German Turcica manufactured sexual perversion tales about Ottomans

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

• XREF: These fantastical sexual-perversion tales are a textbook example of the monster-making machinery the reader is tracking; parallels the sodomia-obsession in Iberian anti-Muslim polemic.
• QUESTION: What Christian anxieties are being displaced onto these sexual stories—projection about the fall of Constantinople, or broader anxieties about bodily integrity and the sacred?
• SHARE: The detail about Turkish soldiers having sex with fish is exactly the kind of grotesque tidbit a medievalist colleague would savor.