What’s in a Font? Pathways of the Medici Oriental Press’ Arabic Typeface
OLGA VERLATO
Euclidis Elementorum Geometricorum Libri Tredecim. Ex Traditione Doctissimi Nasiridini Tusini. Nunc Primum Arabice Impressi. Romae: in Typographia Medicea, 1594. (Front-page detail).
In 1798, Napoleon famously brought to Egypt a printer, which he used to produce 4,000 proclamations in Arabic addressed to “the people of Egypt,” and published what is largely considered to be the first paper of the Middle East, the Courier de l’Égypte. The advent of the press under French occupation helped cement a conception of 1798 as a major watershed in the modern formation of the region. This understanding tapped into the widespread argument, originating from scholarship on the printing revolution in early-modern Europe, that the diffusion of this technology was a key motor behind modernization. In recent decades, however, scholars studying the early days of printing in the Middle East have successfully decentered Napoleon’s venture. Empirically, they have turned to instances of Arabic-script printing in the region that predates the French occupation, such as the activities of ‘Abdallah Zakhir in 1706’s Aleppo, or the Müteferrika Press founded in Istanbul in 1727. Theoretically, they have shifted the conversation away from the unproductive tropes of “delay” and “borrowing”. Instead of asking why printing did not spread before, more sophisticated approaches have sought to ask why and how it spread in specific cities and regions of the Middle East when it did. Scholars have thus explored the connected history of manuscript and print traditions, exposed the fallacy of arguments about the “sacred refusal to print” in Islamic cultures, and examined the intellectual, social, and economic consequences that printing entailed.
Yet others have returned to the Napoleonic occupation by recontextualizing it within transregional networks of knowledge production. Ian Coller has explored the role played by Egyptians and other Ottoman subjects, with a focus on Copts and Eastern Christians, in orientalist intellectual formation and Arabic printing both in France and in the context of the occupation of Egypt. Alexander Bevilacqua has reconstructed the longer genealogy of Mediterranean intellectual exchange prior to the Napoleonic expedition, with a focus on French knowledge-making in the Mediterranean and the European tradition of Arabic scholarship during the Old Regime.
In an attempt to further connect Napoleon’s printing venture to a longer and multi-sited tradition of manuscript and print production, I turn to a less prominent, but nonetheless revelatory Arabic printing venture: that of the Medici Oriental Press in Rome in the late sixteenth century. By following the journey of the Medici fonts, I seek to uncover some of the multiscalar, transregional, long-durational processes that partook in the early history of Arabic printing, connecting North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to Southern Europe over the course of more than two centuries.
THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY
On the 29th of November 1593, at the Curia Savelli prison in Rome, Lieutenant Barnabeo was interrogating Matteo Neroni, a Pisan man who worked for four to five years at the Medici Oriental Press. The Press was established in 1584 in Montedoro Square, Rome at the behest of Pope Gregorio XIII and Ferdinando de Medici. Neroni worked as a proto, the foreman in charge of overseeing the Press’ operations and preparing the master copies to be used for printing. Giovanni Battista Raimondi (1536-1614), the director of the Medici Oriental Press since its establishment, oversaw the designing of the Arabic typefaces used to print, among other works, Ibn Sina’s Canon, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s version of Euclid’s Elements, and a Latin-Arabic bilingual and Arabic monolingual version of the Gospels. These were among the first texts to ever be printed in Arabic, only predated by a handful of isolated ventures in Northern Italy and Western Europe which did not compare in scope and volume with the project of the Medici Press. The Press served a series of interrelated goals. It was an expression of the orientalist interests characterizing Renaissance intellectual and artistic production. Additionally, it contributed to the Papacy’s proselytizing efforts and renewed concern with Eastern Christianity in the wake of the protestant reformation. To secure the Church’s financial support, Raimondi assured that no book containing Islamic content would be printed. Finally, the Press aimed to create a new market for printed text in the Middle East and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Neroni was interrogated by the lieutenant over the disappearance of some texts produced by the Press. Prior to the interrogation, a house search revealed the presence of numerous “printed pages in Arabic and other scripts” in Neroni’s cupboards. Yet the prisoner seemed concerned with other matters. “I was arrested last Saturday in [the fluvial port of] Ripa,” he declared to the lieutenant, “but I do not know why […] whether it was because of Cascio from Sardinia whom we helped arrive by boat, and they said that the sailors and I did not have the authorization of the port authority.” Neroni, a cosmographer by training, appears to have been involved in a wide arrange of maritime transport and commerce, whether legal or illicit, specializing in the import of mathematical and measuring instruments. In his role as the Press’ proto, he worked alongside translators, copyists, and engravers from the Italian peninsula as well as Western Europe, like the French Robert Granjon, and the Middle East, such as the Maronite Yaqub Ibn-Hilal. These men collaborated to print thousands of books, and to develop fonts not only in Arabic, but also in Persian, Ottoman, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Cyrillic, and Coptic. Fidelity to manuscript aesthetics was the main criterion informing the Press’ design choices, one that in turn entailed higher expenses for developing different series of letterforms and ligatures in order to exhibit a handwriting-like visual quality. The texts received much praise from contemporary scholars, although they also contained a series of grammatical and syntactical errors.
