European elites imagined Ottoman commanders as quasi-demonic monsters with boar tusks.

Evidence

The ghostly figure in the background of the painting in Austria represents the clay effigy of a Turk’s head, an object that, although already decapitated, was knocked off its pedestal. This description from a Habsburg emissary of an Ottoman military commander suggests how Turks were viewed by the Austrians: “A thick bodied eunuch with sallow complexion, he had, ‘a sour look, scowling eyes, broad shoulders that stuck up, from which his head extruded as from a valley. With two teeth like boars’ tusks dominating his mouth [and] his voice, hoarse… he was the Fourth Fury.” The carousel game offered a way for the Turkish monster to be exterminated through the imagination. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 345

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete evidence of the monster figure being visual-artifacted in the imagination, with the ‘Fourth Fury’ epithet anchoring the demonic framing that ties into the book’s core thesis.