The Khan's Pifferi

This volume explores what Italian readers of the 1480s and 1490s could learn about the musics of Asia through the newly expanding medium of print. Drawing on ten travel books printed in Italy before 1501, including pilgrim accounts, the popular Mandeville, and eyewitness narratives by slaves, merchants, diplomats, and Marco Polo, the authors reconstruct how musical practices in the Levant, Turkey, Persia, India, and China were described and imagined for late fifteenth-century Italian audiences.

Through close textual analysis, the book reveals how references to singing, instruments, religious ritual, and courtly patronage shaped an emerging Italian understanding of Asian sound worlds. These printed accounts are situated within Italy's dense networks of pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and migration across the Eastern Mediterranean, demonstrating that Italian musical culture was inflected by global connections reaching far beyond Catholic Europe.

Interdisciplinary in approach, The Khan's Pifferi will be of particular interest to musicologists, Renaissance scholars, historians of travel and intercultural encounter, and researchers in global and pre-modern studies. It offers a fresh perspective on how musical knowledge circulated and how Renaissance Italy engaged imaginatively with cultures beyond Europe.