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

by Alan Mikhail

France and Britain had banished their Jewish communities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Germany, many towns had blamed Jews for the scourge of the Black Death and had subsequently expelled them. And Italy, given the viciously anti-Semitic attitudes of a succession of popes and secular rulers, was all but closed off to Jewish immigration.

But King João II, Moor-slayer and sponsor of several of Portugal’s West African expeditions, was as hateful and fearful of Jews as his Spanish counterparts, and quickly enacted policies to push out the refugees. He required that they purchase extortionate entry and residence permits valid for only eight months, after which they were forced to flee again. Those unable to meet the border fees were sold into slavery. And, in an inexplicably cruel move, the king forcibly separated more than a few refugee parents from their children, whom the king sent to the Atlantic island of São Tomé, off the West African coast. This recent Portuguese acquisition, right on the equator, was “inhabited by lizards, snakes, and other venomous reptiles, and was devoid of rational beings.” The children were tossed mercilessly from ships onto the desolate island’s beaches, where “almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island and the remainder, who escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment.”

Given the zealotry in Spain, the mendacity of King João, and the anti-Jewish politics of most of Europe, Jews were much safer in a Muslim polity than they were in any Christian state.

Human nature being what it is, all was not perfect, of course.

Islam, the latecomer, had to address and adapt itself to the other two religions. Islam understands itself as the culmination of the monotheistic traditions, tracing its lineage from Judaism and Christianity and seriously engaging with them as parts of its own family tree. Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Jesus are all prophets within Islam and accorded reverence and devotion. Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an stipulates how adherents of other religions should be treated, and how a Muslim leader should rule over non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians—who, as People of the Book, are accorded an elevated status over other non-Muslims.

For more than two hundred years, Muslim sultans were members of a religious minority, ruling over a majority Greek Orthodox population. Only after Selim’s conquests of 1516 and 1517 did Muslims come to represent the majority of the population of the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, in the centuries during which Europe persisted in bloodying its hands with the Inquisition while the Ottoman Empire fostered a pluralistic society, the Ottomans increasingly came to dominate the Mediterranean.

especially after 1453, Europe recognized its own weakness and feared not just Ottoman power, but all Muslims everywhere. This sobering development would shape European literature, religious thought, and propaganda for centuries. Given the global balance of power around 1500, the Ottomans did not perceive Christianity, and certainly not all Christians everywhere, as their enemy.

European fragmentation meant that the Ottomans faced only a variety of small Christian enemies—the kingdom of Hungary, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Venice, Genoa, and so on—rath...

Moreover, being a Muslim numerical minority in a sea of Christians, the Ottomans had no fifth-column anxieties about their own Christian subjects, since they had to cooperate with Christians to maintain their rule. Given these realities, the Ottomans did not think...

they did not see Europe as an existential threat;...

they did not demonize their religious minorities as Spain and other European powers did. Still, the historical record cautions against exaggerating ...

This same account goes on to relate a specific instance, most likely fictionalized, of anti-Jewish violence during Selim’s governorship.

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. Hyperbolic phantom fears about blood purity, corruption, and deceit—not the real-world politics of military strategy and global territorial conquest—ultimately led to Europe’s expulsion of the Jews. Although occasional outbursts of anti-Jewish violence did occur, the 1490s witnessed a Jewish renaissance in the Ottoman Empire, and, for centuries afterward, the empire remained the center of global Jewish culture.

Not surprisingly, political upheaval and social uncertainty tend to spur the growth of heterodox religious communities whose adherents come from the disenfranchised, maligned, and otherwise marginalized.

Selim’s foreign and domestic programs intertwined in an even bloodier way during his march, when he led one of the largest domestic massacres in Ottoman history, killing as many as forty thousand of the empire’s Shiite subjects.

Selim’s massacre of the Shiites stood until the end of the nineteenth century as the largest domestic population purge in Ottoman history, and it is remembered and mourned to this day.

