Europeans framed the Ottoman presence as divine punishment for their own Christian sins

Evidence

According to the Renaissance episteme, God’s punishment was often expressed on the bodies of Muslim characters. The existence of the Turks was seen as a punishment for Christian sin. … “The Renaissance detected scourges of God everywhere. They ranged from Timur, particularly under his Marlovian guise as Tamburlaine, to the less probable instance of lawyers (‘Corrupt Lawyers are no doubt a scourge of God’). The most consistent invocation of this traditional belief was made in connection to the Ottoman Empire.” This way of seeing the Ottomans as both a curse and an enemy helped to create the Muslim monsters of the age. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 271

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘scourge of God’ framing of outsiders as divine punishment connects to the broader pattern of the Muslim monster as a container for Christian anxiety, and echoes how other cultures read enemies as divine chastisement.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘the enemy as God’s punishment for our sins’ legitimizes both passive submission and crusade — the two-faced logic of reading catastrophe as deserved.