Divided Europe (1500–1700ce)
III. Virtual Islam
1. The Image of the ‘Turk’
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans generally distinguished between Islam, which was an object of disdain and fear, and the ‘Turk’ who was an object of fascination. On the one hand, Ottoman victories were seen as a typical man-ifestation of Islam as a violent and aggressive religion, symbolized by the cruelties perpetrated especially by the elite corps of the Janissaries, and one had to pray for the undoing of this Islam.157On the other hand, the prominent presence of the Ottoman Empire on the European continent in the seventeenth century generated great pop-ular interest in the ‘Turk’ and his customs and religion. Descriptions of Ottoman society were published as early as the late fifteenth century.158By the seventeenth century, however, an increasing stream of travel accounts, diaries and pamphlets with first-hand experiences and observations about Ottoman society appeared in Europe where “the Turks were filling the minds of nobles and peasants, seamen and intellectuals.”159The authors were quite diverse: pilgrims travelling through the Ottoman realm on their way to Jerusalem, slaves who were liberated or had es-caped, religious refugees from Europe who had found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, physicians hired by the Ottoman elite, European merchants and diplomats.160The merchants and diplomats also brought artists in their wake, so that pictorial images were added to the scriptural ones. These stories, in turn, greatly influenced plays, literature, folktales and apocalyptic literature of this period.161And they all reached a wide audience thanks to the newly functioning printing press.
This stream of information, combined with the new mindset of impending En-lightenment that invited the Europeans to exercise self-reflection and self-criticism, gradually transformed the image of the Turk as well as Islam. The Turk inherited from previous centuries the image of the negative or exclusionary Other, such as the fierce Saracen, the conquering Turk or the licentious Muslim, but also acquired the image of the positive Other, such as the tolerant Turk or the ally against a common enemy. The Turk was viewed negatively as someone exercising arbitrary power and unbridled lust and who disliked alcohol, but also positively as a person of honesty, sobriety, religious tolerance, with an administration of “swift, expeditious, inexpen-sive” justice.162
The European curiosity about the Turk stood in stark contrast to the near in-difference of the Ottoman towards the European Christian. Apart from the keen awareness of the Porte of the religious struggles in sixteenth century Europe of which the Sultan tried to make political use,163Ottoman interest in European customs or affairs was almost non-existent until the nineteenth century.
2. Dealing with the ‘Turk’
While there was popular interest among Europeans in the Turk out of sheer curios-ity and fascination, the European Christian states had great interest in the Ottoman Empire for pragmatic reasons like political alliances and commercial treaties. From 1500ce onwards, the Ottoman Empire became a power like any other European power. Still, the ‘Turk’ remained an outsider, regardless of how much the European Christian nations were engaged in internal bloody wars – especially the devastating religious Thirty Years War (1618–1648ce) – and regardless of all the diplomatic and commercial overtures these nations made towards the Ottoman Empire. The Eu-ropean nations might be practising a considerable degree of Realpolitik as regards the Ottoman Empire, but in their diplomatic exchanges among each other – even with their bitter arch enemies – they maintained the jargon of a united Christian commonwealth, admitting that their diplomacy with the infidel Turk was actually inappropriate.164
The outsider’s position of the Ottomans in the international European setting became particularly apparent with the Reformation and the religious conflicts and wars that followed in Europe. The debates on how to respond to the encroach-ing Ottoman military onslaught focused mainly on the infidel character of the Ottomans, so that arguments were of a theological nature. The Catholics gener-ally called for a general crusade against the Ottomans (the crusade being the term for any war against non-Christians, not unlike the jihadas called for by the Ot-tomans when fighting non-Muslims). The Protestants, on the other hand, were willing to lend their support only to a defensive war. There were of course prag-matic reasons for this position (the Roman Church was suspected of calling for a crusade merely to reassert its authority), as well as political reasons (holding back support might press the Catholic rulers to give in to Protestant demands).165But the Protestants also raised various objections of a theological nature against par-ticipating in fighting the Ottomans. For one, the Protestants held a different con-cept of the notion of a just war. Such war could only be waged by secular
