God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  In early 1518, Pope Leo, famous for his chubby cheeks and sagging chin, wrote again to European rulers—as he had done unsuccessfully after Selim’s victory over the Safavids at Chaldiran nearly four years earlier—inviting them to unify in a new Crusade against the Ottomans. He sent cardinals to England, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, seeking a five-year truce among the European powers that would allow them to direct all of their energies against the Ottoman threat. As in 1514, he found no willing allies. The European monarchs preferred to plan wars against one another than to consider a huge, expensive, and potentially suicidal confrontation with their daunting adversary to the east, which had only become more powerful during the intervening years. Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Francis I of France were rivals; the Italian Wars at the turn of the sixteenth century had killed thousands; succession conflicts roiled Castile, Scotland, and Bavaria; and most European rulers despised Leo—who treated the papacy as his to enjoy—and hoped eventually to invade and capture Italy for themselves. In stark contrast to the mosaic of squabbling polities that was Europe, the Ottoman Empire ruled across three continents as a unified juggernaut. As the pope wrote to one of his bishops, “While we waste time in negotiating and writing, the Turk spends it in getting to work and putting his plans into effect, and he will have taken some Christian port before we have the news that he has even set out!” Even though Leo would continue to renew his calls for Crusade until Selim’s death in 1520, European unity against what he termed “the diabolic Mohammedan rage” never materialized.

  This same political stasis, which prevented Europe from even considering military action against the Ottomans, is what allowed an upstart like Luther to flourish without the vestige of a response to what would become an existential challenge to Europe’s prevailing order. As the scholar Egil Grislis explains the contemporary political scene, “Instead of fearing the Turks, Luther had every reason to be grateful to them. It was the constant danger of a Turkish invasion that had kept the [Holy Roman] Emperor from taking severe measures against Luther’s reformation. The empire needed the help of the Evangelical princes in the war against the Turks and therefore had to postpone its plans to destroy Luther. From the point of view of realistic power politics, the safety of the Reformation depended upon the strength of the Turkish armies.” Europe’s territorial fracture only substantiated Luther’s charges about the Church’s corruption, and made his message about the need for reform more exigent. Without the looming threat of the Ottomans, the great sweep of the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible.

  IN 1516, AS SELIM was marching into Syria, the pontiff dispatched “an undistinguished Dominican” friar named Johann Tetzel to Germany to sell indulgences to support construction work on the imposingly ornate St. Peter’s Basilica. Tetzel’s pithy sales pitch became famous: “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” At the time, such purchases of absolution were almost de rigueur, but Martin Luther, then a thirty-three-year-old devout Augustinian monk and priest, started to voice extreme discomfort with the idea that blessings and forgiveness, which doctrine decreed were bestowed by God for a lifetime of good works, could be bought by a sinful human—or that sinful human’s descendant—in an instant. It further disturbed him that the worldly lavishness, if not debauchery, that he saw in St. Peter’s and throughout Europe’s churches was apparently being subsidized by the promised absolution of the spirits of individual parishioners.

  This entrenched practice would be at the center of Martin Luther’s writings against the Church. Interestingly, it, too, was fueled by the fight against Islam. The idea of indulgences arose in the twelfth century, at the height of the Crusades. Before Crusaders left their homes to battle Muslims in the Middle East, priests would guarantee them absolution of their sins in advance, in case they died while fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem. Instead of financial compensation, these promises of salvation served as the soldiers’ reward for their bravery in the Holy Land—thus establishing the principle that redemption could be won by something other than piety. From these origins, indulgences ballooned into a commodity that flooded the Church’s coffers with cash. By Luther’s time, individuals could simply pay the Church—no warring required—for the forgiveness of ordinary sins such as lying or lust. Like checking a price list in a butcher’s shop, a believer could find his sin on the ledger and pay the going rate to have it excised from his worldly and, he would hope, eternal life. Even setting aside the rise of the Ottomans, then, the sale of indulgences tied Islam to the birth of the Protestant Reformation.

  In 1517, Luther outlined his concerns about indulgences and other Church practices in a letter he sent to his bishop. This letter, which came to be known as the 95 Theses, is the familiar story of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Quickly translated from Latin into German and printed on one of the earliest printing presses in Europe, it was distributed widely across Germany. (It was almost certainly never posted on the door of the church of Wittenberg, as is commonly thought.) Within a month, Luther’s strident critique of Leo and the Catholic Church had been further translated from German into several other European languages and was forging its way across the continent, creating nothing less than a theological tempest.

