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

by Alan Mikhail

Ottoman military conquests and economic acumen created one of the world’s first truly global commodities, coffee, and spurred capitalist consumerism through their invention of the coffeehouse.

By ignoring Islam, we have thus failed to understand Columbus and his age fully and, indeed, correctly.

The ineluctable fact is that the Ottoman Empire made our modern world—which is, admittedly, a bitter pill for many in the West.

Why is this so? A primary reason is that in the twenty-first-century West—as, indeed, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe—Muslims are often seen reflexively as enemies and terrorists, diametrically opposed to the religion that defined our culture and to the political systems we hold sacred. From popular culture to global politics, among conservatives and liberals alike, Islam—in the United States especially—is seen as “the great other,” a problem that somehow needs to be “fixed.” Muslims are targets of both popular and official vilification and often outright physical violence.

Foremost, we tend to read the history of the last half-millennium as “the rise of the West.” (This anachronism rings as true in Turkey and the rest of the Middle East as it does in Europe and America.) In fact, in 1500, and even in 1600, there was no such thing as the now much-vaunted notion of “the West.” Throughout the early modern centuries, the European continent consisted of a fragile collection of disparate kingdoms and small, weak principalities locked in constant warfare. The large land-based empires of Eurasia were the dominant powers of the Old World, and, apart from a few European outposts in and around the Caribbean, the Americas remained the vast domain of its indigenous peoples. The Ottoman Empire held more territory in Europe than did most European-based states.

Since the Industrial Revolution and the so-called European glories of the nineteenth century, this history has been rewritten to portray European ascendancy as somehow stretching back to Columbus. This is a historical absurdity. Not only does it paper over the deep fissures in early modern Europe, it also masks the fact that the Ottoman Empire struck fear into the world for centuries before it earned its derogatory nineteenth-century sobriquet, “the sick man of Europe.” Some historians claim that the Ottoman Empire began to decline from its peak of imperial might around 1600, just as the English began their settlement of the Americas. While it is true that the empire lost wars and ceded territory more often after that date, it remained the most hegemonic force in the Middle East and one of the most formidable states in Europe, Asia, and Africa for another three hundred years—until World War I.

Their long migration explains why today’s Turks share bonds of language, culture, and ethnicity with peoples throughout Central Asia, even as far as China and beyond. (Korean and Turkish are both in the Altaic language group, for example.)

In effect, much of the “civilization” of the Renaissance developed from Christianity’s atavistic hatred of Islam.

Although all religious minorities throughout the Mediterranean were subjected to much hardship, the Ottomans, despite what Innocent thought, never persecuted non-Muslims in the way that the Inquisition persecuted Muslims and Jews—and, despite the centuries of calls for Christian Crusades, Muslims never attempted a war against the whole of Christianity. While considered legally inferior to Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (as elsewhere in the lands of Islam) had more rights than other religious minorities around the world. They had their own law courts, freedom to worship in the empire’s numerous synagogues and churches, and communal autonomy. While Christian Europe was killing its religious minorities, the Ottomans protected theirs and welcomed those expelled from Europe. Although the sultans of the empire were Muslims, the majority of the population was not. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was effectively the Mediterranean’s most populous Christian state: the Ottoman sultan ruled over more Christian subjects than the Catholic pope.

Thus, to a young Selim, the religious clashes of the early modern world seemed not a matter of Christianity versus Islam but rather of Ottoman Islam’s ecumenical view of the world versus European Christianity’s violent efforts to achieve religious homogeneity.

No power without troops, No troops without money, No money without prosperity, No prosperity without justice and good administration.

In fact, nearly everywhere the Ottomans came to rule, the local population recognized the advantages provided by the Ottoman system: freedom of worship, lower taxes, military protection, social stability, and the free flow of commerce.

Co-optation nearly always proved more successful than force,

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 be overstated. It provided the first legal basis for the European enslavement of Africans.

In a world of Christians Crusading against Islam, Europeans warring against the Ottomans, this bull equated the legal status of West African Muslims with that of pagans—both considered unbelievers, of course, and both now subject to enslavement by Christian Europeans. Given the history of encounters between Christendom and Islam, Muslims were the closest, most familiar, and ultimate “other” for Europeans—the political, military, and ideological enemy against whom all other enemies were measured and through whom they were understood. Because West Africa’s non-Muslims were also non-Christians, they were interpreted through the primary category of non-Christian “otherness” available to Europeans—Islam. For Christians, then, pagan equaled Muslim, making it possible for the Portuguese in West Africa to understand both non-Muslims and Muslims as part of the same conceptual category of “Muslim”—a category of person which a Christian was allowed to treat with great force and violence. The papal conjoining of Muslim and non-Muslim is what ultimately allowed both to be taken “legally” from West Africa to the New World as slaves. The repurposing of the category of “Muslim” to encompass non-Christians outside of Europe was hence a constituent element of the birth of the much-vaunted European age of discovery—an age built, of course, on Europe’s territorial conquests in West Africa and the enslavement of its people.

