In pursuit of Mediterranean hegemony: history and representations

Looking at Islam with a mixture of fear, bewilderment and uneasiness, European Christians saw Muslims as the enemy and rival of Christianity. The Orient and Orientals were always in the position of ‘outsiders’ and were considered to be the weak partners for the West. This displacement made the Ottomans and the Orientals seem to be alien, backward, the ‘other’, existing somewhere in the peripheral world of Western egemony. Still, it did not prevent Western interest in the Orient. The growing historiographical recognition (among Ottomanists, at least) of widespread familiarity between certain early modern Ottoman political élites and their European counterparts has had radical implications for the master-narrative of Ottoman history.