The battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571) signified an important victory for ChristianEurope against the Ottoman Empire. In the Spanish area, six poets (re)shaped the navalbattle as the central theme of their epic poems. The focus of this paper will be on the firstepic poem that was published after Lepanto: the Austrias Carmen of the former blackslave Juan Latino (1518-1594/7). In my analysis of Latino's representation of the Ottomanadmiral Ali Pasha I will argue that the author's use of the classical tradition leads toan ambiguous portrait of the cultural Other.
