This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo's (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto's (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo's cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto's crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between Christians and Saracens.