In recent years, there has been a growing interest in relations between Islam and Christianity during the Renaissance, but the results have so far been mixed, a measure of how little we still know about this important subject. Here is a book that investigates one aspect of that story — Renaissance humanists’ accounts of the origins of Islamic empires, especially the Ottoman Turks — with insight, flair, and an extraordinary command of a large range of sources. In a series of complex and absorbing thematic enquiries, Margaret Meserve patiently uncovers the humanists’ sources, methods and motives in a period in which the threat of Ottoman power loomed very large in European minds, especially after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. She demonstrates that the primary objective of most humanist history-writing in this area was to damn the Turks as cruel, barbarous, and illegitimate. Renaissance intellectuals attempted to deploy their philological knowledge in the public sphere so as to mobilize political opinion against the Turks, with the aim of inspiring a new Christian crusade. This was in part because the damage inflicted on the Greek cultural heritage by the fall of Constantinople was felt especially keenly in scholarly circles. Perhaps more significantly, humanists saw the issue as an opportunity to advertise their expertise, undermine their rivals, and secure patronage in high places. (‘Dung-dropping little turd’ is what one humanist called a scholarly colleague writing on the subject.) The competitive individualism so often associated with Renaissance achievement appears less edifying or heroic when the question at stake was whether the Greek form of “Turks” should be spelt Turkoi or Tourkoi, rather than how to build the cupola of Florence Cathedral or design the Baptistery doors.

Furthermore, because the humanists claimed mastery in the interpretation of ancient sources, and because of the primarily polemical nature of their work in this area, Meserve demonstrates that they tended to neglect eyewitness accounts of the Turks from the past or from their own period. As a result, although she rejects with good reason the concept of orientalism as useful for the study of the Renaissance, her book is very much an enquiry into Islam and the Turks as represented in the imaginations of Christian intellectuals. It is all the more sobering for that. For she shows most strikingly how, in myriad ways, the humanists got the history of the Turks utterly wrong. This seems partly to have been because their methods were not up to the very complex scholarly challenges involved, but Meserve emphasizes rather the fact that philological research was repeatedly pressed into the service of rhetorical effect, resulting in selective manipulation of sources to portray the Turks in the worst possible light.

The high estimation of learned activity held by Renaissance rulers has often been regarded as one of the attractive aspects of the period, but this book raises implicit questions about that relationship. Emblematic of the marriage of scholarship and politics in the 15th century is the figure of the humanist churchman Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II from 1458 to 1464), who wrote extensively about the Turks and whose later curial career was dedicated to motivating a crusade against them. But he like nearly every other humanist mentioned in this book failed to understand the Ottomans, arguing repeatedly for their barbarous Scythian origins as suggested to him in medieval rather than ancient texts. Indeed Meserve underlines the traditional vision of the humanists, who were happy to draw on a medieval heritage that they generally claimed to despise, whether in the use of source materials or in the adoption of a broader, albeit largely implicit, providentialist vision.

The use of medieval sources in itself is not perhaps quite as surprising as Meserve suggests — we have been aware for some time that humanists did exactly this in many other fields of enquiry; they were surely right to do so here when dealing with a phenomenon that simply did not exist in classical times. The wider conclusion, however, that this area yields no evidence of a methodological revolution in the writing of history in the 15th-century, is highly significant. Not only does Meserve find little sense of the progression of historical understanding during that period (16th-century innovations are treated only briefly in an epilogue), but she implies that historical scholarship in some respects actually seems to have retrogressed as the need to counter the Ottoman threat became more pressing. At least ascribing Scythian origins to the Turks, though ultimately mistaken, was a genuine advance on a competing theory that claimed for them descent from the Trojans. But after 1453, the relatively balanced presentations of Turkish power in the context of successive Islamic empires, pioneered in the 1430s and 1440s by Andrea Biglia and Flavio Biondo, were distorted so as both to rehabilitate other Islamic empires and, by contrast, to emphasize the viciousness and upstart nature of the Turks in particular. This surely reveals that political motivations ultimately took precedence over providentialist ones, but at the same time it explodes the promise held out by some recent studies, of an era of east-west friendship waiting to be uncovered behind the orientalist Renaissance constructed by the nineteenth century.

The case is rendered only more powerful by the fact that we know the humanists to have employed more appropriate methods in other areas. To take one example, they were not averse to making use of firsthand, eyewitness accounts to enhance their understanding of distant places or peoples. The Florentine Poggio Bracciolini's De varietate fortunae (1447–1448) includes a lengthy description of southern India supplied to him directly by a merchant traveler, Nicolò Conti; Aeneas Silvius Piccolimini's own Commentaries, one of the most entertaining reads of the fifteenth century, includes descriptions of European peoples encountered on his extensive travels. Since humanist historiographical methods play a not insignificant role in modern historians’ understandings of their own professional origins, Margaret Meserve's study amounts to a highly revisionist account of one august element in the western tradition, and a bracingly instructive inquiry into the perils of writing politically-positioned history. Brilliantly sustained, beautifully constructed, and researched to the highest scholarly standards, this book raises the debate on the Renaissance engagement with Islam onto an altogether new level.