The battles between Christians and Saracens are the central issue in one of the most popular Italian Renaissance epics, Boiardo's Orlando innamorato (1495).  It is the aim of this paper to analyze the representations of the Saracens in this text and to explore whether the conflicts are to be interpreted as conflicts between Christianity and Islam - considering the great threat from the Turks at  the time when these works were written - or as the results of literary genre-specific topoï without any direct relation to the historical reality, as many scholars have argued. Through the analysis it will be argued that these texts did indeed contribute to the formation of the idea of a European, Christian identity as an opposition to Islamic culture.