There is considerable and growing interest in western perceptions of the Ottomans and of Islam in early modern Europe. The lively contribution reviewed here concentrates on the cultural and ideological dimension to the clash between the Austrian Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The first part investigates attitudes in the Habsburg monarchy toward the Ottomans and Islam from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Much has already been published on the central European construction of “the Turk” and his religion as the personification of evil and the antithesis of Christianity. The universalist pretensions of the Holy Roman imperial title held by the Habsburgs, and the claims of the Ottoman sultanate, left little room for mutual recognition. Political rivalry was underpinned by theology, since both Christianity and Islam claimed to represent singular, exclusive truths. Fichtner adds detail to the Habsburg perspective, especially on the fashioning of their image as innocent victims of Ottoman aggression that ran parallel to the better-known arguments advanced in Lutheran Germany of the Turks as the scourge of God, sent to punish Christian sinners. Attitudes were far from uniform. A minority of scholars continued the earlier Humanist interest in the Islamic world and were willing to recognize positive features within Ottoman culture. Economic and diplomatic exchange persisted with varying intensity. The view remained overwhelmingly negative, however, dominated by notions of Ottoman treachery and brutality. These sentiments were deliberately fostered by the Habsburgs to mobilize support against what was often considered a superior enemy. One of the most significant points to emerge from this part of the discussion is Fichtner's conclusion that the strident and often shrill tone of Habsburg propaganda reflected their underlying fear that their military inferiority might end in defeat.

The second part stresses a fundamental shift in perception in the wake of the victories in the Great Turkish War of 1683–99. The euphoric triumphalism following the relief of Vienna in 1683 swiftly evaporated to be replaced by a gradual acceptance of the Ottomans as fellow humans, summed up as “conciliation, coffee, and comedy.” It is here that the theoretical underpinning of the book becomes more apparent. Fichtner argues that prejudice is due to wider material circumstance. Bigotry might have a basis in actual individual encounters, but this does not render it entirely resistant to change. “Officially-sponsored denunciations of Islam were political manoeuvres, not critical theology” (p. 73). The earlier hostility was thus rooted in the military clash between the Habsburgs and Ottomans that appeared to lock the two empires in an existential conflict. Prejudice declined as diplomatic relations improved, especially during the eighteenth century as the Turkish terror was replaced by the increasingly ailing “sick man of Europe.” Fichtner traces this shift through a series of stereotypes that remained derogatory, but became increasingly complex, subtle, and benign as artistic and literary depictions of Muslims gave greater prominence to more human and positive attributes.

The third, and perhaps most original part of the book, adds a second conceptual and empirical dimension to the main argument. Fichtner analyzes the work of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) and other Austrian Orientalists to emerge from the monarchy's Academy for Oriental Languages, established in 1754 to provide interpreters and translators for the diplomatic service. Contrary to Edward Said's critique of western views, Austrian Orientalists were pluralists whose “purpose was to understand and appreciate Eastern cultures critically, not to disguise religious, political, or social agendas by calling them scholarship” (p. 171). Here, Fichtner goes beyond other critics of Said's thesis who have also argued that the waning of the Ottoman threat allowed more positive views of the Orient to emerge. Alongside the mockery of an increasingly ineffective enemy lay a genuine desire to see beyond religious antagonism and political rivalry and to appreciate Islam as a distinct culture within a common family of human societies. This desire had been present all along, but was largely smothered by the anxiety stemming from military competition and the corrosive sense of permanent threat.

There are clear parallels to the contemporary situation, both within modern Austria which now has a substantial Muslim minority, as well as the world generally. Fichtner draws attention to this, without allowing any present-mindedness to distort her analysis. Making sense of past perceptions is a difficult task, fraught with the dangers of generalizing from what are often highly individual and sometimes exceptional personal accounts. The material in the book's first two parts occasionally appears a little jumbled as various common elements in the stock image of the Ottomans reappear during the discussion. There is also a rather curious neglect of the long period of relatively peaceful coexistence of the two empires between 1606 and the onset of renewed rivalry over Transylvania in the late 1650s. Further investigation of this period might suggest a more complex ebb and flow of hostile perceptions, rather than a single shift following the relief of Vienna. More could also be said on how the Habsburgs used the concept of the “Ottoman menace” as a tool to manage the Holy Roman Empire. These qualifications do not detract from the welcome contribution of a sensitive and flexible conceptual framework to explore east-west relations.