• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1217 0

into a noble Turk are a turban and a scimitar. The Bourgeois first appears “dressed in the Turkish style, but without a turban [turbanta] or scimitar [scarcina].” Then, ceremoniously, “the Mufti” bestows these on him and, lo, he becomes a Turk. “Scimitar” and “turban” remained symbols of the Turk well into the twentieth century. Dr. George Horton, American consul general in Smyrna, in his Turcophobe book The Blight of Asia, published in 1922, described how “the Turk, wherever his scimitar reached—degraded, defiled and defamed—blasting with eternal decay Roman, Latin civilization, until when all had gone he sat down satisfied with savagery to doze into hopeless decrepitude.”12

A “scimitar” featured in the first printed images of the outlandish Turks that had been based on observation.13 These appeared in The Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Peregrinatio in terram sanctam) written by a secular official of the cathedral of Mainz, Bernard von Breydenbach. In April 1483, he began a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the company of the artist Erhard Reuwich and a number of aristocratic travelers. Breydenbach always intended an account printed with wood engravings since he made Reuwich sketch the places they visited, as well as a set of images of the people in the Holy Land. The most dramatic features of the book were the panoramic views of the ports the party passed through, especially the pullout view of Venice, more than six feet in length, and one of the earliest depictions of the Queen of the Adriatic.

Reuwich, even in his panoramas, had a wonderful eye for social detail. He sometimes took a high-angle perspective, looking down on an urban scene, but also incorporating the surrounding countryside. Here we can see robbers holding up travelers and other crimes, women washing clothes, and punishments being executed. Breydenbach’s writing was competent, but it was Erhard Reuwich’s woodcuts that made the work stand out. Other images were embedded in the text, such as a group of Turks riding, Saracens with their women, a Jew with bags of coin, travelers settling down to a meal. The image of the Jew struck an uncertain note, but the rest showed only curiosity and no obvious hostility.14

Breydenbach’s book was first printed by Reuwich in Mainz in 1486, and subsequently appeared in some twelve editions, in Latin, Dutch, German, Spanish, and French.15 It became a staple ingredient in later compilations such as Samuel Purchas’s famous compendium, or history of the world, Purchas His Pilgrimes, first published in 1625.16 In the dedication of the first part to Charles, Prince of Wales (soon to be King Charles I), Purchas wrote that he had “out of this chaos of confused intelligences framed this historical world by a new way of Eye Evidence.” “Eye Evidence” was very different from the fantasies of Sir John Mandeville, and wrong or grotesquely opinionated though some of Purchas’s witnesses may have been, they had indeed seen with their own eyes what they described.17

But with The Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, both author and illustrator had seen the sights—at the time this was highly unusual. Reuwich’s depictions became one standard source for future images of the East. His Turks and Saracens wore turbans and flowing robes. They were all armed, with characteristic bows and “scimitars.” Their faces were lean and hawkish. Yet not all readers would see the same images when they read Breydenbach’s text. The French edition published in Lyons in 1488 was a free adaptation by Nicholas le Huen, with fanciful copper engravings instead of Reuwich’s woodcut originals. Over time the range of images supposedly depicting the Ottomans, some based on “Eye Evidence,” increased enormously. Indeed, these depictions came to epitomize the mysterious East in all its aspects. In many biblical scenes, Jews of the time of Jesus Christ wore the flowing robes and capacious turbans of sixteenth-century Turks.

These same elements—robes, curved swords, and turbans—became (with the omnipresent crescent) the emblems of a mortal enemy. In Othello, Shakespeare succinctly described the