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All creatures living beneath the sun,

That creep or swim or fly or run,

After me so as you never saw!

And I chiefly use my charm

On creatures that do people harm.60

Part Five

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Turban’d and Scimitar’d”

THERE IS A DARK LITTLE LITHOGRAPH BY NICOLAS-TOUSSAINT Charlet that shows how Parisians learned of the destruction of the Egyptian-Ottoman fleet at Navarino in 1827. Charlet takes us inside a very humble house, where the neighbors have come to hear the news. A child stands on a table with the newspaper and reads to the gathering of adults. Other children play and dogs roll around on the floor in a typically domestic scene. This picture tells us quite a lot about who was literate and who was not, and shows the process by which the written and printed word was spread far beyond the limits of those who could read for themselves. But since the first days of printing in the 1450s even the unlettered had been able to “read” some things for themselves: pictures.

Images usually have a surface message, but for those who had learned the key, the pictures were charged with deeper meanings.1 Even the illiterate were used to reading images. Not every household in England that owned a copy of John Foxe’s History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church (1563), better known as his Book of Martyrs, was able to follow the text of its more than a thousand pages.2 Nor would they necessarily have been interested in the early persecutions of Christians under long-forgotten Roman emperors. But they could understand the powerful woodcuts and would painstakingly decipher the short captions that described the torments suffered in their own day. For English Protestants these images and the stories were reminders of Catholic oppression and tyranny. Foxe’s book was so enduringly popular that new editions were still being reprinted three centuries after its first publication.

Depictions of the Turk were similarly replete with symbolism. Swords, bows, and spears took the place of the pyres on which the Protestant martyrs suffered, but were just as much perpetual reminders of violence, threat, and danger. And sometimes sexual excess and perversity were suggested instead of savagery. In some images all these elements were present. Many Europeans were convinced that Muslims were pederasts and sodomites. The Turks were held to be devotees of impalement, one of the few forms of cruel punishment not practiced in the West. The depictions of this implied both unnatural sex and excessive cruelty.3

But not all pictures were of this type. Many showed the solemnity of Ottoman life, the Turks’ sumptuous apparel, and their dramatic townscapes full of fine buildings. The Renaissance image of the Turk had multiple facets, some admiring and curious, some fearful. But just as it was difficult for a seventeenth-century Englishman to see a picture of Rome and not recall the Protestant martyrs burnt at Smithfield, the image of the East was tainted with dark or salacious overtones. Every depiction, as Lacan suggested, has been supercharged by the ways in which it has been used before.

Specific images developed slowly. At first few European artists had any notion of how to draw a “Saracen,” so they made them look like Westerners, wearing the same armor, riding the same horses, and often carrying the same arms. So in a picture of the battle of Mansourah in 1250 (during the Seventh Crusade), Louis IX of France is distinguishable from his Muslim opponents only by the crown on his head.4 Gradually, identifying marks appeared. In the windows of the Habsburg chapel at Königsfelden in Switzerland, Saracens were differentiated from Christians by the stylized scorpion emblems on their shields.5 But they still wore European-style armor. It was in Spain, unsurprisingly, that more realistic images were first painted showing infidels as being very different from their Christian adversaries.6 An altarpiece in Valencia showed King James I of Aragon aided by a saint in a battle with the Moors. His adversaries, with their dark features,