In the impressively researched and engagingly innovative Portraits of Empire, Robin D. Radway establishes the interpretive richness of alba amicorum as documents of early modern social media. She weaves together materials analysis, visual interpretation, and fine-grained textual evidence to delineate the social world of the “German” House, the residence of the Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople during the second half of the sixteenth century. The album amicorum (friendship album) or Stammbuch is an involuted historical object: a small bound volume typically assembled by an individual over years or decades and filled with the collected signatures of people encountered as well as images, adages, or other brief notations. Having assembled a source base of more than fifty albums containing some 4000 signatures (at least 1000 of which were collected at the ambassadorial residence), in addition to associated diplomatic dispatches, visual sources, and travel accounts, Radway reconstructs political and social networks, personal interactions, and projects of knowledge formation involving some 900 of the residency’s short- and longer-term male occupants. Capitalizing on the affordances of research in the digital era and the building blocks of previous Hungarian-, German-, Turkish-, and English-language scholarship, this monograph enlivens the field of early modern Habsburg–Ottoman cultural exchange and diplomacy through a skillful recuperation of historical subjects.

Radway’s deep interdisciplinarity is on display in a key chapter, “Making Albums in the German House,” which explores the production of alba amicorum at the residency. Identifying a “culture of borrowing” (75), she situates these complex albums in conversation with other contemporaneous assemblages, in particular print or manuscript costume books, collections in paper, and patchwork muraqqa. Through a nuanced examination of the albums’ material and visual elements, ranging from their decorated papers to the back-and-forth copying of images found in other print and manuscript formats, Radway makes a persuasive case for the co-constitutive production of these works in Constantinople through the direct or indirect involvement of Ottoman and Habsburg artists and artisans. Her findings are resonant with Aaron Hyman’s concept of the conforming copy, in which filiation between source and copy is of secondary importance (Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America [Los Angeles, 2021]). Here, Radway shows that the entangled network is also fundamental to reconceptualizing the modes of artistic expression in a complex global early modernity.

Subsequent chapters focus on different groups of album compilers: ambassadors, staff, scholars, and visiting noblemen. Each album is read as an individualized collection, offering insights into men such as Sebastian Plan, kitchenmaster, whose album epitomizes the view “from ‘below’” (148) of the busy world of the Ottoman capital; messenger Hans Joachim Prack von Asch, whose album interlaces texts and scenes of more intimate daily life along his route to and from Constantinople; and, among the better-known, the Lutheran theologian Stephan Gerlach, whose diary and album reveal his careful separation of sociability and information gathering. In many of these snapshot studies, Radway grapples with the challenge of interpreting evidence as eyewitness observation or indexicality, although the limitations of the evidence leave some questions unanswered.

The rhetorical, political, and military weakness of the Habsburgs vis-à-vis the Ottomans during the sixteenth century has been well established, yet Radway demonstrates that there is still much to uncover about interimperial diplomatic dynamics in the crucial years of the permanent Habsburg embassy between the 1568 Treaty of Edirne and the beginning of the Long War in 1593. Habsburg officials’ subordinate position was marked not only by their annual tribute payment but also by the location of the German House itself; they navigated this political challenge by recoding their ambassadorial identities as Hungarian. This insight into the mutability of political identities is consequential for the history of Habsburg, Ottoman, Hungarian, and Transylvanian dynamics across a never-stable border.

The fine-grained analysis of alba amicorum also brings the polyvalence of Habsburg’s imperial identity to the fore. While recognizing that the ambassadorial residence was never only or always known as the “German House” (32), Radway employs this term throughout, situating it in relation to later definitions of Germanness (10). However, as Radway notes, the alba and other residency records deploy language, hometown, and costume to signal affiliation. The presence of these identity markers suggests that understandings of the late medieval natio might also be worth considering. Nationes were porous, flexible impermanent collectivities of merchants, churchmen, and university scholars. Indeed, in elevating the alba amicorum’s value as a source for investigations of individual and collective identities, Portraits of Empires has opened up precisely these sorts of fresh questions about the strength, malleability, and durability of social, political, and cultural networks beyond the demands of diplomatic exigency.