God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  That late night in Cairo, Selim—his shadow now falling over three continents—was mesmerized by how much of the world was his, but equally entranced by what might one day become his. He pondered the land across the western ocean, then looked to the map’s east, contemplating whether or not the Ottomans could march an army across Central Asia to the ancient cities of China. Just a year earlier, as he advanced through Syria, he had received the firsthand account of an Ottoman merchant who had journeyed from Iran to China, and his curiosity was piqued. He saw also how far south Africa extended, and the enormity of the Atlantic. Even as Piri’s map delineated the impressive breadth of Selim’s intercontinental power, it revealed clearly just how many challenges the Ottomans still faced if they wanted to dominate the entire world.

  Selim noticed that Piri had labeled the islands of the Caribbean, as well as sections of the American mainland, Vilayet Antilia. Vilayet was the generic Ottoman term for an administrative province, such as Vilayet Aleppo or Vilayet Trabzon. Thus, quite stunningly, Piri seemed to be designating the Caribbean and parts of the American continents as a province of the Ottoman Empire. Was he imagining that the New World would eventually, inevitably, become part of Selim’s expanding empire, reifying the very worst of Spanish and Portuguese fears? Perhaps he meant to issue a daring challenge to Selim—a suggestion that he attempt to follow Kemal Reis’s lead by extending the empire westward out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, even to the New World?

  Selim, despite his excitement, was becoming tired. In one swift motion, he ripped the map in half and handed to the stunned mapmaker the portion depicting the New World. Walking out of his tent, Selim tucked the other half—that showing the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia—into the pocket of his robe and retired for the evening.

  It remains impossible to know why Selim ruined the map Piri had so painstakingly put together, retaining only the eastern half—the portion of the map that has never been recovered. It was obviously within his purview to consider an Ottoman venture across the Atlantic to the New World. But why should he? He had never met with defeat on the battlefield and now possessed nearly unrivaled expanses of territory and unparalleled access to trade routes and economic resources. The Ottomans’ unmatched successes in the Old World gave them no compelling reason to cross the ocean. With his conquest of Cairo, Selim had in his hands all the keys to world dominion in the sixteenth century.

  This, then, would seem to answer the question of why Selim tore Piri’s map. The New World floated out across the ocean—risky, unknown, unproven in its wealth. Unlike weak European powers, Selim had no reason to gamble so desperately. The Spanish went to the New World—unintentionally, of course—because the Ottomans and Mamluks forced them to do so. By contrast, no polity could push the Ottomans, now the dominant power of the Old World, out of the Mediterranean. Consolidating Ottoman hegemony in areas of known resources and proven strategic importance—the areas depicted on the eastern half of Piri’s map—was a far better geopolitical tactic than chasing an expensive and treacherous phantom into the largely uncharted Atlantic.

  WITH THE CONQUEST OF the Mamluk Empire, Selim took nominal possession of Yemen, on the southeastern shore of the Red Sea. Yemen, with its access to the Indian Ocean, would open up a vast new horizon for Ottoman trade. It was also a strategic chokepoint in protecting the areas around the Red Sea, including the newly acquired prizes of Mecca and Medina. Selim knew he would need to move quickly to seize Yemen before the Portuguese could exploit the political transition and establish a strong base on the Red Sea.

  After Vasco da Gama (notably, a member of the Order of Santiago, the patron saint of Moor-slayers) reached India in 1498, clashes between the Portuguese and the Mamluks had increased in frequency and intensity, as the Europeans attempted to displace the Mamluks as the preeminent trading power in the Indian Ocean. In 1500, for example, the Portuguese burned ten Mamluk ships in the major spice trading port of Calicut (now Kozhikode) on the Malabar Coast. The Mamluks had cultivated many connections throughout India, especially among the numerous small Muslim principalities that regularly appealed to them for help against the encroaching Portuguese. Muslim leaders in Gujarat and Goa, two of the major ports on India’s western coast, as well as in Aden and Muscat on the Arabian peninsula, all looked to the Mamluks for military support. To counter these Muslim alliances, the Portuguese forged relationships of their own in India and elsewhere. In 1502, for instance, the Portuguese reached an agreement with the Hindu ruler of Cochin (now Kochi), near the southern tip of India, to expel the city’s Muslim merchants, specifically because of their close relations with the Mamluks.

  In 1504, the Portuguese blockaded the mouth of the Red Sea, known as the Gate of Tears because of the many ships that have sunk there over the years trying to navigate the narrow opening. A year later, they attacked Jeddah, the maritime gateway to Mecca and Medina, and in 1507, nineteen Portuguese ships from India sailed into the Red Sea, destroying several Mamluk ships. On that same expedition, they had also grabbed the strategically located island of Socotra, just off the Horn of Africa, in hopes of making it an outpost for controlling access to the mouth of the Red Sea. Socotra, the so-called “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean,” was notoriously otherworldly; a full third of the island’s flora exists nowhere else on earth. Its most famous species is the dragon’s blood tree, with scarlet resin and upward-turning branches that make it look more like an umbrella than a tree. Unfortunately for the Portuguese, the island’s lack of water and its inhospitable conditions forced them to relinquish it after only a few months.

