German Turcica depicted Ottoman sexuality as monstrously deviant and predatory

Evidence

Turcica, German collections of stories about Turks, include fantastic tales of perverse sexual behaviors and other disturbing stories of Ottoman life. The Turcica often focus on behaviors known as sodomia, a collection of acts that referred to any sexual act deviating from “normal” Christian practices. Stories narrated in these collections detail the victimization of innocents, including children, females, and dead Christians. In one story, Turkish soldiers have sex with corpses—Christians killed in the fall of Constantinople. Another tale claims that Muslims “have it off with those fish that possess sexual organs.” One strongly disturbing story tells of an old woman who disguises herself as a man, revealing herself to the bride—a beautiful virgin—on her wedding night. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 274

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘sodomia’ as the period’s catch-all term for any sexual act deviating from Christian norms, not just same-sex acts.
• XREF: These fabricated sexual atrocity tales—necrophilia, bestiality, cross-dressing predation—are textbook ‘fear without an object’ material, xenophobic projection that prefigures modern propaganda tropes about out-groups.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the manufactured-moral-panic mechanism in my ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article but for sexual deviance claims about an out-group rather than dress.