CHAPTER 8
The Christians, first those of the East, then those of the West, had rejected Islam from its first appearance and continued to do so throughout the Middle Ages. Initially, they even denied it the status of religion, seeing it only as a heresy or a form of paganism or idolatry. When they had to consider Islam a religion, they could only denounce it, given that Christianity alone was true. In addition to being false, Islam was also a mortal danger: as a universal religion, it claimed to be superior to Christianity and intended to take its place. It was thus imperative to stand up to Islam and combat it by every means. The very survival of Christianity was at stake, and therefore humanity’s salvation. Deep- seated hostility and ignorance combined in the Middle Ages to bring forth and spread the most negative and pejorative image of that religion and of the person of its Prophet.
Ideological Baggage
The same aversion and the same prejudices predominated in Christian minds during the modern age as well. Theologians themselves were not generally better informed, or more nuanced in their criticisms, or more sophisticated in their arguments than their medieval predecessors. In fact, they did not refrain from printing old polemical treatises such as that of the late thirteenth- century Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce titled Contra sectam mahumeticam, published in France for the first time in 1509. Works such as the Debate between the Christian and the Saracen by the Burgundian Jean Germain (d. 1460) or the treatise composed by the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples against the religion of the “enemies of Christ’s name,” are evidence of that. The treatise in dialogue form by the Carthusian Denys Ryckel, titled Against the Qur’an, was published for the first time in 1533. The tone of that publication is apparent in its dedication to Ferdinand of Habsburg, who was fighting the Ottomans at the time. Among the major publishing ventures antagonistic to Islam during that time period, a place must also be made for that of a Zurich theologian, Theodor Buchmann, known by the pseudonym “Bibliander.” In Basel, through the famous Oporinus Press, he published a set of texts on Islam under the title: Life of Muhammad, Prince of the Saracens and the Whole Doctrine Known as the Law of the Ishmaelites and the Qur’an. The book reprinted the twelfth- century Latin translation of the Qur’an by Robert of Ketton, complemented by the other translations commissioned by the twelfth- century abbot Peter the Venerable, an Apology written by Bibliander himself, a prefatory note by Martin Luther, and texts by Riccoldo da Montecroce and Nicholas of Cusa. As a compendium of relevant documents (of which Guillaume Postel would make very personal use), that Protestant venture displayed a new interest in documentation at its very heart. But the tone was still unconditional rejection and merciless combat.
Another example of antagonistic literature, this time Catholic in origin, appeared in 1589 within the context of the Wars of Religion. Written by the Celestine father Pierre Crespet, it was titled Instructions in the Christian Faith against the Impostures of the Muhammadan Qur’an of the Great Sultan of Turkey. That commentary, which accompanied the French translation of the letter from Pius II to Mehmed II, was composed by a fierce partisan of the Holy League. It is an apologia for the Christian religion and an incendiary refutation of the Qur’an, which, in accordance with tradition, is assimilated to a set of superstitions and impostures.1 Once the issue at hand was to establish the falseness of that religion and the truth of Christianity, the same polemical arguments against Islam that had been made by medieval theology found their place even in Pascal’s Pensées. All the old gossip about the person and life of the Prophet was still present in 1697, in The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d, by an English clergyman named Humphrey Prideaux.2
The Sacralization of Battle
Other, very different views of Islam would appear during the period, but medieval discourse continued to serve as the backdrop.
The term “Saracen,” which was still current in Jean Froissart’s writings, and the other medieval terms faded away. It was now generally the term “Turk” in the various European languages that designated the Muslim. “To become a Turk,” for example, became the ordinary expression for the act of converting to Islam.
The modern age began with the idea that the peril was greater than ever, since Europe, which had become a refuge for Christianity, by both the failure of the Crusades and the success of the reconquista, was in turn threatened at its very core by the Ottoman advance. If Islam was unacceptable in itself, Islam in Europe was doubly so, even though the divisions and compromises of the Christian princes had been of no little help in establishing it there. Particularly eloquent expressions of the anomaly of the situation can be found in many writings by one of the most clear-sighted observers of the mid- fifteenth century, Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who would become pope in 1458 under the name Pius II. He declared, for example: “In the past, wounds were inflicted on us in Asia and Africa, that is, in foreign countries. But now we are struck in Europe, our fatherland, our homeland.”3 In 1463, ten years after the taking of Constantinople, the same author declared before the cardinals of the Curia: “The necessary war against the Turks is imminent, and if we do not take up arms and meet the enemy head on, our religion is done for.”4
Naturally, the reaction to the Turkish advance took the form of a Crusade, as that institution had developed in the Middle Ages: not just any expedition but a war decreed by the pope, involving a vow from participants and justifying the collection of tithes on the clergy’s property, for example. Only the objective had to be adjusted somewhat: the liberation of the Holy Land was still the order of the day, but the defense of Constantinople and eastern Europe was becoming the main priority. In the early days of the Ottoman conquest, three neo- Crusades of that type had been set up in turn, with more or less success mobilizing Christian knights: the Crusade of Gallipoli in 1366; of Nikopolis in 1396; and of Varna in 1444. Apart from the difficulty in mobilizing the Christian princes, the last two of these were such resounding defeats, and the Turkish military superiority over the Crusader armies that had ventured into southeastern Europe became so obvious, that no further undertakings of that kind would be attempted.
Another obstacle to the organization of formal Crusades, even as the threat to Constantinople was becoming increasingly urgent, was the schism that continued to divide the Christians. The Turkish peril put the papacy in a position of strength for bringing about the unity of Christendom to its own advantage. That meant holding the Orthodox Church hostage.
In desperation, Basileus John VIII, who had come to Italy, agreed in July 1439 to sign the document concluding the long discussions of the Council of Ferrara- Florence. The union was consummated, even as Roman supremacy took root. Nevertheless, the violent reaction of most of the clergy and of the population in Constantinople completely undermined the implementation of that act, so that the question was left hanging. During that time, Mehmed II ordered the construction of the fortress of Rūmeli Hisārı on the Bosphorus and made ready for siege. The basileus attempted one last time to overcome Rome’s reluctance to orchestrate a rescue mission, by having the end of the schism formally proclaimed in the Hagia Sophia on December 12, 1452. Isidore of Kiev, the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, had come from Rome for the occasion. But the opposition remained just as keen. It was then that the megaduke Lucas Notaras is alleged to have said: “Better the sultan’s turban than the pope’s miter.”
When the city was taken, Nicholas V did order a Crusade, promulgating the bull Etsi Ecclesia Christi on September 30, 1453. In it, the Ottoman sovereign is portrayed as a prefiguration of the Antichrist. Tithes were to be collected throughout the Christian world; those who abetted the Turks were threatened with an interdict and excommunication. Several princes demonstrated their intention to join the Crusade, including the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. During a ceremony of knights held in Lille and called the “Feast of the Pheasant,” he and others solemnly pronounced the oath to take up the cross. But ultimately, for fear of leaving the way clear for adversaries or of exposing themselves to the condemnation of the Turks, with whom some preferred to compromise, none of them made a move. Piccolomini made this bitter observation: “Each state has its prince, and each prince has his special interests.” Once he became pope, Piccolomini would make a final attempt to mount a Crusade, before death overtook him in summer 1464.
