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The Turks and Islam in Reformation Germany
Although their role is often neglected in standard historical narratives of the Reformation, the Ottoman Turks were an important concern of many leading thinkers in early modern Germany, including Martin Luther. In the minds of many, the Turks formed a fearsome, crescent-shaped horizon that threatened to break through and overwhelm. Based on an analysis of more than 300 pamphlets and other publications across all genres and including both popular and scholarly writings, this book is the most extensive treatment in English on views of the Turks and Islam in German-speaking lands during this period.
In addition to providing a summary of what was believed about Islam and the Turks in early modern Germany, this book argues that new factors, including increased contact with the Ottomans as well as the specific theological ideas developed during the Protestant Reformation, destabilized traditional paradigms without completely displacing inherited medieval understandings. This book makes important contributions to understanding the role of the Turks in the confessional conflicts of the Reformation and to the broader history of Western views of Islam.
Gregory J. Miller is Professor of History at Malone University.
1 Sixteenth-Century Bestsellers
Once only on the edges of early modern European scholarship and on the margins of maps, the Ottoman Turks have begun to be recognized as an important part of the mental world of sixteenth-century Europeans. As is the case with many kinds of otherness, when one becomes aware of them, the Turks seem to be everywhere in the period. In the first half of the sixteenth century alone, for example, over 600 books, pamphlets, ballads, and broadsheets with the Turks and/or Islam as the main subject were published in Western Europe. Throughout Europe, pamphlets reported one Ottoman victory after another. As far away as England, the ‘Turk’ was a catchword for unexpected attack and invasion. The confluence of this perceived danger with the Renaissance interest in the exotic produced a knowledge hunger that was fueled by the development of new print technology. Although it is tenuous to argue that the quantity of publication on a topic alone demonstrates the level of contemporary importance, it seems clear that sixteenthcentury Europeans were fascinated with the Ottomans. 1
One particularly important subgenre of this Turcica was captivity narratives. For much of Western Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, these narratives were among the few available sources concerning life in the Ottoman Empire behind what might be termed the ‘crescent curtain.’ Apart from Venetian news reports, until the mid-sixteenth century reports from former captives provided the most extensive information. 2 The wide distribution and multiple editions of these writings reflect a perennial human interest in stories about adventure, danger, and the exotic. There seems to have been something particularly intriguing about those that had been subjected to slavery and lived to tell the tale.
The insider information they brought back both intrigued and scandalized their readers. 3 Captivity narratives played a much greater role than simply entertainment, however. They had an enormous impact on the shaping of Western views of Islam. These ex-slaves wrote with authority. They could speak the languages of the Ottoman Empire. They had spent long years inside Turkey, seeing society in a way that, for example, a reporting itinerant traveler could not. 4 Of course, the former captives did not and could not perfectly translate Turkish culture into written Latin. (Although there is much that is of interest in these writings even to historians of the Ottoman Empire.)
The primary value of these writings is what they say about developing attitudes within Europe, and in particular, Western understandings of the Turks and Islam (See Figure 1.1). In Reformation Germany two publications by former slaves of the Turks were particularly important. The Tractatus de moribus Turcarum, (c.1480) [Pamphlet on the Customs of the Turks] attributed to George of Hungary, and Bartholomew Georgijevic’ two-part publication De Turcarum ritu et caeremoniis [On the Rituals and Ceremonies of the Turks] and De afflictione tam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcae tributo viventium Christianorum [On the Afflictions of the Captive Christians Living under the Tribute of the Turks] (both 1544). 5 Both of these publications were reprinted numerous times and in whole or in part were translated into several vernaculars. These two authors are especially important for three reasons.
Taken together, they give significant insight into the type of information about Islam that was widely circulated in Europe during the period. In comparison with material on Islam from earlier in the medieval period, considerably more information, and more accurate information, is known. In addition, because both authors claim to have written out of the experience of Ottoman slavery and escape, these documents can add to our understanding of religious boundaries between Islam and Christianity as imagined and constructed by early modern Europeans. These texts draw boundaries in a myriad of ways, from religious practices to bathroom etiquette and food culture. Finally, although the supposed regional origins and life stories of both former captives are remarkably similar, because they were penned almost seventy years apart, a comparative reading demonstrates considerable diversity in European responses to Islam and points to important developments in Western responses to the Muslim Ottomans from the Late Middle Ages to the early modern period that highlight the important transitional nature of the period. One central focus of this study is the analysis and comparison of these two publications (See Figure 1.2).
