Renaissance origin-myths traced Turks to Scythian monstrous races to explain their barbarism.
Evidence
Renaissance studies that focused on the possible origins of the Turks frequently relied on medieval fables of monstrous races and mysterious lands. In some cases, the ancestry of the Turks was linked to the Scythians, one of the groups associated with monstrous races in Shakespearean dramas and other writings. Scythians were often featured in medieval writings about monsters, and a Scythian origin, when not explicitly linked to monsters, was still cited as an explanation of the Turk’s barbarism. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 234
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- QUESTION: Worth tracing how the Scythian-as-monster trope travelled from Herodotus-era ‘barbarian’ ethnography into Renaissance Ottoman polemic — a genealogy the reader’s thesis could use.
- DEFINE: Shows the mechanism by which ‘monstrous origin’ functions as an explanatory etiology of barbarism, not just an epithet.