  In 1513, an even more threatening Portuguese naval battalion, comprised of twenty-four ships and over 2,500 men, arrived in the port city of Aden, at the southwestern corner of Yemen and the mouth of the Red Sea. This venture was, in fact, yet another manifestation of Christianity’s global Crusade. Like many of the Iberians who explored down the coast of West Africa and crossed the Atlantic, most of those who sailed into the Indian Ocean began their careers warring against the Ottomans and other Muslims in North Africa and around the Mediterranean. Afonso de Albuquerque, Portugal’s governor in India—who himself had spent a decade in North Africa fighting against Islam—had sent a proposal to Pope Leo X, informing him that Portuguese ships could sail up the Red Sea to capture Mecca—the “Muslim Jerusalem,” as he put it. Europe’s Catholic powers could then ransom Mecca back to the Mamluks in exchange for the true Jerusalem, their goal for centuries. Afonso also asserted that Prester John, the wealthy Christian king of Ethiopia, would help the Portuguese attack Mecca. The myth of Prester John was cut from the same cloth as the notion of the Grand Khan of China—a spectral Christian leader, sometimes described as black, sometimes as white, far off in a vague East, with whom Europe could align to surround the Muslim world and crush it. Although there were Christians in Ethiopia, as there were in parts of East Asia, no historical evidence has ever surfaced to suggest that a Prester John actually existed. Still, Afonso assured the pope that, once allied with this African Christian king, Europeans could dig a canal in Ethiopia at the source of the Nile to drain it eastward into the Red Sea, thus robbing Mamluk Egypt of its major source of water. The Muslim lords of Jerusalem, starving as their fields dried up, would be compelled to relinquish the city. Afonso succeeded in destroying part of Aden in this year and even more of the port of Kamaran Island, farther north in the Red Sea and just off the Yemeni coast. As the Portuguese ships continued north, toward Jeddah, however, they were turned back by unfavorable winds.

  Portuguese map of the Indian Ocean

  This was obviously a lucky outcome for the Mamluks, as they were helpless against these Portuguese incursions. Their navy had been decimated a few years earlier when, in 1509, Francisco de Almeida—another veteran of Portugal’s wars in Africa—burned the Mamluk fleet docked at the island of Diu, on the west coast of India. This defeat had opened the way for a quick succession of Portuguese victories in India, allowing them to develop their infrastructure of coas
tal holdings. On their heels against the Portuguese, the Mamluks appealed to their Ottoman brothers for support.

  Even though he was in the final stages of planning his assault on their empire, Selim responded positively. In 1515, he sent one of his most experienced admirals, the Lesbos-born Selman Reis—with a flowingly long mustache and powerful tree-trunk legs—to the Red Sea with supplies and sailors to help the Mamluks rebuild their navy. This move, of course, did not derive from a sense of religious brotherhood. Instead, it was a means of protecting Ottoman economic interests by undermining the growing Portuguese trade in the East, as well as preparing for the time when, once the Mamluks had been defeated, the lands bordering the Red Sea would become part of the burgeoning Ottoman Empire.

  In 1517, when Selim was in Cairo, Selman Reis sent him a feverish letter, begging for more supplies, sailors, and cash. “The Portuguese have not yet entered the sea of Tor [the Red Sea],” he warned, “but if they hear that these ships are not operational and lack crews they will inevitably come with a big armada for, apart from these ships, there is nothing here to deter them.” Putting things considerably more positively, he offered that, “should it [Yemen] be conquered [by the Ottomans], it would be master of the lands of India and send every year a great amount of gold and jewels to Istanbul.”

  The sultan ordered fifty new ships to be constructed in Suez to vie with the Portuguese—“perfidious troublemakers”—for the Indian Ocean trade, and dispatched “numberless troops” overland, first to secure Yemen and then to confront the Portuguese at sea. Given the distances involved, as well as the massive project of imperial integration that he faced after his victory over the Mamluks, it would be several years before these goals were fully achieved. Even after Selim’s death, his successors would struggle to safeguard this extreme southern fringe of the empire.

  Home to fiercely independent tribes, living in famously perilous mountain terrain, Yemen has always been (and remains to the present day) a formidable challenge for any single government to control fully. With their capital a continent away, the Ottomans knew they could never exercise complete sovereignty over Yemen, but they were determined at least to hold its key port cities on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Even this would prove fantastically difficult. In the interregnum between Mamluk and Ottoman rule, armed Circassian and Syrian mercenaries—initially hired by the Mamluks and Selman Reis to fight against the Portuguese—plunged Yemen into chaos as they battled each other, as well as pirates and tribal leaders, for control of the territory and its many resources. According to one local historian, Yemen in the years around 1520 was “in a state of incessant anarchy and discord, during which there was nothing but spurted blood, violated hearths, spoiled goods and spilled tears.” Not until 1527 did the Ottomans muster enough naval strength to control Yemen’s coast. That year, they established a permanent naval base and customs house on Kamaran Island, which the Portuguese had razed almost fifteen years earlier. Over the next century, Yemen would move repeatedly in and out of the empire’s shadow of sovereignty.

