Published
2019-10-23
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Copyright (c) 2019 Thorin Wenner
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Portraying the Enemy
Two German Lutherans’ Turkish Travelogues and the Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
Thorin Wenner
University of Minnesota
Keywords: Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire
Abstract
In the 1570s, Austria sent an embassy to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople in order to maintain contact during a fragile period of peace. This article examines the writings of two theologians, Stephan Gerlach and Salomon Schweigger, who were sent with this embassy and compares them to those of another traveler to the Ottoman Empire, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, in order to better understand the motivations and biases of these writers. This article also examines these writings within the broader contemporary literature on the Turks.
