The Renaissance Bazaar. How the East and Islam Influenced the West
We remember the not-so-distant controversies around the place of Islam in the European Renaissance. Jerry Brotton's book, The Renaissance Bazaar. How the East and Islam influenced the West, (The links that liberate, Paris, 246pages, 2011, 21euros), makes a major contribution to the history of what was the Renaissance. I publish below the preface that I wrote.
A wonderful journey through our history
" And if Europe did not owe its knowledge to Islam ? Under this catchy question, the columnist Roger Pol-Droit presented, in the prestigious World of Books (April 4, 2008), Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel. The Greek Roots of Christian Europe. With, by way of summary: The historian Sylvain Gouguenheim rejects the idea that the science of the Greeks was transmitted to the West by the Muslim world. “The conclusion of Roger-Pol Droit was without appeal: “ Contrary to what has been repeated crescendo since the 1960s, European culture, in its history and its development, does not owe much to Islam. In any case, nothing essential. Precise, well-argued, this book which puts history back on time is also very courageous. »
Roger-Pol Droit thus brushed aside all the knowledge accumulated over half a century to revive a thesis that he himself defends in his opuscule The West explained to everyone (Seuil, 2008) and that one can thus condense: the division of the world between West and East dates back to ancient Greece, and for a thousand years there has been an eternal confrontation between two conceptions of the world.
For Gouguenheim too, “ During the Middle Ages, two civilizations faced each other. One combined the Greek heritage and the message of the Gospels, the scientific spirit and rootedness in a religious tradition of which the Church wanted to be the guarantor. The other was a daughter of the Book of God, of the uncreated Book. It was fundamentally anchored to its central axis, the Koran: everything that unfolds in time renews the original matrix of the eternal suras. " What supports this argument is an hallucination, that of a Muslim world petrified in the Koran, unable to evolve, to access the scientific spirit, deeply separated from " we “, as would prove, still according to Gouguenheim, September 11.
This thesis, far from being brave », has been peddled since at least the middle of the 19th century by a number of European thinkers, in particular Ernest Renan. It took a botox hit at the beginning of the 21st century in certain academic circles, scholarly Islamophobia relaying a popular Islamophobia which is feeding a populist far-right wave and infecting the parties of the traditional right and, sometimes, of the left. The bestseller by Thilo Sarrazin, member of the executive board of the German central bank and of the Social Democratic Party, Germany is running to its loss, testified to this. " I would not like, wrote this “socialist”, that the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren be largely Muslim, that people speak mainly Turkish and Arabic there, that the women be veiled and that the rhythm of the day is determined by the calls of the muezzin. »
Bazaar Renaissance, by Jerry Brotton, is not a direct response to these controversies. It does not aim to demonstrate that the Renaissance was the result of Muslim or Oriental influence alone. He claims to belong to another school of thought, that of global history, which tries to define the interactions between the different regions of the world and not to isolate Europe from the rest of the planet. study outside the commercial, financial and cultural relations between the two shores of the Mediterranean which have mutually stimulated each other.
The concept of the Renaissance, Brotton recalls, was invented in the 19th century and first by the French historian Jules Michelet, who summarizes: " … The discovery of the world, the discovery of man. The sixteenth century, in its great and legitimate expansion, goes from Columbus to Copernicus, from Copernicus to Galileo, from the discovery of the earth to that of the sky. The man refounded himself there (History of France, Volume ninth, Jean de Bonnot, 1878). And it was, of course, in France that the Renaissance appeared. It represented for this nationalist historian a break with the dark age of the Middle Ages, a victory for the ideas of Reason, Truth, Art and Beauty. If Michelet invented a definition of the Renaissance, it was the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt who made the definitive portrait of it as an Italian phenomenon of the 15th century, which would have allowed the " creation of the modern individual " She was " the birthplace of the modern world created by Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and characterized by the revival of classical culture ".
This vision, like that of the Englishman Walter Pater (1873), has shaped our imagination and led us to understand the Renaissance not as a historical period (each of the three thinkers we have cited places it at a different time !), but as a " mind », a spirit that seems to define the ideal of these intellectuals for the 19th century more than the historical reality.
" One of the problems with these classic Renaissance definitions, Brotton notes, is that they celebrate the achievements of European civilization to the exclusion of all others. It is no coincidence that the period when the term was coined was also the moment in history when Europe most aggressively proclaimed its imperialist dominance over the globe. »
However, exchanges with the Ottoman Empire profoundly modified tastes and possibilities in the west of the continent and contributed to the birth of the modern world. Imports from the Orient covered a wide range of products, from spices to cotton, from satin to carpets, from tulips to porcelain and horses, pigments, etc. " The palette of painters has also been expanded » and this enrichment has « brought to Renaissance paintings the bright blues and reds that characterize them It was Arab and Islamic trade practices that spread, and imposed Indo-Arabic numerals, the use of the comma, the signs of addition (+), subtraction (-) and multiplication (x). The bazaars of Cairo, Aleppo and Damascus have " literally modeled the architecture of Venice ".
Not only were objects from the Orient shown in the paintings (including Arabic inscriptions on the Virgin's clothes), but the painters themselves, like the artist Costanzo da Ferrara, traveled to Istanbul and reported patterns, inspired by Ottoman and Persian traditions. Flows in the scientific field, especially from East to West, were no less dense.
Even the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was viewed with moderation by many Christians, and in the following years Venice and Vienna entered into agreements with the Sublime Porte.
This period of the 15th-16th centuries was therefore that of a tremendous commercial and financial boom, of a breathtaking dynamism of which all the protagonists were aware. It was the breeding ground of humanism which was part of this era where enrichment, power and the lure of gain were glorified. The very down-to-earth concerns of humanists are highlighted by the Italian writer Petrarch, who advocated both " the personal quest for philosophical truth and the pragmatic ability to operate effectively in society through rhetoric and persuasion ". And the students of the new colleges should not hesitate to put this rhetoric and this persuasion at the service of power, whatever it may be. One of the most famous humanists, Guarino of Verona (1374-1460), founder of a famous school, explained thus: Everything the prince decrees must be accepted calmly and with the appearance of pleasure. Because those who can do it are dear to the rulers, ensure their fortune and that of their parents and obtain high promotions. »
Just as the founders of secularism at the turn of the 20th century did not attach importance to women, who were kept in the status of minors, so Renaissance men rarely omitted to explain that the " second sex could not claim to benefit from the new times. The Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti wrote in 1444: The small household affairs, I leave them to the good care of my wife. (…) It would earn us little respect if our wife bustled among the men outside, in the market, in full view of everyone. As for me, it would also seem a little humiliating to remain shut up in the house among the women, when I have to carry out men's activities, among men, my fellow citizens and eminent and remarkable foreigners. “And if women did have a Renaissance,” it was in general, writes Brotton, despite their humanist counterparts of the opposite sex ".
We cannot sum up Bazaar Renaissance. You have to let yourself be carried away by this long journey across seas and oceans, through cities and countries, by these unexpected encounters with admirable men and women with multicolored languages, curiosities and religions, who cooperated despite their many differences and who invented a new world. They all found their inspiration in this eastern Mediterranean bazaar that was " the true source of the European Renaissance », a bazaar reminiscent of the « global village in which we live today.
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Session 2: Migrations in the Mediterranean, with Claire Rodier (lawyer at the Immigrant Information and Support Group (GISTI) and founding member of the Euro-African network Migreurop).
Session 3: Mapping migrations in the Mediterranean with Philippe Rekacewicz (geographer, cartographer and journalist at Le Monde diplomatique).
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