Professor (2015-) at Arizona State University. Stantchev's research interests focus on the political, religious, and economic factors that shaped human relations throughout the Mediterranean (ca. 1000-ca. 1600). Stantchev prefers to work with voluminous source material, chiefly Venetian and Genoese archival and narrative sources, papal letters, and canon law commentaries. Stantchev's publications include Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice (2013) as well as nummerous book chapters and articles.
Stantchev applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517), and shared the following:
Page 99 of Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (part of Chapter 3) continues a discussion—begun at the bottom of the preceding page—of how both contemporaries and modern historians have explained Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Drawing on my examination of the entire Venetian Senate record and major narrative sources, I give particular credit to historians whose insights I find especially astute. Michael Angold, for instance, rightly observed that despite centuries of rhetoric about the Ottoman threat, the West had never prepared for the city’s fall; he also noted, with equal accuracy, that the Venetians failed to treat the matter with urgency—an assessment my study corroborates. Similarly, I underscore Steven Runciman’s view that Mehmed was perceived as being under the influence of his peace-loving grand vezier, and Franz Babinger’s point that the sultan had acquired an undeserved reputation as an “incompetent boy.” At the same time, I argue on page 99 that scholarship suffers from a fundamental imbalance: whereas premodern observers often overstated the role of individual rulers, many modern historians have overcorrected. In their effort to avoid writing a “history of great men,” they have failed to grasp the decisive role that Mehmed II's leadership made in 1453, erroneously attributing his success chiefly to demographics or cannon fire.Learn more about Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517) at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 reflects one of my book’s two defining traits: a thorough re-assessment of major studies that gives credit where it is due while also revising specific arguments and, at times, entire explanatory frameworks. This is most evident in my engagement with Freddy Thiriet in the preceding Chapter 2: I embrace his method of a complete, personal examination of the material, but I also rebut and replace his account of Venetian expansionism in the early 15th century—a section that, appearing at the end of his book, is not its strongest. The same approach shapes my treatment of Franz Babinger (especially in Chapter 6 of my book). Babinger's work on Mehmed II oscillates between penetrating insights and wholesale misreadings of the Venetian record. Page 99 thus captures both my close engagement with individual contributions and my attention to broader historiographical trends. However, it does not reflect the book’s primary driving force: my own re-examination of the primary sources. It offers an accurate view of one of the two main dimensions of my work, but ultimately my own work with primary sources, which it does not capture, is even more important.
Leaving page 99 behind, if I were to distill the single most fundamental characteristic of my book, it is that it seeks to uncover the worldview and priorities of a specific group of people. My first book, Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice (2013), examined above all why popes and canonists persisted with embargoes—even when these measures rarely succeeded in halting trade. Similarly, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea explores why the Venetian patriciate responded to the rising Ottoman power as it did during the decisive fifteenth century. In both cases, the conceptual foundation of my work lies in a fusion of the anthropologist’s question—“what are people up to?”—with the economist’s assumption that groups, however they frame or articulate their own actions, can fruitfully be analyzed as engaged in some form of maximization (though not necessarily of profit). For the patricians of Venice, that meant preserving oligarchic rule in an age of rising princely regimes across Italy and safeguarding their social and economic privileges at home.
The Page 99 Test: Spiritual Rationality.
--Marshal Zeringue
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