Статті в журналах з теми "Venetian ambassadors"

The article examines the data of the final reports of the Venetian ambassadors on English cities. The information of the Venetian ambassadors about the cities of England, unfortunately, is brief. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that they basically boil down to pointing out that London is the main city of the country, that other cities of England are simply listed by the Venetian ambassadors, that the testimonies of the Venetians, albeit indirectly, help to recreate the perception of the cities of the English kingdom by the Venetians.

Abstract Until the sultanate’s fall from power in 1517, the Republic of Venice spent several lucrative centuries trading with the Mamluks of present-day Egypt and Syria. Even in their final years of partnership, Venice’s close contact with the Mamluks continued, as visually described in The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus (1511). In the composition, the anonymous Venetian painter depicts a diplomatic meeting of these two parties. This article proposes that the contested patron of the work, Pietro Zen, had a specific agenda in commissioning the painting. As the consul in the composition, Zen had the Reception created to erase his past errors as ambassador to Damascus. By repainting history, Zen hoped to restore his reputation as a skillful Venetian diplomat as well as render for posterity his family’s legacy of working in the Levant.

European sources for Süleyman I’s Persians campaigns of 1548 and 1554 have been little noticed. This essay reviews a journal of a French ambassador’s campaign travels (1548), a Venetian merchant’s account of the 1553–1555 war, and the dispatches of Vienna’s ambassadors at the Porte, relaying what are said to be letters from the sultan’s camp. No definitive assessment of these sources is offered, since Ottoman and Persians sources are used only in translation. But the European accounts add unfamiliar material for a still-needed discussion of logistical problems. They corroborate one another, and they combine to give a concrete idea how difficult it was to supply a huge army in mountainous terrain 2,000 km from the Ottoman capital.

Abstract Venetian diplomatic relazioni are a familiar source to sixteenth‐century historians. They often present a detailed philosophical and political analysis of the courts to which Venice had sent ambassadors. At their best, they are sophisticated humanist commentaries on the state. Relazioni from Tudor England were no exception. Unfortunately, the politically turbulent years of the early Reformation are marked by a break in the Venetian relazioni coinciding with the period when diplomatic representation was suspended. However, a newly‐discovered document reproduced here, from the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, is almost certainly a secretary's report which fills this chronological gap. The document is formal in tone and follows the structure of a model relazione. The lengthy descriptions of England's history and geography and references to contemporary events suggest a date of c. 1540.

Abstract In recent decades, research on the Venetian mainland state has underlined the tendency of subject elites to establish political relationships with foreign princes. This phenomenon was remarkably prominent in the cities of Brescia and Bergamo. The western periphery of the Venetian state was home to a wealthy and ambitious feudal nobility whose loyalty to the Most Serene Republic was very dubious. From the early decades of the 16th century, the Gambara family of Brescia maintained habitual contacts with the Imperial court and Spanish Lombardy to gain prestige and honour. In 1584 and 1596 two young brothers, Scipione and Lucrezio Gambara, were thus sent to the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where they served as pages. Although their brief experiences did not lead to noteworthy careers, their stay in Prague represented their family’s interest in preserving its long-standing Imperial allegiances. The rich family correspondence provides a detailed account of the two brothers’ life at the Imperial court, highlighting their family networks and relationship with courtiers and ambassadors. The Gambaras’ pro-Habsburg attitude ultimately had a negative impact on their relationship with Venice, since the Republic could not completely trust them as vassals. Nevertheless, the family’s allegiance to the House of Austria endured at least until the 1630s.

Against the traditional vision, the relations between the Spanish Monarchy and the Republic of Venice improved significantly during the second half of the 17th century. Once again, the war against the Ottomans in Candia (1645-1669) forced the Serenissima to look for the support of the Catholic King. For this reason, the role played by their ambassadors in Madrid, with a view to achieve the necessary assistance of Philip IV, became essential for the Venetian interests. At the same time, they pursued to ensure a relevant and closer position to the principal nucleus of power in the Spanish court. Accordingly, the continuous disputes with the members of the Spanish institutions with regard to their lodging become an essential field of study to measure the degree of influence, supremacy or immunity of these legates during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the House of Austria.

Reading, society and politics in early modern England. Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix+363. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. £50.00.The politics of information in early modern Europe. Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viii+310. ISBN 0-415-20310-4. £75.00.Literature, satire and the early Stuart state. By Andrew McRae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+250. ISBN 0-521-81495-2. £45.00.The writing of royalism, 1628–1660. By Robert Wilcher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+403. ISBN 0-521-66183-8. £45.00.Politicians and pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum. By Jason Peacey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xi+417. ISBN 0-7546-0684-8. £59.95.The ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration publicist. By Lois G. Schwoerer. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii+349. ISBN 0-8018-6727-4. £32.00.In 1681 the Italian newswriter Giacomo Torri incurred the wrath of the French ambassador to the Venetian Republic with his anti-French reporting. The ambassador ordered Torri to ‘cease and desist or be thrown into the canal’. Torri, who was in the pay of the Holy Roman Emperor, responded to the ambassador's threat with a report that ‘the king of France had fallen from his horse, and that this was a judgement of God’. Three of the ambassadors' men were then found attacking Torri ‘by someone who commanded them to stop in the name of the Most Excellent Heads of the Council of Ten … but they replied with certain vulgarities, saying they knew neither heads nor councils’. Discussed by Mario Infelise in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron's collection, this was a very minor feud in the seventeenth-century battles over political information, but it exemplifies several of the recurring themes of the books reviewed here. First, the growing recognition by political authorities across Europe that news was a commodity worthy of investment. Secondly, the variety of official and unofficial sanctions applied in an attempt to control the market for news publications. Thirdly, the recalcitrance of writers and publishers in the face of these sanctions: whether motivated by payment or principle, disseminators of political information showed great resourcefulness in frustrating attempts to limit their activities. These six books investigate aspects of seventeenth-century news and politics or, alternatively, seventeenth-century literature and politics – the distinction between ‘news’ and certain literary genres being, as several of these authors show, often difficult to make.

