Ottoman History Podcast - The Life and Times of Sultan Selim I

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Episode 472 with Alan Mikhail hosted by Sam Dolbee Sultan Selim I is well known for the conquests he pursued that brought places like Cairo, Damascus, and Mecca into the Ottoman Empire. But in this episode, we're exploring the life and times of Selim I in an entirely new light by placing the Islamic world at the center of the momentous events of the turn of the 16th century. We talk with historian Alan Mikhail about his new book God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss the events and developments that led to Selim's rise as well as the ignored centrality of Islam in the imagination of the early European explorers of the Americas and thinkings of the Protestant Reformation.   « Click for More »

You come to see these sort of flashes of Islam in these early accounts of the New World, which are very strange. Columbus says that Taino women, the indigenous women in the Caribbean, look like Moorish women. Their sashes remind me of Moorish sashes. Cortes, you know, a couple of decades later, says that when he arrives in Mexico, he sees 400 mosques, mezquitas, Aztec temples. He calls Montezuma a sultan.

But so I was interested in trying to think about how can we explain these kind of odd flashes of Islam in the new world very early in this period. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Today's guest, Alan Mikhail. So I'm Alan Mikhail. I teach at Yale University in the history department. Is that good enough? That's good. All right. That's me. His new book is God's Shadow, Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. There have been books about Selim before, but what makes this one unique is its global perspective. So it's about Selim, but also not Selim. This book is a life and times of Selim's age.

I don't think of it necessarily as a strict biography. This book began as a project to try to understand Ottoman global influence around the year 1500. Even more specifically, I wanted to think about the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Empire as a global moment and what that meant for world history. Obviously, the book expanded out in all kinds of directions, but thinking about how we can narrate a history of the Ottoman Empire and Islam into 1492 was really, really important to me.

In this episode, we'll be discussing that interplay between Sultan Selim's life and the world more broadly, cutting back and forth between Thrabzon in the Caribbean, Cairo and Wittenberg, the past and the present. And in closing, we'll talk about the trajectory of Mikhail's research more broadly. That's in a minute, when our show continues. Okay, so Selim is born in 1470 in Amasya. His father at the time, Bayezid, is the governor in Amasya. His father at the time, Bayezid, is the governor in Amasya. His grandfather, Mehmed II, Mehmed the Conqueror, is still the Sultan. So Selim spends his early years in Amasya from

1470 to 1481 until his father becomes Sultan and then the whole family moves to Istanbul. He goes to Istanbul once in that period in 1479 for his circumcision ceremony, which, as you know, is a very important piece for any young Ottoman royal. The Ottoman Empire in this period is geographically mostly the Balkans and, you know, the center of Anatolia to the west. It's a majority Christian empire. The majority of the people living there are Christians. It is sort of on the front foot in the Mediterranean after 1453. So quite famously, right, Mehmed has Otranto on the tip of the heel of Italy for less than a year in 1480 and 1481. And that's the only time the Ottomans have

territory on the Italian peninsula. You know, that's very threatening to European powers. The Ottomans are clearly now major players in the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps even pushing further west to Sicily. There are rumors, etc. The Mamluk Empire is still the strongest state in the Middle East when Selim is born. They clearly have claims over universal rulership in the Muslim world, given their holdings in the Hejaz and the sort of constitution of the empire in a way that the Ottomans don't in this period. So, you know, Selim's early life in Amasya, in the harem, with his mother Gulbahar, who's very important to his life history, obviously, I suppose, is, I think, pretty typical of most Ottoman royals, learning languages, learning a bit about the Islamic

sciences, mathematics, literature, poetry, archery, those kinds of things. And, you know, quite importantly, he is also interacting with his half-brothers who, given the structure of Ottoman dynastic power, are always part of the story. So in his case, he is the fourth of Bayezid's ten sons. The eldest dies and is not really a major player in this story, but his two remaining older half-brothers, Ahmed and Korkud, are very important to his taking of the throne, ultimately, and the kind of maneuvering to get to that point. He's not favored by his father, as best we know. It seems pretty clear from the historical record.

father, as best we know, it seems pretty clear from the historical record. And yeah, that's roughly his early life up until 1481. When they moved to the palace, of course, his life changes. He's now a prince, right? Not the son of a prince, but a prince himself, who's one step away now. And I think, you know, something that's always interesting in dynastic royal families is the kind of double-edged sword of the fact that you need a lot, if you are the sovereign, you need a lot of heirs for the line to continue,

but then they're always a potential threat to your rulership. So, you know, that dynamic is certainly at play. You know, again, following the classical model, he's shipped out at the age of 17, 1487 with his mother to Trabzon. How does that experience in Trabzon shape him? I mean, it's absolutely key. You know, he's in Trabzon longer than anywhere else in his life. And, you know, the first thing to say is that he and his mother arrive in Trabzon very soon after its incorporation into the empire. And, you know, we should put incorporation here in quotation marks in the sense that it's really

a frontier city, anywhere from 85 to 90 percent Greek Orthodox, a very cosmopolitan city, of course, given its trade history, the presence of the Genoese and others there, its place on the Silk Road, etc. So, you know, the Ottomans are foreigners in Trabzon, and Gulbahar and Selim are foreigners when they arrive in the city. and Gulbahar and Selim are foreigners when they arrive in the city. During their reign, they do institute a very real process of Ottomanization. They begin a process of Islamization, which really doesn't get going until much later. So by the time, you know, Gulbahar dies and Trabzon and Selim leaves,

the city is still a Christian city to the vast majority, still over 80%. We can get back to some of what they do there. But just to answer your question, so he's really there on the frontier. And his posting there in and of itself is important, I think, for understanding his father's intentions. You know, proximity to the capital, as you know, is one of the most important factors in any succession battle, posting Selim, therefore, to the furthest reaches of the empire. I mean, literally, there's no further place for Amistad at this point. You know, puts him at a great disadvantage in any kind of succession battle. He's really, really out there. You know, he turns that, as I try to discuss in the book, he turns that disadvantage into an advantage. How so?

So one is, you know, he's on the frontier with the empire's enemies. In this period, it's this kind of soup of Turkic tribal groups, Ak-Koyunlu, Erli,iyya, you know, this kind of melange of Caucasus, northern Iran, a lot of raiding and trading over that border, both, you know, the Ottomans raiding and trading and then enemies from the east. It's, you know, very multicultural, not in the kind of, you know, modern sense of the world, but just that there are a lot of cultures there. And Selim adopts a very proactive kind of aggressive stance towards those who would be his enemies in the East. And so this means he attacks the Georgians very viciously. He retaliates on various kinds of infiltrators and raiders from the East. he really develops there a sense that the empire has to strike first,

not be reactive and defensive, but proactive and aggressive. And that, you know, that sets him in contrast to his father and to, you know, various parts of the military establishment of the empire. So there are various moments in which, you know, enemies from the east will lobby the sultan various moments in which, you know, enemies from the east will lobby the sultan, his father saying, you know, your impetuous son here has, you know,

stolen some of our soldiers or taken some of our arms, you know, you need to return this. And so Bayezid is sort of open to doing that. He wants to maintain peace and stability. And Selim very much is against that. So that's part of his contrast with his father. So he develops that in Trabzon. And I think that's part of his turning a disadvantage into an advantage. Yeah, it seems like an interesting mix of that kind of strike first, but also the importance of administering populations in a way that brings them into the empire. Right. So that's the other important thing that he does in Trabzon, is he develops this kind of coalition of disparate groups, Karamonids, disaffected Janissaries, other groups who, for one reason or another, have a sort of orthogonal relationship

to the empire. And he's able to sort of carve out some relationships that will be useful for him later. This is something that Erdem Ciba in his book is very good on in showing how this, how Selim develops these relationships. And so that's a story that happens in Trabzon. Also, you know, he sort of cuts his administering bureaucratic chops in the city.

