During the early modern period, Muslim and European Protestant leaders and states often made diplomatic and commercial contacts, including occasional military alliances and collaboration. At this time the two groups shared an enemy in the Catholic Habsburg empire which sought to eliminate what they considered to be an emerging Protestant heresy and to drive out the greatly expanding Muslim Ottoman Empire from Europe. The Protestants appreciated the Ottoman's tradition of tolerance for other religions -- including their accepting of Protestant refugees fleeing Catholic rule. The Ottomans saw the religious division of European as an opportunity to expand their empire.
Support by the Ottoman Empire for early Protestant churches and princes in Germany under attack by (Catholic) King Charles V contributed to the "consolidation, expansion and legitimization of Lutheranism" more than "any other single factor", according to Jack Goody. But there were other alliances, agreements or attempts at such, included between Morocco and the Low Countries against Catholic Spain, England and the Barbary states, Persian Shah Abbas and the East India Company.
The two religious groups shared some religious differences with Catholicism -- not considering marriage a sacrament, rejecting monastic orders, and the banning images in places of worship -- and would sometimes highlighted these issues in their communications with each other seeking to establish religious common ground.
Cooperation between Christian and Muslim powers was not limited to Protestant entities. The alliance between the Catholic Kingdom of France and the Ottomans lasted to French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the Habsburgs sought to forge an alliance with Safavid Iran to counteract it. As vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, Protestant Imperial Estates participated in Reichskriege against the Ottoman Empire.
Historical background
Following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror and the unification of the Middle East under Selim I and his son Suleiman the Magnificent managed to expand Ottoman rule into Central Europe. The Habsburg Empire thus entered into direct conflict with the Ottomans.
At the same time the Protestant Reformation was taking place in numerous areas of northern and central Europe, in harsh opposition to Papal authority and the Holy Roman Empire led by Emperor Charles V. This situation led the Protestants to consider various forms of cooperation and rapprochement (religious, commercial, military) with the Muslim world, in opposition to their common Habsburg enemy.
Early religious accommodation (15th–17th centuries)
During the development of the Reformation, similarities between Protestantism and Islam were noted: "Islam was seen as closer to Protestantism in banning images from places of worship, in not treating marriage as a sacrament and in rejecting monastic orders". The dispute between Catholics and Protestants in a divided Europe opened the way for Islam on the field of battle.
Mutual tolerance During the Reformation, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was known for his tolerance of the Christian and Jewish faiths within his dominions, whereas the King of Spain did not tolerate the Protestant faith. Various religious refugees, such as the Huguenots, some Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists or even Jesuits or Capuchins were able to find refuge at Istanbul and in the Ottoman Empire, where they were given right of residence and worship. Further, the Ottomans supported the Calvinists in Transylvania and Hungary but also in France. The contemporary French thinker Jean Bodin wrote:
Comments of Martin Luther
Martin Luther regarded the Ottomans as the instrument of "God's wrath against Europe's sins", but opposed that empire's religion as "false". In his 1528 pamphlet, On War against the Turk, he criticized the principles of Islam as "utterly despicable and blasphemous" and called on Germans to resist the Ottoman invasion of Europe, as the catastrophic Siege of Vienna was lurking, stating "[b]ut as the pope is Antichrist, so the Turk is the very devil". Concerning the Islamic holy book, Luther promised he would translate the Quran into German, "when I have time ... so that every man may see what a foul and shameful book it is". His knowledge on the subject was based on a medieval polemicist version of the Qu'ran made by Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, which was the European scholarly reference of the subject. In 1542, while Luther was translating Riccoldo's Refutation of the Koran, which would become the first version of Koranic material in German, he wrote a letter to Basle's city council to relieve the ban on Theodore Bibliander's translation of the Qu'ran into Latin. Mostly due to his letter, Bibliander's translation was finally allowed and eventually published in 1543, with a preface made by Martin Luther himself. With access to a more accurate translation of the Qu'ran, Luther understood some of Riccoldo's critiques to be partial, but nevertheless concurred with virtually all of them.
However, Luther felt a sense of tolerance should be given to Islam as to other faiths of its time:
(However, it is not clear whether the meaning was of "Turks" in this statement was to the rule of the Ottoman Empire, or Islam in general.)
Luther's tolerance also appears in another comment, in which he said that "A smart Turk makes a better ruler than a dumb Christian".
Luther noted that some Christians who were favourable to the Ottoman Empire, and "who actually want the Turk to come and rule, because they think that our German people are wild and uncivilized - indeed that they are half-devil and half-man".
Ottoman attempts to claim similarity
On a number of occasions Ottoman sultans professed their beliefs (correctly or not) to be closer to the Protestants than to the Catholics.
