How do stereotypes of the Other change over time? In its broadest form, this is the question guiding Paula Sutter Fichtner's erudite study of Habsburg views of Turks and Islam. She aims to trace the “accommodations and turns in the mental and spiritual culture of the Habsburg empire” (18) in its relations with Ottoman neighbors over several hundred years. The trajectory of the study is suggested in the title. In the Habsburg lands, the Turk appeared in three valences: early modern “terror of the world,” eighteenth-century comical stage figure, and finally, nineteenth-century tolerated Other, the subject of empathic yet critical scientific study by Austrian Orientalists. Fichtner wants to understand how the Austrian Türkenbild got from point A to point C, which institutions and individual actors played a role in changing public perceptions of Turks, and whether this Habsburg story holds lessons for twenty-first-century Christian-Muslim relations. On this last point she is guardedly optimistic.

As may be clear from this brief description, the kind of study Fichtner undertakes is difficult to pull off. It might be described as a history of floating ideas that one group of people held about another. “Stereotypes” are unstable things to work with; they are not internally consistent, nor do they change uniformly over time. Fichtner's sensible approach is to place Austrian texts that depict Turks (sermons, histories, plays, operas, scientific treatises) in their historical context in rough chronological order and to analyze possible influences on author and reactions of audience. She allows for simultaneity; negative images of Turks persist and mingle among the emerging enlightenment ideas about the oneness of humankind.

For the sixteenth century, Fichtner introduces the writings of Habsburg diplomats in Constantinople, including Stephan Gerlach, a chaplain-advisor to embassies in the 1570s, and Giacomo Maria Malvezzi, an envoy of Ferdinand I. These reports from the field did nothing to challenge negative images of the Turks that were “hardwired [into] the European imagination” (41) following Turkish actions in Southeastern Europe, Hungary, and eastern Austria from the time of Süleyman the Magnificent through the campaigns of Kara Mustafa. Benefiting from, and indeed promoting, stories of the Turk as looting, hacking barbarian were the Habsburg government and the Catholic Church. Fichtner charts the textual production of the Turk in “Vienna and Rome's chancellories [sic] and pulpits, printing firms, ateliers and workshops” (46). Croatian-Hungarian humanist Bartholomew Georgievicz's grim accounts of his twenty-year Ottoman captivity and bondage following the battle of Mohács were sixteenth-century bestsellers. A century later even more vicious, fantastical Muslims sprang from the pen of Viennese homilist Abraham a Sancta Clara. Repetition of the story of Turkish menace was crucial for the negative Türkenbild to take hold and stick. Venturing into present-day cultural theory, Fichtner notes that the Habsburg peoples were “living experiments in the use of repetition to impress cultural attitudes on to a society” (53).

And yet, a transition was underway following the defeat of the Turks in 1683 and the subsequent victories of Eugene of Savoy. In a second chapter, “Conciliation, Coffee and Comedy,” Fichnter charts a “change of heart,” whereby the Turk/Muslim was reinvented on the eighteenth-century stage. To the existing image of the Turk as tyrannical despot, came the hapless, comic Turk, a power-hungry but impotent dolt. Osmin from Mozart's 1782 “Abduction from the Seraglio” became a prototype for this incarnation of the stage Turk. Interestingly, Fichtner identifies the “new Turk” not as an Austrian creation, but as an import from various Italian stages and France. It is somewhat difficult to follow Fichtner's argument on why Austria, no longer under Ottoman military threat, was a follower rather than a leader in revising the European Türkenbild in these cultural productions.

In a third chapter, the interests of the Habsburg state enter the story in a more pronounced way. Writing with a light touch, Fichtner engages with broader questions from Orientalist scholarship but avoids making a simplistic “Edward Said neglected Austria” argument. For several decades now the links between scholarly study of the Orient and state instrumentalization of academic knowledge have been at the center of Orientalist studies. Fichtner offers useful analysis of the Oriental Academy, founded in 1754, and its agenda from Maria Theresa through Francis I and Metternich. The educational program of the Academy “encouraged students to criticize and reject traditional and recent stereotypes of the Turks and Muslims and to think hard about assigning the erstwhile enemy a place in the human household” (130). The final third of the book reads like a biography of the Academy's most influential graduate, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Fichtner offers a rich review of the world in which Hammer-Purgstall operated, with detailed readings of Orientalist publications and their patrons, as well as Hammer-Purgstall's own prolific writings.

Although we learn of Hammer-Purgstall's thorny relationship with Metternich, the link between nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship and Habsburg statecraft could be made more explicit. Metternich found the scholar “too clever for his own good” and “ignored Hammer-Purgstall's expertise again and again,” whereas Emperor Francis I found Hammer-Purgstall “unfit to mentor the young” and prevented his appointment as director of the Oriental Academy (134). We hence come away with a vivid picture of the personalities involved, but less clarity on the regime's actual commitment to fostering “an objective understanding of the Ottoman state and its policies” (160).

Deeper attention to the long history of commercial relations between Habsburg and Ottoman traders might have provided an opening for study of state policies. More could be done with the short-lived Oriental Company established in Vienna in 1667, which according to Fichtner “did not outlast the hostilities of 1683” (91). But for a short discussion of coffee and a brief paragraph on “Ottoman material culture” in Central Europe, the economic angle of the Austrian-Turkish story is somewhat underdeveloped. Examination of commercial contacts might not undo the cultural stereotypes that are at the heart of this study, but it would acknowledge trade as a transmitter of culture and perhaps introduce some more tangible historical actors.

One actor in the shadow of this study is the Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher. Although he belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century and is hence outside the stated chronological scope of Fichnter's book (ending in 1850), the book does include a curious Coda that briefly covers the career of Hammer-Purgstall's successor—and Goldziher's contemporary—Alfred von Kremer. We learn only that the “cantankerous” Goldziher “railed against Hammer-Purgstall's posthumous hold on oriental studies in the Habsburg lands” (163). Promising future research topics include a more detailed analysis of Goldziher and of the ways that orientalist scholarship differed in Budapest and Vienna. Fichtner opens with the provocative question of what would cause “one person” (Hammer-Purgstall) to “reject emphatically the negative and often wildly distorted images of an enemy that had terrorized his compatriots to varying degrees for almost two centuries and to turn scholarship into an end unto itself” (17). The same question could fruitfully be asked of the Hungarian.

Terror and Toleration is a book impressive in scope and rich with new food for thought for those thinking about Habsburg conceptions of self-identity and Other. Readers will likely come away with an appreciation for the deftness with which Fichtner handles stereotypes as a field of inquiry and the ways she grounds floating Türkenbilder within the specific writings of those who perpetuated and challenged them.