By the time of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 the “Turks” had finally arrived in the European public discourse. As their territorial expansion continued, and boosted by the invention of the printing press, publications on this subject, also known as Turcica, increased dramatically from the second half of the 15th century onwards. In addition to the polemic pamphlets, which mainly aimed to mark the Turks as “enemies of Christianity”, a new literary genre in form of travelogues emerged, in which authors shared their extensive knowledge of the Ottoman Empire. Almut Höfert’s comprehensive study, based on her dissertation, examines not only what these authors considered worth knowing, but also in what format the information was organized and presented. She assumes that the phenomenon of the Turkish fear, a specific enemy discourse of that time, led to Europeans describing their enemies more closely, engendering a more empirical look at the Ottomans, their government, culture, and religious practices.
The monograph is clearly structured and divided into seven chapters. In chapter one, Höfert explains her category of analysis, which she calls “ethnographic knowledge” and whose beginnings she locates in the 15th and 16th centuries. Chapter two deals with the emergence and impact of the phenomenon of the “Turkish fear”. In sharp contrast to this research term, Höfert discusses the Ottoman expansion in chapter three in regard to the Ottomans’ relations with Venice, France, and the Austrian Habsburgs. The fourth chapter presents the European diplomatic system on the basis of these three powers and explains its importance for the accumulation of knowledge about the Ottoman Empire. After all, 70% of all reports published in the period under study arose from the diplomatic context (p. 166). However, the focus of Höfert’s closer examination lies not on the reports written in the diplomatic field, but on those travelogues that were written outside the diplomatic context and which chapter five deals with. Besides the knowledge about Islam and the Turks that had been transmitted in Europe since the Middle Ages, the author bases her further analysis on twelve representative travelogues. These were printed in at least five editions within the examined period of 1450 to 1600 and thus had a lasting influence on public opinion. Höfert explains her elaborated methodology of “module analysis” in chapter six: she arranges the information she collects reading the sources (such as descriptions of the Janissaries, clothing and food, religious holidays) into 330 “modules” from 45 subcategories, which can be classified into three major themes: 1. court, government and military, 2. customs and traditions and 3. religion (p. 119). Finally, in the seventh chapter (“The Order of Things”), the author, following Michel Foucault’s 1966 study of the same name, attempts to apply the “epistemological configuration of ethnographic knowledge” to her previous results. In her conclusion, Höfert states that one of the most important findings of her study is the fact that the travel writers of the 16th century described the Turks in a way that was somewhat independent of the common “enemy” image of the time. The reason for this, however, was not the authors holding an open-minded attitude towards the Ottomans, but the dominance of the new ethnographical systematic order, which left no room for polemic condemnations or statements without an empirical basis. Because of its enormous popularity, the genre of travelogues thus contributed to the consolidation of modern ethnographic fields such as religion. “The ethnographic system of categorization thus imperceptibly opened up a space in the sixteenth century in which the semantics of ethnographic terminology were redefined in opposition to contemporary theological discourse; a space in which Islam was described in a terminology that had heretofore been the exclusive domain of Christianity” (p. 306).
Almut Höfert’s study plausibly explains the factors that led to the emergence and establishment of early modern ethnographic science in the context of Ottoman expansion. The sociological vocabulary she uses at times impedes access to her work. On the other hand, several factors apart from Höfert’s findings make her work valuable, especially from a methodological point of view, namely its clear structure, the extensively presented procedure, and the comprehensive appendix.