Conflict, News, and History

Abstract

The years of the Ottoman-Hapsburg ‘Long War’ of 1593–1606 brought an unprecedented flood of English publishing on the Turks.¹ A substantial portion of this material either directly describes, or explicitly refers to, the events of this conflict. For example, of the fifty-four items on the topic of the Turks recorded in the years 1591 to 1610 in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (i.e., the Stationers’ Register, a forerunner of copyright where printers and booksellers paid to record their exclusive right to produce copies of a work as a form of trade protection), twenty-two relate either directly to the Long War, the state of Hungary or Ottoman-Habsburg conflict, while numerous others allude to contemporary events.² However, while the surge in English writing on the Turks in these decades was, as we shall see, largely due to the scale, importance, and proximity of these events, this escalation was also affected to some extent by a steady increase in the volume of printing in England across the late-sixteenth century, as well as developments in pamphlet news as a print genre.³ This chapter focuses primarily upon news and history, two categories of material that were particularly prominent amongst print responses to the Long War. The central theme is how continental material was transmitted into England, but also how it was received and reworked within distinctly English contexts, specifically the print market for news, and the patronage relationships depended on by many scholars, and how these production and print contexts shaped this material.