It seems that they [the Turks] were made only to murder and destroy. In the history of the Turkish nation you will find nothing but fighting, robbery, and murder. Every nation has turbulent times in its past, but alongside them also times that are crowned with the marvelous fruits of quiet effort and beneficial work; our nation, for example, has the age of the Hussites, but also the era of the Fathers of Our Country â the unforgettable Charleses. But in the history of the Turks you would search in vain for even a short period devoted to quiet, useful patriotic work. That is also why the images compiled here, in which only fear and terror and gloomy desolation reign, might seem chilling. Nevertheless, the history of the Turks is important, for the fight that Europe has conducted in its defense against the nations of this race has been waged by Christians alone and by the nations of our monarchy in particular. For this reason, the main consideration is given to the scenes that unfolded either in the countries of the Balkan Peninsula or those of Austria-Hungary.
kodym, 1879 1
There have been few other non-Christian figures in European history that have been the object of such a vast range of visual representations as âthe Turk.â From the warrior depicted in medieval and early modern German woodcuts, to the Turk as a symbol of wealth woven into the patterns of Renaissance French carpets, the captive Sultan who appeared on the stages of 18th-century Venetian opera houses, not to mention the pipe-smoking Turk on the signboards of coffee shops in many European cities and the harem women pictured in 19th-century Orientalist paintings, images of the Turks have accompanied Europeans for centuries. Print materials that in some way dealt with Turkish issues, such as religious treatises, war propaganda, ballads, comic plays, and scholarly essays, displayed a similar heterogeneity of form, tone, and purpose. This chapterâs introductory quote, from a book by a secondary school teacher named FrantiÅ¡ek Kodym intended for young people, represents just one end of the
Earlier works in particular, such as Norman Danielâs classic study Islam and the West, maintained that a special Western way of looking at Islam developed in Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries, which viewed Islam as a form of Christian heresy, Muhammad as a false Prophet and schemer, Muslims as violent and lascivious, and their Paradise with its houris as absurd. 7 When the Ottomans advanced into Europe, their Empire was increasingly seen as a military and political as well as a religious threat. There was a strong fear of Ottoman expansion even in England, where the Turks were called âthe scourge of Godâ and âany news of a Christian victory against Islam was a cause for rejoicing.â 8 According to Fichtner, the Turks, who gradually came to be seen as synonymous with Muslims, were regarded as idolaters whose religion supported indulgence and lasciviousness and encouraged polygamy. 9 Anti-Turkish rhetoric was particularly strong in the Habsburg Empire because it expressed the interests of both the state and the church, though this dual concern about the Turkish threat did not prevent more neutral curiosity about or fascination with the Turks from being expressed in writing and visual imagery. 10 In short, the early modern picture of âthe Turk in Europeâ consisted of a variety of images that mirrored diverse circumstances across time and countries and whose unifying features result from the emphasis put on religious difference and military threat.
The 18th century was a transitional period in the development of views about the Turks, and this is perhaps why the interpretations of it differ. Ãırakman says that âthe image of the Ottomans deteriorated in the eighteenth centuryâ when âone finds the emergence of a stereotypical image of Ottomans as a stagnant, backward and corrupt people, governed by arbitrary regime.â
11
Wolff, in contrast, sees the 18th century as an intermezzo in the long tradition of prevailingly negative images of the Turks, and that was what made it possible
In the 19th century, when Europe and the entire world became more interconnected, views on the Turks were affected by events and developments on the international scene. However, even then images of âthe Turkâ were neither similar nor equally relevant everywhere in Europe: they were much sharper in the regions that were either under direct Ottoman rule or had been through long wars with the Ottoman Empire than they were in countries where the Turks were viewed as just more of those exotic peoples who were not European. With Russiaâs accelerating turn to the East, inhabited by Turkic peoples, and with its claims on Ottoman territory, Russiaâs interest in the Turks grew in the 19th century. In the West, changes in the images of Ottoman Turks were intertwined with the colonial aspirations of European powers. For the modernized West, the 19th-century Ottoman Empire was becoming both the target of colonial ambitions and an area of exotic escape and a destination for organized tourism.
15
Teresa Heffernan argues that 19th-century Western visitors to the Ottoman Empire were no longer worried about the risk of religious conversion, but were instead disturbed by the Empireâs cosmopolitan mix and the fluidity of race and ethnicity; according to her, British travelers in particular were obsessed with questions of hybridity and mixed-race unions.
16
Although
In the 19th century, Western powers began to cooperate more with the Ottoman Turks, not only in commerce, but also in the political and military spheres, especially in light of Russian ambitions and involvement in the Ottoman realm. During the Crimean war, the Ottoman Empire fought on the side of Great Britain, France, and Austria (and Italy) against Russia. These developments were reflected in a gap between the opinion of the public, which was prevailingly negative, and the pragmatic nature of state policy toward the Ottoman Empire in some countries. In Britain, the strong anti-Turkish sentiments that existed in the 19th century were influenced by the publicâs passionate support for the Greek uprising in the 1820s, and the fervently anti-Turkish Gladstone then drew on these negative feelings during the revolt in Bulgaria in 1876 to criticize British Ottoman policy. In Austria, the recurring and more decisive victories over the Ottoman army from the 18th century onward, while they had little impact on public perceptions of the Turks, led to a dramatic change in Habsburg policy toward the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks went from being the enemy to an object of interest, which was followed by increasing efforts to build economic ties and diplomatic relations. 18
Czech images of âthe Turkâ were during the wars in the early modern period based on religious antipathy. With the decline of Ottoman military power, the amount of attention the Czechs paid to the Turks dwindled. Turks became a minor theme in folk culture and appeared in history books only in chapters devoted to what were called the Turkish wars. In the 19th century, the emerging Czech press followed the Greek liberation struggle with interest, but Czechs did not participate in the philhellenic movement or actively support the Greeksâ fight.
19
Consequently, the Greek uprising did not influence Czech public opinion on the Turks the way it did in Britain, and comparably little attention was paid to the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century.
20
It was not
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background for a better understanding of Czech views of the Turks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and to identify some of the factors that shaped these views. It is intended as another piece in the mosaic of âEuropeanâ perceptions of the Turks, which (unlike Ãırakman) I believe continued to differ both among and within European regions even in the 19th century. The development of Czech perceptions of the Turks is outlined here with a focus on the effects of the events in Southeastern Europe in the 1870s. New uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans erupted in 1875, initially as protests against tax collectors during a difficult time when there were widespread crop failures. The revolts started in Herzegovina and Bosnia, spread to Bulgaria, and gained a more anti-Ottoman dimension under the instigation of Russia. Serbia and Montenegro, who supported their revolting kin in the Ottoman Empire and declared war on the Sultan, were quickly defeated, but Russiaâs reaction led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877â1878.
There ensued a revival of interest in Turkish issues in the Czech public discourse: the Czechs followed the situation in the Balkans with the kind of animated concern that events abroad seldom generated in them.
21
A large number of writings dealing with the Turks were then published in Czech, ranging from histories to descriptions of the current Russo-Turkish war, poetry, and stories for young people. If the Greek uprising of the 1820s interested some Czechs, the wave of revolts in the Ottoman Balkans in the mid-1870s moved them strongly and brought âthe Turkâ back to center stage. Unlike the Southern Slavs for whom âthe Turkâ remained a major Other from the medieval period up to and beyond the time of the 19th-century national movements, this image was not of central significance for Czech nationalism. Nonetheless, the Czech search for national identity included from its late-18th-century beginnings the germs of âSlavicâ identification and solidarity (vzájemnost),
22
and this in turn affected how much attention the Czechs paid in the 19th century to the Turks as the oppressors of their Slavic brethren. The concept of Pan-Slavism was interpreted differently: as a cultural or political unity, as just a community of shared interests, as an emphasis on the common roots of the Slavs, or as a kind of utopia. Pan-Slavism went through some turbulent phases in the 19th century,
The decline of Ottoman military power and the emergence of Czech national awareness gradually weakened the perception of the Turks as a religious and military threat. This chapter argues that just as this development opened up space for a secularized and more neutral image of the Ottoman Empire and its inhabitants, the uprisings in the Balkans and their suppression revived and gave new strength to older anti-Turkish prejudices. While with the rise of the Czech national movement the image of the Turk as the Muslim enemy of Christendom was gradually supplanted by a more secular view, the events of the 1870s not only strengthened the role of national identification â and particularly its Pan-Slavic elements â in how the Turks were seen, but also reignited past animosities that had been expressed mainly in religious terms.
In order to set the imagery of the 1870s in a broader context, this chapter outlines the prevailing attitudes that had existed since early modern times. The first part of the chapter presents a brief overview of Czech relations with the Ottoman Empire and perceptions of the Turks up to the 18th century. Then more attention is paid to mainstream views of the Turks as expressed in historical writings and dictionaries published between the 1800s and 1860s. In this period, older stereotypes in some cases gave way to a less hostile representation of the Turks. The main part of the chapter analyzes images of the Turks in non-fiction, contemporary propaganda, and historical works that appeared as a direct consequence of the uprisings in the 1870s in the Balkans and the Russo-Turkish war, 23 and that point to the return of âthe Turkâ as a terrifying figure and a cruel fighter. The chapter also asks about the role of race in how Czechs viewed the Turks. The last part of the chapter shows how stereotypes about the Turks associated with the 1870s survived into the early 20th century in examples as diverse as trivial portrayals of âthe Turkâ as a comic figure and comments in serious political considerations.
1 The Turkish Wars and Czech Variations on the Turkish Theme
The Czech relationship to the Turks was formed in periods of war. Like elsewhere in Europe â except in the southeastern part, which had already begun to
From the 1540s to the 1680s, the Czech populace regarded the Ottomans as a constant threat because of the latterâs presence and expansion in neighboring regions, most notably Slovakia, and because they conducted raids on the adjacent territory of eastern Moravia. Life in the borderland areas was made difficult by the raids, the fighting, and the movement of armies, and occasionally the peasant population was doubly impacted when an area was claimed by both Ottoman and Habsburg lords. The Ottomans, under the Sultanâs direct command or at the initiative of the governors of Ottoman-held Buda and local administrators, captured extensive areas in the south and center of the Hungarian Kingdom, which became divided into three parts: the Ottoman province with Buda as its capital; the Transylvanian Principality as a vassal state; and Royal Hungary, which was reduced to a narrow strip of land in western Hungary and present-day Slovakia.
