The Turks in Protestant and Catholic Depictions from the Beginning of the Reformation to the Peace of Augsburg (1517-1555) 

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was followed by an intense public debate in Christian Europe that made use of a vast variety of different forms of discourse, media and literary genres. This was particularly the case in the German-speaking world, where the Ottoman victory in Hungary (1526) and the siege of Vienna (1529) made the threat of Turkish conquest of Christian Europe very real. These events occurred during a time when the Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, had gained significant momentum.

Usual treatment of the topic focuses on the depictions of the Ottomans themselves. My dissertation for the first time looks beyond this and shows how these depictions were instrumentalized in a Christian religious discourse. Religious partisans on both sides not only used their depiction of the Turks in order to define themselves as Christians (in contrast to non-Christians) and stress Christian values and doctrines, but also in order to define members of the rival Christian confession as un-Christian by associating them with the Turks. Moreover, the depictions served to delineate what their authors conceived as defining doctrines of their respective confessions.

In the first chapter, I explain the provenance of my primary source material. It consists of scholarly and religious treatises, chronicles and travelogues, which were usually written with an elite literate audience in mind. Other sources I discuss, such as sermons, church and popular songs, were more accessible to an illiterate or semi-literate audience. Many of my sources, most of which I gathered during field research in Germany, have heretofore not been examined in the scholarly literature.

My second chapter outlines the history of contact between the Ottoman Empire and the main European powers. Far from being shunned by European rulers, the Ottoman sultan was an often sought-after ally in the European power struggles, notwithstanding the official anti-Turkish rhetoric. The latter part of the chapter explains how the struggles over issues of faith and religious practice as well as political power within the Holy Roman Empire provided an environment in which the notion of a Turkish threat could be instrumentalized in the confessional discourse.

In the third chapter, I illustrate how different definitions of alterity in the 16^th century were adapted to the requirements of confessional debate. First, I show how the depiction of the Ottomans fits in with existing notions of otherness related to different religious and ethnic groups. Second, I examine how Catholics and Lutherans in Reformation Germany described each other outside the Turkish context, highlighting accusations of hereticism, treason, foreign oppression and expectations of an imminent judgment day.

My fourth chapter shows the evolution of pre-Reformation depictions of the Turks, identifying the topoi of cruelty, promiscuousness, and deceitfulness. Together with a handful of medieval treatises on Islam, these representations form the sources from which 16^th-century authors drew in their writings.

How the depictions of Turks were employed in the context of the confessional discourse between the Lutherans and the Catholics is the subject of my fifth chapter. My discussion shows that Reformation-era discourse about the Turks was not merely a result of the proximity and success of the Ottoman forces, but also a function of their utility in the discourse between Lutheran and Catholic writers. Discussing the religion of the Turks and the teachings of the confessional rival in correlation served to delineate differences between the two Christian groups.

My dissertation shows that, far from merely representing the quintessential Other in early modern Germany, the Turks were used as a point of reference in the confessional conflicts of the time that served to demarcate the two large religious factions in Germany from one another and to emphasize points of doctrine and religious practice.