  IN 1517, AS SELIM’S “numberless troops” streamed southward from Syria along the eastern coast of the Red Sea, they stumbled upon something none of them had encountered before—a bush with a strange, bright-red berry. Arguably even more than gaining Jerusalem and Cairo, assuming the caliphate, or building the largest empire in Islamic history, this plant represented the most significant outcome—and certainly one of the most lasting—of Selim’s conquest of the Mamluks. What Selim’s army found in Yemen was coffee.

  No one, at least in the West, quite appreciates that an Ottoman sultan made coffee the global phenomenon it is today. Thanks to the intercontinental unity Selim achieved in 1517, coffee infuses our bodies, structures our day, dominates millions of agricultural acres, generates billions of dollars in corporate profits, and energizes nearly every kind of social interaction across the world. For the first time since the Roman Empire, Selim joined Yemen—where coffee had arrived from Ethiopia—to a polity that stretched from the Arabian peninsula to Bulgaria and from Iraq to Algeria. The commercial, institutional, political, and cultural connections Selim forged across the Old World allowed coffee to spread—first snaking up from Yemen across the Middle East; then to Ottoman eastern Europe, Iran, and India; and ultimately to western Europe, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. The first coffee drunk beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire was drunk in Venice in the late 1580s.

  As the bean gained popularity within the empire, the Ottomans generated foundational ideas about the drink. Many of these ideas remain with us today, most significantly in the form of the ubiquitous locale that Selim bequeathed to humanity—the café. By cultivating and distributing a consumable good and developing a culture of consumption around that good, the Ottomans led one of the world’s earliest consumer revolutions. In so doing, they diffused something of the Ottoman Empire around the world and very literally into our own individual bodies, from 1517 until today.

  Coffee plant

  Coffee was the first truly global agricultural commodity. With the integration of the New World and the Old having taken place only a few years before Selim conquered Yemen, the coffee plant soon thrived in the soils of all five known continents. Linking producers to consumers across oceans, coffee formed a common market from the Americas to the Malaccas. More than spices, more than textiles, coffee drove the economy of the early modern world, and the Ottomans’ dominance of the coffee trade helped them eventually to surpass their earlier rivals, the Portuguese, in the Indian Ocean economy. In addition to its geographic spread and later universality, coffee’s addictive character, its material durability, and its high profit margins worked to merge capital and culture like no other commodity ever had.

  From Selim’s conquest of the Mamluk Empire until the third decade of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans controlled the world’s coffee trade, managing supply and distribution from Mocha and several smaller Yemeni ports and producing as much as twelve to fifteen thousand tons of coffee beans per year. In Amsterdam’s import market—the world’s largest in the early modern era—coffee from Mocha represented about 90 percent of the total coffee imports in any given year of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The coffee trade pumped enormous amounts of cash into and out of the Ottoman Empire—cash from which the state earned substantial tax revenues.

  At the turn of the eighteenth century, coffee cultivators in the Americas and Southeast Asia began to take over the market from Yemen. By the end of the 1720s, Java had replaced Yemen, claiming 90 percent of Amsterdam’s coffee market in that decade. In 1750, Amsterdam’s imports from the Americas matched those from Java, and by 1840, Yemeni coffee had fallen to only 2 or 3 percent of the world’s production. Without the slave labor of the Americas or the colonial labor regimes of the Dutch East Indies, Yemen had a comparative disadvantage, as, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most coffee was still cultivated on the same kind of smallholder family farms as centuries earlier. By the 1770s, it was cheaper to import coffee from Hispaniola to Cairo than from Yemen to Cairo. Even as the sun set on Ottoman Yemen’s two centuries of global dominance in the coffee trade, coffee had become, thanks to Selim, “one of the most valuable internationally traded agricultural commodities in history.” Today, coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity—the first being another Middle Eastern export, oil.

  PART SIX

  FINAL FRONTIERS

  (1518–20)

  IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:

  Selim in conversation

  CHAPTER

  21

  EMPIRE EVERYWHERE

  Selim hunting

  WHAT HAS BEEN HISTORY’S GREATEST KILLER? IT WAS NOT A state, a weapon, or an idea. Arguably, it was plague. Yersinia pestis and its bacterial cousins have for millennia crippled whole societies, brought down empires, and marked the end of historical epochs. Extant in rodent populations even today, plague moves from the small mammals to humans through fleas. When a flea bites an infected rod
ent and then a human, plague bacilli enter the bloodstream and rapidly multiply. Lymph glands filter the bacilli from the blood. In the lymph glands, these bacilli continue to multiply and accumulate, producing the telltale dark protuberances on the victim’s neck and groin known as buboes. From rat to flea to human, plague has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, both for individual humans and whole regions of the globe. In the sixth century, for example, the Plague of Justinian eradicated nearly a fifth of the world’s population, almost bringing down the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. The Black Death of the fourteenth century killed a third of Europe. Since antiquity, the Middle East, with its global commercial and transport links, has served as the crucial conduit of plague between the Mediterranean and Asia. Almost all of history’s plague outbreaks, therefore, have a Middle Eastern story. In fact, the disease was a regular feature of the region’s history.