‘… WHO SHED CHRISTIAN BLOOD LIKE WATER …’
[TURKS.]
Ein Gebet wider die vorstehende Noth und Gefahr der Christenheit, wegen deß Türcken.
[Wittenberg?], Im Jahr 1593.
12mo, pp. [12] (with quire signature S); woodcut vignette of man in Turkish costume to title-page, woodcut initial; some browning and light staining; good; unbound, spine reinforced with strip of paper.
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Ein Gebet wider die vorstehende Noth und Gefahr der Christenheit, wegen deß Türcken.
A 1593 pamphlet containing a German prayer against the Turks. Throughout the sixteenth century the Ottoman empire remained a powerful existential threat to western European Christendom. Following a comparatively lengthy period of peace, renewed skirmishes and border conflicts resurfaced in Hungary in 1592, a period of tension which eventually led to the siege of Sisak in June 1593 (which saw Ottoman forces under the Bosnian Pasha attack the Hapsburg-controlled garrison fort at Sisak, in modern-day Croatia) and the outbreak of the so-called ‘Long Turkish War’ (1593–1606). It was during this period of renewed Turkish threat that public prayers against the Ottomans, organised by local German electors and city councils, proliferated. The present prayer, which interprets the (supposedly brutal) Ottoman attacks as justified divine punishment for contemporary godlessness among the Christian West and pleads for mercy and eventual deliverance from the Turkish threat, is one of a number of similar prayer pamphlets to have been published in 1593. According to the study of Michal Suchý, it was commissioned by the Konsistorium of the priesthood in Wittenberg in 1592 and was also printed in the 1593 Flugschrift entitled Der Röm: Keis: Maiest. Auch etlicher Churfürsten vnd Stendt des H. Reichs Teutscher Nation Christliche anordnung.
VD16 ZV 21144, recording only 1 copy, at Halle. No further copies recorded on OCLC. See Michal Suchý, ‘Das türkische Problem in Ungarn im 16. Jahrhundert und die deutsche öffentliche Meinung’, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, vol. 50 (1968), pp. 55-56.