And his mother is very important for that. It's there that he learns how to, you know, deal with market regulations, deal with the military, all the normal stuff of Ottoman bureaucratic practice. And could you talk about his mother's role? Yeah. So Gulbihar is, you know, a fascinating figure. As best we know, she was born in Albania, probably in the 1450s.

She is at the height of her power in Trabzon. Again, in a very classic kind of imperial mother role. She, especially at the beginning, when Selim is very young, is the one who's really administering the city. She is the one who does all of the Ottoman bureaucratic things that I mentioned just now. She also imprints her legacy in the city in stone, literally. She founds what's still today known as the Ladies' Foundation,

which is a mosque complex in her name that is wholly, wholly important for various reasons. One, it's one of the major events in the Ottomanization, Islamization of the city in the 1480s and the 1490s. It has a mosque, obviously, a soup kitchen, a library, a fountain, and a couple other things attached to it. It's a walk complex, so it's endowed in perpetuity. She uses the revenues on some agricultural lands outside of the city and then also properties in the city

to fund the complex. And it's one of the most important sites in the city then until today. So it serves a kind of as a very visible marker of Ottoman rule and serves a very practical function of providing for children and the hungry and the needy, et cetera, et cetera. So she's really at the height of her power in the city. And, you know, she wants to be buried in the city. And she dies in Trabzon and Selim makes good on his, on, you know, her wishes and buries her, builds a tomb complex for her after her death to be buried in the complex. You know, in the absence of a huge number of written records that she penned, we have her complex that helps us to kind of read. I use it to read, you know, her intentions and some of her personality. And we have accounts of her dealing with, again, various bureaucratic matters in the

city. At this point, we're going to move a little further afield to discuss what Mikhail calls Ottoman 1492. We'll start with him reading a passage from God's Shadow. In the decades around 1500, it was not the Venetians, nor the Spanish, nor the Portuguese who set the standard for power and innovation, it was Islam. Islam shaped the ways in which European armies fought wars, it influenced European cuisine and clothing, it drove the direction of the continent's territorial expansion, and it spurred advances in European astronomy, architecture, and trade. To think beyond the familiar narratives handed down to us by generations of historians is

to see that Columbus's life simply cannot be understood without taking Islam into account. Connecting Islam and Columbus, furthermore, revises our understanding of one of the most iconic years in world history, 1492. The Ottomans' influence on Columbus was a measure of the empire's global reach. That first generation of Spanish conquistadors who went to quote unquote the new world, the Caribbean, what we now call the Caribbean, were shaped by one of the largest geopolitical forces of their age, which was Christendom's encounter with the Muslim world. That's clear in all kinds of ways. So if we just take Columbus, for example, He was born in Genoa in 1451, two years before 1453.

1453 being the sort of trauma for Europe, as one of the popes described it, plucking out one of the eyes of Christianity. Genoa is, of course, a mercantile port, but it's also a place where crusading ships left and returned to. So he would have been familiar with the kind of ethos of the Crusades and with the fact that Genoa had and now lost to some degree a trading empire in the Black Sea and in the eastern Mediterranean. Black Sea and in the Eastern Mediterranean. When Columbus is an apprentice sailor, he undertakes several voyages in the Mediterranean that bring him in close contact with the Muslim world, Tunis and Chios in the 1470s. So Islam is there in his imagination as a child, reading the works of Marco Polo,

the idea that there's a grand con of the East on the other side of Islam. When he's a bit older and in Spain, he's in Spain at the exact moment of the Reconquista and is present at some of those battles. So the notion that Christendom is under threat, at war with, somehow involved with the Muslim world is baked into Columbus's life. And that's true of his generation of conquistadors. I just take him as the, you know, the most obvious exemplar. And he's very clear about that.