Of course, escaped slave reports make up only a fraction of the body of Western literature about Islam and the Turks in early modern Europe. The historical confluence of Ottoman expansion and the development of widespread moveable type printing created an explosion of small booklets and broadsheets about the ‘exotic’ Turks. This production was directly tied to the military conflict with the Ottoman Empire. Some pamphlets on the Turks were published each year, but production soared during periods of more intense military confrontation, especially the 1529 siege of Vienna, the 1532 Ottoman campaign, and the 1542 annexation of Hungary. When the threat increased, general interest in the Turks increased as well. Although nearly every land with a printing industry published “little booklets on the Turks” (in German: Türkenbüchlein) the majority were published in Italy, France, the Low Countries, and especially in Germany. During the first half of the sixteenth century alone, more than 350 pieces of literature specifically on the Turks were published in German-speaking lands.
Very little of the significant body of sixteenth-century Turcica has been translated into English, 6 despite the importance of this genre of literature in early modern Europe. This specific period is not only interesting because of the large number of publications on the Turks. It represents a high point of the Ottoman Empire’s push into Central Europe and, at the same time, a significant event in the intellectual history of Western Europe due to the development of the Protestant Reformation.
From the beginning of Protestantism, understandings of the Turks and evaluations of appropriate responses to them became embroiled in confessional debates. Interest in the Turks was not limited to any genre. All printed genre contain works on the Turks. As has been expertly analyzed by Charlotte Colding Smith, visual images, some proclaiming their basis in eyewitness accounts, were broadcast by means of single-leaf woodcuts and illustrated publications small and large. 7 Secular ballads and spiritual hymns concerning the Turks were printed. Sermons and prayers against the Ottomans were published along with political speeches and Reichstag decisions. Early newspapers (in German: Neue Zeitungen) kept interested people up to date on the latest events. 8 In fact, according to Andrew Pettegree, “by far the greatest stimulus to the growth of the European news industry was the relentless encroachment of the Ottoman Empire.
Organization of the Study This study summarizes the views of Islam and the Turks presented in the great outpouring of literature on the Ottomans produced in German-speaking lands during the first half of the sixteenth century, that is, during the first generation of Protestant Reformers. While some of this literature originated outside of German-speaking lands, vernacular translations brought them into the German milieu and blended with the already significant number of native publications. Germans seemed to have been particularly interested in the Turks, in part due to the Hapsburg-Ottoman rivalry but also because the first generation of German Reformers (especially Martin Luther) were themselves interested in the Turks and Islam. 10 In order to understand these publications, two layers of context need to be established. I begin with a short summary of the intellectual context through a survey of the development of Western attitudes toward Islam and the Turks prior to 1520.
The political context is established through a summary of the engagement between the Ottomans and Europe in Reformation-era Germany. A central contribution of this study is the content analysis of more than 300 publications from German-speaking lands that discuss the Turks and/ or Islam and were printed between 1520 and 1550, that is, between the accession of Sulaiman the Magnificent and publication of the final edition of Theodor Bibliander’s Qur’an. Most of the authors of these publications make no distinction between the ‘Turks’ and Islam and often use the terms as synonyms. However, for reasons of topical analysis, I devote one chapter to descriptions of social, cultural, and military aspects of the Turks in particular. A second chapter surveys understandings of religious aspects of Islam that sometimes were applied to the Muslim world more generally.
There are two questions at the heart of most of these publications: why are the infidel Turks seemingly invincible against Christendom? What is the appropriate Christian response? The chapter ‘Holy Terror’ surveys the answers to the first question found in these pamphlets and the chapter ‘Holy War’ discusses answers to the second. Here, too, the Protestant Reformation, as seen for example both in Martin Luther’s absolute denunciation of the Crusade as a blasphemous confusion of spiritual and temporal, and in various Anabaptist disavowals of all warfare, was a catalyst for new developments that influenced the history of Christian-Islamic relations. I conclude with a more detailed comparison and contrast of the two main escaped slave narratives in the broader context of the Reformation in Germany.
