4. "The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was known for his tolerance of the Christian and Jewish faiths within his dominions, whereas the King of Spain did not tolerate the Protestant faith.[8] The Ottoman Empire was indeed known at that time for its religious tolerance. Various religious refugees, such as the Huguenots, some Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists or even Jesuits or Capuchins were able to find refuge at Istanbul and in the Ottoman Empire,[9] where they were given right of residence and worship.[10] Further, the Ottomans supported the Calvinists in Transylvania and Hungary but also in France.[9]" The contemporary French thinker Jean Bodin wrote:[9]
"The great emperor of the Turks does with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors, and yet detests he not the strange religions of others; but on the contrary permits every man to live according to his conscience: yes, and that more is, near unto his palace at Pera, suffers four diverse religions viz. that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mahometans."
— Jean Bodin.[9]
"Martin Luther, in his 1528 pamphlet, On War against the Turk, calls for the Germans to resist the Ottoman invasion of Europe, as the catastrophic Siege of Vienna was lurking, but expressed views of Islam which, compared to his aggressive speech against Catholicism (and later Judaísm), are relatively mild.[11] Concerned with his personal preaching on divine atonement and Christian justification, he extensively criticized the principles of Islam as utterly despicable and blasphemous, considering Qu'ran as void of any tract of divine truth. For Luther, it was mandatory to let the Qu'ran "speak for itself" as means to show what the Christian Religion saw as a draft from prophetic and apostolic teaching, therefore allowing a proper Christian response. His knowledge on the subject was based on a medieval polemicist version of the Qu'ran made by Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, which was the European scholarly reference of the subject. Luther was writing his own translation of Riccoldo's Refutation of the Koran in 1542 when wrote a letter to Basle's city council to relieve the ban on Theodore Bibliander's translation of the Qu'ran into Latin. Mostly due to his letter, Bibliander's translation was finally allowed and eventually published in 1543, with a preface made by Martin Luther himself. His own translation of Riccoldo was also the first version of Koranic material in the German Language. With access to the actual Qu'ran, Luther saw some of Ricoldo's critics as actually exaggerated, but nevertheless agreeing with virtually all of them. .[12]"
5. "Martin Luther also took note of the similarities between Islam and Protestantism in the rejection of idols, although he noted Islam was much more drastic in its complete rejection of images. In On War against the Turk, Luther is actually less critical of the Turks than he is of the Pope, whom he calls an anti-Christ, or the Jews, whom he describes as "the Devil incarnate".[11] He urges his contemporaries to also see the good aspects in the Turks, and refers to some who were favourable to the Ottoman Empire, and "who actually want the Turk to come and rule, because they think that our German people are wild and uncivilized - indeed that they are half-devil and half-man".[10]
The Ottomans also felt closer to the Protestants than to the Catholics. At one point, a letter was sent from Suleiman the Magnificent to the "Lutherans" in Flanders, claiming that he felt close to them, "since they did not worship idols, believed in one God and fought against the Pope and Emperor".[15][13]
This notion of religious similarities was again taken up in epistolary exchanges between Elizabeth I of England and Sultan Murad III.[16] In one correspondence, Murad entertained the notion that Islam and Protestantism had "much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols", and argued for an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire.[17]"