Preface
1: The Fall of Constantinople, the Turks, and the Humanists
2: Views of Islam: standard assumptions
3: Habsburgs and Ottomans: 'Europe' and the conflict of empires
4: Protestantism, Calvinoturcism, and Turcopapalism
5: Alliances with the infidel
6: The new paradigm
7: Machiavelli and Reason of State
8: Campanella
9: Despotism I: the origins
10: Analyses of Ottoman strength and weakness
11: Justifications of warfare, and plans for war and peace
12: Islam as a political religion
13: Critical and radical uses of Islam I: Vanini to Toland
14: Critical and radical uses of Islam II: Bayle to Voltaire
15: Despotism II: seventeenth-century theories
16: Despotism III: Montesquieu
Conclusion
List of manuscripts
Bibliography
Index
Noel Malcolm read History and English Literature at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He
began his career as Fellow of Gonville and Caius Colleege,
Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently,
Foreign Editor of the Spectator, and then chief political columnist
of the Daily Telegraph. He gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in
2001
and, since 2002, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls
College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an
Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He
has published books and
articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a
particular emphasis on Hobbes), and the history and culture of the
Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in
2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.
Noel Malcolm has provided a masterpiece in the history of
ideas...
*Ritchie Robertson, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the
Year 2019*
The author is one of the great scholars of our time ... Malcolm has
here uncovered an entirely new field of inquiry, ranging from
Machiavelli to Montesquieu, and embracing many less familiar but
fascinating thinkers en route...
*Daniel Johnson, Mosaic, Best Books of 2019*
A timely look at how the perceived threat of Islam shaped early
modern Europe... This is a potentially polarising topic, ripe for
ill-informed claims and tendentious commentary. Malcolm is one of
the handful of people capable of taking it on with scholarly rigour
and clarity... Anyone who wants to understand how we got to where
we are today should read this book.
*Tim Laing Smith, The Daily Telegraph*
[A] wise and beautifully judged book...
*Christopher de Bellaigue, The Guardian*
With its breadth and perspicacity, this book will be the standard
history for decades to come.
*Nabil Matar, American Historical Review*
Useful Enemies is an exhaustive study of such uses of the Ottomans
and Islam in early modern European political writing.
*Jan Loop, Journal of Modern History*
Noel Malcolm's impressive inquiry ... is remarkable for its
insight, order and clarity of exposition.
*Rolando Minuti, Journal of Ecclesiastical History*
Useful Enemies offers a balanced and nuanced view on how and why
the Westerners perceived the otherness and how, over time,
different authors and different testimonies about the Ottomans
intertwined one with another in a construction of a complicate
'image'... This book also may be seen as an invitation for scholars
to think about how the Ottomans were perceived in Eastern
Europe.
*Ovidiu Cristea, Institute of History 'Nicolae Iorga', European
History Quarterly*
Noel Malcolm's brilliant study ... a wealth of scholarship drawing
on primary sources in many languages ... The book's importance is
thus not only to do with its nuanced account of the varieties of
western European responses to Islam - though this is valuable
enough...
*Rowan Williams, New Statesman*
Learned and fascinating account...
*Sameer Rahim, Prospect Magazine*
[A] richly research and commendably lucid new book ... As with all
Malcolm's work, the power of the underlying scholarship in Useful
Enemies - the archives visited, the languages mastered - is deeply
impressive. Perhaps still more impressive, however, is the way
Malcolm has organised and shaped his material into a subtle,
many-faceted exposition that is always clear and never feels forced
or sophisticated...
*David Womersely, Standpoint*
An indispensable guide to that encounter that combines deep
learning, refined historical judgment, and an elegant authorial
voice. Malcolm describes his book as "a study of Western political
thinking about Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern
period," roughly 1450 to 1750. But the book offers much more than
that.
*James Hankins, New Criterion*
Useful Enemies provides a model for how a book that articulates its
core objective with judicious precision can open a window,
simultaneously, onto a landscape of intellectual
cross-fertilization.
*World History Connected*
... impressive inquiry, which is remarkable for its insight, order
and clarity of exposition... , strongly grounded on philological
and historical inquiry.
*Journal of Ecclesiastical History*
Noel Malcolm displays an overwhelming erudition and vast linguistic
abilities which underline why Useful Enemies will be a mandatory
reference book for any scholar who, from now on, intends to study
the interactions between the Ottomans and the Christian world. This
book also may be seen as an invitation for scholars to think about
how the Ottomans were perceived in Eastern Europe.
*Ovidiu Cristea, European History Quarterly*
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