'From Documents to Artefacts: Genoese Converts in Tunis and their Material Corpus'

Italian converts to Islam in the Ottoman Empire play a leading role in our imaginary of Mediterranean history. Many historiographical approaches still share a fascination with the identity of these “renegades”, understood as something fluid or opaque which the historian must interpret. This talk tackles such questions of personhood and belonging from a materialist perspective. It does so through the case study of two converts to Islam in Ottoman Tunis: a brother and sister originating from the Republic of Genoa. In addition to Italian and Arabic written sources, the siblings left behind a number of Baroque architectural elements in a Tunisian mosque, which they commissioned to Christian artisans in Genoa. These marble and wooden artefacts, which travelled hundreds of nautical miles across the Mediterranean, can show us forms of agency that written sources tend to occlude. In order to analyse this corpus, the talk will integrate the insights of Italian microanalysis with those of the anthropology of art. From a materialist perspective, documents and artefacts can be seen as social actions rather than vectors of meaning, transposing our focus from identity to practice. 

Achille Marotta researches slavery and citizenship in the early modern Mediterranean. His book project centres around enslaved and freed Muslims in the Republic of Genoa. He is the current Sir John Elliott Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, University of Oxford.