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by
Alan Mikhail
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October 8 - October 29, 2020
the atrocities Europeans were committing against indigenous Americans were indefensible. Unfortunately, his solution for overcoming this barbarity was no less barbaric—to ship African slaves to the New World instead of enslaving the natives. He wrote scathingly of the Requirement, considering the document vile. What would happen, he asked, if “Moors or Turks came to make the same requirement?” With this rhetorical question, he obviously meant to poke fun at the Requirement’s manifest Islamic origins. “Did the Spaniards show superior proof by witnesses and truer evidence of what they declared
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By adding some Christian elements to an embellished Aztec legend, Cortés claimed that the Aztec emperor Montezuma—described by the expedition’s chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo as “of good height, well proportioned, spare and slight, and not very dark”—“donated” his empire to Charles V because the Aztecs believed Cortés to be the prophesied “Great Lord” who would one day come from the east.
Above all, sage governance and provident strategy drove Selim, rather than an apocalyptic imagination or dreams of gold and unconverted souls in far-off lands.
Ottoman slavery ultimately functioned in an integrative fashion. In fact, it was far easier for a converted Christian slave born in the Balkans to become a member of the Ottoman elite than it was for a freeborn Muslim from Anatolia to do so.
European slavery was vastly different. Christians regularly captured non-Christians (most often Muslims) in war and held them as slaves—the trade in African slaves, too, had been flourishing for decades before it expanded across the Atlantic—but these human possessions were seldom integrated into their captors’ society.
In so doing, it also exported the Old World’s major civilizational battle across the Atlantic. Islam is not thought of as central to the history of the New World; however, the realities of slavery, which is obviously critical to any understanding of the history of the Western Hemisphere, cannot be separated from the conflict between Islam and Christianity. In fact, as we will see, Muslims led the first ever revolt against European slavery in the Americas.
BEGINNING WITH COLUMBUS AND continuing well into the 1500s, gold was the prime motivator for Spanish exploration throughout the lands bordering the Caribbean and provided the initial justification for slavery. In Hispaniola, the Spanish forced the Taino to mine as much of the island’s modest deposits as they could.
Soon, sugar would replace gold as the primary economic engine of the Caribbean colonies.
island in the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, divided into the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After its European discovery by Columbus in 1492, Hispaniola was colonized by the Spaniards, who ceded the western part (now Haiti) to France in 1697.
“THE CONQUEST OF THE EARTH,” wrote Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.” Although Conrad wrote these words about the Belgian Congo in the nineteenth century, he could just as easily have been describing the first few decades of Spanish rule in the Americas. It was certainly “not a pretty thing.”
90 percent of the native population of the Americas died between 1492 and the middle of the seventeenth century—
The largest Jewish city in the world after 1492—indeed, the only Jewish-majority city for two thousand years—rose in the Ottoman Empire. This was the humming port of Salonica (now the Greek city of Thessaloniki), on the hilly northwest coast of the Aegean Sea. Over the next four centuries, Salonica, “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” became the global center of Jewish
Both Judaism and Islam were regarded by Christians as diseases plaguing Europe.
Pogroms targeting “Christ’s crucifiers” had occurred throughout the course of Spanish history, one of the most significant coming in 1391, when Christian mobs massacred scores of Jews across Spain’s major cities. Next came waves of expulsions from neighborhoods and even whole towns, and then a flood of forced conversions.
We . . . having had much deliberation upon it, resolve to order all and said Jews and Jewesses out of our kingdoms and that they never return nor come back to any of them. . . . [W]e command all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age they may be, who live and reside and are in the said kingdoms and seignories, natives and non-natives alike, who by whatever manner or whatever reason may have come or are to be found in them, that by the end of July of the present year, that they leave the said kingdoms and seignories with their sons and daughters, male and female servants and Jewish domestics, both
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them, neither as dwellers, nor as travelers, nor in any other manner whatsoever, upon punishment that if they do not thus perform and comply with this, and are to be found in our said kingdoms and seignories and have come here in any manner, they incur the penalty of death and confiscation of all their belongings for our treasury, and such penalties they shall incur by the very deed itself without trial, sentence, or declaration.
In just four short months, from April to July of 1492, the Jews of Spain—a community that had persevered if not prospered for more than a millennium—faced a bleak choice among three repugnant alternatives: conversion, flight, or death. The expulsion decree rehashed many familiar themes permeating the anti-Jewish sentiment that had intensified in Spain over the previous few centuries: the corrupting inf...
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they held vast amounts of property to the detriment of Christians. The Spanish Crown’s ultimate goal was the total Christianization of Spain by the excision of such cancerous tumors as Jews and Muslims, and so, after the fall of Granada and the anti-Jewish expulsion efforts, many Muslims were expelled as well, mostly to North Africa, and the violence against them would continue until their final expulsion in 1614. But in ...
