by Alan Mikhail
GOD’S SHADOW
Sultan Selim,
His Ottoman Empire,
AND THE
Making of the Modern World
ALAN MIKHAIL
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE PRINCE (1470–87)
1. Perfume of the World
2. Empire Boys
3. An Ottoman Abroad
PART TWO GOVERNOR (1487–1500)
4. Learning the Family Business
5. Power at the Edge
PART THREE THE OTTOMAN (1492)
6. Columbus and Islam
7. Columbus’s Crusade
8. New World Islam
9. Christian Jihad
10. The Taino–Muslims of Hispaniola
11. Finding Ottoman Jerusalem
PART FOUR ENEMIES NEAR AND FAR (1500–12)
12. Heresy from the East
13. Enemies Everywhere
14. Summer in Crimea
15. Bound for Istanbul
16. One and Only Sultan
PART FIVE SELIM’S WORLD WARS (1512–18)
17. “Their Abode Is Hell”
18. Fraternal Empires
19. Conquering the Navel
20. Conquering the World
PART SIX FINAL FRONTIERS (1518–20)
21. Empire Everywhere
22. Fulcrum of the Atlantic
23. Eternity
PART SEVEN DESCENDANTS (After 1520)
24. Selim’s Reformations
25. American Selim
CODA: SHADOWS OVER TURKEY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHRONOLOGY: SELIM AND HIS WORLD
NOTES
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
MAPS
All maps drawn by David Lindroth, Inc.
The Ottoman Empire in 1500
The World in 1500
Europe in 1500
Venice and the Ottoman Empire
Cem’s Journey
Trabzon
Genoa and Its Trading Empire
West Africa and Iberia
Routes of Jews out of Spain
Ottoman Salonica
Selim’s East
Crimea and the Black Sea
Sixteenth-Century Istanbul
The Chaldiran Campaign, 1514
The Mamluk Empire
Jerusalem
The Ottoman–Mamluk War
Damascus
Cairo
Middle East, East Africa, and Indian Ocean
North Africa
The Further Fragmentation of Europe after 1517
GOD’S SHADOW
INTRODUCTION
. . .
Selim
ON THE BORDER BETWEEN TEXAS AND MEXICO, PRECISELY WHERE the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico, lies a sleepy town with the unlikely name of Matamoros. “Mata” comes from the Spanish verb matar, to kill, while moros—the Spanish equivalent of the English word “Moors”—is the derogatory name Spanish Christians reserved for Muslims. To be a Matamoros, then, is to be a Moor-slayer, a title with seemingly no connection to the American past or present. Why would a sunny border town in northeastern Mexico be named “Moor-slayer”? Were Muslims ever an existential enemy to kill in Mexico or Texas?
The word “Matamoros” was coined by Catholic Spaniards. For them, it was the duty of every Christian soldier to be a Moor-slayer. Much of Spain had been under Muslim rule from 711 until 1492—a fateful year in geopolitical history, for in 1492 not only did Spain’s Christian armies take (or retake, as they preferred to say) the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian peninsula, but one particular Matamoros by the familiar name of Christopher Columbus opened up a new front in Spain’s war against Islam. Having been a common soldier in Isabella and Ferdinand’s conquest of Granada, Columbus showed himself to be a religious man. Throughout his life, in battle after battle against Muslims and, specifically, against the Ottoman Empire, Spain’s major rival throughout the Mediterranean, he had refined his palate for the taste of Muslim blood, and he felt the burden of holy war deep in his soul. Thus, as he bobbed westward on the high seas, his mind was occupied by neither a secular passion for discovery nor a calculating commercial vision. More than anything else, he sailed to the Americas imbued with a zeal for waging Christianity’s war against its foremost enemy—Islam.
Despite their great victory on the Iberian peninsula, Christians were losing captives, commercial influence, and territory to the Ottomans almost everywhere else. The ideological wind propelling the white sails of Columbus’s three ships was the fifteenth-century world’s most exigent political struggle—the one between Catholic Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, contrary to nearly all conventional accounts of world history, was the very reason Europeans went to America.
For half a century before 1492, and for centuries afterward, the Ottoman Empire stood as the most powerful state on earth: the largest empire in the Mediterranean since ancient Rome, and the most enduring in the history of Islam. In the decades around 1500, the Ottomans controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any other world power. It was the Ottoman monopoly of trade routes with the East, combined with their military prowess on land and on sea, that pushed Spain and Portugal out of the Mediterranean, forcing merchants and sailors from these fifteenth-century kingdoms to become global explorers as they risked treacherous voyages across oceans and around continents—all to avoid the Ottomans.
From China to Mexico, the Ottoman Empire shaped the known world at the turn of the sixteenth century. Given its hegemony, it became locked in military, ideological, and economic competition with the Spanish and Italian states, Russia, India, and China, as well as other Muslim powers. The Ottomans influenced in one way or another nearly every major event of those years, with reverberations down to our own time. Dozens of familiar figures, such as Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Montezuma, the reformer Luther, the warlord Tamerlane, and generations of popes—as well as millions of other greater and lesser historical personages—calibrated their actions and defined their very existence in reaction to the reach and grasp of Ottoman power.
