Five Books of Turkish Letters by Various and Diverse Authors

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Original title: Epistolarum Turcicarum variorum et diversorum authorum libri V A Latin documentary anthology in five books gathering letters concerning Turkish and Ottoman affairs (epistolae de rebus Turcicis) rather than narrating a continuous history. It assembles papal, imperial, royal, conciliar, municipal, Ottoman and Mongol chancery documents together with literary, fictive and pseudepigraphic epistles — among them Laudivius Zacchia's invented letter-book of Mehmed II, letters ascribed to Chinggis Khan and Baiju, the Morbasanus letters, and Pius II's Epistola ad Mahumetem — arranged in rough chronological order from the age of Gregory the Great and the first Saracen conquests to the campaigns of the 1590s, with a medieval account of Frederick I Barbarossa's Asian expedition (Expeditio Asiatica, associated with Tageno, dean of Passau) appended at the close. Prefaced by a dedicatory epistle to Heinrich Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and Prince of Wolfenbüttel, subscribed at Jena in February 1599, it justifies its documentary method on the Plinian principle that what is to come mostly resembles what has already been done, offering the assembled record of appeals, leagues, truces, betrayals and defeats as counsel on the Ottoman threat and repeatedly diagnosing Christian disunity — the lack of a head whom all will obey — as the sultan's chief advantage. Printed at Frankfurt am Main by Johann Kollitz for the bookseller Paul Brachfeld, in a volume of some three hundred pages, and presented as the capstone of Reusner's serial anti-Turkish enterprise, which already included his Orationes Turcicae and continued in further books. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
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