It has long been surmised that the Paduan singer, lutenist and composer Angelo Notari (1566–1663) was employed as a spy after immigrating to England circa 1610. In examining Venetian counterintelligence papers previously neglected by musicologists, I here confirm that Notari was indeed an intelligencer. More specifically, he was a paid informant for the Venetian State Inquisitors between 1616 and 1619 and participated in a contentious international trial concerning the Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini. I argue that Notari's work as a musician was inextricable from his identity as an intelligencer and former Venetian citizen and demonstrate that Italian musicians in Jacobean London significantly influenced international diplomatic relations. By identifying intersections between the two highly social practices of music-making and intelligence-gathering, I encourage greater musicological attention to political networks that transmitted music across borders and, conversely, musical networks that transmitted political intelligence. I thus situate seventeenth-century musical transculturation within its broader diplomatic, confessional and economic contexts.

This paper examines the position and actions of the Albanian population in certain sanjaks on the basis of published material of Venetian provenance. From the perspective of his position in Constantinople, Francesco Foscari, the Venetian ambassador (1757-1762) in the Ottoman Empire, followed with great interest the developments in connection with the actions of Albanians for several years, especially because their actions threatened to disrupt the Ottoman-Venetian relations. His correspondence is one of the major neo-Ottoman sources regarding the interests of Albanians and their relationship with the Ottoman authorities. This contemporary watched the events from the perspective of a man whose education, beliefs and manners did not belong to the Islamic (Ottoman) cultural sphere, which added credibility to his reports. The reports of Francesco Foscari are kept at the State Archive in Venice (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) and were published in 2007 due to the efforts of the publishing house La Malcontenta and editor Filippo Maria Paladini.

AbstractNumerous scholars have sought to locate the origins of social scientific research in the late-sixteenth-century ars apodemica, the northern European body of literature dedicated to methodizing educational travel. Little attention has been paid, however, to the earlier model of educational travel that emerged from sixteenth-century Venetian diplomatic culture. For many Venetian citizens and patricians, accompanying an ambassador on a foreign mission served as a cornerstone of their political education. Diplomatic travelers were encouraged to keep written accounts of their voyage. Numerous examples of these journals survive from the sixteenth century, largely following a standard formula and marked by an emphasis on the description of customs. This article examines the educational function of diplomatic travel in Venice and the practices of cultural description that emerged from diplomatic travel, arguing that Venetian diplomatic travel offers an earlier model for the methodization of travel—one with its own distinctive norms of observation.

ABSTRACTIn the period 1520–50 there was a large English community in the Veneto. This has traditionally been associated with the household of Reginald Pole, who is believed to have dispensed learning and patronage to those who went to the University of Padua in search of a continental education. However, an examination of both primary and secondary sources for the life of Pole suggests that he was only one of a number of reference points for young English scholars and travellers. Of equal, and perhaps greater, importance was the household of Edmund Harvell, a merchant who became English ambassador to the Republic. His household was philo-protestant in tone, and linked to Venetian dissenters and literary circles. These two central figures presented English scholars with the chance to experience the varying strands of Venetian political and religious philosophy at a time of great intellectual vitality. Men such as Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey returned home to write books about English government and society. When their work is set against the Venetian milieu of Harvell and Pole, we can gain a greater understanding of those Venetian influences which underpinned English political thought in the Tudor period and beyond.

<p>The Tessins in Venice</p><p>Foreign royalty and other travelers visiting Venice in the early eighteenth century encountered a flourishing of the arts. This vibrant artistic life could be transposed to new settings, as a number of Venetian painters worked for courts north of the Alps. When the statesman and <em>connoisseur</em> Carl Gustaf Tessin, Swedish Ambassador to Vienna, visited Venice in 1736, it was with the intention of hiring a decorative painter for the new royal palace in Stockholm. His first choice was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, but his services proved to be too costly for the Swedes. Tessin did, however, buy art works, among them easel paintings by Tiepolo, Giuseppe Nogari and Francesco Zuccarelli. Anton Maria Zanetti helped Tessin survey the artistic landscape of his city and later became his agent. Carl Gustaf Tessin was not the first Tessin in Venice. His father and grandfather had also visited and documented Venetian architecture in drawings and notes. Marble floors in Venetian buildings left such a lasting impression on Nicodemus Tessin the Elder that he incorporated their patterns in his floor designs for Drottningholm Palace. In his travel notes from 1688, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger is critical of Venetian architecture, but writes enthusiastically about the city&rsquo;s theatre and civic life.</p>

During the mid-1560s, Paolo Paruta (1540-1598), future Ambassador of the Republic of Venice in Rome (1591-1595) and author of the three books of Perfettione della Vita Politica (Venice, 1579) wrote some poems: the canzone Donna, che fosti tra le donne un Sole, and three somnets. The former was then published in Dionigi Atanagi’s Rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori, in morte della Signora Irene delle Signore di Spilimbergo (Venice, 1561), the latters were insert in Diomede Borghesi’s anthology for Cinzia Braccioduro Garzadori (then published in Padua, 1567, without Paruta’s somnets). Writing those juvenile poems and making them circulate among the Venetian literary circles (such as Domenico Venier’s), Paruta was looking not only for artistic approval, but also for social visibility: the canzone and the somnets were part of his wider strategy for social climbing inside Venetian patrician ruling class.

Les rapports de fin de mission des ambassadeurs vénitiens, ou relazioni (relations), décrivaient le pays où ils avaient servi, leur souverain et sa cour, et analysaient la politique que ce souverain avait avec les autres états. Apparues au XIIIe siècle, les relazioni qui subsistent se répartissent des années 1490 aux années 1790, et sont parmi les sources les plus connues pour l’histoire moderne. Toutefois, il semble nécessaire de renouveler notre compréhension de leurs usages et de leurs significations originales. Cet article se concentre sur les nombreuses variantes des relazioni , éliminées dans les éditions modernes, et cherche à reconstruire le processus par lequel elles ont apparu et circulé, d’abord oralement, et ensuite ont été déposées, sous forme écrite, dans les archives de Venise, mais aussi diffusées sous la forme de pamphlets manuscrits et imprimés, vendus en dépit des lois interdisant ces pratiques. On traite ensuite des fonctions institutionnelles, collectives et personnelles, que les relazioni ont joué au moment de leur rédaction : pour le gouvernement, pour leurs auteurs et pour leurs nombreux lecteurs appartenant ou non aux élites politiques.

