"Having It Off" with Fish, Camels, and Lads: Sodomitic Pleasures in German-Language Turcica

In 1530 the German Lutheran reformer Justus Jonas claimed: "Wherever [the Turk] does not slay all, he leads off the best men, woman and child, and the youth, into captivity, and takes them to market in Turkey, naked, has them viewed shamefully, and sells them for money, like cattle."¹ What would a Lutheran reformer in the Saxon town of Wittenberg know about a Turkish bazaar? He must have gained his information from other texts, like those by former slaves of Ottoman masters, such as the Tractatus de Moribus, Condictionibus et Nequicia Turcorum (1481), presumably written by Georgius de Hungaria.² Martin Luther republished the work in 1530; it was then very freely translated into German (and partially rewritten) by Sebastian Franck that same year under the title Cronica-Abconterfayung und entwerffung der Türckey.³ The Tractatus presented an extensive description of a slave market, luridly emphasizing its sexual aspects, an approach that also became a significant part of Franck's rendering.⁴ Cronica provided many details of the marketplace: "[It] is shameful to say, once they are on the market, they are stripped: wife, maidens, man, etc. They are touched in public, their private parts are shown to everyone, and naked and bare they must walk in front of everyone, jump and run to make apparent whether the person on sale is weak, healthy, old, young, woman or man."⁵ If exposing a body to the shameful gaze and public touch violated its integrity, then the act of selling did so even more. However, neither Jonas nor Georgius/Franck would have cared had those sold not been Christians or, more precisely, Christians traded by "Turks," a term that signified "Muslims" more generally.

The quotes presented above raise a number of questions: What is happening, on a semiotic level, with respect to sexually laden images in Occidental texts that take "Turks" as their theme? If the Christian body is (textually) displayed naked, a victim of gaze and touch, how is the Muslim body and Muslim sexual behavior constructed in such texts?⁶ Finally, how might the Other's paradigmatic "sexuality" contribute to and/or undermine the social disciplining of behaviors in the Christian Occident?

The early modern era experienced an ever-increasing "flood of literature on Turks."⁷ This body of texts, which is termed turcica, includes fiction and nonfiction and appears in genres such as poetry, song lyrics, drama, novels, religious treatises and sermons, travel narratives, broadsides, and pamphlets, both illustrated and nonillustrated. The vast outpouring of published turcica began with the 1453 Ottoman takeover of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, an event that coincided with the onset of the age of printing. This concurrence of technological advance and military conquest is embodied in one of the oldest surviving German prints (and the oldest completely preserved printed book), issued in December 1454 in response to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans: the nine-page propagandist pamphlet entitled An Exhortation of Christianity against the Turks (the so-called "Türkenkalender").⁸ Throughout Europe authors and illustrators directed their attention to the "Turkish threat" in a remarkable variety of genres and languages, including Latin and vernaculars such as English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Carl Göllner has counted about a thousand German imprints in the sixteenth century alone.⁹

While the texts promoted moral reforms in the Christian Occident, for the most part they championed military actions against the Ottoman Empire. To that end they fanned the flames of fear and loathing against the Muslim Other, the "hereditary foe" of Christendom, as some of the titles proclaim.¹⁰ A significant component of their rhetorical strategy is the frequent invocation of sexually charged images.

This focus on sexuality would be heightened and transformed by the publication of Scheherazade...