The Ottomans and the Renaissance Part 4

So in one of my last posts, I mentioned how important the Ottomans were to the founding of America. I recently found another reason for this.. While the process of the Reformation never happened in the Balkans, due to the activation of ethnic identities that actively resisted the Islamicization that the Ottomans brought, this process of separating ethnic identity from religion also could not have happened without their intervention in the affairs of Central Europe. I was reading a book called Rescuing the Gospel: The Significance of the Reformation by Erwin W. Lutzer. He was one of the pastors of the largest churches in America, and while I disagree with him on a lot of things, I still found it really relevant to read from the perspective of an evangelical historian: someone who is intimately connected with the legacy of the Reformation. He basically stated that at one point Charles V of the Hapsburg Empire (when Austria-Hungary, Germany, Spain, and the New World were one big empire) wanted to go to war against the newly Protestant German States. He being Catholic, could not imagine the Holy Roman Empire not being Catholic, because he was crowned by the pope, the representative of God on Earth. But, having just been besieged by the Ottomans in his capitol of Vienna, he needed unity in his army before he struck back. He decided to forgo the heresy, and move against the Ottomans.

This helped create America's distinctly  (original settlers) Protestant background. Many of the descendants of the German breakaways came over and settled America. Others like the Dutch, and the Puritans were cultural descendants of these original heretics. But what really matters is that they came together, and recognizing that they had more commonalities in their diversity of religion, and did not have to form a government or ethnicity bound to their one religion. They could treat each other with decency and respect, without regards to the differences to their beliefs. America was born because of this and other events that the Ottomans had a direct hand in shaping.\


For more details from a source I haven't validated: