Deniz Şengel, Sources and Context of The Renessaince Historiography (Turks)

Historical Image of the Turk in
Europe, 15th Century to the

Present
Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies
A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of

collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of
Ottoman and Turkish studies. These scholarly volumes address
important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single
volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of
research on the subject.
Historical Image of the Turk in
Europe, 15th Century to the
Present
Political and Civilisational Aspects
Mustafa Soykut
1
The Isis Press, Istanbul gorgiaS preSS
2010
Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA
www.gorgiaspress.com
Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul
Originally published in 2003
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Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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2010
ISBN 978-1-61719-093-3
Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Mustafa Soykut 7
Part I: The concept "Turk" from the Ottoman point of view.
Mehmet Kalpakli: TURK and OTTOMAN: A BRIEF

INTRODUCTION TO THEIR IMAGES IN THE OTTOMAN
EMPIRE 13
Part II: A General Outlook
Nedret Kuran Bureoglu: A GLIMPSE AT VARIOUS STAGES OF

THE EVOLUTION OF THE IMAGE OF THE TURK IN
EUROPE: l5™ TO 21st CENTURIES 21
Part III: An Italian Point of View: Papal and Venetian

Documents
Mustafa Soykut: THE "TURK" AS "THE GREAT ENEMY OF

EUROPEAN CIVILISATION" AND THE CHANGING
IMAGE IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SECOND SIEGE OF
VIENNA: (IN THE LIGHT OF ITALIAN DOCUMENTS
POLITICAL LITERATURE) 45
Gaetano Platania: THE TURKISH THREAT AND THE IDEA OF

CRUSADING IN THE PAPAL POLICY OF THE MODERN
AGE IN THE STUDY OF SOME UNPUBLISHED OR RARE
WORKS OF LAY OR RELIGIOUS AUTHORS (15TH-17TH
CENTURIES) 117
Part IV: The Renaissance Debate
Suheyla Artemel: VIEW OF THE TURKS FROM THE

PERSPECTIVE OF THE HUMANISTS IN RENAISSANCE
ENGLAND 149
Deniz §engel: SOURCES AND CONTEXT OF THE RENAISSANCE

HISTORIOGRAPHY CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF
TURKS 175
6 HISTORICAL IMAGE OF THE TURK
NazanAksoy \ TURKS IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 197
Part V: 17 th and 18 th Century British Views
Fiona Tomkinson: FOR THE SATISFACTION OF ALL THAT

DESIRE TO LOOK INTO THE TURKISH VANITIES':
IMAGES OF THE TURK IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY
ENGLAND 211
Ash Cirakman: SIR PAUL RYCAUT AND HIS INFLUENCE ON

THE 18™ CENTURY THOUGHT ON THE TURKS 227
Part VI: Image of an non-Muslim Ottoman People: the Jews
Arusyak Yumul: THE PERENNIAL IMMUTABILITY OF THE

JEWISH BODY 247
Part VII: From the Turkish Republic to the Present
Nur Bilge Criss: IMAGES OF THE EARLY TURKISH NATIONAL

MOVEMENT (1919-1921) 259
Mediha Göbenli: THE IMAGES OF TURKISH MIGRANTS IN THE

FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY: FROM "GUEST
WORKER" TO A MINORITY 287
Korkut Bugday: THE IMAGE OF TURKEY REFLECTED IN THE

GERMAN MAGAZINE "DER SPIEGEL" 295
Kamil Aydin: A POPULAR REPRESENTATION OF TURKEY INTO

THE 21st CENTURY: FROM VERBAL TO VISUAL 309
SOURCES AND CONTEXT OF THE RENAISSANCE
HISTORIOGRAPHY CONCERNING
THE ORIGIN OF TURKS
Deniz §ENGEL
As studies of the perception and chronicling of Turks promise to pick

up both in Turkey and elsewhere in Europe, it may be worthwhile to revisit
earlier stages of such historiography. This paper seeks to take stock of writers
and theories at the junction of the Middle Ages and early modernity, in so far
as these shed light on later transformations and developments as well as
elucidate the nature of the proliferation of writing on Turks in the
Renaissance. For, too often do the said studies ignore the original context
from which the chronicling of Turks derived and perhaps therefore — for lack
of rooting in established categories of scholarship — necessarily lapse into
describing their aim as the study of the 'image' of the Turk. Aided by the
recent movement of 'cultural studies' and their psychological category of the
'other', the study of the 'image of the Turk' compounds ideology with real
politics and substitutes the opportunity for joining the global circulation for
more genuine understanding of history. It may in the short run prove
profitable to relegate the conception of the 'Turk' to the hollowness of the
Lacanian imago, but the very political circumstances which may make that
appear profitable, now more than ever necessitate detailed historical research.
The context in which the topic of Turks arose historically was inextricably
intertwined, in a first step, with the genre of medieval universal history, and
in a second, with the birth of modern historiography, viz. the transformation
of medieval legend into an empirical ars. As such the topic equally provides a
framework within which to survey the itinerary of the birth of modern
historiography. It was specifically in the framework of the origin of the
nations, including but not limited to the origin of Turks, that medieval legend
proved most resilient despite the enormous steps Renaissance historiography
was going to take in the direction of empirical method. Turks had been
inscribed in universal history at least as early as the seventh century; in other
words, long before the Ottoman monarch Mehmet II rode into Constantinople
in 1453 and, performing an act of imperial translatio at least as old as
Charlemagne, took on the title of Kaysar-i Rum—Caesar or Emperor of
Rome. 1 By then, in the wake of the modern centralized monarchies, historians
everywhere in Europe were embarking with renewed vigor upon the re-telling
of the medieval legend of the nations' origins, again including but not limited
to Turks.
^For translation as the imperial act of the sacralization of the conquered place, see Stephen G.
Nichols, Jr., Romanesque Signs : Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 15-65, and pp. 9 and 14.1 would like to thank Camilla
Cederna, Nadine S. Abergel, and Robyn L. Schiffman for their help in obtaining materials used
in this article at Paris, New York City, and Chicago libraries respectively. Their assistance was
indispensable to the preparation of this article.
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176 DENiZ ÇENGEL
Like much medieval legend, pre-modern speculation concerning the

