God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

goes, Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, in 330 transferred his capital to a new city, which he named Constantinople, thereby purposefully leaving—“donating”—Italy and the rest of western Europe to the pope and his successors. Charles V stood then as the rightful heir of both Constantine and Montezuma, a descendant of the Roman legacy and the custodian of New World imperial power. By logical extension, anyone in the Ottoman and Aztec empires who resisted Spanish rule prevented Charles V from fully possessing what was rightfully given to him as “monarch of the universe.” As with the expansion of the Crusades to the New World, the competition between the Spanish and the Ottomans to be the early modern world’s new Roman Empire crossed the Atlantic too.