Turk

‘Turk’ was a mutable word in early modern England, difficult to untangle from a range of associations with Muslims, the Ottoman imperial state, and English converts to Islam. ¹ ‘Turks’ were often synonymous with Ottomans and the power of Ottoman sultans, while Muslims originating from central Asia or Africa could also be described as such. ² Elizabethan and Stuart encounters with Ottomans through popular print, sermons, travel literature and plays revealed a rich, if at times contradictory, interaction with ideas of the Turk. ³ Alongside a sense of awe at Ottoman imperial power, there were accounts of pirates who converted to Islam, Englishmen enslaved on Ottoman galleys, and travellers such as George Sandys who, behind assumptions of Christian superiority, admired aspects of Muslim hospitality or charity. This was not a world in which Europe necessarily emerged superior. ⁴ The ‘mightie Empire of the Turks’, acknowledged the historian and translator Richard Knolles in 1603, was ‘the greatest terror of the world, and holding in subjection many great and mightie kingdomes’. ⁵