In appendices are found lengthy selections both of George of Hungary and Bartholomew Georgijevic. No modern English translation of either of these influential publications has previously been available. The translations have been made from their printings accompanying the first published Latin Qur’an, Theodor Bibliander’s Machumetis saracenorum principis (1543, second edition 1550). This three-volume equivalent of an ‘encyclopedia of Islam’ is the form in which these pamphlets would have been read by scholars throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 11 Because of their attempt to provide Europeans not only with theological and political guidance concerning the Turks but also because they attempted to portray all aspects of life and culture concerning the Ottoman, George of Hungary and Bartholomew Georgijevic provide the best short summary of the general understandings of Islam and the Turks available to Western Europeans (See Figure 1.3).
Paradigm Shifts Over the last twenty-five years, several studies of the perceptions of the Muslim world in Western Europe have challenged the dominant metanarrative that early modern Europeans had a binary understanding of their relationship with the Islamic world. The most interesting work recently has been done in the area of early modern English dramatic literature. 12 These studies have demonstrated that ‘Islam and the West’ in the early modern period is more complicated than it has been portrayed. Matthew Dimmock and Jonathan Burton demonstrate, for example, how Marlowe’s Tamburlaine continuously violates stereotypes and common lines of division, highlighting the “period’s conditional suspension and activation of anti-Islamic prejudice.” 13
Gerald MacLean describes an “ambiguous representation of the Ottoman Empire” as both a “realm of tyrannous slavery and a space where Britons might do rather well for themselves.” 14 Thus, “attitudes towards peoples and cultures of Muslim North Africa . . . were certainly more complicated, varied, and indeed more self-reflexive than some twentieth century historians would have us believe.” 15 Similar ambiguity is demonstrated by the work of Thomas Burman on the study of the Qur’an in the late medieval and early modern periods. Burman’s research contradicts the common presumption that polemics always trumped philology in Western study of the Qur’an. In fact, he demonstrates that scholars used a variety of reading strategies from derogatory polemic to pure linguistic interest— and sometimes within the work of the same translator. 16 Charlotte Colding Smith’s conclusions on the way that the Turks were represented visually in Germany during the sixteenth century also supports this position. 17
Of course, it is possible to find enough material from the received tradition in early modern European accounts to argue that the understanding of Islam which developed in the medieval west persisted long after the end of the Middle Ages (or indeed even down to the present day). But this obscures the interesting fluidity of early modern Western approaches to Islam and can lead to an inaccurate essentializing—this time not of ‘Islam’ but of western views of Islam. With due respect to the enormous influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism, I argue for what might be termed a ‘post-Said’ understanding of the West’s views of Islam in the early modern period. Said argued that a certain discourse about the Muslim world in the West created a binary of ‘occident’ and ‘orient’ for the express purpose of domination and control, and located the origin of that discourse in the early modern period. 18
In contrast, I argue that despite many shared images and themes, early modern European understandings of Islam did not originate in an attempt to dominate or to justify domination—nor could they in light of Ottoman political and military power. In addition, I argue that there was much more diversity and ambiguity in Western views of Islam than Edward Said recognizes. My study, then, can be seen in part as a continuation of the one made by Margaret Meserve in Empires of Islam concerning how fifteenth-century humanists understood the origins of the Turks. She argues that “there was no one Oriental other” in the fifteenth century, either in geopolitical reality or in the conceptions of Europeans. 19
Likewise, the writings on Islam that form the center of this study do not speak with a single voice or perspective. They reveal to us how knowledge about Islam gets translated, modified, re-used, altered in its purposes, and adjusted to an audience and the demands of authority structures. These publications are often at odds with themselves and self-contradictory. Although most of these authors would not have desired a new view of Islam to develop, the ambivalence of these texts helped to destabilize and create space for new information and new perspectives to break through. This is a complexity of which cursory readings are oblivious. Residual, emergent, traditional, and innovative perspectives all can occur at the same time in a culture, some of which may be more dominant than others. It is important to identify trends, emergences, changes, and especially underlying shifts in the framework of understanding. There is much more going on in early modern understandings of Islam than simple ‘medieval’ disparagement or the seeds of a later orientalism. And the Reformation was a critical factor in these developments.
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