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

REVIEWS 192 Making Said the interlocutor for her work is an interesting choice, however, and in her concluding chapter, she presents us with a way to engage Said fully. The book that should be written—and this reviewer hopes Scarfe Beckett writes, given her ease with Anglo-Saxon texts as well as archaeological evidence —is one she barely mentions. She suggests that a comparative study of Anglo-Saxon perceptions of “the orient” with those of “the north” (i.e., the Vikings) would be fruitful. Indeed, such a work could go a long way towards a deeper understanding of Anglo-Saxon perceptions of those outside of England, as well as being able to fully engage with Said. MELISSA BRUNINGA-MATTEAU, History, UC Irvine Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 320 pp. Nancy Bisaha, professor of history at Vassar College, has published a beautifully written and fascinating study that evokes an aspect of Renaissance Italian humanist writings long neglected by historians: the humanist responses to the perceived, and often real, threat of the Ottoman Turks (and Islam generally) to Europe in the wake of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Throughout the sixteenth century, humanists produced hundreds of works, creative and scholarly, about Islam and the Turks: ethnographies, histories, religious works, tracts on the crusades, even poetry. Modern historians of Italian humanism have, Bisaha points out, usually viewed these works—some offering a disinterested or even tolerant perspective, others calling for new Christian crusades to take back the “new Rome”—as aberrations from typical Italian humanist concerns such as classical scholarship, republican government, and human dignity. Bisaha shows that the writings are in fact vital to understanding how Italian humanists connected the contemporary world of Italian politics and culture with Greco-Roman ideas and philosophy. She argues that many of these influential humanist writings “revolutionized Western views of Islam, transforming an old enemy of the faith into a political and cultural threat to their growing sense of ‘Europe’” (5). That is, while many humanists retained the medieval perception of the Muslim as an infidel, an “enemy of the faith,” many others rejected that view and instead re-created the Turk in terms of classical mental categories—as a barbarian and enemy of learning whose leaders were comparable to those of the ancient past. Yet Bisaha’s thesis has implications for early modern intellectual scholarship far beyond humanist studies. She posits the Renaissance as a “crucial moment of cultural self-definition: in responding to the Turkish outsider, humanists simultaneously crafted a compelling notion of Western society” (7). In other words, not only did common enemies make common friends as Christian Europe tried to ally itself against the Turkish threat; but also for sixteenth-century Europe, politically and culturally disintegrated, the creation of a “new vision of the Turk” led to the birth of a new idea among elites. Mental categories of identity shifted, and elites came to believe that there was such a thing as a “West,” politically, religiously, and culturally distinct, and usually superior to, a newly conceived “East” of Muslim Arab and Turkish cultures. Bisaha offers four thematic analyses of humanist tracts concerning the Otto- REVIEWS 193 man East. She opens with a necessary review of intellectual construction of the Turk in the Middle Ages, focusing on crusader propaganda and courtly literature that developed a concept of the Turk as a religious foe, enemy of the true faith, the infidel who needed to be conquered in order to free the Holy Land for Christian rule and prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. Next, Bisaha moves forward chronologically to an analysis of individual writings by a number of sixteenth-century Italian humanists, who, steeped in the philosophy and natural paradigms of the ancients, eventually came to reject the medieval Christian tradition in favor of a view of Muslims (and Turks in particular) as barbarians, “others” utterly different from, and inferior in learning, civilization , and custom from the West. This chapter, which presents the core of Bisaha’s argument and is the most successful chapter, rescues an obscure aspect of humanist scholarship. The texts she...