Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks

by Nancy Bisaha

As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other.

Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Islam

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2004

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at the development of attitudes and understandings of the other in western thought through the lens of the Renaissance Humanists views on the Ottoman Turks. Bisaha does a great job explaining the complicated, and often contradictory ideas the humanists developed towards the Turks over time. I would have appreciated a bit more connecting those ideas to the modern day, but even so it's a fascinating look at how ideas, good and bad, can spread and develop.

[Ian O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delighted to read this from a neighbor who is a professor of history at Vassar College, NY. Bit of a dark tone - how Renaissance humanists used their newly acquired rhetorical gifts, inspired by the study of ancient Greek texts, in a propaganda war against their Ottoman enemies, particularly in the brutal aftermath of the 1453 siege of Constantinople, which received precious little help from their western Christian allies in its moment of extreme peril. In fact Vatican authorities saw an opportunity to unify the churches under Western authority, grotesquely trying to impose their liturgy on a panicked Byzantine populace even as they prayed to God in their own way for salvation, sensing that the end was imminent.