An even more vitriolic anti-Muslim sensibility had long circulated in Europe, based on the fear of Islamic power, the distortions growing out of the Crusades, and the perception of religious heresy. In the early fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, placed Muhammad in the eighth circle of hell, where the “sowers of discord” were punished and mutilated. To many Christians, Muhammad was a “false prophet,” sometimes portrayed as drunk. Protestants such as Martin Luther on occasion equated their great enemy, the pope, with the Muslim “Turk,” both of them leading people away from authentic religion.

The most infamous Renaissance example of hostility to Islam as a religion is displayed in Visual Source 12.5, a fresco by the Italian artist Giovanni da Modena, painted on a church wall in the northern Italian city of Bologna in 1415. It was a small part of a much larger depiction of hell, featuring a gigantic image of Satan devouring and excreting the damned, while many others endured horrific punishments. Among them was Muhammad—naked, bound to a rock, and tortured by a winged demon with long horns. It reflected common understandings of Muhammad as a religious heretic, false prophet, even the anti-Christ and therefore “hell-bound.”