On the very first page of his travelogue, he says, after you, my sovereigns, Isabella and Ferdinand, have retaken Granada on Epiphany, January 1492, you decided to fund my voyages to find India and the Grand Khan. So the connection between what will become the Atlantic Voyages and the battle with Islam, the retaking of Granada, the Reconquista, is those are one and the same for Columbus. And I don't want to overstate this, but I think it is the case that most historians, and certainly in our sort of popular understandings of 1492,

separate those things. So 1492 usually means the Atlantic voyages, especially in a kind of American context. For other historians it means reconquista, expulsion of the Jews, etc. eventual expulsion of the Moors, right? But those two things go together. So, I wanted to keep them together to try to understand the influence of Islam. And Islam here is not just the Ottomans, right? It is the Muslims of Spain, it's Muslims in North Africa. But the Ottomans are certainly a piece of this, especially given what I was talking about before in the 1480s and 1490s of this kind of impending move west. So, that's one insight is to keep those two things together. The other one is that in the month it takes to cross the Atlantic, these people somehow don't forget who they are, that world, any of that history,

because it formed them as soldiers, as Christians, as men, as warriors. because it formed them as soldiers, as Christians, as men, as warriors. And, you know, so for someone like Cortes, he begins his life fighting Muslims in Spain and North Africa. He goes to Mexico and battles the Aztecs. He comes back to the old world. And the last battle of his life is in Algiers. So that's a kind of, you know, remarkable career showing how for Spain, you know, the grid through which you understand enemy, other, etc. is Islam and are

Muslims. And that gets grafted into the new world. And I think also has interesting reverberations when it comes back. But that's, that's really the story that I'm trying to tell about 1492. So it's not simply this macro story of Columbus going West. It's also all of these cultural associations that he brings with him, this way of seeing. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's that sort of story of imagination, if you like. But this, you know, this obviously has real world impacts in terms of the demographic devastation of the New World, but it has bureaucratic implications. So some of the land tenure systems, the encomienda system that's applied in the new world, that's Spanish,

is borrowed from a history of Muslim rule in Spain. The requirement, this document that's read out at the time of conquest, historian Patricia Seed has written a great book in which she describes this as a form of Catholic jihad, that this is a sort of reading of the rights before war. And if you want to get out of war, this is what you have to do, essentially convert to Catholicism in this case. So, you know, there's that entire Muslim history of bureaucratic practice that has echoes

in the new world for the Spanish conquests. And, you know, the history of slavery is very, very important to understanding the role of Islam in these early decades. So fairly early on, once plantations are established in the once the Spanish established plantations in places like Hispaniola and they try to forcibly coerce indigenous labor. Sometimes that is successful, but more often it's not. People escape or they die. There's a labor shortage very, very soon in the early, early decades of the 16th century.

So between 1500 and 1520, these Spanish plantation owners start demanding that slaves from West Africa and North Africa be sent to work on their plantations. You know, a little history here. and North Africa be sent to work on their plantations. You know, a little history here. 1452 is the first papal decree sanctioning, quote unquote, the enslavement of West Africans of any kind, of any religion, right? It cites in the bull Saracens and also heathens, right? So those of religion and those not of religion in the Catholic worldview.

So soon thereafter, there is a pretty active slave trade from West Africa and North Africa to Spain. Valencia, for example, is a very important slaving city. The Spanish imperial officials are very concerned, and you see this in the documentary record, are very concerned about the importation of Muslim slaves to the New World. The New World, in their worldview, is a sort of tabula rasa in which Islam is not present, their enemy of the Old World, and they want to keep it that way. So you see various decrees saying we can't directly ship slaves from West Africa to a place like Hispaniola because we first have to send them to Spain, convert them to Catholicism, put them in a kind of religious quarantine, make sure they're okay, right? And then we can possibly send them. But

the plantation owners need labor quickly. And so there's a whole back and forth. Eventually, slaves are shipped more directly from West Africa to the Caribbean. And many of them indeed are Muslim of various kinds. You know, what does that mean exactly? Are they believers in their soul? Of course, impossible to know. Are they raised in a Muslim culture? Very clearly, the largest group are Wolof Muslims. And, you know, the Wolof Empire in this period

is a highly developed state with an imperial culture, an imperial language. They are expert horsemen. They have training in weaponry. They are very good at gold mining. They're a very important empire in West Africa. There is a concentration of Wolof enslaved people in Hispaniola who, as I narrate in the book, an important moment for me is the Christmas Day Revolt in 1521 when this group of Wolof slaves, again with their own language, with their own sophisticated, you know, martial and political culture, organized the first slave revolt against Europeans in the New World.