‘Uthman is a figure of monumental stature in Islamic history. Not only is he one of the four leaders known as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, who personally knew and immediately succeeded the Prophet, but he also produced the first canonical written text of the Qur’an. Because the revelations Muhammad received from the angel Gabriel and then taught to his followers remained an oral tradition for several decades, a number of divergent versions emerged. ‘Uthman reconciled these into a standard edition, destroyed all of the previous ones, and then distributed this text, known as the ‘Uthmanic codex, as the only sanctioned version of the Qur’

Selim’s general policy of maintaining the existing local order while demonstrating the virtues of Ottoman hegemony often took on a religious dimension, alongside his overriding economic, legal, and political concerns. After seizing a territory, he would make a point of praying in iconic religious sites such as the Umayyad mosques of Aleppo and Damascus, after which he would visit the shrines of local saints and the residences of living holy men to publicly express his respect.

As we have seen, as much as conquests required armaments, they also needed legends and heroes.

SELIM ENTERED JERUSALEM IN mid-December 1516,

As one of his first acts in the city, he pledged to protect Jerusalem’s Christians and Jews.

Had Columbus ever succeeded in conquering Jerusalem, an equivalent act of protection seems unimaginable, given his interests in destroying Islam.

Selim also met with representatives of the Armenian, Coptic, and Abyssinian churches in Jerusalem, as well as with the heads of the Rabbinate, to assure them that Ottoman rule would not alter their ritual practices, property holdings, or community affairs. In fact, he increased the stipend of the Franciscan friars in the Church of...

Just before the new year, however, they secured the fertile coastal plains of Gaza, on the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, which provided them with enough food to reach Cairo.

Home to fiercely independent tribes, living in famously perilous mountain terrain, Yemen has always been (and remains to the present day) a formidable challenge for any single government to control fully.

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

The first coffee drunk beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire was drunk in Venice in the late 1580s.

As the bean gained popularity within the empire, the Ottomans generated foundational ideas about the drink. Many of these ideas remain with us today, most significantly in the form of the ubiquitous locale that Selim bequeathed to humanity—the café.

By cultivating and distributing a consumable good and developing a culture of consumption around that good, the Ottomans led one of the world’s earliest consumer revolutions. In so doing, they diffused something of the Ottoman Empire around the world and v...

Today, coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity—the first being another Middle Eastern export, oil.

If Selim had captured Morocco, he would have completely reforged the history of the world after 1520. In a Catholic European doomsday scenario, he might have allied with Spain’s non-Catholic enemies on the continent, perhaps even with the surging tide of Martin Luther’s nascent Protestant movement, to surround Spain and conquer the whole of Europe. Islam would prevail over Christianity, Ottoman ecumenicalism over European intolerance.

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. Many Islamic concepts, as we will see, would influence his own notions of religion. As one scholar explains it, “the ‘terrible Turk’ and his religion lurks in the shadows throughout all of Luther’s life.”

Christianity had never been so impotent. For Pope Leo and the Catholic Church, weakness soon morphed into panic and then outright hysteria.

Thus, as the Ottomans occupied ever more territory around the Mediterranean, they occupied ever more of the European imagination.

In stark contrast to the mosaic of squabbling polities that was Europe, the Ottoman Empire ruled across three continents as a unified juggernaut. As the pope wrote to one of his bishops, “While we waste time in negotiating and writing, the Turk spends it in getting to work and putting his plans into effect, and he will have taken some Christian port before we have the news that he has even set out!”

Even though Leo would continue to renew his calls for Crusade until Selim’s death in 1520, European unity against what he termed “the diabolic Mohammedan rage” never materialized. This same political stasis, which prevented Europe from even considering military action against the Ottomans, is what allowed an upstart like Luther to flourish without the vestige of a response to what would become an existential challenge to Europe’s prevailing order. As the scholar Egil Grislis explains the contemporary political scene, “Instead of fearing the Turks, Luther had every reason to be grateful to them. It was the constant danger of a Turkish invasion that had kept the [Holy Roman] Emperor from taking severe measures against Luther’s reformation.

