In this paper I explore the roles of love and desire in fourteenth and fifteenth century narratives of conquest and conversion and compare them to their roles in lyric courtesan poetry of the same period. I aim to advance the premise that desire represented a central element in explaining love as a driving force of victory over the infidel by renowned warriors (ghazis) as depicted in frontier narratives, as much as it was the driving force of spiritual victory in contemporary lyric and mystical poetry. I focus on different instances of stories of conquest and victory pertaining to three epic narratives, namely, Saltukname, Battalname and the Book of Dede Korkut. These epic cycles shared and reproduced stories in which the decisive element of victory or defeat was the love of a woman (wife, beloved, maiden) for the warrior. Expressed as an incontrollable feeling of union, love was triggered by desire and turned into impetus and action, finally resulting in measures (help, betrayal, sacrifice) necessary for victory and success. The emotional responses of female characters to the physical beauty, gallantry, and chivalric values possessed by the heroes of these stories were embedded in a larger moral and ethical system. It is my contention that in these narratives the capacity for desire and love of the characters were thought to be necessary qualities in the hero/warrior: this perception was intrinsic to cultural understandings of morality, justice and good. The effects of beauty, love and desire have been studied for other literary products (mainly poetry) contemporary to the epic cycles analyzed here, but they have been overlooked in narratives of conquest and conversion. The cultural context of the production and reproduction of epic literature is the same as that of poetry, in which love and desire are considered to be central elements for understanding rulership, morality and religiosity. It is my contention that love and desire as depicted in the poems of lyric poets contemporary to the writing of these epic cycles, such as Sheyhi, Ahmet Pasha, and Necati, will help us to understand better the cultural milieu in which these stories were read, reproduced and rendered meaningful.