Introduction
In the early modern era, religion was an essential part of decision-making. With the dominance of the Roman Empire during the time, European nations were seeking expansion, such as imperial, political, economic, and, most significantly, cultural change, primarily in religion. Most Europeans were Christian, although Jewish and Muslim beliefs had begun to sprout in the region(Baraz, 2010). Therefore, the Catholic Church was a prominent political and cultural force in the 14th and 15th centuries, followed by the Protestants.
However, the emergence of the Muslim religion during the stretch got a mixed reception from the Catholic Church and Protestants. Attempts at mending fences had become rare since the early modern period, when relations began deteriorating. Catholics are often compared to Muslims of the Shia sect, and vice versa, because of the parallels and discrepancies in their beliefs and practices. This paper examines Muslim reception in Europe during the early modern period.
Hostile Reception of the Muslims in Europe
Christians during the period felt that the Ottoman Empire posed the most significant external threat to Christian control in Europe after the Reconquista of Spain in 1492. Accordingly, many Western academics assume that Christians in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw Muslims primarily in a negative light. For that reason, Europe was warned of the impending threat of Ottoman conquest by the Papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Protestant thinkers, including John Calvin and Martin Luther. However, it wasn’t until after the Siege of Vienna in 1529 that Luther warned about this danger (Housley, 2012). During the period of Ottoman dominance, when it posed no military threat to Protestant governments, Christian theologians were generally sympathetic toward Muslims and their religious devotion.
Not only that, but the discourse within the Ottomans was notably pro-Protestant. The Catholic Church was seen as an enemy by both Protestants and Muslims. This resulted from the rhetorical rapprochement that political and economic accords, which benefited Christian Europeans and Ottoman Muslims, became conceivable (Dimmock et al., 2005, p. 15).
Besides, the realization that England was quitting Catholic beliefs in the 1580s made Queen Elizabeth I commit her efforts to forge such a connection with Sultan Murad III. This move became possible because they shared a common goal of countering the influence of the Catholic Habsburgs in Europe (Baraz, 2010). Thus, Ottomans and the English sovereigns gained a political and commercial partnership despite the predominant anti-Islamic ideology of the protestants in the 15th century. This was primarily due to England’s Protestant identity, commonalities, and religiously general trade practices with the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
Although Martin Luther’s views on Islam were relatively mild compared to his assertive statement against Catholicism (and later Judaism), the pamphlet On War against the Turk, written in 1528, urged the German people to resist the Ottoman invasion of Europe. This utterance resulted from the impending catastrophic Siege of Vienna, linked to Ottoman rule. While preaching on Christian atonement and justification, he found the doctrines of Islam to be exceedingly disgusting and sinful. As a result, he dismissed the Qur’an as devoid of any divine truth. For Luther, the only way to illustrate how the Catholic Church and Protestants understood the Qur’an as an appropriation of prophecy and apostolic teaching was to let the text “speak for itself”(Housley, 2012).
His expertise came from Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s medieval polemicist translation of the Qur’an, a standard performance on the subject in question in Europe at the time. Furthermore, Luther submitted a letter to the city council of Basle in 1542 to lift the prohibition on Theodore Bibliander’s Latin translation of the Qur’an. Later, Bibliander’s translation was published in 1543 with a preface written by Martin Luther, mainly due to his letter. By reading the Quran in a more reliable translation, Luther could see that some of Riccoldo’s criticisms were incomplete, but he still agreed with almost all of them.
Mehmed the Conqueror led the Ottomans to victory at the Battle of Constantinople in 1453. His son, Suleiman the Magnificent, consolidated Ottoman power in the Middle East and pushed it into Central Europe (Dimmock et al., 2005, p. 12). This led to open hostilities between the Habsburg Empire, catholic allies, and the Ottoman Empire, which advocated for the spread of the Muslim religion. At the same time, the Protestant Reformation was underway across most of northern and central Europe, causing challenges to the authority of the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope. When faced with the common enemy of the Habsburgs, the Protestants began to consider theological, commercial, and military rapprochement and cooperation with the Muslim world.
Islam was perceived as closer to Protestantism in forbidding representations from worship locations, not recognizing marriage as a sacrament, and opposing monastic orders. These perceptions all apply to Protestantism and Islam, respectively, during the growth of the Reformation. The religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in a fractured Europe paved the way for Islam to be used as a battleground.
The Christian inferiority to the pagan virtue was a common motif in the education of the Renaissance humanists, who turned total disgrace into a light business (Womack, 2022, p. 122). Early modern Europe saw a lot of Christian-on-Christian warfare. Thus, the Muslims were held up as more outstanding examples of cohesive purpose and religious allegiance.
Ottoman and Protestant Reformation
As the Ottoman Empire expanded into the Balkans in the early 16th century, it came into contact with Calvinist Protestants in Hungary and Transylvania (Calvin, 2005). Since they shared an enemy in the Austrian Papacy and its Roman Catholic allies, they frequently spoke to learn more about their religious beliefs and the possibilities of forming a trade or military alliance. Despite their Christological differences, early Protestants and Turks regarded one another as more similar to their traditions than to Catholicism. They thus fostered a spirit of mutual tolerance and understanding (Hankins, 2019).