From the point of view of realistic power politics, the safety of the Reformation depended upon the strength of the Turkish armies.”

Europe’s territorial fracture only substantiated Luther’s charges about the Church’s corruption, and made his message about the need for reform more exigent. Without the looming threat of the Ottomans, the great sweep of the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible.

Tetzel’s pithy sales pitch became famous: “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

At the time, such purchases of absolution were almost de rigueur, but Martin Luther, then a thirty-three-year-old devout Augustinian monk and priest, started to voice extreme discomfort with the idea that blessings and forgiveness, which doctrine decreed were bestowed by God for a lifetime of good works, could be bought by a sinful human—or that sinful human’s descendant—in an instant. It further disturbed him that the worldly lavishness, if not debauchery, that he saw in St. Peter’s and throughout Europe’s churches was apparently being subsidized by the promised absolution of the spirits of individual parishioners.

The idea of indulgences arose in the twelfth century, at the height of the Crusades. Before Crusaders left their homes to battle Muslims in the Middle East, priests would guarantee them absolution of their sins in advance, in case they died while fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem. Instead of financial compensation, these promises of salvation served as the soldiers’ reward for their bravery in the Holy Land—thus establishing the principle that redemption could be won by something other than piety. From these origins, indulgences ballooned into a commodity that flooded the Church’s coffers with cash. By Luther’s time, individuals could simply pay the Church—no warring required—for the forgiveness of ordinary sins such as lying or lust. Like checking a price list in a butcher’s shop, a believer could find his sin on the ledger and pay the going rate to have it excised from his worldly and, he would hope, eternal life.

This core conceptual dyad of body and soul, flesh and spirit, also shaped one of Luther’s other central fixations with Islam—the fate of European Christians captured by the Ottomans. He erroneously believed that the Ottomans wanted to forcibly convert all Christians to Islam—which, as we have seen, was never the case. Luther either did not know or did not care that the empire’s population had become majority-Muslim only in 1517, after over two centuries of being a majority-Christian society. A Christian living happily, even willingly, under Muslim rule must have been inconceivable for him. He thus ignored Ottoman Christians—the various Orthodox denominations, Armenians, Chaldeans, and others living in the Balkans and the Middle East—in his thinking about Christianity in the empire.

No human held a monopoly over the interpretation of God’s message, he contended, and therefore no human should command authority over another in his spiritual communion with God.

Selim secularized the courts to make them more accessible and relevant.

Contrary to popular thinking and both recent and older assertions otherwise—by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (many of whom, conveniently, are either Muslims or ex-Muslims)—Islam did in fact undergo a reformation.

Sunnis and Shiites and Protestants and Catholics all fused religion to politics, making their wars not only about empire but also about eternity. The Ottomans, however, were singular among these states, because they initiated this political and religious struggle for world domination—winning territory that led their enemies to predict that the ultimate battle was nigh, proving the bankruptcy of the supposed divinity of various imperial rulers, and challenging the notion that God was on the side of anyone other than themselves. Many Muslims today ignore the fact, or simply do not know, that Sultan Selim led a reformation in Islam almost half a millennium ago. Similarly, though the world’s Protestants may not recognize or accept it, their history and success owe a major debt to the Ottoman Empire.

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 period of Spanish colonization to the present day. No group has been vilified for longer in the Americas than Muslims.

Only after a century or so of abysmal living conditions, rampant death, few profits, and apparently only a fleeting possibility of permanent settlement in the Americas, did the English succeed in making some small territorial gains. Some even began to turn a profit along the western Atlantic coast. Though Native Americans were frequently—understandably—hostile to the settlers, negotiation eventually proved possible, and what settlers could not accomplish through these means they attained by subjugating those whose land they felt entitled to take by virtue of their superiority as Christians.

When the Ottomans pushed Europe out of the Mediterranean around 1500, they obviously had no inkling of the violent fury with which it would one day return.