In 2002, Tomáš Rataj's České země ve stínu půlměsíce: obraz Turka v raně novověké literatuře z českých zemí [“The Czech Lands in the Shadow of the Crescent: The Image of the Turk in Early Modern Writing in the Czech Lands”] was published in Prague. In this path-breaking work, Rataj listed 402 items produced by Czech printers (mostly in Czech, but also in German and Latin) from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century and discussed the whole range of that literature, dividing it into many different categories: news, polemics, sermons, poetry, and so on. There had been many studies of Western European perceptions of the Ottoman world, both national and general, but this was the first work to give an overall view of how Christendom's most powerful neighbor was viewed in the Czech lands.
Laura Lisy-Wagner's monograph begins by declaring its indebtedness to Rataj. It is primarily a text-focused work, and the texts in question are to be found mostly in three of Rataj's categories: travelogues, religious polemics, and didactic literature. But the use made of them here is strikingly different. Lisy-Wagner's special interest is in the various ways in which writing about the Ottoman or Muslim world could be used to imply or develop a particular sense of Czech identity—an identity formed in relation not only to Muslims, but also other religious or national communities closer to home.
Pride of place is given to travelers, from Jan Hasištejnský and Martin Kabátník in the late fifteenth century to Václav Vratislav and Kryštof Harant at the end of the sixteenth century (the first and last went on traditional pilgrimages to Jerusalem; the second also went there, but as a representative of the Hussite “Unity of Brethren” tasked with looking for pristine forms of religious life that had survived in the Holy Land; and the third traveled as a teenager in the retinue of the imperial ambassador to Istanbul and was imprisoned there in the early part of the “Long” Habsburg-Ottoman War). In each case, Lisy-Wagner finds intimations of Czech identity that disrupt any simple binary view of the world, whether Christian versus Muslim or Northern European versus Mediterranean. Of Hasištejnský, she writes that he draws “special links … between the Czech lands and the Balkans,” so that Bohemia “sits at the intersection” between the Mediterranean and Northern European worlds (31). Vratislav “both constructs difference between Czechs and other Christian Europeans and emphasizes similarity and togetherness with individual Ottomans” (71), whereas Harant portrays the Czechs as “connected both to the Ottomans and to the other Europeans, but not fully allied with either” (151).
Such claims depend on selecting from these texts quite small details that may not bear all the weight that is placed on them. Yes, Hasištejnský does give the Slav names of Croatian cities; but is this evidence of a belief in special links between the Czech lands and the Balkans, or just a simple consequence of his being a Slavic-speaker? True, Vratislav did have friendly relations with a janissary who worked for the imperial embassy; but does anything follow concerning his views about either Ottomans in general, or his own Czech identity? When he mentions that this janissary was especially kind to him because he was a Czech, the most likely explanation must be, again, linguistic: the janissary was probably a Serb or Croat who could communicate (approximately) with Czechs but not with Germans. The janissary's own sense of identity may be more at issue here than Vratislav's.
Although Lisy-Wagner exerts herself to find a peculiarly Czech thread running through these travelogues, her account of some of the other texts—humanist tracts on the Turks or religious polemics against Islam—emphasizes, correctly, that their authors drew on a common stock of Western European ideas and arguments. The mix of ingredients may have been adjusted, as she notes, according to confessional taste, but nothing very distinctive was added. Even Václav Budovec's linking of Socinianism and Islam in his Antialkorán [Against the Koran] (Prague, 1614), to which Lisy-Wagner draws special attention, was already a commonplace of polemical writing against anti-Trinitarianism in Central Europe.
The most distinctive chapter of this book concerns not texts but pots: the superb faience jugs, tankards, and plates made by the “Habani” or Anabaptists in Moravia, who developed a peculiar Czech fusion of Italian (maiolica) and Ottoman (İznik) styles. This topic is fascinating in itself, though a little difficult to integrate into the argument of the rest of the book. Lisy-Wagner speculates with due hesitancy about the aesthetic-religious thinking of the Habani themselves, but it is impossible to assess what meaning these pots may have had for their purchasers in the general public without being told much more about the circulation of Ottoman goods in the Czech lands. Seventeenth-century probate inventories for Kraków reveal widespread ownership of Ottoman decorative items, including ceramics; Lisy-Wagner tends to assume that the Czech lands were much less exposed to such cultural influences than Slovakia, which bordered the Ottoman Empire, but the more prosperous Czech cities were probably better served than the Slovak towns by the major trading route which ran from Istanbul to Kraków and beyond.
This book contains thoughtful accounts of some understudied texts and themes; its argument may be overextended in places, but it is always cautious and nondogmatic. Any readers interested in early modern Czech history, and/or the story of East-West relations during this period, will find their interests quickened by it, even if they remain unconvinced by some of its central claims.
