Naturally, as northern Protestants and southern Muslims had the same common enemy between them—Catholic Christendom, particularly in the guise of the Holy Roman Empire—the timeless adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” was evident during the siege of Vienna, as well as previous conflicts. Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603), for example, formed an alliance with the Muslim Barbary pirates—who during her reign had enslaved hundreds of thousands of Europeans—against Catholic Spain.
Even so, Norberg ignores the fact that it is precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant schism—which was entirely religious—that Catholics and Protestants came to fight each other in the first place. While he lumps them together as “Christians” in an effort to show that Christian unity against Islam never existed, Catholics and Protestants did not see each other as “fellow Christians” but religious enemies of the first order—worse than Muslims. It is because of this ideological divide that one could ally with Islam against the other without breaking faith.
In short, during the siege of Vienna, realpolitik was evident only in the very limited sense that the Catholic king of France, Louis XIV—who once said “If there were no Algiers [to terrorize his competitors, particularly Spain] I would make one”—sided against Catholic Vienna.
Other than that, most if not all of the Christians and Muslims involved at Vienna saw the conflict in distinctly religious terms, beginning with the battle-hardened Catholic king of Poland, John Sobieski III. Although he had little to gain by fighting on behalf of and eventually delivering Vienna, he still lamented how Islamic “fury is raging everywhere, attacking alas, the Christian princes with fire and sword.” He also believed that “it is not a city alone that we have to save, but the whole of Christianity, of which the city of Vienna is the bulwark. The war is a holy one.” Before setting off, he sent a message to Imre Thokoly, the Hungarian Protestant who was stirring trouble around Poland’s border, “that if he burnt one straw in the territories of his allies, or in his own, he would go and burn him and all his family in his house.”...
In the end, however, Norberg’s greatest failure is that his is a classic strawman argument. Recall the title of his video: “Dead Wrong: The Anti-Muslim Myth.” Recall his opening sentence: “The Nativist right likes to tell the story of the West through the prism of a conflict between Christendom and Islam.” Yet, while pretending to debunk the religious nature of the perennial conflict between Christendom and Islam—which dramatically manifested itself in countless ways and battles over the course of a millennium before the siege of Vienna in 1683—he talks only about that one encounter (and fails even there).
The reason is evident: before the aforementioned Catholic-Protestant rift began in the sixteenth century, Christian unity against Islam was relatively solid, providing little material for people like Norberg—such as John Voll and William Polk, professors of Islamic history—to manipulate in an effort to show that the “anti-Muslim myth” is “dead wrong.”