Even so, though never actually realized, the idea of a Crusade did not fade away. “Turkish war” remained a duty for Christians and, in the representations of it, that fight more than any other was a holy war expressing divine will. Either God gave his benediction by granting victory to his faithful, or he displayed his wrath by inflicting defeats on them to expiate their sins. Special rites sought to appease that particularly redoubtable form of divine wrath: Turk prayers, Turk processions, Turk pilgrimages (Türkengebete, Türkenprozessionen, Türkenwallfahrten).5
One of the first stunning manifestations of the value placed on victories over the Turks accompanied the failure of Mehmed II’s siege on Belgrade in 1456. The defense of that Hungarian border fort did not constitute a Crusade in the strict sense, but Pope Callixtus III nevertheless had his legate promise a plenary indulgence to all who participated in combat. John of Capistrano, a Franciscan famous for his fiery sermons against the Turks, sparked the passions of the city’s defenders. When the sultan finally retreated after terrible massacres in both camps, there was immense relief and joy throughout Europe. The rumor even circulated in Rome and other cities that Constantinople had been retaken. Nearly everywhere there were magnificent feasts and bonfires as well as processions accompanied by thanksgiving and the exposition of relics. The pope went so far as to declare that the liberation of Belgrade was the most blessed event of his life.6
Subsequently, the Turkish defeats of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, independent of their real military significance— small, in the event— elicited similar or even more enthusiastic reactions. A famous case was the naval victory of the Holy League, uniting the pope, Spain, and Venice off the coast of Lepanto in the strait separating the Gulf of Corinth from the Ionian Sea, on October 7, 1571. The consequences were limited, since the Turks reconstituted their fleet within a few months, and Venice had to abandon Cyprus to Selim II. That did not prevent immediate and long- lasting celebrations of the event, duly orchestrated, first, in the capitals of the league members and then throughout Europe, where sumptuous festivities proliferated. All the arts— poetry, painting, sculpture, and music— paid their tribute.7 In Venice in 1572, the composer Pietro Vinci published motets for five voices on the theme: On the Destruction of the Turks. Among the great pictorial works inspired by that victory are the frescoes of Vasari in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace, and the paintings of Titian and Veronese. In the upper register of Veronese’s work, the victory seems to have been awarded by the Virgin and the saints. A large number of books and engravings spread the happy news, which was also glorified in the altarpieces of modest churches in the most remote townships of Christendom.
A similar initiative had already occurred on the occasion of the recapture of Tunis by Charles V in 1535, following Barbarossa’s takeover of that stronghold the previous year. Of that victory by the emperor in person, accompanied by the Infante Don Luis of Portugal, Gentile Virginio Orsini wrote, without illusions: “The sacking of Tunis is a paltry deed of little importance, with very minor gains, since all fled with their possessions.”8 Charles V was content to reinstall the Hafsid sovereign, Moulay Hassan, whom Barbarossa had thrust aside. Yet the episode was viewed as a sacred mission. Throughout the campaign on land and sea, Charles V had with him a standard bearing Christ on the cross; and, with the place evoking the memory of Saint Louis and the Eighth Crusade, he providentially discovered the weapons of the martyr king. Above all, that excessively orchestrated success was seen as the prefiguration of even more decisive accomplishments. In a letter to Charles V, Don Luis presents it as the prelude to the final major offensive against Constantinople, called the “holy venture” (sancta empresa), which he continually “longed for like a lover,” and as the premonitory sign of the definitive expulsion of the Turks.9
The notion persisted that the most recent Christian success was the first act of a reversal that would put an end to the monstrosity of the Turkish presence in Europe. It was long the custom to celebrate any success against the Turks, even a minor one, by the Te Deum, processions, prayers, and donations: that would be the case in 1598, for example, at the victory of Raab, an episode in the Long War.10
In the late seventeenth century, the three jubilee years of 1669, 1670, and 1683 corresponded to periods of war between the Turks and Christendom. The respective popes, Clement IX, Clement X, and Innocent XI, let it be known that they were granting indulgences to all who would pray to “thwart the efforts and forces of the Turks, the cruel and irreconcilable enemies of the word ‘Christian.’ ” The jubilee of 1683 began in a particularly tragic context, since it was decreed on August 11, just after Vienna was besieged, on July 14. The pope put out an anguished and tearful call in face of that new attack against “the strong and famous city of Vienna in Austria, which once vigorously repelled the impetuosity of Ottoman arms; and which, like a powerful dam, arrested their course.” At stake was “the defense of the word ‘Christian,’ ” while the Turk, “overlooking nothing that he could do to spread the abomination of Muhammad’s perfidy everywhere . . . used all his strength to turn the church of the living God on its head.”
On January 15, 1684, Innocent XI’s appeal reached a distant audience, in the person of Louis de Laverne- Montenard du Tressan, bishop of Le Mans, who did not fail to pass it on to his flock. By then, the situation had changed: on September 12, the besiegers were defeated at Kahlenberg and had to retreat. Having compared the Holy Father to the “chaste Rachel” grieving the loss of her children, the prelate from Le Mans radiated joy: “Have we not already felt the effects of [God’s] divine promises, since, when the Pastor of the universal church raised his hands to Heaven, that cruel enemy was put to flight . . . and the children of the chaste Rachel have come into possession of their inheritance.”11
The Turkish wars were vested with a special sacredness. The coalitions to which they gave rise were so many “holy leagues” (sacra ligua). The victims were martyrs on the path of sainthood. Consider the example of Gedik Ahmed Pasha, who took Otranto in the summer of 1480. Eight hundred men, survivors of the siege on the city, were put to death at that time, in a massacre of a punitive nature intended to sow terror. These eight hundred victims became the eight hundred martyrs of Otranto who, it would be said, preferred to die rather than recant. They were considered blessed (though their official beatification was declared only three centuries later), and a series of miracles was attributed to them. Here again, paintings consecrated and perpetuated the event: many depicted the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents, making implicit reference to Otranto. Other victims of the Turks were similarly the object of a popular cult. The shock produced by the landing of the Turks elicited fervor and excitement throughout Italy. In the following years, several apparitions of the Virgin were reported on the peninsula, especially in Tuscany: in 1482 in the Maremma and in 1484 in Prato.12
The ideal of Crusade was also perpetuated by the notion that at least part of the European nobility held about the war against the Turks: it was always meritorious to participate in it, whatever the flag under which one did so, since it was a supreme duty transcending national divisions. As a result, it offered an honorable path of escape— sometimes the only one— to all knights at odds with their own sovereigns. A good example is the French or Lorrainian nobles who, after the Wars of Religion or the Fronde, joined the Habsburg armies to go fight the Turks in Hungary (the duke of Mercoeur is an emblematic figure). Then there were those who, having joined the Order of Malta, participated in the corso maltese, hunting down Muslim ships in the Mediterranean.