origin of the European nations was rooted in Virgil and the story of Troyan
exiles, with supporting proof drawn f r o m the Old Testament, in particular
f r o m Genesis IX and X and the Table of the Nations. 1 Aside f r o m these and
the H o m e r i c epics (which latter were not in circulation in Western Europe in
the Middle Ages), other sources of tales of Troyan migrants were the Cypria,
the Aethiopis, the ' M i n o r Iliad', a tale of the excidio Ilii (the destruction of
Ilium) none of which four have reached our day. Dares the Phrygian, w h o
figures in the Iliad, is also believed to have been the author of a pre-Homeric
account of the Troyan War, of which the Daretis Phrygii de excidio Trojae
historia dating f r o m the fifth century A . D . is said to be the Latin translation.
Along with the Ephemeris belli Trojani by Dictys Cretensis, D a r e s ' work,
which the Middle Ages knew rather than the Homeric text, became source for
Troyan romances such as Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (c. 1165)
and Albert de Stade's thirteenth-century Troilus, and of historical narratives
such as Joseph of Exeter's De bello troiano (fl. 1190-1210) and G u i d o delle
C o l o n n e ' s 1287 Historia destructione Troiae, which saw c o n t e m p o r a r y
translations or adaptations into Irish, Danish, and other vernaculars. 2 Thus, by
the aid of these sources, the origin not only of Turks, but certainly of Italians,
as well as of Franks, Germans, Austrians, Gallo-Belgians, the British, the
Genesis IX and X narrate the aftermath of the Flood. For analysis of the Table, see John
Skinner, The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, rev. ed. (New York: Charles
Scrihner's Sons, 1925), pp. 187-223. According to one tradition, IX, 20-27 was followed by a
Table of Nations to which the fragments in X belong. The dissection of the Table is largely
enabled by reconstructing the lost Table (for description and criticism of this tradition, see
Skinner, Exegetical Commentary, pp. 188-89). One example of the story of national origins
deriving from classical and Virgilian narrative set with Biblical details is the compilation under
Nennius' name (fl. 796), the Historia Britonum (seventh to mid-ninth century). See R. Hanning,
The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), especially
pp. 92-120. Historia Britonum, ed. and trans. John Morris (London: Phillimore; Totowa, NJ:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1980).
^ Among these, Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Le roman de Troie is a conflation of Phrygius' and
Cretensis' works [ed. Louis Constans, 6 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1904-1912)]. Following the
medieval non-differentiation between 'history' and 'fiction', Benoît saw no paradox in
conflating two contradictory accounts (see line 24400). He was 'translating' Latin texts into the
'romance' language, or, the vernacular (see lines 33-39). Daretis Phrygii De excidio Troiae
historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1873); Dictys Cretensis Ephemeridos
belli troiani libri sex, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig; B. G. Teubner, 1872) and Dictys Cretensis
Ephemeridos belli Troiani libri, a Lvcio Septimo ex Graeco in Latinvm sermonem translati.
Accedvnt papyri Dictys Graeci in Aegypto inventae, ed. Werner Eisenht (Leipzig: Teubner,
1973); and see Stefan Merkle, Die Ephemeris belli Troiani des Diktys von Kreta (Frankfurt a.
Main: P. Lang, 1989). Troilus Alberti Stadensis, primum ex unico Guelferbytano codice, ed. Th.
Merzhof (Lepzig: B. G. Teubner, 1875); Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War I III, ed. and trans. A.
K. Bate (Bristol: Bolchazy-Carducci; Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986); Leslie Diane-Myrick,
From the De excidio Troiae historia to the Togail Troi: Literary-Cultural Synthesis in a Medieval
Irish Adaptation of Dares' Troy Tale (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1993); Trôjumanna saga: The
Dares Phrygius Version, ed. Jonna Louis-Jensen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1981).
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H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G THE O R I G I N OF TURKS 177
Danes, the Poles, and perhaps of others too, was traced to Troy. 1 The
Frankish case became particularly developed owing, aside from the work of
chroniclers, to the early, originary development and elaboration of the genre of
the romance which, as in the above examples, made ample use of the tale of
the Troyan origin. In France as elsewhere, the Middle Ages did not distinguish
between historical narrative and what we today would call 'poetic' or fictional
narrative, and it was not until well into early modernity that one reflected on
their difference, notably in the poetics and historiographic theory of the
sixteenth century.
Similarly developed was the Italian case for Troyan origin, on which
one had nothing less than the word of Virgil, and which was endorsed by
writers on the order of Boccaccio. 2 A number of specific dynasties, moreover,
claimed Troyan lineage, such as the Merovingians, the Carolingians, the
House of Luxembourg, the Dukes of Lower Lorrain, the Counts of Louvain,
Namur, and Boulogne, the Habsburgs, and others. 3 The construction of
national origins and dynastic origins went hand in hand, as Geoffrey of
Monmouth's (d. 1155) Historia regum Britanniae attests: Scholars agree that
the Historia intended to serve the interests of the Angevines over against
those of the Kings of France. Ascribing the origin of both the people and the
H. Hommel, "Die troyanische Herkunft der Franken," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 99
(1956): 323-41; John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar
(London: T. Nelson, 1960); Jacques Abelard, Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye
de Jean Lemaire de Belges: étude des éditions, genèse de l'oeuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Judy
Kern, Jean Lemaire de Belges's Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye: The Trojan
legend in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (New York: Peter Lang, 1994); Georges
Doutrepont, Jean Lemaire de Belges et la Renaissance (Brussels: M. Lamcrtin, 1934); P.
Strohm, "Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English
Troy Narratives," Speculum 46 (1971): 348-59; Amnon Linder, "£x mala parentela bona sequi
seu oriri non potest; the Troyan Ancestry of the Kings of France and the Opus Davidicum of
Johannes Angelus de Legonissa," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 40 (1978): 497-
512.
o
However, already in the preface to De genealogie deorum gentilium Boccaccio will send an
ironic dismissal in the direction of the generalization of the thesis and make a similar remark in
Book VI concerning the French thesis, as also noted by Linder ("Troyan Ancestry of the Kings
of France," p. 498n,13): "Quod etsi multum non credam, absit ut omnino negem, cum omnia sint
possibilia apud deum" (V1.24). Charles G. Osgood points out in his commentary on Books XIV
and XV of De genealogie the implicit reference to Eusebius' chronicle—whose importance for
the dissemination of the Troyan myth we shall see immediately below—in Boccaccio's Proem
[Boccaccio on Poetry (1930; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1956; 1978), p. 144n.6]. The
reference may be equally held to be to Fredegarius, the earliest medieval chronicler
propounding the theory of Troyan origins, more on which below. But for an example from
sixteenth-century Italy diametrically opposed to Boccacio's skepticism, see the case of Ottavio
Ferrari cited at the end of n.19 below.
For the French Houses, sec Robert Folz, Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans
l'empire germanique médiéval (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950), p. 113: cit. in Linder, "Troyan
Ancestry of the Kings of France," p. 498n.l0. For the Habsburg thesis, see A. Lhotsky, " A p i s
Colonna: Fabeln und Theorien über die Abkunft der Habsburger," Mitteilungen des Instituts für
Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 55 (1944): 203-43. Family chronicles began to appear as
early as the tenth century: see L. Génicot, Les Généalogies (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975); Georges
Duby, "Remarques sur la littérature généalogique en France aux Xle et Xlle siècles," and
"Structures de la parenté," Hommes et structures du moyen âge (Paris: Mouton, 1973), pp. 287-
98, 266-85.
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178 DENiZ § ENGEL
dynasty to the same source must have served to establish a d y n a s t y ' s right to
rule over the territory where those people dwelled. The Troyan tale in the later
M i d d l e A g e s had b e c o m e a p r i m e vehicle f o r legitimizing g e n e a l o g y .
G e o f f r e y ' s air-tight fusion of the conjecture of origin with the claiming of the
l a n d — n o t to mention the identity of patrimony and patronymy—provides the
example. Brutus was, of course, the great-grandson of Aeneas:
Agros colere incipunt, domos aedificare, ita ut brevi tempore terram ab

aevo habitatem censeres. Denique Brutus de nomine suo insulam
Britanniam, socioque suos Britones appellat; volebat enim ex
derivatione nominis memoriam habere perpetuam. Unde postmodum
loquela gentis, quae prius Trojana sive curvum Graecum nuncupabatur,
Britannica dicta est.1
They began to work the fields, to build houses, so that in brief time, you
might have thought the land inhabited from the beginning. And finally
Brutus, after his own name, called the island Britannia, and his companions
Britons; for he would that his memory be eternally preserved in the
derivation of his name. Whence afterwards the people's speech, which
previously had been called Troyan or crooked Greek, was called Britannic.
T h o u g h G e o f f r e y ' s treatment was going to be all influential and

c o m m a n d the p o p u l a r i m a g i n a t i o n as well as f u r t h e r c h r o n i c l i n g and
romanciering — the year of G e o f f r e y ' s death, Robert Wace had completed his
Roman de Brut1 —, the oral tradition narrating the Troyan migration to
Britain via R o m e is held to go back in Britain to before the ninth century.
A n d fantastic as such tales had c o m e to strike quite a f e w writers by the
fourteenth century as the example of Boccaccio above and, in Britain, Ranulf
(or R a n u l p h ) H i g d e n ' s (c. 1282-1364) Polychronicon would show, they
continued to proliferate in and beyond Britain. 3 Starting with the fourteenth
century, still more Troyan exiles were provided with elaborate genealogies. It
was easy to claim Troyan origins for Troy no longer existed, and n o one quite
knew the exact geographic location of the city. But more important was the
venerable nature of the textual sources in which one could anchor the claim.
1 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. San-Marte (Halle: Eduard Anton,
1854), p. J 8.
^ Roman de Brut de Wace, ed. Ivor Arnold, 2 vols. (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français,
1938-1940). And see Julia C. Crick, The historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth 3: A
Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989).
3
For a different vector of development, which is going to link up with the empirical trend in
historiography we are going to discuss below, see Anthony S. G. Edwards, The Influence and
Audience of the Polychronicon (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1980), and
Newburgh below. Higden was one of the early works Caxton published, but so were Troyan
tales: see text below.
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HISTORIOGRAPHY CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF TURKS 179
To the medieval mind, ultimately there was no contradiction in

a s c r i b i n g s u c h d i v e r s i t y of n a t i o n s a n d d y n a s t i e s t o a s i n g l e s o u r c e . 1 The
m o d e l of c r e a t i o n at a n d d i s p e r s i o n f r o m a s i n g l e s o u r c e h a d b e e n p r o v i d e d in
t h e B i b l e . A s i d e f r o m t h e d i s p e r s i o n of N o a h ' s s o n s in o r d e r t o r e - p o p u l a t e t h e
w o r l d after the devastation of the F l o o d , Babel as the p l a c e of dispersion of
m e n , w o m e n , a n d t o n g u e s ( G e n e s i s X I ) f i g u r e d p a r a m o u n t in t h e g e n e a l o g i c a l
c o n c e p t i o n of m e d i e v a l universal h i s t o r i o g r a p h y . T h e p a r a d i g m of e p o n y m o u s
n a m i n g f o u n d in t h e p a s s a g e f r o m G e o f f r e y of M o n m o u t h q u o t e d above
derived directly f r o m Genesis IX and X , where,
e a c h n a t i o n is r e p r e s e n t e d b y an i m a g i n a r y p e r s o n a g e b e a r i n g its n a m e ,
w h o is c a l l e d i n t o e x i s t e n c e f o r t h e p u r p o s e of e x p r e s s i n g its u n i t y , b u t
is at t h e s a m e t i m e c o n c e i v e d as its real p r o g e n i t o r . F r o m t h i s it w a s an
e a s y s t e p to t r a n s l a t e t h e s u p p o s e d a f f i n i t i e s of t h e v a r i o u s p e o p l e s
into the f a m i l y relationsof f a t h e r , son, brother, etc., b e t w e e n the
e p o n y m o u s a n c e s t o r s ; w h i l e t h e o r i g i n of t h e e x i s t i n g e t h n i c g r o u p s
w a s h e l d to b e a c c o u n t e d f o r b y t h e e x p a n s i o n a n d p a r t i t i o n of t h e
family.^
T h e m e d i e v a l g e n r e of universal h i s t o r y h a d started in t h e f o u r t h c e n t u r y
A . D . B e g i n n i n g , in t h e W e s t , w i t h J e r o m e ' s L a t i n t r a n s l a t i o n of E u s e b i u s of
Caesaria's Chronicon (Interpretado Chronicae Eusebii Pamphili), the
universal c h r o n i c l e traced h u m a n l i n e a g e f r o m Creation t h r o u g h the tree of
s u c c e s s i v e g e n e r a t i o n s f r o m an original pair of p a r e n t s d o w n t o p r e s e n t - d a y
f a m i l i e s ( i . e . , d y n a s t i e s a n d n a t i o n s ) . 3 L i k e t h e a c c r e t i o n a r y m o d e l it a p p l i e d
to h u m a n l i n e a g e , universal history itself w o r k e d c u m u l a t i v e l y . T h u s J e r o m e
translated into Latin and updated to A.D. 379 the chronicle which Eusebius
h a d l e f t a t A . D . 3 2 4 / 5 , A u g u s t i n e b r o u g h t it u p t o t h e s a c k i n g o f R o m e , a n d
so o n . 4 T h e underlying a s s u m p t i o n of the genre w a s that the linear history of
William of Newburgh's (1135/6-1198?) frequently cited criticism [e.g., Linder, "Troyan

