SULAYMAN THE MAGNIFICENT AND CHRISTIANITY: THE LIMITS OF AN ANTOGONISM

Abstract

The epoch of the Crusades, from the 11th to the 13th centuries, remained in the memories of the Muslıms as well as Christians, as the peak of confrontation between the two religions, as an emblematic forerunner of all the ‘clashes of civilisations’ to come. However, another more recent period of history, namely the 15th and 16th centuries, could be characterized in the same way. Western historians have given these decades the enhancing title of Renaissance, but they could also have discerned a spectacular resurgence of antagonism between Christianity henceforth torn apart between Catholicism and the Protestant reformation and Islam. As if by a curious result of the phenomenon of communicating receptacles, while Islam was forced, under the merciless assaults of the Spanish Reconquesta, forced to withdraw in the West, first with the fall of Grenada in 1492 and then by the expulsion of the Moors in 1609-1611, which put an end to the Muslım presence on the Iberian Peninsula, at the same time it advanced in eastern and central Europe with the progress of the Ottomans.