The idea of Crusade also survived in the many writings by obscure or more illustrious authors. Addressed to sovereigns, these works exhorted them to rid themselves of the Ottomans, or predicted the destiny of the East and the eschatological mission of the blessed lineage from which the kings were descended. The “most Christian kings of France” in particular, given what their role had been in the Middle Ages, were the focus of hope both in Europe and among the sultan’s Christian subjects, especially the Armenians of Syria and the Maronites of Lebanon. For example, a prophecy from an ancient Armenian saint, Nerses, declared that the king of France would be in Jerusalem in 1550.13 Francis I, after initially corresponding with Pope Leo X to plan a mission against the Turks,14 then took a diametrically opposed position, allying himself with the sultan. His successors, with more or less ardor, took the same path. But that in no way discouraged the illusions of the prophets or armchair strategists of the following centuries, who wagered first on the Valois and then on the Bourbons to realize the definitive victory of Christianity. In the early seventeenth century, for example, a certain Jean Aimé de Chavigny appealed to Henry IV to undertake grandiose adventures and turned to his own advantage ancient predictions supporting a “second Charlemagne”: a king who “would stem from the extraction and stalk of the very illustrious lily” and would conquer the peoples of the East before going to die in Jerusalem. In 1632, an Italian, Silvestro Manfredo Vanino, dedicated a pamphlet to Louis XIII, reminding him that he was destined “to destroy all sects opposed to the Holy Church and above all that of the Great Turk.”
Louis XIV was in turn the object of predictions and exhortations, from the time of his youth and throughout his reign. For example, in Louis XIV’s “imperial horoscope,” published in 1652, it is said that the young prince was given to France by God, “to reform France with new constitutions, to correct the vices and abuses being committed, to extirpate heresies and conquer the infidels, to this end as well that the Christian faith may be free throughout the universe.” The king would receive the imperial title, which included the obligation to fight against the Ottomans.15 In 1670– 1672, the illustrious philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, part of the entourage of the archbishop- elector of Mainz— an influential figure in the politics of his time— also sent the Sun King a plan for the conquest of Ottoman Egypt.16
Seventeenth- century bishop and theologian Jacques- Bénigne Bossuet should also be mentioned in this context, since he pronounced the panegyric of Saint Peter Nolasco, in the church of the Fathers of Mercy, who were committed to ransoming captives taken by the infidels: “O Jesus, Lord of Lords, arbiter of all empires and Prince of the kings of the earth, how long will you allow your declared enemy, seated on the throne of the great Constantine, to support the blasphemies of his Muhammad with so many armies, to flatten your cross under his crescent, and every day weaken Christendom by such fortuitous weapons?”17
The Protestants and the Turkish Question
It may have appeared for a time that the plans and prospects for reconquest of the Turk were irremediably compromised by the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the inexpiable divisions that followed within Christendom.
In their reciprocal imprecations, Catholics and Protestants used the Turk as the standard of ignominy, just as canonists and inquisitors had once declared heretics and schismatics worse than the infidels. The Protestants accused the pope and his entourage of being more vile, debauched, and dangerous than the Turks. And to discredit the Protestants, the Catholics could do no better than to discern their “resemblances” to the Turks.18
Apart from the fact that Christendom’s unity was once again destroyed by that new fracture— following on the Great Schism— the Catholic sovereigns had reason to fear that the Turks would take advantage of the division and find allies among the dissidents. In a letter of May 10, 1552, Süleyman the Magnificent exhorted the Protestant princes, who were in fact allies of Henry II, king of France, to wage war against Charles V.19 In any event, no formal alliance was needed for the Turks and Protestants to be objectively united against the emperor. Was it not true that Charles V, whose troops fought the Ottoman forces, did not have those needed to prevent Protestantism from spreading and gaining strength in his empire? That observation is the basis for the thesis of Stephen Fischer-Galati, who argues that the consolidation and ultimate legalization of German Protestantism was inextricably linked to the “Turkish peril” (die Türkengefahr). The thesis is not unfounded, at least until the Augsburg Confession in 1555. With that document, which marked the official recognition of Protestantism (and more precisely, of Lutheranism) in the empire, all tension between Protestants and Catholics surely did not disappear, but the struggle against the Turks became the best guarantor of the unity of the empire and the legitimacy of the Habsburgs’ authority.20
At first, the thinkers of the Reformation, or close to the Reformation, maintained a troubling distance from the Turkish war. Erasmus did so in the name of his pacifism: in In Praise of Folly, he portrays all war as folly, including war against the infidel. In A Plaint of Peace, he maintains that the best way to fight the Turks would be for the Christian princes to begin by not making war against one another, which, Erasmus observes, had led some to ally themselves with the Turks against coreligionists. He adds that, even in combat that could not be avoided, people ought to maintain a Christian spirit. One of his adages eloquently expresses his thinking: “War is sweet to those who have never experienced it.”
Others, such as Luther in the first place, then John Calvin, Phillip Melanchton, and the humanist Ulrich von Hutten, assumed a resigned defeatism toward the Turks: the Christians must not resist them but must rather submit to the punishment sent by God for their sins through the instrument of the Turks. That position, which is also sometimes found in Guillaume Postel, finds radical expression in Luther, who declared in 1520: “To fight the Turks is to oppose the will of God” (Gegen die Türken zu kämpfen, heisst dem Willen Gottes zu widerstehen).
The same authors, reasoning within an eschatological perspective, developed the idea, also tending toward demobilization, that the Turks’ victories had to be accepted as part of God’s plans. The “Muhammadists” or “Ishmaelites,” as Postel calls them, had been incited by divine providence to rid the world of pagans and schismatic Greeks and thus prepare the way for the universal domination of the Roman church, since, he concludes, “Christendom . . . must be the sole and legitimate princess of the world, both in spiritual and in temporal things.”21
These attitudes, inspired by philosophical and theological considerations, lasted only a little while, however, and most of these dissident thinkers later had no qualms about rallying behind a “Turkish war”— if not exactly behind the principle of Crusade in its traditional conception— especially after the successes of Süleyman the Magnificent in Belgrade, Rhodes, and Mohács, followed by his march on Vienna.
In his Consultatio de bello Turcis inferendo, printed in early 1530, Erasmus feverishly denounces the Turkish peril. “All of Asia Minor,” he wrote at the time, “which contains no fewer than twelve peoples; all Thrace, with Constantinople . . . ; the two Mysies of Europe near the Danube; a large part of Dacia; all of Macedonia and all of Greece with the entirety of the Aegean Sea, part of it called Sporades and part Cyclades: all of these endure harsh servitude under Turkish domination.”
Then there were the recent events in Hungary, which raised the philosopher’s anxieties to their paroxysm: “What about all those murderous incursions into Hungary? What about the death of Louis, king of Hungary? And, in the current year [1529], this same country in its entirety is cruelly occupied, King Ferdinand driven from his throne, Vienna besieged with the greatest fury and all of Austria outside that city devastated with incredible ferocity.”22
During the same period, Luther too went on the offensive.23 Revising his earlier attitude, he became the ardent supporter of war against the Turks in a 1528 book titled On War against the Turks,24 in various other pamphlets at about the same time (the Türkenbüchlein, or Turkish Booklets), and in the preface he wrote in 1530 for the first edition of George of Hungary’s Treatise on the Mores, Customs, and Perfidy of the Turks.25 The theme also appeared in his correspondence. In a letter of October 26, 1529, sent to Nicholas Haussmann from Wittenberg, Luther has these definitive words: “I will fight to my death the Turks and the God of the Turks.” The culminating point of that conversion to passionate warmongering is indicated in Luther’s 1541 work, Admonition to Prayer against the Turks.