Eleven manuscripts and one printed book, preserved in various funds of the Apostolic Vatican Library and in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, are traced back to Cardinal Marcello Cervini’s library. This has been possible thank to the analysis of a characteristic type of decoration of the three painted edges and bookbindings of some volumes, which reinterpret Greek models in modern, and especially Venetian, terms. Such acquisitions are limited to the biennium Cervini spent in Trento (1545- 1547) and were made possible by the intervention of the Spanish ambassador Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and of Romolo Cervini, cardinal’s brother.

While the naval battle of Lepanto as well as the founding and dissolution of the Holy League has attracted significant scholarly attention, the preparation and ratification of the ensuing peace treaty between Ottoman Empire and Republic of Venice has received relatively little attention. Nonetheless, the three months of lengthy negotiations that culminated in the treaty of capitulations provide a valuable insight into the early modern Ottoman approaches to international negotiations and treaty-making. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (1565-1579), Grand Vizier of Sultan Selîm II (1566-1574), was the principal protagonist of these negotiations on the Ottoman side. This article focuses on the encounters of the latter with Marcantonio Barbaro, Venetian bailo and François de Noailles, ambassador of King of France Charles IX and aims to provide a new perspective on their bargainings by emphasising the participants’ points of view, achievements and failures, hidden agendas, as well as tactics.

The years after the fall of Constantinople witnessed a period of intensive diplomatic activity, with Christian powers trying to form an alliance against the Ottomans, including one with the new dominant power in Persia, Uzun Hasan’s White Sheep horde. After a brief geopolitical survey of the final decades of the 15th century, this article analyses Venice’s political game during this moment. This example of intensive diplomatic contacts between the Christian world and the Persian Orient reveals a weft of older relations, made of economic exchanges and wellestablished connections. In this context, during the last decades of the 15th century there were points of connection between the great medieval political and economic areas. The court of the Khan of the White Sheep Empire, where the Venetians could encounter Indian ambassadors carrying letters of credentials and meet Turkish and Tartar envoys was one of these places where the worlds were connected.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the attempted impeachment of the duke of Buckingham by parliament in 1626 through the lens of manhood, and specifically early modern definitions of youth. The parliamentary speeches of Buckingham's accusers and the reports of observers such as the Venetian ambassador are used to demonstrate how youth and inexperience were deployed as evidence of his insufficient manhood, and therefore legal justifications for Buckingham's removal from power. The attributes of youth – wilfulness, rashness, and being a prisoner to one's passions – provided a narrative in which Buckingham could be placed to discredit his political authority. Additionally, through personal correspondence with his allies, and Buckingham's own defence of himself before parliament, this article demonstrates that definitions of youth and its relationship with political authority were malleable in the early modern period. Buckingham's impassioned defence of both his political career, and himself as a man, point to an ongoing negotiation over the terms of manhood, and how men were judged as figures of legitimate political authority.

Mary made the unfortunate mistake of antagonizing her successor, without being able to impose any limitations upon her freedom of action. Writing in 1557 the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, observed “although it is dissembled, it cannot be denied that [the queen] displays in many ways the scorn and ill will she bears her [Elizabeth]….” The younger woman reciprocated such feelings in full measure, and a few days before her accession, when there was no longer any need to be discreet, the Count of Feria reported, “She is highly indignant about what has been done to her in the queen's lifetime….” Such personal antagonism may not go far in explaining Elizabeth's decision to reverse so many of her sister's policies, but it certainly helps to account for the animus that the new queen's most trusted servants so quickly developed against their predecessors. In the last days of 1558 a royal commission was issued “to discover by what means the realm hath suffered great harm” under the previous regime, and soon came up with a long list of secular and ecclesiastical grants. Most of the latter were immediately resumed in the succeeding Parliament. It was to be another quarter of a century before Elizabeth finally emerged as the winner, and Mary as the loser, of the English reformation struggle, but those in power after 1558 did not wait to celebrate their victory.

Beginning in 1609, as a result of the Capitulations concluded between France and the Ottoman Empire, the French Jesuits launched their missionary work in Istanbul. Protected by the French ambassador, the French Jesuits defined themselves as both French subjects and Catholic missionaries, thus experiencing in a new and complicated geopolitical context the tensions that were at the core of their order’s identity in France, as elsewhere in Europe. The intricate story of the French Jesuit mission to the Ottoman Empire is here considered through two snapshots. One focuses on the foundational period of the mission in Istanbul, roughly from 1609 to 1615. A second one deals with the temporary suspension of the Jesuits’ mission in Istanbul in 1628. These two episodes illustrate multilayered and lasting tensions between the French and the Venetians, between the hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church and Western missionaries, and between missionaries belonging to different Catholic orders, between the Roman church’s centralism and state-funded religious initiatives. Based on missionary and diplomatic correspondence, the article is an attempt to reconstitute the way in which multiple allegiances provided expedient tools for individual Jesuit missionaries to navigate conflicts and to assert their own understanding of their missionary vocation.

