This book has investigated the cultural significance and understanding of the Islamic Turk within the development of German print culture from the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Printed images and their accompanying texts spanned a variety of media, including incunabula, military pamphlets, biblical illustrations, travel literature, costume books, chronicles and histories. This book has established that the cultural events taking place in German-speaking areas of the Holy Roman Empire, including the religious turmoil of the Reformation, directly influenced Northern and Central European interpretations of the Ottoman Empire. The growing military, diplomatic and scholarly contact between the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires during this period resulted in a broad spectrum of images and texts available to a growing literate readership and viewership. Information could be disseminated at a far more rapid rate than previously possible due to the advances in printing with movable type. Furthermore, the artists and writers creating the images and text drew on the social and religious concerns in their own region to reflect on their emerging identity in relation to Islam, the Turk and the Ottoman Empire.

Foundations of printed images of Islamic groups had been established in earlier illuminated manuscripts, especially those produced during the Crusades, in which medieval concepts of Saracens and the perceived dangers of Islam loomed large. Furthermore, fifteenth-century humanist writings on the history of the Ottoman people drew strongly on classical and biblical scholarship.