In the following generation as well, Calvin was less impervious to the Turkish peril than some have claimed. What reformers continued to criticize were the institutional aspects the Crusade had assumed with the pontificate of Innocent III (1198– 1203). At the time, the war against the infidel had become a powerful tool for managing— militarily, financially, and legally— the Christian world in the hands of the Roman Curia. The Curia had a powerful weapon at its disposal: someone who swore an oath to take up the cross and later delayed or avoided fulfilling his vow was liable to be excommunicated. He could liberate himself from his vow only by paying a sum of money or performing another mission decreed by the church to be a “cause of the cross” (causa crucis) or a “mission of the Cross” (negotium crucis). And Rome now had another spur to action: since the pontificate of Nicholas V in the mid- fifteenth century, those who came to the assistance of the Mediterranean islands threatened by Islam were granted specific indulgences in the afterlife. The first attested measure, from 1451, had to do with the island of Cyprus, which was still under the domination of the Lusignans. The first corresponding indulgences were printed in Mainz in 1454.26 It was these various aspects that elicited the reformers’ criticisms. As of 1517, therefore, Luther declared war on the practice of indulgences. Everyone now believed that, though the Turkish war should not be abandoned, it should be “depontificalized.” François de La Noue would elaborate the idea with particular rigor in his Political and Military Discourses. That French Huguenot took up the pen during his captivity by the Spanish, after he had gone to support the rebel Calvinists of Flanders. Assuming a pragmatic stance, he did not claim that the pope’s contribution— any more than the emperor’s— to a future Crusade was completely without utility. The pope, he observes, “can work effectively,” since his high position is still “much revered by the Catholic princes.” As for the emperor, “though his power is not now commensurate with the title he bears,” he can also provide valuable assistance because of “the sacred dignity with which he is vested” and which “must be held in great reverence by all Christian potentates.”27
The Militia Christiana: The Knights of Modern Times
Whereas the Protestants rallied behind the cause of Turkish war and even, with a few correctives, behind the idea of Crusade, that same idea could be revived among the Catholics only by the advent of Tridentinism. One episode in 1616– 1625 may serve as an example: the Crusade planned by the duke of Nevers, Charles Gonzaga, and by the Capuchin François Leclerc du Tremblay, Richelieu’s right- hand man, better known by the name “Father Joseph” and the title “éminence grise.” In Father Joseph’s view, not only was the battle against the Turks necessary for the salvation of Christendom, but it also had the advantage of purging the Christians’ hot- headed belligerence and therefore of introducing the reign of peace among them. As he wrote in a report to Louis XIII in support of his cause, “the certainty and stability of peace among Christians would follow from it, whereas the diversity of beliefs and the emulation of neighboring or domestic princes not engaged in something better can never allow peace to reign for long.”28 Trying to halt the Ottoman advance in Europe, as during the Crusades of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was no longer at issue. Rather, at a time when that advance was running out of steam, the matter at hand was to combine the permanent objective of liberating the holy sites with the more pressing one of liberating the Christians, in this case most of them Orthodox, from the Ottoman yoke. In addition, Charles Gonzaga, by virtue of the fact that his grandmother was a Palaeologus, had claimed a right to Byzantium and therefore maintained relations with Greek notables. To realize their goal, the protagonists, having taken various diplomatic measures and obtained the pope’s authorization, in 1616 founded a new military and religious order, the Christian Militia (Militia Christiana), with the support of part of the European nobility and of several sovereigns, such as Louis XIII and Sigismund II, king of Poland. In February 1618, the pope’s secretary, Cardinal Borghese, sent instructions to the different nuncios living in the European capitals. But an event of great consequence, the “defenestration of Prague” on May 23, 1618, doomed the entire undertaking by provoking the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholic and Protestant states.
The “Terrible Turk”
Although the rejection of the Turks had religious motives and found justification in the alleged flaws and profound falseness of the religion that they professed and sought to impose, it also assumed other faces and was based on other reasons.
The Turks were not merely infidels. They were thought to lack any notion of civilization and morality: they were barbarians, a fact that corresponded to what people thought they knew about their origins. The scholars and thinkers contemporary to the Turkish advance had in fact pondered the origins of these invaders.29 Their geographical origin, as well as the resemblance between the terms Teucri (the name of the Trojans in ancient literature) and Turci, initially led them to think that the Turks were none other than the descendants of the Trojans. That hypothesis was compatible with the sense of otherness they aroused, since the Christians implicitly identified themselves with the Greeks. But it quickly became incoherent since, according to Virgil’s Aeneid, the Romans— with whom the Europeans identified as well— were also descended from the Trojans. Furthermore, in the flattering genealogies that several European princes of the time asked to have drawn up for themselves, they too could be traced back to Troy. That had the disadvantage of making them related to the Turks (a theme that persisted in diplomatic relations over the following centuries). The Trojan hypothesis, which simply entailed too many conundrums, was abandoned in favor of another, much more satisfying one. It appeared in 1456 in the treatise by Nicoló Sagundino, a Venetian from Eubea, titled De origine et gestis Turcarum; it was dedicated to Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who would use it to his own advantage. The same view is found again in 1538 in the Commentario delle Cose de Turchi a Carlo Quinto, written by Paolo Giovio, which claims: “Without a doubt, the Turkish nation drew its origin from the Scythians, now called Tatars, who inhabit the lonely regions above the Caspian Sea, near the course of the Volga.”30
In assimilating (against all historical truth) the Turks to the Scythians of antiquity, Renaissance humanists were merely adopting a Byzantine custom, which designated as Scythians all the many peoples arriving in Europe from what is now the Russian steppes, including the Mongols and Tatars of the thirteenth century. In the twelfth century, to distinguish them from the other peoples of the steppe, Anna Comnena called the Turkomans in the Seljuk armies “eastern Scythians”; George Tornikes termed them “Persian Scythians” (Persoskythai). In addition, he says that they “live scattered in tents and migrate over the earth and . . . fly like sparrows in the field.”31 A dialectical relationship existed between the assimilation of the Turk to the Scythian and the European view of him. The success of that identification lay in the fact that it equated the Turks with barbarism; at the same time, it led Europeans to apply the ancient authors’ discourses on the “barbarians” to these same Turks and thus shaped their image.
