Research Information System
in: Imagined,Embodied and Actual Turks in Early Modern Europe, Bent Holm,Mikael Bogh Rasmussen, Editor, Hollitzer Verlag, Vienna, pp.137-151, 2021
In the following, a number of European travelogues from the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are discussed and compared with de- scriptions of Turkish society and politics that relied on the secondary knowledge that was often harvested from such travelogues, but was interpreted differently by their authors. The aim is to convey the political and social relevance of the Otto- man Empire to European intellectuals of the period.1 The Turks were obviously interesting, as the sheer amount of literature about them clearly shows.2 One of my aims is to explore the extent to which descriptions of Ottoman society and customs were also instrumental in the identification of Early Modern European construc- tions of identity, and in the search for solutions to internal problems in European societies.