In 1471-1472 Ferrante King of Naples (r. 1458-1494) ushered in an ambitious political program with clear imperial overtones. This project was centered (at least initially) on countering the Ottoman advance and was based on a complex system of marriage alliances set up through Ferrante’s numerous legitimate and illegitimate children as well as his nieces. This paper shows how Ferrante used his nieces, the daughters born of his sister Eleonora and the disgraced baron Marino Marzano, to draw in a select group of magnates from the eastern, “Illyrian” coast of the Adriatic. These were magnates with previous connections to the Aragonese regime that had been established by Ferrante’s father, Alfonso King of Aragon and Naples (r. 1416/1442-1458). However, after the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463, they found themselves in a desperate state, as they came under pressure not only from Ottoman raids but also from the centralizing politics of their overlords. Vlatko Kosača, Duke of St. Sava, an Ottoman tributary; Count Stjepan Frankapan of Modruš, a subject of the King of Hungary; and Count Ivan Frankapan of Krk, a Venetian vassal. This paper examines the political circumstances that drove these magnates to respond to Ferrante’s calls and traces the dynamic of the marriage negotiations that transpired between them. The marriage negotiations of Vlatko Kosača are by far the best attested of the three and seem to have been carried out with the least obstacles. Drawing on previously unpublished or simply unknown sources (published in Appendix 1), this paper reconstructs the complex three-way communication that transpired from December of 1472 till June of 1473 between the Neapolitan court, Duke Vlatko in (Herceg-)Novi, and, finally, Vlatko’s sister Catherine, the exiled Queen of Bosnia, who, together with Nicholas bishop of Modruš, helped broker the deal from Rome. The result was the marriage of Duke Vlatko and Ferrante’s niece Margherita Marzano, celebrated in May of 1474. Ivan Frankapan of Krk and Stjepan Frankapan of Modruš established direct contacts with the Neapolitan court as early as October of 1472, when an unnamed Neapolitan envoy — perhaps Ferrante’s resident ambassador in Venice, Anello Arcamone — arrived in Croatia as part of the joint Venetian-papal-Neapolitan mission to reconcile the Croatian magnates (extensive documents related to which are published in Appendix 2). It is argued, however, that both the Frankapani of Krk and the Frankapani of Modruš, much like Costanzo Sforza of Pesaro, were first presented with an opportunity to marry Ferrante’s nieces at the wedding of Ferrante’s older daughter Eleonora d’Aragona and Duke Ercole d’Este in Ferrara in July 1473, which tellingly they both attended. Their experiences with the Neapolitan court thereafter were quite different, as revealed, among other things, by new archival evidence regarding their contacts with Italian courts (the most extensive of which are published in Appendix 3). Ivan Frankapan thus seems to have begun the discussions regarding the marriage of his son Nikola with a Neapolitan princess at the end of 1473 or in the first half of 1474, making use of the growing Neapolitan-Venetian enmity over Cyprus. His plan of secretly sending his son to the Neapolitan court was, however, foiled by Venice, as was his subsequent plan to marry him off to the daughter of Ferrante’s captain general, Federico da Montefeltro. Stjepan Frankapan, on the other hand, had a tense relationship with his overlord, King Matthias of Hungary, but, though he constantly maintained independent contacts with the Italian courts, he only responded to Ferrante’s proposal after September 1474, when the Neapolitan-Hungarian marriage alliance was agreed. The result was the marriage of Stjepan’s son Bernardin to Luisa Marzano, which was celebrated in Naples in summer of 1476, just before the per procuram marriage of Beatrice d’Aragona and King Matthias. This marriage, finally, after a decade of tense relations, brought the Frankapani of Modruš back into their king’s grace. Ultimately all three lords turned to King Ferrante for political reasons and all three hoped that marriages to his nieces would also be followed by the establishments of Aragonese bridgeheads on the eastern Adriatic coast, whether south in Dubrovnik (per the hopes of the Kosače) or north in Senj (per the hopes of the Frankapani). At the same time, it is also clear that there were other non-political questions that were important to the magnates. Probably the most important was the beauty and youth of the bride; not all the Marzano sisters were considered equally attractive. Also, it is interesting that Ferrante insisted on the magnates paying the dowries themselves, since he believed that the protection and prestige that came with marrying into royalty was enough of an incentive. The fact that Bernardin Frankapan of Modruš and Vlatko Kosača agreed to this shows that they did indeed consider them an investment. In the end the Neapolitan heritage became an important element of their family identity even after the collapse of the Aragonese regime.

After the end of the Cretan war (1645-1669) and before the starting of the Morean war (1684-1699) Venetian diplomats settled again in Constantinople and in the Venetian Palace (Venedik Sarayı) that had been the embassy of the Republic for centuries. In this period baili and extraordinary ambassadors (ambasciatori straordinari) used to celebrate Venetian or Ottoman civic and religious festivals with dinners and parties. Their guests were above all other European diplomats and middle-ranking Ottoman officials. Some Turks, above all those who lived in the neighbourhood, contributed to the organisation of such events with their gifts and, in exchange, they received money or other presents. This paper aims to study the circulation of objects and commodities between Europe and the Ottoman Empire and, in particular, which kind of items were exchanged before or during official dinners held in the Venetian Palace or in the Venetian summer houses in Arnavutköy and Balta Liman. The Turks brought or sent mostly vegetables, flowers and different kind of food, while Venetians used to give to their guests not only the famous Venetian cloths but also unusual objects such as ivory boxes, gloves, brushes, glass sculptures, mirrors, fans, fake flowers and so on. The sources used for this research are the accounting books of the Venetian embassy for the years 1670-83.

Thanks to a passage of Coryat’s Crudities (1611), where the English traveller describes his visit to Brescia (August 1608), now is possible to reconstruct a lost commemorative plaque, once placed upon the internal wall of the local Broletto (City Hall). The inscription upon that marble plaque, dated 1591, was erased almost one hundred years later (1692) by the authorities of Venetian Republic, worried for the growing selfglorification of patrician magistrates. Luckily Coryat transcribed the inscription, dedicated to Paolo Paruta (1540-1598), statesman and historiographer of the Venetian Republic, capitano of Brescia from 1590 to 1592, when he was appointed as Ambassador to Rome. Starting from the discovery of this lost inscription, this essay tries to investigate how Paolo Paruta, a refined political writer but also an able statesman, took his 2 year office in Brescia, at that time the second city of Venetian Terraferma.

The article discusses the reports of European travelers about Batumi in the late Middle Ages. German (Bavarian) warrior andtraveler Johann (Hans) Schiltberger tells about Batumi in the 20s of the 15th century, who calls Batumi the capital of Samegrelo.An interesting fact is the attack of 200 Burgundian pirates on Batumi in 1445 under the command of the famous knight GeoffreyToyse, a relative of Duke Philip III (1419-1467). The Europeans who came to loot were met here by Gurieli with a detachment of 600people. The captured Toyse was released only at the request of the Emperor of Trebizond.In the 70s of the 15th century, the Venetian merchant and Diplomat Giosafat Barbaro and the Venetian ambassador to the courtof Uzun Hassan - Ambrogio Contarini attributed Batumi to a part of Samegrelo, however, the first one called the head of Samegrelo“Bendiani”, the second – “Gorbola”. Based on the above-mentioned, we think that at the beginning of the 15th century, Batumi was subordinate to the leader of Samegrelo, in the middle of the 40s, Gurieli repulsed the Burgundian pirates in Batumi, which indicates his certain legal status. In the late 1450s, Batumi was part of the Principality of Samtskhe (South Georgia), and in the 1470s it was already part of Sabediano, which was ruled by Bediani, also known as Dadian-Gurieli