Ancestry of the Kings of France," p. 497 n. 2J, in Historia rerum Anglicarum I, proemium [ed.
R. Howlett (London: Longman, 1884-1889), p. 11] of Geoffrey of Monmouth's attribution of
Troyan origin to the British, concerns not the notion of dispersion of many from a single source,
but questions the veracity of Monmouth's construction of Troyan origins for the British. Higden
in Polychronicort was going to do the same.
^ Skinner, Exegetical Commentary, p. 189. But see also p. 190. For other sources of the
relations between genealogy and patronymy from antiquity onward, see Ernst Robert Curtius,
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1963; Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 495-500.
3
See Richard W. Burgess (with the assist, of W. Witakovvski), Studies in Eusehian and Post-
Eusebian Chronography (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999). On the use of the 'tree' in medieval
culture, see A. Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1934).
4
See J. Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp.
1-49; Alden A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebios and Greek Chronographic Tradition
(Lewisbvrg, Pa.: Buckneil University Press, 1979). For a list of universal historians, whom he
starts from Moses (indicated as having 'fl. 1519 B.C.') and in the 1572 edition of the work
brings up to Mercator ('fl. 1570'), see chapter X of Jean Bodin's Methodus ad facilem
historiarum cognitionem (Paris: apud Martinum Iuuenem, 1566; 1572; etc.; Aalen: Scientia,
1967).
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180 D B N I Z § E N G E L
the race, which cvinced progressive degeneration, would be redeemed at the end
of time by a return to the unity of the beginning. It was the idea and nature of
the final redemption, in other words, that in a way necessitated the linearity of
the chronicle and the ascription of the nations to a single common source. The
eponymous itinerary of the nation's name of the kind evinced in Geoffrey of
Monmouth's work, pursued through etymology the same path of the return to
original unity. Etymological interpretation offered a device for connecting the
temporal world to the Divine Word in a universal history. On the human-
historical plane, earlier versions of a word, traced along a linear path, brought
one closer to the original, Edenic language. 1
The assimilation of the Biblical model of the universal history to the

talc of the Troyan dispersion dates to Fredegarius's Chronicon, a collection of
cumulative chronicles of the seventh century. Or rather, the Chronicon is the
earliest known articulation of the Troyan thesis. It includes enumeration of
Turks, Franks, and Macedonians as Troyan nations. 2 Another seventh-century
appearance of the thesis, assumed to have done so independently of Fredegarius
but this time in relation to the Franks, is in the Liber historiae Francorum?
Renaissance historiography was going to inherit other ancient explanations of
the Turks' origins. One was a tradition attributed to Josephus which, however,
again implied the Troyans: Josephus had maintained that Phrygians, who
included the Troyans, had descended from Togarmah, one of Japheth's
grandsons. 4 This legend of Turkish identity found following in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, 'Turk' and 'child of Togarmah' indicating the same
entity as in Tudelensis' twelfth-century "the children of Togarma, who are
commonly called Turkes" and Leunclavius' (or Hans Lowenklau's) assertion,
at the end of the sixteenth century, that Turks themselves identified their
ancestor as Japheth. 5 But Fredegarius' version, becoming the more firmly
established one in the course of the Middle Ages and propounding the origin
of the politically significant West European nation of the Franks that
had genuinely gripped medieval French imagination and dynastic interest, was
1
Adam's language, originating in his naming of the animals in God's presence in Genesis II,
18-20.
Chronicon II.4, 5, 6: Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, ed. Bruno Krusch, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1888), II: 45-46,
and see the Wallace-Hadrill work cited above.
3 Ed. Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae II: 241-45.
4
Genesis X, 3. Noah's three sons were the patriarchs each of the Semites, Africans, and Indo-
Europeans. Japheth was the father of the third group. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.126
5
The twelfth-century 'peregrination' is reprinted in Hakluyt: Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus
posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes: contayning a history of the world in sea voyages and lande
travells by Englishmen and others, by Samuel Purchas, reprint of the 1625 ed. (Glasgow: J.
MacLehose & Sons; Hakluyt Society, 1903-1907), VIII: 536. Johannes Leunclavius (1533?-
1593), Annates sultanorum Othmanidarum, a Tvrcis sva lingva scripti [...] (Frankfurt a. Main: A.
Wechels Erben, Claudius Aubrius, Ioannes Aubrius, 1588). Ger. trans.: Neuwe Chronica
türckischer Nation, von Türcken selbs beschrieben [...] (Frankfurt a. M.: A. Wechels Erben, C.
Marne und I. Aubri, 1595).
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H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G THE ORIGIN OF TURKS 181
going to offer more ground for speculation and a tougher challenge for early
modern empirical historiography. Troyan origins were noble origins which
not only the French, but many European nations and dynasties continued to
covct in the course of the Renaissance. 1
The medieval Troyan talc was not going to disappear in the age of
humanist historiography and of Gutenberg. 2 Fredegarius was going to serve as
source to nothing less than Pierre de Ronsard's national epic La Franciade
(1572); the library at the Court of Burgundy possessed in the fifteenth century
seventeen different manuscript accounts of Frankish Troyan origins 3 ; the
Venetian Pietro Dolfin (1427-1506), who was a quattrocento humanist by all
counts and whom we know to have studied closely seminal humanist works
like Pier Paolo Vergerio's De ingenuis moribus and Matteo Palmieri's De
temporibus, chronicled the array of troiani zentilhomeni when it came to
writing his own work in history 4 ; The Recuyell of the Histories ofTroye, the
English translation of Raoul Le Fevre's Recueil des histoires de Troye
(1464) which Le Fevre had derived from Guido's thirteenth-century Historia
destructions Troiae mentioned above, was one of the first books printed in
For the continuation and re-vitalization of the Troyan thesis in the Renaissance, one may cite
the sixteenth-century French historian Paulus Aemilius [De rebus gestis Francorum (Paris,
{1517-1520})], and Robert Gaugin and Nicol Gilles who in Les grandes chroniques de France
follow Aemilius in opening the chronicle with the tale of Troyan exiles seeking a new homeland
[see Corrado Vivanti, "Paulus Aemilius Gallis condidit historias?" Annales 19 (1964), though
elsewhere in their work, both Aemilius and Gaugin express scepticism; J. P. Bodmer, "Die
französische Historiographie des Spätmittelalters und die Franken," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte
45 (1963): 95]; the Annales seu cronicae inclyti regni Poloniae of the Polish Ioannes Dlugosz
(d. 1480) [see M. Schlauch, "Geoffrey of Monmouth and Early Polish Historiography; A
Supplement," Speculum 44 (1969): 258-63]. For the work of Jacobus Mennel's humanist circle
in the court of Maximilian I, see Lhotsky's article cit. above, and Klaus Arnold, Johannes
Trithemius (1462-1516) [(Würzburg: Kommissionsverlag F. Schöningh, 1971; 1991), pp. 165-
71] on J. Trithemius' work. In England, the medieval legend finds revival in the reigns of
Edward IV and Henry VII [see S. Anglo, "The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda,"
Bulletin of the John Ryland's Library 44 (1961): 17-48, and H. Matter, Englische
Gründungssagen von Geoffrey of Monmouth bis zur Renaissance (Heidelberg: G. Winter,
1922)]. The case of Italy provides examples too numerous to be summarized as individual cities
and townships—notably Padova and Venice—claim the Troyan origin for themselves. But one
is particularly worth mentioning since it demonstrates that even in the land that gave birth to
modern historiography the theory of Troyan origins was innegligible as late as the times of
Ottavio Ferrari (1518-1586) who 'demonstrated' that long before the Troyan War, immigrants
from Italy had settled in Troy and were eventually to migrate back to Italy as told in the legend
(Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, p. 435).
E.g., Dares' De excidio was printed in Lyons (Romain Morin, 1520): Dares Frigius de hello
troiano.
For the fifteenth-century Burgundian court, see Doutrepont's Littérature française à la cour
des ducs de Bourgogne (Paris: H. Champion, 1909) and his Inventoire de la 'librairie' de
Philippe le Bon (1420) (Brussels: Kiessling et Cie, 1906).
4
Pietro Dolfin, Annali Venetorum, ed. Roberto Cessi and Paolo Sambin (Venice: Istituto Veneto
di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1943).
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182 DENIZ § ENGEL
England at William Caxton's press 1 ; and Este historians would begin as late
as the 1580s to produce Troyan origin for Ferrara. 2 Venetian historian
Giovanni Candido (d. 1528) indeed questioned, in his Commentariorum
Aquileiensium libri VIII (Venice, 1521), whether the place name Aquileia
could not have derived from the acquae, waters, surrounding it rather than
from the name of Aeneas' friend Aquilo of Troy. He even asked a rather
unorthodox question for the time, namely, whether historians who asserted the
latter could not have been led astray by the poets. But he left the question
open. Particularly telling seems the case of Paolo Giovio's (1483-1552)
Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae, et Orchaddum (pub. 1548),
which was based on eye-witness accounts and material whose accuracy Giovio
found could be established with certainty. He had therefore eliminated the story
of Brutus from the history of Britain. The work was received in England with
enthusiasm. George Lyly (d. 1559) edited the English publication, prefaced it
with a eulogy to the author, but filled in the work's significant "lacuna" with
an appendix about the descent from Brutus. 3
Disproving Fredegarius' thesis thus carried implications for reasons not

