Correcting Europe's error: Venetian cosmopolites on Turkish 'literature'

After serving four years as Venice's head ambassador to the Ottoman Turks, Giovanni Battista Dona published a brief treatise titled Della Letteratura de' Turchi (1688). Under the rubric of "literature," it guided the reader through the largely unknown terrain of Turkish learning, documenting the nation's advances in the arts, letters, and sciences. The treatise -- the first known of its kind -- spawned a revisionist thread as more writers took up Dona's core aim: overturning the entrenched "error" among many Europeans who continued to believe the Turks were immersed in ignorance. Roughly one-hundred years later, another Venetian by the name of Giambattista Toderini wrote a longer treatise with a slightly altered title, Letteratura turchesca (1787).;This dissertation explores what Dona, Toderini, and others hoped to gain by correcting Europe's longstanding "error." I argue that their turn to "literature" is best understood as a "cosmopolitan" endeavor. To understand what cosmopolitan means, the dissertation explores scholarly contributions, and examines past observers of the Turks at the intersection of ideas and practices.;"Literature" was a central component of the cosmopolitan perspective or ethos exhibited by those at the heart of this study. Because "literature" is also part of our own linguistic and conceptual world, I seek to problematize it throughout this dissertation by placing it historical context. In this way we can better grasp how contemporaries used and understood it. While "literature" was a comprehensive category (meaning it included a range of topics, from philosophy and morality, to poetry and scientific subjects), the writers explored here particularly admired the aesthetic side of "literature" -- sometimes rendered as "beautiful letters." In this realm, they lauded the eloquence of the Turkish language and the moral sentiments embedded in it.;Such interests coincided with what Dona, Toderini, and others were more willing to take away from the Turks. These were interests that stood at a slight remove from Islamic texts and doctrines. Though Venetian writers questioned the legitimacy of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, this did not hinder them from seeking out other, more "secular" areas of Turkish learning, where, they believed, Europeans had much to learn.