Commentators cite several privileged pieces of evidence attesting to their barbarism. In the first place, Turkish pretenders to the throne sometimes committed fratricide to rid themselves of their competitors, and sultans who were worried about their sons’ ambitions sometimes killed their own children. (Süleyman, for example, ordered the execution of his sons Mustafa and Bayezid and their descendants, causing a great stir.) Such acts demonstrated the Turks’ disdain for all the laws of nature and humanity. In his pamphlets on the Turks, Francesco Sansovino listed sultans who had been guilty of such crimes, under the title Lords Who Murdered Their Own Blood and Usurped Power.32 The practice of polygamy and of other vices such as sodomy, portrayed as being very widespread, was another mark of their bestiality. Finally, commentators pointed out the Turks’ ignorance and contempt for works of art, and especially, for books. In a letter from Lauro Querini, a Venetian from Crete, to Pope Nicholas V on July 15, 1453, shortly after the taking of Constantinople, he notes that more than 120,000 volumes were destroyed at that time, obliterating the work of many centuries. The conclusion to be drawn was that the Turks were “a barbarian people, an uncultivated people, living without clear laws or customs but in laxity, nomadism, and arbitrariness, full of perfidy and deceit.”33
A number of Renaissance authors took up the theme first addressed in these lines. It is found in Montaigne, who speaks of people trained to “value arms and have contempt for letters.” The theme would persist unchanged until the contemporary period: the religion of the Turks and Muslims in general was not only false, it was also synonymous with ignorance and with a militant contempt for science and the arts. That could not have been claimed without reservations in the Middle Ages, when the knowledge of antiquity was being transmitted to Westerners, at least in part, through the Arabs. But it was now freely asserted, since the transmission of knowledge was occurring in a single direction. Chateau briand, along with many others, adopted that theme in 1807, making it one of the foundations of his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem: “Islam is a religion that burned down the library of Alexandria, that considers it meritorious to trample men and to hold arts and letters in supreme disdain.”34 The connection to the barbarians of antiquity was shored up in particular by descriptions of the Turks in battle. In reality, the Ottoman conquest had been gradual, with delays, breaks, setbacks; it had required organization and the adaptation of technology by its planners; it had privileged sieges of cities; and finally, it had sometimes had to combine force of arms with the use of a pragmatic policy of reconciliation and integration of the defeated. The rhetoric obscured all these realities, conforming completely to the descriptions of barbarian invasions from the past and even sometimes citing the ancient authors word for word. The Turks were simply hordes arriving in waves, birds of prey falling on fields, an irresistible torrent carrying off everything in its wake. Certainly such descriptions corresponded well to certain episodes in the Ottoman conquest, especially the raids of “privateers” (akınjı), which prepared the way for the arrival of the full army by terrorizing the population. “They are terrestrial corsairs, men who commit evil against Christians,” the Genoese Promontorio de Campis wrote of them.35 The Serb Konstantin Mihailović described them as follows: “The Turkish raiders, or ‘those who flow,’ like rainstorms, do not linger long, but wherever they strike they burn, plunder, kill, and destroy everything so that for many years the cock will not crow there.”36 In such evocations, it is only the shock images that appear, when the events were in reality more complex: other texts emphasize the sophistication of the Ottoman military apparatus as a whole, the specializations of the diverse units cooperating to achieve general effectiveness, and the rule of order and discipline.
But to return to the previous image, the barbarian is identifiable not only by the suddenness of his attacks but also, to an equal degree, by his cruelty in war: he massacres, inflicts horrible tortures, rapes women and children, and reduces his captives to the harshest slavery. He shows thereby that he is not only different but also, strictly speaking, outside humanity. Hence the Turk, used as the measure of deviance in the religious conflicts, was also the standard on the spectrum of evil: there was no better way for a Christian to stigmatize his enemy than by declaring him as bad or worse than the Turk.
A disturbing consequence of the Turks’ perceived inhumanity is that it allowed the Christians to inflict the same abominable treatment on them that they were accused of reserving for their adversaries. The application of the principle of an eye for an eye to the Turks did not raise any moral questions. Without a second thought, witnesses therefore mention the conduct of the Christian army in Transylvania during the Long War in Hungary. At the victory of Raab in 1598, the Turkish governor’s head was stuck on a pike and placed in a very visible spot. After the retaking of the Alba Regia stronghold, the heads of a number of Turkish chiefs were sent to Archduke Matthias “and then offered in exchange for a few Christian prisoners.”37 After a few other victories, “seventy- two heads of Turks” and then “eighteen Turkish heads” were collected in the same way.38Transgressions intended to terrorize could even go much further, if we are to believe an account of 1595: “The Tatars and the Turks have been beaten this year, and three times the Cossacks and Transylvanians forced some Tatar women to roast and eat their children, so that they would so be horrified of Hungary that they would flee, and through their accounts would put off others and even their posterity from coming here.”39
But on the question of war, it is necessary to make a distinction between the peoples in the northern and western parts of Christian Europe, who had never seen and would never see a Turk or Muslim— for whom the threat, however terrible, was nevertheless theoretical and fantastical— and those in central Europe or on the banks of the Mediterranean, who were always at risk of seeing their Türkenfurcht materialize, whether as devastating raids, military occupations, or corsair attacks. “All’armi! All’armi! La campana sona, li turchi sunnu giunti alla marina” (To arms! To arms! The bells are ringing, the Turks have come to the shore), goes an old Italian popular song. In those regions, the representation of Turkish cruelties took on more precise and even tragic forms, accompanied, in the Germanic world, by strong biblical references: it was the arrival of Gog and Magog, the scourge of God who punishes humanity, especially the Germans, for their sins by making them fall under “the tyrannical yokeorth (das tyrannische Joch) and into “bovine servitude” (die viehische Servitut).
Winfried Schulze has shown that, in the Germanic empire and throughout central Europe, the Turk was represented not only as the infidel and the barbarian but also as the hereditary enemy (Erbfeind) and a danger to the social order.40 There, all- out resistance consisted not only of saving the Christian religion or attempting to deliver Jerusalem but also of defending the fatherland against an enemy hungry for conquest. The Catholic Johann Baptist Fickler thus wrote during the Long War at the very end of the sixteenth century: “If Hungary is occupied or conquered by the Turk, neither Italy nor Germany will be secure any longer, and the Rhine too will be unable to protect France.”41 It was not only the fatherland that was threatened but every person, home, and family, since the Turk kidnapped and raped women and children. As a result, not only holy war but a just, necessary, and even vital war was at issue.
That discourse was obviously not gratuitous. Its primary aim was to persuade the participants at the imperial diets to vote for allocations from Germany to the Habsburgs for the defense of Hungary and Croatia.
Official propaganda, whether it emanated from political or religious authorities, also had to fight another danger specific to those same regions: the “Turkish temptation” (Türkenhoffnung). That term referred to the illusion among the poorest and most oppressed classes of the population that their fate could not be worse, and might even be better, if the Turks were to become their new masters. When these oppressed peoples were not Catholic, they might also prefer the Turks to the Roman clergy: eher Türkisch als Päbstisch (better Turkish than popish). In that context, the Turks were not characterized solely by their unbelief, and in fact that trait was becoming relatively secondary. The actions taken throughout Ottoman history by “renegades,” acting on their own with various motives, were now becoming a collective attitude inspired by despair. Veltwick, an envoy of Charles V to the sultan, confirmed the reality of such attitudes, when he reported to his sovereign what he had observed while traveling in Hungary: “The peasants of Hungary are wondrous pleased at the treatment [of the Turks toward them], and betray their lords to the Turks.”42 An echo of that same phenomenon could be heard at the end of the century, in the sermon the minister Salomon Gessner addressed to his flock in Wittenberg in 1597: “Many complaints and much agitation have been heard here that you have not put aside the opinion that you might perhaps live with less and not more difficulty under that race of Muslim dogs, and, if opportunity gave you that choice, who knows what you might and would venture to do, under the effect of folly and Satan’s accursed influence.”
Nor was joining the sultan ruled out in certain Italian circles, whether motivated by the “Turkish mirage” or as a form of blackmail. It could be found among the supporters of autonomy for medieval communities, against the centralizing tendencies of the Renaissance popes. In the early sixteenth century, for example, a deputy of the city of Ravenna declared to the pope’s legate Cardinal Giulio de Medicis: “Monsignor, if the Turks come to Ravenna, we will surrender to them.”
