Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

This chapter explores ideals and practices of turning classical histories into political lessons for the present, focusing on a number of individuals who translated the histories of Tacitus into Spanish, while they also served their king as soldiers, counsellors and informants. All testified about the practical value of Tacitus in the present, as they struggled with the internal contradictions and the fact that their author had produced the texts many centuries ago, in a different, pagan world. The counsel of historical experience was tirelessly advocated in reason-of-state discourse, and this chapter shows that the call was answered in practice as the Tacitists in various capacities engaged with the problem of the Dutch Revolt. The chapter argues that although they were well aware of change, they had no scruples in using anachronism and historical analogies, or using the ancients as rhetorical tools to express their ideas and further their political aims. Memorials and pieces of counsel were written from the perspective of events from recent history and could effortlessly be placed alongside Tacitean phrases. Yet the ancient past was also a safe space that could be used to criticize present policies or express warnings, without infringing on the domain of Providence.

This chapter introduces the distinctive character of Spanish reason of state and gives a sense of its broader contribution to the study of political thought. It develops the relationship between reason of state and history, and outlines the relevance of reason of state to recent work on the early modern uses of the past, developments in early modern historical scholarship and methods of coping with so-called ‘information overload’. This chapter introduces how this book explores reason of state in a number of theoretical and practical contexts in the seventeenth-century Spanish monarchy, by focusing on individuals who used the act of organizing information – drawn from classical and recent history, their own experience and analyses of current circumstances – to rhetorically present the condition of necessity. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the paradox that although reason of state as a discourse was closely entwined with political practice, no attempt has been made to systematically trace how the discourse functioned in political action. It also points out that Spain tends to be left out of discussions of seventeenth-century political thought, arguing that the Spanish monarchy’s context is especially valuable for advancing the historiography on the interaction between political ideas and concrete contexts.

Chapter 2 explores the politics of history in wartime Venice, focusing on the processes of documentation and representation that articulated the meaning of war in official and popular accounts. It charts how the two state historiographers, Michele Foscarini and Pietro Garzoni, incorporated the war into the official narrative of the Republic and patrician image-making. It then provides a detailed overview of popular histories, with emphasis on the political and commercial imperatives that determined their publication. Finally, it considers the role of censorship and shows how official historiography became a site of contestation between competing elite groups. The chapter argues that state-sponsored and popular histories compel us to rethink the colonial conditions of the production of Venetian historical sources and the close relationship between historical discourse and overseas empire-building.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

The generative power of war and its centrality to the production of culture lie at the heart of this book. Despite the common perception that these two spheres of human activity are polar opposites, in reality they have always been linked by a shared history. In the opening chapter of his Istoria, Pietro Garzoni cited Lucian of Samosata to argue that ‘war is the mother of histories’. In his celebrated treatise How to Write History, the Roman satirist recalled Heraclitus’s dictum that war ‘is the father of all things’ to mock the proliferation of contemporary war historians and stress the links between warfare and pathological history writing.1 What lies beneath this bellicose conception of historiography is the wider idea that human civilisation is inseparable from war and organised violence. In many ways, the same notion seems to be present in Walter Benjamin’s provocative thesis that ‘there is no document of civilisation that is not a document of barbarism’.

This chapter explores ideas about orthodoxy and powerful necessity in Spanish Counter-Reformation reason-of-state discourse. Individual authors engaged in describing pragmatic politics and ways of imagining how to put these into practice, while simultaneously taking care to avoid association with Machiavelli. Through translations of Lipsius’ Latin Politica into the Spanish and Italian vernaculars, the chapter first shows how the translators explored ways to square Lipsius’ thought with the Christian-Ciceronian framework endorsed by Catholic orthodoxy. Lipsius recovered the concept of necessity that Machiavelli had reshaped into necessità, and enlisted it once more as a force that could legitimately overrule human law. The chapter then traces how authors in the Spanish monarchy subsequently conceived of necessity as a concept or tool that could legitimize amoral political behaviour, especially in the discussion about deceit. Necessity depended on circumstances that were impossible to define in advance, and this made it orthodox yet flexible. Both the translators and the authors of ‘true’ reason of state experimented with organizing knowledge and (historical) information, and its potential for creating meaning and legitimizing amoral political behaviour, as they tailored a language of reason of state that was both orthodox, and suited to the realities of the present.

As elite Ottoman Bosnians belonged to multiple places, the pilgrimage equally belonged to their native society. Even though going on the Hajj was an unreachable goal for most Ottoman Bosnians, the pilgrimage was deeply embedded in society in a variety of ways. Its presence in the imagination as well as the emotional and spiritual attachment to it were continuously nurtured, not only through the social prestige that returning Hajjis accrued through the coveted title of Hajji, but also, and even more persistently, in the way in which textual and visual material mediated believers’ aspiration to the sacred. Depictions of Mecca and Medina in manuscripts called dalā’il al-khayrāt circulated in great numbers, bringing an almost palpable presence of the sacred places into Bosnian homes and cultivating believers’ devotion to the Prophet in domestic settings. Other material objects from the Hijaz helped to nurture not only the emotional, but also the sensorial connection: perfumes, oils and eye make-up were some of the most desirable items that Hajjis brought from the pilgrimage. Some material objects linked believers to both the holy places and the other world – for example, the shroud (ihram, the cloth also worn by pilgrims), as well as the outer cover (ćuburtija) were directly connected to the performance of the pilgrimage and the cycle of life.

Apart from figuring in material culture, the pilgrimage was made visible to local Bosnians in the annual succession of farewell and greeting ceremonies for Hajjis. The flow of Hajjis from Bosnia was not steady throughout the Ottoman period, and the numbers varied according to factors beyond the control of individual believers: wars, plague and Bedouin raids on pilgrim caravans all affected the physical mobility of the Hajjis and shaped the expectations of Bosnian Muslims. The rich and the learned were more likely to go to the Hijaz, but, as we will see, those less privileged also managed to travel great distances and emerge from the depths of anonymity thanks to that feat.

