Coexistence, Conversion, and the Crusade against the Turks

Abstract

Although historians of the Turks and Turkishwestern relations have long known and used the works of fifteenth-century Latin writers dealing with the Ottoman menace, students of Renaissance intellectual history have until recently paid them scant attention. Paul Oskar Kristeller wrote in 1956 that 'compositions in prose and in verse against the Turks represent a considerable body of literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that has never been listed, let alone studied'.The explanation for this neglect lies largely in the history of the last hundred years of historiography but involves, among other considerations, the reactions of historians to the peculiar requirements of Quattrocento style.