The earliest album collected by a man from the Habsburg Netherlands in the German House belonged to Arnold Manlius (also known as Manlio, c. 1530-1607). It is an example of a typical collection of signatures by an ambitious humanist-doctor who was well integrated into the social life within the caravansary and the broader Christian professional and intellectual community outside its walls.14 Born in the 1530s in Ghent to a family of printers from Bruges, Manlius studied medicine in Leuven, Paris, Bologna, and Rome.15 Shortly after completing his education, he joined the imperial embassy to Constantinople as the medical doctor of Karl Rym, the resident ambassador and a fellow native of Ghent.16 They arrived in the Ottoman capital on 31 May 1570, and Manlius remained for the full length of Rym’s four-year appointment. During his lengthy stay he regularly met with local Greek scholars and accumulated a substantial collection of manuscripts.17 Upon the embassy’s return to Vienna from Constantinople in December 1574, Manlius stopped there for several months before travelling on to Cologne, where he eventually took up a professorship in medicine in 1578 that he held until his death in 1607.18

Manlius’s album amicorum is held in the Heidelberg University Library.19 It spans from 1570 through to his death in 1607, and also includes a handful of posthumous additions. The album itself is a copy of the German translation of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber published in Frankfurt in 1567 and consists of 137 printed folios interleaved with 127 additional folios numbered in pencil, some with printed frames for coats of arms. Several of these empty coats of arms have been filled in, some simply with blocks of colour and some with sketches of arms in ink. Entries with arms in full colour appear more frequently on blank interleaved folios. These 264 pages hold a total of 168 signatures, which appear predominantly (though not exclusively) on the interleaved folios rather than on the pages taken up by Alciato’s text and images. Though the volume was rebound, the original order of pages has been preserved.

Many of the signatures are accompanied by Manlius’s own Latin annotations which identify the profession and occasionally hometown of the inscriber.20 At the end of the volume, in the margins of Alciato’s index, Manlius kept a curious running list of names including several dozen Ottoman officials, foreign sovereigns, and references to others who did not sign his book but he may have heard of. These notes reveal how Manlius used the album as an aid to help him recall details of the journey and all he encountered along the way. Though he never composed a travel narrative, he could page through his album and use the signatures and names to prompt the recollection of anecdotes, experiences, and major events that took place during his four years of service. The anachronic picture of his journey that emerges from the moments captured in textual exchanges on paper match the way most album collectors constructed meaning according to their own logic.21 This would have been useful during conversations that took place in the German House as well as those back home.

Unlike the majority of sixteenth-century album owners, Manlius began collecting signatures only after he had completed his university studies. His album begins in Vienna on 18 April 1570, the day of his departure for the long journey to Constantinople. As a parting gesture, he asked three friends to sign: the Flemish nobleman Ferdinand van der Dilft, the doctor of theology Paulus Marchesinus, and the tutor to the imperial family, Nicholas von Coret.22 These entries point to Manlius’s priorities in securing signatures that reinforced his professional networks: noblemen, theologians, and intellectuals. This same focus can be observed in the set of ninety-nine signatures he collected in the German House in Constantinople and on several visits to Galata and to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Manlius himself signed two alba in Constantinople. The first was that of Lambert Wijts of Mechlin (discussed in greater detail below), a fellow housemate from the Habsburg Netherlands, on 3 August 1572.23 The second Manlius signature appears a few weeks before his departure on 12 October 1574, where he wrote in honour of amicitiae perpetuae in the album of Christopher Pfister, a scribe and occasional messenger in the retinue of Ungnad.24 The remaining sixty-six signatures come from Vienna and Cologne after he returned from his Ottoman sojourn. Throughout the thirty-seven years of its existence, Manlius had a clear purpose in mind for his album: to collect physical proof of his networks and encounters.

