Western fear of the Ottomans collapsed within a few decades

Evidence

In the late seventeenth century, the French traveller Jean de Thévenot, in Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (3 volumes, 1665, 1674, 1678), was perhaps the first to diagnose a sickness in what was superficially still a great power in the East, for he judged that the Ottoman empire was in rapid decline: ‘All these peoples have nothing more to boast about than their ruins and their rags.’ Thévenot’s analysis proved to be an accurate one and a few decades later, in 1699, by the Treaty of Carlowitz, the Turks had to accept humiliating defeat and cede Hungary, Transylvania and Podolia to an alliance of Christian powers. Western fears of the triumph of Islam and the Turk abated. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 192

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: British views of Ottomans mixed fear and awe without colonial designs

Related

• Ottoman advances drove European study of Islam through fear (similarity 0.79)
• Ottoman decline freed orientalism to aid Enlightenment anti-Christian universalism (similarity 0.78)
• Ottoman decline eventually made Western charges against the Turks partly accurate (similarity 0.78)