Herodotus, explaining the writing of his History circa 444 BC, commented that he wanted to preserve the rememberance of what men have done. For purposes of this book it is invaluable to consider the writings of the many Western European travelers who provided valuable information about the Middle East and India. Many wrote critically of their experience in those societies; others were more sympathetic. To posit that Western analyses of the Orient are hegemonic in their approach, or always suffer from doctrinaire attitudes, or duplicitously explain Muslim societies and culture in terms of an unchanging Islam is an essentialist argument. If some Westerners had insufficient or inaccurate information, made mistaken generalizations about the realities of Eastern societies, or were prejudiced from a religious perspective, many others sought objective, empirical data and tried to formulate unbiased conclusions about Eastern societies and about the real, understandable fear of Muslim expansion.

A wide variety of people during the centuries wrote about Eastern countries, especially about Turkey and India where at its peak in the seventeenth century the Mughal Empire ruled more than one hundred million people, a number five times larger than in the Ottoman Empire. These people included pilgrims to the Holy Land; travelers and adventurers; diplomats, notably Venetian envoys to Turkey in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; physicians; commercial agents and merchants; artists; Christian missionaries, friars, and French Jesuits who wrote sympathetically of China; former prisoners in Turkey; and historians.