On Cosmopolitanism
In all three moments of disintegration, the breakdown in commercial relations is at the same time a moment of cultural separation.[483] But these are the exceptional moments in Mediterranean history.
The inland sea is better known, perhaps even renowned, for a vibrant commercial life which has never been stymied by ethnic, linguistic and religious boundaries. This multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-linguistic commercial tradition is at the heart of the Mediterranean’s famous ‘cosmopolitanism’, a word that is used by popular and academic historians of the region alike.The scholarly discussion on Mediterranean cosmopolitanism is multifaceted and wide-ranging but at its heart is the historical experience of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious port cities of the central and eastern Mediterranean. Which cities, exactly, and how far back the concept extends - does it predate the nineteenth century? - is an essential part of the debate. A powerful dose of nostalgia is wrapped up with the notion of cosmopolitanism; the port-cities, it is imagined, were places of ‘urbaneness, refinement, and inter-cultural co-existence and conviviality’.[484]
In part as a reaction to this romantic strain, scholars have pushed back hard and worked to look at cosmopolitanism more critically. Merchants, diplomats, travellers, pirates and intermediaries of all sorts have always been the quintessential cosmopolitan figures of the Mediterranean world, precisely because they are boundary-crossers. One of the most important new interpretive frameworks to emerge in recent years is the argument that intermediaries not only crossed boundaries, they were instrumental in their creation and their maintenance. This also means that cosmopolitan figures did not dissolve boundaries but, in fact, were dependent upon them for their survival.[485] It was Natalie Rothman’s 2012 book Brokering empire: Trans-imperial subjects between Venice and Istanbul that first made this argument and subsequent work on boundary crossers has proved to be equally fruitful.[486]
As Venetian supremacy broke down, the Venetians had to accept the participation of Ottoman subjects in the trade between the Serenissima and the eastern Mediterranean.
Different terms for the variety of Ottomans who showed up in Venice began to make their appearance in the documents produced by the state bureaucracy. Rothman traces the history of the word ‘Levantini’ in Venetian commercial discourse. Originally applied by the state to a specific group of merchants - the diasporic Sephardi Jews coming from the Ottoman Empire - it came to encompass all Ottoman merchants trading in Venice. As part of its linguistic travels, it went from a focus on diasporic commercial activity to a term that referred to a specific group of people, of presumed provenance and particular character traits, the ‘Levantini’ who were the ‘Natives or Inhabitants of the Levant, the Eastern People’.[487] Crucially, this unfolded with the enthusiastic participation of those merchants and fortuneseekers from the eastern Mediterranean who at times were keen to present themselves as ‘Levantini’ to the authorities, while at other times they rejected the term for themselves but insisted that it should be applied to others. Whichever position they took, their role ‘underscores the important mediation performed by those claiming to be “in-between” in the process of articulating categories of difference and developing metropolitan practices of boundary-marking and boundary crossing’.[488] Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became a cosmopolitan city; that is, it attracted foreign merchants of widely varying religious, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. They certainly co-existed but their co-existence was marked less by conviviality and refinement, as the nostalgia industry would have it, but rather by an incessant process of boundary making and remaking.Francesca Trivellato makes similar points about the famously cosmopolitan city of Livorno in the early modern period.[489] Sephardi Jews were encouraged to settle in the city and were offered extraordinary privileges as inducement. As a result, the Jewish community in Livorno emerged as the second largest Sephardic settlement, after Amsterdam, in Europe.[490] Nevertheless, this relentlessly commercial society was fully conscious of differences between Jews and non-Jews and boundaries were carefully policed, both by state authorities and by community leaders.
In fact, Trivellato argues, it was the clarity of such boundaries that allowed economic cooperation to flourish.[491] The famously protean character of Mediterranean boundary crossers, she warns, should not be exaggerated. Everyone, including the Medici, understood that the Sephardi habit of using Christian pseudonyms when trading with merchants in Iberia was ‘a conventionally accepted fiction used to bypass legal restrictions’.[492] It did not mean that Sephardi merchants were uncertain in their religious identity.One of the debates around Mediterranean cosmopolitanism concerns the relationship between early modern cosmopolitanism (the two cases discussed here) and the (mostly Ottoman) cities of the nineteenth century. The scholars working on these two periods tend to write from different traditions and are rarely in conversation with each other. Bringing them together would be an exciting and worthwhile project to explore as we think about the future of Mediterranean history. Such a collaboration would also have the great benefit of bridging one of the most intractable divides in the field, namely the chasm between the early modern and the modern Mediterranean.