The Country of “Yellow Lord”: Russia in the Context of the Perception of Europe by the Population of Arabic Mediterranean in the Early Modern Time

The evolution of the identification of imaginary communities, including through group oppositions ‘Friend-Foe’, is one of the least studied phenomena of the historical process. The Muslim-Christian look at each other across the Mediterranean provides an extensive field of research in this regard. In recent decades the scientists prefer to talk about the Mediterranean World as a single space that not only divides but connects the Arab-Muslim and Eastern- and Western-European civilizations. This point of view stands up to the still popular binary oppositions as “East vs. West” or “Christian world vs. Muslim world”. The simplicity of such approach considering the humanity to be divided to culturally incompatible and religiously hostile civilizations is proved in particular by numerous connections between the inhabitants of Europe and the Middle East at the early Modern times. Russia has entered into the close cooperation with the Arab world in the 16th — 18th centuries: first through pilgrim-ages and inter-Orthodox contacts, and in the Catherine epoch by organizing the military invasion of the region. The presented article is about how different groups of Arabs, — Muslims and Christians, people of religion and secular rulers, — were perceiving Europe in general and Russia in particular at the early Modern times.