Abstract

Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans' rise helped the Protestant Reformation as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, survive their infancy and mature. Utilizing a comprehensive data set on violent confrontations for the interval between 1401 and 1700 CE, I show that the incidence of military engagements between the Protestant Reformers and the Counter-Reformation forces between the 1520s and 1650s depended negatively on the Ottomans' military activities in Europe. Furthermore, I document that the impact of the Ottomans on Europe went beyond suppressing ecclesiastical conflicts only: at the turn of the sixteenth century, Ottoman conquests lowered the number of all newly initiated conflicts among the Europeans roughly by 25 percent, while they dampened all longer-running feuds by more than 15 percent. The Ottomans' military activities influenced the length of intra-European feuds too, with each Ottoman-European military engagement shortening the duration of intra-European conflicts by more than 50 percent. Thus, while the Protestant Reformation might have benefited from—and perhaps even capitalized on—the Ottoman advances in Europe, the latter seems to have played some role in reducing conflicts within Europe more generally.

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Ari Zamir provided excellent research assistance. For detailed comments and suggestions, I thank Robert Barro, five anonymous referees, as well as Ann Carlos, Zvi Eckstein, Haggay Etkes, Wolfgang Keller, Timur Kuran, Naci Mocan, and Joel Mokyr. I owe special thanks to Peter Brecke for making available his Conflict Catalog Dataset. For many other useful suggestions, I also thank Benito Arrunada, Said Boakye, Tarhan Feyzioglu, Asli Gocer, Claudia Goldin, Regina Grafe, Noel Johnson, Shuichiro Nishioka, Patrick O'Brien, Sevket Pamuk, Gulesin Pinar, Halit Pinar, David Pinto, Dani Rodrik, Carol Shiue, Stergios Skaperdas, Aksin Somel, Enrico Spolaore, Bridget Strand, and Peter Temin as well as seminar or session participants at Brown University, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Tufts University, the University of Southern California, 2006 Economic History Association Meetings, 2006 International Society for the New Institutional Economics Meetings, and 2007 American Economic Association Meetings. All errors and speculations are mine, murat.iyigun@colorado.edu.

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