The challenge of the Ottoman brand of Islam, as the empire pushed westward into Europe, was a major impetus behind Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. On the empire’s eastern border, its wars with Safavid Iran intensified the divide between Sunni and Shiite that roils the Muslim world even today. Ottoman military conquests and economic acumen created one of the world’s first truly global commodities, coffee, and spurred capitalist consumerism through their invention of the coffeehouse.
Europe’s forced departure—more like ejection—from the Mediterranean contributed to an apocalyptic mind-set in Christian Europe. Christianity and Islam seemed to be battling for the body and soul of creation. Once in the New World, self-styled soldiers of Christ continued their old war, waging it now against the indigenous peoples of a distant land. These Moor-slayers used their experiences of Islam in the Old World to understand the Americas and their peoples, and even—with the spiritual and legal backing of the pope—invoked their perceived duty to counter Islam to justify their importation of West African slaves to the Americas. By ignoring Islam, we have thus failed to understand Columbus and his age fully and, indeed, correctly.
In tracing the global influence of Ottoman power, God’s Shadow offers an innovative, even revolutionary, account of the role of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in defining the shape of the Old and New Worlds. Over the past five centuries, the bulk of this story has been dismissed or ignored by professional historians and lay readers alike. Yet, Muslims were integral to what is inevitably a shared history. The ineluctable fact is that the Ottoman Empire made our modern world—which is, admittedly, a bitt
er pill for many in the West.
Why is this so? A primary reason is that in the twenty-first-century West—as, indeed, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe—Muslims are often seen reflexively as enemies and terrorists, diametrically opposed to the religion that defined our culture and to the political systems we hold sacred. From popular culture to global politics, among conservatives and liberals alike, Islam—in the United States especially—is seen as “the great other,” a problem that somehow needs to be “fixed.” Muslims are targets of both popular and official vilification and often outright physical violence.
Other facts, too, have blotted out our recognition of the Ottoman influence on our own history. Foremost, we tend to read the history of the last half-millennium as “the rise of the West.” (This anachronism rings as true in Turkey and the rest of the Middle East as it does in Europe and America.) In fact, in 1500, and even in 1600, there was no such thing as the now much-vaunted notion of “the West.” Throughout the early modern centuries, the European continent consisted of a fragile collection of disparate kingdoms and small, weak principalities locked in constant warfare. The large land-based empires of Eurasia were the dominant powers of the Old World, and, apart from a few European outposts in and around the Caribbean, the Americas remained the vast domain of its indigenous peoples. The Ottoman Empire held more territory in Europe than did most European-based states. In 1600, if asked to pick a single power that would take over the world, a betting man would have put his money on the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps China, but certainly not on any European entity.
Since the Industrial Revolution and the so-called European glories of the nineteenth century, this history has been rewritten to portray European ascendancy as somehow stretching back to Columbus. This is a historical absurdity. Not only does it paper over the deep fissures in early modern Europe, it also masks the fact that the Ottoman Empire struck fear into the world for centuries before it earned its derogatory nineteenth-century sobriquet, “the sick man of Europe.” Some historians claim that the Ottoman Empire began to decline from its peak of imperial might around 1600, just as the English began their settlement of the Americas. While it is true that the empire lost wars and ceded territory more often after that date, it remained the most hegemonic force in the Middle East and one of the most formidable states in Europe, Asia, and Africa for another three hundred years—until World War I. Indeed, the combined longevity of the empire and its centrality to world affairs is one of the most striking features of its history. The Ottoman Empire, as all empires invariably do, did end, but only after more than six hundred years of rule. Reading sixteenth-century Ottoman history through the lens of the nineteenth century, or even through the lens of Edward Gibbon’s once canonical eighteenth-century account of the decline and fall of Rome, takes us down a historically indefensible dead-end path.
While not diminishing the intense conflicts between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, an examination of how the Ottomans constructed our modern world shows that the histories of Islam and Europe (and later America) were not exclusively or necessarily oppositional or divergent. These conjoined histories involve far more than just violence; the much-ballyhooed “clash of civilizations” represents a minuscule portion of a richly interwoven tapestry. Such an examination also explains how the town of Anahuac, so named by its native inhabitants, became Matamoros, a remnant symbol of Christian Spain’s brutal wars against Islam.
THE EPIC STORY OF the Ottoman Empire begins far from the Middle East. The people who would eventually become the Ottomans started marching westward from China as early as the sixth century, making their way across Central Asia to the Mediterranean. For nearly a millennium, they continued their steady trek. Along the way, they fought wars and converted to various religions. In doing so, they also converted others to those religions, built cities and towns, exchanged goods and foodstuffs, learned and spread languages, invented new breeds of horses, created artistic masterpieces, and wrote spectacular poetry. Most of the descendants of those who started the journey settled down along the way, on or near the historic Silk Road, marrying into local families, adopting and altering the cultures of their new homes.