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THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS the only Mediterranean locale where, in the words of one Jewish refugee, “their weary feet could find rest.” Indeed, Sultan Bayezit II, Selim’s father, issued a decree in July 1492, just after Jews started leaving Spain, that welcomed them to his empire.
In fact, he actively courted Spain’s Jews, going so far as to send ships to the Iberian coastline to bring Jewish refugees to the shores of the Bosphorus. He ordered all his provincial governors to welcome and protect any Jewish refugees who arrived in their territories—and some Jews journeyed as far east as Selim’s Trabzon.
After 1453, Istanbul was unquestionably the best place in the world for Jews to live; nowhere were Jews as prosperous and free as they were in Istanbul. Immediately after capturing Constantinople, Mehmet made the city’s chief rabbi a member of his imperial council, offering him the same level of administrative power as the empire’s grand mufti. Accordingly, the chief rabbi collected Jewish taxes (including the jizya), appointed rabbis in all the empire’s cities, and generally managed his community’s internal affairs. He also oversaw Jewish civil law courts and the criminal punishment of
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THEOLOGICAL, DEMOGRAPHIC, AND POLITICAL factors explain the profound difference between the treatment of Jews in Europe and their treatment in the Ottoman Empire. Within Christian theology, Jews stood as deniers of Christ’s message, as well as his assassins. They adhered to the laws of the Old Testament rather than to those of the new kingdom that Christians believed Christ brought to earth.
Trafficking as it does in tropes that were commonplace in medieval and early modern Europe—the capture of Gentile children and the emphasis on bloodletting—this almost certainly apocryphal story demonstrates that anti-Semitism existed in the Ottoman Empire and often led to anti-Jewish violence, in narrative form and in reality. Unlike in Europe, however, Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not represent a threat so dire that they needed to be excised from the realm.
Selim was strong where the rest of his family was weak. As the least advantaged of his father’s sons, the least likely to win the throne, he had to become more brutal and resolute than the rest. He had to prove himself against his half-brothers and their supporters, against his own father, against the Safavids—all of whom would resist him.
In 1511, still smarting from those denials, Selim tried a different tactic. He requested that Suleyman be given one of the provinces in the Balkans—some of the most prized governorships in the empire. As Bayezit aged and Ahmed and Korkud openly declared their intentions to claim the throne, Selim knew he would need a power base closer to Istanbul. Though Selim confidently expected rejection, he persisted, for two reasons. First, the request was a negotiating strategy; it maintained pressure on Bayezit. Second, it served to expose his father’s biased support for Ahmed.
By the end of July, Selim had begun his march southward, along the western shore of the Black Sea from Akkerman toward the outskirts of Edirne, the former imperial capital at the bend of the Meriç River. Further men and supplies accompanied him by boat. The time for letters and emissaries had passed. Bayezit, informed by a cascade of messengers of Selim’s steady advance, dispatched one of his highest-ranking and most able confidants in an attempt to intimidate his rebellious son. Hasan Pasha, the governor of Rumelia—perhaps the most important province in the whole of the empire, as it included
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Bayezit now dispatched fifteen thousand of his own troops to intercept Selim. Only with their armies face to face did Selim and his father, through their representatives, begin talking. Instead of wasting lives in a chest-puffing battle, both hoped to save their soldiers for the ultimate confrontation that surely lay ahead. They negotiated a rapprochement whereby Bayezit would grant Selim a governorship in the Balkans in exchange for his withdrawal from Edirne.
More significantly, Bayezit swore he would not abdicate in favor of any of his sons. This promise represented a major victory for Selim; it bought him time and forestalled the threat of the imminent enthronement of Ahmed. When Bayezit died, Ahmed would be left to fend for himself. Self-confident, self-reliant, and well-armed, Selim was convinced that without their father’s support behind Ahmed, he would have the advantage in any all-out war among the three half-brothers, particularly since he had the most military experience and the most imposing fighting force.
The Battle of Çorlu represented the first time in Ottoman history that a prince warred against his father the sultan. The unprecedented nature of this conflict is why we know of its outcome but not the details of the fighting itself. Such a story necessitated suppression, an observation that prompts caution when relying on accounts such as the Selimname. Within Ottoman political culture, raising an army against a sultan, the divinely endowed leader of the Ottoman realm, was by definition inherently illegitimate, not to mention illegal and immoral. Even some of Selim’s own supporters, as much
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ON THAT DAY, SATURDAY, April 24, 1512, the Ottoman Empire ineradicably changed. As Selim’s men led a despairing, enervated Bayezit out of the palace, he became the first sultan in Ottoman history to relinquish his throne before his death, while Selim became the first non-eldest, non-favored son to succeed his father as sultan.
