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also sent shockwaves through Europe as it seemed that the Islamic forces of
the Turk were on the verge of invading the rest of the continent. Three years
later in 1529, Suleiman laid siege to Vienna, and it seemed to many that Eu-
ropean capitulation to an Islamic invasion was inevitable. Europe had been
weakened and divided by the religious disputes of the Reformation, and a
common fear was expressed in the literature of the time that Europe was about
to turn Muslim.
As it happened, the siege of Vienna was the pinnacle of the Ottoman
advance westwards, and despite another attempt in 1532, Suleiman’s armies
were resisted and turned their attention elsewhere. Throughout the 1520s, the
Turkish threat paradoxically helped the spread of the Reformation, because it
preoccupied the attention of Charles V, and it was not until the Ottomans had
begun to retreat around the turn of the decade, that he was able to turn his
attention again to resisting the growth of the evangelical movement, by be-
latedly implementing the Edict of Worms in the late 1520s. Nonetheless, the
fear of Islamic takeover was very real in Europe during the decade in which the
Reformation took hold. There was a very live question as to whether a new
crusade needed to be launched against the Islamic threat, and whether a milit-
ary or diplomatic solutions should be sought.
Luther himself expressed on a number of occasions his own slightly
resigned sense that it is quite possible that Europe’s future was to Islamic. He
expresses a grudging admiration for Islam, due to its disciplined and ordered
piety, and the fervency of its adherents, even if he does see it as ultimately de-
structive of the three estates of the church, temporal government, and mar-
riage and the family. He was pessimistic about the resilience of European
Christianity, and its ability to survive a hostile takeover by Islam, due to its
flabby spiritual state, weakened as he saw it, by centuries of papal teaching, and
theological and pastoral neglect. Partly because of this pessimism, he backed a
proposal for a translation of the Qu’ran into Latin by Thomas Bibliander in
1542, not of course so that Islam could spread in Europe, but so that Christian
scholars would better refute Islamic claims.
In 1529, as the Ottomans were laying siege to Vienna, Luther wrote a
brief treatise entitled ‘On War against the Turk’. He responded to calls for a
Christian army to defeat the Turks militarily with the argument that the Pope
certainly should not be engaged in such a venture, and that if Charles V were to
do so, he should do it firmly in his capacity as Emperor, rather than in his ca-
pacity as a Christian. There should be no Crusade against Islam in the name of
Christianity. This of course is an application of his doctrine of the two king-

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