The Turkish Tyrant
Because the illusion existed and was in no way excluded a priori by the religious objection, it was important to dissipate it by giving the most repulsive image possible of the Ottoman regime: the sultan’s subjects were governed by a terrifying and bloody tyrant who kept them as slaves and held over them the right of life and death. “All subjects in Turkey are slaves, actual serfs who have no access to the slightest freedom anywhere or to the rights of the bourgeoisie,” declared Georg Mylius, another preacher speaking to a different audience.43
For the benefit in this case of the petty nobility, who might also be tempted to rally behind the Turks, the preacher Georg Scherer, among other critics, contrasted the benevolent attitude of the Kaiser and other German sovereign princes toward the nobility to the behavior of the sultan vis- à- vis his aides: “The Turk would not have so much patience with them, but at the slightest indiscretion would order straightaway all their heads to fall by the saber.”44
That idea— that the divorce between Muslims and Christians was not necessarily radical in terms of religion and morality but remained so when it came to political notions, where the gulf could not be bridged— is brilliantly expressed in an anonymous work from the Spanish Golden Age (its attribution is a matter of controversy), the Viaje de Turquia, composed in 1557–1558.45
The work is as favorable toward Islam as prudence allowed. One of the characters declares of the Muslims: “During my travels, I never met a people more virtuous, and I believe that none could be found in the Indies either, . . . apart from their belief in Muhammad: I am well aware that the Turks will all go to hell, but here I am assuming solely the standpoint of natural law.”46 Another character categorically denies the accusation of barbarism: “Those people are called barbarians? It is rather we who are so in judging them such.”47 At the same time, the condemnation of the regime is absolute: “Turkey is a people of slaves, entirely subjugated to their leader, the Great Turk.”48 That diagnosis and verdict are omnipresent in the relazione of the bailis from Venice to Constantinople, at least in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After 1630, the Ottoman government was definitively stigmatized as despotico.49
Jihād and Gazā in Europe
Corresponding to these Christian representations, a no less antagonistic view prevailed among the Muslims: both posited an irreducible incompatibility between Muslims and Christians for reasons beyond the strictly religious. Islam, at least in the legal developments of the eighth and ninth centuries, projected a binary image of the world, which contrasted the “House of Islam” (dār al- islām) to the “House of War” (dār al- harb). It was the duty of sovereigns and of at least some of their subjects to expand the dār al- islām at the expense of the dār al- harb by conducting holy war, jihād— or, in a term often used by the Ottomans, gazā— against the infidels who had not yet submitted to Islam. The fate of Islam, at least virtually, was to spread throughout the world or, more exactly— in accordance with the cosmological notions in play— to the “inhabited quarter” (rub’- i meskūn) of that world. That was the messianic horizon toward which Islam was headed. In theory, then, there was no place for a peaceful coexistence between Muslims and infidel harbīs, or for the long- term survival of the Christian world. Temporary truces could occur between Muslims and Christians but in no case “perpetual peace.” The Ottomans, who by virtue of their original position in a border region facing Byzantium, and because the European dār al- harb offered them their best chances for expansion, at least in a first phase, were quite naturally inclined to give a place of honor to that duty of jihad or, to use an expression that present- day historians have coined, that “gaza ideology” (which other Muslim princes in a less favorable position toned down). For these parvenus from the fringes of the Muslim world, the best means to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of Islam was to assign that label to their conquests. Upon taking Constantinople, at a time when the Mamluks had not yet lost their prestige and symbolic supremacy, the young Mehmed II, in his victory report to Sultan al- Malik al- Ashraf Inal, protector of the holy sites of Islam, defined his own place beside “the man who assumes the inherited suffering of his father and ancestors to revive the ceremony of the pilgrimage to Mecca.” For his part, Mehmed was “the one responsible for equipping the men who work for gazā and jihād.”50 Elsewhere, Mehmed II styled himself the “lord of combatants for the faith” (Sayyidü- l- ghuzzāt wal- Mujahidīn). The chroniclers regularly call him the gāzi of gāzis, champion of the holy war.
These notions appeared continually in the official Ottoman phraseology. Members of the dynasty present themselves not as monarchs of a people or a particular state, but as the pādishāh of Islam, acting in the name of Islam as a whole. Their armies, according to another standard formulation, are the “armies of Islam destined for victory” (‘asakir-i mansūre- i islāmiyye). Their states were the “well- guarded territories of Islam” (memālik- i mahrūse- i islāmiyye).” And so on. Their adversary is designated primarily as an infidel (kāfir), even before the miscreant country from which he comes is specified (Venice, Hungary, Portugal), if in fact it is specified (this was not always done when evoking the fight against the Portuguese in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, for example). According to the same conventions, the term kāfir (pl., küffār) is always accompanied by a pejorative, even insulting qualifier that rhymes with the noun to which it is attached, so that the expression will be more forceful: the infidels are worthy of scorn (küffār- i haksār); they behave badly (küffār bedgīrdār); they are full of tricks and ruses (küffār hilekār); they bear the marks of abjection (küffār mezellet āsār); they are in error (küffār zalaet shi’ār); and so on.
A large number of official Ottoman documents and chroniclers’ narratives give considerable place to that rhetoric, which ascribes to the sultan, as his first priority, war against the infidel (or heretic), conquest of his territory, extermination if he resists, and, if he surrenders, subjugation and humiliation. The more a text claims to exalt a sovereign’s greatness, the more it will use hyperbole, both pious and belligerent, even bloody. The dedicatory inscriptions on monuments, the elaborate titulatures of sultans, the victory reports (fethnāme or fethināme), the letters of imprecations (tehdīdīdnāme), and the preambles to formal orders are the privileged sites of that phraseology. Their authors try to outdo one another in Islamic erudition and stylistic virtuosity. Consider, for example, how Selim II (or more accurately, a scribe in the chancery) addresses one of his governors, the beylerbey of Egypt, in the preamble to an order of 1568. It commands him to study the possibility of digging a canal in the Isthmus of Suez, designed to facilitate the passage of ships sent against the Portuguese and the Shiite rebels of Yemen. His grandiloquence is all the more remarkable, given that the sultan’s words are for internal use only, for a subordinate, albeit one of high rank:
Formerly, my glorious ancestors and my illustrious forebears who belonged to our dynasty, whose ambition is jihād, and to our lineage, for whom gazā is our lot— may God shine on their graves!— devoted their days, dedicated to victory, and every one of their moments, happy in its outcome, to jihād and gazā. They conquered and defeated a number of climates and territories, to the east and to the west, by their saber which brings victory, delivering them from associationism and error [shirk ü delālet], and reunited them to the well- guarded territories of the Ottomans.51
Another short draft in Persian, studded with multiple Qur’anic quotations, was written by a scribe from the chancery or a scholar badly in need of favor. It was to be used in the composition of a fethnāme celebrating the taking of Caffa from the Genoese in 1475. In accordance with Persian tastes, it is an even more astonishing purple passage. The expedition, it claims, is under the sign of the Qur’anic verse: “Make war on them until idolatry shall cease and God’s religion shall reign supreme” (8:40). Its leader, Vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha, became “the leader endowed with sharp judgment, destroyer of the subversives’ base by means of penetrating thought and a sharp saber.” When the fleet set out, “the resounding voices of those who dwell in the firmament [the angels], and who celebrated the verse: ‘Embark,’ said Noah. ‘In the name of God it shall set sail and cast anchor’ [Qur’an 11:43], arrived within hearing of the ships of holy war and within that of the residents of the kingdom of bold efforts.” Once Caffa was taken, the significance of that victory was analyzed as follows: “We choke the law of tyranny and eliminate the shadow from the surface of the mirror by polishing our swords, whose pores contain divine assistance. We have devoted ourselves to brandishing standards of the gleaming law of Muhammad— may the best prayers and most perfect greetings be open to him— and by pushing toward the progress of the shining community of the Prophet.”52
After Caffa, the other fortresses of southern Crimea fell one by one. Thus all of the former “Genoese Gazaria” passed into Ottoman hands, which the draft of the victory report proposes to formulate as follows: “The bride that is this kingdom, from the day of the Prophet’s mission until today, had wrapped her slender figure in the costume forcibly worn by the infidels [an allusion to the fact that, since Islam had been preached, Gazaria had never been Muslim]. She was now adorned in the beautiful silk of the manifest Religion.” In such a text, there is no discussion of the likely strategic and economic motivations of that Ottoman advance on the Black Sea: everything is represented in the most Manichaean religious terms.
