ABSTRACT
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 focussed the attention of western states on the menace of Islam, creating for the first time a consciousness of their common interest against the enemy. The humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, writing the year after its fall, appealed to the west to rally to the concept of ‘Europe’, which he identified with the Christian cause and whose leadership he assigned to the states of ‘Germania’. Subsequent writers tended to agree that the continent of Europe included all those countries that had been Catholic in faith and Latin in culture. Exceptionally, the French humanist Montaigne included ‘Muscovy’ in the continent, since the Russians also were a line of defence against Islam. But in the Cosmographia (1588) of Sebastian Münster, Muscovy and the Balkan states were portrayed as the mere skirt-trails of a queenly Europe whose heart was in central Europe and whose crowned head was in Spain.