Two pages from Basharat Yasu’ al-Masih kama kataba Mar Mattay wahid min athni ʻashar min talamidh. Romae, In Typographia Medicea, 1591: 14-15. Internet Archive.
Orientalist and colonial printing ventures in non-Latin scripts have been traditionally approached in such a way that marginalizes non-European contributions. The Medici Oriental Press is no exception. Most of the sources available largely disregard or only briefly reference the numerous forms of non-European expertise—mercantile, intellectual, and technical—that made this venture possible in the first place. Commenting on the growing scholarly interest in the relation between the Renaissance and the Muslim Mediterranean, historian Francesca Trivellato emphasized a need for exploring “the putative ‘two-way process of recognition’ that engaged the inhabitants of the [Italian] peninsula and its eastern neighbours.” In keeping with this call, I bring back into the picture some of the individuals from the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa who participated, whether directly or indirectly, in this early instance of Arabic printing. In so doing, I seek to offer a more expansive understanding of the Medici venture in the context of Renaissance orientalism, as well as its colonial afterlife.
MULTISIDED INTERACTIONS
A growing body of scholarship has examined the career trajectories and crucial role played by Eastern Christians, like Yaqub Ibn-Hilal of the Medici Press, and Egyptian Copts in European orientalist and commercial ventures during this period and over the following centuries. The contributions of these groups and individuals were relatively well-documented in their own times. Originally from Mount Lebanon, Ibn-Hilal arrived in Rome in 1583 to teach Syriac at the Roman Maronite College. He was a crucial professional figure at the Press by virtue of his linguistic expertise and intellectual formation, and he later went on to open his own printing house, the Typographia Linguarum Externarum apud I. Lunam. Anecdotally, “Lunam,” or moon, as the Maronite’s last name appears in the name of his Press, was the Latin rendition of the word “Hilāl” found in his last name, which in Arabic means “crescent moon.”
The Press’ endeavor, however, did not begin nor end inside the printing house in Montedoro Square. Prior to its establishment, Raimondi had commissioned three merchants and travelers, the brothers Giovanni Battista and Gerolamo Vecchietti, and Giovanni Battista Britti to travel to North Africa, Ethiopia, and the Ottoman and Safavid Empires to collect high-quality manuscripts to be used as models at the printing press. During their travels, conducted in part together, in part separately, the Vecchietti brothers encountered Greek, Indian, and Armenian merchants, enjoyed the hospitality of local rulers and religious authorities, from the governor of Shiraz to the patriarch of Alexandria, witnessed the siege of Baghdad by the Ottoman forces in the context of the Jelali revolts, and were attacked by brigands as they were traveling with a caravan coming from Mecca. Meanwhile, the merchants were also tasked with gathering information about the feasibility and modalities of selling the printed texts in the region once they had been completed. It was suggested, for example, that “from Cairo we transport the books to Ethiopia via camel, and likewise or with other [animals] through the Red Sea”. The enterprise posed logistical as well as bureaucratic and political challenges, since “passports and letters of transit” needed to be secured in order to place the finished products in regional markets. To this aim, one copy of Euclid’s Elements was equipped with the printing rendition of Sultan Murad III’s firmān (decree) on the possibility for European merchants to carry Arabic-script printed material in the Ottoman territories. The existence of this and other firmāns on printing, as well as various localized engagements with this technology in the Empire has led some historians to disclaim the longstanding assumption originating from Western scholarship that Ottoman sultans banned printing.