related to Turks alone. Aside from serving the legitimate construction of the
past, genealogical paths spun from the Troyan model were going to be applied
so as to make sense of, or prompt, contemporary alliances and enmities.
Thus, Jean Lemaire de Belges (b. 1473) who particularly admired the
aggressive military politics of the Valois king Charles VIII and wished the
new French king (Louis XII, who had ascended in 1498) to extend the
militarism upon Turks, declared, in his Illustrations de Gaules et singularités
de Troie (1500-1513), the French as the "vrays Troyens" and Turks to be
'usurping the name' ("usurpent ... le nom"), and in 1451 Francesco Filelfo
(1398-1481) had called on King Charles VII to fight Turks in order to avenge
his Troyan ancestors. 4 For purposes of demonstration, Lemaire de Belges
1
Guido's work had seen early translations into medieval vernaculars [Neapolitan: Libra de la
destructione de Troya, ed. Nicola De Blasi (Rome: Bonacci, 1986); English: C. David Benson,
The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne 's 'Historia destructionis
Troiae' in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980); Spanish: La Coronica Troyana: A
medieval Spanish Translation of Guido de Colonna 's Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Frank
Pelletier Norris II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970)1, and in the
Renaissance was published, among others, in Polish [Historya trojanska, ¡563, ed. Wydal
Samuel Adalberg (Krakow: Nakl. Akademii Umiejetnosci, 1896)], again in Spanish [Cronica
Troyana, en que se câtienne la total y lamentable destruycion de la nombrada Troya, ed. and
trans. Pedro Nunez Delgado (Medina, 1587)].
2
For the bibliography of Este historians Pigna, Falletti, and Mosti, see Eric Cochrane, Historians
and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1981), pp. 551-52 n. 32.
3
Cochrane narrates the anecdote at pp. 366-67 in Historians and Historiography. Giovio's
work was published in Venice by Tramezino. Lyly's eulogy was published in Latin in the same
year: Virorum aliquot in Britannia, qui nostro seculo eruditione, & doctrina clari,
memorabile'sq[ue]fuerunt, elogia per Georgium Lilium Britannum, exarata (Venice).
4
Illustrations 1.1, ed. J. Stecher, Œuvres (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882), I: 15. Filelfo, Epistolarum
familiarum libri XXXVII (Venice); see Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: the
Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517) (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967), 150-52.
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H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G T H E O R I G I N OE T U R K S 183
borrowed from the work of Giovanni Annio da Viterbo (c. 1432-1502). 1

Annio (or Nannio), in turn, had forged texts to demonstrate the superioty of
Italians and their chronological priority to Greeks by tracing the formers'
origin to Noah, whom he identified with Janus, the first king of Italy. Annio
purported to base himself on works by the Egyptian Manetho and the
Chaldean Berosus, which Josephus had recorded were lost and which he,
Annio, had 'discovered' and 'translated' into Latin. 2 He delivered his thesis as
a lecture in the presence of Pope Alexander VI and when the 'translation' was
published in 1498, he was not only rewarded for it by pope and prince alike,
but became immensely popular. In this historiographic environment, Charles
VIII's (reigned 1483-1498) invasion of Italy had generated its own series of
Troyan-based interpretation, namely as the French attempt to recuperate
Troyan entitlement from the Italians. The immediate model for this had been
the employment of 'Troy' a few decades before, to interpret Mehmet II's
capture of Greek territories as the avenging of the original Troyan catastrophe.
Mehmet II and Charles VIII shared, according to the Renaissance historico-
poetic imagination, numerous characteristics—above all the desire to rule
Roma, caput mundi—that made them particular material for comparison to
grandiose conquerors of the past, more on which later. But, momentous as
they were, these specific incidents aside, the Troyan model was in general
accepted as an entire scheme—as a model that explained the origins of all
agents upon the scene of Europe. The discursive attack on a prince or nation
ran through disproving the Troyan origin of the target as we saw above; the
compliment reiterated Troyan origin or drew an analogy to a famous Troyan.
Thus an aide to Francesco Gonzaga described the general's comportment in the
battle against Charles VIII by observing that no one since Hector had fought
on horseback as did he. 3 The Troyan model was an interpretive grid and served
best when taken as a whole. Attempts to disprove it were for the most part
local, sought to dismantle the Troyan claim of a specific prince or nation, and
were motivated by enmity or rivalry, as in Pius II's rejection of the thesis for
Turks but acceptance for Franks and Venetians—the two forces he found could
play elementary role in a mobilization against Turks. There are few exceptions
to this, such as the Commentario delle origine de Turchi et imperio della
casa ottomanna by Andrea Cambini, an innovator in the direction of genuine
historiography who rejected Troyan origin for Turk and French alike. 4 But
1 Doutrepont, Jean Lemaire de Beiges, pp. 13-26.

2
Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, pp. 432-33; and see p. 588 n. 60.
3
Marino Sanudo, La spedizione di Carlo Vili in Italia, ed. Rinaldo Fulin (Venice: Marco
Visentini, 1873), p. 478; see Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, "La coltora e le relazioni
letterarie di Isabella d'Este Gonzaga. 7. Gruppo meridionale," Giornale storico della letteratura
italiana 40 (1902): 289-334.
4
Pius' thesis is in Cosmographia: Aeneas Sylvius, Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: H. Petri,
1551), pp. 384, 394, 433, 681, 926. On Pius' interpretation of British history, see Constance
Head, "Pope Pius II as a Student of English History," Archivum Historiae Pontificae 9 (1971).
On Pius' interpretation of British history, see "Pope Pius II as a Student of English History,"
Archivum Historiae Pontificae 9 (1971). Libro Andrea Cambini Fiorentino. Delia origine de
Turchi et imperio dell Ottantanni (Florence: Philippo di Giunt, [1538]) (On the publication date
of Cambini's book, which in the book is indicated as 1529, see Cochrane, Historians and
Historiography, pp. 564-65 n.71.)
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184 DENIZ § E N G E L
Annio's forgery, like the practically countless forgeries of Troyan origins for
individual families and towns starting in the Middle Ages, evinces to what dire
extent the model was needed. Deriving its essential structure from the Bible
and reinforced by widespread medieval lore, it had proved resilient. But now, in
a Europe torn by war and strife as history had neither seen nor was going to
see again, it was a model that could also serve arguments for peace. We need
not forget that this was the culture of humanism and of Montaigne, and that
historiography was essentially a humanistic enterprise.
Fredegarius mentioned the "Turci" and traced their patronymy to the

Troyan King Torquotus, to be etymologically reinforced by yet another kingly
name further down in history: he told that a group of Troyan exiles under
Friga settled first in Macedonia, eventually spreading toward the Danube. A
number of these, ancestors of the Franks, migrated under Francio to the
Rhine. Those who stayed behind elccted Turcot as king.1 The Greek terms for
the Troyans were, of course, Dardanoi and Teukroi (Latinized as Teucri—the
form used by Virgil), the latter from the name of the first king of Troy,
Teukros, later Latinized also as Torquotus. The tale was repeated by highly
influential medieval writers, among them the compiler of all extant human
knowledge, Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum historiale (c. 1250). The
notion persisted after Mehmet II's capture of Constantinople. Bernhard von
Breydenbach reprinted in his Peregrinationes ad terram sanctam an eye-
witness account by Cardinal Isidore of the 1453 siege that referred to Mehmet
II as the 'prince and lord of the Troyans'— "Teucrorum princeps et dominus."
The historical vision aligning Turks and Troyans had slipped into early
modern writing through conceptual as well as philological pathways which
derived Latin from Greek and the vernacular from Latin. Breydenbach's work
was first published in his native Germany in 1486, and saw two more editions
in Germany before being translated into French and Spanish. Independently,
Isidore's letter underwent even further publications as it was quoted in full in
several historiographic works. 2 Before moving on to other aspects of the
historical persistence of the Troyan tale and particularly the interpretation of
Mehmet, wc need to linger on this new value attached, in the Renaissance, to
a letter like Isidore's. Questions arising from its circulation as described by
Robert Schwoebel and summarized above, but also the imperviousness to it in
a country like Italy, are answerable in a framework less relevant to the topic of
Turks or any particular nation than to epistemo-ethical problems involved in
the birth of modern historiography.
1
Chronicon II. 6, ed. Krusch, p. 46.
2
Schwoebel, Shadow of the Crescent, pp. 176-201.
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H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G THE ORIGIN OF TURKS 185
As Renaissance historiography came to value the empirical, it would

