Turks on the Border: Images of Ottoman-Occupied Space in Early Modern Europe

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe were a period of heightened European anxiety over the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. The successful incursion of the Ottomans into the West posed a viable threat to the borders of Europe. Previous scholarship on early modern images of occupied cities has focused on the ways in which Western artists effaced or diminished the Ottoman presence in order to reappropriate these cities for Christianity. In my thesis, however, I consider three case studies that acknowledge the Ottoman presence in three different regions: the Holy Land, Byzantium, and the Peloponnesus. All three represent the challenges faced by Western artists in portraying these contested sites. The inherent tensions between East and West, Christian and Muslim, and past and present generated city views that depicted the physical features of the site as well as its variegated cultural and historical layers. The three case studies in my thesis demonstrate how the uncertainty and anxiety plaguing early modern Europeans stimulated new and provocative ways of portraying a world that was constantly in flux.