This paper examines the imagery that several English and Scots travelers used to describe the eastern Adriatic region known in the Renaissance as Illyria. In Illyria, ethnic and religious identities of diverse native peoples were continually re-defined due to the military, economic, and cultural interventions of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the Venetian Republic, and other foreign powers. The travelers are particularly interested in the Illyrians’ loss of lives and property through material destruction in warfare and the strategic impoverishment of Illyrian lands enabled by the restrictive policies of foreign rulers. These types of deprivation dovetail with the loss of bodily boundaries in images of the Illyrians’ sexual impropriety and physical deformations that sometimes escalate into the bestial and the monstrous. While such imagery was common among visitors from the British Isles particularly in “exotic” parts of the world, I am interested in the role that the widely recognized plasticity of the Illyrian geographic, political, and other boundaries may have played in their remarks, and particularly the status of the Illyrians as slaves or allies to the Turks, the Venetians, and the Habsburgs.

—Lea Puljcan Juric, Independent Scholar