Huge moment in which they wake up very early on Christmas Day, 1521, and take their machetes and kill a couple of their masters. The revolt is eventually crushed. But one of the results of this is that many of these enslaved Wolof people escape into the mountains in Hispaniola, as had previously some Taino slaves. And there develops a very early Maroon culture of Wolof Muslims and indigenous Taino, which is a kind of remarkable thing to think about, that this kind of indigenous African Muslim culture created by these, you know, cataclysmic events is developing this early in the early 1520s. And the Spanish sources talk about this. The contemporary Spanish sources talk about this

when there's this whole debate about the importation of slaves. They say, you know, we are worried about Africans teaching the Taino, they don't use those terms, but the indigenous people, the bad customs of Islam. So again, this old world threat of Islam remains in the new world in these early decades. So yeah, so again, to zoom back out again, you know, as I said, I wanted to insert Islam and the Ottomans into these huge stories of, you know, global history around the year 1500. And so this is one of the ways that I do it. I think it's important for all kinds of reasons. and misses a huge part of what you need to know to understand this. It also serves to kind of erase,

you know, excise Islam from a story of the early colonization of the Caribbean. It serves to excise Islam from, you know, if you believe various narratives in global history, of the kind of beginnings of a new age. It accepts this kind of notion that we want the new world to be a new age. It accepts this kind of notion that we want the

new world to be a tabula rasa free of Islam. You know, 1492 is problematic in all kinds of ways, but this is a story that needs to be understood. And I think it has all kinds of echoes and reverberations later on in the new world, and then also, obviously, in the new world and then also obviously in the old world. So Muslims and the Ottoman Empire shaped the Americas in different ways. The conquistadors came with a whole set of cultural assumptions of other based on their encounter with Islam. They quickly began to rely on enslaved West African Muslims there, and those same enslaved West African Muslims quickly began to rebel. And on a macro level, the Ottoman Empire's political power had helped push Columbus and others west in the first place. The empire may have been far away, but it was also connected to these developments. And now we're actually

going to jump back there to return to Selim. In the 1490s he's in Trabzon and Selim is administering, he's coming into his own, he's now, you know, a father, an adult and, you know, he's beginning to think about what comes next. 1501, as you know, is, you know, canonically the beginning of the Safavid Empire, which is very important for Selim. This ramps up this kind of cross-border war skirmishes that he's having to deal with. There are various times that he's warring with the Safavids in the early 1500s. The Safavids come very close to Trabzon at one point. They're to his south at numerous points. There's a lot of prisoners being taken in both directions. This is also the period when he

hits Georgia and brings back many slaves there. Georgia is very important because that's the moment in which he very publicly gives all the spoils of battle to his soldiers rather than taking anything for himself, which shows him to be the kind of, at one time, aggressive, violent, bloody warrior, but also the generous leader. He also begins a little bit later in the 15 knots maneuvering to try to get a good governorship for Suleyman. So he, you know, tries to get him one as first close to Trabzon, to be close to him, then as close to Istanbul as possible. Eventually, through various back and forth communications, he goes to Crimea. He's the governor of Crimea. Selim goes with him to Crimea, which is the last time he's in Trabzon. And it's from there that he begins his power play. He had begun it earlier, of course,