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cials and rulers in defence of the people and the land entrusted to them, not as an extension of their religious convictions. From this perspective, fighting the Ot-tomans might be justified, but not as a crusade.166Another argument was that the Turk might be fought as an aggressor, but not for the mere fact of being a Mus-lim, since all people, regardless of their religious differences, belonged to the same
‘spiritual church’ (geistliche kirche) from where they, ideally, should reach the true faith of Christianity; the Turk was therefore a ‘potential brother’ and not an in-fidel enemy. Finally, there were Protestants who saw the Ottoman onslaught as a punishment from God that had to be suffered as penitence; the more radical el-ements among the Protestants went even further and saw the conquests by the Ottomans either as the fulfilment of the Apocalypse and the coming of Judgment Day, or as a means of converting the Muslims once they had occupied all of Eu-rope.167
Not all Protestants were so reluctant to withstand the Turk. There were also voices calling for Christian unity against the Turkish peril. Especially in England, authors and clergy called upon the Anglican faithful to stand shoulder to shoul-der with the Catholics to withstand the Turkish onslaught.168But regardless of what argument was favoured, none of these arguments would have been made if the Ot-toman Empire had been a Christian nation. The role that religion played in ordering societies by creating the dichotomy of us versus them and insider versus outsider also applied to the international arena: the ‘Turk’ was marked as an outsider by the mere fact of not being a Christian, and all additional stories and descriptions of the
‘Turk’ merely emphasized this difference. Even though so much more knowledge was available on Ottoman society and customs, the ‘Turk’ was set to follow the same fate as the Saracen and Muslim of being the European Other.
3. Islam: ‘Better Turkish than Papish’
Knowledge of the religious tenets of Islam further increased in the seventeenth cen-tury with the establishment at various European universities of chairs dedicated to the study of Arabic and Islam. However, the attitude towards this religion remained polemic: it needed to be studied properly, but only with the purpose of proving it wrong and wicked. Arabic was not considered the key to a civilization, but the lan-guage needed to read Islamic scripture. While this was the situation in academic circles, the case of Islam was also taken up by religious intellectuals in the disputes between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Protestants in general looked favourably on the Ottoman relative tolerance to-wards their non-Muslim subjects as opposed to the Protestants’ treatment at the hands of the Catholics. It did not go unnoticed that many religious refugees from Catholic Europe found shelter in the Ottoman Empire, like the Jews from Spain, Huguenots from France and some Anglicans and Quakers from England. From this observation stemmed the revolutionary slogan ‘better Turkish than Papish’ (Liever Turks dan paaps, meaning: better Muslim than Catholic) used by the Dutch (Calvin-ist) opposition against Spanish (Catholic) rule. But this battle cry had little to do with Islam itself, as one of the first professors of Arabic at Leiden University expounded in a lengthy lecture presented in 1648 ce: Islam itself was an evil heresy, but if ever offered the choice between Turkish and Catholic rule, a Protestant would prefer the first since the Turk allowed Protestants religious freedom, whereas the Catholic Church did not.169
Protestants detected quite some similarities with ‘the Turk’ and his religion.
Were they not also against icons, clerical hierarchy, celibacy, alcohol and swearing and excessive religious architecture?170Indeed, the successes of the Ottoman army, as opposed to those of European armies, were explained by the prohibition of alco-hol and the strict discipline in Ottoman ranks. The Ottomans were aware of these sentiments in northern Europe, and used them to their own political advantage, as shown in the letter from sultan Suleyman addressed to the ‘Lutheran princes in the Low Countries’ shortly after 1552ce, offering them military help against the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, and writing that he saw them as standing close to him since they did not worship idols, believed in one God and fought against the Pope and Emperor.171Not much later, in 1574ce, sultan Murad III wrote an open letter in a sim-ilar vein to the ‘Members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain,’ which is worth quoting: “[a]s you, for your part, do not worship idols, you have banished the idols and portraits and bells from churches, and declared your faith by stating that God Almighty is one and Holy Jesus is His Prophet and Servant, and now, with heart and soul, are seeking and desirous of the true faith; but the faithless one they call Papa [Pope – MB] does not recognize his Creator as One, ascribing divinity to Holy Jesus (upon him be peace!), and worshiping idols and pictures which he has made with his own hands, thus casting doubt upon the oneness of God and instigating how many servants to that path of error.”172Of course, this religious overture to the Dutch merely served the Ottoman goal of forging alliances with these European countries against the common enemy, Spain.
