Western Attitudes Toward Islam in the Fourteenth Through Sixteenth Centuries

Islam in the 14th-16th Centuries

With the rapid rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, European attitudes toward Islam would change vastly. We can see this illustrated in the differing attitudes toward Islam which are expressed by William of Adam, in his strange early-fourteenth century strategy pamphlet emphasizing the total European defeat of the Saracens, and Martin Luther, in his sixteenth century publications offering policy recommendations toward the Islamic power to the southeast. William of Adam wrote at the time when the Ottoman Empire was barely yet a phenomenon -- with his tract How To Defeat The Saracens dating to approximately 1317, this was a point in time when the Ottomans had barely yet made inroads against the Byzantine Empire that was still standing. By the time of Luther's central pamphlet on Muslim policy, the 1529 publication On the War Against the Turk, the Ottoman Empire was posing a serious threat to continental Europe -- this was the year of the Siege of Vienna, which was ultimately the high-water-mark of Ottoman incursion into central Europe. In some sense, the differing strategies recommended by these two men -- both Christian religious functionaries -- indicates the fundamental difference in Western attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire, purely based on external estimates of its strength.

William of Adam writes essentially at a pre-Ottoman moment in Christian-Muslim relations. Scholars of his 1317 tract note that the basic occasion prompting his theoretical musings was the 1291 siege of Acre, in which the Crusader-controlled peninsular city on the northernmost coast of present-day Israel -- which had been held for the past hundred years, having been seized in 1191 during the Third Crusade. This had represented a significant Christian and Crusader presence in the Holy Land, and was largely maintained due to the strategic advantages of Acre itself -- with walls and battlements defending the small stubby peninsula, the city was able to receive reinforcement via the Mediterranean, while defending itself against the larger Muslim presence beyond the walls. However it was always the case that a serious attack on the Crusader base at Acre could easily have been taken -- the issue was that it took a century for a Muslim polity, in this case the Mamluk Sultanate based in Egypt, to take enough of an interest to force the Christians out. Arguably this was a phenomenon that required the unusual status of the Mamluks, who were essentially a permanent warrior class that had essentially seized political control -- as such their raison d'etre was warcraft, and the Crusader stronghold at Acre was a sitting duck for their campaign. Yet the very specific historical moment at which William of Adam was composing his text is indicated by his advice for future Crusaders in terms of directly besieging Constantinople: William's notion is that Byzantine Constantinople was enabling a policy of Christian-Muslim coexistence in the area which essentially ceded the whole of the Holy Land to Islamic control. What is noteworthy is, of course, that Constantinople was still a nominally Christian (although Eastern Orthodox) city in 1317: it would not fall to the Ottomans until 1453, but it would ultimately become the capital city of the Ottoman Empire for the next four-hundred-plus years of the Ottoman Empire's existence.

William of Adam's basic premise, however, is that it was the economic life of the Mediterranean which permitted Islam to flourish. His plan for dealing with Muslims was therefore analogous to modern-day economic sanctions. William suggested a ban on trade with the Indian subcontinent, as these trade routes essentially sustained the Muslim states of the southern Mediterranean, including the Mamluk Sultanate that held Egypt in this time period. As William's translator informs us, he had spent time in the Red Sea area, and thus his rather detailed proposal for a naval blockade of the region to choke the trade between Egypt and India is based on specific strategic observations, and is probably a sound idea -- since overall his notion of a revived Crusade hinges on the belief that such a Crusade would be more successful if the territories were first weakened with crippling economic sanctions. (This was essentially the same policy recommended by the Bush administration in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, believing that the invasion would be a cakewalk after over a decade of economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime: it just goes to show that Crusades are rarely as easy as strategic theorists imagine beforehand.) William of Adam then suggested a policy of religious excommunication of Christian merchants and sailors who were willing to do business with Muslims -- which would have excommunicated Marco Polo among others, but which would have additionally starved off the economic vitality of the Middle East which allowed it to maintain military strength during previous Crusades. Ultimately, however, William's plan never came to fruition: he did not seem to comprehend that, at the time he was proposing this bold and detailed strategy, the Crusades were fundamentally over.