The men he ‘collected’ in Constantinople varied widely in social standing and profession. They included ambassadors, retinue members, secretaries, cooks, translators, messengers, informants, merchants, medical professionals, musicians, released captives, members of the Polish and Italian embassies, and local members of the Greek Orthodox community. Rather than following a hierarchical order, with the most important signatories near the front and the less important ones near the end, Manlius’s album includes several clusters of signatures by people of similar professions, occasionally grouped around relevant emblems in Alciato’s text. For example, three signatures from different dates are placed on the folio opposite the emblem for the music of God: Gibertus Vigarannus, a musician from Galata (2 July 1571), and Simeon Strats (6 February 1575) and Franciscus Mergot (21 February 1575), musicians from the court of Maximilian ii.25 Ten of the first nineteen signatures in the album belong to Greeks in Constantinople, including the famous scholar and teacher Damaskinos Stouditis, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos and Arta.26 These Greek signatures were gathered throughout Manlius’s stay in Constantinople but are concentrated near his departure in 1574. In his annotations, Manlius identifies four of them as ‘bibliophiles’.27

In addition to the members of Rym’s embassy, we also encounter several members of his deceased predecessor Albert de Wijß’s retinue, and those of Rym’s successor as resident ambassador, David Ungnad. The album also includes several dozen men who were members of the three tribute-carrying delegations that arrived during Manlius’s stay: the 1571 delegation led by Kaspar von Minkwitz, that of 1572 led by David Ungnad and Eduardo Provisionali, and that of 1574 led by Philibert de Bruxelles.28 Several important translators, known as dragomans, who worked across the tenures of various embassies, signed Manlius’s album as well.29 This includes the Italian-language signatures of the dragomans Mattia dal Faro and Dominico Zeffi.30 Another rather extraordinary entry – by the renegade translator Murad Bey – has been studied in detail on account of its curious mixture of languages accompanied by a two-page annotation by Manlius.31 Murad was a Christian convert and regular at the German House where he served as the Ottoman-appointed translator. Born in the town of Nagybánya (then in the Kingdom of Hungary, today Baia Mare, Romania), he attended school in Vienna before joining the ill-fated expedition of the Hungarian King Louis ii in 1526, during which he fell captive to the Ottomans. Rather than being sent to the galleys, he was trained in Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish, and converted to Islam. He also continued to wield Hungarian dexterously while maintaining his mediocre Latin, and sources suggest he could also communicate in a Southern Slavic dialect.32 He composed hymns, wrote an introduction to Islam (similar to a catechism), and even tried his hand at translating Cicero into Ottoman Turkish.33

Murad’s signature in Manlius’s album amicorum comes from 1571 and is written in Ottoman Turkish (both in Arabic letters and a phonetic transcription into the Latin alphabet), Hungarian, and Latin (fig. 1). The motto at the top reads: ‘It is better to have an enemy than to have a friend who has no sympathy for you.’ The second motto in the middle, ‘Wine is the old man’s milk to be sipped’, alludes to his great fondness for the free-flowing wine that welcomed him on the many occasions where he was invited to dine with the ambassador at the German House. He even chose the placement of his signature to correspond with the emblem for ‘in vino veritas’. This emblem page, however, was covered in the tightly packed handwriting of Manlius himself, who recorded notes on a conversation between himself and Murad that began as a friendly dispute on theological matters but quickly shifted towards a heated comparison between Christian and Muslim marriage, divorce, and sexual practices. As the conversation turned to circumcision and bathhouses, Murad retorted that it does not matter, because the whole world will soon fall into Muslim hands anyway. In the heat of the argument, Manlius insulted the Prophet Mohammed. At this, Murad drew his knife and Manlius followed suit.34 Nothing came of the incident, if indeed it ever really took place. Manlius seems to have added this dialogue to the album after Murad left his inscription, in the way he annotated many other signatures. That an inscription should be so colourful, with its mixture of languages and scripts was by no means unique, but the amusing anecdote is.35 Perhaps Manlius recorded this anecdote in such detail because it offered him a chance to reflect on his limited personal encounters with Islam. Murad was the only Ottoman notable and only Muslim to sign the album. The autograph proved that Manlius had experience interacting directly with the Ottoman world, and provided him with talking points and an exotic script with which he might prompt discussions with interested scholars back home. In other words, Murad’s signature and the lengthy annotation show how Manlius reworked the album, crafting it into a tool that could help bolster his authority as a learned man.