Not all Protestants went so far as to prefer the Ottomans over Catholics. And those who did definitely did not go as far as the sultans to equate Islam with their
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protestant versions of Christianity. Islam remained to them an aberration or evil, and it was more common among Protestants to equate Islam with Catholicism, declaring them equally bad. For instance, a wall painting in the Gothem church on the Swedish island of Gotland depicts St Christopher carrying Jesus as a child safely across the wa-ter with, on either side, the Pope and Muhammad (with distinct Ottoman features) drowning, symbolizing their heresy and unbelief.173This imagery was also voiced by Martin Luther in whose Christian cosmology the Turks represented ‘the Devil’ who had come as ‘the scourge of God’ to punish the Christians for their sins, whereas the Pope and his clergy represented the ‘Anti-Christ’ because of their burning and perse-cution of “the innocent, the pious, the orthodox.”174Still, he thought the Pope worse than the Turk, because the latter was at least tolerant towards other faiths.175
But even such a staunch theologian as Luther was influenced by the political realities of his time. In 1518 ce he wrote in hisExplanation of the Ninety-five Theses that the Turk should not be fought since he represented God’s punishment for the sins of European Christians, and this punishment should not be resisted but endured as a purification of these sins: “to fight against the Turk is the same thing as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod”. But several years later, in 1529ce, when the Ottomans were besieging Vienna for the first time, Luther strongly favoured fighting the Turk, albeit on “two fronts”: one by penance and prayer, for in fighting “servants of the Devil” one first needs to beat the Devil before one can beat his servants; the other front was by war. This war against the Turk, however, should be a secular, not a holy war, because it was to be fought on the prince’s command in his capacity as defender of his land and as protector of “our body and earthly life”, and not in his capacity as protector of the Church.176But whatever Luther’s thoughts on the role of ‘the Turk’, he had no sympathy whatsoever for Islam as a religion because, he said, it taught violence, deceit and disregard for marriage, denied Christ as a son of God, and had a prophet who had written “a foul and shameful book” full of lies.177 One might argue that equating Islam with Catholicism in terms of its evilness effectively elevated Islam from the shadowy world of heathendom to the level of a despised, but nevertheless Christian religion like Catholicism. This is twenty-first century logic, however, because the recognition of a plurality of equally valid re-ligions was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not part of the European mind-set. Only very few ventured actually to compare Islam and Christianity on an equal footing as religions. The French jurist and political philosopher Jean Bodin178 (1530–1596ce) in hisColloquium heptaplomeres(‘Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime’) described a fictional discussion among a philosopher of natural law, a Calvinist, a Muslim, a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran, a Jew, and a sceptic, ending with
a call for mutual tolerance. Similarly, Guillaume Postel in hisRepublique des Turcs (1560ce) argued that Muslims, Jews and Christians held many beliefs in common.
Later, Jean de Savigny in hisDiscours sur les choses torques(1606 ce) would go even fur-ther by stating that Turks are “for the most part, half-Christians and possibly closer to true Christianity than many among us”.179What is interesting here is not so much the favourable attitude towards Islam, but the fact that Islam was seen as a religion comparable to that of Christianity, which was a break with the centuries-old theo-logical position that held Christianity as the only religious truth, condemning all other claims to similar truths as falsehoods and paganisms. This development was to continue but only became generally accepted in the late nineteenth century.