The taking of the fortress of Szigetvár during the final campaign of Süleyman the Magnificent, who met his death there in 1566, is viewed the same way in the victory report that his son Selim II sent to Tahmasp, shah of Persia, though the writer’s pen is less florid. Selim declares that his father “had gone to conduct illustrious holy war [gazā] against the Christians, as was his custom and ancient practice. . . . He had marched and launched an attack against the headstrong miscreants who brought harm to believers, endlessly causing damage and destruction in the Islamic countries.”53
When a few later sultans adopted the tradition of their ancestors, placing themselves at the head of their armies, their successes, even of limited scope, were presented just as surely as victories of Islam over error and impiety. Such was the case for Mehmed III during the Eger campaign in 1596. At the most critical point of the battle of Keresztes, as a safeguard, he had taken care to put on the mantle of the Prophet, the most holy of relics, kept in the Palace of Topkapı. In addition, Mehmed IV’s conquest of Kameniec- Podolski in 1672 earned the sultan the title “father of victory” (Ebülfeth), like his ancestor Mehmed II, and like “the one who demolished the edifice of unbelief and error” (küfr ü zelāl bünyanının hādimi).
The Quest for the Golden Apple
Although the struggle between the Ottomans and the European states was officially expressed in terms of religious antagonism, that interpretation was not exclusive. Somewhat the same way that, in fighting the Turk, the Christian attacked not only the infidel but also the barbarian, and simply, the invader, jihad was not the only ideological motivation (setting aside the more concrete, strategic, and socioeconomic motivations factoring in) that pushed the sultan’s troops toward the west. At the same time, that movement was impelled by a myth that did not contradict the Islamic motive, that occasionally combined with it, but that was nevertheless distinct.
The sultan’s armies were setting out on a quest for the Kızıl Elma, the Golden Apple (or Red Apple). That fabulous fruit symbolized any city to be conquered, and in the end, the ultimate city, whose possession would signify that these armies had accomplished their task and that their master would now exercise the universal domination to which he had been called. The theme is clearly defined in what is the oldest attestation of it on the Ottoman side: a life of Sarı Saltuk (a Saltuknāme), semilegendary hero, patron saint of the first Turkish conquerors of eastern Europe, which was composed by Abū l- Hayr- er Rūmī at the request of Prince Jem, son of Mehmed II. The work dates to 1473, but the oldest manuscript extant is from 1590–1591. One passage evokes a dream of the glorious Sultan Murad I (1362–1389):
In Iznik, Murad Khan Gazi saw in a dream His Lordship the Envoy [Muhammad]— may salvation be upon him!— And he said: “Go to the city of Edirne, it is your home, the place of the gāzis, the gate of victory, and the house of conquest. From there, to whatever place you go, conquest and victory will be yours; you will be in a position of strength. From there, you will conquer the east and the west, the north and the south, the four corners, on land as well as sea. You will defeat all who live in that land and will take those places. From there, you will march on, and your generation will also conquer the Red Apple. The whole world will be obedient to you,” he said.54
Many later texts attest to the potency and popularity of the apple symbol. Depending on the period and phase of Ottoman conquest, various cities concretely corresponded to the objective the Golden Apple symbolized. But curiously, the most ancient city cited, and the one that would continue to be cited among the others, was Cologne. In the manuscript of the aforementioned Saltuknāme, Cologne is not expressly mentioned, but the city at issue might very well correspond to that Rhineland city: “They arrived in the prosperous places near Hungary, Germany, and Ayurusapur [Augsburg?]; they arrived in a large city where, inside a great fortress, was a large church whose door was shut. Above, on its dome, stood a golden globe; it had the shape of a golden or red apple. Then the sharif Sarı Saltuk spoke: ‘What is that?’ he said. They replied: ‘It is called the Red Apple.’ ”
That reference to Cologne is surprising, given that the city never played any role in the Ottoman conquest. It very likely has to do with the intriguing and long- controversial question of the legend’s origin, which was sought in Byzantium. In fact, the gilded copper globe held in the left hand of the equestrian statue of Justinian, erected on a column in front of the Hagia Sophia, may have served as a model for the Golden Apple, especially since that globe was interpreted as a symbol for the emperor’s universal domination. It is much more likely, however, that the origin is to be sought, as Stéphane Yerasimos has argued, in a legend of the western Middle Ages, which accounts perfectly for the reference to Cologne. It was to Cologne that, in 1164, the Germanic emperor Frederick Barbarossa had the relics of the Magi transferred from Milan. A legend had formed around these relics, first mentioned in the Liber de trium regum corporibus ad Coloniam translatis, compiled by Johannes von Hildesheim in about 1370. According to that legend, Alexander had fashioned a golden apple by melting down the gold from the imperial tribute, and it was that apple that Melchior offered to the Christ Child. Jesus blew on it and reduced it to dust. But the relics of the Magi nevertheless preserved the spiritual power that the apple had initially borne within it. Transported to Cologne with the relics, that force now resided in the city, in possession of the Germanic emperors, who used it to good advantage in their rivalry with the Eastern emperors. The origin of the Turks’ Golden Apple, then, may not have been the golden globe of Justinian but rather the Reichsapfel of Cologne. Furthermore, in the Turkish versions, the apple, identified from the start with Cologne, is never identified with Constantinople.55 And the Reichsapfel became the Kızıl Elma only after many changes and adaptations, which in turn raise complex questions of origin.
