How Western art learned to stop fearing the East - BBC

On 29 May 1453, Constantinople, capital of the mighty Byzantine Empire, fell to an army of Ottoman Turks who had besieged the city for seven weeks. For three days, the victorious 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II allowed his soldiers to rampage in the metropolis, pillaging whatever they could find.

From the perspective of Europe’s rulers, it was a catastrophic blow for Christendom: the balance of power in the world had changed for good. Nearly three decades later, the Ottomans struck deeper into Europe, storming the southern Italian city of Otranto, and executing more than 800 inhabitants who refused to convert to Islam.

By 1529, Ottoman troops led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent were outside the walls of Vienna. According to Haydn Williams, author of Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy, published last year, Western Europe fell into “a state of shock”.

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