The Khan’s Pifferi: Reading about the Musics of Asia in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

This volume explores what Italian readers of the 1480s and 1490s could learn about Asian music through the expanding medium of print. Drawing on ten travel books printed in Italy before 1501, reporting the experiences of pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and an enslaved individual, the authors examine how musical practices in the Levant, Turkey, Persia, India, and China were described for late fifteenth-century 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.