Elaborate signatures in Arabic and Greek scripts further illustrate Manlius’s humanist interests. A signature by Paolo Strada, son of the famous Habsburg court humanist Jacopo Strada, which appears on the following page includes a combination of Ottoman Turkish, Latin, and Latin rendered in Arabic script.36 Paolo had been taking lessons in Ottoman Turkish from the elderly Murad Bey and his signature showed off his developing dexterity with writing in the Arabic script. The placement of Strada’s signature, and its date a month after that of his tutor’s entry, clearly shows that Strada wanted to highlight his connection to his tutor. Arabic script was not the only exotic text collected by Manlius. Most of the signatures of officials from the Greek orthodox church are written in a complicated early modern Greek script with calligraphic signatures (monokondylion) that rival Arabic in their complexity.37

Other less illustrious signatures were gathered from well-travelled messengers and captives. This includes the imperial courier Jacob von Betzek, whose career spanned decades.38 Also included are the signatures of recently liberated captives, such as Bartholomäus Prew from Tirol and the Bohemian nobleman Hans Kekule von Stradonitz, whose contributions Manlius gathered as they were leaving the German House in order to return home after finally being freed from captivity.39 Prew had been captured on a boat in Malta back in 1570. After several years of petitioning the emperor while serving as a galley slave, ambassador Karl Rym ransomed Prew and sent the young nobleman home with a letter of recommendation.40

There are several notable absences from Manlius’s album, however. Though he met with and collected the signature of the Polish ambassador Andreas Taranowski, neither the Habsburg resident ambassador for whom Manlius worked, Karl Rym, nor his successor David Ungnad, signed his album.41 This is peculiar, since both Rym and Ungnad signed several other alba from the German House. In fact, Manlius seems to have socialized, or at least sought to document his socialization by procuring a signature, with only a quarter of his fellow residents. Instead, Manlius seemed to focus much of his collecting on the world beyond the walls of the German House, revealing his interest in networking beyond his immediate social circle. The Polish ambassador Taranowski was not the only person from another embassy that signed Manlius’s album; Georg Michalowski, a member of Taranowski’s retinue, also met Manlius and signed his album.42 On 26 February 1574, Manlius asked Filippo Pigafetta, who belonged to the retinue of the Venetian diplomat (called the bailo), to sign.43 Pigafetta would soon travel widely across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and later published a wildly popular travel narrative of his travels to the Congo.44 Another member of the bailo’s retinue, Bartolomeo Bruti, signed on 24 October 1574, just before leaving Constantinople.45 Bruti, still a teenager then, would go on to have an illustrious career as an informant, diplomat, and councillor hired out by a dizzying array of states, often simultaneously.46 These individuals, particularly those who later became famous, further bolstered Manlius’s authority as a learned man with important connections.

Manlius made a point of befriending several physicians and apothecaries during his stay, suggesting he also used his time in Constantinople to expand his professional circles. He met with and gathered the signatures of the two famous Portuguese Jewish physicians employed by Sultans Suleyman and Selim ii: Brudo Lusitano and Haim Abenxuxen.47 Though their signatures themselves reveal little, Manlius provided annotations for each, explaining their positions at the court. Both men occasionally fed information on the Ottoman court to the Habsburg ambassador as did Chaim Sinai Lautenschläger, a Bohemian-born Jewish informant who signed Manlius’s album in 1571.48 The signature of the Milanese doctor Giovanni di Castelle in Constantinople also reveals few clues, but its placement on the same page as a Greek apothecary in Galata a few weeks earlier suggests Castelle may have been on a study tour.49 On their way back to Central Europe, Manlius also befriended Wilhelm Vischer, a medical doctor for the tribute-carrying delegation of 1574.50 These signatures are spread throughout the album and do not appear to have been organized according to any internal logic. Thus, the album’s arrangement is typical for the sixteenth century.

The annotations accompanying the Ragusan agent and merchant Giogrio di Ragnina’s signature from 1572 mention that he was a good friend and kind host in Galata. Ragnina was an important broker for the German House, and he often arranged the transport of its post and loaned the ambassador cash when the Vienna court was too slow to respond to his urgent pleas. It was perhaps through Ragnina that Manlius met several of the leading merchants in Galata such as the Ragusans Stefano Babali and Matteo di Prodanelli, and the Italian Francisco Antonio Ferrario. Heinrich von Bünau der Jünger zu Treben (not to be confused with another Heinrich von Bünau auf Droyßig in the retinue of Ungnad) signed the album while on a shopping mission for August, Elector of Saxony.51 Farrario and Bünau may have conducted business together, which would explain their signing on the same page.