25
The Ottoman armies were victorious in most battles throughout the 16th century and in 1606 the peace of Zsitvatorok (Zsitvatörök) established the borders between the empires for the next half century. The 17th century was a time of anti-Habsburg rebellions in Central Europe. The success of the Ottoman campaign in the 1660s, when the Ottoman army seized the Slovak fortress Nové Zámky in 1663, was offset by a Habsburg counter-attack, but the Vasvár Peace treaty of 1664 that ended this war left the captured Slovak territory under Ottoman rule. The year 1683 witnessed the famous Ottoman siege of Vienna, the defeat of Kara Mustafa PaÈa, and the triumph of Eugene of Savoy (or, for the Slavs, particularly that of Jan Sobieski). The Austrian emperor Leopold I considered the failure of the siege his victory over Islam and this achievement âwould become the foundational epic of the
Although the 18th century is generally viewed as the time when the might of the Ottoman Empire declined, in the eyes of the Habsburg government the Ottomans were still a dangerous enemy. After the Austrian victories in the early 18th century, including the conquest of Belgrade, the 1737â1739 war deprived the Habsburgs even of some territories they had obtained in the 1718 peace of Passarowitz (Požarevac). Over time, however, the Ottoman army was less and less successful in military conflicts with the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Empire was only saved from incurring more substantial losses in the wars it was engaged in simultaneously with the Habsburg (1788â1791) and Russian (1787â1792) Empires by the revolution and events in France, which then came to preoccupy all of Europe. In this period it was possible to find individual Czechs in the Austrian army and serving as engineers, interpreters and technical staff, while the general population continued to be affected by the financial costs of the Habsburg Empireâs defense and potential expansion.
For the Czechs, as a part of the Habsburg Empire, there were various connotations attached to the Turks, all of which had something to do with war: they were associated with the religious processions, services, and prayers that were organized to support the success of the army in battles and with the selling of âindulgencesâ; they were associated with the recruiting of soldiers from among the Czech population, with the anti-Turkish propaganda asserted by the state and the Church, and, no less important, with the collecting (and in the case of the nobility the approval) of taxes for the Turkish wars. The population in eastern Moravia was also affected by Turkish raids in its borderlands when areas of southwestern Slovakia were under Ottoman rule, though the raids tended to be small in scale. Diplomatic missions to the Sultan and Ottoman legacies in Prague brought yet another type of contact with the Turks. Also among the Czech nobility, it became popular to give a captured Turk as a gift; some of them were even baptized, 27 imitating a similar practice in Vienna. 28
Throughout the centuries of Turkish wars Czechs were subjected to intense preaching by the Catholic Church against Muslims in an effort to unite
Over time Czechs began writing and publishing their own texts on the Turks and the Turkish wars â this included news reports, religious treatises, outright anti-Turkish propaganda, and travel writings by Czechs who had visited Ottoman territory. The early modern images of the Turks that Czechs produced were mainly connected with the Turkish wars. During the war and especially after the fall of Belgrade in 1521 there were many writings by anonymous authors that bore such titles as âThe Terrible Newsâ and âNews about Victoriesâ and reported on the events of the war, which shows that there was a strong interest in Turkish issues among the Czech public.
32
Military events were described in songs â one
The impact of the early 15th-century Hussite movement, the Czech forerunner to the Protestant Reformation seeking to purify the Catholic Church, began in the 16th century to align the views of many Czechs more closely with those of German Protestants, who used the Turkish threat for polemical purposes, claiming the Turks had been sent by God to punish mankind â Christianity â for their sins. 35 In the 17th century, Jan Amos Komenský, the well-known Czech pedagogue and thinker who had to emigrate after the failure of the uprising of the Czech Estates against the Habsburgs in 1618, adopted a more conciliatory tone toward Islam and the Turks, praising their religiosity and charity. He believed that the Turks could be converted to Christianity and wrote the Sultan to suggest that the Bible be translated into Turkish. 36
Early modern Czech views of the Turks have received detailed attention from both Czech and international scholars, notably Tomáš Rataj and Laura Lisy-Wagner.
37
Searching for images and stereotypes of âthe Turk,â Rataj analyzed printed texts on the Turks (turcica) that emerged in the Czech lands between the 15th and 18th centuries, which included contemporary news coverage, histories, educational literature, travelogues, military and religious propaganda, and polemical writings against Islam and the prophecies.
38
He showed that, like
Ratajâs analysis makes clear how mixed and contradictory the images of the Ottoman Empire were. While descriptions of the âreal lifeâ of the Turks and the Turkish state were consistent in their emphasis on the Turksâ inborn savagery, the Ottoman Empire was also perceived as a powerful state and its army was respected and even admired. Ottoman criminal law was seen as strict, but fair. Educational literature noted the absolute power of the Sultans, the absence of hereditary nobility, and the resulting high social mobility, which the humanists viewed as positive, but which pro-Habsburg propaganda criticized. The variety of information on the everyday life of the Turkish people was, according to Rataj, broad. Much was written about religious rites, ritual washing and prayers; Turkish music and eating habits were described as âweird,â but the Turks were commended for their temperance and this was contrasted with European habits. Rataj points out that people were criminally prosecuted for expressing support for the Turks, but adds that it is difficult to analyze the occurrence of pro-Turkish feelings because anti-Turkish propaganda might have exaggerated the extent of such feelings. 40 Rataj believes that partisan support for the Turks probably had more to do with a discontent with their own Christian suzerains and opposition to the taxes and other duties that the elites imposed on their subjects than it did with pro-Turkish sympathies. Despite these instances of more positive views, the prevailing image of the Turk, Rataj concludes, was one of cruelty. Rataj found no evidence of the steady secularization of the image of the Turk during the 17th and 18th centuries, but he claims that the Turks did come to be viewed increasingly in political terms. The sense of religious enmity then began to weaken in the 18th century, when the Habsburgs decided to make it their mission to defend Christianity against the Ottoman Empire, whereby the Turks came to be newly envisioned as the enemy of the emperor or the state.
Lisy-Wagner worked with similar types of sources as Rataj (and also with the so-called Habaner ceramics that incorporated elements of Turkish decorative motifs) and interpreted them as evidence of cross-cultural contact that
Ratajâs and Lisy-Wagnerâs in-depth analyses suggest that the Czechsâ views of the Turks, affected as they were by their specific circumstances, whether that meant their Hussite heritage, their position within the Habsburg Empire, or their dissatisfaction with their rulers, were constructed and developed along lines similar to those in other Central European areas. Compared to Hungarians and Slovaks, the Czechs lacked direct experience with Ottoman occupation and fewer of them witnessed actual fighting with the Turks. Nevertheless, some Czechs did participate in anti-Turkish struggles. The Poles, who at that time were living in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had the most idiosyncratic relationship to the Turks. In the 17th century, the perception of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity and of Polish noblemen as Catholic warriors increased in response to the Turkish threat. But it was around this time also that the values, costumes, weaponry, and material culture of the Polish gentry were being influenced most by Oriental and specifically Ottoman imagery.
45
Religious animosity was a constant in Central Europe, but it was accompanied
2 âThe Turkâ as a Proxy
By the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire had ceased to be perceived as a major threat to Europe. Even in Vienna, the center of anti-Turkish propaganda and campaigns, instead of being an everyday concern in high politics the Turks were becoming a subject of popular songs and stories. The defeat of the Ottoman siege of Vienna and the liberation of Buda were followed by a gradual shift in attitudes toward the Turks. As Fichtner notes, the image of the terrifying invaders was replaced by one that portrayed Turkish visitors peacefully drinking coffee with their hosts. 46 For large parts of Europe, by the early 19th century the Ottoman Empire had gone from being an aggressor to a potential target of exploitation and the object of long-term international rivalries. In addition, the 19th century witnessed an increasing interest in the Orient, and Oriental literature, fashion, and arts came into vogue in the West, a trend that also took in the ânearâ Ottoman Orient. The changing balance of power and the Ottoman Empireâs proximity to Europe made it a popular destination of developing European tourism.
For the Czechs, the Turkish wars were by the early 19th century a part of the past. Folk culture, however, reflected Turkish themes not just during the wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, but again in the late 18th century when Habsburg armies fought with the Ottomans, and this led to a revival of the earlier folk tradition. Oriental themes can be traced in the folk tales that were collected by Czech intellectuals in the first half of the 19th century and contemporaries discussed the possibility that several stories published by the famous writer Božena NÄmcová (1820â1862) were inspired by The Thousand and One Nights.
47
Turkish themes figured in historical legends and in broadsheet and tragic ballads in Bohemia and Moravia as well as Slovakia. But they were more common in the eastern part of Moravia, which had experienced Turkish raids, and in Slovakia, which had been under direct Ottoman rule. Folk songs in these regions tended to focus on Turks abducting women and children, the separation of families, and fights with the janissaries, while in the rest of Moravia and in Bohemia the stories were less tragic, or were even
Although reminiscences on traditional Turkish themes and the image of âthe Turkâ as the archenemy of Christendom continued to appear, earlier imagery survived in a somewhat diluted form as the real fights and the Turkish wars moved further into the past. âThe Turkâ surfaced as a comic figure in 19th-century dramas and epic poetry, and it does not seem that the ridicule was being used as a strategy to tame a feared enemy or that it fulfilled some other defensive task. 50 It was around this time that Turkish folk poetry was first published in Czech, particularly the stories of Nasreddin Hoca. 51 Turkish themes also served as settings or props in Czech literature. For example, in âThe Bagpiper from Strakonice,â a famous play by Josef Kajetán Tyl (1808â1856) from the 1840s, Å vanda the piper is so successful with his charmed bagpipes that he is able to bring laughter to Princess Zulika in a distant Oriental country, which was clearly based on the Ottoman Empire. 52 The epic poems of VÃtÄzslav Hálek (1835â1874), âBeautiful Leylaâ (Krásná Lejla) and âMeyrima and Huseynâ from 1859, though not considered his best works, reflected the writerâs interest in the Orient even before he traveled to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s.
Like in other European countries, Oriental inspiration found its way into Czech art and architecture. Artâs interest in the Orient also embraced more remote areas, both in time and space, but until World War I the artistic image of the ânear Orientâ remained more closely associated with the Balkans than with Istanbul. Czech artists in the 19th century often studied in France and sometimes lived there, and generally were strongly influenced by famous French
âÃnos Äernohorkyâ (Kidnapping of a Montenegrin Woman), replica of a painting by Jaroslav Äermák, 1865
Although the harem and the odalisques were not an uncommon subject among a broader range of Czech painters, Orientalism is not considered a specific stream of Czech art.
