‘The Apocalypse’ was the first of Dürer’s challenging book publications. Using the revelations of Saint John the Evangelist, he designed fifteen full-page woodcuts, each bearing the German or Latin text on the reverse. The first illustration shows Saint John’s martyrdom which is not described in the New Testament but in the ‘Legenda aurea’ (Golden Legend), a late-medieval collection of the lives of the saints. John was boiled in oil for refusing to worship pagan gods under the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, who is shown here in the costume of a Turkish sultan. This disguise, as well as the northern cityscape in the background, reflects the actual threat Christian Europe faced from the Ottoman Empire around 1500.