Anders Toftgaard: “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”. On Giacomo Castelvetro’s manuscripts in The Royal Library, Copenhagen. In exile from his beloved Modena, Giacomo Castelvetro (1546–1616) travelled in a Europe marked by Reformation, counter-Reformation and wars of religion. He transmitted the best of Italian Renaissance culture to the court of James VI and Queen Anna of Denmark in Edinburgh, to the court of Christian IV in Copenhagen and to Shakespeare’s London, while he incessantly collected manuscripts on Italian literature and European contemporary history. Giacomo Castelvetro lived in Denmark from August 1594 to 11 October 1595. Various manuscripts and books which belonged to Giacomo Castelvetro in his lifetime, are now kept in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Some of them might have been in Denmark ever since Castelvetro left Denmark in 1595. Nevertheless, Giacomo Castelvetro has never been noticed by Danish scholars studying the cultural context in which he lived. The purpose of this article is to point to Castelvetro’s presence in Denmark in the period around Christian IV’s accession and to describe two of his unique manuscripts in the collection of the Royal Library. The Royal Library in Copenhagen holds a copy of the first printed Italian translation of the Quran, L’Alcorano di Macometto, nel qual si contiene la dottrina, la vita, i costumi et le leggi sue published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547. The title page bears the name of the owner: Giacº Castelvetri. The copy was already in the library’s collections at the time of the Danish King Frederic III, in the 1660’s. The three manuscripts from the Old Royal collection (GKS), GKS 2052 4º, GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º are written partly or entirely in the hand of Giacomo Castelvetro. Moreover, a number of letters written to Giacomo Castelvetro while he was still in Edinburgh are kept among letters addressed to Jonas Charisius, the learned secretary in the Foreign Chancellery and son in law of Petrus Severinus (shelf mark NKS (New Royal Collection) 1305 2º). These letters have been dealt with by Giuseppe Migliorato who also transcribed two of them. GKS 2052 4º The manuscript GKS 2052 4º (which is now accessible in a digital facsimile on the Royal Library’s website), contains a collection of Italian proverbs explained by Giacomo Castelvetro. It is dedicated to Niels Krag, who was ambassador of the Danish King to the Scottish court, and it is dated 6 August 1593. The title page shows the following beautifully written text: Il Significato D’Alquanti belli & vari proverbi dell’Italica Favella, gia fatto da G. C. M. & hoggi riscritto, & donato,in segno di perpetua amicitia, all ecc.te.D. di legge, Il S.r. Nicolò Crachio Ambas.re. del Ser.mo Re di Dania a questa Corona, & Sig.r mio sempre osser.mo Forsan & haec olim meminisse iuvabit Nella Citta d’Edimborgo A VI d’Agosto 1593 The manuscript consists of 96 leaves. On the last page of the manuscript the title is repeated with a little variation in the colophon: Qui finisce il Significato D’alquanti proverbi italiani, hoggi rescritto a requisitione del S.r. Nicolo Crachio eccelente Dottore delle civili leggi &c. Since the author was concealed under the initials G.C.M., the manuscript has never before been described and never attributed to Giacomo Castelvetro. However, in the margin of the title page, a 16th century hand has added: ”Giacomo Castelvetri modonese”, and the entire manuscript is written in Giacomo Castelvetro’s characteristic hand. The motto ”Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” is from Vergil’s Aeneid (I, 203); and in the Loeb edition it is rendered “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”. The motto appears on all of the manuscripts that Giacomo Castelvetro copied in Copenhagen. The manuscript was evidently offered to Professor Niels Krag (ca. 1550–1602), who was in Edinburgh in 1593, from May to August, as an ambassador of the Danish King. On the 1st of August, he was knighted by James VI for his brave behaviour when Bothwell entered the King’s chamber in the end of July. The Danish Public Record Office holds Niels Krag’s official diary from the journey, signed by Sten Bilde and Niels Krag. It clearly states that they left Edinburgh on August 6th, the day in which Niels Krag was given the manuscript. Evidently, Castelvetro was one of the many persons celebrating the ambassadors at their departure. The manuscript is bound in parchment with gilded edges, and a gilded frame and central arabesque on both front cover and end cover. There are 417 entries in the collection of proverbs, and in the explanations Giacomo Castelvetro often uses other proverbs and phrases. The explanations are most vivid, when Castelvetro explains the use of a proverb by a tale in the tradition of the Italian novella or by an experience from his own life. The historical persons mentioned are the main characters of the sixteenth century’s religious drama, such as Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth, James VI, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and his son, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, Gaspard de Coligny and the Guise family, Mary Stuart, Don Antonio, King of Portugal, the Earl of Bothwell and Cosimo de’ Medici. The Catholic Church is referred to as “Setta papesca”, and Luther is referred to as “il grande, e pio Lutero” (f. 49v). Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca are referred to various times, along with Antonio Cornazzano (ca. 1430–1483/84), the author of Proverbi in facetie, while Brunetto Latini, Giovanni Villani, Ovid and Vergil each are mentioned once. Many of the explanations are frivolous, and quite a few of them involve priests and monks. The origin of the phrase “Meglio è tardi, che non mai” (52v, “better late than never”) is explained by a story about a monk who experienced sex for the first time at the age of 44. In contrast to some of the texts to be found in the manuscript GKS 2057 4º the texts in GKS 2052 4º, are not misogynist, rather the opposite. Castelvetro’s collection of proverbs is a hitherto unknown work. It contains only a tenth of the number of proverbs listed in Gardine of recreation (1591) by John Florio (1553?