Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (review)

One of the time-honored approaches of Western scholarship to Islam has been the literature of image, which treats the rhetorical views employed by Christian Europe of the Islamic East. Works in this genre abound, including C. D.Rouillard's The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, Samuel Chew's The Crescent and the Rose, R. W. Southern's Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Norman Daniel's Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, and Robert Schwoebel's The Shadow of the Crescent. Nancy Bisaha's first book, Creating East and West, fits into this tradition of image literature, and is an important contribution both to the study of humanism and to our understanding of European views of the most powerful early modern Islamic state, the Ottoman Empire.

While significant attention has been paid to medieval and modern views of Islam, Bisaha maintains that the Renaissance has been neglected, in large part because scholars have seen little difference between humanist views of Islam and their medieval precursors. Through a careful study of the works of thirty humanists, mostly fifteenth-century Italians, she convincingly shows that the Renaissance was in fact a pivotal moment in the evolution of European views of Islam and its own self-definition, that it differed significantly from medieval precursors, and that it had an important influence on evolving modern views.

To support her central contention, Bisaha begins by demonstrating the continuity between medieval crusade and chivalric literature, on the one hand, and Renaissance writers such as Petrarch, Salutati, and Bracciolini, on the other. This is not, however, a case of simple appropriation of medieval models. Rather, humanist writers adapted and stretched these medieval ideas, influenced by their own readings of classical rhetoric and history. The classical division of the world into realms of civilization and realms of barbarity, into East/West and Europe/Asia, profoundly affected the way humanists perceived their own age. The result of this amalgam of medieval and classical ideas was the unique Renaissance model that combined religious and cultural views of the Turks, and became the foundation for the orientalist paradigm of subsequent centuries.

Besides classical precedents, the humanist construction of the Turks as the antithesis of Europe was also significantly influenced by Greek scholars and ideas, particularly following the fall of Constantinople. Italian humanists saw parallels between what they perceived as the vicious and barbaric destruction of the eastern capital and the barbarian sack of Rome in the fifth century. Byzantine rhetoric regarding its centuries old conflict with Islam became an important cornerstone of this view. This is evident in the shift from characterizing Turks as religious infidels to uncivilized barbarians among Italian writers, a change influenced by Manuel Chrysoloras who was in Italy around 1400. By classing Turks as barbarians, humanists were able to stake out the cultural high ground in which, though pressed militarily by the Ottomans, Europe was still able to perceive of itself as the sole heir of classical antiquity and thus culturally superior to this latest iteration of barbarian challengers to Western civilization.

While most image literature has tended toward a somewhat monotone listing of evidences of European antipathy toward Islam and the Turks, one of the strengths of this book is Bisaha's insistence on the diachronic complexity of the medieval and Renaissance discourse on Islam and the Turks. She demonstrates the range and nuance of both medieval and Renaissance responses to the Turkish expansion. This is no reductive reaction, however, as the author acknowledges that in the end humanist rhetoric about the Turks was most often negative. While not a primary focus, the author is also clearly critiquing Edward Said's orientalist model, which privileges the colonial era when Europe held political and economic sway over the East as the crucial moment in the development of his orientalist paradigm. Bisaha, however, argues that already in the Renaissance the concept of...