Good morning.
Welcome to this video about Islamic legacy in Europe.
Material culture, culture and religion.
I am Elena Paulino, professor of art history at the
UNED University.
In 2022, the Alhambra in Granada received
more than 2 million visitors throughout the year.
At the same time, restoration works in
Partheneon brought to light the remains of a minaret,
witness of the location of a mosque in Ottoman times.
At the same time, in Bosnia Herzegovina,
restoration campaigns have focused on Ottoman mosques,
but also on manuscripts preserved in various institutions.
Undoubtedly, Islamic culture was very present
in medieval and modern Europe, and the architecture, the objects,
painting or works of literature reflect this.
The question is, is this Islamic material culture
part of a common heritage in Europe?
How has it been perceived throughout history?
And above all, how this perception have changed throughout the centuries.
Since the first
Ummayad expansion across the Mediterranean
in the seventh and the eighth centuries,
there were different Islamic political entities in the Iberian Peninsula
and the south of Italy and also in the Balkans.
And with the Ottoman expansion of the 15th century,
Eastern and Central Europe also came into direct contact with Islam.
Beyond this direct presence, political presence,
the Mediterranean was also a space for the circulation of ideas,
objects and people.
It was a space of exchange and trade, and it was also
a space of struggle, confrontation and conflict.
In this course, we intend to show, on the one hand,
how the mobility of people, knowledge and artifacts across political
and religious borders define the reality of pre-modern Europe.
On the other hand, it will analyze the complex narratives, identity
and otherness produced from the Middle Ages until today
around this mobility of objects,
around this mobility of people.
and these artistic consequences of such mobility,
it is
important to clarify that Islam has varying
varying timelines and different regions and chronologies
during the late medieval, and early modern periods in Europe.
Thus, it consists of diverse experiences
at different times and at different places.
And we can see how both Ottoman Constantinople
and Ummayad Cordoba were deeply Islamic cities
that rooted their past in a common Roman heritage,
but that their Islamic religious, political, social,
economic and cultural landscapes were very, very different.
And those differences need to be acknowledged.
In this context, two Apparently opposing historiographical
currents have developed
on the one hand geographical fragmentation, meaning that all
these places have been studied separately and fragmentary as
unrelated unicums.
For example, the trilingual
epitaph of Ana, the mother of Grisandus in Sicily,
or the
one of Ferdinand the third in Seville, which contains
Spanish, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, should be analyzed as a whole.
It is true that they belong
to different geographical areas and to different chronologies,
but it is also true that if we analyze them
as a whole
in a broader context,
we can draw new conclusions about them.
Both belong to the elite.
Both belong to the Christian ruling elite in hybrid, social
and cultural context,
and both tell us how the use of Arabic and the exhibition
of multilinguality has to do with public displays of authority
and with strategies of courtly self-representation.
Each one had their own specificities,
but both of them resorted at different times and different
context to common strategies of self-representation.
These objects also
like the fabrics associated with royal bodies, either
as royal garments or in the time of death,
Tell us how these strategies
of self-representation were carefully conceived
and where in correspondence to long Mediterranean traditions,
they are not passive reflection of a multicultural society,
but active choices
of the ruling elite which refer to certain ideas of power
and were understandable to the viewers of the time.
The second, historiographical trend
apparently in opposition with the first one,
but only apparently, has been the homogenization.
Religion has been used as a flattening explanatory element
of a diverse cultural production interaction
and degrees of assimilation of different traditions.
Not all Islamic objects in Christian contexts,
whether churches or palaces, were part of spoils of wars,
although some of their were.
Different objects show us how
Different objects show us different possibility of reception,
and we cannot interpret them in the same way.
And we need to establish differences between an Ottoman flag
as we can see on the top part of the of the slide
coming from the siege of Vienna.
And it it's completely different from a silk of the Alhambra
on the bottom part highly appreciated in their time
traded diffused and given as a gift at the end of the Middle Ages.
In the same way this Alhambra's silk cannot be appreciated
and used in the same way as the elaborate casket
that were used to complete the back of the relic casket
that have been remade in the 14th century,
and I'm presenting here the so-called casket of the Bienaventuranzas
today at the archeological museum in Madrid.
The perception of the other
and its representation also had many nuances.
Muslims were not always the enemy,
and when they were the enemy, they were not always
animalized or
characterize as
as a unworthy enemy. Among other things,
we have to take into account the direct knowledge, interaction
and balance of political and economic power around the Mediterranean
between the various political powers.
On the left
part of the slide we can see a corbel
of the Cathedral of Burgos from the 14th century,
which has been identified with the representation
of the chivalric story of Florence, Blanca, Fleur and Blanchefleur,
a story of love and conversion
that circulated widely in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.
But in the context of the reign of Alfonso
the 11th, when this corbel was made
in Castile,
it acquires a very clear connotation
related to the military campaigns of conquest of the king.
On the right side of the slide, we have Bellini's
portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, around 1480,
which was actually a result of the commercial
and diplomatic ties between Venice and Constantinople.
We can see the difference between the representation
of the Muslim, of the enemy, of the ally.
We have different nuances and they need to be contextualized
On the other side of the spectrum we have the defeated Turk
presented by Valdés Leal in this painting on the left
and on the same
period, more or less
than the Muslims in the Battle of Higueruela
represented on the right.
And we can see how there are two different kind of Muslims
in the battle of Higueruela.
represented here in the
in the Escorial
because some of them belonged to the Christian Army, as some of them
were part of the personal guard of the Castilian king.
Thus not always the enemy, sometimes also the ally.
Beyond fragmentation
and homogenization a third element must be taken
into account when analyzing all these issues
related to the role of Islam
and its material legacy in
in Europe, which is the construction
of different national narratives.
Evidently the
reassessing
of the Islamic past in countries
that today maintain a majority of Muslim population
is not the same as the one in the countries
with a majority of Christian population.
On the other hand, also
in the later countries, different
narratives have been developed around the Islamic past.
Sometimes these narratives have been based on the idea of exclusion,
considering the Islamic period of al-Andalus and Sicily as sometimes
completely alien to history of the nation of Spain and Italy.
They have created narratives of conquest, of continuous confrontation
about absolute otherness,
and they have made it very difficult to value and to understand
the material culture of those periods.
On other occasions,
opposing narratives have been configuring.
Terms such as coexistence convivencia,
the idea of the three cultures are still frequently used today
although specialists
are very skeptical about about this
this terminology.
This terminology is complicated
because it wears the risk of
falling into simplistic interpretations.
There are works, for example, such as the Alcazar of Seville,
which shows the subtle complexities
of the scientific, diplomatic, artistic, philosophical,
political relationship between Castile and al-Andalus.
But, within this perspective
of the three cultures of the convivencia,
these complexities are often reduced
to the idea of admiration of the King towards the Alhambra, for example,
admiration, emulation, fascination.
Those are terms that are frequently applied indiscriminately
to explain works such as this Alcazar of Seville, and that are wildly
vague and do not help
to understand the historical context
and refer to an Orientalist interpretative framework
how this process of artistic transfer happened?
which meanings the different artworks conveyed?
how perception of the material legacy of Islam in Europe
changed throughout different centuries?
Those are the questions that we tried to develop throughout this course
of material Islamic legacy in Europe.
Thank you very much.