–1625), but by contrast these explanations can be used, on the one hand, as a means to an anthropological investigation of the past and on the other hand they give us precious information about the life of Giacomo Castelvetro. For instance he cites a work of his, “Il ragionamento del Viandante” (f. 82r), which he hopes to see printed one day. It most probably never was printed. GKS 2057 4º The manuscript GKS 2057 4º gathers a number of quires in very different sizes. The 458 folios in modern foliation plus end sheets are bound in blue marbled paper (covering a previous binding in parchment) which would seem to be from the 17th century. The content spans from notes to readyforprint-manuscripts. The manuscript contains text by poets from Ludovico Castelvetro’s generation, poems by poets from Modena, texts tied to the reformation and a lot of satirical and polemical material. Just like some of Giacomo Castelvetro’s manuscripts which are now in the possession of Trinity College Library and the British Library it has “been bound up in the greatest disorder” (cf. Butler 1950, p. 23, n. 75). Far from everything is written in the hand of Giacomo Castelvetro, but everything is tied to him apart from one quire (ff. 184–192) written in French in (or after) 1639. The first part contains ”Annotationi sopra i sonetti del Bembo” by Ludovico Castelvetro, (which has already been studied by Alberto Roncaccia), a didactic poem in terza rima about rhetoric, “de’ precetti delle partitioni oratorie” by “Filippo Valentino Modonese” , “rescritto in Basilea a XI di Febraio 1580 per Giacº Castelvetri” and the Ars poetica by Horace translated in Italian. These texts are followed by satirical letters by Nicolò Franco (“alle puttane” and “alla lucerna” with their responses), by La Zaffetta, a sadistic, satirical poem about a Venetian courtisane who is punished by her lover by means of a gang rape by thirty one men, and by Il Manganello (f. 123–148r), an anonymous, misogynistic work. The manuscript also contains a dialogue which would seem to have been written by Giacomo Castelvetro, “Un’amichevole ragionamento di due veri amici, che sentono il contrario d’uno terzo loro amico”, some religious considerations written shortly after Ludovico’s death, ”essempio d’uno pio sermone et d’una Christiana lettera” and an Italian translation of parts of Erasmus’ Colloquia (the dedication to Frobenius and the two dialogues ”De votis temere susceptis” and ”De captandis sacerdotiis” under the title Dimestichi ragionamenti di Desiderio Erasmo Roterodamo, ff. 377r–380r), and an Italian translation of the psalms number 1, 19, 30, 51, 91. The dominating part is, however, Italian poetry. There is encomiastic poetry dedicated to Trifon Gabriele and Sperone Speroni and poetry written by poets such as Torquato Tasso, Bernardo Tasso, Giulio Coccapani, Ridolfo Arlotti, Francesco Ambrosio/ Ambrogio, Gabriele Falloppia, Alessandro Melani and Gasparo Bernuzzi Parmigiano. Some of the quires are part of a planned edition of poets from Castelvetro’s home town, Modena. On the covers of the quires we find the following handwritten notes: f. 276r: Volume secondo delle poesie de poeti modonesi f. 335v: VII vol. Delle opere de poeti modonesi f. 336v; 3º vol. Dell’opere de poeti modonesi f. 353: X volume dell’opre de poeti modonesi In the last part of the manuscript there is a long discourse by Sperone Speroni, “Oratione del Sr. Sperone, fatta in morte della S.ra Giulia Varana Duchessa d’Urbino”, followed by a discourse on the soul by Paulus Manutius. Finally, among the satirical texts we find quotes (in Latin) from the Psalms used as lines by different members of the French court in a humoristic dialogue, and a selection of graffiti from the walls of Padua during the conflict between the city council and the students in 1580. On fol. 383v there is a ”Memoriale d’alcuni epitafi ridiculosi”, and in the very last part of the manuscript there is a certain number of pasquinate. When Castelvetro was arrested in Venice in 1611, the ambassador Dudley Carleton described Castelvetro’s utter luck in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, stating that if he, Carleton, had not been able to remove the most compromising texts from his dwelling, Giacomo Castelvetro would inevitably have lost his life: “It was my good fortune to recover his books and papers a little before the Officers of the Inquisition went to his lodging to seize them, for I caused them to be brought unto me upon the first news of his apprehension, under cover of some writings of mine which he had in his hands. And this indeed was the poore man’s safetie, for if they had made themselves masters of that Magazine, wherein was store and provision of all sorts of pasquins, libels, relations, layde up for many years together against their master the Pope, nothing could have saved him” Parts of GKS 2057 4º fit well into this description of Castelvetro’s papers. A proper and detailed description of the manuscript can now be found in Fund og Forskning Online. Provenance GKS 2052 4ºon the one side, and on the other side, GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º have entered The Royal Library by two different routes. None of the three manuscripts are found in the oldest list of manuscripts in the Royal Library, called Schumacher’s list, dating from 1665. All three of them are included in Jon Erichsen’s “View over the old Manuscript Collection” published in 1786, so they must have entered the collections between 1660 and 1786. Both GKS 2053 4º and GKS 2057 4º have entered The Royal Library from Christian Reitzer’s library in 1721. In the handwritten catalogue of Reitzer’s library (The Royal Library’s archive, E 15, vol. 1, a catalogue with very detailed entries), they bear the numbers 5744 and 5748. If one were to proceed, one would have to identify the library from which these two manuscripts have entered Reitzer’s library. On the spine of GKS 2053 4º there is a label saying “Castelvetro / sopra Dante vol 326” and on f. 2r the same number is repeated: “v. 326”. On the spine of GKS 2057 4º, there is a label saying “Poesie italiane, vol. 241”, and on the end sheet the same number is repeated: “v. 241”. These two manuscripts would thus seem to have belonged to the same former library. Many of the Royal Library’s manuscripts with relazioni derive from Christian Reitzer’s library, and a wide range of Italian manuscripts which have entered the Royal Library through Reitzer’s library have a similar numbering on spine and title page. Comparing these numbers with library catalogues from the 17th century, one might be able to identify the library from which these manuscripts entered Reitzer’s library, and I hope to be able to proceed in this direction. Conclusion Giacomo Castelvetro was not a major Italian Renaissance writer, but a nephew of one of the lesser-known writers in Italian literature, Ludovico Castelvetro. He delivered yet another Italian contribution to the history of Christian IV, and his presence could be seen as a sign of a budding Italianism in Denmark in the era of Christian IV. The collection of Italian proverbs that he offered to Niels Krag, makes him a predecessor of the Frenchman Daniel Matras (1598–1689), who as a teacher of French and Italian at the Academy in Sorø in 1633 published a parallel edition of French, Danish, Italian and German proverbs. The two manuscripts that are being dealt with in this article are two very different manuscripts. GKS 2052 4º is a perfectly completed work that was hitherto unknown and now joins the short list of known completed works by Giacomo Castelvetro. GKS 2057 4º is a collection of variegated texts that have attracted Giacomo Castelvetro for many different reasons. Together the two manuscripts testify to the varied use of manuscripts in Renaissance Italy and Europe. A typical formulation of Giacomo Castelvetro’s is “Riscritto”. He copies texts in order to give them a new life in a new context. Giacomo Castelvetro is in the word’s finest sense a disseminator of Italian humanism and European Renaissance culture. He disseminated it in a geographical sense, by his teaching in Northern Europe, and in a temporal sense through his preservation of texts for posterity under the motto: “Perhaps even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall”.