Collectively, then, the signatures in the album amicorum of Arnold Manlius left little trace of his native city of Ghent. The album contains no references to the Low Countries, no signatures in Dutch or French, nor does it include a proportionally greater number of signatures from other travellers and embassy members related to the Habsburg Netherlands. Instead, it can be read as a typical example recording the social practices of an ambitious doctor and humanist in the Habsburg embassy, who used signatures to expand his professional and intellectual networks. The album began as a document of Manlius’s journey to Constantinople, and followed him during his long career in Central Europe afterwards.

After Manlius’s return to Central Europe, he gathered one signature from the notary of Pressburg (today Bratislava, Slovakia), György Imre, before moving on to Vienna where he stayed with Franciscus Mergot, the chapel singer of Maximilian ii.52 Perhaps his most important contact during this extended visit to Vienna, where he may have been attempting to secure Habsburg patronage, was the fellow Flemish humanist in Austrian Habsburg service, Hugo Blotius, who had just been appointed head of the Imperial Library and had an interest in all things Ottoman.53 Blotius was then building up the library’s collection and, in addition to speaking at length about Manlius’s experiences in Constantinople, he may have purchased several of Manlius’s books. The final series of signatures comes from Manlius’s lengthy tenure as professor of medicine in Cologne.

Manlius’s album is a large and important example of how an ambitious humanist in the retinue of a Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman court navigated social circles in Constantinople. His collection documents his expanding intellectual and professional networks, networks which stretched beyond the confines of the German House. The album reveals little about the relationship between the Central European and Spanish branches of the Habsburg dynasty and the role of the Low Countries between them. The album addressed next is similarly difficult to identify as a product of the Low Countries.

The second album amicorum collected in the German House by an embassy member from the Habsburg Netherlands belonged to Lambert Wijts of Mechlin (b. 1542). Unlike the humanist and professor Manlius, Wijts is virtually unknown beyond the object in which his signature collection appears. His album is a hybrid object that combines several genres and contains a few signatures from his brief stay in the House, all of which are incorporated into the middle of Wijts’s 221-folio travelogue.54 The text chronicles his travels to Madrid in September 1570, to Vienna in 1571, and his Ottoman sojourn as a retinue member in the 1572 tribute-carrying delegation of David Ungnad and Eduardo di Provisionali. Together with the embassy, Wijts resided in Constantinople between 11 June and 14 August 1572. After his return to Central Europe, he remained in Vienna through April 1573 before resuming his journey back to his native Mechlin.

In addition to the travelogue and the signatures, the album also includes forty-seven folio-sized costume book images of varying quality and four large-format genre scenes depicting the formal entry of the tribute carrying delegation to the Topkapı palace (fig. 2), the handover of the tribute to the sultan (fig. 3), prayers at a mosque (fig. 4), and games in the hippodrome (fig. 5). Though these images have been widely reproduced in secondary literature as examples of one of the earliest Ottoman costume books, their uneven quality, heterogenous methods of being affixed to the volume, and range of watermarks suggest that they were not collected all at once in Constantinople.55 The costume book images can be attributed to at least three different hands. Some of them were likely made by the painter of the French House, which Wijts records visiting on 12 July 1572.56 Others seem to have been cut from another album and pasted onto the page (fig. 6). Meanwhile, the large format images all come from the same hand, and two of these include the monogram of an unidentified artist. Many of these images are heavily mediated through European printed sources.57 The pedestal of an obelisk in the view of the hippodrome includes the date 1573, which is a clear indication that at least some of the visual materials postdate Wijts’s journey to Constantinople. Throughout the collection, Wijts’s handwritten annotations identify the images and underscore their veracity. The collection offers a selection of archetypes that were available for purchase in 1570s Constantinople and Vienna. They provided Wijts with colourful illustrations to accompany his travelogue, revealing the costumes and customs he described in his text.

