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THE VIEW OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN THE WEST WAS LARGELY imprinted during the two centuries after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This period coincided with the development and spread of the printed word and image in the West. By the late seventeenth century, what the infidel looked like, and how he behaved, had become common knowledge. Hostility to the Islamic world, as I have suggested earlier, had very distant antecedents.7 But printed images, painted works of art, sculpture, and objets d’art gave that hostility a visual identity, which to some extent changed and shifted over time, as new elements were introduced. But the very basics that constituted the infidel enemy remained more or less the same, although their ordering and arrangement altered over the centuries. The process of identification was both visual and textual. Quite often images and words were not in harmony. Sometimes the pictures invoked older and more visceral responses than the written texts that accompanied them. The gap between image and text grew during the eighteenth century, narrowed during the nineteenth, and narrowed further in the twentieth century.

The actors also changed. Until the nineteenth century, the infidel was “the Turk,” but during the first half of that century, Europe also rediscovered what the travel writer A. W. Kinglake called in his book Eothen (1847) “the True Bedouin.”8 The desert dweller was imbued by many Europeans with the qualities of the noble savage that could never be applied to the Ottomans. Forty years after Eothen, Charles Montagu Doughty published his Travels in Arabia Deserta in two substantial volumes. He made heroes both of the desert and of those who lived in it. The French conquest of North Africa also threw up distinctively Arab heroes, such as the Algerian Abd el Kader, who became a latter-day Saladin and noble enemy. The change in the role of images in nineteenth-century publications meant a much greater diversity in what was depicted and how it was presented. Printed images became games that an increasingly educated market could read and decipher. As a consequence of that cultural shift, it is a mistake to search for a single stereotypical perception, the sense of unmitigated hostility of the Middle Ages. Images and texts in the nineteenth century and later are both more complex and more allusive, for they assume a literate audience. The Punch cartoons that I discussed in chapter 10 have to be read in context: not for nothing was Punch’s secondary title “The London Charivari,” a colloquialism for a cacophony or hubbub. It took some skill to make sense of the discordance.

Yet despite these new styles and modes of presentation, older attitudes toward the infidel East still remained. Quite how this shadow first developed is not at all clear. Early (fifteenth- and sixteenth-century) images alone could not, I suggest, root the idea of the infidel particularly deeply. For one thing they did not exist in any great number.9 About “Turks” there was nothing like the plethora of mordantly abusive (and highly memorable) Lutheran images of the pope and his cardinals. Here images usually made visible and specific what had already been named. But with the “Turk” the visual form sometimes anticipated the words. Take the deeply curved saber, often with an absurdly broad tip that made it look like some kind of meat cleaver: we call it a scimitar. The first recorded usage of the word “scimitar” in English to refer to a curved Turkish sword came in 1548, long after the image had become a visual signifier of the fierce and dangerous Turk. Quite where the word had originated no one knows. It was not a Turkish term, and has no obvious etymology.10 Yet it became emblematic of the infidel. In, for example, Molière’s comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme, first performed in 1670, a strange “Turkish Ceremony,” delivered in an outlandish “lingua franca,” was used to ennoble the gullible Bourgeois, Monsieur Jourdain.11 The objects that transform him