Turkish History in Early English Print

Abstract

The 1540s was the first period in which general accounts of the Turks and their history began to appear in English. These accounts are characterised by the twin contexts of Ottoman expansion into central Europe and the intensity of the religious upheavals of the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The printers and translators that produced them responded directly to the Ottoman advance, often translating continental accounts, but the texts they produced cannot be understood without recourse to the English circumstances in which these figures worked, and it is the intersection of these influences that form the central theme of this chapter. However, before I can turn to the texts of the 1540s, and the religious characteristics that make them distinctive, I must first set the stage by surveying the very earliest accounts of the Turks to be printed in English and how these overlapped with the debates of the English Reformation.