Bayezit did indeed die of natural causes, his spirit broken from having lost his throne to a reviled and defiant son. Whatever the truth, Bayezit’s death on the road to Dimetoka surely pleased Selim, particularly since it occurred outside Istanbul, providing him with plausible deniability. Later historians, hoping to avoid the suggestion that any sultan’s reign could be illegitimate—even the first to involve the overthrow of a sitting sultan—were loth to assign blame for Bayezit’s death to Selim.
Bayezit’s body was wrapped and transported back to Istanbul for burial in the mosque, “paradise-like in form,” that he had constructed for himself years earlier. Selim spared no expense
Once the fittest won the throne, he killed his rivals to ensure that no bitter also-ran would seek revenge and thereby disrupt the stability of the state.
In an accident of history, Niccolò Machiavelli, who admired and feared the Ottoman Empire, completed his famous treatise of political philosophy, The Prince, the same year—1513—in which Selim defeated his half-brothers to secure the sultanate that he had gained in 1512. Selim was the archetypal Machiavellian politician, and, indeed, Machiavelli esteemed Selim over the two other Ottoman sultans he witnessed, Mehmet and Bayezit.
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.
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.
Coffee was the first truly global agricultural commodity.
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.
Being sultan did not give him immunity from plague, of course, but it did make him less vulnerable than most other humans. The simplest strategy to protect oneself from the disease—running away from it—was the most effective. So Selim and his retinue fled plague-stricken Istanbul for the former imperial capital of Edirne. Although he could not have known it, this would be the last time he stepped on Istanbul’s cobblestones or laid his eyes on the Bosphorus.
AS SELIM CONTEMPLATED AN invasion of Morocco in 1518, he turned to Hayreddin Barbarossa for insight and advice. Hayreddin, far less enthusiastic than his sultan, explained how Morocco differed from the rest of North Africa and why it would prove enormously difficult to conquer.
IN THE EARLY AUTUMN of 1518, the Ottomans, the Spanish, and the Saadians stood poised for a triangular war in Morocco. On September 20, a fleet left Spain for its North African holdings, only to have high winds slam twelve of the ships into rocks on the Moroccan coast, completely destroying them. All three thousand Spanish soldiers on board six of these vessels perished, and the horses on the other six ships drowned as well. But this was just the first of several waves of Spanish military transports to cross the sea. Soon Crown soldiers were flowing steadily into Morocco.
In May 1520, as Europe convulsed with revolts in Spain against its Habsburg ruler and Luther’s Protestant challenge churned the Catholic hierarchy, a man named Ali Bey, one of Selim’s dragomans (interpreters), arrived in Edirne carrying a gift for his sultan: a new mappamundi, this one inscribed in Italian and Latin. Like the map Piri Reis had unfurled for Selim in Cairo in 1517, this new world map enchanted and amazed the sultan, as Venetian sources relate—though, unlike Piri’s map, it has not survived and therefore not received the attention from historians it deserves.
The figure of a wrestler fittingly symbolizes Selim. He had been a combatant his entire life—first against his own family, then against the Safavids and Mamluks, and now against the Spanish in the Mediterranean and the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Selim’s ambitions in Morocco, however, presented him with a far more formidable test than any he had faced to this point.
SELIM DREW HIS LAST breath early in the morning of September 22, 1520, mere weeks before his fiftieth birthday. The cause of death was most likely plague, or perhaps anthrax contracted from his horse. A few months earlier, in June, the Aztec ruler Montezuma, whom Cortés described as a sultan, also died, probably at a similar age. Coming within months of each other, these two deaths could not have been more significant for the course of world history. Montezuma’s demise allowed the Spanish to march on the Aztec capital, with the empire yielding to its final destruction the very next year, 1521.
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Today, the world’s largest religions are Christianity and Islam, with the two faiths claiming over half of the earth’s population.
In Luther’s final analysis, the evils of the pope always exceeded the evils of the sultan. While Luther unfailingly viewed the Ottomans as enemies, and Muslims as unbelievers, still he sought to understand them. He wrote reams about the Ottomans, whom he always referred to as “the Turks.” He studied Islam deeply, and even contemplated sponsoring the first German translation of the Qur’an.
LUTHER RESERVED HIS MOST virulent attacks for Pope Leo himself. “In the East rules the Beast,” he offered, “in the West the False Prophet.” Both figures presaged the end-times. “After
John Smith’s map of Virginia, with his coat of arms depicting three severed Turkish heads
OF THE RISE of the Ottoman Empire offers an alternative narrative to the dominant interpretation, which pretends that Islam played no role in Europe’s expansion to the New World.
