Machiavelli, Islam and the East

This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli's work and the Islamic world, running from the Arabic roots of The Prince to its first translations into Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. It investigates comparative descriptions of non-European peoples, Renaissance representations of Müammad and the Ottoman military discipline, a Jesuit treatise in Persian for a Mughal emperor, peculiar readers from Brazil to India, and the parallel lives of Machiavelli and the bureaucrat Celalzade Mü-afá. Ten distinguished scholars analyse the backgrounds, circulation and reception of Machiavelli's writings, focusing on many aspects of the mutual exchange of political theories and grammars between East and West. A significant contribution to attempts by current scholarship to challenge any rigid separation within Eurasia, this volume restores a sense of the global spreading of books, ideas and men in the past. 

Lucio Biasiori is Balzan Prize Post-Doc Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. His research encompasses the cultural and religious history of early modern Europe. His last book is Nello scrittoio di Machiavelli. Il Principe e la Ciropedia di Senofonte (2017).  Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History (European and Extra-European, 1450-1800) at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at Exeter College. His research focuses on the Iberian world and Renaissance historiography. His most recent book is Indios, cinesi, falsari: Le storie del mondo nel Rinascimento (2016).

1 Introduction: Reorienting Machiavelli; Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci.- Part One - From Readings to Readers.- 2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli's Thought? The Prince and the Kitab sirr al-asrar from Baghdad to Florence and Back; Lucio Biasiori.- 3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War; Vincenzo Lavenia.- 4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians; Carlo Ginzburg.- Part Two - Religion and Empires.- 5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Müammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli;  Pier Mattia Tommasino.- 6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons from a Mughal Emperor; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.- 7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries); Giuseppe Marcocci.- Part Three - Beyond Orientalism.- 8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celalzade Mü-afá, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century; Kaya Sahin.- 9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World; Nergiz Yilmaz Aydogdu.- 10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean; Elisabetta Benigni.