The thirty-four signatures all come from Wijts’s stay in Constantinople and appear on folios 147-152, with one posthumous addition made in seventeenth-century Rotterdam. Several of the pages include a grid with six squares in which the signatures appear (fig. 7). Most entries include all the hallmarks of an album amicorum entry: a date, an autograph, a motto, a year, and references to the act of writing in honour of unwavering friendship. The organization of the signatures into grids is curious, but may be due to the fact that the book itself was unusually large for the genre (measuring over 32 × 21 cm). This perhaps indicates that Wijts saw the entries as an integral component of his travel narrative rather than as a stand-alone album amicorum. The signatures are mostly organized by ambassadorial household, with the first group encompassing his own travelling partners and the second group covering mostly the highest-ranking members of the resident ambassador’s household and a select group of regular visitors. Just as we saw with Manlius, Wijts annotated the signatures in his own hand (here in French). On folio 151v, Wijts provides a list of further members of the tribute-carrying delegation who did not sign the album.

Manlius and Wijts were residents of the German House at the same time and their alba share twenty-two signatures, mostly members of resident ambassador Rym’s retinue and the 1572 tribute-carrying delegation. As we have seen above, Manlius concentrated most of his attention on collecting signatures from local notables related to his professional interests. Meanwhile, Wijts did just the opposite, and apparently desired to have an exhaustive catalogue of his housemates, whether they signed the album or not. Unlike Manlius, Wijts collected the signatures of both the resident ambassador Rym and the tribute-carrying delegates Ungnad and Provisionali. Their signatures are prominently placed in the beginning of the sequence and on separate folios.58 In the following tightly packed pages we encounter several members of Rym’s resident embassy not found in Manlius’s album. The only signatures from beyond the German House who appear in Wijts’s album – and not in Manlius’s – are the two Venetian merchants Marcantonio Stanga and Marco Sanuto.59 Their presence in the album indicates they were active at the German House. Indeed, Stanga is later documented as a secret informant of the ambassador, via a letter requesting that he be renumerated for his services.60

Manlius signed Wijts’s album on 3 August 1572 with a quotation from Hippocrates, thus highlighting the humanistic training of both men.61 Wijts returned the gesture a few days later when he signed Manlius’s album. Below the signature, Manlius annotated the entry with ‘D. Jodoci Wÿts frater’.62 This suggests Manlius must have known Lambert’s brother Jodocus Wijts well, who also was a member of Karl Rym’s retinue, living in Constantinople together with Manlius in the German House for several years.63 Jodocus himself however did not sign Manlius’s album. This omission lends further evidence to the fact that Manlius was not only collecting autographs from friends and acquaintances, but had professional ambitions in mind when compiling his album.

Wijts, on the other hand, compiled his signatures like a typical member of a tribute-carrying delegation who was just passing through Constantinople as a visitor and tourist.64 His relatively short stay meant that his collecting was confined primarily to the residents of the German House. He supplemented these signatures with an intriguing set of images acquired from different sources, some completed after the trip itself. His hybrid album reveals the editorial hand of a person working through his recent experiences on paper using a variety of media. When viewed in combination with Wijts’s surrounding travel narrative, the inventory of names organized in a grid provided Wijts with a record of his sojourn in the Ottoman Empire. These two alba stand in contrast to the third and final album to be addressed in this article, compiled thirteen years later by a native of Antwerp with an ambiguous relationship to the Habsburg imperial project embodied in the German House.

The final album from the sixteenth-century German House owned by a man from the Habsburg Netherlands belonged to Johann Huenich of Antwerp. The album is today housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and covers two years of his travels on 111 folios. It has a nineteenth-century binding with a pasted note in French dated 23 July 1874 listing the blank pages of the album.65 The album is comprised of a set of marbled and silhouetted papers, both of which were wildly popular in the German House and could be purchased from the paper-finishing shops that were a five-minute walk from the building.66 These folios provide the backdrop for fifty-six signatures, twenty-eight of which came from Constantinople and a further six from its environs. In addition to the entries, folio 108 of Huenich’s album is filled with a list of key positions at the Ottoman court and types of neighbourhoods and buildings in Ottoman Turkish (written in Latin script) alongside their German explanations. Like Manlius’s annotations, these notes may have served as memory devices to help Huenich recall details about the city and highlight his personal experience there. Furthermore, folio 110 verso includes notes by Huenich on additional people he met in Constantinople and Transylvania but who did not sign the album. The verso of folio 111 has a small sketch of a turbaned head along with a note indicating that fifty-three costume images should follow it. Instead, the album, which has suffered some water damage and has been rebound, ends abruptly. Two further folios from Huenich’s album can be found in a volume of miscellaneous items and fragments also held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.67 These loose folios include the same pattern of water damage on decorated Ottoman papers as the rest of Huenich’s album.