also seek out 'eye-witness accounts' of current events such as Isidore's letter
provided. Thus, for example, Giovan Battista Egnazio utilized diplomatic
reports in De origine Turcarum, included in his biographical history of
Roman emperors (pub. Basel, 1533). And we have already mentioned the case
of Paolo Giovio who, in his history of Britain, sought to utilize exclusively
sources whose accuracy could be verified by being demonstrably connected to a
witness. Thus too, Giovio attempted in his history of Turks, first published
in Latin in 1537; and in 1541, in one volume with the story of the 'life and
deeds' of Iskender Bey (Scanderbeg) by Cambini. 1 The drive for empirical
documentation ran deep: Eric Cochrane cites a publication in which "passages
from Giovio were disguised to look like results of oral interviews" {De prima
Truculentissimorum Turcorum origine, 1543), and another book of 1557 that
translated and re-arranged passages from Menavino and Domenichi to create the
impression of deriving from the translator's records. 2 By the end of the 1580s,
Tomasso Campanella had identified the value of the 'eye-witness' in
epistemological terms inextricably bound up with the ethical and was
elaborating on the ethics of the discourses, including those of the
historiographie. Like the natural sciences, historiography had to be conducted
"non ratione, sed sensu" (not by means of method, but by means of the
senses), he claimed in the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (pub. c. 1589).
He was here following verbatim Bernardino Telesio, whose anti-Aristotelian,
natural-scientific De rerum natura (pub. 1570) he was defending. Campanella
intended something like what Jacques-Auguste de Thou was going to attempt
in his Historia sui temporis— 'the history of his time'. Pushing to the limit
the principle of writing history de sensu (by means of the senses), de Thou
asked Paolo Sarpi in 1607 for his 'eye-witness account' of the events that had
occurred since Pope Paul V had issued an Interdict at the Venetian Republic
whose Servite —as official theologian—Sarpi was.
Of course, it was also the impossibility of practicing a historiography

based on the empirical observation of events that eventually, in the age of
Hobbes and Descartes, was going to lead to its rejection in the name of
'science'. For, given that no one could live long enough and be at so many
different places at the same time, it followed that many historians had written,
and were writing, by 'hearsay'. 3 And historiography thus came alarmingly
' Commentant dette cose de Turchi di Paolo Giovio, et Andrea Gambini, con glifatti, et la uita
di Scanderbeg (Venice: Figlioli di Aldo, 1541). An English version appeared in London in 1546
(Edward Witchurche): A shorte treatise vpon the Turkes chronicles, compyled by Paulus Jouius
byshop of Nucerne, and dedicated to Charles the v. Emperour.
^ Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, p. 337.
3
Two years before Bodin's Methodus was due to appear, in 1564, in chapter 31 of the
Cinquième livre, Rabelais represented 'Hearsay' as decrepit, blind, covered with open cars,
and endowed with seven tongues that moved continually and simultaneously. Rabelais's
Hearsay received through his ears information and conveyed them to audiences who accepted
them without verification or criticism.
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186 DENIZ § ENGEL
close to fabulation. Philip Sidney had put the matter rather bluntly in his
poetics treatise written in the early 1580s. 1 Sidney's "which no man could
affirm" represented an empiricist critique of historiography so entrenched in
Renaissance culture—this culture that was in the course of inventing the
positive sciences—that in the seventeenth century, empirical historiography
was going to shrink, in the very land of its birth, to local history—"local
flag-waving," as Cochrane describes it. 2 If empirical observation was going to
be the basis of science, then historiography was most unreliable. "Actions of
honour and dishonour," Thomas Hobbes would write in elucidating
Thycydides' historiographic style, were "in the present age [...] so disguised,
that few there be, and those very careful, that be not grossly mistaken in
them." 3 Unlike Sidney, Hobbes exempted ancient historians from fallibility as
the higher ethical nature and clearer perception of that culture had enabled its
historians to write so that, "actions of honour and dishonour do appear plainly
and distinctly, which are which." Hobbes had begun his career by translating
history, but concluded it in philosophy and, in the 1668 Latin version of
Leviathan, in the rejection of historiography.
The distinction Hobbes was making between the order of lived

experience (Campanella's writing de sensu) and the order of methodic
discourse (de ratione) had been recorded by Jean Bodin in 1566 when he
asserted that 'many things escape the sight and sense of even the most
perceptive', and thence resorted to the development of ratio, the methodus, for
a truthful historiography. 4 The problem of writing the truth in historiography
had been a primary issue since the early stages of humanism, and was
repeatedly going to surface as the ground for rejecting historiography as in
Cornelius Agrippa's De vanitate scientarium (1526/1530?) and in a work that
framed the issue in relation to travelers' witnessings that had acquired such
prominence in empirical historiography in the course of the sixteenth
century—Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler (1594). On the other
hand, there were those who insisted on and trusted the proof of the pure
senses. But in this culture, which was deeply engrossed in working out the
distinctions between black magic and white magic, between fiction and fact,
"Historiographers (although their lips sound of things done, and verity be written on their
foreheads) have been glad to borrow both fashion and, perchance, weight of the poets. So
Herodotus entitled his History by the name of the nine Muses; and both he and all the rest that
followed him either stole or usurped of poetry their passionate describing of passions, the many
particularities of battles, which no man could affirm; or, if that be denied me, long orations put in
the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced." Geoffrey
Shepherd, ed., An Apology for Poetry or the Defence of Poesy (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965),
97.21-30; italics are mine.
o
Historians and Historiography, p. 489.
3
Thomas Hobbes, The Peleponnesian War in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of
Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth (London: J. Bohn, 1839-1845), VII. vi; see also vii, viii,
xxii.
4
Methodus, pp. 42-43.
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and the criteria for legitimate apparitions and heretical ones and becoming
sceptical to the extent of dismissing, in Luther, all images and visions, the
details of what in the realm of the tangible constituted proof and the means of
establishing its documentary status remained murky. Thus, for example, one
did not take Homer's word for the existence of Cyclops until it was confirmed
when, in 1552, a whole cemetery full of their bones was unearthed. And one
did not accept the traditional description of Noah's Ark until merchants who
had traveled to East Anatolia testified it was true. In the culture that was
producing, among so many other things, the means of distinguishing between
fictional and historiographic discourses, it would remain to fiction, as in
Nashe's work and later in Cervantes' Don Quixote, to represent the fallibility
of individual sense perception and to question to the limit the credulity of both
the public and some historians.
Then there was the ethical aspect of the problem. Like Lorenzo Valla
more than a century before him, 1 Bodin was certain that owing to the
pressures of patronage, as historiographers were inevitably in the service of
princes or other wielders of power, the historian was 'influenced to deviate
from the truth by fear, or bribes, or hate of princes'. He gave the example of
Turks, who on these very grounds, he said, rejected historiography in its
entirety. Hence Bodin emphasized the importance of rigorous method, and
'writing for posterity rather than for contemporaries'. 2 Historiography
immersed in the contemporary was tantamount to politics since the writer's
interest was implicated in the situation. The notion went much further back
than Bodin and was going to remain intact through the Renaissance. The idea
that historiography belonged with the vicissitudes and interestedness of
politics and the profession of arms rather than with the ethically superior
bonae litterae that included poetry and philosophy, dated to the late Middle
Ages and was convoyed to the early modern period by writers like Francesco
Petrarca (1304-1374) and Colluccio Salutati (1331-1406). The problem over
against which we find Carnpanella and Bodin on opposite sides remained at an
impasse throughout the Renaissance. The two men's positions were aspects of
the same problem and, in a sense, the same solution. In any case, Renaissance
In The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine [Latin text and trans, into
English by Christopher B. Coleman (1922; Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto
Press and the Renassainee Society of America, 1993)], see particularly the prologue; and
Valla's Historiarum Ferdinandi Regis Aragonia libri tres (Opera omnia II, ed. Eugenio Garin
(Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1962), which is the later, toned-down version; for earlier, more
declarative text on the ethics of so-called empirical accounts, see the appendix to Gianni
Zippel's "Lorenzo Valla e l'origine della storiografia a Venezia," Rinascimento 7 (1956). On
Valla's polemic with Bartolomeo Facio about truth in historiography and deviations from truth
implied in writing for a contemporary audience, see Ottavio Besomi's "Dai Gesta Ferdinandi
Regis Aragonum del Valla al De orthographia del Tortelli, " Italia medioevale e umanistica 9
(1966). On Coluceio Salutati in relation to the same problem, see Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at
the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1983), pp. 243ff.
2
Methodus, p. 42.
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188 D E N Ì Z § E N G E L
writers oscillated between the two poles; the politicians despite whom they
tried to write truthful history apparently saw more clearly: Campanella spent
most of his life in prison and was frequently subjected to torture while Bodin's
work entered the Papal Index in 1590.
Despite the enormous epistemological, ethical, and political

