The paper analyses the construction of the Turks in works of collective knowledge from the 15th to the 17th centuries. It takes into account bilingual Latin-German as well as German-language dictionaries. It asks whether and, if so, how they participate in a specific way in a discourse of enmity that developed in the course of the Ottoman expansion from the 15th century onwards. The works of collective knowledge participate in three historical-semantic fields: political, socio-cultural and religious semantics, whose key terms are tyranny, barbarism and unbelief, or false faith respectively. In their combination, they unfold a complete invective image of the Turks. By means of the concept of affordance, we profile the specific performance of lexicographical works in processes of enmity and othering.