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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alan Mikhail
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October 8 - October 29, 2020
For his part, Şehinşah would never see Selim take the throne, dying in Konya in 1511 at the age of thirty-seven. In his last days, he was despondent, having lost his beloved youngest son the previous year, but he would have been pleased to know that the Karamanid force he had nurtured found a new patron in Selim.
In myriad ways, all of his voyages were a response to the power of the Ottomans and other Muslims in the Old World—the political force that shaped Columbus and his generation more than any other.
As both civilizational kin and territorial rival to Christianity, Islam was Christianity’s most imposing and lethal enemy. In the decades around 1500, it was not the Venetians nor the Spanish nor the Portuguese who set the standard for power and innovation; it was Islam.
Genoa was primarily a mercantile port, not a military one. Blessed with a deep and protected harbor, Genoa was pushed to the sea by the Apennine Mountains, forced—like Selim’s Trabzon—to spread along a narrow strip of coast. It was “one of the maritime wonders of Europe,” in one historian’s words, a key way-station on the “coastal highway” linking Italy and France.
As a boy in this vibrant commercial city, Columbus likely spent hours at Genoa’s docks, where, in addition to watching Crusaders sail off to the east and workers haul cargo and repair vessels, he would have seen ships, sailors, and wares arriving from Ottoman ports. It is likely that he saw Ottoman merchants, wearing unusual garb and speaking a language he could not understand.
He was ten in 1461, when Selim’s grandfather captured Trabzon, jolting Genoa and once again underscoring the immediacy of Ottoman dominance.
Columbus also learned important lessons about the East from the still unpublished work of Marco Polo, which was circulating in Genoa in manuscript. Although Polo was Venetian by birth, he had an important connection to Columbus’s hometown: he had been captured by the Genoese in the Battle of Curzola in 1298, and it was while he was imprisoned in Genoa that he regaled a cellmate, a man named Rusticello, with the tales of his travels in the East.
Rusticello, not Polo, who would eventually record—and embellish—these now legendary stories. When Polo traveled through Trabzon, in the late thirteenth century, the city’s Genoese community was thriving—a fact that made the recent loss of the city to the Ottomans all the more personal.
A major figure in Polo’s tales was the Grand Khan (most likely a fictionalized version of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan), whose opulent court and persona especially fascinated Columbus. Polo supposedly reached this court far off in Asia—beyond Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Afghanistan—where he discovered a jewel-encrusted paradise of luxury, learning, and power. But what most intrigued Columbus about the Grand Khan was that, according to Polo, though he was not a Christian he wanted to become one.
The illusion of a Grand Khan of the East with Christian proclivities was not entirely fiction. The germ of this idea lay in the historical reality of the Eastern Nestorian Church, a branch of Syriac Christianity that spread from the Middle East throughout Central Asia and to parts of China.
Nestorianism is a Christian theological doctrine that upholds several distinctive teachings in the fields of Christology and Mariology. It opposes the concept of hypostatic union and emphasizes that the two natures (human and divine) of Jesus Christ were joined by will rather than personhood. This Christological position is defined as radical dyophysitism.[1] Nestorianism was named after Christian theologian Nestorius (386–450), Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, who was influenced by Christological teachings of Theodore of Mopsuestia at the School of Antioch.
Nestorius' teachings brought him into conflict with other prominent church leaders, most notably Cyril of Alexandria, who criticized especially his rejection of the title Theotokos ("God-bearer") for Mary, the mother of Jesus, and issued 12 anathemas against him at a council in Rome in 430. Nestorius and his teachings were eventually condemned as heretical at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which led to the Nestorian Schism; churches supporting Nestorian teachings broke with the State church of the Roman Empire.
According to the fantasy, once the Grand Khan converted, the Muslims holding Jerusalem would be surrounded by Christians who, in one final, apocalyptic pincer movement, would destroy them forever, smashing the glistening Dome of the Rock
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition
Thanks mostly to Polo, European Christians believed the Grand Khan to be more open to conversion than the recalcitrant Muslims and Jews. The historical record, however, says otherwise.
The Travels of Marco Polo, which encouraged this hope, remained one of Europe’s most widely printed texts for over half a millennium.
The Seven Cities of Gold, also known as the Seven Cities of Cibola (/ˈsiːbələ/), is a myth that was popular in the 16th century. It is also featured in several works of popular culture. According to legend, the seven cities of gold could be found throughout the pueblos of the New Mexico Territory.[1] Names associated with lost cities of gold include: El Dorado, Paititi, City of the Caesars, Lake Parime at Manoa, Antilia, Quivira and Cibola.
