Islam did not represent a rejection of Eastern Christianity; rather, in powerful
continuity, it picked up and smoothly adopted much of the Eastern imperial
tradition from Christianity and integrated it into what would be the world’s
biggest and longest-lasting Muslim empire.
Empire looms larger than faith in
this great transition.
A recent reviewer of a book on the Ottomans and the West comments:
… the skirmishes and the pitched battles that raged between the
Hapsburgs and the Ottomans [around the gates of Vienna], and their
numerous
vassals on both sides, represented not so much a “clash of
civilizations” as a collision of empires. For all the pious sloganeering that
accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and
Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but
equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire….
Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized
Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the
Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…