God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire and theMaking of the Modern World, Mikhail - B

     The year 1492 saw Spain enter the New World, and finish expelling the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula.  The encounter between Spain and the Ottomans was the "exigent political struggle" of the day.  Indeed, "The Ottoman Empire, contrary to nearly all conventional accounts...was the very reason Europeans went to America." In the decades before and after 1500, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful on Earth. It pushed the Portuguese and Spanish out of the Mediterranean, compelling them to sail around Africa. Europeans justified their importation of slaves from Africa to America as necessary to defeat Islam. To a great extent, "the Ottoman Empire made our modern world."

     Beginning in the early fourteenth century, the turkic speaking descendants of Osman began to conquer pieces of the deteriorating Byzantine Empire. Mehmet II, the seventh sultan of what was now known as the Ottomans, captured Constantinople in 1453. From that point until the 19th century, the Ottomans stood "at the center of global politics, economics, and war." Mehmet's grandson, Selim, would triple the size of the empire before his death in 1520 at the age of 49. 

    Selim was the fourth of ten sons fathered by the Bayezit, who became sultan in 1581. Born to different concubines, half-brothers and their mothers spent their lives plotting against each other because those who did not become sultan were murdered or exiled. Selim and his mother, Gulbahar, were sent to the far reaches of the Black Sea to govern Trabzon when he was 17.  He would stay there for twenty-five years and was generally considered to have done an excellent job. However, his distance from the capital clearly meant he was not to succeed his father. Nonetheless, he used the challenges of managing a border region to develop his own skills, particularly building military alliances. 

    Raised in Genoa, a city that traded extensively with the Ottomans, Columbus knew full well how Islam dominated from the eastern Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Like his peers, Columbus viewed the world through a religious prism focused on crusading against Islam. Earlier, when the Portuguese had discovered Muslims in W. Africa, a Papal Bull authorized them to "enslave any Saracens." Pagans, Jews, and Muslims were less human than European Catholics, and were the victims of Spanish violence in Europe and America. Columbus spent a decade searching for funding to go west. In Ferdinand and Isabella, he found dedicated 'Moor slayers.' When the Reconquista was completed in January, 1492, the Spanish crown was ready to sponsor Columbus. Attacking the Ottomans from Asia was the plan. The Spanish in the Caribbean were so focused on the Far East that they thought Cuba was Japan,  San Salvador, India and the Yucatan, Egypt. "The vocabulary of the war with Islam became the language of Spanish conquest in the Americas." "Spain conceived of itself as engaged in a perpetual Crusade against non-Christians." Failure of the Amerindians to convert meant that the natives were subject to being enslaved and losing their property. The barbarism of Spain, the only country in Europe ever occupied by Muslims, was condemned by the Dutch, French and English. "Violence, expulsions,  forced migrations, the expansion of religious war, the annihilation of New World peoples, and increased slavery dominated the early modern world in the decades around the paroxysmal  year of 1492." 

    "Much of Selim's time as governor of Trabzon, like much of his later reign as sultan, was focused on facing down the threat of Shiite rebels in eastern Anatolia and the growth of the early modern world's major Shiite power in Iran and the Caucasus." The Safavids dominated the lands west and south of the empire. When they attacked in 1505, Selim struck back with such ferocity that the Safavids appealed to the Sultan for mercy, which Bayezit responded to, thus creating a fault line between Selim and his father. After a raid into Georgia, Selim publicly decried the administrators in Istanbul for being soft, and began to rally more troops to his side.  A second Safavid foray into Anatolia killed the Sultan's grand vizier, further embarrassing Bayezit. Selim rode a horse into battle with his troops; his father and brothers waited in their palaces. He set his eyes on Istanbul and the ultimate prize.  With the help of the Janissaries, the Empire's professional warrior class, Selim was able to bully his father into resigning. He became sultan in April, 1512 in what clearly was a coup.  Soon, all rivals were eliminated and Selim was Sultan. He was assisted by his only son, Suleyman, who someday would be known as the Magnificent. Once he was firmly in control, Selim turned to the Shiite Safavid Empire. He cut off their access to the silk trade, and descended on them with an army of 140,000. He defeated them in battle and took the capital of Tabriz. Selim now ruled the world's largest land empire.

    He next attacked the Mamluk Empire of Egypt, custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He crushed the Mamluk army in Syria, killed the sultan, marched to Damascus, then to Jerusalem and Cairo. He defeated the Mamluk defenders in January, 1517, and entered Cairo. Selim had tripled the size and population of his empire. One of the reasons that the Ottomans were so successful was that they maintained the status quo. Almost all local administrators were retained, property rights were respected, taxes were not raised, and freedom of religion was confirmed. In 1520, Selim had his eyes on Morocco and a possible conflict there with the Spanish when he died, in September. Suleyman consolidated and strengthened the empire his father had created. 

    The author is chair of Yale's history department, and a noted Ottoman scholar. The sections of the book on Selim are fabulous. The attempts to equate much of Spain and Catholic Europe's policies as a direct result of, and in response to, the goings on in the Ottoman world feel uncomfortable to me, and also to some of the reviewers I've read.