Enemy Enticements: A Habsburg Artist in Süleyman's Capital City

Abstract

Throughout the early modern era, the confrontation and conflict with the Ottoman Empire shaped notions of Europe as a place as well as emerging European identities. This said, trade and other cross-cultural encounters often smoothed conflicts between the Muslim-majority Ottoman realms and the Christian realms of Europe. The standard-bearers of the military confrontation with the Ottoman empire were the Habsburgs, based on their stature and obligations as Holy Roman Emperors, as well as on their dynastic territorial interests. From the early sixteenth century onward, the Spanish Habsburgs embraced this role as defenders of the faith. Spanish perception of the Ottomans and their Islamic allies, generalized as “Turks,” was informed by the historical memories of Christian-Muslim clashes during the Reconquista, followed by the persecution and eventual expulsion of the Moriscos (ca. 1568-1609). Other Europeans, unburdened by the Habsburg self-conception as Christendom’s line of defense against Islam in Europe, proposed less bellicose conceptions of the Turks. At times, those attitudes took on an almost friendly character, at least on the level of everyday experience, such as commercial and diplomatic interaction. England under the Tudors, for instance, had close connections with Saadi Morocco, the two realms being united in their common aim of curbing the Spanish in the last decades of the sixteenth century. France, for its part, maintained a direct military alliance with Constantinople for a large part of the century, motivated by a shared rivalry with the Holy Roman Empire. Aware as they were of these cases of negotiation or accommodation, the Habsburgs and their allies viewed themselves as the real bulwark against the Ottoman Turks and their Muslim client states.