Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [232]
2. Cited in Mary Lucille Shay, The Ottoman Empire from 1720–1734 as Revealed by the Dispatches of the Venetian Baili, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944, p. 34.
3. For example, successful plays on the London stage included The Christian Hero (1735), Zoraida (1780), and The Siege of Belgrade (1791), all of which deployed these themes.
4. The writer of these words, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, was a skeptical young French civil engineer and savant much admired by Diderot. He died at the age of thirty-seven in 1759, but one of his last works, published secretly after his death, tackled the controversial topic of despotism. His treatise Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental was considered seditious in France, and so was published in the Netherlands in 1761. Although Boulanger considered that Europe had its own share of despotisms, and despite his well-honed critical sensibilities, nonetheless he held to the traditional and unquestioning view about the East, which included the Near East as well as the Far East. My text source can be found at http://www.vc.unipmn.it/~mori/e-texts/.
5. See Lewis, Discovery.
6. See A British Resident, p. 308.
7. With so many young women dying in childbirth or from disease, many Western widowers made a series of marriages. (Thus the wicked stepmother became a literary stereotype.)
8. Possibly Skene’s experience of many years had not been with Constantinople sophisticates like the general, but with more traditionally minded provincials.
9. Skene was the British consul in Aleppo.
10 The concept of “recovered memory” was developed in the 1990s as a means of enabling children and adults to recall memories of events they had forgotten or repressed. The use of these powerful psychotherapeutic methods also elicited recollections of events that had never taken place, or manipulated recollection to produce a desired outcome. While most of the research has focused on sexual abuse in childhood, the wider implication of this research sheds light on the process of generating social “memories” about the distant past. See Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Imagining the Past,” The Psychologist 14 (November 2001), 11, pp. 584–7. Moreover, “memories that have had time to fade are particularly susceptible to distortion” by imprinting ideas; see Kathryn A. Braun, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,” Psychology and Marketing 19 (January 2002), pp. 1–23.
11. The concept of collective memory derives from the work of Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s–30s; born in 1877, he died in Buchenwald in 1945. His principal work has now been translated as On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Halbwachs asserted (page 50) that “if certain memories are inconvenient or burden us, we can always oppose to them the sense of reality inseparable from our present life. We are free to choose.” Part of the lesson of the Balkans in the 1990s is that this freedom to choose may well be heavily constrained.
12. The number who actually migrated is, like most other elements of this history, still violently contested. For a reasoned revisionist view, see Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 139–40.
13. “An Abbreviated Biography of Prince Lazar,” translated and cited in Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, pp. 62–3.
14. The Serbian capacity to transmute disaster into victory had deep cultural roots and carried through into the twentieth century. The retreat of the Serbian army through Montenegro before the Austrian army in 1915, losing 100,000 killed or wounded, was followed at the end of the war with the creation of a South Slav kingdom.
15. Il regno degli Slavi hoggi corrottamente detti Schiauoni historia di Don Macro Orbini in Peso: Appraise Girolamo Concordia, 1601.
16. The translator was a native of Herzegovina named