The Turkish enemy and the eastern European space in Giambattista Vico’s Deeds of Antonio Carafa

This contribution intends to examine Giambattista Vico’s De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei (Naples, Felice Mosca, 1716), which is a biography of Antonio Carafa (1642-1693), marshal in the service of Leopold I of Habsburg, engaged in the 1670s and 1680s fight against the Turks in the eastern part of the empire. In the battlefields between Austria, Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia, the struggle with the Turks was transformed into a “just war” between Christians and Muslims while, at the same time, Catholics and Protestants fought each other in the clashes with the Hungarian rebel Imre Thököly. Within the context of the rhetorical constraints of historical narration, Vico reflected on the presence of foreigners within and at the borders of Europe, describing their attitudes and behaviours, and raised questions about what consequences their presence could cause in terms of ‘Reason of State’. As Vico himself testified in his own autobiography, Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo (1723-1731), the reading of Ugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis helped him prepare Carafa’s biography, supported by the Tacitean themes that were extremely influential in European political discourses between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a rhetorical-narrative analysis focusing on the ways of organizing the narrator’s voice, the point of view and the representation of the characters, this essay will show what traits of the adversary emerge from the story.