Huenich’s biography awaits a proper study in Netherlandish archives.68 However, his itinerary reconstructed based on the album already reveals that, like Wijts, Huenich joined a tribute-carrying delegation from Vienna to the Ottoman court. The dates and pattern of signatures suggest Huenich may have also been part of the Protestant exodus from his native Antwerp in May of 1585.69 This would have provided him with plenty of time to reach the court in Vienna before the Hoffmann delegation departed in October of that year.70 The presence of several controversial radical thinkers among the names collected lends further weight to this suggestion. Unlike Wijts, Huenich did not depart with the delegation led by Johann Friedrich Hoffmann, but instead remained in Constantinople for a month longer than his fellow travellers, before moving on to Transylvania via Bucharest. Given the paucity of surviving sources from the Hofmann mission, this album is an invaluable resource for reconstructing its composition. Further signatures in the album belong to a few select members of resident ambassador Paul von Eytzing’s retinue. A majority of the Constantinople signatures come from the week leading up to the departure of Hofmann’s tribute-carrying delegation back to Vienna on 13 February 1586.71 That same week, several members of Hofmann’s retinue left on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.72

Huenich’s album amicorum seems to follow a different internal logic than the alba of the ambitious humanist-doctor Arnold Manlius and the nobleman Lambert Wijts. Like Wijts, Huenich began collecting in the German House, possibly inspired by the collections of his housemates and his newly acquired decorated papers. The first signature is dated 20 January 1586 and belongs to a relative of the resident ambassador’s secretary, Johann Baptista Pezzen.73 As with thirteen other signatures in the album, Johann Baptista Pezzen’s name does not appear in any official documents on the embassy. Most of these men signed another album in the German House between 26 December 1585 and 13 February 1586, however, which indicates that they were all members of the 1585-1586 tribute-carrying delegation.74

Huenich’s album, unlike those of Manlius and Wijts, includes the signatures of several foreign representatives whose relationships with the Habsburg ambassadors were strained, if not outright hostile. On 18 March 1586, he met with the English ambassador-merchant William Harborne and his apprentice and successor Edward Barton, in their residence in Beyoğlu.75 It is unclear if they met only to discuss mercantile opportunities or if they also addressed Antwerp’s very recent appeal to England for help in protecting its Protestant population from Habsburg persecution.76 Further archival research may reveal if Huenich had the knowledge and authority to discuss such events. He also met with the staff of the French embassy: the agent P. Berthier and the secretary Simon Bouillon, who was employed by Jacques Savary de Lancosme, another ‘friend’ of Huenich’s, in the French residence in Pera.77 At the time, the French ambassador was locked in a bitter rivalry with the Habsburg ambassador. Again, it is unclear if the visit was purely social or if Huenich had other motives.

Huenich’s album is extraordinary for its inclusion of English and French ambassadors, and for its documentation of Huenich’s subsequent journey to Transylvania.78 The album may point to Huenich’s rather ambiguous position within the broader Habsburg imperial project in the wake of the Dutch Revolt. While Protestants were common across all alba from the German House in Constantinople, one of Huenich’s autographs comes from a Bohemian nobleman named Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, who would later play a key role in the defenestration of Prague.79 Even the signature of the only Muslim in his album can be read as a trace of radical strands of reformed thinking. Magyar Mehmed Bey, an informant of the resident ambassador from the office of Grand Vizier Siaus Pasha wrote his name alongside the following quotation: ‘There are not many Gods. God is one. He who created the heavens, the earth, the seas, and all those who reside in them.’80 It is unclear if Huenich understood the Hungarian inscription, but certainly those who signed the album a few months later in Transylvania would have understood it and possibly even its connections to the spread of radical ideas about reconciling Christianity and Islam in select circles at the Ottoman court.81

