Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq`s letters to his schhol pal Nicholas Michault, ambassador to Portugal, provide a remarkably vived eyewitness account of the Turkish government and military system that threatened Europe during the Renaissance. The Flemish diplomat`s graceful and urbane report of his mission to Buda, and the trek there from Vienna at the command of the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria (King of the Romans, Sovereign of Hungary and Bohemia) is an invaluable source of historical information about contemporary Austro-Hungarian relations - at the same time that it is a compelling travelouge. In all the capitals of Europe, Busbecq`s letters ran through twenty editions in his lifetime. He was at home in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Slav, as well as his Flemish mother tongue. So cosmopolitan is Busbecq that no subtlety of diplomatic behaviour is beyond him; so curious an observer, that no detail of hospitality omitted is beneath his notice. Through his gossipy accounts, as he describes the mysterious janizaries, we experience vicariously the inner recesses of the Muslim world that struck terror in the European heart. His descriptions of the grandiosely rationalized drinking habits of the Turkish hosts, and his casual provision of the fuel for them, reads like a textbook case of codependency and a reminder that it was not only the native Americans who were plied with "fire water." The graceful casualness of Busbecq`s style makes him sound like a newspaper correspondent rather than a successful emissary whose urbanity helped protect Renaissance Europe from threats of invasion.