To reconstruct the role played by local professionals within the Middle East, we must embrace a more imaginative mode of history writing and rely on broader contextual information. To this aim, it is helpful to regard the Medici venture as an instance of early-modern “flows of information” between Europe and the Middle East, so as to appreciate the impact of “exchanges between individuals that took place on the small-scale level of interaction.” Who were the local intellectuals, merchants, collectors, and copyists met by the merchants who traveled to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire? How did they shape the terms and modalities of these purchases, and what did they think of their foreign interlocutors? In this period, a vigorous book trade existed in several cities in the Ottoman Empire, notably Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo. This catered to urban learning institutions and local as well as transregional markets, the latter including not only Mediterranean routes, but also hinterland circuits, most notably the Ottoman-Safavid manuscript network, and the Trans-Saharan book trade. The Ottoman cities’ book bazaars, as well as those of other North African centers such as Fez and Marrakesh, hosted a variety of professionals involved in manuscript production and selling, including book sellers and dealers, ink and paper tradesmen, and bookbinders. In Cairo, one of the major book centers in the region, twenty bookshops, forty-eight paper sellers, and forty-eight book binders were reportedly found in the early 1700s, around the time of the Vecchietti brothers and Britti’s travels. How did European travelers and merchants, including but not limited to those collaborating with the Medici Press, relate to this well-established infrastructure for book production and trade?
European interactions with this vigorous book market spanned from mutually profitable trade to violent looting and appropriation. Merchants from Europe had become an ever-growing presence in these markets due to the interest in the world of Islam and the Orient characterizing the Renaissance. The existing evidence suggests that many local book dealers established good or at least profitable relations with foreign merchants and orientalists, working to procure rare and precious manuscript editions for them. The significant volume of book exports led the Ottoman Grand Vizier Şehid Ali Pasha to denounce the booksellers’ “crude greed.” “They send away countless valuable books to different places, perhaps even outside the Ottoman realm,” he noted, and issued a ban against the export of books outside the Empire. Yet it was not simply the alleged “greed” of local book merchants that should be blamed for the exodus of large quantities of Ottoman manuscripts. Alongside commercial and diplomatic networks stood other more violent forms of appropriation of manuscripts. All across the Empire and North Africa, we find several instances in which Europeans violently or unlawfully appropriated manuscripts, for example as spoils of war (like during battles along the Hapsburg-Ottoman frontier), or through theft, such as the 1612 steal, at the hands of a French consul-turned-pirate, of Moroccan Sultan Muley Zaydan’s library, which was later incorporated into the Spanish royal library. One needs only to look at where many valuable manuscripts from Africa and the Middle East are found today (Western libraries) to appreciate the extent of Renaissance and subsequent purchases, lootings, and appropriations.
One last local figure that was central to book production and trade was that of the copyist. The act of copying was not always aimed at commercial endeavours. Students, for example, would transcribe texts needed for their education, which may explain why ink and paper tradesmen often outnumbered book sellers. Additionally, there were individuals who copied manuscripts for a living. Such were, for example, Nizam al-Din Seljuqi and Shams al-Din Bin Qutb al-Din Qalati Khonji, whom the Vecchietti brothers commissioned to copy a number of Persian works. Copyists did not simply replicate texts, but directly participated in manuscript knowledge production through their addition of marginalia and colophons, and by contributing to record-keeping and helping to determine the date and authenticity of various documents.
The Medici fonts presented themselves as a remarkable instance of technological innovation, of a novel commercial and proselytizing vision (if one that proved quite short-sighted), and of European orientalist knowledge production. As such, they did not carry explicit traces of much of the labour located outside of Europe that went into their realization. The names of the copyists, for example, could still figure in the manuscripts purchased by the Press. Yet the trace of their script—so crucial to the Press’ pursuit of manuscript-like aesthetics—and their participation in knowledge production were, albeit indirectly immortalized, ultimately concealed once their handwriting was turned into metal typefaces.
Nevertheless, once we pay attention to figures such as Yaqub Ibn-Hilal, Nizam al-Din Seljuqi, and the nameless other merchants, artisans, and scholars specializing in book production, trade, and printing, the Medici typefaces appear at last as a material repository of stratified, more or less visible technical, intellectual, and commercial relations and expertise. The product of different forms of inter-personal communication, violence, profit, intellectual pursuit, and exploitation in the early-modern Mediterranean, the typefaces thus lay at the conjunction of hierarchical, multi-scalar, and transregional processes—and of the individuals who populated them.
