in infrastructure that I'm looking at, dealt with manuscripts, but as yet I can't tell you with certainty
Starting point is 00:33:27 whether they brought back you know the unique specimen of uh Razi or so this is something that will need to be clarified but it's also you know you have to you're dealing with different constituencies so speaking of kind of books that are extant or not extant how do we find these doctors because so far we don't really know anything about them until your research
Starting point is 00:33:57 so what are the sources that you're able to pull these stories and these experiences from so I guess the minority evidence is books like those compiled by Alpino, things that get printed. So you have a few of those. So they're books, they're descriptions of the travelogues?
Starting point is 00:34:19 You have some travelogues. Often what happens is that the travelogues have more of a religious focus, following the pilgrimage narrative that had been common from the medieval period. You have the occasional natural historical treatises, such as the one that Alpino produces. The majority of the information you find in the archive.
Starting point is 00:34:48 And you have to... This is the Venetian archive. Exactly, yes. The state archive of Venice. And you also find something in Mantua. The majority of the information comes from, if you think about it, unexpected realms of the archive, from the inquisitors of state, from the Council of Ten,
Starting point is 00:35:12 basically from those executive and administrative bodies of the Republic of Venice concerned with political matters primarily because those were the individuals who would assign, if you will, missions either to the council or directly to certain physicians to acquire information. So you definitely obtain evidence from there. And then you have the fiscal bodies,
Starting point is 00:35:41 the Savia La Mercanzia, a body deputed, and particularly the cottimo the alessandria and damascus a body deputed uh to overseeing the the amount of money spent by the consuls and the consulates in in the levant and basically it's a question of finding this evidence in rather indirect ways. So you don't have, I mean, you mentioned one example, you know, we have one notebook of a ledger of a doctor that was stationed in Damascus.
Starting point is 00:36:17 But otherwise, you're looking for traces of them in the kind of official paperwork. Exactly. And as I mentioned before, often you don't necessarily have names um so how do you deal with that i mean so often when we think of these i think as you point out in your research so often when we think of these go-betweens or brokers that they're often these uh very well known or kind of fanciful individuals uh so how do we deal with this kind
Starting point is 00:36:44 of broader category of um of go-betweens how do we deal with this kind of broader category of go-betweens? How do you deal with this kind of nameless masses of doctors and apothecaries? My interest is both in the individuals. I mean, Cornelio Bianchi, whom I mentioned, who produced this journal, Prospero Alpino and Ralf Pago,
Starting point is 00:37:00 does definitely give an extraordinary insight into the aspect of knowledge exchange but i'm interested also in reconstructed a category of go between a category of individuals such as it is medici condotti who was there for three centuries and like other categories of intermediaries such as translators, for example, or commercial brokers studied by Natalie Rothman, provide us with, in a way, a long-term open door from which you can analyze the interaction
Starting point is 00:37:37 between one side of the Mediterranean and the other. So it's more about understanding how they enabled certain types of activities over and over and over, because basically these individuals, as I said, went there from the early 15th century, even late 14th century. All of them were exposed to the same kind of activities. They were there because they had to practice medicine in a particular locale and in a particular building and the area around it the fundaco this had consequences and they were also often used as informal diplomatic and political intermediaries and this is something that happens again and again and again.
Starting point is 00:38:27 So when you consider these, in a way, constraints, you can ask questions about the production of knowledge. What does it mean to have to work, for example, in translation? What does it mean to be exposed to a locality that is not your own and over which you don't have the same control that you would have if you were instead employed in back in your hometown in Italy and these questions you can see in the longer term and also what I find interesting is that you can also measure the impact that cultural and intellectual trends happening in Europe,
Starting point is 00:39:09 such as the crisis for natural history, such as the interest in antiquarianism, how these trends affected the work of these intermediaries, and in turn, how this, in a way, stable infrastructure affected the work or affected the development of these intellectual trends. Well, I think you've given us some wonderful insight into this category of go-betweens. And I think we've learned quite a bit about this, what was to me a totally unknown world
Starting point is 00:39:43 of Venetian doctors operating in the Ottoman Empire and all the different subjects and notables and governors that would go to them. And I agree with you. I think this is just, you know, this raises some wonderful questions, and I hope and we're looking forward to reading your research more
Starting point is 00:39:59 and finding out more about this topic. So with that, I think we'll wrap it up. So thank you, Valentina, for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. For our listeners who would like to know more, I recommend that they go to our website where there will be a short bibliography where you can find out more information on the topic
Starting point is 00:40:22 as well as some of Valentina's other forthcoming works. You should also check out our Facebook page, in which you can find a community of like-minded listeners. And otherwise, we'll see you on the next podcast. Thank you.

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