Ottoman Legal Attitudes towards Diversity

Abstract

In 1484, the Senate of Venice dispatched one of its citizens, Giovanni Dario, as ambassador to the Court of Sultan Bayezid ii. An experienced diplomat, he had been appointed as ambassador to the sultan’s predecessor Mehmed ii five years before; on that occasion, Dario had to deal with the humiliating losses of a number of Venetian outposts, such as Scutari in Albania, and the rich colony of Negroponte in the Aegean, which had belonged for centuries to the Serenissima. After dealing with painful borderland issues during his first mission in Istanbul, Dario labored to prevent Ottoman involvement in Italian affairs pursuant to the war of Ferrara, which opposed the Papacy and his allies against Venice. During this episode of the Italian internecine wars, Pope Sixtus iv (1471– 84) went so far as to invoke the Ottoman assistance against Venice, and proceeded to excommunicate the Venetians. The Turks, it has to be noted, declined to receive the Pope’s ambassador to Istanbul on that occasion. In the context of these diplomatic intrigues, Dario attended numerous meetings with Ottoman dignitaries, the pashas, and as a result sent twentytwo dispatches reporting on his progress to the Doge and the Senate. In his missives, Dario addresses, among other subjects, a fair number of borderland issues, ranging from the enslavement of former Venetian subjects in regions recently lost to the Ottomans to the building of bridges across borderland watersides. It is in this context too that both the Venetian envoy and the pashas exchanged jokes about the excommunication imposed by Sixtus iv, and even about the news of the Pope’s death. On several occasions, Dario confesses having found amusement in these irreverent exchanges with the pashas: “the other day the pashas said to me that the new pope had not yet absolved them of his excommunication, and I answered that this was not necessary, since the