In the Americas, where of course no Muslims existed in 1492, European Christians again filtered the unknown peoples they encountered through their notions of Islam and anti-Muslim Christian Crusade.

João’s fort immediately proved its worth. Between 1487 and 1489, 8,000 ounces of gold went from São Jorge da Mina to Lisbon; 22,500 ounces were shipped between 1494 and 1496; and by 1500, shipments totaled 26,000 ounces. Owing in large measure to the infamous papal bull that Henry had negotiated, the commerce of São Jorge da Mina soon came to include slaves as well, with ten to twelve thousand West Africans transported to Lisbon between 1500 and 1535 alone. In subsequent centuries, the fort that Columbus helped construct became one of the main export hubs of the transatlantic slave trade.

Isabella especially took it as her duty, as sovereign of one of the largest and most influential of Spain’s Christian states, to lead the global war against all Muslims—whether in Castile, across Iberia, in North Africa, in the Ottoman Empire, or anywhere else. (Ironically, there were more Christians in the Ottoman Empire at the time than in the whole of Spain.) For both Ferdinand and Isabella, any Muslim anywhere was a potential threat, but they regarded those living under their own rule as the most dangerous.

peninsula, a community with nearly eight hundred years of history.

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.

Although there is a stark lack of female leaders in the historical record, here we see how Columbus, like Selim, relied on powerful women.

The Muslims who remained in Spain were given three years to leave, as were its Jews.

While no doubt a true watershed of the last millennium, the fall of Granada, in fact, did little to stop Ottoman advances, in the Balkans and Central Europe or North Africa and the Middle East;

The active suppression of over seven hundred years of Europe’s domestic Muslim history began in January 1492, and it continues in various guises to the present day—making our story of Selim, the Ottomans, and Islam vital as a corrective to current understandings of the past.

To understand 1492 properly and fully, however, we must understand the continuities that made and shaped it. We must eschew the mythology about a secular Western march of progress. On their three square-sailed ships, Columbus and his eighty-seven crewmen carried across the Atlantic their long history of warring with Islam and their sense of inadequacy in the face of the Ottoman colossus.

Spanish and Portuguese shipbuilders took a navigational leap forward at the end of the fifteenth century by borrowing a technology from their Muslim rivals: the lateen sail, a triangular sail joined at 45 degrees to a ship’s mast. Combining lateen sails with traditional European square rigs offered advantages of speed and maneuverability without sacrificing the stability of the square sail. The result was large ships that performed like smaller vessels. The “combined rig made possible a change in the nature of exploring voyages,” quickly becoming the preferred means for crossing the Atlantic. In maritime historian J. H. Parry’s words, “the Arabs were their teachers.”

Although this fact is ignored in most historical accounts, many of those who fought against indigenous peoples in the New World had battled Muslims in the Old World.

The Requirement’s “unique ritual demand for submission,” as opposed to conversion, derived directly from Spain’s historical experience with the Muslim practice of jihad. Despite modern-day distortions,

jihad does not always, or even usually, have a military connotation. Its most general meaning is to struggle, to accept the summons to follow the path designated by God. Most commonly, this meant to endeavor to become a better person, a better servant of God—to strive toward the advancement of one’s personal faith, moral character, and religious practice. On occasion, when jihad did refer to taking up arms against an enemy, strict rules defined the combat. The first step of any jihad was to invite a non-Muslim enemy to convert to Islam, an act that, if performed, would eliminate the need for war. This invitation, which always occurred on the cusp of a potential war, was not only a way to avoid costly bloodshed but also a means of winning acknowledgment of Islam’s superiority.

The Requirement was effectively jihad in Christian garb.

“No other European state,” in the words of historian Patricia Seed, “created a fully ritualized protocol for declaring war against indigenous peoples.” Other European powers found the Spanish Requirement odd, if not barbaric; British, French, and Dutch officials criticized and mocked it as a recognition of and concession to Islam, their collective enemy. It was, as we have seen, a direct descendant of a culture that had dominated Spain for centuries, and it was thoroughly alien to the rest of Europe, where Islam had never ruled.

