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by
Alan Mikhail
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October 8 - October 29, 2020
“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.
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.
More than anything else, he sailed to the Americas imbued with a zeal for waging Christianity’s war against its foremost enemy—Islam.
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.
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.
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.
By ignoring Islam, we have thus failed to understand Columbus and his age fully and, indeed, correctly.
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.
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.
Ottoman Empire struck fear into the world for centuries before it earned its derogatory nineteenth-century sobriquet, “the sick man of Europe.”
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Selim was the grandson of Mehmet II, the sultan who in 1453 captured Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul.
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.
Selim’s life and reign spanned perhaps the most consequential half-century in world history. He proved the most influential of the line of Osman’s thirty-six sultans—more so than even his son, perhaps the Ottoman Empire’s most famous sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent—his legacy shaping the empire until its end in the twentieth century, along with the geopolitical realities of our own day.
Ottoman histories written both before and after his death provide many details. The foremost corpus of sources is known collectively as the Selimname, the “Book of Selim,” and it grew out of an effort after Selim’s death to paint the sultan in as flattering a light as possible. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ottoman historians copied and adapted earlier texts, creating a set of distinct yet tightly interlinked versions.
GOD’S SHADOW THUS SERVES as a revisionist account, providing a new and more holistic picture of the last five centuries, and demonstrating Islam’s constituent role in forming some of the most fundamental aspects of the history of Europe, the Americas, and the United States.
Seven moles on a newborn’s body would thus mark him as the future sovereign of the known world.
The newborn was a boy. His name would be Selim. And, indeed, he had seven moles.
Many preferred Ottoman sovereignty to Venetian rule and agreed to pay the Ottomans taxes in kind or in cash.
As the Ottomans accumulated territory in Europe, they integrated people from these captured regions into their imperial system and developed an institution known as the devşirme. Teenage Christian boys were seized
Sultans and princes focused on producing as many male heirs as possible, to ensure the continuation of the dynasty and therefore the empire in a world in which death—during childbirth, in battle, from disease—was commonplace.
Amasya had established communities of Armenians, Greeks, Bosnians, Jews, Turks, and others. Thus, as a microcosm of the diversity of the Ottoman Empire, Amasya was an ideal venue for preparing potential sultans for rule.
This period of conflict finally ended in 1479 with the Ottoman siege of the Venetian-held city of Shkodra (in the north of modern-day Albania), a victory that allowed the Ottomans to project their power further north along the Adriatic coast. The Treaty of Constantinople, signed on January 25, 1479, brought peace to both sides.
BAYEZIT’S HAREM, WHILE LAVISH, was crowded with his twenty-seven children, several wives, and a retinue of concubines. Of his ten boys, sons two through four emerged as viable contenders for the throne: Ahmed, Korkud, and Selim.
Cem, on the other hand, was a bon vivant. Handsome and charismatic, he enjoyed hunting and sport, poetry and wine. His womanizing was legendary, with much-embroidered tales of maidens throwing themselves at his feet.
The Ottomans’ professional military, always at the ready for battle, far outshone any force in Europe, where states had to round up an army of mercenaries and irregulars every time they went to war. Not only was this cumbersome and slow, but the recruits were woefully unreliable and undertrained, often fighting for personal gain rather than for the interest of the state. It was no wonder, observed Niccolò Machiavelli, that the Ottomans were in the ascendancy in the Mediterranean.
CEM’S FIRST MOVE WAS to enter into an alliance with the leader of the Kasıms, one of the largest tribal principalities in Anatolia. They were among the many very old families of pastoral nomads who had interests and influence around major Anatolian towns and had managed to cut deals with ruling powers over the centuries—from the Romans to the Byzantines and now the Ottomans.
Like Alexander the Great, the Seljuks, the Crusaders, and so many others, Cem and the Kasıms prepared for their invasion of Konya by amassing troops, weapons, and other resources on the plains beyond the city.
Cem’s quest for the throne had already taken him to Cairo and the Arabian peninsula. Before the succession was finally resolved, he would take the struggle through the royal courts of France, Italy, and Rhodes, grafting the politics of Ottoman succession into the politics of early modern Europe and then the globe.
Pope Pius II blesses a Crusading fleet at Ancona, with Cem in attendance
Rhodes, just off the southwestern Anatolian coast, is a parched and craggy island, strategically located where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean.
When Cem arrived in Rome on March 4, 1489, nearly eight years after his father’s death, he became in essence a reified weapon in Renaissance Europe’s bloodlust against Islam—a more compelling obsession than the classics of antiquity, art, or personal salvation.
In effect, much of the “civilization” of the Renaissance developed from Christianity’s atavistic hatred of Islam.
In Trabzon, in addition to cultivating copious amounts of wheat, barley, and other staples, farmers grew specialized delicacies in mass quantities for trade, the most important being cherries and hazelnuts. The region around Trabzon was then, and remains today, the world’s most prolific producer of these crops. Forming a checkerboard pattern, the farms of red cherries and brown hazelnuts dominated the landscape around Trabzon, much as they do even now.
ONCE SELIM AND HIS mother had established their administrative control, they dedicated themselves to a thoroughgoing program of Ottomanization, aimed at replacing Trabzon’s Christian and Greek character with a more distinct Muslim and Turkish ethos.
Perhaps most significant in the process of making Trabzon Ottoman was the newly endowed pious foundation that, under the direction of the Christian-to-Muslim convert Gülbahar, forever changed the city.
Gülbahar did not leave any writings, letters, or a diary. In the absence of such first-person accounts, we are fortunate to have her foundation as documentation of her life and worldview, as her achievements, which have not been fully recognized by past scholars, deserve our attention. The buildings Gülbahar endowed in perpetuity reveal her personality and interests. First, she clearly cared for Trabzon’s disadvantaged. Her soup kitchen kept the hungry fed; her school educated children for free; and the library she built offered knowledge to all who cared to enter.
Suleyman’s mother, Hafsa, was fifteen at the time of Suleyman’s birth. Hailing from Crimea, Hafsa—plumpish, with long auburn hair and a prominent forehead—was one of Selim’s two concubines.
Bayezit clearly had no fear of Selim—a gross error in judgment that would come to haunt him.
Selim recognized the crucial need to cooperate with the area’s powerful minority groups—not just for the success of the overall imperial enterprise in the east but for his own ends. This success rested on a formula of what in the nineteenth century became known as Realpolitik.
In his decades in Trabzon, close to the Kurds’ historic power base, Selim achieved a rapprochement with the Kurds. To maintain authority and relative calm in the region, he cut deals with Kurdish chieftains, offering them advantages where other Ottoman officials had preferred the sword. In return, they pledged their loyalty to him.
Proud of their Central Asian heritage and famed for their swift horses and ornate carpets, the Karamanids, with their distinctive helmets and flowing beards, were fearsome figures as they surged over the horizon. Their stronghold was the ancient south-central Anatolian city of Laranda, which they renamed Karaman. (A local breed of sheep is the source of a yogurt that has made the city regionally famous.) Karaman stood at the foot of the Taurus Mountains, near an extinct volcano.
