Christians ranked the Turks among divinely sent plagues

Evidence

Muslim Turks were shown performing the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. A turbaned Pontius Pilate festooned a decorative balcony in Lorch in Upper Austria and elsewhere. Jesus’s tormentors on his way to Calvary, along with the Pharisees and their henchmen, wore Turkish headdresses and brandished scimitars. Turks were coupled with the trials of this world as well. Sometime after 1480, the cathedral church of Graz commissioned a picture of God with three lances named ‘Hunger, Sword, and Pestilence.’ Beneath them were three specific plagues—locusts, the Plague, and the Turks. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 254

Categorization

• CANDY: The Graz painting listing locusts, the Plague, and the Turks as the three scourges of God is a vivid, offbeat image — easy to retell.
• XREF: The Turk-as-divine-plague framing deepens the reader’s thesis that the Muslim monster functions as a theological container for cosmic anxiety; parallels apocalyptic ‘four horsemen’ imagery in religious art.