Una biblioteca trans-imperiale: reti diplomatiche e libri orientali a Vienna prima e dopo la Langer Türkenkrieg

PAOLA MOLINO - CHIARA PETROLINI Abstract Despite its geographical location as ‘Porta orientis’, Vienna was slow both to promote the study of Eastern languages at an institutional level and to establish diplomatic relations with the Islamic empires. Nevertheless, it was precisely the tenuous centralisation and the delicate equilibrium between Vienna and Constantinople which resulted in the Imperial Library becoming the fulcrum of movements of books, ideas, and individuals – Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim – between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Out of the mesh of diplomacy, confessional differences, military conflict, and scholarship, new forms of knowledge and new libraries emerged. The contribution studies the role played by three individuals who had different ties to the Imperial Library: the diplomat, scholar and polymath Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who brought a large collection of manuscripts to Vienna from Constantinople; the librarian Hugo Blotius, who compiled the inventory known as Turcica, and his successor Sebastian Tengnagel, who became one of the leading Oriental scholars in the European Republic of Letters. The stories of these individuals show how the ‘trans-imperial’ library in Vienna, part of a power which was reshaping itself in relation to the Muslim empires and European monarchies, became in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries a repository of the goals and efforts of different individuals driven by entirely personal interests, confessional, diplomatic, or scholarly. In a city marked by structural instability, library projects, networks of Oriental scholarship, and diplomatic channels intersected to the point of merging into each other."