In the Americas, the most famous seeker of the Seven Cities in the mid-sixteenth century was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.
Decades before Coronado’s journey, however, Columbus believed firmly that the Seven Cities existed somewhere in the Atlantic, and that they would provide the gold needed to wrest Jerusalem from Muslim hands.
Throughout his maritime career, Columbus was routinely mendacious, privileging his instincts and self-interest above all else: honesty, his crew, and even reason itself.
Chios had a further strategic advantage: it is the only place on earth where mastic is naturally produced. The crystallized sap of the island’s trees—which have gnarled trunks and bushy tops that make them look like enormous bonsai trees—was a coveted luxury item used for cooking and in medicines, perfumes, and varnishes. Thus, whoever held Chios could earn enormous profits.
In traveling to Chios, Columbus had his first direct encounter with the imposing power of the Ottoman Empire.
While enjoying the pleasant sunshine of Chios, Columbus listened attentively and, one presumes, with dread to lurid tales of the Ottoman conquest of Kefe only a few months before and of the siege of Constantinople over two decades earlier.
Stories Columbus had heard in his youth about Christianity’s existential wars with Islam were reified on Chios with baleful tales of lost loved ones.
London had eighty thousand souls when the Black Death arrived in 1348 and would not reach that number again until 1500, when its population began to boom.
More than anything else, trade and religion forged the physical landscape of London in the fifteenth century. Merchants came from the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Germany, as well as from the Mediterranean. Columbus himself had landed in the city
Men of Cathay have come from the west. [Of this] we have seen many signs. And especially in Galway in Ireland, a man and a woman, of extraordinary appearance, have come to land on two tree trunks.
The individuals Columbus saw in Galway were most likely Native Americans, perhaps Inuit or Yupik in wooden kayaks or umiaks. Long before Columbus crossed the ocean, numerous Native Americans rode Atlantic currents eastward to Europe and Africa.
THIS SIGHTING OF NATIVE Americans in Galway in 1477 was the germ of Columbus’s belief that an Atlantic route to Asia was possible.
Henry’s most famous plan for outflanking the Muslim world rested on his belief in the possibility of a southern route around Africa. The primary problem with this idea, initially, was that it meant crossing the equator. Ancient wisdom held that anyone who tried to cross the Torrid Zone, as the equatorial latitudes were then known, would be, as if in some Dante-esque torture, scorched to death by this hottest of rings around the earth.
Unbeknownst to Henry (as well as to Columbus), Islam had been introduced to West Africa in the eighth century by Muslim merchants from the East trading across the Sahel.
In 1452—the year before Constantinople fell—Nicholas issued a papal bull entitled Dum Diversas, which bestowed upon Portugal “official dominion” over the west coast of Africa and all the islands of the eastern Atlantic. This legalized Henry’s territorial gains as a part of Portugal’s empire. The bull specified that Portugal had the right to enslave any “Saracens” (another term for Muslims) and pagans living in the region. Still decades before Europeans would cross the Atlantic and centuries before the transatlantic slave trade would peak, the significance of this stunning papal document cannot
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Pushed out of the Mediterranean by Ottoman military and economic power, Columbus would export this conceptual innovation across the Atlantic, which would soon allow Europeans to expand their understanding of “Muslim” otherness to encompass not just West African non-Muslims but Native Americans as well.
The second piece—hearing from sailors in the African port that they often saw logs washed up on shore that seemed to have been carved by human hands—confirmed his experience in Galway with the two Native American corpses: Asia, apparently, was close. Thirdly, in São Jorge da Mina Columbus gleaned an understanding of the Atlantic’s predominant patterns of wind and current. On the West African coast, the prevailing winds blow out to sea, and the ocean’s dominant current is to the west as well.
Columbus’s major push for money occurred in the 1480s—the decade during which Isabella and Ferdinand, the eventual financiers of his voyages, declared war on Islam. It is hardly a coincidence that Europe’s war on Islam and Columbus’s voyages transpired at the exact same time. In the minds of Columbus and the Spanish sovereigns, the two were pieces of the same global war: Christianity against Islam.
Ottoman ships continued west, reaching Corsica, Pisa, the Balearic Islands, and even breaching the Iberian mainland itself at Almería and Málaga. Although these were not full-scale invasions resulting in permanent Ottoman settlements, the sight of a fleet of Ottoman ships pulling into port panicked already frightened European states, especially Spain, because of its large Muslim population.
