SEEING THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS IN THE LIGHT 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. As we have seen, Columbus was a man of his time, driven by the zeal of Crusade, as was his patron, Queen Isabella; and the Spanish, obsessed by the threat of Islam, imported those fears to the New World. The notion of Islam as a specter looming over the New World has—most often, quite irrationally—coursed through the history of the Americas in an unbroken line from the
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