This period, marked as it was by relatively peaceful relations between East and West, the flourishing of trade, and a general attitude of indifference, was soon to be punctuated by a new enemy: the rising Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans
Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, turned against Mongol rule in the late thirteenth century and began a period of conquest. In the century that followed, Ottoman armies expanded into the eastern Mediterranean region and the Balkans. Just as during the early conquests of the Muslim armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, some people in Christian states welcomed the Turks in order to escape religious persecution, this time at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Ottoman policy of “live and let live” stood in contrast to the intolerance that Orthodox Christians and other religious minorities faced under the Church. Balkan peasants captured this mood with the saying “Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope.”20
In 1453 the Ottomans captured Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and brought an end to Christian rule in the East. They now turned their attention to other parts of Europe, conquering Belgrade in 1523. These incursions deep into Europe brought the new Muslim enemy into focus. However, this time the enemy was viewed in secular terms and seen as a political rather than a religious threat (even though the term “Turk” became synonymous with Muslim). Two periods followed: the first, a period of admiration for the new Ottoman enemies, who were seen as a great European power; the second, a complete reversal of this mood, as the Ottomans began a period of decline relative to Europe.
Phase One: Contradictory Views of the Ottomans
The new Muslim enemy was now seen as part of Europe rather than as an outsider. The threat it posed to its neighbors was seen not as a religious one; rather, it was the threat represented by a powerful, arguably the most powerful, European state. Indeed, the Turks were by and large considered to be ethnically European. One theory suggested that they were, like the French and the Italians, descendants of the Trojans.21 This theory bears some semblance to the Abraham-Hagar story in that Muslims are seen as a part of Europe’s history; even while they are enemies, they are still a part of the family, so to speak.
Such Ottoman European genealogies were accepted by some and rejected by others. Nevertheless, various European figures made alliances with the Ottomans. A French king allied himself with a Turkish sultan against the Habsburg Empire; the Pope similarly forged an alliance opposing the Habsburg emperor’s plans for a crusade against the Ottomans.22 Jews fleeing Europe, particularly after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, found a home in the Ottoman Empire. This was true too of Protestants and other dissident Christians seeking to escape Catholic persecution. In short, the diversity that marked al-Andalus found its reflection in the Ottoman territories; Christians and Jews not only lived in an atmosphere of tolerance but also experienced prosperity.
Europe, by contrast, was going through a bitter and violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The first half of the sixteenth century saw the emergence of the Reformation. This internal dissent within Christianity created a climate where Islam came to be seen as yet another schism, albeit a dangerous one. Thus, even while Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, had negative things to say about Islam, he viewed the Vatican as the greater enemy. For Luther, only after the defeat of Catholicism could Islam be beaten.23 Defenders of Catholicism attacked Protestantism by comparing it to Islam, in some instances seeing it as worse than Islam. Along the way, the Ottomans became involved in this struggle on the side of the Protestants against their common enemy, the Habsburgs, who were the key defenders of Catholicism.
The image of the Ottomans in this period was contradictory. On the one hand, in popular literature the Ottomans were depicted as cruel and violent, in ways that drew on earlier caricatures of Muslims; there was also a morbid fascination with the sexual lives of the Turks and intense curiosity about the harem. On the other hand, however, among those who understood the Ottoman system of administration, there was appreciation for its efficiency as well as the overall grandeur of the empire.
The sixteenth century also saw the emergence of some of the first studies of the Orient to adopt a more open-minded and disinterested tone. At the broader level, the Renaissance led to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, marking a shift to studying the natural world though the use of empirical and scientific methods (as opposed to religious ones). This would impact how Islam was studied in various newly constituted Oriental centers in Paris, Oxford, and Rome. This “more objective understanding of the Middle East,” Rodinson explains, arose from factors such as “geographical proximity, close political relations, increasing economic interactions, [and] the growing number of travelers and missionaries who journeyed to the East.”24
However, as the Ottoman Empire started to decline, particularly after its defeat in Vienna in 1683, the attitude of admiration and even of tolerance and neutrality it had enjoyed dissipated.
Phase Two: Oriental Despotism
During the seventeenth century, as the Ottoman Empire began to lose its military superiority over Europe, European travelers to Ottoman lands found more to criticize than to respect. The Turks, Zachary Lockman writes, were now depicted as “boorish, ignorant, dishonorable, immoral, ineffectual, corrupt and irrational. The older image of the Ottoman state as an efficient, just, virtuous and tolerant meritocracy faded away, to be replaced by a depiction of that state as corrupt, oppressive and brutal.”25 In part, this was accurate: the Ottoman system had in fact seen a decline, as described by its own chroniclers.
But Europe’s contempt toward the East had more to do with its new image of itself. European thinkers during and after the Renaissance imagined their history as an unbroken line of continuity from ancient Greece and Rome to the present—in the process exorcising the Islamic history of Europe. Europe now imagined itself as superior, the heir to the democratic political systems of the Greeks and Romans, and therefore very different from the despotic regimes that it now saw as characterizing the East. In contrast to the democratic West, the Ottomans came to be seen as the manifestation of “Asian despotism.” Ottoman integration into Europe was therefore short-lived, and the Muslim enemy again became Europe’s “other.”
The French writer Montesquieu, writing in 1748, explained that Asia was destined to be despotic because of the way its hot climate affected the temperaments of its people. He argued that in cooler regions such as Europe the people tended to be active and therefore braver, whereas in the warmer climates of Asia the people were inactive and therefore servile and effeminate.26 It followed from this that democracy was more at home in the former, while the servile people of the East were capable only of despotism. While Montesquieu’s bizarre and ridiculous theory is long out of style, the notion of “Oriental despotism” and the belief that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are best suited to dictatorships has endured.
The origin of this myth is based in Europe’s transformation and its subsequent rise to global dominance. Up until 1500 or so, Europe was a marginal player on the world stage relative to other great powers (such as the Ottomans, Chinese, and Indians). It overcame its backwardness thanks in no small part to the rise of capitalism. The question of the origins of capitalism is a complex and hotly debated issue, and I will not discuss it here. For our purposes,