A Shared Taste? Material Culture and Intellectual Curiosity in the Habsburg Mediterranean

This chapter discusses the Habsburg Mediterranean as an “affective space” anchored in and shaped by the circulation of artefacts and the mobility of people. Across the imperial and religious divide, early modern Habsburg and Ottoman subjects cultivated—at least to a certain extent—shared aesthetics. I take a praxeological stance in order to reconsider what Andreas Reckwitz called “the relevance of aesthetic objects and experiences and their significance for moulding collective forms of perception and sensation.” The cross-cultural appreciation of ornaments and artefacts, then, reveals a story that reaches beyond mere aesthetic similarities; such shared aesthetics, in fact, shall be considered as consequences of the movement of people and flow of goods engendered through the imperial ambassadorial household in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The imperial embassy (elçi han) in Istanbul, I argue, was a microcosm in which the Habsburg Mediterranean materialised in ways that connected the Holy Roman Empire with the material culture of the Ottoman Empire and the broader Mediterranean world. The study of Ottoman artefacts and their increasing circulation—facilitated through the milieu and cultural setting of the Habsburg embassy and its specific “atmospheres”—promoted a shared interest in ornaments, calligraphy and objects; taste that linked the material world of Ottoman cities such as Istanbul, Jerusalem or Cairo to equally important cultural sites in the German and Habsburg lands. It is in this particular interplay of travelling artefacts, shared spaces and practices of exchange, as well as patterns of sociability, that the sixteenth-century Habsburg Mediterranean emerged as an affective space.