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By Root 1293 0

enemy (the “circumcised dog”) in terms his audience would recognize. He calls him “a malignant and a turbaned Turk.”18 Suggestive details were essential. In 1522, the well-known Nuremberg artist Hans Sebald Beham produced a single-sheet engraving of the contemporary Turkish attack on the island of Rhodes, then occupied by the Knights of St. John. Some of the details seem out of place. Beham’s besieged city of Rhodes looks like a south German town. His Turks fire Western-type field guns, and advance like the German mercenary infantry, known as landsknechts, on the breaches in the city walls. Their ships at sea are potbellied Atlantic vessels, not sleek Mediterranean galleys.

But a few deft symbolic touches specified an unmistakably Eastern and mighty enemy.19 The attackers all wear turbans, they carry curved swords. They have Eastern-style war tents, each decorated with a crescent half-moon, while on the foreshore an unfortunate (and we presume) Christian has been impaled on a stake. The Turks appear as disciplined and implacable opponents. Beham’s large engraved image was intended for an affluent audience, but similar visual components appeared on numerous cheaper pamphlets and broadsheets in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century. Also in 1522, an anonymous pamphlet called A Little Book About the Turks: A Useful Discourse or Conversation Among Several People went through four editions, and was reprinted again in 1527 and 1537.20 There were many more “informative” publications, all dwelling on the new Turkish danger, a powerful enemy who had captured the impregnable island of Rhodes and the well-defended fortress of Belgrade within a few months. Most of these had very short texts of four or five pages only, and many had illustrated covers or some engravings within.

How people “read” these pamphlets and illustrated books is impossible to know.21 But the images themselves seem to me to provide the key. Michel de Certeau devised a wonderfully vivid phrase—“a laminated text”—to describe the situation where two different and contrary types of material are bonded together.22 He was thinking about types of written text and not of the relationship between image and text, but the tensions I found were similar to the examples that he gave. Laminating an image to a text on the same page creates instability. The text is read sequentially, from the top left to the bottom right of the page; anything interrupting that flow distorts meaning. So even the most appropriate image is never wholly harmonious with the text. The image is there to attract attention. It is read or understood in ways very different than the words that surround it.

The repertoire available to a woodcut artist was much more limited than the resources available to a writer. In practice, woodcuts were intended to be simple and dramatic, and so often, in this context, heightened the fierce and bellicose qualities of the Muslim infidels. When the printer Johann Haselberg wrote and published his own pamphlet in 1530, exhorting Emperor Charles V to attack the Turk, he commissioned a front cover depicting the two armies. The turbaned host led by Sultan Suleiman, “the arch-enemy of the Christian faith,” confronts the forces of Christendom led by Emperor Charles. The latter wears peacock’s feathers on his helmet, symbolizing immortality and resurrection. The cover image strongly influenced how the inside text was understood. Then, as now, a reader absorbed the text with that image in mind.

In the period bounded by the Turkish destruction of the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs in 1526 and the Turkish defeat at Lepanto in 1571, ever more potent and complex ways of portraying the malevolent and powerful Ottomans were devised. Beham’s fairly simple imagery was superseded by increasingly convoluted designs. At the end of the sixteenth century, the court artists of Charles V’s great-nephew Emperor Rudolf II got to work on the “Turkish menace,” and produced Baroque masterpieces. However, despite their sophistication, the images were still governed by the same limited