A letter was sent from Suleiman the Magnificent to the "Lutherans" in Flanders, claiming that he felt close to them, "since they did not worship idols, believed in one God and fought against the Pope and Emperor".
This notion of religious similarities was again taken up in epistolary exchanges between Elizabeth I of England and Sultan Murad III. In one correspondence, Murad entertained the notion that Islam and Protestantism had "much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols", and argued for an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire.
In a 1574 letter to the "Members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain", Murad III made considerable efforts to highlight the similarities between Islamic and Protestants principles. He wrote:
Such claims seem to have been politically inspired as well, with the Ottomans trying to establish religious common ground as a way to secure a political alliance. Elizabeth I herself however made efforts to adjust her own religious rhetoric in order to minimize differences with the Ottomans and facilitate relations. In her correspondence with Murad, she stresses the monotheism and the anti-idolatry of her religion, by uniquely describing herself as:
Military collaboration
Protestantism and Islam entered into contact during the 16th century when Calvinist Protestants in present-day Hungary and Transylvania coincided with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.
Franco-Ottoman alliance and Protestantism
Military cooperation between the Ottoman Empire and European powers started in earnest with the Franco-Ottoman alliance of 1535. The alliance provided strategic support to, and effectively protected, the kingdom of France from the ambitions of Charles V. It also gave the opportunity for the Ottoman Empire to become involved in European diplomacy and gain prestige in its European dominions. Side effects included a lot of negative propaganda against the actions of France and its "unholy" alliance with a Muslim power. According to historian Arthur Hassall the consequences of the Franco-Ottoman alliance were far-reaching: "The Ottoman alliance had powerfully contributed to save France from the grasp of Charles V, it had certainly aided Protestantism in Germany, and from a French point of view, it had rescued the North German allies of Francis I."
Protestant states were excluded from the Holy League in 1571 and no intention of joining it. Even after the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, Ottoman support for France would continue however, as well as support for the Dutch and the English after 1580, and support for Protestants and Calvinists, as a way to counter Habsburg attempts at supremacy in Europe. Various overtures were made by Ottoman rulers to the Protestants, who were also fighting against a common enemy, the Catholic House of Habsburg. Suleiman the Magnificent is known to have sent at least one letter to the "Lutherans" in Flanders, offering troops at the time they would request, Murad III is also known to have advocated to Elizabeth I an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire.
The allegiances of the Ottoman Empire and threat of Ottoman expansion in Eastern Europe pressured King Charles V to sign the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) with the Protestant princes, accept the Peace of Passau (1552), and the Peace of Augsburg (1555), formally recognizing Protestantism in Germany and ending military threats to their existence. Overall, the military activism of the Ottoman Empire on the southern European front probably was the reason why Lutheranism was able to survive in spite of the opposition of Charles V and reach recognition at the Peace of Augsburg in September 1555: "the consolidation, expansion and legitimization of Lutheranism in Germany by 1555 should be attributed to Ottoman imperialism more than to any other single factor". The Protestant Electorates of Brandenburg, Hanover and Saxony send troops in support of the Holy Roman Empire in the Great Turkish War (1683–1699).
The Dutch Revolt and Islam
Fundamentally, the Protestant Dutch had strong antagonisms to both the Catholics and the Muslims. In some cases however, alliances, or attempts at alliance between the Dutch and the Muslims were made possible, as when the Dutch allied with the Muslims of the Moluccas to oust the Portuguese, and the Dutch became rather tolerant of the Islamic religion in their colonial possessions after the final subjugation of Macassar in 1699.
The Dutch looked expectantly at the development of the Siege of Malta (1565), hoping that the Ottomans "were in Valladolid already". They saw Ottoman successes against the Habsburgs with great interest, and saw Ottoman campaigns in the Mediterranean as a way to obtain concessions from the Spanish crown. William of Orange wrote around 1565:
Contacts soon became more direct. During the Dutch Revolt in 1566, the Dutch were under such a desperate situation that they looked for help from every nationality, and "indeed even a Turk", as wrote the secretary of Jan van Nassau. William sent ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire for help in 1566. When no other European power would help, "the Dutch cause was offered active support, paradoxically enough, only by the Ottoman Turks". One of the Sultan principal advisers Joseph Miques, Duke of Naxos, delivered a letter to the Calvinists in Antwerp pledging that "the forces of the Ottomans would soon hit Philip II's affairs so hard that he would not even have the time to think of Flanders". The death of Suleiman the Magnificent later into the year, however, meant that the Ottoman were unable to offer support for several years after. In 1568, William of Orange again sent a request to the Ottomans to attack Spain, without success. The 1566-1568 revolt of the Netherlands finally failed, largely due to the lack of foreign support.