complications involved, verification from empirically sound sources was
becoming a criterion, even though the momentum it gained would eventually,
in the course of the seventeenth century, bear negative implications for
historiography. Following the general developmental direction of empiricism
in early modern historiography, travelers' accounts came to play an
increasingly important role as providing what Campanella was going to call
the material for de sensu writing. Isidore's letter describing the 1453 siege
entered modern historiography in this framework, but it did so along with its
Fredegarean universal-historical baggage. However, the two further German
editions and translations of Breydenbach as well as the separate publication
itinerary of Isidore's eye-witness letter were more a matter of the sixteenth
century. As Cochrane has pointed out, others, like Nikolaos Sekoundinos
(1402-1464), who had been both prisoner and envoy to Turks, had written on
the subject from personal experience. And the Milanese Lampo Birago (d.
1472) wrote on the basis of interviews with Greek refugees and from current
Greek sources. Aside from Enea Silvio Piccolomini's (Pius II) use of them,
under whom both humanist historians worked in the Roman Curia, the works
were not read. Sekoundinos' was published a century later in Germany, and
Birago's not until the twentieth century. 1 They both offered enough critical
material to nourish anyone's anti-Turkish sentiment if that had been indeed the
drive behind the profusion of writing on Turks; what they offered was enough
at any rate for Enea Silvio's fervent crusading bent. However, that did not
suffice to render them popular. De campis (c. 1475), Genoese businessman
and magistrate Jacopo de Promontorio's description of Turkish administration
and 'atrocities' received, according to Franz Babinger, no attention. 2 So-called
empirical accounts of Turks' history and culture, even when they bore all the
accepted signs of having been well researched, did not necessarily enter wide
circulation. 3
1
Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, pp. 328-29. Sekoundinos (Saguntinus), De orìgine et
rebus gestis Turcorum (Vienna, 1551; Basel 1556); Pertusi, "Le notizie sulla organizazione
amministrative e militare dei Turchi nello 'Strategion adversum Turcos' di Lampo B i r a g o i n
Studi sul medioevo cristiano offerti a Raffaello Morghen, voi. 2 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano
per il Medio Evo, 1974). For this and further bibliography, see Cochrane, p. 563 n. 57, 58.
2 Babinger, "Die Aufzeichnungen des Genuesen Iacopo de Promontorio—de Campis über den
Osmanenstaat um 1475," Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften:
Philosophisch-Historische Klasse (1956).
3
For other material on Turks and a discussion of the lack of popularity, see Cochrane,
Historians and Historiography, pp. 328-33, and Agostino Pertusi, "I primi studi in occidente
sull'origine e la potenza dei Turchi," Bollettino dell'Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato
Veneziano, Studi veneziani 12 (1970).
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H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G T H E O R I G I N OF T U R K S 189
Given the f r a m e w o r k of the debate on criteria for sound historiography,

this disinterest with which empirical accounts met ought to be taken in t w o
interdependent contexts: as part of the mistrust of the interestedness and of the
inevitable rhetorical thrust attributed to historiographic discourse, and the
attendant falling back on the medieval mode of historiography. T h e reception
with which Cardinal Bessarion's (1403-1472) orations 'exhorting Italian rulers
to take action against T u r k s ' (Ad Illustrisimos Inclytosque Italiae Principes
contra Turcos exhortatio) met, perhaps provides the paradigmatic example.
Native of Trebizond and resident of Constantinople and Mistra starting before
their fall, he could report on occurrences in immediate fashion. His orations
were not published until the late sixteenth century (Florence, 1598), and then
admired for their rhetorical quality and for the k n o w l e d g e of antiquity they
displayed. 1 The equally fiery fifteenth-century crusader Lemaire de Beiges met
with the same f a t e . 2 A l o n g with the position of a Pius II, B e s s a r i o n ' s and
Lemaire de B e l g e s ' s texts were among the f e w whose call for a crusade was
perhaps genuine; with the rest representing more a call for unity and peace
b o t h w i t h i n Italy a n d in E u r o p e t h a n w a r a g a i n s t t h e O t t o m a n s . 3
Simultaneously in this environment, one finds Renaissance historiography—
of Turks and others—repeatedly falling back on medieval models and ancient
themes w h e r e the empirical thrust proves disappointing in relation to its
original aim of the pursuit of the truth. In fact, the m o d e in which the eye-
witness account was incorporated in the historiographic work itself bespoke
the continuation of the accretionary f o r m of the medieval chronicle. T h e
inclusion of Isidore's letter in different historiographic works, de T h o u ' s call
on Sarpi for an in situ contribution to his collectively planned work are all
examples in point. A n d the letter by M e h m e t II to Pope Nicolas V, to which
we are going to return below, was printed by fiftecnth-century continuators of
the chronicles of E n g u e r r a n d de M o n s t r e l e t (d. 1453). 4 T h e work on the
history of Turks by Laonikos Chalkokondyles (1423/4-1490) was re-published
in French translation in Paris in 1662. C h a l k o k o n d y l e s ' account in French
translation had been previously updated to 1612 by T h o m a s Artus and had
1
For a lengthy discussion of Bessarion, see Mustafa Soykut, Image of the 'Turk' in Italy. A
History of the 'Other' in Early Modern Europe: J453-1683 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag,
2001), pp. 24-29,49-53, et passim.
2
See Michael F. O. Jenkins, Artful Eloquence: Jean Lemaire de Beiges and the Rhetorical
Tradition (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and
Literatures, 1980).
3
John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum; Toronto:
Maxwell Macmillan; etc., 1994), p. 133, but also see p. 134f.
4
(Paris: P. L'Hullier, 1512), vol. 3, p. ccxxiiiv. See below. The work had very numerous
editions through the nineteenth century in France and England. Citing in length the title of the
English translation may indicate why: The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet. containing
an account of the cruel civil wars between the houses of Orleans and Burgundy, the posession of
Paris and Normandy by the English, their expulsion thence, and of other memorable events that
happened in the kingdom of France, as well as in other countries [...] beginning at the year
MCCCC, where that of Sir John Froissart finishes, and ending at the year MCCCCLXV11, and
continued by others to the year MDXVI, trans. Thomas Johnes, 2 vols. (Milkwood, NY: Kraus
Reprint Co., 1975). Johnes is the original Renaissance translator.
Authenticated
190 DENÌZ § ENG EL
now been brought up to 1661 by François E. de Mezeray. The two-volume

edition also contained an additional essay by Michel Baudier on the history of
the seraglio. In the seventeenth century, Chalkokondyles was accruing new
material in the mode of the universal history. The specific topic of Turks
aside, it is important to remember that the Eusebius-Jerome chronicle was
reprinted, re-edited, and examined throughout the Renaissance and beyond. As
late as 1747, Etienne Fourmont's (1683-1745) examination of Eusebius' use
of his sources could enter yet another edition. 1 Fourmont's career in
philology, ranging from Sinology and Homeric questions to ethno-
cosmography, aptly demonstrates the historical convergence of topics of the
oldest chronicles and the joint emergence of linguistics and ethnography in the
eighteenth century. It shows how the latter directly developed from the
former. 2
In telling the story of Troy, medieval writers in Western Europe had

been generally favorable to the Troyans and hostile to the Greeks—one would
surmise on account of dynastic interest, nascent national sentiment that would
seek to aggrandize the Troyan ancestry of the writer's own political culture,
and on account of the separateness of the Greek Church. The Phrygian author
Dares' influential De excidio Troiae historia mentioned previously, which the
Middle Ages knew rather than the Homeric epic, had been a pro-Troyan
account of the war (though Cretensis' had been written from the Greek
perspective). The fact that pro-Troyan, anti-Greek sentiment picked up toward
the later Middle Ages may also be attributed to the environment brewing on
the eve of, and during, the Crusades on the East. But writing his chronicle
throughout the period of 1461-1492, Pietro Ranzano of Palermo went as far as
substituting Seph, son of Esau, as founder of Sicily in order to dispel the tale
of Hellenic founders to Sicily. 3 And we saw Annio taking the trouble to forge
translations of archaic documents to advance the chronological priority of
Italians to Greeks and becoming immensely popular with it as late as 1498.
Starting with the Renaissance, we must add as a factor in anti-Greek
sentiment, the all-important influence of Cicero on humanism. He who had so
empowered the historian as to describe him as the 'witness of time, light of
truth, life of memory, guide of life, ambassador of antiquity', had repeatedley
1 Eusebij Chronico quod Hieronymus Latinum facere curauit, ed. Palmerius & Palmerius (Paris:
Henricus Stephan[us], n.d.); Alfonso de Tosado de Madrigal (d. 1455), Tostado sobre el eusebio
(Salamanca: Hans Gysser, 1506); Rerum toto orbe gestarum chronico a Christo nato ad nostra
usque tempora, ed. Aubert Le Mire (1573-1640) (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussius, 1608);
Fourmont, Réflexions sur l'origine, l'histoire et la succession des anciens peuples (Paris: De
Buré l'aîné, 1747).
2
Réflexions et critiques sur les histoires des anciens peuples (Paris: M. Pere, etc., 1735); the
following concerns the Ottoman Empire: Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas, fait par ordre du roi dans
la Grèce, l'Asie Mineure, la Macédoine et l'Afrique (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la
Compagnie, 1714).
3
Opusculi di autori siciliani, vol. 9, Book XXIX (1767), ed. Gioachimo Pulejo (Palermo:
Catania, 1758-1797).
Authenticated
expressed a lack of esteem for post-classical Greeks—explicitly as well as in

the frequent use of the diminutive term Graeculi, ' G r e e t i n g s ' . 1 Cicero's
impact in this respect was greater in Italy, but far from lacking in other
countries. The notion became part of the humanist view of history, namely
that culture had been in steady decline since Greek and Roman antiquity,
which in turn was but a secular, non-cschatological version of the medieval
view of the progressive degeneration of human history and had originated in
Petrarch's culture. Moreover, with the capture of Constantinople, and
gradually of the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands by Turks, expectation
steadily rose in the West that the 'schismatic Greeks' would now convert to
the Latin church. Instead, it was found with growing alarm and resentment,
they were becoming 'Turks'. There were those who believed that Greeks had
deliberately, out of spite to Rome, surrendered their land to the Ottomans.
Mustafa Soykut points out that Pope Pius II himself severely criticized
Greeks for their continued schism, in a text probably written in 1453-1461, 2
and in Gerusalemme liberata (1.51), Torquato Tasso sent Greeks to 'shame'
for their 'unworthiness' (1581). Frequently, moments of rage directed at Turks
included the same leveled at Greeks. 'Barbarous Turks' went hand in hand with
'perfidious Greeks'.
Thus, wide-spread sentiment as well as the contemporary political