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Roman Prahl argues that in Czech culture the use of exotic elements in architectural projects, ranging from landscape gardening to monumental buildings, may have been envisioned as a way of mastering the world in an ideal, spiritual sense.
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He also shows that the exotic motifs that were used in Czech architecture and that drew inspiration from various Muslim architectonic styles were seen as a useful way of distinguishing Czech work from German styles. Late 19th-century Czech industry used Oriental motifs as a marketing tool, which Prahl interprets as a cultural parallel to the Western domination of the non-European world.
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On the whole, the Orient came into fashion in the Czech lands later than in Western Europe and often indirectly
Along with the legacy of the wars with the Ottoman Empire in the the 16thâ17th centuries and the withdrawal of Ottoman power from East-Central Europe, 19th-century Czech views on the Turks were shaped by the growing Czech national movement. This movement had developed from modest beginnings in the late 18th century, when it was limited to an intellectual ârevivalâ and a newly discovered interest in Czechness, into a mass movement with self-confident political representation in the last third of the 19th century. Between the late 18th century and the mid-19th century, Czech intellectuals focused on more local and more immediate issues and the Turks remained of marginal interest to Czechs; Turkish themes were often employed as backdrops in literature and theater or were used to support arguments about the courage of the Czechs, but they were not the focus of any attention in their own right. As a small nation without a state of their own, the Czechs, or more accurately their intellectual and political elites, searched for various ways in which to strengthen their identity and position within the Habsburg Empire, to which most of them still felt loyal. The Czech national movement saw its major Other in the Germans, but at the same time the more advanced German milieu served in many ways as a source of inspiration. 60 Influenced by the ideas of Pan-Germanism, the Czechs began to pursue the idea of Slavic solidarity and Pan-Slavism. 61
Pan-Slavism, according to RadomÃr VlÄek, was a set of ideas that searched for and advocated the cultural-civilizational, religious, and potentially also political unity of the Slavic nations; it was related to the broader concept of Slavic solidarity, but had a more concrete aim: a union of the Slavs.
62
Pan-Slavism combined a strong emphasis on the common origins of the Slavs and the closeness of their languages and original national character(s) with visions of future collaboration between the Slavs or their actual unification. Notions of Slavic affinity stressed either cultural or political aspects, and they diverged mainly
For small nations like the Czechs there were various advantages to be had from associating themselves with the broad family of Slavs. In political debates, the card of the stronger Russian brother could be played against the Habsburgs. In the cultural sphere, Slavic solidarity served to bolster the Czechsâ confidence and self-esteem. Although the Czech elites often thought of themselves as the avant-garde of Slavdom, their recent history (in contrast to the glory days of the medieval Czech kingdom, Charles iv and the Hussite movement) had offered little that could be used as evidence of Czech courage and military strength. By identifying with the long struggles of the Southern Slavs against Ottoman rule, the Czechs were able to share in Slavic bravery. Among the Slavs fighting the Ottomans, the Montenegrins held a special attraction for the Czechs. FrantiÅ¡ek Å Ãstek argues that the Czechs projected their own conflict with the Germans onto the fight of this small South-Slavic nation with the Turks.
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An image of the Montenegrins took shape that bore an Orientalist subtext, was awash in Romanticism, and reflected the perceived absence of certain values in Czech society, most notably courage and belligerence, and
The Czech press did not limit its attention to the Montenegrins. In the early 1860s, it informed its readers about the uprisings in Herzegovina and the role of Montenegro and the Serbian principality in anti-Turkish fights. 68 Slavic immigrants who settled in the Czech lands throughout the 19th century, even more so in its second half, also left an impression on patriotic Czech society and especially its intellectuals, teachers, and students. Such immigrants included Serbs, Slovenians, and a number of Bulgarians, many of whom studied in Prague and other cities, such as PÃsek, Tábor, and Hradec Králové. Some founded revolutionary and cultural organizations, others made friends among the Czechs. For example, Josef HoleÄek (1853â1929), who would eventually become a famous Slavist and began writing about the Southern Slavs in the 1870s and would continue to do so for years, attended secondary school in Tábor with some Bulgarians. 69 Direct personal contact with South Slavic immigrants living in Czech society would likely have influenced Czechsâ opinions on their Turkish enemies as well.
We can get some idea about the views on the Turks that prevailed among Czechs in the 19th century from non-fiction educational publications, dictionaries, textbooks,
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and encyclopedias. Educational publications like these were major undertakings of the patriotic intellectuals at that time. The Czech-German dictionary that Josef Jungmann wrote in the 1830s, which is considered the beginning of modern Czech explanatory lexicography,
71
defined the
Anthologie z literatury Äeské (The Anthology of Czech Literature), which contains samples of medieval and early modern writing, including translations, compiled by the literary historian Josef JireÄek (1825â1888), shows that older, religiously based stereotypes were still alive in the mid-19th century. The section of the anthology that deals with the early modern period devotes considerable attention to the Turkish theme in literature because, JireÄek notes, â[o]ur ancestors tended to enjoy treatises about Christendomâs archenemy at that time.â 73 It is hardly surprising that the Turks are mainly dealt with as subjects in texts that do not describe the Turks in favorable terms, as the texts were written during the time of the early modern Turkish wars. More telling is the fact that even the excerpts JireÄek drew from works that did not deal specifically with the Turks are still ones that portray them in a markedly negative light. Also, the author himself in his comments on the texts called the Turks âthe archenemy of Christendomâ and celebrated the Czechsâ contribution to the Habsburgsâ fights both on the battlefield and by ideological means â for instance, by producing anti-Turkish pamphlets. 74
In history books, the Turks were referred to primarily, and sometimes exclusively, within the context of their wars with the Habsburgs, but there was no uniform image of the Ottoman Empire in historical works. âA General Civic Historyâ written by the priest and scholar Josef FrantiÅ¡ek Smetana (1801â1861) in 1846, in which substantial attention is devoted to the Turks,
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dealt with the âTurkish Empireâ in a section on âEast European States,â together with Russia, and in the 19th century in a section entitled âOther States of Europe,â and the Ottoman Empire received more space here than Scandinavia, the Netherlands, or Belgium did. For Smetana, the Turkish invasion of Europe was a âhorror.â But the founding of the Ottoman Empire was the most important event of the time, the Turkish army was âno less braveâ than the Christian troops, and Süleyman
Even in the 19th century, views on the Turks did not develop in one direction. There is a âHistory of the Czech Nationâ published in 1864 that shows signs of being slightly more influenced by older anti-Turkish stereotypes than the works by Tomek and Palacký had been. The book was written by Jakub Malý (1811â1885), a prolific Czech writer, journalist and translator.
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In his âHistory,â Malý writes about the Turkish threat, the Turkish yoke, and the horrors of the wars with the cruel âarchenemy of Christendom.â
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He also
Just as important as the interpretations the history books offered of encounters with the Turks were the depictions of the Turks in the first Czech encyclopedias. It was a major project of the Czech patriotic community in the 19th century to produce encyclopedias in the Czech language, and eminent scholars, teachers, and journalists contributed to these works. Although inspired by famous foreign encyclopedic works, in particular the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, some entries in the Czech encyclopedias were scholarly articles in their own right and were later translated into other Slavic languages and to German.
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In 1872 the first Czech encyclopedic work (SlovnÃk nauÄný), edited by FrantiÅ¡ek Ladislav Rieger together with Malý, author of the above-mentioned âHistory,â distinguished the Turks more broadly, as âone of the most important tribes of the Altay family [ÄeleÄ] of the Mongolian race [plemeno],â
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from the Turks in the narrow sense, âa nation ruling in the Turkish Empireâ who were called Osmanli.
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The brief entry on âthe Turks,â written by Malý, recounts the history of the Turks from the earliest times, mentioning Chinese sources on the ancestors of the Turks and later dynasties of Turkish origin, in a way that is generally reflective of the style of scholarship in the late 19th century, and without any evaluative comments. The longer entry on âTurkeyâ covers the countryâs geography, demographic and economic situation, education, the military, and history, for which Hammer-Purgstallâs, Ubiciniâs, Zinkeisenâs, Lamartineâs, and other 19th-century historiansâ works are cited as sources.
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Although the author of the entry is not given, it reproduces (at times to the letter) the depiction of the Turks from the Názorný atlas (Illustrated Atlas) that accompanied the encyclopedia, which was published earlier, in 1866, and the text of which was
According to Malý, modern-day Turks were not the âoriginalâ Turkish nation because they had mixed with other nations.
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The Turks, as he depicts them, have shapely bodies, a serious and imperious look, and are perceptive and quick-witted, but lazy and apathetic because they are so blindly fatalistic. He describes them as strictly observant of their religious duties and the moral commands of Islam. He goes so far as to ascribe Turkish hospitality to the obligation of charity set out in the Koran, and explains that they extend this charity even to animals and look after them (which he claimed was why there were so many street dogs in Istanbul).
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As was common in descriptions of the Turks, their character was portrayed as full of contradictions: they are polite and hospitable to foreigners, but furious religious fanatics who see Christians as dogs; they are steadfast in their friendship but immune to feelings of warmth; they can be modest in needs when necessary, but in times of plenty they are lecherous and devote themselves to various, and even âunnatural,â pleasures. Malý, and many Czechs after him, attributed to the Turks a passion for good food and sensual pleasures, as reflected in the harem. Although women lived in segregation, according to Malý, they were able to plot against their husbands and have love affairs. He also explained that polygamy, which allowed a man to have four wives and as many concubines as he wished, was limited to the upper classes because it was costly, and most lower-class Turks had only one wife.
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Slavery, a topic that figured prominently in Western writings on the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, was mentioned only once by Malý and described as âmoderate.â He likewise briefly commented on the Turkish form of governance, which he likened to despotism or absolute monarchy, headed by the Sultan or Padishah, whose power, considered unlimited, Malý acknowledged to be restricted by the supreme religious authority, the sheyh ul islam. Malýâs views are perhaps best expressed by his assertion that a Turk, even if educated in Paris, remains in his true thinking a barbarian. He âcorroboratesâ this by claiming that a Turk can never develop refined tastes because he is naturally lacking in an appreciation for beauty (krasochuÅ¥).
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These examples show that throughout the second half of the 19th century both negative images of the Turks connected with the wars of the past and a more mixed perception of Turkish character and military skills survived. The Turks were sometimes presented as the enemies of Christianity, but there was no new substance behind the formally religious rhetoric. The anti-Turkish sentiment these works expressed was not especially strong or emotional. The Czechsâ contribution to the defense against the Turks was praised, but not presented as a key element of Czech history, and thus it did not play any substantial role in the formation of Czech national identity and the construction of national history. In the 1870s, the situation changed.
