The author of this book, William Lithgow, a man who lived in the 16th century, famed for his journeys on foot across various parts of the world, including Spain, Turkey, France, and Egypt. Lithgow seems to have started his travels at a very early age, having 'a large infusion of the wandering spirit common to his country-men.' He claims that his 'painful feet traced over (beside my passages of Seas and Rivers) thirty-six thousand and odd miles, which draws near to twice the circumference of the whole Earth.'
He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest – and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. Now, in this first new major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook traces the adventurer’s astonishing exploits across three continents, testing Smith’s own writings against the historical and geographical reality on the ground. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England’s arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.
This volume investigates how the peace and trade agreements, better known as capitulations, regulated Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. As one of the many non-Muslim groups that made up Ottoman society, Catholic communities were scattered around the Empire, from the Hungarian plains to the Aegean Islands and Palestine. Besides the more famous cases of the French capitulations of 1604 and 1673, this work explores the evolution of often ignored religious privileges granted by the Ottoman sultans to the Catholic rulers of Venice, the Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania, as well as to the Protestant Dutch Republic and Orthodox Russia. While focused on the seventeenth century, precedents of the fifteenth century and later developments in the eighteenth century are also considered. This volume shows that capitulations essentially addressed the presence and religious activities of Catholic laymen and clerics and the status of churches. Furthermore, it demonstrates that European translations, the primary sources of previous scholarly works, offered a flawed perspective over the status of Catholics under Muslim rule. By drawing heavily on both original Ottoman-Turkish texts and previously unpublished archival material, this volume is an ideal resource for all scholars interested in the history of Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.
Against the backdrop of England's emergence as a major economic power, the development of early modern capitalism in general and the transformation of the Mediterranean, Maria Fusaro presents a new perspective on the onset of Venetian decline. Examining the significant commercial relationship between these two European empires during the period 1450–1700, Fusaro demonstrates how Venice's social, political and economic circumstances shaped the English mercantile community in unique ways. By focusing on the commercial interaction between Venice and England, she also re-establishes the analysis of the maritime political economy as an essential constituent of the Venetian state political economy. This challenging interpretation of some classic issues of early modern history will be of profound interest to economic, social and legal historians, and provides a stimulating addition to current debates in imperial history, especially on the economic relationship between different empires and the socio-economic interaction between 'rulers and ruled'.
Drawing on texts written by and about European and Euro-American captives in a variety of languages and genres, Lisa Voigt explores the role of captivity in the production of knowledge, identity, and authority in the early modern imperial world. The practice of captivity attests to the violence that infused relations between peoples of different faiths and cultures in an age of extraordinary religious divisiveness and imperial ambitions. But as Voigt demonstrates, tales of Christian captives among Muslims, Amerindians, and hostile European nations were not only exploited in order to emphasize cultural oppositions and geopolitical hostilities. Voigt's examination of Spanish, Portuguese, and English texts reveals another early modern discourse about captivity--one that valorized the knowledge and mediating abilities acquired by captives through cross-cultural experience. Voigt demonstrates how the flexible identities of captives complicate clear-cut national, colonial, and religious distinctions. Using fictional and nonfictional, canonical and little-known works about captivity in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas, Voigt exposes the circulation of texts, discourses, and peoples across cultural borders and in both directions across the Atlantic.
'Imagining Sex' examines a variety of material from 17th century England to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it usually subject to suppression. The book explores contemporary thinking on these issues and wider cultural concerns.
This book deals with popular Orthodoxy during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, approaching the material from a historical and anthropological perspective. The discussion takes as its starting point a letter of Leo Allatios, the seventeenth-century author and scriptor of the Vatican Library. The early chapters of the book focus on Allatios and the western intellectual background in which the work was written, while later chapters consider popular beliefs and practices surrounding childstealing demons, revenants, spirits of place and popular healing. This book provides the first detailed treatment of a major source for post Byzantine popular Orthodoxy, offering valuable insights into the relationships between laity and clergy, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, religion and natural philosophy during the seventeenth century.
