Bisaha’s excellent study reveals the Renaissance as a crucial moment in the formulation of European self-definition and cultural perceptions. Her sources go deep into the intellectual response of 15th c. Italians and Eastern Europeans on the defensive against the growing Ottoman Empire, and she finds that Renaissance humanists were not so anti-medieval and secular as Jacob Burckhardt suggested, nor was there a sharp break between medieval and Renaissance ideals.

According to Bisaha, the humanists’ contribution to the formulation of “Western civilization” was in making cultural superiority a key component of emerging post-medieval European sensibilities. The ancient Greeks invented cultural stereotyping and xenophobia, but it was the Renaissance humanists who were responsible for the development of a more unified discourse of European ‘civility’ v. Turkish/Muslim ‘barbarism.’ References to Muslims as barbarians were rare before the 15th c., says Bisaha―when the Turks were placed in the same category as the Persians and Germans of antiquity and the Vikings and Mongols of later days―because medieval thinkers recognized the superiority of Muslim learning and cultural accomplishments.

Late medieval perceptions of the Turks were mixed. Some western Europeans expressed a grudging respect for Turkish military superiority after the victory over the Hungarians at Nicopolis in 1396. The unity and vigor of the Turks and their strong and simple faith was contrasted favorably with the embarrassing papal schism and the quibbling that made Christendom appear weak and divided. Humanist commentary on the Turks became more fraught after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; sermons and laments, circulated with the aid of the newly developed printing press, spread allegations of Turkish cruelty, slaughter and sexual violence. For western scholars, Constantinople was a living piece of ancient history: reports that thousands of books were lost or destroyed sent tremors of shock and anger through humanist circles. Greek émigrés did much to impress upon Italian scholars the extent to which Byzantium and Greek learning were imperiled by the Turkish advance.

Bisaha’s discussion of relations between Italian humanists and Byzantine émigrés suggests that the Turkish threat was the impetus for the myth that ancient Greek culture formed the roots of European civilization. Byzantine scholars who taught in Italy represented the richness of Greek heritage to their Western admirers, but for many Latins, Byzantium looked as foreign and exotic as the Persians once had to the Greeks (and the Turks were fornicators and flesheaters like the Scythians). At least since Petrarch, there had been the view that modern-day Greeks were merely the descendants of an enslaved and subjugated people, a decadent, pale imitation of the dignity of the Roman Empire. Humanists admired ancient Greek achievements, and some praised the Greeks for their brave efforts in fighting off the Turks, but others saw the demise of Byzantium as the expression of God’s wrath against those who had strayed from the ‘true faith.’ Not until Byzantium was on the verge of extinction did Westerners exhibit enthusiasm for the fruits of Greek learning. When Bishop and former Latin Patriarch of Constantinople Basilios Bessarion delivered a speech on the occasion of the transferal of the head of St. Andrew the Apostle from Patras in Greece to Saint Peter’s church in Rome (1462), he warned that an entire heritage was in danger of being erased. The heritage Bessarion hoped to preserve, however, was not the one that for centuries had bound up Greek identity in Orthodoxy, but the one that imagined Greece as the ancient source of Western identity and the bulwark against Eastern barbarians. As the Turks came to be seen as a threat to the security and honor of Europe, the Greeks became European.

Humanists deployed religious rhetoric alongside the classical and secular discourse on the Turks. Some, mimicking medieval polemic, designated Turks as ‘enemies of the faith’ or Muslims as ignorant and brutal beasts of the desert. Some repeated sensational tales about the Prophet and his ‘cult of carnal pleasure;’ others accused Muslims of Satanism and idolatry. Crusading bulls and sermons flowing from the papacy often veered toward apocalyptic pronouncements on the Turkish peril in the unfolding of sacred history. Some of the less hysterical polemicists, among them John of Segovia and Nicholas Cusanus, issued conversion treatises interpreting Muslim texts and beseeching the West to consider the possibility of winning converts to Christianity even while encouraging anti-Turkish crusade. After the siege of Otranto in 1480 and the subsequent bloodbath, some humanists wondered whether the Turkish advance was a kind of divine punishment, an exhortation to repent for extravagant sins. Papal announcements and popular preachers picked up on the anti-Muslim rhetoric, converting it into propaganda for the masses.

The conceptual opposition of East and West was mostly vague and unformed, writes Bisaha, until the humanists created an aggressive discourse of cultural difference and superiority. The rhetoric of Christian v. infidel was insufficient for humanist notions of cultural supremacy once the Turks were regarded as serious geopolitical adversaries. With the aid of classical thought, humanists began to transform an old enemy of the faith into a political and cultural threat to the growing sense of “Europe.” The humanists’ chauvinistic sense of “Western civilization” shaped later perceptions of other non-Western cultures, and provided what Bisaha calls “an arsenal of justifications for European hegemony.” ( )