Abstract
Empires of the ancient world and the Ottoman and Catholic Empires of the early modern period occupied a significant place in England’s conception of its cultural, religious, geographical, and imperial identity. In the early modern era, the Mediterranean world became the seat of the Ottoman Empire that claimed Roman succession on the basis of Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This empire was the direct geographical heir to the Byzantine Empire, expanding in the sixteenth century into the Mediterranean seas. Christian Europe defined itself in opposition to the Muslims, who spread through much of eastern Asia and the Barbary Coast, the southeastern part of Europe, and the regions stretching from Arabia to Egypt, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the Crimea, and Hungary.
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Notes
John H. Elliott, “The Seizure of Overseas Territories by the European Powers,” Theories of Empire, 1450–1800, ed. David Armitage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 14; originally published in The European Discovery of the World and its Economic Effects on Pre-Industrial Society, 1500–1800, ed. Hans Polh (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 45–6. Twice reprinted in the 1650s and often cited by English writers, De monarchia Hispanica discursus, Tommaso Campanella’s advice to King Philip II of Spain, outlines the means for Spain to establish a universal monarchy, which involved “conquer[ing] and subdu[ing] the Turkish Empire” (Tho. [Tommaso] Campanella, A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy … Newly translated into English, according to the Third Edition of this Book in Latine [trans. Edmund Chilmead] [London, 1654], pp. 11–12). “Empire” refers here to a territorial and legal formation held together by structures of differentiation and containment, and more directly in the case of England, to the domination of a nation over more than one geographical area.
See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 14. This definition constitutes the third of three concepts of empire Pagden identifies.
See also Lesley B. Cormack, “Britannia Rules the Waves?: Images of Empire in Elizabethan England,” in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 45–68, esp. pp. 46–7.
Bruce McLeod, “The ‘Lordly Eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), p. 55.
John Milton, Paradise Lost in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 11. 386–87; Paradise Regained, 3.252ff. All citations to Milton’s poetry are from the Merritt Hughes edition and cited parenthetically.
Paul Stevens recognizes that Milton’s major epic “authorizes colonial activity even while it satirizes the abuses of early modern colonialism” (Stevens, “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” Milton Studies 34 [1996]: 3). Also see Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature 1580–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 134.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1658 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 190.
Also see Matar’s Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory,” in Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 127–46 and
Daniel Goffman and Christopher Stroop, “Empires as Composite: The Ottoman Polity and the Typology of Dominion,” in Imperialism: Historical and Literary Imagination 1500–1900, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 129–45.
John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611). See also Christopher Ivic, “Mapping British Identities: Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine,” in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 135, 153n3. Evidence of Milton’s engagement with Speed is provided by Milton’s 31–3 citations of Speed’s works in his Commonplace Book (William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], 2:802).
Two recent and impressive examinations of the catalogues’ place names in the epics are Robert Markley’s “‘The destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), pp. 191–213,
and John Michael Archer’s “Milton and the Fall of Asia,” Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 63–99. Both essays, however, focus on the geographical significance of Middle Eastern and Eastern place names.
The breakdown of the self-other oppositional relationship is captured in Othello’s final long speech: “Set you down this; / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and turbaned Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,/I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, / And smote him—thus!” (William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Edward Pechter [New York: Norton, 2004], 5.2.356–61).
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. pp. 8–18. Helgerson argues that discursive forms of nationhood directed attention away from sovereignty and the power from the monarch to the nation or land (p. 12).
Sandys’s account of Constantinople, which Milton mentions in his prose and verse—including in the Book 11 catalogue in Paradise Lost (11.395)—connects the ancient to the present day empires: Constantine gave the name Constantinople to Byzantium, making it “the seate of his Empire; enduing it with the priviledges [sic] of Rome.” Constantinople remained the key city in the Roman state until 1453, when the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks. “This Citie by destinie appointed, and by nature seated for Soveraignitie, was first the seate of the Roman Emperours, then of the Greeke, as now it is of the Turkish” (Relation of a Journey, 29–30). For Milton’s indebtedness to Sandys, see Robert Ralston Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Traroel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).
Loren E. Pennington, “Hakluytus Posthumus Samuel Purchas and the Promotion of English Overseas Expansion,” The Emporia State Research Studies 14:3 (1996): 11.
See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 61–99.
Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 140.
Milton, Areopagitica, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2: 548. Subsequent quotations from the Yale edition of Milton’s prose are cited parenthetically as CPW.
On the politicization of epic poetry, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 8.
I am indebted to the notes on this passage provided in John Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 424, n431–3, 432, 457. Also see CPW, 8:485n44.
Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory (London, 1600, rpt. 1896), p. 16.
See Andrew Hadfield, “The English and Other Peoples,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 182–3.
Raleigh’s account is recorded in Richard Halduyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598–1600), rpt. Glasgow, 1903, lst. ed., 3.636.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Milton, Familiar Letter [Letter 20], “To … Peter Heimbach,” in The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 12:83.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Sauer, E. (2007). Theaters of Empire in Milton’s Epics. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_11
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