circumstances in Europe that called for interpretation fit the myth strangely ,
but exceedingly, well. In this environment, the story of the Turks' Troyan
origin was extended beyond the chronicling of the past, and utilized to
interpret contemporary events. The Ottoman advance was originating out of
the same Troyan geography. 'Troy' was now taken as Ilion, as the province of
Troy rather than the city, and Ottoman administrative presence in the Balkans
since the preceding century (not to mention longer-standing Turkish presence
in the region) coalesced with Fredegarius' story of the initial migration toward
the Danube. "All the countre of Troya is the Turkes owne countre by
inherytance," wrote Sir Richard Guylforde in 1506, fifty-three years after the
capture of Constantinople, "and that countre is properly called nowe Turkey,
and none other." 3 The Athenian historian Chalkokondyles—whose history of
Turks is today still indispensable to historians of the period of Mehmet II4—
would write shortly after the fall of Constantinople that there were even
Greeks who assumed the loss of Constantinople to Turks to have been
retaliation for the Troyan War, and that certainly the 'Romans' thought so.
1
Cicero, De oratore II.lx.36 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William
Heinemann, 1976).
2
La Discritìore de l'Asia et Europa di Papa Pio II (Venice: Erasimo, 1544), cit. in Soykut,
Image of the 'Turk', p. 22, p. 22n.21. The work was originally published in Latin: see above.
3
The Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde to the Holy Land, A.D. 1506, ed. Henry Ellis
(London: Camden Society, 1851), p. 13.
4
E.g., Halil Inalcik, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar I (Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu, 1995), pp. 2, 4, 10, 84,159, etc.
Authenticated
192 DENÎZ § ENGEL
Chalkokondyles would have known of the Roman (Italian) bent as his cousin
Demetrios was a known member of Marsilio Ficino's circle at the Platonic
Academy. 1 Giovan Mario Filelfo's epic panegyric Amyris narrated the feats of
Mehmet II, whose conquest of Constantinople and Greece was described as the
avenging of the destruction of Troy. 2 Other writings one may cite in this vein
for the most part derive from the above theory confirmed by the letter of
Mehmet II to Pope Nicolas V (1447-1455) we have mentioned previously. In
the letter, extant in French and Latin, Mehmet expresses surprise at the
mobilization for a crusade in Europe and writes that he feels 'doubt that
Italians could be cast against us, for they ought to be like us, who have the
natural inclination to love them. For they too are issues of Troyan blood'
("car ilz sont ains yssus du sang de troye"). The letter goes on to declare
M e h m e t ' s intention of avenging the blood of Hector upon Greece. The
scholarly tendency is to declare the letter 'spurious'. Most likely written by a
humanist in the service of Mehmet II, the text of the letter is indeed as
spurious as the other contemporary accounts of Troyan origins produced in
courts throughout Europe. 3 Among others, it was cited at some length by
Montaigne (who assumes it to have been written to Pius II) in Essais
Il.xxxvi, in the context of the praise of Homer as not only 'families but most
nations seek their origin in his fictions'. The notion of the Turks' Troyan
ancestry further provided etymological paths for tracing proper names to Troy
via 'phonetic similarities' with Turkish words. A Lorenzo Maruccini could
thus around 1577 trace the place name Bassano to a Troyan word for 'prince'
'preserved' in the Turkish bassa ('Pasha'). 4
With few exceptions, West European scholars tend to assume that the
medieval attitude favoring Troyans over against Greeks about-faced in the
fifteenth century in direct proportion to Turkish advance in Europe and came
to privilege other traditions of explaining the origin of Turks. We have seen
sufficient examples of continuations of the Troyan theory to warrant assertion
that this was not the case. A favored example of this thesis, however, is Pius
li s association of Turks with Scythians in the Cosmographia.5 It was
probably the relevant segment of this work which prompted, among others',
Montaigne's impression that Mehmet's letter above was written to Pius. The
humanist imagined an epistolary dialogue on origins between emperor and
1
Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica I, 2nd and rev. cd. (1942-1943; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
1958); Carl Hermann F. J. Hopf, ed., Chroniques gréco-romanes, inédites ou peu connues [...]
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1873), pp. 94ff.
2
Ed. Aldo Manetti (Bologna: Pàtron, 1978).
See above, and Babinger, Laudivius Zacchia, Erdichter der 'Epitolae Magni Turci' (Munich:
Verlag der Bayerischer Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960).
4
Marruccini, Bassanum sive Dissertatio de urhis antiquitate et de viris eiusdem illustrihus, in
Thesaurus Antiquitatum et Historiarum Italiae, vol. IX, ed. Joannes Georgius Graevius (Lugduni
Batavorum, 1704-1725).
^ For bibliography, see above.
Authenticated
H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G THE O R I G I N OF T U R K S 193
pope. Probably written between 1453 and 1461, 1 Pius' Cosmographia

consisted of three parts—concerning Europe, Asia, and Bohemia—and was the
first comprehensive (at least for most of the Old World) work in the area of
historical-ethnogenic geography since Strabo, Ptolemy, and Pliny in
antiquity. Thus the work circulated widely, was one of the sources consulted
by Columbus (though the latter preferred Pierre d'Ailly's Imago mundi),1 and
despite its anachronisms that must have become obvious by the sixteenth
century, 3 was translated into Italian as late as 1544. 4 That part of the
Cosmographia that is concerned with Europe—Europa inquia sui temporis
uarias historias complectitur—was probably written around 1458. One
important aspect here, of Pius' discrediting of the Turks' Troyan origins is his
separation of what is permissible to autores and poets from what is
permissible to historians. Further, he draws attention to the unwarranted
phonetic derivation of Turci from Teucri, and argues that the etymological
alliance has been prompted by the Turks' current geographic location. 5
Therefore Pius must now re-assign the Turks' ancestry to a different
geography.
In order to break up the etymological connection to geography, and

thereby the patrimonial assumption, Pius relocated Turks' geographic origin
to a region 'on the other side of the Perichean mountains, & Taracuntan
islands'—"ultra Pericheos montes, & Taracuntas insulas" 6 —and assigned
Turks to Scythian stock ("Turcas [...J quos Scytharum docuimus"). 7 In this
passage, Pius' aim appears not to be the questioning of Turkish presence in
Anatolia, even Constantinople and Greece. He concedes that even though the
Turkish conquest has been vast, 'dominating Asia and Grccce', it is not
'entirely alien'. Pius' culture accepted the model for the grand conqucst (as the
biographic accounts of Mehmet II and Charles VIII that liken them to Caesar,
Alexander, and other 'world conquerors' of antiquity indicate), and the
unification of Asia (i.e. Asia Minor) and Greece was indeed not an idea
'entirely alien'. To that extent, the Ottoman dynasty had not upset the age-old
geo-political status quo. The pope's aim seems rather to have been to dislocate
1
Soykut, Image of the 'Turk', p. 23 and p. 117 n.15.
^ Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (1942; New York, London, etc.:
Meridian, 1983), p. 19.
3
Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, p. 45.
4
See above.
5
Opera quae extant omnia, p. 394.
® Opera quae extant omnia, pp. 383-84.
7
'Scythian' appears to be an early modern category for linguistic classification of peoples
whose languages bear no observable connection to European languages. Italian man of letters
Antonio Bonfini (c.1427-1502), royal historian to the Humgarian court in 1468-1487 and 1491-
1502, traces, in Rerum Ungaricarum decades, King Mattias Corvinus' father's origin to Rome
and his mother's to Greece, but on linguistic basis, sends Hungarians to Scythia and their origins
to Scita, son of Hercules who was the first Scythian. For detailed bibliography on Bonfini, see
Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, p. 568 n.128; see also pp. 345, 347.
Authenticated
194 D E N Í Z § E N G E L
the Turks' right to what we call 'the Balkans' today. In fact, the passage being
described here occurs in the framework of the discussion of the affairs of
Thrace. Thus it is the Fredegarian notion of the Troyan dispersion under Friga,
that had brought the ancestors of Franks, Turks, and Macedonians to
Macedonia and the environs of the Danube, which is Pius' prime target. And
perhaps more than anything else it is this that attests to the rootedness of the
Troyan theory of the Turks' origin: from the earliest, crusades were waged on
the basis of the idea of their legitimateness. 1 Thus Pius had to reach for the
heart of the Troyan argument in which Biblical tradition, the Church Fathers'
chronography, monarchic ideology, and etymology —which bore status
incomparably more substantial than it does as a branch of linguistics t o d a y -
con verged so as to become nearly immovable.
But, carried away by the rhetorical possibilities of his discovery, and

more in the vein of his pre-ordinance days as writer of occasional soft
pornography, Pius went too far for his purposes. Given the traditional lore on
Scythian viciousncss, from the identification with Scythian stock, Pius could
then discredit the Turkish character. Characterology was a field he had mastered
while writing De viris illustribus in 1440-1450, a compilation in the
medieval manner, of deeds, habits, physical appearance, and moral qualities,
but nothing, of course, coming close to the Scythian character he described
could be found in a book of the illustrorum. It was perhaps the kind of exotic
elaboration found in the following and elsewhere that contributed to the
insertion of the Cosmographia in the environment of the expanding body of
travel literature of the sixteenth century in which it was common to find the
possible and the fantastic side by side: Like contemporary Turks, Pius wrote,
their Scythian ancestors had been, "Gens truculenta et ignominiosa, in cunctis
stupris ac lupanaribus fornicaria, comedit quae caeteri abominantur,
iumentorum, luporum, ac vulturum carnes, et quod magis horreas, hominum
abortiva, Diem festum nullum coluit, nisi mense Augusto Saturnalia." ['A
ferocious and disgraceful people, all together lustful and notorious fornicators,
they eat what others abominate: the meat of mules, wolves, vultures, and—
what is utmost loathable—prematurely born infants. They do not care for any
holiday except for Augustus Saturnalia'.] 2
The 'Perichean mountains' and the 'Taracuntan islands' were mentioned

in no geography book, ancient or modern. In the same passage, Pius identified
his source, which made of Turks, Augustan contemporaries celebrating
the Saturnalia, as Aethicus (Ethico or Aethicus Ister) — a yet unidentified
1
Michel Villey, La croisade: essai sur la formation d'une théorie juridique (1942; New York:
AMS Press, 1980).
Opera quae extant omnia, pp. 383-84. On the basis of Soykut's English rendering of the 1544
Italian text—which 1 have not been able to consult—one may assume that in the translation the
description of Scythian-Turkish character had been toned down. Image of the 'Turk', p. 117.
Authenticated
H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y C O N C E R N I N G THE O R I G I N OF TURKS 195
'philosopher' attributed to the fourth century and putative author of an