In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202). Certainly, musical creativity has always involved a certain amount of appropriation and adaptation of previous works. For example, Vivaldi appropriated and adapted the “Cum sancto spiritu” fugue of Ruggieri’s Gloria (Burnett, 4; Forbes, 261). If stuck for a guitar solo on stage, Keith Richards admits that he’ll adapt Buddy Holly for his own purposes (Street, 135). Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.” Sample-based music is premised on adapting audio plundered from the cultural environment. This paper explores the ways in which technology is used to adapt previous recordings into new ones, and how musicians themselves have adapted to the potentials of digital technology for exploring alternative approaches to musical creativity. Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer. Perhaps it is more prudent to describe sampling simply as the process of capturing sound. Regardless of the process, once a sound is loaded into a sampler (hardware or software) it can be replayed using a MIDI keyboard, trigger pad or sequencer. Use of the sampled sound, however, need not be a faithful rendition or clone of the original. At the most basic level of manipulation, the duration and pitch of sounds can be altered. The digital processes that are implemented into the Roland VariOS Phrase Sampler allow samplists to eliminate the pitch or melodic quality of a sampled phrase. The phrase can then be melodically redefined as the samplist sees fit: adapted to a new tempo, key signature, and context or genre. Similarly, software such as Propellerhead’s ReCycle slices drum beats into individual hits for use with a loop sampler such as Reason’s Dr Rex module. Once loaded into Dr Rex, the individual original drum sounds can be used to program a new beat divorced from the syncopation of the original drum beat. Further, the individual slices can be subjected to pitch, envelope (a component that shapes the volume of the sound over time) and filter (a component that emphasises and suppresses certain frequencies) control, thus an existing drum beat can easily be adapted to play a new rhythm at any tempo. For example, this rhythm was created from slicing up and rearranging Clyde Stubblefield’s classic break from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. Sonic adaptation of digital information is not necessarily confined to the auditory realm. An audio editor such as Sony’s Sound Forge is able to open any file format as raw audio. For example, a Word document or a Flash file could be opened with the data interpreted as audio. Admittedly, the majority of results obtained are harsh white noise, but there is scope for serendipitous anomalies such as a glitchy beat that can be extracted and further manipulated by audio software. Audiopaint is an additive synthesis application created by Nicolas Fournel for converting digital images into audio. Each pixel position and colour is translated into information designating frequency (pitch), amplitude (volume) and pan position in the stereo image. The user can determine which one of the three RGB channels corresponds to either of the stereo channels. Further, the oscillator for the wave form can be either the default sine wave or an existing audio file such as a drum loop can be used. The oscillator shapes the end result, responding to the dynamics of the sine wave or the audio file. Although Audiopaint labours under the same caveat as with the use of raw audio, the software can produce some interesting results. Both approaches to sound generation present results that challenge distinctions between “musical sound” and “noise”. Sampling is also a cultural practice, a relatively recent form of adaptation extending out of a time honoured creative aesthetic that borrows, quotes and appropriates from existing works to create new ones. Different fields of production, as well as different commentators, variously use terms such as “co-creative media”, “cumulative authorship”, and “derivative works” with regard to creations that to one extent or another utilise existing works in the production of new ones (Coombe; Morris; Woodmansee). The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator. Proponents of what may be broadly referred to as the “free culture” movement argue that creativity and innovation inherently relies on the appropriation and adaptation of existing works (for example, see Lessig, Future of Ideas; Lessig, Free Culture; McLeod, Freedom of Expression; Vaidhyanathan). For example, Gwen Stefani’s 2004 release “Rich Girl” is based on Louchie Lou and Michie One’s 1994 single of the same title. Lou and One’s “Rich Girl”, in turn, is a reggae dance hall adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. Stefani’s “na na na” vocal riff shares the same melody as the “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum” riff from Fiddler on the Roof. Samantha Mumba adapted David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” for her second single “Body II Body”. Similarly, Richard X adapted Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” for a career saving single for Sugababes. Digital technologies enable and even promote the adaptation of existing works (Morris). The ease of appropriating and manipulating digital audio files has given rise to a form of music known variously as mash-up, bootleg, or bastard pop. Mash-ups are the most recent stage in a history of musical appropriation and they epitomise the sampling aesthetic. Typically produced in bedroom computer-based studios, mash-up artists use software such as Acid or Cool Edit Pro to cut up digital music files and reassemble the fragments to create new songs, arbitrarily adding self-composed parts if desired. Comprised almost exclusively from sections of captured music, mash-ups have been referred to as “fictional pop music” because they conjure up scenarios where, for example, Destiny’s Child jams in a Seattle garage with Nirvana or the Spice Girls perform with Nine Inch Nails (Petridis). Once the initial humour of the novelty has passed, the results can be deeply alluring. Mash-ups extract the distinctive characteristics of songs and place them in new, innovative contexts. As Dale Lawrence writes: “the vocals are often taken from largely reviled or ignored sources—cornball acts like Aguilera or Destiny’s Child—and recast in wildly unlikely contexts … where against all odds, they actually work”. Similarly, Crawford argues that “part of the art is to combine the greatest possible aesthetic dissonance with the maximum musical harmony. The pleasure for listeners is in discovering unlikely artistic complementarities and revisiting their musical memories in mutated forms” (36). Sometimes the adaptation works in the favour of the sampled artist: George Clinton claims that because of sampling he is more popular now than in 1976—“the sampling made us big again” (Green). The creative aspect of mash-ups is unlike that usually associated with musical composition and has more in common with DJing. In an effort to further clarify this aspect, we may regard DJ mixes as “mash-ups on the fly.” When Grandmaster Flash recorded his quilt-pop masterpiece, “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” it was recorded while he performed live, demonstrating his precision and skill with turntables. Modern audio editing software facilitates the capture and storage of sound, allowing mash-up artists to manipulate sounds bytes outside of “real-time” and the live performance parameters within which Flash worked. Thus, the creative element is not the traditional arrangement of chords and parts, but rather “audio contexts”. If, as Riley pessimistically suggests, “there are no new chords to be played, there are no new song structures to be developed, there are no new stories to be told, and there are no new themes to explore,” then perhaps it is understandable that artists have searched for new forms of musical creativity. The notes and chords of mash-ups are segments of existing works sequenced together to produce