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The encounters between Christendom and “Islam” in Spain and in the Levant were very different. In the Levant, Western Christendom intervened in an area that already had a long Christian tradition and a large Christian population, albeit one largely indistinguishable, to Western eyes, from the Muslims. In Spain, it was the position of “Islam” that changed, from victor to vanquished. The Moriscos became a feared and despised remnant in a Christian state that ultimately found their presence intolerable. The confrontation between French glory and Muslim resistance in North Africa was a synthetic crusade. In the Balkans, the third area where “Islam” met Christendom, the situation was different again. Only on one level—in the encounter between two religious faiths—was the position strictly comparable. Everything else—languages, history, and ethnicities—was different. But if there are few direct connections, there are at least suggestive parallels. In the Balkans, many local Christians in Albania and Bosnia converted to Islam, just as Christians had done in Spain in the first centuries after the Muslim conquest. In the Levant, after the mass conversions that followed the Muslim conquest, the local Christians preserved their own culture and faith largely intact. Orthodox Christians suffered more under the Latin Crusaders than they did under Islam.

All of these regions were detached from Europe. (If the Pyrenees do not now seem a daunting barrier, they did in earlier times.)58 The Levant was unquestionably part of the East, “belonging” to Europe only in a metaphysical sense. But the Balkans were Europe’s wild frontier, on the perimeter but nonetheless integral.59 By the sixteenth century the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans seemed a cancerous intrusion within the natural bounds of Christendom. The geographer Abraham Ortelius reflected a widely held view when he wrote, “For Christians, see Europeans,” in the 1587 edition of his Thesaurus geographicus.60 The reemphasis of the idea of Christendom (even though irretrievably divided by the Protestant Reformation) was generated by the threat from Islam. The constant fear of Ottoman incursions across an open frontier made the Turks’ possession of these formerly Christian lands a real menace.

From the last quarter of the sixteenth century, even if there was no war between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, almost every year Tartar bands slipped across the border from Hungary and raided as far west as Steyr in western Austria. Like the conflict in the Mediterranean, which was punctuated by great battles such as Lepanto, this new enmity was never ending. The struggle with Islam in the Balkans, within the body of Europe, became more virulent than any earlier encounters. All the weight of anti-Islamic propaganda, such as the fiery orations of the seventeenth-century Austrian divine Abraham à Sancta Clara, of the hundreds of books and pamphlets directed against the Turks, constituted a sustained attack unlike any which had been deployed before. Thus, the Balkans became the mise en scène for the final act of Europe’s encounter with “Islam,” a last “crusade.” Unfortunately, the long-run consequences of that antagonism have outlived the Ottomans.

Part Four

CHAPTER NINE

Balkan Ghosts?

IN MY GRANDFATHER’S HOUSE, WORLDLY BOOKS WERE KEPT IN A DARK, musty, and icy-cold back room. Downstairs, in a stained-oak bookcase with little green curtains covering the glazed panels, were the various editions of The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation from the Original Languages by J. N. Darby, the King James Bible (for critical and comparative purposes), Cruden’s Concordance, and shelves of pamphlets, Bible readings, and tracts. There too were the Bible games that we played on Sundays—question 6: “Name the three good men cast into the burning fiery furnace.” But upstairs were forgotten and ignored heaps of old National Geographic magazines, and untidy piles of books that had belonged to my grandfather’s childhood and which still bore the grubby finger marks of my own father’s avid reading. There