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232 PERIOD 2 • The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

AP ® The Ottoman Siege of Vienna, 1683 This anonymous late-seventeenth-century painting
SOURCING AND captures the crucial moment in the siege of Vienna when a last Ottoman attack is pushed back
by Austrian, French, and Polish forces. The siege marked the end of a serious Muslim threat to
SITUATION
What is the value of this Christian Europe. (akg-images/Newscom)
picture for a historian
studying the Siege of the scarcity of Turkish settlers and the willingness of the Ottoman authorities to
Vienna? What are the accommodate the region’s Christian churches led to far fewer conversions. By the
picture’s limitations?
early sixteenth century, only about 19 percent of the area’s people were Muslims,
and 81 percent were Christians.
AP ® EXAM TIP Many of these Christians had welcomed Ottoman conquest because taxes were
lighter and oppression less pronounced than under their former Christian rulers.
Pay close attention to
how empires dealt with Christian communities such as the Eastern Orthodox and Armenian churches were
various religious and granted considerable autonomy in regulating their internal social, religious, edu-
ethnic groups in the cational, and charitable affairs. Nonetheless, many Christian and Jewish women
period 1450–1750.
appealed legal cases dealing with marriage and inheritance to Muslim courts,
where their property rights were greater. A substantial number of Christian
men — Balkan landlords, Greek merchants, government officials, and high-ranking
clergy — became part of the Ottoman elite, sometimes without converting to Islam.
Jewish refugees fleeing Christian persecution in a Spain recently “liberated” from
Islamic rule likewise found greater opportunity in the Ottoman Empire, where
they became prominent in trade and banking circles.
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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