Glass Bridges: Cross-Cultural Exchange between Florence and the ...

while travelling, as well as Bonsignore’s memoirs written years afterwards at the
request of a friend, all still preserved in the Biblioteca Nazaionale of Florence, there
is a wealth of information on the Florentines living in Adrianople, Constantinople and
Bursa.
Adrianople was one of their stops during the land journey. Until 1458, this city
used to be the capital of the Ottoman Turks. It was considered an important trading
centre for cloth and there were several Florentine agents present in this city to
extend hospitality to Michelozzi and his companions. 40 An aspect of the city that
caught his attention was the sultan’s garden where the Florentines were allowed to
indulge in the Italian ‘sport’ of bird catching. Bonsignore mentioned Fra Biagio, an
active Franciscan missionary who was chaplain to the Florentine colony in
Adrianople. 41 This exemplifies the issue of freedom of worship, which was at the core
of extraterritoriality in the Ottoman Empire. Each legate had a church or a chapel
where he and his staff could worship freely and each ambassador and consul had
legal jurisdiction over his ‘nation’. No other state employed such a sweeping
extraterritoriality until well after the religious wars of the sixteenth century, which
aided in quelling the notion of universal law. This idea became an axiom of
diplomacy in Western Europe thereafter. 42
More importantly, the presence of such facilities indicate that Florentines
were very much able to create a home away from home in a space that had been
perceived as hostile to their own cultural and religious practices but obviously was
not. Bonsignore also gave an account of a conversation with a Turk concerning
‘Turkish law and the relative merits of Christianity and Mohammedanism’ 43 .
Presumably ‘Modammedanism’ refers to Islam. Bernardo, on the other hand, was
engaged in a hunt for books and texts, specifically those owned by the Greek colony.
This was a major preoccupation of travelers to the Ottoman Empire. Bernardo details
his attempts, both frustrating and successful, in procuring Greek texts of good quality
at reasonable prices. Given the fascination with classical history among humanists in
Florence, this was understandable.
From Adrianople, they travelled onto Constantinople. Their first month in
Constantinople involved a sightseeing agenda presumably typical of a traveler to the
city. Bernardo visited the Hippodrome, then used by the Turks as an exercise yard
for their horses and copied the Greek inscriptions and made Latin translations of
40 Borsook 1973, p. 157.
41 Ibid, p. 158.
42 Goffman 2002, p. 187.
43 Ibid.
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