Visual Memories of Life in Ottoman Istanbul

Visual Memories of Life in Ottoman Istanbul

29 June 2020
Mundy conceived of his writings and drawings as an aid to his ‘owne remembrance of things’.

By the turn of the seventeenth century British travellers had started to travel to the Ottoman Empire in order to write about it. One striking aspect of their printed books is that they are often sparsely illustrated. There are various reasons for this, the most important being the additional cost. Book illustrations, however, were not the only visual traces of British encounters and exchanges with the Ottomans. Occasionally we can find drawings and pictures in manuscript travelogues or references to such pictures in travellers’ wills: for example, Levant Company clerk John Sanderson doodled what seemed to be copies of Ottoman tughras, or calligraphic monograms into his commonplace book and left pictures that he had acquired in the Levant to his relatives.

Occasionally even richer visual sources survive. The Middle East department of the British Museum holds an Ottoman costume album with an inscription at the back stating ‘PM 1618.’[1] This album once belonged to the Cornish merchant Peter Mundy (1597-1667), who was stationed in Istanbul from 1617 to 1620. Mundy mentioned in his manuscript travel memoir Itinerarium Mundii[2] that he had bought the album to complement his own ‘course and coursary’ notes on the Ottoman capital, writing that ‘For severall habits used at Constantinople, where most officers and Nationes are distinguished by their habits, I have a little booke, only of that particular, painted by the Turcks themselves in Anno 1618, although no great art therein, yet enough to satisfie concerning that Matter.’ Ottoman costume albums have sometimes been interpreted as visual encyclopedias, which helped travellers and diplomats to navigate Ottoman society, indicating the differences between a janissary, a mufti or an ‘agiamoglan.’ However, there is evidence of similar books being purchased by travellers just before their departure back home, which would suggest that they functioned as mementoes or souvenirs.[3]

When considering the album in the context of Mundy’s rich legacy of writings and drawings – of which there are 117 in his Itinerarium – I would suggest that in addition to its possible ethnographic and memento functions, the little album participated in memorializing Mundy’s mobile life, just like his Itinerarium did. Even if the album’s images were not painted by Mundy himself, but made by an anonymous Ottoman artist, Mundy customised the book by writing on its blank pages and on top of its images, sometimes describing the Ottoman social types in the pictures. An example of this is the women of the ‘seraglio’, whose singing he claims to have heard all the way from his lodgings in Pera, as in the two folios on show. Some similarities can also be noticed with alba amicorum, a genre shaped by elite sociability and travel, reflecting Mundy’s aspirations for social advancement. In his Itinerarium Mundy conceived of his writings and drawings as an aid to his ‘owne remembrance of things’ and as a way to educate his ‘interested friends’ about foreign lands. Travel memoirs like his were social texts that aimed at preserving legacies. Conceived this way, the costume album’s images, similar to Mundy’s own drawings, the cut-out prints of Francis Drake and his ships, and the maps Mundy marked with his actual and intended itineraries, became entangled into a rich visual and textual memoir of his mobile life.

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum, A briefe relation of the Turckes, their kings, Emperors, or Grandsigneurs, their conquests, religion, customes, habbits, etc. Image used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

————————————
[1] M[undy], P[eter]. A briefe relation of the Turckes, their kings, Emperors, or Grandsigneurs, their conquests, religion, customes, habbits, etc. 1974-0617-0.13-49.r, Add. 23880. Or. 54. British Museum.

[2] Mundy, Peter. Itinerarium Mundii, MS Rawlinson A 315, Bodleian Library. See also Mundy, Peter. The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia. 1608-1667. Vol. I. Travels in Europe, 1608-1628 (1907). Edited by Lt.-Col. Sir Richard Carnac Temple, Bart.

[3] See ‘”Painted by the Turcks themselves”: Reading Peter Mundy’s Ottoman Costume Album in Context.’ In The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by Sussan Babaie and Melanie Gibson, 38-50. London: Gingko, 2017, 40-46. Kynan-Wilson has shown that apart from a few cases, Mundy correctly identifies the Ottoman social types and the text tends to follow the images, though not always. This would suggest that the images were already attached to the book following a hierarchical order.