From the end of the 15th century on,
the Ottomans took the place
that the Muslims in general and the Moors on the Iberian
Peninsula in particular, have occupied since the high Middle Ages.
Since the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire
after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans appear
at the head of the Muslim territories
as the great enemy to be beaten by Christianity.
The control of the Christian holy places, their conquests
in European territory, their emerging dominance
in the Eastern Mediterranean, together with the already
consolidated image of the Muslims in the European
imaginary, made the Ottoman Empire its rulers and its soldiers
the target for the creation of negative and pejorative images
throughout Europe.
Before the fall of Constantinople
Conquest by Sultan Mehmet in 1453,
the Ottomans were not depicted as very aggressive characters.
But as the 16th century arrived,
the descriptions became more and more accurate.
The interest in learning about this new Islamic power that emerged
in eastern Mediterranean gave rise to a large number of works
that attented to explain the origin and history of the Ottomans.
In the absence of classical reference to them legends,
and some fanciful etymologies
are used to build portraits of the rulers and their peoples.
Perhaps the first thing this to stand out is that generally
the authors did not insist on ethnographic differences
between the Turks and other Islamic peoples.
Turks are those who obey the Sultan,
although different people are included under that name,
such as converts to Islam (renegades or uluj).
As Miguel Angel de Bunes shows the very ethnocentrism of the Turks
despising the conquered or dominated peoples,
including the Arabs, helps to give this impression.
Only those who know more directly North Africa or other Arab countries
are able to establish distinctions between them
and the native population
or, in the case of Spain, between them, the Maghrebis and the Moriscos
Ottoman sultans, especially those of the 16th century,
are portrayed as powerful and fearsome monarchs
on whose will many lives depend.
Another general element that can be extracted
from the negative descriptions of the Ottomans, their origin
and their customs is the character of divine punishment for sins,
but actions and forgetfulness of the feith of the eastern Christians.
According to Western beliefs, God send the Turks to Christendom,
especially Western Christianity, to reflect their defects
political, ethical and religious back to them
so that they can reform themselves and live a more virtuous life.
This Erasmian vision characterizes
a considerable number of works on the Ottoman Empire. When praise
or a positive judgment is issued about Turks or their society,
it is not that a pro-Ottoman vision is making its way,
but rather that an attempt is made to contrast those traits
with the defects of Christian societies, defects
that must be erased.
This basic message is that is
if the practitioners of a religion as crude as Islam
can have appreciable traits, a quick justice,
the praise of religion, obedience to the ruler, respect for the women...
Christians should try much harder to stand out in those same traits.
A third
global element that characterizes Turks, according to these works,
deserves to be highlighted: their propensity and taste for violence.
If, on the one hand the Ottoman soldiers, especially the feared
Janissaries, are tough warriors raised in military discipline,
the Ottomans as master of captives and slaves
are all really harsh with their Christian prisioners.
The fact that several of these accounts come from ex captives
or from religious redeemers in captives lands, turns
their accounts as catalogs of horrific forms of torture
and death of Christians, in which there can be no room
for a positive even neutral feature.
The Turks, above the Arabs, indulge in extreme violence
with Christians fulfilling this way their cruel natural instincts.
It is not surprising
then, that adjectives and negative description of the Turks
are organized around this three general axis of the Ottoman image
in European culture.
As Jose María PErceval
has shown both in a vertical axis of otherness
and in a horizontal one of space,
The Ottomans are burdened with all the pejorative meanings
that the Christians reject. In this way,
they are primitive and ignorant, compared to the cultivated Christian.
Their ignorance made the Turks convert to Islam
a religion that is very easy to follow and also allows them
to practice their old vices. Following ancient anti-Islamic reasoning
the Ottoman elites only pretend to belong to Islam
in order to maintain their privileges.
Although they are very formal in the fulfillment
of their rites and in maintaining a serious attitude,
they do not allow blasphemy unlike Christians
and they also respect the holy places, as
several authors point out, they
the Turks, are also vicious boasting about it as well.
Although they are greedy and
cruel, the vices that Christian authors stand out the most from the Turks
are their unbrdiled taste for alcohol and especially their tendency
to sodomy which have infected the Arabs.
Echoing the Ottoman institution of devçirme,
of levies of children
and adolescents in Ottoman territories to serve the sultan,
the horrified authors recount how the Ottomans and also renegades
corsairs have several of these adolescents at their expense,
pampering and dressed, only to satisfy
their degenerated sexual desires. For Christians
it is a kind of upside-down moral world
that is described to draw attention to the hardships
that people often go through the Ottoman rule.
Of course, it must be assumed that in all these descriptions,
there is a good percentage of second-hand passages,
translated foreign literature and rumors and reports of events
that run throughout the European continent.
In reality, not too many authors had direct contact with the Ottomans
to be able to offer more nuanced portraits.
The Ottomans, in the eyes of Spanish, French or Flemish
writers and painters have as their central characteristic
that they are the main and most feared enemies of Christianity
and, as such, their depiction is uniform.
This could explain facts such as that overestimation
of the Turkish threat in the war of the Apujarrass or that
in some peculiar representations of that war in the Alpujarras,
such as Francisco Heylan's engravings, the Morisco rebels appear
represented as Turkish soldiers as Borja Franco and Francisco Moreno
have analyzed. For the witnesses of their rule
be their captives, religious or diplomatic,
some features of the Ottomans that may seem
surprising, such as respect for the practice
of Christian worship or a certain balance in the administration of
justice,
do not hide the fact that we are always before
the anti-Christian enemy par excellence.