The sixteenth century saw a transformation in West European thinking about the Ottoman state and Ottoman society. Not everything changed, of course; Western ideas about Islam were still largely determined by the long tradition of medieval anti-Muslim polemics, and popular culture maintained the image of the ‘Turk’ as an embodiment of cruelty, ferocity and lust. But any literate person could, by the second half of the century, gain access to a substantial body of information about the conditions of life and government in the Ottoman world – information provided by writers who had been there and seen it for themselves. Broadly speaking, these authors divided into two categories: former captives on the one hand, and those who travelled there in connection with diplomatic missions (whether as ambassadors or as scholars in the envoys’ entourages) on the other.1