Elizabethan stage Turks were built from medieval church polemics, not observation

Evidence

However, before turning our attention to him, there is the Ottoman sultan Bayazid, who was the first portrayal of an Ottoman sultan on the stage. He, too, is a monster, albeit a less complex one than Tamburlaine. Bayazid is described as a member of the “detestable and cursed sect of Islam,” who appeals to his “god” Mahomet—a monster with “purple blood,” which courses through the veins of all Turks. … In formulating these characters, Marlowe was likely influenced by the account of Turkish history penned by John Foxe, published in 1570 and again in 1576 and 1583, before the publication of Tamburlaine. Foxe relies on medieval theology, and specifically the history of the Church, in his account of the Turks. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s ‘fear without an object’ thesis: Marlowe’s monster-sultan descends from Foxe’s medieval theological account, an image chain with little to no actual contact.
• SEED: Angle: tracing one stage monster’s genealogy back through church history texts to show dramatic ‘tyranny’ figures were recycled theological constructs.