Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [239]
4. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Roy, 16 G VI. f. 412.
5. See the cartouche in window 11, of the Saracens climbing the walls of Assisi, reproduced in Marcel Beck, Peter Felder, Emil Maurer, and Dietrich Schearz, Königsfelden: Geschichte, Bauten, Glasgemälde, Kunstschätze, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1983.
6. A fifteenth-century French image distinguished Arabs from Crusaders by presenting the former as half-naked savages. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Add. 21143. f. 90.
7. As can be seen in the crest of the medieval Lords Audley, whose ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Their arms, in the quaint language of heraldry, consisted of an arm couped at the shoulder, embowed, and resting the elbow on the wreath, holding a sword in pale, enfiled with a Saracen’s head. The crest depicts a hand holding a sword on which is spiked the head of a bearded man of “Eastern” appearance. The motto given below the crest, Mors ad inimicum (death to the oppressor), makes the point clear.
8. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, London: J. Ollivier, 1847, p. 180.
9. For the range, and significance of early images, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. The interrelationship between the image and text is not generally well covered: Hélène Desmet-Grégoire’s study of eighteenth-century French images of the East is a notable exception. See Hélène Desmet-Grégoire, Divan magique.
10. The OED gives the first usage as Edward Hall’s in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, published in 1548: “Aparaled after Turkey fashion … girded with two swords called cimitaries.” It cites Christophorus Richerius, De rebus Turcarum, published in Paris in 1540, for the statement that the janissaries called their swords “cymitharra.” Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmesteter in their Dictionnaire général de la langue Française du commencement du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, précédé d’un traité de la formation de la langue (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1890–1900) say it has a fifteenth-century origin but are not specific.
11. The Turkish incident was inserted at the personal insistence of Louis XIV, who had become entranced with the Ottomans after an embassy to Paris in 1669. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 72–3. Göçek gives a full account of the mutual effects of the links between France and the Ottoman Empire.
12. G. Horton, The Blight of Asia, 1922, chapter 19, www.hri.org/docs/Horton/hb-29.html.
13. “Outlandish” moved from its late medieval usage—meaning “external”—to the later use, which had become a term of abuse. See OED.
14. That is, it seemed to represent the stereotypical medieval Christian view of the Jew.
15. These included an edition printed by Mikulas Bakalar in Pilsen; a Lyons edition of 1488 printed by Martin Huss (freely adapted with new illustrations); another by Anton Sorg in Augsburg, also in 1488; another brought out by Pablo Hurus as Viaje de la Tierra Sancta in Saragossa in 1498; see Clair, History, and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976.
16. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books, London: William Stainsby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625. The copy I have used is British Library BL 984 h. 5.
17. One, Lithgow, opined that “the nature of the Arabs was not unlike the jackals,” decried the “villainy of the Armenians” while noting “the constancy of the Turks,” ibid., p. 1846. “Sir John Mandeville” was the author of the most famous (and widely read) medieval travel