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Analyzing Austrian accounts from before the fall of Constantinople through the failed siege of Vienna in 1529 as contributions to historical memory, the essay not only registers the images of the Islamic opponents, in particular the Ottoman Turks, but also considers the type of experience behind these accounts. In a number of cases interpretations and appeals to mobilization against the Turks relied on second hand information, received rhetoric about the Turks, and religious questioning of God's hand in the events, yet in some texts this rhetoric goes together with closer experience of Ottoman raids in Austrian lands and in the 1529 siege.
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