  One of Luther’s most blistering denunciations of the Church centered on Pope Leo’s calls for a new Crusade. In large measure because of its long association with indulgences, Luther viewed the Church’s history of Crusading as part of Catholicism’s web of corruption and its vile obsession with worldly things. A focus on warfare betrayed an obsession with flesh rather than soul, with this world rather than the next. The Church had often waged Crusades, he observed, for no other reason than to make money, building its campaigns for holy war on foundations of false threats and greed rather than a pious desire to defend the faith and flock. Luther expressed his opposition to Europe’s holy wars in the theological terms most familiar to him: “The ‘big wheels’ of the church, now dream of nothing else than war against the Turk. They want to fight, not against iniquities, but against the lash of iniquity and thus they would oppose God who says that through that lash he himself punishes us for our iniquities because we do not punish ourselves for them.” The Ottomans, in Luther’s view, were God’s “lash of iniquity,” which he used to punish Christendom for its sins—sins that Church leaders willfully ignored, even encouraged, by allowing absolution to be so cheaply bought.

  Martin Luther

  Thus, even though Luther clearly regarded the Ottomans as evil—God, he explained, sometimes “punished pious people by evil men”—at that moment the Ottomans, in his formulation, represented Christians’ “best helpers.” They—unwittingly—motivated Christians to improve and refine their spiritual lives; in their absence, God would have used some other calamity as his instrument. Christians themselves—not the Ottomans—were Christianity’s true problem. Christians should therefore recognize and willingly accept the challenging opportunity God offered them in the shape of the Ottoman threat. Only if the Church overcame its sins would God drop the Ottoman lash.

  “Since the devil is a spirit, he cannot be overcome with armor, rifle, horse,” wrote Luther, in a criticism of the pope’s call for Crusade. Only spirit could overcome spirit. And, “since the Turk is the wrathful rod of our Lord God and the servant of the raging devil, it is necessary first of all to overcome the devil himself, the Lord of the Turks, and thus to take the rod out of God’s hand. Without the devil’s help and God’s support the Turk will remain alone in his power.” The way to establish peace and security, then, as Luther saw it, was not war against the Ottomans but a struggle within Christendom against its own sins. If Europe’s Christians, each and every one, cleansed themselves of sin, God would no longer need the whip of the Ottomans to chastise them, and the Muslim empire would therefore dissolve from the earth, allowing a purified Christendom to triumph.

  The space the Ottomans opened up in Europe by weakening the Catholi
c Church thus allowed individual Christians to flourish in their personal faith and Luther to extend the reach of his teachings. Islam, in Luther’s view, served Christianity in threatening it. For the true believer, Islam was a tool which could be used to root out the corruption in Catholicism.

  LUTHER RESERVED HIS MOST virulent attacks for Pope Leo himself. “In the East rules the Beast,” he offered, “in the West the False Prophet.” Both figures presaged the end-times. “After the Turks,” Luther suggested, “the Last Judgement follows quickly.”

  A state, a religion, a community, will always face external enemies; standing up to the heathens who persecuted Christianity from without was of course necessary and laudable. More sinister, because more difficult to recognize, was the enemy inside the gates—the one who looked like you, the one you knew, your own religious kin. Thus, the bankrupt pope always proved far more dangerous than the sultan. As Egil Grislis puts it, quoting Luther, “The Turk is the ‘black devil,’ rude and superficial, incapable of deceiving either faith or reason, ‘who like a heathen persecutes Christianity from without.’ The pope, by contrast, is ‘the subtle, beautiful, hypocritical devil who sits within Christianity and retains the Holy Scripture, baptism, sacrament, the keys, catechism, marriage.’ ” As the Safavids were to the Ottomans, the deadliest foe was one’s brother in faith, who seemed to act like you, even pray like you, but whose tenets were corrupted by corrosive wickedness and the desire for earthly power.

  Instead of upholding the right and good of the faith, Luther insisted, the hypocritical Pope Leo had allowed evil to infect the Church. In the gloomy halls of the Vatican, the Catholic elite pretended to be pious and pure while engaging in one abomination after another. This failure of the pope’s spirit, Luther felt, explained the Catholic body politic’s weakness against the Ottomans. “The pope kills the soul,” he wrote, “while the Turk can only destroy the body.” Assigning Islam to the bodily, and hence fleeting, realm of this world, Luther in this passage partakes of the long Christian obsession with the supposedly lecherous sexuality of Muhammad—that “due to his lust, whatever he speaks or does is flesh, flesh, flesh”—and then uses Islam’s asserted base corporeality to again castigate the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church: “The coarse and filthy Muḥammad takes all women and therefore has no wife. The chaste pope does not take any wife and yet has all women.”

  This core conceptual dyad of body and soul, flesh and spirit, also shaped one of Luther’s other central fixations with Islam—the fate of European Christians captured by the Ottomans. He erroneously believed that the Ottomans wanted to forcibly convert all Christians to Islam—which, as we have seen, was never the case. Luther either did not know or did not care that the empire’s population had become majority-Muslim only in 1517, after over two centuries of being a majority-Christian society. A Christian living happily, even willingly, under Muslim rule must have been inconceivable for him. He thus ignored Ottoman Christians—the various Orthodox denominations, Armenians, Chaldeans, and others living in the Balkans and the Middle East—in his thinking about Christianity in the empire.

