The Armed Men Sing: Music and Colonial Encounters in the Anti-Ottoman Crusades

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Abstract

While most people consider the crusades as a series of religious wars for the conquest of the Holy Land that happened between 1095 and 1291, today historians embrace a definition of crusading that also encompasses later military endeavors happened in the late medieval and early modern period. In the years between the 1453 and 1683, the Ottoman Empire was considered the main crusading enemy and crusading propaganda shaped significantly European society, including also works of art. In this talk, I aim to reconsider one of the most renowned and studied products of the so-called "Franco-Flemish school", that is the tradition of polyphonic settings based on L'homme armé tune. One of the hypotheses put forward for the early history of these works relates to the late medieval crusading movement and the Ottoman territorial gains, symbolized by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. However, both historians and musicologists have focussed almost exclusively on the role played by the Dukes of Burgundy and the Order of the Golden Fleece, with scholars highlighting the role played by the enigmatic canons in the six anonymous Masses in the manuscript Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, VI.E.40, that would enhance the relationship between these settings and the promotion of a Crusade against the Turks by the Dukes of Burgundy.

In this paper, I decentre the early history of L'homme armé from the historiographical perspective of aBurgundian product and argue instead that we should read this tradition in the wider framework of the late crusading movement. I show how crusading rhetoric permeated works of art all around Europe and I discuss the case study of NapBN 40 in relation to its donation to Beatrice of Aragon, Queen of Hungary and wife of Matthias Corvinus, contending that the Hungarian court played a central role in the crusading cultural rhetoric. In so doing I hope to revise the historiographical centrality of areas of Europe traditionally considered peripheric, by showing how music was part of, and helped to define, a common European crusading cultural idiom.

Nicolò Ferrari is an Initiative Geisteswissenschaften Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Zurich, working on a project examining the intersection between digital humanities and manuscript studies. After studying musicology at the University of Pavia in Cremona, Nicolò then moved to the UK where they obtained a PhD with a dissertation on the masses of the 15th-century composer Fremin le Caron. Before coming to Zurich, Nicolò was Research Associate at the University of Manchester, and now holds there an honorary research fellowship. Among recent and forthcoming publications are an article on texting in late fifteenth-century polyphonic masses (Journal of the Alamire Foundation), studies on the "L'homme armé" tradition, and the Catalogue raisonné of the Cappella Sistina music manuscripts of the Vatican Library, co-authored with Thomas Schmidt.

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