Biography

Federica Gigante is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. She is a historian of the material and intellectual exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe in the early modern period. She worked extensively on Islamic art collecting in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on Bologna, on which she wrote her PhD thesis jointly at the Warburg Institute and SOAS in 2017, soon to be published as a book (EUP). She has been doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and Koç University in Istanbul (RCAC) and worked for several years in a curatorial capacity at the University of Oxford, at the Ashmolean Museum and History of Science Museum, where she was in charge of Islamic scientific instruments.

Project Summary

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, thousands of North Africans, Turks, Berbers and Moriscos were enslaved and put to row on Italian galleys as a result of the skirmishes occurring in Mediterranean waters between Ottoman and Italian forces. They, however, were far from being mere captives. During the periods of non-navigation in winter months, in Genoa, Livorno, Civitavecchia, and Naples the slaves were allowed to work on their crafts and hold pop-up shops on land. In those, they sold goods, herbs and remedies and provided knowledge on their uses, functions and workings to the local Italian population. This was a widespread and yet seldom investigated phenomenon which fuelled the craze for all things Turkish among the Italian elite, replenished museums and cabinets of curiosities, and brought into Italy technological and medicinal practices from the Islamic world. Networks of exchange among scholars, collectors and physicians formed across the whole of Europe, often starting from and leading to the enslaved Muslims of Italian port towns, moving things and knowledge and setting the first roots of the European interest in Islamic culture and languages. This project aims to recover the pivotal role played by Muslim captives in the European encounter with Islamic culture and to offer a fresh and encompassing examination of the historical contributions of Muslim minorities to the rich fabric of Western culture.