3 The Oppressors of Our Slavic Brethren
The Czechs followed with real anxiety the daily news in the newspapers about the uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans, their suppression, and the ensuing Russo-Turkish war of 1877â1878. Their unanimous and enthusiastic support of the anti-Turkish struggle reflected both a keen interest in the national liberation of the Southern Slavs and various political concerns, including the Czechsâ feelings about Austrian rule, as for some people a demonstration of Slavic solidarity was a gesture of defiance against Vienna.
95
The Czech preoccupation with the anti-Turkish struggle also expressed itself in the collections that were taken up in support of the insurgents and the volunteers who went off to participate in the fighting or to help treat the wounded, and on a more mass scale there were also anti-Turkish political demonstrations.
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The atmosphere of the time and the Czechsâ deep concern for the fate of the Southern Slavs is reflected vividly in a short story by the popular 19th-century Czech writer Karolina SvÄtlá (1830â1899). The story, centered on the dilemma of a young woman who is in love with the wrong man, draws a parallel between a manâs betrayal of a woman and of his nation â in this case represented by all Slavs and their fight against the Ottoman Empire. Its title, âPlevno,â is the name of a fortress besieged by Russian troops during the war, and the story opens with the question âDid Plevno fall?,â a question repeated daily as the patriotic family of the young heroine eagerly seeks and discusses news about the Russo-Turkish war.
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A number of pamphlets and books were published in 1877â1878 about the suffering of the Slavs under Ottoman rule and about the war. This lively interest in
Publications from the second half of the 1870s voiced hostility toward âthe atrocious Turkâ
98
and called the Turks âsavage creaturesâ
99
and âhalf-mad berserks.â
100
These views, which were common in 19th-century sources, have already been described in modern-day scholarship.
101
It is indicative of the nature of anti-Turkish sentiment at that time that many authors who wrote with hostility about the Turks had no personal experience with the Ottoman Empire and its population and often even admitted that they did not know much about the Turks or their past.
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One of the exceptions was HoleÄek, who, having befriended some Southern Slavs while a secondary school student in Tábor, became in 1875 the Balkan correspondent for newspapers in Prague and was thus able to provide firsthand observations.
103
Others relied on works by Czech and foreign experts, such as the aforementioned literary historian Josef JireÄek and his son Konstantin JireÄek (1854â1918), a historian who specialized in the past of Southern Slavs,
104
or they quoted the Austrian Darwinist Friedrich Heller von Hellwald (1842â1892). In his âCultural History in Its Natural Developmentâ from 1875, Hellwald applied Darwinâs theory to history, which he interpreted as a struggle between unequal races.
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Several works by Hellwald were translated into Czech in the late 1870s and early 1880s by well-known intellectuals,
Although Czech interest in the Turks was motivated by national concerns and sympathy with the Slavs, the Turks were still largely depicted in religious terms as the enemies of Christians and as fanatical Muslims.
108
More rarely, their negative features were ascribed not only to Islam but also to the fact of being Turkish.
109
Most writings on the Turks at that time espoused the view that humanity would benefit from the annihilation of the Ottoman Empire or at least from the expulsion of the Turks from Europe.
110
During the Russo-Turkish war, they expressed their hope that the war would finally bring an end to the Ottoman Empire.
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Because concerns about the Turks resurfaced in connection with revolts and wars, it is not surprising that the image of the Turks that came to prevail in writings in the 1870s drew on the older stereotype of âthe Turkâ as a fighter whose ferocity made him the âterrorâ and âscourgeâ of Europe.
112
Most people writing at that time about the Turks explicitly or implicitly shared the view that the Turks were born to kill and destroy, a sentiment captured in the opening quote to this chapter by the schoolteacher Kodym.
113
Among the Turksâ characteristics as fighters, Czech writers of the 1870s highlighted first and foremost their cruelty. They wrote about the violence of the Turks with striking frequency and intensity. For example, Kodym, in a text intended for youths, described the âcadavers of murdered men, disfigured women, old men, and children,â
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and the writer and journalist Eduard Rüffer (1835â1878) wrote about the fanaticism and brutality with which the Turks murdered, plundered, and burned, cut the heads off the dead and mutilated their bodies.
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Similar images and vocabulary appeared even in the work of a woman, EliÅ¡ka Krásnohorská (1847â1926), a respected writer and one of the leaders of the Czech womenâs movement in the 1870s and 1880s. A collection of poems she wrote in 1880 entitled K slovanskému jihu (To the Slavic South) features only cruel, perfidious Turks, graphic descriptions of dead bodies, and blood that âlicks the skyâs browsâ and âflows in rivers.â
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Perhaps the most striking example of this is her poem âVdÄkâ (Gratitude), which paints the Turks as remorseless monsters: a Turk loses both arms in battle, a Christian woman takes pity on him, takes him to her poor dwelling, puts him in her own bed, and gives him the last cup of milk she has in the hope that his suffering will make him more compassionate in the future. The Turk repays her kindness by setting the house on fire, using his teeth to set alight the sheaf his bed is made of. Krásnohorská likens the Turk to a mordacious beast, wide-eyed and white-fanged, with a look of bestial lust on his face when he âlunges at the baby in the cradle, sinks his teeth into the soft little body, and tears it from the bed in his bloody
This contrast between the mercifulness of the Slavs and the mercilessness of the Turks, so dramatically expressed by Krásnohorská, appears in more prosaic accounts as well. Rüffer contrasted Turkish cruelty with the humane conduct of the Russians during war, and argued that the Turks deserved the highest contempt for their bestiality and cowardice because they tortured and killed wounded Russians and would not hesitate even to cut the limbs and heads off the bodies of the dead. In a similar vein to what we read in Krásnohorskáâs poem he wrote about how the Turks, because of their fanaticism, hurt even those who were trying to help them. And he claimed that despite this, Russian officers made sure that their men did not reciprocate and that they treated captured Turks decently, which was confirmed by the large number of Turks they took prisoner after each fight. 122
Kalpana Sahni in her work on Russian Orientalism notes that Russian witnesses of the battles with Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus often ascribed the violence committed by their army to the enemy.
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Other historians, especially those studying Austriansâ experiences with Ottoman attacks, claim that the descriptions of violence were not the result of anti-Turkish prejudices, but reflected the real brutality to which the Austrian population was subjected.
124
Czechs writing about the revolts in the Balkans and the Russo-Turkish war in the 1870s were rarely eyewitnesses to any combat. But they read about the violence that occurred during the war and were shocked by it, and therefore attributed the cruelty solely to the Turks. The writer and journalist HoleÄek, who unlike many others was a witness to events in the Balkans, wrote that the âopioid visionsâ of the Turks led them to come up with the cruelest tortures, such as hanging people by their ribs.
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Trying to explain the violence on the side of the Slavs, HoleÄek wrote that after the Turks went about decapitating the bodies of Montenegrins left on the battlefield, the Montenegrins started to do the same, but â[t]heir Slavic tenderness [jemnocit] prevented them from acquiring the Turksâ barbaric habitsâ; whereas the Turks pitched everybody they captured alive on poles, the Montenegrins often let the captives go.
126
The
Most writings that dealt with the Turks in the late 1870s and early 1880s regarded them as aggressive, violent, and cruel. Some, however, also added other characteristics, calling the Turks perfidious and lazy and their country dirty and smelly, and commenting on their lack of education and inability to become civilized. These authors criticized the state of the education system in the Ottoman Empire and depicted the Turks as too superstitious to be able to participate in European learning and civilization.
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But in the writings that responded directly to the events of the 1870s, these criticisms were only sidelines in larger narratives about Turkish vileness, which mostly regurgitated older stereotypes that associated the Turks with belligerence, fanaticism, and sexuality. Like other Europeans, Czechs were fascinated with polygamy and the harem, which the 1870s anti-Turkish writing did not regard as exotic and mysterious but as a sign of the Turksâ weakness. According to Rüffer, polygamy contributed to the mental decline of the Ottoman population and paradoxically was the reason why the Turks were dying out.
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Mayerhofer claimed that Islam was responsible for the lasciviousness of the Turks: âMohammed has in the Koran certainly promised all soldiers who fall on the battlefield a direct path to Turkish heaven, where, among other heavenly delights, the plump embrace of beautiful odalisques awaits them.â
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Krásnohorská employed similar imagery in her poems: the Turkish pashas are often dreaming of or succumb to the charms of their female slaves, who in most cases are Slavic women; lust is presented as more important than honor to the Turks, who covet Slavic women more than gold, and in some poems salaciously kiss Slavic beauties.
130
Krásnohorská showed great sympathy for South Slavic women; her Slavic heroines are brave fighters against the Turks, capable of inspiring men, but she was unable to extend her interest in the fate of women to Muslim or Turkish women.
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In the anti-Turkish climate of the late 1870s rarely any attempt was made to provide readers with broader and less biased information. Mayerhofer quoted a French author who argued that the Turks are not a lower race to Europeans, just different. Mayerhofer wrote that the true and original character of the Turks could be found in their old homeland, Asia Minor, far away from European influence, which he claimed had allowed them to preserve their character in its pure form. He portrayed them as brave and having a feeling for social equality. Yet, Mayerhofer hastened to add that even the good qualities of the Turks resulted from their weaknesses, their politeness and dignity being a product of their laziness, and their hospitality, required by their religion, not free from self-interest, but provided with the expectation of gifts in return, which often cost more than what they had given in the first place. 132
Although in the 1870s the Turks were most often mentioned in the context of the events on the Balkan Peninsula, they were also talked about in connection with Czech history and the fate of the Slavs more generally. Some writings on the Turks indirectly criticized the situation of the Slavs under Austrian rule in the Habsburg Empire or drew a parallel between the Turks and the Hungarians as oppressors of Slavs.
133
The Turks also served as a contrast, as the opposite of the Slavs. The vivid depictions of Turkish cruelty described above were often used to underscore how humane and compassionate the Slavs are. Kodym, as we saw in the introductory quote, wrote that in Christiansâ battles against the Turks, the role played by the inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire deserved to be acknowledged.
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But more often Czech authors emphasized the important role of the Czechs and specifically the Moravians in these wars.
135
According to one of them, Vienna and the Habsburg dynasty were saved from the Turks âby the mighty Slavic arm,â embodied in the person of Jan Sobieski.