Near the end of his stay in Constantinople, following the departure of Hofmann and his retinue, Huenich gathered the signature of the Flemish merchant Karl Helman, which appears on a folio detached from the album and bound in bnf Ms. Italien 2216, as mentioned above.82 Helman, a wealthy dealer of semi-precious stones and jewels residing in Galata, was the head of network of merchants based in Antwerp and Venice.83 Huenich’s presence in the German House speaks against the possibility that he had, at least initially, travelled under Helman’s patronage. German and Flemish merchants, however few there were in Constantinople, were discouraged from interacting with the Habsburg ambassador at the time.84 Instead, it is more likely that Huenich and Helman were introduced by the two Galata-based German-speaking goldsmiths who signed Huenich’s album on 31 January 1586: Peter Alert of Stettin (Szczecin, Poland), and Johann Halepage of Mecklenburg.85

Huenich departed from Constantinople in late March and made his way, via Bucharest, to the semi-independent Ottoman vassal state of Transylvania, where he spent several months in Nagyszeben (today Sibiu, Romania), Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania), and Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania). It is unclear how or for what reasons he undertook the journey. While he was there, he collected signatures from several goldsmiths, merchants, senators, city council members, and priests.86 Those that can be identified were prominent Protestants like the priest Johannes Rodnerus from the village of Meschen (Moşna, Romania), whose published theses were confiscated and burned by the Jesuits.87 Huenich’s stay in Transylvania coincided with talks between the estates and agents from the papacy and Poland-Lithuania with the hopes of securing an alliance that would rid the region of Ottoman tributary status and Habsburg influence. These talks, which were partly coordinated by Stephan Báthory, Prince of Transylvania and King of Poland-Lithuania, proved unsuccessful.88

Ultimately, Huenich’s album records his connections within his own travelling party and the household of the Habsburg resident ambassador, while at the same time documenting those personal interactions that radiated far beyond it. By including the signatures of several foreign representatives and imperial rivals harvested while he journeyed through a politically contested and confessionally plural region trying to extricate itself from Ottoman hegemony without falling into the hands of the Habsburgs, Huenich’s album marked the 1580s as an era in which alternative patronage networks and avenues of socialization were available to individuals from the Southern Netherlands. Unlike the intellectual networks of Manlius and the documentary records of Wijts, Huenich’s album might be read as a record of subtle forms of resistance to the broader Habsburg imperial project. Ultimately it is more productive to use Huenich’s album to address the complexity of such deeply personal objects and the challenges they pose for historians today.

Alba amicorum are extraordinarily complicated historical documents to work with. They contain entries in dozens of languages and countless scripts that lead to a set of metadata which is difficult to standardize and contextualize. Many alba, like those of Wijts and Huenich, have undergone alterations over the centuries since their creation, adding further barriers to interpretation. Nevertheless, such alba can also be delightfully revealing objects, providing information on individuals usually missing from official historical records. They can also be mined for details about specific people, places, events, and networks, but the results of such data-driven approaches need to be understood as heavily mediated. These should be complemented by other methods focused on context, codicology, and the multiple interpretations invited by each page. They need to be reopened, reread, and mentally rearranged again and again as they will always reveal new connections and avenues of contemplation. In this way, alba amicorum behave remarkably like many other early modern alba across Eurasia, such as the ‘patched’ or muraqqa’ alba of the Perso-Islamic world.89

In this spirit, this article has examined three sixteenth-century alba amicorum belonging to men from the Habsburg-ruled Low Countries which offer a chance to explore the world-making strategies of individuals whose experiences across and between the empires of early modern Europe are otherwise virtually unknown. These three alba are the only known examples collected by men from the Low Countries in the German House in Constantinople. Arnold Manlius’s album embodied his professional networks and served as a tool to recount his experiences in learned circles. Lambert Wijts’s album served as a colourful keepsake from his journey to the Ottoman Empire. Johann Huenich, on the other hand, used his album to record meetings with a broad cast of characters, many of whom could potentially be read as indicative of Huenich’s personal religious and political sympathies. While the signature-collecting practices of Manlius and Wijts are characteristic of the groups in which they travelled, Huenich’s social networks deviated from social norms of the House. Thus, these three alba reveal the diversity and limits of album amicorum exchanges in sixteenth-century Ottoman Constantinople.