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.

XREF: Connects to Western historiography of the Ottoman Empire and orientalist constructions of the Turk in early modern European writing.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 234