The process of attempting to make Spain wholly Christian was known as the Reconquista (or “Reconquest”), a perceived (and expected) “return” to the status quo ante of the early eighth century, before Muslims arrived in Spain. The Reconquista sprang from the same ethos as the Inquisition: the belief that non-Christians threatened and weakened Christian Spain and therefore had to be eliminated either through conversion or expulsion.
Jews never had a formal state in Spain, nor an external state that was alleged to be supporting the Judeo-Spanish community. Spain’s Jews, unlike Muslims, were not locked in a battle with Christendom for global territorial and religious domination. Spain hence justified violence towards its Jews, as we will see in more detail later, on the basis not of international politics but of anti-Jewish theology.
Isabella captiously strung Columbus along until May 1486, when she finally offered him a few minutes of her time in Córdoba.
The so-called “Ornament of the World,” Córdoba was a handsome city in southern Spain in which churches became mosques and mosques became churches; where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars had worked and lived together for centuries along the ancient Guadalquivir River; where the three religions overlapped, conversed, and intertwined their beliefs. Around the year 1000, Córdoba was one of the world’s largest and richest cities,
He would sail westward to the court of the Grand Khan of the East, convince him to join forces with Christian Europe against the Ottomans, and together they would retake Jerusalem in an epic battle that would destroy Islam forever. He set out his belief that such an apocalyptic war was the only way to ensure the triumph of Christianity over Islam. He vouched that he had both the experience and the knowledge to guarantee this outcome. He buttressed his credentials by explaining that he had studied Marco Polo, Pliny’s Natural History, and Ptolemy’s Geography, and had pored over every map he
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Her interest piqued, Isabella ordered her advisers to study Columbus’s plan. At that point, in 1486, given the demanding war effort in the Iberian south, she was unable to devote the resources needed to do anything more than entertain Columbus’s fancies. She did, however, offer to hire him as a soldier. Strapped for cash and without other viable patronage options, he agreed, joining the Spanish fight against the Moors. As a soldier in Isabella’s army, Columbus wagered, he would have opportunities to remind her of his plan.
In it they say there are many and very large ships and many traders. And from this island . . . I have already decided to go to the mainland and to the city of Quinsay [Hangzhou, China] and to give Your Highnesses’ letters to the Grand Khan.” On October 28, having traveled south, Columbus’s ships landed on the northern coast of Cuba. Maybe, he now thought, this was not Japan; Cuba appeared far too vast to be an island.
Since the remaining two vessels could not accommodate all the sailors, Columbus was forced to leave thirty-nine men behind. He left them enough food and supplies for a year, but when he returned eleven months later, he found the camp burned and all the men dead.
Spanish observers of Aztec dancing wrote that it was derived from “the zambra of the Moors.” In
Santiago Matamoros was thus imported from Europe to Peru and recast to fight against Spain’s new enemies. Interestingly, during a nineteenth-century revolt against Spanish colonial rule, recently Christianized Indians in Peru reimagined Santiago as their patron, too, invoking his help as Mataespañois—the Spaniard-slayer.
Crippled by arthritis and denied the grants and privileges he had previously enjoyed, Columbus died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain, surrounded by his family and shipmates.
The conquistadors, typically unaware of the motive, were legally obliged to recite the Requirement’s precepts aloud at the outset of each new conquest. For the native peoples of the Americas, witnessing such a puzzling performance paled in comparison to the violence it portended. The Requirement became a ritualized part of Spanish warfare, an unsheathing of the sword before it was plunged into flesh. Its words remain central to our understanding of the age.
It opened by proclaiming Christianity as God’s one true faith. “God our Lord one and eternal created heaven and earth . . . God our Lord gave charge [of all peoples] to one man named Saint Peter, so that he was lord and superior of all the men of the world . . . and gave him all the world for his lordship and jurisdiction (señorio y jurisdicción).” It then acknowledged all those who had already chosen, rightly, to accept God’s message. “Almost all who have been notified [of this] have received His Majesty and obeyed and served him, and serve him as subjects . . . and turned Christian without
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It then states directly that the choice before the peoples of the Americas was either Christianity or suffering: But if you do not do it . . . with the help of God, I will enter forcefully against you, and I will make war everywhere and however I can, and I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty, and I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves . . . and I will take your goods, and I will do to you all the evil and damages
There were Spaniards, too, who disapproved of the Requirement. The most famous dissenter was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who served as the first Bishop of Chiapas and is often memorialized as the “Protector of the Indians.”
