THE COMENIAN LEGACY IN ENGLAND - THE CASE FOR THE CONVERSION OF THE MUSLIMS

The encounter between Christendom and Islam in the Renaissance resulted in two attitudes among Christian Europeans. The first and more dominant was the desire to see the armies of Ottoman Islam annihilated by divine vengeance: The Muslim was the betrayer of God and therefore merited the most brutal of God’s retributions. Once the Muslim was destroyed, the millennium would begin and the rule of the saints would prevail. The other attitude was a continuation of an earlier desire that had been proclaimed in the twelfth century to see the Muslim spared God’s violence by renouncing his religion and converting to Christianity. Indeed, while the Crusaders had been attacking the Muslims and the Arabs of the Near East, Christian theologians had been calling for evangelical activity towards them and promising that only after the conversion, not the destruction, of the Muslims would the millennial kingdom of Christ be inaugurated. © 1993 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.