Terror and Toleration

Many negative stereotypes of Muslims can be traced to the clashes between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Paula Sutter Fichtner explores here the particular dynamics between the Ottoman and Austrian Habsburg empires and chronicles the evolution of a political relationship that shifted from hatred to understanding. In the fourteenth century, Ottoman armies swept westward across the Danube Valley before confronting the Habsburgs, who ruled central and eastern Europe, an