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It was particularly common to stress the virtues of the Montenegrins, which were made
4 The Turkish Race
Compared to the Pan-Slavic framing of Turkish themes in the 1870s, references to race in relation to the Turks were significantly rarer. The medieval and early modern views of the Turks that have been summarized earlier in this chapter reflected primarily religious concerns. Nevertheless, scholars studying the racialization of Muslims suggest that racial discourses had a long (pre)history and that religious and racial Othering were far from mutually exclusive. According to Nasar Meer, âthe category of race was co-constituted with religion.â 140 At the same time, it is important to remember, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant note, that â[a] racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial signification and identities.â 141 For Czechs, representing the Turks through racial categories reflected a perception of difference between the Czechs and the Turks (as in the reference to race by Kodym), but did not serve to legitimize any position of dominance over the Turks.
The term race, or its equivalents in circulation at the time, was used in descriptions categorizing various populations according to their racial origins. Riegerâs encyclopedia, as we could see, in 1872 characterized the Turks as âone of the most important tribes of the Altay family of the Mongolian race
In 1877, a popular Czech journal OsvÄta (Enlightenment) published a long article in several installments entitled âThe Struggle of Europe against the Mongolian Race, with Particular Attention to the Wars of the Russians with the Turks.â Its author, Josef KubiÅ¡ta (1840â1907), writing under the pen name Josef Procházka,
146
was a secondary school teacher and popularizer of history, who is all but forgotten today. He was neither the first nor the most important person to write about the Turks in racial terms. Nonetheless, his article deserves special attention because it is a more extreme example of the impact of the racial discourse on attitudes toward the Turks, published, moreover, in a then mainstream Czech magazine.
Procházkaâs article was a variation on the narrative celebrating the merits of the Czechs or Slavs in saving Europe from the Turkish threat. In the article, the saviors were all Slavs, most notably Southern Slavs and imperial Russia; at the time the article was published Russia was allegedly engaged in its âtenth war with Turkey,â 147 and the entire âMongolian raceâ was seen as posing a threat. The term Procházka used to describe the Turks and their Mongolian relatives was plemeno, which literally means âtribeâ or âbreed,â but in the way the term was commonly employed in Czech in the later part of the 19th century it also referred to race. 148 Procházka maintained that the uprising in Herzegovina that spread to other Slavic nations under Ottoman rule marked the start of a new age â the age of the Slavs. He associated the Russo-Turkish war at that time with the old religious and national antagonism that existed between Europe and the Turks and presented the Ottoman Empire as the antithesis of Europe. 149 He claimed that Europe celebrated personal freedom, while in the Ottoman Balkans rough serfdom prevailed; in Europe nations were struggling to extend political rights, while in Turkey Asian despotism ruled; in Europe equality before the law was a given, while in Turkey a Christian could not testify against a Turk; and in the West, despite its political conflicts, society was becoming increasingly humane, but in the East, the ruling nation committed atrocities that could only be described as âTurkish brutality.â 150
Procházka argued that the Turks are the opposite of the Slavs also in racial terms: the Turks are Mongolians, whereas the Slavs are Caucasians of the Indo-European race. He acknowledged that the seeds of religious, moral, and scholarly education came from Asia, but argued that they blossomed in Europe, which then matured, while vast Asia remained a child, and only Europe could provide the spiritual food necessary for Asiaâs elevation. The author presents European history as the history of the âMongolianâ invasions, which included Magyars and Tatars as well as Ottoman Turks. It is worth noting that a subject of debate in Hungary at that time was whether a relationship of kinship existed between the Turks and the Magyars. Leaving aside the origins of this theory and its later developments, in the second half of the 19th century some scholars, including the traveler and Turkologist Ãrmin Vámbéry (1832â1913),
Procházka wrote that the Mongolian race had made no contribution to the progress of humanity and represented a âdemonic forceâ that sought to destroy everything of beauty that had been created by good and noble people. 152 The author expressed the belief that brute material force would have to give way to a higher moral and spiritual force, and that was why, he claimed, the Mongolian race was on the retreat in Europe and the number of Magyars as well as Turks was decreasing â the law of nature would make sure that the Mongolian race had neither a past nor a future among the Iranian tribes of Europe: âThe science of cross-breeding seems to have demonstrated its validity even here; crossbreeding between individuals of the same species refines the race, [while] crossbreeding between heterogeneous persons can in a moment lead to sterility.â 153 Procházka contended that Turkish rule had managed to last for five centuries because of Islam, a religion that had to be taken seriously. He argued that while Islam had gained numerous adherents among the Semitic, Hamitic, and Turkish races, its appeal was lost on the Arian tribes, just as Christianity could only take root among the Arian nations. Thus, according to the author, the religious difference is a major antagonism between Arians and Turkish Mongolians, as if each race had, apart from physiological and consequently mental characteristics, also a separate religion. 154
Similar views were expressed in 1878 by Karel Adámek (1840â1918), a writer, mayor of the East Bohemian town Hlinsko and a member of parliament, in an article titled âSouth Slavs and the Turks.â
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Adámek discusses the views of Hellwald and uses similar phrases and images as KubiÅ¡ta-Procházkaâs article published a year earlier, suggesting Hellwaldâs views were popular and influential among some Czechs. Adámek also highlighted the lack of any contribution
In the same vein, Rüffer quoted Hellwald extensively in a chapter titled âThe Annihilation of Turkish Rule â the Benefit of Learningâ (Záhuba panstvà tureckého â prospÄch vzdÄlanosti). He claimed that the English and the Jews opposed the dissolution of the âTurkishâ Empire for economic reasons, and the Hungarians feared losing their influence over the non-Magyar population in Hungary. Some Austrian Germans allegedly agreed with them, but others, more educated ones, believed that the end of Turkish rule would benefit civilization. According to Rüffer, Hellwald, who applied a scholarly approach in his writings on the Turks and the Slavs, had proved that the Turks were completely incapable of participating in European learning and intellectual life, and had shown that polygamy was responsible for the decline in the number of the Turks. Rüffer (and Hellwald) claimed that whenever the Turks conquered an Arian nation, they destroyed its civilization, like other Mongolian nations had done before them. 157
The Czechs were thus no exception when it came to the appeal of racial discourse in the late 19th century. Race was not, however, the dominant lens through which the Turks were viewed. The racial perspective was reserved primarily for the Jews, although occasionally links were made between the two groups of Others.
158
Both groups were also mainly perceived in terms of their difference from the Czechs.
159
Interestingly, the entry under the word âTurkishâ in Jungmannâs Czech-German dictionary from 1838 talks about âfurious Turkish, Jewish words.â
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Later observers of the Ottoman Empire sometimes expressed both anti-Turkish and anti-Jewish opinions.
161
In 1901, the anti-Semitic journal NaÅ¡e zájmy (Our Interests) announced that (too) many children had been born in the Sultanâs family and that the Sultanâs wife had died, but commented that the Sultan would luckily be able to find solace in the fact that he
5 The Longevity of Stereotypes
The Congress of Berlin in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish war brought independence or increased autonomy to the Balkan nations, including some of the Slavic ones. Continued tension and conflict in the Balkans nevertheless ensured that the Turks did not disappear from the news or from the Czechsâ awareness. One of the consequences of the congress that was of relevance for the Czechs was the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is dealt with in another chapter of this book. Although in the three decades following the Berlin Congress there was no scarcity of other news associated with the Ottoman Empire, leaving aside the occupation and later annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was not until the Balkan Wars of 1912â1913 that the Czechs were strongly drawn into the events in the Balkans once again. The First Balkan War was followed passionately not only by Czechs in the cities but also throughout the countryside, where lectures were held on current issues and their historical roots and were accompanied by protests against the planned Austro-Hungarian invasion of Montenegro. The success of the fundraising organized in order to send Czech physicians and other staff to help the wounded Southern Slavs demonstrated the Czechsâ unfading interest in the situation in the Balkan Peninsula.
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The victories of the Balkan Slavs in the First Balkan War, in which Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece united to expel the Ottoman Empire from its remaining territory in the Balkans, and especially the triumph of the Montenegrins at Skadar in April 1913, were celebrated enthusiastically. This enthusiasm contrasted with the Czech response to the Second Balkan War: When Bulgaria, in its effort to get hold of Macedonia, assailed the Serbian and Greek armies, which led to Turkish and Romanian attacks on Bulgaria and a fight among Slavic countries, the Czech public became disillusioned.
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The ongoing turmoil on the Balkan Peninsula helped to prolong the life span of the anti-Turkish sentiment and the stereotypes about the Turks that had emerged, or resurfaced, in response to the events of the 1870s. Their lingering influence on Czechsâ views of the Turks was manifested in a variety of forms, from literary production to non-fiction and the visual arts. It might appear at first glance that the stereotype of Turks as fighters and the enemy had grown weaker and softer by this time, and this is indeed what the (re)appearance of âthe Turkâ as a comic figure seems to suggest. But on closer inspection, it is evident that among some parts of the Czech population a deeper animosity toward the Turks survived and was present even in contexts where the Turks and their fate were not the center of attention.
The Balkan Wars ushered in a new, though weaker, wave of anti-Turkish publications. In 1913, a respected historian and ethnographer named ÄenÄk ZÃbrt (1864â1932) published an article titled âThe Turks as Warriors in Old-Czech Literature,â which he introduced with a comment on how appropriate it was to remind ourselves today, in a time of renewed fighting with âthe hereditary enemy of Christianity,â of the literature devoted to the Turkish wars written in the 15thâ17th centuries.
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Even more widespread were the stereotypical representations of the Turks that existed in pulp culture, such as popular vaudeville-type songs and poems aimed at a broad audience, as the number of such works exploded during the Balkan Wars. In the context of the war, the image of âthe Turkâ as a fighter reappeared, along with all the scary attributes of this stereotype. Yet, given how quickly the Ottoman Empire was losing the war, images of âthe Turkâ were in fact far from frightening and his terrible attributes were described ironically or mocked. A characteristic example of this is a play that was originally written by the German author Franz Pocci (1807â1876) and was adapted into a short comic puppet show in Czech titled Zajatý Turek (The Captive Turk), which featured Czech characters and reacted to current events. The Czech version of the play is set during the First Balkan War, when the Ottoman armies were defeated by the Slavs and many Turks were captured. It has KaÅ¡párek, a Czech comic figure reminiscent of Punch, pretending to be a captive Turk in order to frighten and ridicule the innkeeper whom he owes money.