Besides, the early Protestant churches relied on the Ottoman Empire’s help to survive difficult times. When Luther saw the Ottomans as the “rod of God’s anger against Europe’s sins,” he saw them as allies in his fight against the pope. King Charles V was compelled by Ottoman allegiances and the threat of Ottoman expansion in Eastern Europe to sign the Tranquility of Nuremberg (Southern, 1980). The treaty involved Protestant princes accepting the Peace of Passau and agreeing to the Peace of Augsburg, thereby establishing the organizational Protestant Reformation in Germany and ending military threats to its existence.
Notably, significant paradigm developments in European religious discourse were made by the sixteenth century. Christianity wasn’t one catholic faith anymore. Denominations from Lutherans to Anabaptists sprouted across the continent, each proclaiming their own religion to be the most authentic. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Muslims’ slow but steady advance proceeded; they had already conquered Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula and were closing in on Italy. After the Ottoman assault on neighboring Vienna in 1529, Protestant Reformation leaders Martin Luther and John Calvin expressed a significant hatred for Islam in their theological disputations(Jerkins, 2012, p. 5).
According to Christianity, Muhammad was the “Son of the Devil” and “second in wickedness to the Pope” (McDermott, 2004, p. 1197). They even made fun of Muhammad by implying that he had usurped and tainted the stories of the New Testament. Christ has ascended into heaven; Muhammad says in his book that God must speak to me by an angel (Womack, 2022, p. 133). As espoused by the Protestants, the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura holds that one should use the Christian Bible as the standard by which all other moral texts are evaluated. Protestants used scripture to try to cast aspersions on Muhammad’s character.
For instance, Luther quoted Daniel 8:25: “By his trickery he makes falsehood prosper under his hand” (Housley, 2012, p. 6) to blame Muhammad’s trickery for Islam’s seeming triumph. This not only provides insight into Muhammad’s personality but also into the meteoric rise of Islam. As the sale of indulgences had done for Catholics, Luther believed that Muhammad was a false prophet who could lead Protestant Christians astray. The Protestants knew education was the best defense against such trickery(Luther & Porter, 2007, p. 2345). The Protestant Reformation was predicated on the idea that Christians could read the Bible for themselves if available in the vernacular.
Christian leaders, especially the Protestants, negated the whole Muslim ideology in their locality. They believed that the emergence of the Ottoman Empire during the period was a trick to trap Christians into an evil cult. Consequently, Christians who “fell for Muhammad’s tricks” and converted to Islam are called Muslims. John Calvin thus singled out Muhammad as the sole scapegoat for Islam’s status as a false religion that condemns believers to hell. This filth is the source of every current social divide.
According to Calvin (2005, II: 6:4), Muhammad is responsible for the deception of the individuals who, in Calvin’s opinion, belong to Christ through Islam and all succeeding cults. Because of Muhammad’s “deceitfulness,” which seems to have “bewitched” Muslims to serve him rather than Christ (Calvin, 2005, II: 6:4), Islam is in its current state of perdition. The act of a Protestant state to side with the Ottomans on religious grounds in the 1530s, when such vehement criticism was rampant, appeared inconceivable (Gürkan, 2013, para. 17).
Conclusion
In conclusion, between the spell, the 15th and 16th centuries were greatly influenced by religious activities, with Christianity dominating most parts of the world. Therefore, every denomination sought to gain power over others, leading to the Reformation at some point. However, everything changed in the religious spectrum with the emergence of the Muslim religion under the advocacy of the Ottoman Empire.
The Muslim faith received a cold reception from both the Catholics and Protestants, who felt threatened by a religion that they felt was a false cult imposed on the people. However, the Protestants agreed with the Muslim religion on some issues. They shared a commonality against the Catholics, especially in their dominance of using their powers to alter political decisions globally.
Works Cited
Baraz, Yevgeniya. 2010. “The Position of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire.” Inquiries Journal. Inquiries Journal. Web.
Calvin, John. 2005. “Institutes of the Christian Religion.” II: 6:4. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Web.
Dimmock, Matthew. 2005. Introduction. In New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England, 16-19, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Gürkan, Emrah Safa. 2013. “Christian Allies of the Ottoman Empire.” Google Books. Institut für Europäische Geschichte. Web.
Hankins, James. 2019. “Eastern Threat in Western Thought by James Hankins.” The New Criterion. Web.
Housley, Norman. 2012. “Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505.” Research Gates, 34–35. Web.
Jerkins, Jae. 2012. “Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination: Religious and Political Rhetoric of English Protestant– Ottoman Relations (1528-1588).” Eras 13 (2): 2–34. Web.
McDermott, Gerald R. The Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 4 (2004): 1197–99. Web.
Southern, R. W. 1980. Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Womack, Deanna Ferree. 2022. “Protestant Portrayals of Islam: From the Reformation to Modern Missions.” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 76 (2): 140–55. Web.