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

by Alan Mikhail

IN 1517, AS SELIM’S “numberless troops” streamed southward from Syria along the eastern coast of the Red Sea, they stumbled upon something none of them had encountered before—a bush with a strange, bright-red berry. Arguably even more than gaining Jerusalem and Cairo, assuming the caliphate, or building the largest empire in Islamic history, this plant represented the most significant outcome—and certainly one of the most lasting—of Selim’s conquest of the Mamluks. What Selim’s army found in Yemen was coffee. 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