German Orientalism in the Age of Confessional Consolidation: Jacob Andreae's Thirteen Sermons on the Turk, 1568

In 1566, Ottoman armies penetrated the Holy Roman Empire, reaching the fortress of Szigetvár in a campaign to conquer that part of Hungary still under Habsburg control after 1533.¹ Numerous reports from Nuremberg, a traditional center of German printing for information on "the Turk,"² recounted massacres, burnings, and the constant advance of the armies under the flags of Suleiman the Magnificent himself.³ Abandoned corpses on the battlefields stank so badly that they periodically forced even the Turks to retreat.⁴ The Ottoman practice of burning the food of resistant communities occasioned anxious comment in an age of scarcity; moreover, the Turks ruthlessly eviscerated local children.⁵ Suleiman executed generals who failed to achieve military objectives, which shocked contemporary German reporters.⁶ After a sixteen-day siege, Ottoman armies 100,000 strong took sparsely defended Szigetvár (recently renovated by the Italian architect Mirandola) with its 2,500 men under the command of Miklós Zrinyi. Forced to the innermost tower of the bastion on 5 September, Zrinyi ordered a hopeless charge on the assailers rather than surrender. He survived bullet wounds and an arrow to the head—until the Janissaries brought him to their Aga for execution. The Ottoman advance ended at Szigetvár: Suleiman died in his tent during the battle, some said of a stroke brought on by frustration with the slow progress of the siege. Overextended, the Ottoman armies retreated. Nonetheless, the Ottoman Empire held Szigetvár until 1664.⁷

In 1568, Jacob Andreae (1528-90) commented on these events to his congregation at the Universitätskirche St. Georg (now the Stiftskirche) in Tübingen, preaching a series of sermons through Lent and into Eastertide and publishing them in a quarto volume. From Andreae's viewpoint, the Ottoman advance augured more than a defensive crisis, the acute phase of which had indeed ended by 1568.⁸ He feared that Islam's proximity threatened his congregation's very souls. To enlighten his audience about this threat, Andreae transmitted ostensibly reliable information intended to instruct them about Islam as a religion beyond general perceptions of Turkish rapacity. By constructing knowledge about the Turks, Andreae participated in the intellectual tradition of Orientalism. This concept, now inseparably associated with Edward Said's influential book, defines the Orient as "an idea [with] a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West." Said proposed a consistency in such ideas about the Orient independent of their correspondence to the "real" Orient.⁹

Theoretical work so seminal as to be read constantly over a quarter-century must nonetheless occasionally show its age. Said's focus on post-eighteenth-century European colonial powers relegated constructions of Islam dating from the genesis of the Muslim-Christian encounter to the status of a prelude to imperialist attitudes, without considering in detail the characteristics of local orientalisms or the contemporary relevance of their outcomes.¹⁰ Luther is named as the cultural successor of Bede.¹¹ Said groups "Christians" together, ignoring the effect of political relationships between Catholics and Protestants on the problem of Islam for the Holy Roman Empire. To re-examine this moment in Said's argument, the first part of this essay explores the medieval tradition (as mediated by Andreae) in dialogue with Said's political and cultural preconditions for Orientalism. Andreae's construction of Islam for sixteenth-century Lutherans both relied on and reformulated older knowledge about the Turks. The reconditioning of medieval constructions of Islam in Lutheran Germany produced one novelty: an apocalyptic emphasis.¹²

The religious ideas that fostered apocalyptic expectations, however, did not emerge spontaneously or from a vacuum. In order to understand Andreae's sermons, then, it will be necessary to consider their political and intellectual contexts. The perceived Central European balance of power, debates over defense against the Turks in the Reichstag, and the Reformation reception of medieval knowledge of the Turks suggest that early modern German Orientalism depended on a series of particular local contexts and relationships.¹³ Andreae's...