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The characters in the play express a fear of the Turks and liken them to wild animals who âcould eat us.â
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In the story there is a rumor that a captured Turk, wearing wide trousers and a turban, broke out of his metal chains and
Illustration from Turek z Kamenýho mostu (The Turk from the Stone Bridge) by J. HeÅman Zefi, n.d. (Artist unknown)
âThe Turk on Charles Bridgeâ is the name of a statue Ferdinand Maxmilián Brokoff created in 1714 to symbolize the then still real fear that existed of the Turks, but in the early 20th century it became a recurring figure in popular culture.
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In one well-liked song titled Turek z Kamenýho mostu (The Turk from the Stone Bridge), the statue of the Turk on Charles Bridge serves as a comic symbol of Ottoman power: The song tells the story of a Turk who carries with him the quirts that he had used to do âgood deedsâ in Turkey. It then goes on to describe how the Old Turks have been treacherously defeated by the Young Turks (because women preferred Young Turks to Old Turks), all the while âthe melancholy Sultan,â the chorus chants, just drinks English tea and eats German liver, cares only for his harem, and doesnât give a damn about the fate of his empire.
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Another song about the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans refers to various aspects of the stereotype of âthe Turkâ: the statue of the Turk on the bridge, a Turk with a pipe, of the type commonly seen on coffee shop signs, and a Turkish musical band. In the Balkans, so the song goes, the Turks are being defeated by the Slavs and the Greeks, which is what they have long deserved, and even the girls in the harem are wondering whoâs going to kiss them now that the Sultan has been defeated. In the song, God is punishing the barbarians responsible for the enslavement of Christians; âthe Arnavutâ (Albanian) has been beaten by the Serbs and Bulgarians â sons of the Goddess Sláva â and once the Turks, to the sound of the Turkish march, are finally expelled from Europe and forced to go to Asia, where they belong, peace will prevail in the Balkans and all Slavs will celebrate their South Slavic brethren.
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Although the farcical nature of these examples of popular culture made the Turks appear tame and the imagery trivial, the images drew on anti-Turkish stereotypes that were widespread in the late 1870s. Similar views were expressed throughout the 1880s and up to the 20th century in works touching on the
Anti-Turkish sentiment based on such notions about the Turks as bloodthirsty enemies found their way into political thinking. Even a figure like Tomáš Guarrigue Masaryk (1850â1937), a professor and politician and future president of Czechoslovakia, shared some of these sentiments. His opinions on the Turks developed over time and were certainly not central to his political and philosophical thinking. Mostly they related to immediate political issues, such as Austro-Hungarian foreign policy. He was particularly concerned with the fate of the Southern Slavs and was involved with their situation both as a thinker and a member of the Austrian Parliament.
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In this framework
6 Conclusion
The 19th-century Czech version of anti-Turkish prejudices drew on attitudes from the early modern period and was affected by the specific type of relations that the Czechs had with the Ottoman Empire, which was that they had participated in wars with the Turks in past centuries and had witnessed the effects of Turkish raids, but they had no direct experience of Ottoman rule. This was reflected, on the one hand, in the strength of the stereotype of âthe Turkâ as a fighter even throughout the 19th century. On the other hand, the lack of direct Ottoman rule and the temporal and spatial distance from the wars gave rise to a wide range of images, in which âthe Turkâ was not always presented as terrifying, but was sometimes a more neutral or even a comic figure. This mocking view of the Turks spread in some parts of Europe in the 18th century, when the Ottoman Empire ceased to be perceived as an immediate danger, and it surfaced in the Czech lands in the early 19th century. The most important factor that in the second half of the 19th century altered the generally lukewarm anti-Turkish imagery of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the sense of solidarity the Czechs had with the Slavs who were living in the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the 19th century, the Czechs, looking for support in their own national movement and for a way of buttressing their self-confidence, sympathized with the Southern Slavs and identified with their suffering and fights against Ottoman rule, a feeling supported by pre-existing ideas about the Turks.
In the 1870s, interest in the Turks, who by then were no longer just mythical enemies remote to the Czechs in both time and space and had come instead to represent a real threat to the Czechsâ Slavic brethren, led to the revival of older stereotypes, images, and vocabulary, which were then enriched with new elements. The imagery did not fulfil the same function as it had in the past, but without the historical backdrop, the animosity toward the Turks in the 1870s might not have been as strong as it was or might have been expressed differently. In the atmosphere of the late 1870s, there was little room for objective information or for the emergence of a new, modern type of exotic interest in an âOrientalâ country and its inhabitants. Many publications devoted to the fate of the Slavs and the Turks in the 1870s and early 1880s, or under the impact of the events of these years, featured surprisingly bloody and violent images of the cruel and bloodthirsty Turks. Stereotypes of the Turks as uncivilized, lacking in education, lazy, and fatalistic appeared as well, but the Ottoman Empire was not as deeply an engraved symbol of Oriental despotism in Czech political thinking as it was in Western Europe; consequently, Ottoman despotism or the Ottoman political system more generally were not usually cited as reasons to criticize the Turks.
Nationalism, and specifically the idea of Slavic solidarity, had a strong effect on Czech views of the Turks. The Czechs identified with the Slavs fighting against Ottoman rule and thus portrayed the Turks as their archenemies. The heroic fight of the Slavic brethren against the formidable Turkish foe gave the Czechs a sense of pride that they could not feel otherwise given their own submissive status within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They also drew a parallel between Ottoman and Habsburg rule, both of which, though in different ways, exercised oppression on the Slavs. As the lawyer and politician Karel MattuÅ¡ (1836â1919) argued in 1877, the struggle in the Balkans was neither merely a fight between the Christians and the Turks (i.e. Muslims) nor one just between the Russians and the Turks and concerned instead a much more important issue â the Slavic question. It was connected with equilibrium in Europe and with the situation in the Austrian Empire, where the Slavs needed to be able to participate in the running of the state alongside the Germans and Magyars. MattuÅ¡ concluded, âThe Slavic question has to be solved and the emancipation of the Slavs in the Turkish Empire is only its first act.â 185
Although Czech nationalism was constructed as secular, it borrowed from the older, prevailingly religious antagonism against the Turks to emphasize the Slavsâ merit in defending Christendom from Islam. References to religious difference seem to have just copied older imagery: they lacked any current content. Alongside nationalism, racial theories also found their way into anti-Turkish treatises from this period and were often tied up with anti-Turkish religious rhetoric and frequently expressed in a limited set of arguments inspired by the same sources. Such views, however, were not particularly widespread and racialization did not become central to the way the Turks were perceived. Given the lack of Czech ambitions in the Ottoman Empire, there were no political grounds for fomenting racism against the Turks.
Anti-Turkish stereotypes did not disappear after the 1870s, but other factors started to affect the Czechsâ views of the Turks, such as the personal experience of individual Czechs who traveled to the Ottoman Empire. The next chapter will show to what extent encounters with the Ottoman Turks altered the existing imagery.
Frant. Vl. Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků dospÄlejÅ¡Ã mládeži (Prague: Nákladem knÄhkupectvà Mikuláše a Knappa, 1879), 7â8.
The relations between individual European rulers and the Ottoman Sultans were influenced by the balance of power in Europe and the aspirations of and rivalries among European states: French kings were keen to collaborate with the Ottomans against the Habsburgs, who were a more important adversary for France than the Ottoman Empire. In Britain, the countryâs maritime ambitions made the Ottomans a factor they had to reckon with, while there were economic motives behind Elizabeth Iâs well-known ties to the Sultan. For the Habsburgs, the Ottomans were an immediate threat and a rival on the Southeastern borders of their nascent empire, and in the 16th and 17th centuries a threat even to its heartland.
On the one hand, depictions of the Ottoman Turksâ violence or their rule as despotic can be interpreted as reflecting reality (see Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 9â11; for a somewhat different view see also Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 6â7). On the other hand, travel writing on Muslim societies can be interpreted as expressing just a drive for domination (see Kabbani, Europeâs Myths of Orient, 86â112).
Ãırakman, European Images of Ottoman Empire, 185.
Ibid., 184.
See Kuran-BurçoÄlu, âA Glimpse,â 29â32.
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), esp. 302â6. See also Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 31.
Daniel J. Vitkus, âIntroduction,â in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 7.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 25.
Smith, Images of Islam, 1; Larry Silver, âEast is East: Images of the Turkish Nemesis in the Habsburg World,â in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450â1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed. James G. Harper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), esp. 208â9.
Ãırakman, European Images of Ottoman Empire, 1 and 105ff.
Wolff, The Singing Turk, 2.
Kuran-BurçoÄlu, âTurkey,â 255; Kuran-BurçoÄlu, âA Glimpse,â 29.
Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, 101â2.
See Susan Nance, âA Facilitated Access Model and Ottoman Empire Tourism,â Annals of Tourism Research 34, no. 4 (2007), 1056â77, https://doi:10.1016/j.annals.2007.06.006; A. Arslan and H.A. Polat, âThe Ottoman Empireâs First Attempt to Establish Hotels in Ä°stanbul: The Ottoman Imperial Hotels Company,â Tourism Management 51 (December 2015), 103â11, https://doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2015.05.016.
Teresa Heffernan, âTraveling East: Veiling, Race, and Nations,â in Ä°nankur, Lewis, and Roberts, The Poetics and Politics of Place, esp. 158â60.
Ibid., 160.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 88â92.
Pavel HradeÄný and Konstantinos Tsivos, âÄesko-Åecké vztahy,â in Hladký et al., Vztahy Äechů, 263â74.
For some exceptions see JiÅà BeÄka, âTurkish Literature in Czechoslovakia,â Archiv Orientálnà 52, no. 2 (1984): 174â76.
During the 1860s, though, the Czechs were already developing an interest in the fighting in Montenegro and Herzegovina. Václav ŽáÄek and Růžena Havránková, âSrbové a ÄeÅ¡i v dobÄ ÅeÅ¡enà východnà krize,â in ŽáÄek et al., ÄeÅ¡i a Jihoslované v minulosti, 357â69.
See, e.g., ZdenÄk Hojda, Marta Ottlová, and Roman Prahl, eds., âSlavme slavnÄ slávu Slávov slavnýchâ: Slovanstvà a Äeská kultura 19. stoletà (Prague: klp, 2006).
The question of Bosnia-Herzegovina is left aside here as it is addressed in Chapter Three (âCivilizing the Slavic Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovinaâ).
Rataj, Äeské zemÄ ve stÃnu půlmÄsÃce, 26.
