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have arrived but have been made into relics in Italy and France as a man sent by your Highness.” With a studied impassivity, the king asked nothing about the battle at first. “For the first half hour he did nothing but ask ‘Is my brother certainly well?’ and all sorts of conceivable questions that the case admitted. He then ordered me to relate everything that had happened from the beginning, omitting no single particular, and while I spoke, he three times stopped to ask me for further explanations; and when I had ended, he as often called me back to ask for further explanations; about your Highness’s care for the wounded, and how you gave away your share of the prize money to the soldiers, at which he was not a little moved.” See Rosell, Historia, Appendix xiv, p. 208.

56. See Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 101–6.

57. See Rosell, Historia, p. 208, for the report of Don Lope de Figueroa.

58. I owe this observation to John Brewer.

59. Reproduced in Göllner, Turcica, vol. I, p. 234.

60. This was recalled in an etching of the triumphal entry made in the mid–nineteenth century, now in the Museo de Roma, Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe.

61. It had been also, of course, the site of the inconclusive battle of Prevesa in 1538.

62. The traditional puppet theater of Sicily also enacts these stories.

63. See Musée de la Corse, Moresca.

64. Cited in Lewis, Discovery, p. 43.

65. See Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’empire Ottoman: Depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, trans. J.-J. Hellert, 18 vols., Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour, 1835–43, vol. 6, p. 434.

66. As in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721).

67. The Dungeons of Algiers, act 3.

68. Muley Malek was modeled on reality, from a Moroccan prince, Muley Maluco, living in Spain.

69. Alfred, an Epick Poem, “In Twelve Books,” by Sir Richard Blackmore, London, 1723, bk. I, p. 24.

70. The last early modern Mediterranean “crusade” was not Lepanto, but this Portuguese expedition that ended in disaster on August 4, 1578, not far from Tangier. See Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 1178–9, and Hess, Forgotten Frontier, pp. 96–8.

CHAPTER 2: FIRST CONTACT

1. In 1575, in his dedication (to Howard of Effingham) of his version of Curio’s Notable Historie of the Saracens, Thomas Newton declared that “this Babylonian Nebuchanezzer and Turkish Pharoeh [are] so near under our noses … Now they are even at our doors and ready to come into our Houses … this raging Beast and bloody Tyrant, the common robber of all the world.” See Coelius Augustinus Curio, A Notable Historie of the Saracens, trans. Thomas Newton, London: n.p., 1575, rep. Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson Inc., 1977.

2. The first “Mad Mullah” was the Somali leader Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, against whom the British fought from 1899. “Mad Mullah” has now become a common insult.

3. The tenth-century writer Hamza al-Isfahani listed only five great nations, from China in the East to the Berbers in the West, plus the Byzantines. Cited in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, pp. 117–18. There was a Muslim polemic against Christianity, and against Western Christians in particular, but before the late eighteenth century it was not accompanied by any strong curiosity about those whom it attacked. Jacques Waardenburg also notes that while the Muslims had “a lingering curiosity for those non-Muslims outside the dar-ul-islam, there was a near-complete absence of interest in the dhimmis [local Christians and Jews] in Muslim lands.” See Jacques Waardenburg, “Muslim Studies of Other Religions: The Medieval Period,” in van Gelder and de Moor, “The Middle East and Europe,” pp. 10–38.

4. This was the “persecuting society,” first identified by R. I. Moore, subsequently challenged and modified, but still solid in all its essentials. See Moore, Formation, and Laursen and Nederman, Beyond.

5. This very quality was condemned by Islam: the term jahillya described the dark ages before Islam brought order and light to the world. But Arab poetry still used the bellicose qualities of the