| This dissertation examines the reception of Aztec and Ottoman cultures in sixteenth-century Europe through a cultural study of exchange, goods, and ideas. The two empires, Aztec and Ottoman, were of new interest in the early sixteenth century: the Aztecs were first encountered and conquered, while the Ottomans were expanding into Hungary and the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the century, their cultural similitude to Christian Europe was accepted. As Aztec or Ottoman people and cultural goods circulated in the Habsburg Empire, people attempted to make further sense of them both conceptually and in practice. This study contends that the Protestant and Catholic Reformations shaped European understanding and evaluations of Aztec and Ottoman cultures. As concepts of the emperor's authority and attitudes toward material culture were transformed during the century's religious and political struggles, so too were perceptions of extra-European societies' cultural worth.;This linkage was reinforced by Habsburg and other elites, who experimented with the status of Aztec and Ottoman people and the possession of extra-European cultural goods. In this process of cultural appropriation, comparison, and amalgamation, freshly-defined Christian orthodoxies encouraged differential evaluations of culture and the emergence of conceptual boundaries between European and Ottoman or Indian cultures. A hegemonic notion of European cultural superiority was not a given in 1492, or even 1519. Strategies of inclusion and transformation, during the course of the sixteenth century, would define and produce the exotic. |
