51 Robyn D. Radway (Princeton University, USA) Misunderstanding Ottoman Europe: The Material Culture of the Borderlands in Renaissance Depictions of the Ottoman World \ e third panel of Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Younger’s Moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz (Customs and Fashions of the Turks, 1553) (Fig. 1 and 2) includes a turbaned figure carrying a curved trapezoidal shield sprouting feathers. 1 Worn across his back and partly in shadow, the surface decoration consists of a thick border, a winged eagle foot with a protruding row of quills down the centre, and two circular bolts and a star to fasten the leather handles on the other side. Melchior Lorck’s (1526/1527 – aſter 1583) sixteenth-century woodcuts for his Turkish Publication includes four similarly feathered shields. 2 Yet the type of wooden shield these figures carry is very different from the classic Ottoman kalkan, which was a convex disc made of metal or woven reeds and painted silks. e angled shield is a hussar targe, oſten labelled as a ‘Hungarian type’ by curators. Composed of a convex piece of wood lined with leather, then gessoed and painted, the shield enables full mobility of the right hand while providing protection of the leſt side and back through the shoulders. While the tech- nique and tradition is clearly central European, 3 in the sixteenth century, this type of shield, oſten with feathers attached, appears in countless Northern European images of Ottomans. Years ago, Pierre Terjanian, now director of the Department of Arms and Armour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asked me one simple question: ‘Were these shields Hungarian or Ottoman?’ I spent months coming up with an answer I found deeply unsatisfying: ‘both’. 1 ere are several copies of this work preserved in its entirety in museum collections, among others in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam RP-P-OB-2304D; the Bibliothéque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, S II 32364; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 28.85.1-.7a, b. 2 See a full facsimile in Fischer, Bencard and Rasmussen 2009. 3 For an in-depth discussion of this, see the last chapter of Kovács 2010.