THE AFTERLIFE OF THE FONTS
The Press’ venture was ultimately a failure, at least from an economic perspective. While the withdrawal of the papacy and the family support of the Medici drastically undercut its prospects, the Press’ demise has also been attributed to a combination of additional factors. These included the mistakes contained in the books, a misjudgment on the part of its owners regarding the demand for these texts, and a series of financial misfortunes and sudden deaths of key collaborators. Some volumes were sent to the Ottoman Empire along with merchants and missionaries, or were gifted to illustrious personalities such as the Patriarch of Constantinople. Others were purchased at the Frankfurt book fair, where some English merchants also offered to arrange a deal with Ottoman and North African merchants residing in London. Despite these isolated purchases, many of the texts—sometimes over half the volumes of a specific edition—remained unsold. To make it even harder for merchants to place the texts in European markets at competitive prices, it turned out that Neroni had in fact pirated extra copies of the books and sold them at reduced prices. In 1610, Raimondi, who had himself attempted to buy the Press but was found unable to comply with the sale contract, was left with no other option than to declare bankruptcy, and the Press shut its doors.
However, this was not the end of the journey of the Medici fonts. In 1811, during the French occupation of the Italian peninsula, Napoleon demanded that the fonts of the Medici Oriental Press be sent to Paris. “The curator of the royal palaces of Tuscany,” where the fonts had been relocated from Rome, “implored [the authorities] of leaving to the intellectuals of Tuscany at least the matrixes so that they could produce other fonts. But none of these requests found the benevolence of Napoleon, and by the end of the year the Medici fonts were in Paris.” Some ten years prior, Napoleon had taken something else with him from the Italian peninsula. On his way to Egypt, he had acquired an Arabic printer from the Vatican – the printer he famously brought to Egypt in 1798.
By exposing the connection of Napoleon’s printing venture to the early development of typographical Arabic expertise in the Italian peninsula, the history of the Medici Press equips us with an additional and valuable tool to recontextualize the French use of this technology in Egypt. Napoleon’s decision to acquire both the Vatican printing press and the Medici’s typefaces in the early nineteenth century connects his printing venture in Egypt to the long history of local production of Arabic fonts in and around Rome—one in which the Medici Oriental Press occupied a privileged and enduring role. In turn, the Medici Press, which has long been regarded as a Roman enterprise if not an Italian one—with quite an imaginative stretch of retrospectively-applied methodological nationalism—was deeply embedded within multiple commercial, intellectual, and technological networks in the early-modern Mediterranean.
At the same time, we should not conceive of the transregional breadth of print production, commercial exchange, and technical collaboration as a level playing field. For example, Trivellato noted that scholars of the Renaissance need to appreciate “the often optimistic views of cross-cultural exchanges that emerge from studies of material artifacts and the more somber conclusions deriving from studies of written texts.” It is therefore important to foreground the intellectual, economic, and political hierarchies and frictions that also characterized these processes. In the case of the Medici Oriental Press, these included proselytizing efforts and the widespread intellectual orientalist interests (enabled by significant capital provision and, in some instances, the use of violence) found on the northern shore of the Mediterranean and Western Europe. By the time of Napoleon’s invasion, a “textual attitude to the Orient” and the pursuit of self-serving orientalist knowledge production through the use of technologies such as printing had become a central feature of colonial power and exploitation.
Engaging with these imperial and asymmetrical dynamics helps us avoid portraying historical forms of collaboration as instances of frictionless encounter and exchange, while at the same time allowing us to recuperate the multiple intellectual, commercial and technical connections originating from and spanning across the southern and eastern Mediterranean and its hinterlands, for how sweepingly most of our sources have managed to relegate them to the background. This is not to declare a new kind of regional primacy or retrospective local pride anchored on isolated Mediterranean locales—an operation that merely relocates, rather than questioning the notion of a single origin—but to bring to the fore the lasting power structures and multisite relations that lay at the heart of this history.
I thank Mahnaz Yousefzadeh for encouraging me to dare explore things before the nineteenth century, Guy Burak for his invariably brilliant insights and kind support, and Karim Malak for his generous feedback and crucial help.
Olga Verlato is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University working on the history of language politics and multilingualism in modern Egypt and the Mediterranean.
This paper was originally presented at the 2021 Conference “Arabic-Script Manuscripts in Africa” organised by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Islamic Manuscript Association in partnership with the library’s Manuscripts Center and the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, and published in Manuscripts and Arabic-Script Writing in Africa, Stewart, Charles C. and Ahmed Chaouki Binebine eds. (The Islamic Manuscript Association, 2023).