inter-layered contexts rather than purely tonal patterns. The merit of mash-up culture lies in its function of deconstructing the boundaries of genre and providing new musical possibilities. The process of mashing-up genres functions to critique contemporary music culture by “pointing a finger at how stifled and obvious the current musical landscape has become. … Suddenly rap doesn’t have to be set to predictable funk beats, pop/R&B ballads don’t have to come wrapped in cheese, garage melodies don’t have to recycle the Ramones” (Lawrence). According to Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critic, popular music (of his time) was irretrievably simplistic and constructed from easily interchangeable, modular components (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). A standardised and repetitive approach to musical composition fosters a mode of consumption dubbed by Adorno “quotation listening” and characterised by passive acceptance of, and obsession with, a song’s riffs (44-5). As noted by Em McAvan, Adorno’s analysis elevates the producer over the consumer, portraying a culture industry controlling a passive audience through standardised products (McAvan). The characteristics that Adorno observed in the popular music of his time are classic traits of contemporary popular music. Mash-up artists, however, are not representative of Adorno’s producers for a passive audience, instead opting to wrest creative control from composers and the recording industry and adapt existing songs in pursuit of their own creative impulses. Although mash-up productions may consciously or unconsciously criticise the current state of popular music, they necessarily exist in creative symbiosis with the commercial genres: “if pop songs weren’t simple and formulaic, it would be much harder for mashup bedroom auteurs to do their job” (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). Arguably, when creating mash-ups, some individuals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the pop industry and are instead working to create music that they as consumers wish to hear. Sample-based music—as an exercise in adaptation—encourages a Foucauldian questioning of the composer’s authority over their musical texts. Recorded music is typically a passive medium in which the consumer receives the music in its original, unaltered form. DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) breached this pact to create his Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous album (also known as the White Album). Dangermouse says that “every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somewhere.” In deconstructing the Beatles’ songs, Dangermouse turned the recordings into a palette for creating his own new work, adapting audio fragments to suit his creative impulses. As Joanna Demers writes, “refashioning these sounds and reorganising them into new sonic phrases and sentences, he creates acoustic mosaics that in most instances are still traceable to the Beatles source, yet are unmistakeably distinct from it” (139-40). Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture: an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines. Using just a laptop, an audio editor and a calculator, Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, created the Night Ripper album using samples from 167 artists (Dombale). Although all the songs on Night Ripper are blatantly sampled-based, Gillis sees his creations as “original things” (Dombale). The adaptation of sampled fragments culled from the Top 40 is part of Gillis’ creative process: “It’s not about who created this source originally, it’s about recontextualising—creating new music. … I’ve always tried to make my own songs” (Dombale). Gillis states that his music has no political message, but is a reflection of his enthusiasm for pop music: “It’s a celebration of everything Top 40, that’s the point” (Dombale). Gillis’ “celebratory” exercises in creativity echo those of various fan-fiction authors who celebrate the characters and worlds that constitute popular culture. Adaptation through sampling is not always centred solely on music. Sydney-based Tom Compagnoni, a.k.a. Wax Audio, adapted a variety of sound bytes from politicians and media personalities including George W. Bush, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, and John Howard in the creation of his Mediacracy E.P.. In one particular instance, Compagnoni used a myriad of samples culled from various media appearances by George W. Bush to recreate the vocals for John Lennon’s Imagine. Created in early 2005, the track, which features speeded-up instrumental samples from a karaoke version of Lennon’s original, is an immediate irony fuelled comment on the invasion of Iraq. The rationale underpinning the song is further emphasised when “Imagine This” reprises into “Let’s Give Peace a Chance” interspersed with short vocal fragments of “Come Together”. Compagnoni justifies his adaptations by presenting appropriated media sound bytes that deliberately set out to demonstrate the way information is manipulated to present any particular point of view. Playing the media like an instrument, Wax Audio juxtaposes found sounds in a way that forces the listener to confront the bias, contradiction and sensationalism inherent in their daily intake of media information. … Oh yeah—and it’s bloody funny hearing George W Bush sing “Imagine”. Notwithstanding the humorous quality of the songs, Mediacracy represents a creative outlet for Compagnoni’s political opinions that is emphasised by the adaptation of Lennon’s song. Through his adaptation, Compagnoni revitalises Lennon’s sentiments about the Vietnam War and superimposes them onto the US policy on Iraq. An interesting aspect of sampled-based music is the re-occurrence of particular samples across various productions, which demonstrates that the same fragment can be adapted for a plethora of musical contexts. For example, Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” break is reputed to be the most sampled break in the world. The break from 1960s soul/funk band the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” (the B-side to their 1969 release “Color Him Father”), however, is another candidate for the title of “most sampled break”. The “Amen break” was revived with the advent of the sampler. Having featured heavily in early hip-hop records such as “Words of Wisdom” by Third Base and “Straight Out of Compton” by NWA, the break “appears quite adaptable to a range of music genres and tastes” (Harrison, 9m 46s). Beginning in the early 1990s, adaptations of this break became a constant of jungle music as sampling technology developed to facilitate more complex operations (Harrison, 5m 52s). The break features on Shy FX’s “Original Nutta”, L Double & Younghead’s “New Style”, Squarepusher’s “Big Acid”, and a cover version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” by Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell. This is to name but a few tracks that have adapted the break. Wikipedia offers a list of songs employing an adaptation of the “Amen break”. This list, however, falls short of the “hundreds of tracks” argued for by Nate Harrison, who notes that “an entire subculture based on this one drum loop … six seconds from 1969” has developed (8m 45s). The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents. Sampling as a technology for creatively adapting existing forms of audio has encouraged alternative approaches to musical composition. Further, it has given rise to a new breed of musician that has adapted to technologies of adaptation. Mash-up artists and samplists demonstrate that recorded music is not simply a fixed or read-only product but one that can be freed from the composer’s original arrangement to be adapted and reconfigured. Many mash-up artists such as Gregg Gillis are not trained musicians, but their ears are honed from enthusiastic consumption of music. 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(May 2007) "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>.