An intrepid few trekked all the way to Anatolia—also called Asia Minor—the land bridge between the Black and Mediterranean seas where Asia reaches out to touch Europe. Most of those who made it that far west were a Turkic-speaking nomadic tribe. Their long migration explains why today’s Turks share bonds of language, culture, and ethnicity with peoples throughout Central Asia, even as far as China and beyond. (Korean and Turkish are both in the Altaic language group, for example.) Once in Anatolia, these new arrivals sought out for themselves and their animals the undulating plains of the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, where they entered a fractured Byzantine entity. In thirteenth-century Anatolia, they became one of dozens of small family principalities—Muslim and Christian, Turkish and Greek—existing within and sometimes fighting against a waning Byzantine Empire. Their loosely-bound tribal group was led by a man named Osman, who died in the mid-1320s. He would later come to be seen as the first Ottoman (the word being an anglicized derivation of Osman). Every sultan down to the twentieth century was his blood descendant.
While Osman succeeded in chipping away some territory from the Byzantine Empire, it was his son who scored the first real victory for those early Ottomans. In 1326, Orhan took Bursa, a cosmopolitan city set in a lush valley not far from the Sea of Marmara. As a center of the international silk trade, its seizure provided a major boost to the Ottomans’ rising ambitions. From this first Ottoman capital, the bearers of the mantle of Osman notched up victory after victory, taking control of an impressive range of territory in western Anatolia and the Balkans. There, the mostly Christian communities accepted the mostly Muslim Ottomans in large measure because these new arrivals from the Asian steppes excelled in cutting favorable deals with strong families and other local power brokers. The Ottomans’ conquering armies promised military protection, along with more favorable tax and trading terms than the Byzantines offered, in exchange for allegiance to the family of Osman and the contribution of some troops every now and then.
Osman
After roughly a century of squeezing the Byzantines, the Ottomans dealt them a lethal blow in 1453, when the empire’s seventh sultan, Mehmet II, stormed through the walls of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. This earth-rattling victory, a conquest both actual and symbolic, won the Ottomans Christendom’s eastern capital and one of the world’s largest and most strategic cities, situated as it was at the fulcrum between Europe and Asia, commanding one of the principal routes from West to East. Mehmet took the title of Caesar, proclaiming the Ottomans a new Roman Empire. For most of Europe’s Christians, the young Columbus included, the capture of one of “the two Romes” by a Muslim power was a sign that the end of days was nigh. The Ottomans had, as a contemporary European described it, plucked out one of the eyes of Christianity.
For close to four centuries, from 1453 until well into the exceedingly fractured 1800s, the Ottomans remained at the center of global politics, economics, and war. As European states rose and fell, the Ottomans stood strong. They battled Europe’s medieval and early modern empires, and in the twentieth century continued to fight in Europe, albeit against vastly different enemies. Everyone from Machiavelli to Jefferson to Hitler—quite an unlikely trio—was forced to confront the challenge of the Ottomans’ colossal power and influence. Counting from their first military victory, at Bursa, they ruled for nearly six centuries in territories that today comprise some thirty-three countries. Their armies would control massive swaths of Europe, Africa, and Asia; some of the world’s most crucial trade corridors; and cities along the shores of the Mediterranean, Red, Black, and Caspian seas, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. They held Istanbul and Cairo, two of the largest cities on earth, as well as the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and what was the world’s largest Jewish city for over four hundred years, Salonica (T
hessaloniki in today’s Greece). From their lowly beginnings as sheep-herders on the long, hard road across Central Asia, the Ottomans ultimately succeeded in proving themselves the closest thing to the Roman Empire since the Roman Empire itself.
Mehmet II in the Hippodrome
ONE MAN, MORE THAN any other, made the Ottoman Empire the transformative global power that it was. Selim was his name, and although born of a sultan, he was never supposed to amount to much. The fourth of his father’s ten sons, he was born in 1470 in a small Anatolian town, the son of an enslaved concubine. Given his pedigree, a life of leisurely wealth and princely comfort was to be his lot—but it would likely be a short life, given the fratricidal maneuverings that often accompanied the death of a sultan and the accession of the next. Implacable and unflappable, callous and visionary, Selim had other plans. The story of his life—the power plays that brought him to the throne, his military ventures and techniques of governing, his personal charisma, his religious piety—presents a sovereign narrative of how the Ottoman Empire made the modern world.
Selim was the grandson of Mehmet II, the sultan who in 1453 captured Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul. His father, Bayezit, continued the empire’s gains, extending its borders in all directions by invading Italy, Iran, Russia, and Hungary. Surpassing all of his predecessors, Selim achieved a conquest far more significant than even Constantinople—the near tripling of the empire’s territories through wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus. When he died in 1520, the empire was stronger than it had ever been, a behemoth, far more powerful than any other state on Earth, bestriding the three continents of the Old World and aiming for more. Selim was the first sultan to rule over an Ottoman Empire with a majority Muslim population and the first Ottoman to hold the titles of both sultan and caliph.