An Ottoman gentleman’s account of seventeenth-century Vienna survives and is remarkable

Evidence

His account of Vienna, where he went as a member of the entourage of an Ottoman ambassador, is particularly interesting. He seems to have spent some time in the city, and the responses of an Ottoman gentleman to imperial Vienna in the seventeenth century make a remarkable document. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1900

Categorization

• SEED: A cross-civilizational gaze reversed — the ‘foreign visitor’ genre flipped toward Europe by a sophisticated Ottoman observer could seed an essay on who gets to be the exotic.
• FICTION: A first-person ‘what the East made of the West’ travelogue is a rich reverse-orientalist frame for a story.