© Borja Franco LLOPIS et al., 2026 | DOI:10.1163/9789004740785_012 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Chapter 10 Images of Islam in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Borja Franco Llopis, Laura Stagno, Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Giuseppe Capriotti, and Naz Defne Kut The representation of the Muslim other in European visual culture is a recurring historiographical theme.1 Historians, artists, travellers, and writers created myths and stereotypes that persist even today, which have been super- imposed upon our social outlook and prevent us from developing a critical understanding of the significance of this Islamic legacy in different periods considering the primary sources beyond the aforementioned stereotypes.2 The artistic and literary production of the early modern period has all too frequently been analysed from preconceived historiographical perspectives, which has resulted in cultural artefacts being subjected to a fragmentary anal- ysis, or shoehorned into contemporary categories where they do not belong. Some such historical studies insist on framing the enemy as a counter-figure to the good Christian, resulting in a simplistic binary of good versus evil. Given the limitations of this perspective as an interpretative tool, many questions are left unanswered. Two problems are particularly worthy of note. First, tra- ditional studies focused on specific artworks with a narrow geographical and chronological scope, and this hinders a longue durée view. In addition, this approach adheres to a direct cause-and-effect relationship which fails to con- sider that many of the ideas represented in these artefacts developed over the course of centuries of conflict and formed part of a dense network of meanings 1 Part of this article has been written under the frames of the Research Project CIAICO/2023/266. El Mediterráneo de la edad moderna (ss. XVI–XVIII) entre cristiandad e islam. PI: Luis F. Bernabé Pons. 2 For a first bibliographical and methodological state of art of this issue see: Laura Stagno and Borja Franco Llopis, “New Methodologies for Old Subjects: A Brief Review of the Scholarly Literature on Lepanto and Otherness in Iberia”, in Lepanto and Beyond: Encounters between Christians and Muslims, eds. Laura Stagno and Borja Franco Llopis (Leuven, 2021), pp. 17–66. For the Iberian case see, among others, Borja Franco Llopis and Francisco Javier Moreno Díaz del Campo, Pintando al converso: la imagen del morisco en la peninsula ibérica (1492–1614) (Madrid, 2019) and Antonio Urquízar-Herrera, Admiration and Awe: Morisco Buildings and Identity Negotiations in Early Modern Spanish Historiography (Oxford, 2017).