  There were two classes of European Christians in the Ottoman Empire that primarily concerned Luther: the Christian boys of the devşirme who had been captured in the Balkans and forcibly converted to Islam, then given every luxury while being groomed for the upper echelons of the imperial military; and Christians seized as slaves in warfare or through piracy who remained unfree, received no privileges, and represented a ready source of labor, mostly as oarsmen in war galleys.

  The phenomenon of the devşirme raised particularly vexing concerns for some Europeans and presented Luther with a theological puzzle. If a European soldier killed an Ottoman soldier of devşirme origins, was he in fact killing one of Christendom’s own? Even if they presented themselves as outwardly Muslim to survive, perhaps some of these Ottoman soldiers remained true Christians in their souls (an interesting parallel to Christian understandings of Jewish and Muslim conversion during the Inquisition). Luther assuaged such fears by insisting that even if, as a survival tactic, a Christian supposedly converted to Islam in flesh alone—itself a proposition of dubious possibility, in a Catholic worldview—taking up arms against true Christians represented the complete corruption of the soul and forever sealed the former Christian’s fate in hell.

  Luther urged those other European Christians seized by the Ottomans—combatants or civilians captured in war, never converted, and condemned to menial labor—to view their enslavement as God’s rod of punishment, which they should willingly accept as a means of spiritual improvement. The slave should, in Luther’s words, “as faithfully and diligently as possible, serve his lord to whom he has been sold, regardless of the fact that you are a Christian and your lord a heathen or a Turk.” The Ottoman master could torture the body, rape, and break bones, but as long as the soul within that accursed body remained pure and faithful, the Ottoman devil would always lose. Such reasoning also applied to the other major class of Christian slaves in the Ottoman Empire, European women in Ottoman harems. “If the married women have been led away to Turkey, and must live with other men both as to bed and board,” Luther wrote, “they must patiently submit and suffer for the sake of Christ, and for this reason not despair, as if they were damned. The soul can do nothing about what the enemy does to the body.” In fact, the pain inflicted on the body would help to cleanse the believer’s soul. In Luther’s theology—and later, as one of the core tenets of Protestantism—worldly poverty led to heavenly riches. Thus, the converted Christian soldiers of the devşirme who were comparatively privileged on earth would deservedly receive everlasting damnation, while lowly Christian galley slaves and unfree concubines could, by piously accepting their suffering, earn eternal life.

  IN HIS COPIOUS WORKS on the Ottomans and Islam generally, Luther developed a much more nuanced view of Muslims than has generally been appreciated. Indeed, he recognized several meaningful affinities between his own evolving philosophy and Islam. Perhaps the most powerful derived from his and Islam’s shared commitment to iconoclasm. Of Muslims, he wrote, “They reject all images and pictures, and render homage to God alone.” He had greater respect for Islam’s singular focus on the “one only God” and its emphasis on the spirit of worship than he had for Catholicism’s obsession with paintings, gilded decoration, and the lavish accoutrements of its clerical elite.

  Luther saw a further formal similarity between his eventual Protestantism and Islam in their mutual anathema to strict ecclesiastical hierarchy. Religious bureaucracies, he believed, bred the venality, bribery, and political intrigue that so plagued the Catholic Church. Even more nefarious, averred Luther, was the Church’s insistence on acting as a mediator in the relationship between the individual believer and God. The Church’s officially sanctioned explanations of God’s message prevented people from developing a direct relationship with the divine, prevented them from personally knowing God. Luther believed that each reader or hearer of scripture had the capacity—indeed, the obligation—to interpret God’s word personally. No human held a monopoly over the interpretation of God’s message, he contended, and therefore no human should command authority over another in his spiritual communion with God.

  In this regard, Luther saw much to admire in Islam. Neither Protestantism nor Islam upholds a figure such as a pope or a body like the council of bishops; the institutions of those faiths exist to aid the believer in his life of piety and prayer, not to direct it. In Islam, even though learned men and respected theologians offer elucidations of the Qur’an, every individual is free to deduce from the text and other authoritative sources whatever he or she understands to be the truth. Obviously, not everything is deemed acceptable textual exegesis—and some readings are judged incorrect or sinful by the majority of Muslims. Still, like Protestantism, Islam upholds the ideal of freedom of individual interpretation, and no religious authority outlaws divergent readings of sacred texts. Indeed, such openness to, and even support of, differenti
al analyses of the Islamic canon explains the extensive disagreements and contradictory points of view that permeate the voluminous writings of the tradition. In both Protestantism and Islam, doctrine exists to support interpretation—not the reverse, as in Catholicism.

  Luther’s assessments of the Ottomans and Islam—both positive and negative—thus ultimately reinforced his views about the irreparable error into which the Catholic Church had fallen, and his personal mission of reform. Even as the Ottomans persisted in capturing, converting, and killing European Christians, Luther saw the papacy as Christianity’s greatest enemy, the insidious channel of corruption that had allowed the evil of the Ottomans to flourish in the first place.