One of the main sources for retracing the paths of Ottoman Bosnians is the mecmua (collection of texts, scrapbook) of Mula Mustafa Bašeskija (1731– 1809).

Many Hajjis describe the summon at Mount Arafat, the crucial mount and place of a major Hajj rite, as a foretaste of Judgement Day. The heat and the vast mass of people in one place often provoke feelings of belonging to a wide unified body of believers, whose numbers and strength in their eyes represents an untapped human potential, a pool of unbreakable solidarity and a firm link between all Muslims. Hasan Ljubunčić, one member of a tiny Yugoslav group of Hajjis travelling in 1949, was not overly impressed by this idea. The difference between Muslims was stark at Arafat: Turkish Hajjis meticulously pondered over every single detail of the ritual and marvelled at the things that the Yugoslavs told them about freedom of religion in their homeland, raising their hands in prayer for the long life of Marshal Tito. Indonesians tearfully recounted their struggles against the colonisers and asked for help. Ljubunčić dejectedly thought how the mission of gathering all Muslims in Mecca for the purpose of knowing and learning from each other had somehow failed, since to him it seemed that it only served to support the poor in this desert region.

The Hajjis were invited to a dinner at King Ibn Saud’s court. The instructions for the attendance were clear: the guests were asked not to request songs or music, and they were to abstain from giving speeches. The dinner was served in ‘European style’ yet simple: whole roasted sheep and turkeys, with cold water for drinks. Hasan Ljubunčić noted the high-ranking guests that flocked around the king: one of them was Amin al-Husseini (1895–1974), a former Palestinian mufti who, as the author recalled, had helped with forming the infamous Handžar division in Bosnia during the Nazi occupation. Ljubunčić added that the Yugoslavs had extremely bad memories of al-Husseini.

Just a few days later, the Yugoslav Hajjis were attending the Eid reception at the king’s court. Waiting in the tent in the courtyard, the Hajjis were sipping lemonade in the scorching heat.

Ottoman Bosniaks had a firm and lasting attachment to places within the traditional Islamic geography. The connection was physical and directed to multiple spaces. Let us take the example of the famous seventeenth-century Sufi scholar ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī (1593–1644). If a careful observer visits his tomb in Konya – hidden within a residential area, close to a hairdresser salon, a restaurant and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s tomb and mosque – they can see a sign erected in 2007, briefly describing al-Būsnawī’s lifepath. In green letters, the sign presents the major points of al-Būsnawī’s biography: he was a scholar, a Sufi devotee and an interpreter of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Bezels of Wisdom) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī’s (1207–73) Mathnawi. He was born in Bosnia, spent time in Egypt, Damascus and the Hijaz, and died in Konya. His Arab students were proud of having learned from him, and he left dozens of works. According to his will, the tomb’s inscription also reads that he carried the nisbas (names indicating belonging) of al-Būsnawī (Bosnian), al-Rūmī (Rūmī, from the lands of Rūm, a term that at this point encompassed Anatolia and the Balkans) and al-Bayrāmī, designating his local, cultural and spiritual leanings. ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī was, thus, a man of many places, ranging from the Balkans to the Hijaz, just like hundreds of his compatriots whose remains today are scattered across the modern-day nation-states of the Middle East, symbolising a long-forgotten mobility.

Beyond the physical, the connection was also emotional and imaginative, especially to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Ottoman Bosnian authors such as ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī penned treatises describing different facets of the holy: how places were made special through God’s love and mercy, how significant the presence of the Prophet Muhammad’s body was in Medina, and how it contained miraculous benefits for believers and visitors. In doing so, the Ottoman Bosnians joined the ranks of their scholarly predecessors and contemporaries, and they wrote for geographically diverse audiences. As the biographical dictionaries testify, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, many Bosnians were truly cosmopolitan through their participation in the scholarly and literary discourses of the age.

In the hot summer of 1981, two Bosnian women decided to go on the Hajj, driving a Volkswagen Beetle all the way to Mecca. One of them, Hidajeta, was a housewife, and the other, Safija, worked for Energoinvest, a gigantic energy corporation and the pride of the socialist Yugoslav state. The two pilgrims were friends; however, they were also bound by a subversive link: in their youth, both of them had been members of the women’s branch of the Young Muslim Movement, and in the late 1940s Safija had even spent several years in prison, for her political and social activities that were deemed unacceptable by the new post-World War II communist rule. By the time they decided to go on the Hajj, the Yugoslav communist leader Tito was no longer alive. The purges of the early decades seemed to belong to a different era. Yet, Safija thought it would be wise to keep quiet about her journey in order to avoid troubles at work: ‘We won’t hide but we won’t spread the news either’, she said. The journey by car – and not by plane or bus, as Yugoslav Hajjis were by then accustomed to – meant to mask their true intention and to present the trip as any other tourist adventure across the Middle East.

More than three decades later, Hidajeta’s children wanted to publish the diary in which she had jotted down the impressions and descriptions of her journey. Hidajeta was no longer alive, and Safija – in 2014 a lively octogenarian – decided to write an introduction and add photos to serve as documentation and means of remembrance. Hidajeta’s family printed the diary in several copies. Since the community knew me as a person working on Hajj narratives, I was given a copy which I reviewed in Preporod, a local religious biweekly newspaper, published in Sarajevo and distributed across Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora abroad. The review stirred great interest in the diary, which was not readily available to readers. Moreover, over the ensuing years, various stories about local pilgrims and curiosities regarding their travels continued to appear in the media, presenting a most popular topic especially during the Hajj season.