The half-popular compositions traditionally referred to as broadside ballads are a specific type of source. Some of them reflect Biblical, legendary and historical events in Egypt and the Near East. Although the factual importance of such ballads in not great, they have some informative value, because their texts mirror the attitudes and opinions of the lower social classes, in this case clearly influenced by the antithesis of Christianity and Islam, or also Judaism. They show that the authors of broadside ballads kept alive deep-rooted stereotypes, mainly the stereotype of Turks as pagans and tyrants. and Michal Klacek.
By the end of spring 1468, within just a few months of one another, the anti-Ottoman crusade had suffered two grievous losses, both unavoidable or, at least, expected. In mid-January, Skanderbeg passed away. With the exception of a couple of fortresses and the Venetian possessions, Albania came under Ottoman rule. The difficult Hungarian-Ottoman negotiations of February-April 1468 led to the conclusion of a two-year truce between King Matthias Corvinus and Sultan Mehmed II (twice prolonged, in 1470 and in 1472). John Hunyadi’s soon left on his other crusade, against the heretic king of Bohemia, George Podiebrad, whom he accused, like his fellow crusader leaguer of 1463, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, of also conspiring with the Turk. The paper explores - based on archival material - the Hungarian and Wallachian background that led to this change in the policy of Matthias Corvinus, who had been prepared to attack the Turks, not the realm of Bohemia, in mid-1467. and Alexandru Simon.
Article concentrates mainly on the period before the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, when the negative stereotype of the Turk as an ancestral enemy had not yet been so firmly ingrained as today. I am operating on the assumption that this stereotype, today presented as at least 900 years old and vigorously supported by Armenian propaganda, dates in reality from the early 20th century, probably originally concerning the category of Muslims in general and later the ethnic category of Kurds. I am looking for support for my hypothesis about the originally non-ethnically motivated image of the Muslim or of the economically defined category of the Kurd (nomad) with respect to the perception of Armenian authors in the texts of Armenian chronicles from the 16th till 18th centuries from the region of Van. Armenians there constituted the most populous minority in the Ottoman Empire while living in an extremely multicultural environment. The chronicles show a great variety of attitudes towards the category of Muslims and Heretics generally depending on the author, and they also provide an interesting anthropological excursion into the life of the local population.