Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

22 Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность. Т. 1 Секция I class shifted its main interests southward. The island of Cyprus was seized thanks to an astute matrimonial policy and a long season of renovated diplomatic connections was inaugurated, linking Venice to Mamluk Cairo, Aleppo, and Damascus 1 . Nevertheless, the northeastern route, leading to the Black Sea and, ultimately, to CentralAsia, never lost its crucial significance in the mentality and cultural framework of theVenetian elites 2 . Pragmatic as theywere, the latter were not interested in re-visiting a past Golden Age, when merchants sailed to Tana/Azov and from there, following in Marco Polo’s footsteps, departed for the fabulous Cathay, through steppes inhabited by Turkic peoples and rivers omitted by Ptolemaic maps. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, far from arousing nostalgic memories of the city-state’s medieval power, the knowledge accumulated bymerchants and travelers in their centuries-long acquaintance of the Ponto-Caspian area became an essential reference point in shaping Venice’s political and diplomatic intelligence beyond the ever-threatening Ottoman Empire 3 . Since both its own economic fortune and the very existence of its state depended largely on the relationship with the Ottoman central government and provincial authorities, the Republic’s ruling class placed considerable importance on information concerning the Empire in its broader sense, including those aspects that might be less evident and more difficult to understand, such as the links connecting the Ottomans to “the other Turks”, i. e. the diversified spectrum of Turkic and non-Turkic peoples beyond the Ottoman eastern frontier. The Venetian government nourished the same investigative attitude towards the Safavid court, knowing that instability eastward generally meant peace in the Mediterranean. Since the motivation of such investigations derived from the same political necessity, the Venetian reports on both the Uzbeks and the Safavids had the tendency to establish an analogy between these two peoples as well as among any state located around the Caspian Sea: from the Venetian perspective, behind the different color of the respective turbans was hidden a potential Tamerlane, capable of defeating and humiliating the Ottoman Sultan. In spite of this heavy ideological limitation, which inspired invented genealogies providing Timurid origins to most Ponto-Caspian dynasties, the Venetian secret ambassadors and travelers to Persia, such as Michele Membré, reported precise information concerning the fight over Khorasan in 1510 that had seen the Shiite Safavids ( qızılbaş ) opposed to the Sunni Uzbeks ( yeşilbaş ) (Membre 1542) 4 . 1 B. Arbel. Venetian Cyprus and the Muslim Levant, 1474–1570 // Cyprus and the Cru- sades. Nicosia, 1995 . P. 159–186; F. Rossi (ed.). Ambasciatastraordinaria al sultanod’Egitto (1489–1490). Venezia, 1988. 2 G. Bellingeri. Venice and Central Asia after Marco Polo: Some Notes // S. Pagani (ed.). Italo-Uzbek Scientific Cooperation inArchaeology and Islamic Studies:An Overview. Roma, 2003. P. 197–268. 3 Ibid. 4 M. Membré. Relazione di Persia (1542). Manoscritto inedito dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia, pubblicatoda G. R. Cardona. Napoli, 1969.