Crusading Ideas and Fear of the Turks in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The volume considers the plurality and diversity of crusading ideas in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern epoch and sheds light on the actors and groups of actors who conceived these. The guiding question is how these conceptions were related to each other and in what regards they were distinct. The “crusade” is not primarily understood as an essentialist category or as a distinct type of conflict, but rather as an attribution that could serve different argumentative functions depending on context and author – for example in the context of identity construction, representation of power, raising of status or the formation of alliances. This reconceptualization enables a comparative analysis of “Crusading Ideas” and “Fear of the Turks” as close but distinct leading categories of late medieval and Early Modern European thinking about the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim powers in the Mediterranean. The inclusion of non-Catholic case studies also shows that crusading ideas in this sense transcended Catholic Europe and should therefore be regarded as part of common and partly even transconfessional spaces of communication.