See Vojtech KopÄan and Klára KrajÄoviÄová, Slovensko v tieni polmesiaca (Bratislava: Osveta, 1983), esp. 25â62.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 67. Fichtner mentions that Leopold himself wrote part of the music for the opera âThe Paladin in Romeâ after the Ottoman siege of Vienna; in Prague, nobility celebrated Habsburg victories and this mood is reflected also on the walls of their palaces â for example, Troja Palace in Prague.
Rataj, Äeské zemÄ ve stÃnu půlmÄsÃce, 26.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 69.
Silver, âEast is East,â 208.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 47â58.
Josef JireÄek, Anthologie z literatury Äeské doby stÅednÃ, 2nd ed. (Prague: Fridrich Tempský, 1869), 2:126.
Rataj, Äeské zemÄ ve stÃnu půlmÄsÃce, 26â58.
Hana Hynková, âStaré Äeské cestopisy jako prameny pro etnografii, folkloristiku a toponomastiku Bulharska,â Äeský lid 55, no. 2â3 (1968): 79; Lisy-Wagner, Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 5.
Hana Hynková, âStaré Äeské cestopisy,â 85â87. These works became part of the Czech literary canon in the 19th century: travelogues by Martin KabátnÃk (published in 1539, about a trip carried out in 1491â2), Václav Budovec z Budova (author of the noteworthy anti-Turkish pamphlet Antialkorán), Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic (written in 1599 about a 1591 journey), KryÅ¡tof Harant z Polžic a Bezdružic (published 1608) and the not so well-known travel account of HeÅman ÄernÃn z Chudenic from 1644. Mitrovicâs travelogue was particularly popular and was largely based on the work of Busbecq, but differed from it in the account it gave of Mitrovicâs personal experiences during his stay in the Ottoman Empire.
See Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 32â33.
See Noel Malcolm, âComenius, the Conversion of the Turks, and the Muslim-Christian Debate on the Corruption of Scripture,â Church History and Religious Culture 87, no. 4 (2007): 477â508.
Furthermore, some images related to the Czech milieu are also discussed by Kalmar (Early Orientalism), Silver, (âEast is Eastâ), and Fichtner (Terror and Toleration).
Rataj, Äeské zemÄ ve stÃnu půlmÄsÃce, 24â216.
Ibid., 164â69 and 219â21.
Ibid., 230â31 and 400â403.
Lisy-Wagner, Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 177.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 174.
See Kieniewicz, âPolish Orientalness,â 77â87.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 71.
Karel Horálek, âOrientálnà prvky ve slovanských pohádkách,â Äeský lid 55, no. 2â3 (1968): 92â101.
OldÅich Sirovátka, âRozÅ¡ÃÅenà balad s tureckou tematikou v Äeské a slovenské tradici,â Äeský lid 55, no. 2â3 (1968): 102â8.
On Slovak views see Charles Sabatos, âSlovak Perceptions of the Ottoman Legacy in Eastern Europe,â Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 5 (2008): 735â49.
In a novel from 1822, the Czechs and the Turks even fought side by side against a common enemy. See BeÄka, âTurkish Literature,â 176.
The first translation was published in 1834. See BeÄka, âTurkish Literature,â 174. Translations of high literature appeared only with the emergence of Oriental studies toward the end of the century.
The text does not mention the Ottoman Empire, but there are some indications that âthe Oriental cityâ by the seaside was Istanbul, and the story may have been based on a stay of a Czech musician in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The first night of the play, which is considered one of the most important Czech dramas of that time, was in November 1847.
Marek KrejÄÃ, âDaleký Äi blÃzký? Evropský Balkán oÄima malÃÅů z Äeska,â in Piorecká and Petrbok, CizÃ, jiné, exotické, 171.
Czech painters traveled more often to the (formerly) Ottoman Balkans and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Petr Å embera, âOrientálnà banket u Samsona: Orientalistická malba v Äechách na konci 19. stoletÃ,â in Piorecká and Petrbok, CizÃ, jiné, exotické, 443â53.
Å embera, âOrientálnà banket u Samsona,â 453.
Roman Prahl, âOsvojovánà âexotismůâ v pÅÃležitostné architektuÅe dlouhého 19. stoletÃ,â in Piorecká and Petrbok, CizÃ, jiné, exotické, 432. Prahl adds that this was due to the fact that ârealâ mastering of the world was not possible.
Prahl, âOsvojovánà âexotismů,ââ 426â27 and 432.
Individuals of course traveled to the Middle East and specifically to the Ottoman Empire and their travels are the topic of the following chapter.
VladimÃr Macura, Znamenà zrodu: Äeské obrozenà jako kulturnà typ (Prague: Äeskoslovenský spisovatel, 1983), esp. 44â46.
The idea had a longer prehistory though and was first put forth by the late 18th-century scholar Josef Dobrovský.
On the Czech Pan-Slavism in the 19th century see RadomÃr VlÄek, âPanslavismus Äi rusofilstvÃ? PÄt tezà k otázce reflexe slovanstvà a panslavismu Äeskou spoleÄnostà 19. stoletÃ,â in Hojda, Ottlová, and Prahl, âSlavme slavnÄ slávu Slávov slavných,â 9. Masaryk argued that political Pan-Slavism would be unable to fulfil the dreams of the Slavs, who were too devoted to their individual nations. T.G. Masaryk, SvÄt a Slované, 2nd ed. (Prague: Nové Äechy, 1919), 6â7.
VlÄek, âPanslavismus Äi rusofilstvÃ?,â 11â16.
F.L. Rieger, ed., SlovnÃk nauÄný (Prague: I.L. Kober, 1867), 6:77.
Ottův slovnÃk nauÄný (Prague: J. Otto, 1905), 23:438â47.
Å Ãstek, Junáci, horalé a lenoÅ¡i, 9.
Ibid., 9â10.
ŽáÄek and Havránková, âSrbové a ÄeÅ¡i,â 357â69.
Růžena Havránková, âMladà BulhaÅi v Äeských mÄstech v 19. stoletÃ,â in ÄeÅ¡i a jižnà Slované, ed. Mirjam Moravcová et al. (Prague: Institut základů vzdÄlanosti Univerzity Karlovy, 1996), 165.
Late 19th-century history textbooks mostly only mention the Turks briefly and the general image of the encounters with the Turks they present corresponds to the official Habsburg interpretation.
ZdeÅka Hladká and Olga Martincová, âTradice a souÄasnost Äeské lexikografie,â in Teoriya i istoriya slavyanskoy leksikografii: Nauchnye materialy k xiv sâezdu slavistov, ed. Margarita Chernysheva (Moscow: Institut russkogo yazyka im. V.V. Vinogradova ran, 2008), 261â86, www.phil.muni.cz/cest/lide/hladka/CJA014_Tradice.rtf.
Josef Jungmann, SlovnÃk Äesko-nÄmecký (Prague: Václav Å pinka, 1838), 4:673.
JireÄek, Anthologie, 2:126.
Ibid., 2:251, 126, 291, and 375. The anthology, intended for secondary schools (gymnasia), was first published in 1858.
Josef FrantiÅ¡ek Smetana, VÅ¡eobecný dÄjepis obÄanský, vol. 1 (Prague: Äeské Museum, 1846).
Ibid., 1:655 and 697.
Originally published as Václav Vladivoj Tomek, DÄje Králowstwà Äeského (Prague: F. ÅivnáÄ, 1850).
Tomek occasionally wrote about Czech participation in the wars against the Turks, including the taxes the Czechs paid, but he mostly just described alliances, the events of the war, and peace treaties, without any evaluations. Václav Vladivoj Tomek, DÄje královstvà Äeského, 3rd ed. (Prague: FrantiÅ¡ek ÅivnáÄ, 1864), 363.
Ibid., 302.
First published in Czech as FrantiÅ¡ek Palacký, DÄjiny národu Äeského w Äechách a w MorawÄ, 10 vols. (Prague: J.G. Kalve, 1848â76).
FrantiÅ¡ek Palacký, DÄjiny národu Äeského v Äechách a v MoravÄ (Prague: B. KoÄÃ, 1907), 1278.
Malý wrote on Czech grammar and history and was appreciated for his mastery of the Czech language, his broad knowledge of history, and his patriotism. See Ottův slovnÃk nauÄný (Prague: J. Otto, 1900), 16:736â37.
Jakub Malý, DÄjepis národu Äeského, vol. 2, Od pÅijetà Sigmunda za krále až do nynÄjÅ¡Ãch dob (Prague: Jaroslav PospÃÅ¡il, 1864), esp. 82, 253, and 364.
Malý, DÄjepis národu Äeského, 2:253.
On the Czech master narrative see note number 31 in the Introduction.
See Dagmar Hartmanová, âHistorie Äeskoslovenské encyklopedistiky do roku 1945,â Národnà knihovna: Knihovnická revue 11, no. 1 (2000): 15â21.
Rieger, SlovnÃk nauÄný, 9:639â40.
Ibid., 9:640.
Ibid., 9:651.
See Malýâs text on the Turks: âTurci,â in Názorný atlas k slovnÃku nauÄnému, ed. Frant. Lad. Rieger and Vácslav Zelený, vol. 2, Národo- a dÄjepis, ed. Frant. Lad. Rieger and Vácslav Zelený with the text by Jakub Malý (Prague: I.L. Kober, 1866), 74â80.
Malý, âTurci,â 74.
Ibid., 75 and 79.
Ibid., 75.
Malý, âTurci,â 76 and 74. Interestingly, this claim does not seem to have been widely shared by other authors, unlike other of Malýâs assertions â for instance about Turkish superstitiousness.
See ŽáÄek and Havránková, âSrbové a ÄeÅ¡i,â 379.
Ibid., 379â86.
KarolÃna SvÄtlá, âPlevno,â in Äasové ohlasy (Prague: J. Otto, 1903), 1:7â118.
Eduard Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká (Prague: Alois Hynek, n.d., ca. 1878), 3.
Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 81.
VojtÄch Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika války východnà (Prague: V. Nagl, 1879), 567.
ŽáÄek and Havránková, âSrbové a ÄeÅ¡i,â 380.
There were always some Czechs reporting on the Balkans, however, especially journalists, and some volunteers and experts who took part in the events. See ŽáÄek and Havránková, âSrbové a ÄeÅ¡i,â 357â69 and 377â82.
Josef HoleÄek, Äerná Hora (Prague: Nákladem Spolku pro vydávánà laciných knih Äeských, 1876), 27.
Konstantin JireÄek was the son of Josef JireÄek, who wrote the above-mentioned âAnthology of Czech Literature,â and the grandson of Pavel Josef Å afaÅÃk, one of the leading intellectuals of the early Czech "national revival." Konstantin JireÄek wrote extensively on the history of Bulgaria and on Serbian history. In the 1880s, he was a minister in the Bulgarian government and the director of the Bulgarian National Library.
Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, Kulturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart (Augsburg: Butsch, 1875). On Hellwald see Richard Weikart, âThe Impact of Social Darwinism on Anti-Semitic Ideology in Germany and Austria: 1860â1945,â in Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 99â100.
See, e.g., Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, ZemÄ a obyvatelé jejÃ: Ilustrovaná zemÄpisná, dÄjepisná a národopisná kniha domácÃ; Evropa (Prague: Fr.A. Urbánek, n.d., ca. 1879); Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, ZemÄ a obyvatelé jejÃ: Ilustrovaná zemÄpisná, dÄjepisná a národopisná kniha domácÃ; Asie (Prague: Fr.A. Urbánek, n.d., ca. 1880); Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, PÅÃrodopis ÄlovÄka, 2 vols. (Prague: Fr.A. Urbánek, 1881â86).
Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, Der Islam: Türken und Slaven; Acht Capitel aus der Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung (Augsburg: Lampart, 1874).
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 3 and 105; Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 5 and 7; Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 30; Karel Adámek, âJihoslované a Turci: Kulturnà obzor,â pt. 1, PodÅipan, April 8, 1878, 2. Even a scholarly article dealing with Harantâs travel book repeatedly wrote about the Turkish âterrorâ and described the Turks as âthe mortal enemyâ of Christianity. MatÄj Rypl, âÃvaha o cestopisu HarantovÄ,â Listy filologické a paedagogické 13 (1886): 259.
Adámek, âJihoslované a Turci,â pt. 1, 2; Kodym mentioned that the instinct to conquer was inborn to the Turks, but it was further inflamed by their religious fanaticism (Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 7).
Adámek, âJihoslované a Turci,â pt. 2, PodÅipan, April 22, 1878, 2; Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 560â61.
Josef Procházka, âZápas Evropy s plemenem mongolským hledÃc obzvláštÄ k válkám Rusův s Turky,â pt. 9, OsvÄta, December 1877, 891.
Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 30.
Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 7â8.
Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 30.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 36.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 12, 234, 240, and 260â61. Rüffer was a German writer who settled in Prague and wrote in German, Czech, and French.
EliÅ¡ka Krásnohorská, K slovanskému jihu: BásnÄ (Prague: Dr. Grégr a Ferd. Dattel, 1880), 9.
Ibid., 195.
Ibid., 196.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 234â36.
Kalpana Sahni, Crucifying the Orient: Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of Caucasus and Central Asia (Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1997), 83â84.
Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, esp. 9â11.
HoleÄek, Äerná Hora, 65.
Ibid.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 560â61; Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 110â11; Krásnohorská, K slovanskému jihu, 205; HoleÄek, Äerná Hora, 104.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 560.
Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 30.
Krásnohorská, K slovanskému jihu, 17â18, 128â29, 135, 156, 209, and 214.
See the poem âSnakeâ (Had) in Krásnohorská, K slovanskému jihu, 22â40, esp. 33â35. The poem âRoses of Bulgariaâ (Růže Bulharska) describes the suffering of young Bulgarian women (ârosesâ), who serve as objects in a harem. In it, Krásnohorská refers to slaves and odalisques and Muslimsâ lasciviousness; the women-roses symbolize the situation of their nation. Krásnohorská, K slovanskému jihu, 128â30. Also other authors celebrated the courage of Slavic women; see, e.g., Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 36â37.
Mayerhofer, Ilustrovaná kronika, 110â12.
Adámek, âJihoslované a Turci,â pt. 2, 2.
Kodym, Obrazy z dÄjin Turků, 82.
FrantiÅ¡ek KamenÃÄek, âÃÄastenstvà Moravanů pÅi válkách tureckých od r. 1526 do r. 1568: PÅÃspÄvek k dÄjinám Moravy v xvi. stoletÃ,â pts. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, SbornÃk historický 4, no. 1 (1886): 15â29; no. 2 (1886): 65â77; no. 3 (1886): 157â75; no. 4 (1886): 193â206; no. 5 (1886): 271â84; Josef Å imek, âJak KutnohorÅ¡tà roku 1529 proti Turku zbrojili,â SbornÃk historický 4, no. 5 (1886): 310â13; Josef Å imek, âO úÄasti Kutnohorských proti Turku l. 1532,â SbornÃk historický 4, no. 6 (1886): 376â78.
Procházka, âZápas Evropy,â pt. 3, OsvÄta, March 1877, 169.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 124.
Ibid., 121.
Ibid., 124â28.
Nasar Meer, âRacialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia,â Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (March 2013): 389.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 128.
Rieger, SlovnÃk nauÄný, 9:639.
According to Weikart, Hellwald in this respect presaged Hitlerâs social Darwinist ideology. Weikart, âThe Impact of Social Darwinism,â 99.
Ibid., 100.
Heller von Hellwald, PÅÃrodopis ÄlovÄka, 2:623â25.
Procházka, âZápas Evropy,â pts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, OsvÄta, January 1877; February 1877; March 1877; April 1877; July 1877; August 1877; September 1877; October 1877; December 1877.
Ibid., pt. 9, 891.
See Michal Frankl, Emancipace od židů: Äeský antisemitismus na konci 19. stoletà (Prague: Paseka, 2007), 31â36; Michal Frankl, âÄeská spoleÄnost a veÅejné vyjednávánà o Židech,â in Habsburkové: Vznikánà obÄanské spoleÄnosti, 1740â1918, ed. Ivo Cerman (Prague: Lidové noviny, 2016), 655.
Procházka, âZápas Evropy,â pt. 1, 7â8.
Ibid., 9.
On these linguistic theories see Susan Gal, âLinguistic Theories and National Images in 19th Century Hungary,â Pragmatics 5, no. 2 (1995): 155â166; see also Köves, âModes of Orientalism,â esp. 166â71; Gábor Ãgoston, âThe Image of the Ottomans in Hungarian Historiography,â Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61, no. 1â2 (March 2008): 15â18.
Procházka, âZápas Evropy,â pt. 1, 9â16.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 17â18.
Adámek, âJihoslované a Turci,â pt. 2, 2. Adámek was also a journalist and author of numerous historical, economic and travel writings.
Ibid., pt. 1, 2, and pt. 2, 2.
Rüffer, Válka rusko-turecká, 560â61.
Rypl, âÃvaha o cestopisu HarantovÄ,â 265. According to Rypl, Harant was prejudiced against both the Turks and the Jews because he believed that the Turks oppress Christians and the Jews cheat on Christians and are responsible for Christâs suffering.
On the Czechsâ views on the Jews at the turn of the century see Frankl, âÄeská spoleÄnost,â 652.
Jungmann, SlovnÃk Äesko-nÄmecký, 673.
See Chapter Two (âCzechs Abroadâ).
âNÄco stydlivého z Turecka,â NaÅ¡e zájmy, November 1, 1901, 5.
Jaroslav Pánek, ÄeÅ¡i a Jihoslované: Kapitoly z dÄjin vzájemných vztahů (Prague: Tribun eu, 2015), 289â90.
Ibid., 293 and 297. See also Milada Paulová, Balkánské války 1912â1913 a Äeský lid (Prague: Nakladatelstvà Äeskoslovenské akademie vÄd, 1963).
ÄenÄk ZÃbrt, âTurci váleÄnÃci v literatuÅe staroÄeské,â pts. 1 and 2, SvÄtozor, November 15, 1912, 285; November 22, 1912, 309â10. ZÃbrt was extraordinary professor of cultural history at Charles University in Prague and director of the library of the National Museum.
FrantiÅ¡ek Pocci, Zajatý Turek, adapt. F. Vysoký (Prague: Äeské lidové knihkupectvà a antikvariát Josef Springer, 1912.)
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 11â12.
Some songs were written by a popular song-writer Josef HeÅman Zefi. See also Karel KrejÄÃ, Praha legend a skuteÄnosti (Prague: Orbis, 1967), 241.
Josef HeÅman Zefi, Turek z Kamenýho mostu (Prague: Tiskem a nákladem Jul. Janů, n.d.).
Václav KnoflÃÄek, Jak dostali na chrám pánÄ dole Turci na BalkánÄ (Prague: J. HeÅman-Zefi, n.d.).
Å imek, âJak KutnohorÅ¡tà roku 1529 proti Turku zbrojili,â 310â13.
Rypl, âÃvaha o cestopisu HarantovÄâ; Josef Janko, âO stycÃch starých Slovanů s Turkotatary a Germány s hlediska jazykozpytného,â pts. 1 and 2, VÄstnÃk Äeské akademie cÃsaÅe FrantiÅ¡ka Josefa pro vÄdy, slovesnost a umÄnà 17, no. 2 (1908): 100â131; no. 3 (1908): 139â92.
KamenÃÄek, âÃÄastenstvà Moravanů,â pt. 1, 15.
J. Vojenský, âVáleÄné ÅeÅ¡enà východnà otázky,â HlÃdka 19, no. 10 (1902): 714.
Jan Klecanda, ed., Devatenácté stoletà slovem i obrazem: DÄjiny politické a kulturnÃ, vol. 1 (Prague: Jos. R. VilÃmek, n.d.).
Karel Jonáš, âUdálosti na BalkánÄ,â in Klecanda, Devatenácté stoletÃ, 58.
Josef J. Toužimský, âVýchodnà otázka,â in Klecanda, Devatenácté stoletÃ, 464â66.
For an overview and analysis of older scholarship on Masarykâs opinions and activities on behalf of Southern Slavs see Ladislav Hladký, âT.G. Masaryk a jižnà Slované: Konstanty a promÄnné v rámci starého pÅÃbÄhu,â in T.G. Masaryk a Slované, ed. Vratislav Doubek, Ladislav Hladký, RadomÃr VlÄek et al. (Prague: Historický ústav, 2013), 237â52.
Masaryk, SvÄt a Slované, 6. The text is a translation of Masarykâs lecture in Paris in 1916.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 8.
T.G. Masaryk, Rakouská zahraniÄnà politika a diplomacie: Annexe a zahraniÄnà politika, zejména na BalkánÄ; Bosna a Hercegovina; Nedostatky rakouské diplomacie; FalÅ¡ovánà bÄlehradského vevlyslanectvÃ; Hr. Aehrenthal a falÅ¡ovacà soustava zahraniÄnÃho úÅadu (Prague: Pokrok, 1911), 27.
Ibid., 28.
Karel MattuÅ¡, âSlovanská otázka: Politická studie,â OsvÄta, January 1877, 4.