Note as well that the Cologne cited in the Ottoman version is no longer the real city, site of the translation of relics; it has become a remote and mysterious city (“in the descending part of the earth,” says one of these versions), which accords with the eschatological character of the legend. The final conquest would mark the end of history; therefore it was fitting to maintain a certain mystery, or at least a certain vagueness, about its identity. “What is the Red Apple?” inquires Baranyai Decsi János, a Hungarian poet of the late sixteenth century. “No one knows. . . . Only God and time will tell us.”56 When answers are provided, they always correspond to cities— with the exception of Cologne— that had been or remained objectives of conquest throughout Ottoman history: Buda, Vienna, or Rome. But they vary by author, and the same author may give several different answers. For Evliya Çelebi, the great traveler from the second half of the seventeenth century— and the Ottoman author who gave the largest place to that myth, perhaps because of the lack of progress in the Turkish conquest during his time— there were several “red apples.” In a passage from his voluminous travel narrative, he cites two of them. The first is the “Red Apple of Vienna” (Betch kızıl Elması), a city he personally visited in 1665, in the retinue of an Ottoman ambassador, and which he predicted would be the object of a second Muslim siege, which would force the Viennese to make peace. The second was the “Red Apple of Rome” (Irim papa kızıl Elması), which prophecies said would also be conquered by the Ottomans (book 7). At another place in his work (book 6), Evliya Çelebi lists six “Red Apples.” Four had already been taken by the Ottomans: Buda, Eger (Erlau), Esztergom, and Stonibelgrad (Székesfehérvár); the two remaining, Vienna and Rome, soon would be.57
In the investiture ceremonies of the new Ottoman sultans, one rite referred to the Red Apple and showed it exactly for what it was: the formulation of an ideology of conquest referring to notions that extended beyond Islam. The new sultan, returning to his palace from the sanctuary of Eyüp, where he had been girded with a symbolic saber in front of the sepulchre of the Standard Bearer of the Prophet, stopped outside the old barracks of the Janissaries, opposite the mosque of Chehzade. There the sovereign, supposedly thirsty from the long journey, received a refreshment from the colonel of the sixty- first company, namely, a cup of sorbet. The sultan brought the cup to his lips, then handed it to his saber-bearer, who returned it to the colonel filled with gold coins. The pādishāh then took his leave of the Janissaries, uttering these words, a pledge to lead them to new conquests: “We shall see each other again at the Red Apple” (Kızıl Elma’da görüshürüz).58
When it became known in (or indeed, when it returned to) the West, the Turkish legend of the Red Apple took on a modified and distorted form that inverted its meaning. It appears in the most famous and most widely diffused of the “Turkish prophecies,” published in 1545 by the Dalmatian Bartholomeus Georgievicz (Barthol Djurdjevic).59 He had been taken prisoner in Mohács in 1526 and remained in captivity among the Turks for about a decade. In one of the writings composed after his liberation, the Vaticinium Infidelium lingua turcica, he provides the text of a prophecy supposedly in force among the Turks, and he does so in the Turkish language, in a phonetic transcription, which confers a cachet of authenticity on it. He accompanies that text with a Latin translation and a short commentary. At the end of the prophecy, the pādishāh seizes the Red Apple, but his possession of it is very limited in time. It will last seven years if there is a reaction by the infidels; if that reaction takes some time to occur, it will last up to twelve years. But at the end of that time, “the Christian saber . . . will drive out the Turk.” In his commentary, Georgievicz rightly says that the Red Apple “designates some imperial city of great scope and renown” and that there is a difference of opinion about its identity. By contrast, the hypotheses he attributes to the protagonists in the controversy do not correspond exactly to the names cited in the Ottoman versions: “There are some,” he claims, “who judge that by that name the city of Constantinople is understood [on the contrary, it is omitted from the Ottoman versions]; especially since, in their books, it is read in two forms, namely, Kusul Elma and Urum Papai, one meaning ‘Red Apple,’ the other Greek ‘priest’ or ‘patriarch’; and especially since, in ancient times, all Greece was subject to the Roman Empire.”
There is no dearth of arguments allowing us to conclude that this Turkish prophecy is in reality a fake— though it is based in reality. It is only a pseudo- prophecy, probably invented to provide reassurance by announcing the final victory of the “Christian saber,” a view diametrically opposed to that of the legend in force among the Turks. It is undoubtedly because it was somewhat reassuring for Christendom that the text of the prediction met with such great success there: no fewer than twenty- three editions are identified for the period 1552–1600 and eighty- two for the period 1544–1686.60
The Idea of Europe or the Idea of Rome?
Was it Europe in the strict sense that the Ottomans sought to conquer, whether their aim was to integrate it into the well- guarded countries of Islam or to pluck the Red Apple there? To ask that question is to inquire into the role of the geographical notion of “Europe” in the Ottomans’ view of the world. But that role was very limited. The word Avrupa appeared belatedly in Turkish and was derived from the Western term. An earlier Arabic term, Urūfa, did exist, but it was rarely used. The Ottomans, like the medieval Arabs, were the heirs to Greek geography and, like their predecessors, they adopted not the division of the world into continents but the Ptolemaic system dividing it into seven “climates” (iqlim in Arabic), that is, into horizontal bands running between the north pole and the equator (see figure 1). Under the circumstances, belonging to a region in Europe was no more a determining criterion in their view than it had been for the Greeks and Romans. By contrast, a different notion, geopolitical in this case, was fundamental: that of Rūm, that is, the Roman Empire.61 But that empire, centered around the Mediterranean basin (mare nostrum), occupied three continents and was not limited to any one of them, though its capital was located in Europe. In classical Arab geography, the designation Rūm was given in particular to a part of Asia Minor, west of the line determined by the Taurus Mountains and the Upper Euphrates Valley, because that region constituted the borderland between Byzantium and the Arab empire, the gateway to the Roman countries. The term was retained to designate the Seljuk sultanate established over that zone in the twelfth century, with Konya as its capital: it was known as the Seljuk sultanate of Rūm. The Ottomans first styled themselves the successors of these Seljuks, but since their territory quickly surpassed that of their predecessors, it was not long before they played on the meaning of the designation “Sultan of Rūm” (very likely, this was already true for Bayezid I). The title certainly included the succession of the sultans of Konya but, much more broadly, also that of the Roman emperors. Although the center of Asia Minor was already named Rūm, and though the corresponding region would remain the province of Rūm (Rūm beylerbeyiliği, eyālet- i Rūm) throughout Ottoman history, the arrival of the Ottomans in Europe, beginning with Orhan’s reign, was still a defining phase for them— not because they changed continents at the time, but because the part of the Roman world into which they were penetrating was of a different nature. No longer a zone that had been Roman in a remote past, it was rather one that, this time, still was so, and where the imperial capital (Constantinople, that is, the “new Rome”) was still standing. That is what Süleyman Pasha expressed in the message he sent to his father, Sultan Orhan, when he established himself on the Isthmus of Gallipoli: “O happy one! Thanks to your wishes, we are making the conquest of the country of Rome!”62
For that new conquest, the Ottomans would also preserve the name “Rome,” but they would distinguish it from the center of Asia Minor by no longer speaking, as in the previous case, of the “province of Rome” (eyālet- i Rūm) but rather of the “country” of Rome (Rūmeli).
Although the Ottoman conquest of Europe was theoretically destined to be total, it turned out to be only partial. It therefore split Europe in two, following in great measure a more ancient fracture line that had divided the Roman Empire itself and then Christendom. To the part of Europe that they could not (yet?) wrest from the dār al- harb (which, for its part, would now consider itself Europe as a whole), the Ottomans generally gave the name “land of the Franks” (Frengistān). Depending on the context, the referent of the expression varied: for the most part, it applied to the Italian states, but it could also encompass France and even England and the Netherlands. It applied, in short, to the countries of Latin Europe with which the Ottomans had diplomatic and commercial relations. It was a peaceful or at least a neutral expression. By contrast, the peoples of Europe with whom the Ottomans were at war were never simply “Franks”: they were harbī infidels.