"History written by the enemy": Eastern Sources about the Ottomans on the Continent and in England.

Although little known today, several histories of the Ottomans originating in Byzantine Greek, Arabic, and Turkish circulated in the Latin West during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Latin translators honored their authors and promoted their works as valuable additions to Western knowledge. In "The Generall Historie of the Turkes" (1603), Richard Knolles regularly cites these Byzantine and Turkish sources. While Knolles sometimes used the Turkish histories to criticize the Ottomans, his reliance upon "history written by the enemy" humanized and contextualized Ottoman actions that, in earlier Western accounts, often appeared arbitrary or incomprehensible. In translating "The Reign of Orchan" directly from the Turkish in 1652, William Seaman outdid even the Latin translators in his enthusiasm for his source and the culture from which it sprang. These texts suggest that Orientalist stereotypes did not develop in a simple linear fashion and that important East-West exchanges occurred through the medium of translation in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]