Jonathan Wright

Précis: 7

HIST 685

March 24, 2020

Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. By E. Natalie

Rothman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. xx + 323 pp.

Natalie Rothman’s comparative analysis, of the social actors who bridged the

Ottoman and Venetian imperial domains and contributed heavily to Venice’s early modern

success, has exhibited how social history can be expanded to embrace the complex historical

question of identity. With four parts covering mediation, conversion, translation, and

interactions between trans-imperial subjects, the monograph’s focus remains unerringly on

groups and individuals crossing religious and linguistic boundaries between Venice and the

Ottoman Empire in the period from 1570 to 1670.

Rothman consistently remains thoughtful and attentive in her exploration of the

importance of language within Venice’s empire as the author adds a distinctly inclusive tone

to the avenue of social ethno-linguistic history. The highly important roles attained by trans-

imperial subjects in Venetian society revealed how individuals would “fashioned themselves

as loyal and useful to the state” (172). The utility of language is the key theme that

perpetuates Rothman’s work, particularly in her third section of the monograph on

“Translation.” Her tracing of the term “Levantini” in the following section, utilizing Swartz’s

semantic prototype theory, highlights the internationally varying connotations that could

derive from objects and people associated with this term (214). While the theoretical basis of

much of Rothman’s analysis may be lost on many new readers, her archival research often

focuses on linguistics. Manuscripts from the Museo Civico Correr and Biblioteca Marciana

1
in Venice are analyzed to reveal petitions to the State, records of conversion and baptism, as

well as texts composed by translators which all tie to the wider theme of language and

conversation. However, Rothman relies heavily on Venetian accounts and the subtitle of the

work can feel like a false promise of comparative perspectives due to the lack of Ottoman

primary sources. This has been a consistent problem within Ottoman scholarship, as

exemplified in Leslie Pierce’s Empress of the East (2017) that also utilizing primarily

Venetian sources. However, occasions of Ottoman influence break the traditional discussion

of conflicting spheres of influence as trans-imperial subjects acting successfully as the

initiators, at least linguistically, of this conformity.

Notions of ethnolinguistics are intertwined with the question of identity within the

Venetian empire as the exposure of trans-imperial subjects will make readers question how

‘foreignness’ represented. Rothman clearly treats the Venetian empire as the boundary of two

cultures, Ottoman and Venetian meeting but challenges notions of supposedly conflicting

identities within an imperial entity as the frontier is “part of an ongoing process of boundary

maintenance” rather than simply a clash (4). Rothman highlights throughout, with expert and

meticulous attention to source material, how ethnic and religious differences were defined

and evolved to become more commercial in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice. The

key difference in thought within early modern Venice was in the understanding of conversion

in the Ottoman Empire: a religio-political shift devoid of the spiritual commitment required

for Christians” (96-7). Viewing the Protestant conversion as intentionally spiritual and the

Ottoman conversion as lacking spiritual commitment, Rothman persuasively highlights how

differences were identified between Istanbul and Venice. Through conversion, these

“prototypical others of the Venetian state were transformed into properly constituted Catholic

subjects capable of filling the normative kinship and institutional roles in metropolitan

Venetian society” (161). The House of Catechumens here provides a unique example that,

2
highlighted as a vital establishment for these transformations by providing support for

marriages and employment, becomes part of the wider spreading of Venice’s sphere of

influence that Rothman effectively exposes. Not foreign, and yet not fully local, Rothman’s

neologism of trans-imperial subjects goes a long way in pushing the scholarly boundary of

transnational discussion by firmly establishing how this sinuous identity brokered the

imperial frontier.

The trans-imperial subjects, in the Venetian imperial sphere of influence, operated in

a political, geographic, cultural, and ethno-linguistic frontier within the Venetian Empire.

Rothman has inspired future historians but has also forced them to methodically outline

transformational identities within borderlands and Eurasian histories. Her significant

academic diligence assembling the vast array of sources concerning cultural exchange is

limited by the deceptive subtitle of book. However, the trans-imperial subjects were working

between the two major cities to establish ethno-linguistic acceptance and the fundamental

cornerstones of becoming Venetian.