Oraculum philosophicum— 'Philosophic oracle'. The fourth century makes
this text of course the contemporary of Eusebius. There is no fourth-century
manuscript extant; the earliest Latin 'translation' dates to the eighth century,
the wake of Fredegarius. 1 Research awaits to be done regarding the spread of
knowledge of this work in the Renaissance, which in any case likely lacked
credibility since the Latin translation was attributed to Saint Jerome. Short of
drawing a comparison between Pius and Annio his contemporary, it needs to
be pointed out that the theory of the Turks' Scythian origin was mentioned by
more serious-minded Renaissance historians, albeit without reference to
Aethicus or, frequently for that matter, to Pius. The details of this alternate
view —as well as other, attendant theories, such as the association of Turks
with Tuscans, that arose when the Troyan theory was questioned—and the
research it prompted both in ethnogenic and—significantly—linguistic terms,
are matter for a separate study.
It should also be pointed out, however, that the 'Scythian' theory

gained momentum in the course of the sixteenth century: early modern
passages expounding it are freely employed in historiographic and particularly
image studies today for demonstrating the 'otherness' of 'the Turk' and the
degree of Turkophobia in Western Europe. Yet the political uses of the
Scythian theory are more profitably read for understanding the past when they
are done so in the framework of the Reformation. Luther's statement that
warring against Turks was to resist God's punishment of Christendom's
errors, is well known. 2 A good part of sixteenth-century writing linking Turks
with Scythians was less interested in Turks than in understanding the nature of
the divine scourge. The extreme abjectness of Scythian origins only went to
show the extremeness of the punishment and of the sin. The interpretative
path of Turkish history and culture in Protestant environments is quite a
separate matter as the very numerous references, in sixteenth- and particularly
seventeenth-century English poetry for example, itirate the 'Turk' with the
'Pope' and, as frequently, with the 'Jew'. Henry Bold's (1627-1683) raising of
"Christs Banner/'Gainst Pope and Turks and King of Spain" and Alexander
Brome's (1620-1666) "rail at Pope and Turk" runs like a Leitmotif through
Samuel Butler's (1612-1680) Hudibras? An Andrea Cambini (1455/60-
It was published in 1852 in Mémoires présentés par divers savants à l'Académie des
Insciptions et Belles-Lettres, 1ère série II (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale), pp. 454-549; on its
history, see in the same volume (at pp. 232-88), Armand d'Azevac-Macaya, "Mémoire sur
Ethicus et les ouvrages cosmographiques intitulés de ce nom." A new edition is in Die
1Cosmographie des Aethicus, ed. Otto Prinz (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Histórica, 1993),
which I have not been able to consult.
A
See H. Buchanan, "Luther and the Turks, 1519-1529," Archiv fur Reformations Beschichte 47
(1956): 145-60.
3
Bold, "Song XXIII," Latine Songs, ed. William Bold (London: John Eglesfield, 1685); Brome,
"To His University Friend," Songs and Other Poems (London: Henry Brome, 1661); Butler,
Hudibras: Written in the time of the late wars, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1905).
Authenticated
196 DENÌZ § ENGEL
1527), on the other hand, writing in the fifteenth century in Italy, did read
Pius and followed him, and myriad others, in declaring in his preface Turks to
be 'barbaric and cruel'. But he used, in the Commentario della origine de
Turchi et imperio della casa ottomanna, the 'Scythian' theory as the starting
point of a historiographic m o d e that liberated the writer f r o m millenium-old
chronicle form, content, and method. In the Storia di Francia dell'anno 1470,
he did the same for the French, explicitly asking what need there was f o r
creating mythic origins for a people about w h o m historians had consistently
written throughout time. 1 As, not reading Turkish, he could not claim the
same f o r Turks, he did as Bodin was going to advise and read all he could find
and read them in an order, and wrote his own history. In the exquisite classical
prose of the Renaissance humanist, he cast M e h m e t II in an ' i m a g e ' pretty
m u c h as the O t t o m a n e m p e r o r u n d e r s t o o d h i m s e l f — t h e b e n e v o l e n t and
fiercely ambitious Renaissance ruler, law-maker and a figure of virtù touched
by learning: "not content with the very ample state his father had left him and
desirous of a c c o m p l i s h i n g s o m e great d e e d by which he could gain a
reputation not only equal to, but actually surpassing that of his ancestors..."
A s Eric C o c h r a n e has brought to our attention, these w e r e m o t i v e s f o r
besieging Constantinople which "every reader of h u m a n i s t historiography
would find acceptable."
See above, and Cochrane, Historians and Historiography, p. 565n.73 and p. 332. The
quotation from Cambini below is from Cochrane, p. 332. For Cambini, see also: Commentarii
delle cose de Turchi di Paolo Giovio, et Andrea Gambini, con gli fatti, et la uita di Scanderbeg
(Venice: Figlioli di Aldo, 1541). Cambini was published in England as well: Two commentaries:
the one of the originali of the Turcks thother of the warre of the Turche against George
Scanderbeg (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis terrarum; New York: Da capo, 1970); Two very
notable commentaries: Delle origine de Turchi (London: H. Toye, 1562).
Authenticated

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Historical Image of the Turk in

Europe, 15th Century to the

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of

Political and Civilisational Aspects

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION by Mustafa Soykut 7

Part I: The concept "Turk" from the Ottoman point of view.

Mehmet Kalpakli: TURK and OTTOMAN: A BRIEF

Part II: A General Outlook

Nedret Kuran Bureoglu: A GLIMPSE AT VARIOUS STAGES OF

Part III: An Italian Point of View: Papal and Venetian

Mustafa Soykut: THE "TURK" AS "THE GREAT ENEMY OF

Gaetano Platania: THE TURKISH THREAT AND THE IDEA OF

Part IV: The Renaissance Debate

Suheyla Artemel: VIEW OF THE TURKS FROM THE

Deniz §engel: SOURCES AND CONTEXT OF THE RENAISSANCE

NazanAksoy \ TURKS IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 197

Part V: 17 th and 18 th Century British Views

Fiona Tomkinson: FOR THE SATISFACTION OF ALL THAT

Ash Cirakman: SIR PAUL RYCAUT AND HIS INFLUENCE ON

Part VI: Image of an non-Muslim Ottoman People: the Jews

Arusyak Yumul: THE PERENNIAL IMMUTABILITY OF THE

Part VII: From the Turkish Republic to the Present

Nur Bilge Criss: IMAGES OF THE EARLY TURKISH NATIONAL

Mediha Göbenli: THE IMAGES OF TURKISH MIGRANTS IN THE

Korkut Bugday: THE IMAGE OF TURKEY REFLECTED IN THE

Kamil Aydin: A POPULAR REPRESENTATION OF TURKEY INTO

As studies of the perception and chronicling of Turks promise to pick

Like much medieval legend, pre-modern speculation concerning the

Agros colere incipunt, domos aedificare, ita ut brevi tempore terram ab

T h o u g h G e o f f r e y ' s treatment was going to be all influential and

To the medieval mind, ultimately there was no contradiction in

William of Newburgh's (1135/6-1198?) frequently cited criticism [e.g., Linder, "Troyan

The assimilation of the Biblical model of the universal history to the

Disproving Fredegarius' thesis thus carried implications for reasons not

borrowed from the work of Giovanni Annio da Viterbo (c. 1432-1502). 1

1 Doutrepont, Jean Lemaire de Beiges, pp. 13-26.

Fredegarius mentioned the "Turci" and traced their patronymy to the

As Renaissance historiography came to value the empirical, it would

Of course, it was also the impossibility of practicing a historiography

The distinction Hobbes was making between the order of lived

Despite the enormous epistemological, ethical, and political

Given the f r a m e w o r k of the debate on criteria for sound historiography,

now been brought up to 1661 by François E. de Mezeray. The two-volume

In telling the story of Troy, medieval writers in Western Europe had

expressed a lack of esteem for post-classical Greeks—explicitly as well as in

Thus, wide-spread sentiment as well as the contemporary political

pope. Probably written between 1453 and 1461, 1 Pius' Cosmographia

In order to break up the etymological connection to geography, and

But, carried away by the rhetorical possibilities of his discovery, and

The 'Perichean mountains' and the 'Taracuntan islands' were mentioned

'philosopher' attributed to the fourth century and putative author of an

It should also be pointed out, however, that the 'Scythian' theory

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