Indeed, following the numerous waves of the Reconquista, Christian rulers often maintained the practices—from taxation schemes to market regulations to administrative assignments to modes of warfare—of the Muslim regimes they had just unseated.

Dhimmis were offered specific rights in exchange for certain obligations, the major one being the payment of the jizya. This was a personal tax, not a tax on property or commerce—a tax for simply being a non-Muslim in a Muslim state. Unquestionably, it represented a humiliating subjugation. Still, it enshrined a pact between the non-Muslim taxpayer and the Muslim sovereign: in exchange for payment of the jizya, the sovereign was obliged to protect dhimmi rights to freedom of worship and the open exercise of each community’s religious laws.

In stark

contrast to Spain’s bloody Inquisition, Muslim policies allowed non-Muslims to practice their rel...

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. This invented “donation” deliberately echoed another fictitious Old World tale the Spanish used to justify their politics, both past and present: the Donation of Constantine. As the story

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.

Selim was not the buccaneer Columbus was. He imposed Ottoman sovereignty not by erasing what existed before conquest, but rather by co-opting often hostile subjects and reshaping existing institutions along Ottoman lines. Surrounded his whole life by imperial administration, he was through learning and experience a bureaucrat. With an understanding of the reciprocity of rule embedded in the Circle of Justice, and having been informed by his mother’s far-sighted strategizing, he understood how to navigate the choppy

social and political waters around him. In many ways, his success was a matter of class and upbringing as much as temperament and interest. 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.

In the Mediterranean, Muslim slavery differed from Christian slavery in several significant respects. In Islam, slavery was temporary, not hereditary, and it did not necessarily sever ties between slaves and their own families. Most often, slaves in the Muslim world performed domestic functions rather than brute labor in agriculture, mining, transport, and the like. Fundamental to understanding slavery in the Ottoman Empire, and indeed throughout Muslim history, is the insight that in fact it served as a conduit for upward social mobility.

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 Europe, slavery was hereditary, and even though captives or their families technically were allowed to purchase freedom (a process known as redemption), most could not meet the prohibitively high cost.

In fact, as we will see, Muslims led the first ever revolt against European slavery in the Americas.

These laws, meant to tighten the grip of the minority whites over blacks, would remain essentially the same over the course of the next few centuries in both South and North America—shaping, for example, laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act in the nineteenth-century United States. This is a further testament to the significance of the Wolof Rebellion as a watershed moment in the history of the Americas—one that historians have mostly ignored.

It became almost a knee-jerk reaction for the Spanish to ascribe all their New World problems to their Old World foe.

“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.”

It is estimated that 90 percent of the native population of the Americas died between 1492 and the middle of the seventeenth century—a decline from sixty million people to six million—and that about thirteen million Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. Never before in world history had genocide occurred on the scale of continents, obliterating languages and cultures, cities and histories. More than anything else, Spanish and other European ideas of the New World propelled these irredeemably wrenching conquests.

Under Ottoman Islam, Jews mostly thrived—not just in Salonica but throughout the empire, even in an outlying city like Selim’s Trabzon. Remnants of these populations lived in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East as late as the mid-twentieth century. Selim’s personal physician, some of his most trusted advisers, and his munitions experts during his wars of conquest were descendants of Spain’s Jews. Thus, in the very moment that Europe exiled its Jews and Muslims, while enslaving Africans and decimating indigenous populations in the Americas, the Ottomans welcomed Jews (and Muslims) from across the Mediterranean world, integrating them into their empire—which, importantly, still had a Christian majority.

The fall of Granada and its annexation to Castile following years of war represented the culmination of the Inquisition that had been raging in Spain, and throughout Catholic Europe, for hundreds of years. Both Judaism and Islam were regarded by Christians as diseases plaguing Europe. From Amsterdam to Venice, laws prohibited Jewish and Muslim religious practices, stipulated that these communities could live only in specific neighborhoods, and sanctioned periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim violence.

Not only did the victory release funds that had been tied up by the war, but the subsequent seizures of Jewish (and Muslim) money and property swelled the state’s coffers further (Spain’s expulsion decree, echoed five centuries later by the Nazis, expressly forbade Jews from taking gold and silver with them). Funds for Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic thus came from both these sources: the war chest Spain had accumulated to battle Islam, and the confiscated assets of Jews and Muslims.