but really begins the kind of physical movement towards Istanbul at that point. And how does that proceed? So as we talked about before, so Selim is stationed as far away from Istanbul as possible. Korkut and Ahmed, his half-brothers, have governorships much closer to Istanbul. So Selim knows he has to get physically closer. So he uses Suleyman's posting to Crimea

to go with him to Crimea. And then he begins maneuvering for a march through the Balkans down to Istanbul. And this is where his coalition building that he had been, you know, working on during his Trabzon days really comes in to great use for him. He's able to call on various parts of, again, disaffected Janissaries, different ethnic groups to come to his aid in the Balkans. He assembles a huge contingent to march down. And he's on the outskirts of Edirne. It's there that he has his first armed battle with his father.

And, you know, quite iconically in this city, Çorlu, which is, you know, in between Istanbul and Edirne. And he is now lobbying for his own governorship very close to the capital. Again, it's a negotiation. He's offered one, rejects it. His father refuses to give him another one. His father returns to Istanbul. Word is now getting out that Selim is getting closer and closer to the capital. Ahmed and Korkut are a little scared. They want to also start making moves on the capital. When Bayezid is back in Istanbul, in the palace, Selim marches to the outskirts of the city. Ahmed's contingent of forces inside the city and various Selim backers in the city start pitching battles against one

another. You know, things are coming to a head. Bayezid agrees to see Selim. They have a couple meetings. Selim comes into the palace at one point and through force of arms essentially forces his father's deposition. You know, huge moment, obviously, in Ottoman history, one of the few forced depositions of a sitting sultan. One of the first times we have a now deposed sultan and a sitting sultan, which creates all kinds of problems of rulership and legitimacy. Selim knows he has to deal with this fact in some way. He eventually settles on a kind of forced retirement for his father. On his way to this forced retirement in a Greek town, he dies on the road, Bayezid dies on the road.

Under somewhat dubious circumstances, the obvious ones that he's, you know, his son has deposed him. There are some who think he was poisoned. Others who think he died of natural causes. It's, we don't know. So Selim is now on the throne in 1512. He has dealt with his father. He has to deal with his half-brothers. So he spends, you know, most of his first year chasing them down in Anatolia. Ahmed, interestingly, sort of plays footsie with the Safavids. One of his sons has gone to the Safavid court. You know, Selim uses this fact as, you know, part of the reason that he's a completely illegitimate, corrupt member of the royal family. reason that he's a completely illegitimate, corrupt member of the royal family. Anyway,

he kills his two half-brothers. And so it's in 1513 when he's finally sort of secure on the throne. His father and his two half-brothers are gone. And, you know, he's able to absolutely claim the sultanate for himself. And he moves pretty quickly after 1513 to expand. Right. So Selim is only sultan for eight years, right? Between 1512 and 1520. And he spends most of it outside of Istanbul on campaign and then a lot of time in Edirne hunting and things. Hunting for the Ottomans, for the Ottoman sultans is a way of sort of keeping sharp in war, right? And also a way of doing so without eminent danger, really. I mean, of course, there's danger and you could fall off a horse, you know, various things could happen. But, you know, you're not fighting an enemy who's shooting back at you. And of course, hunting as a royal art is meant to develop all kinds of

moral attributes of sovereignty and things. He's not comfortable in Istanbul. I think, you know, he spent most of his life outside of it. I don't want to say he's an outsider. I mean, he's a member of the royal family, of course. But in the context of the Ottoman royal family, in some ways he is. He's unique in all kinds of ways. And so I think it suits him to be in a journey. There's also a plague epidemic going

on in Istanbul. So, you know, as we all know, you go somewhere else. 1514, he sets out for Chaldiran, you know, his famous battle with the Safavids. This is a huge campaign all the way across Anatolia. Chaldiran is in August of 1514. After that battle, which is, you know, a resounding win for Selim, he travels all the way to Tabriz and eventually turns back because of an impending winter. You know, all indications are that he wanted to continue marching east into the heart of, you know, Safavid territory, but he's unable to do so and returns back to Istanbul. And then very quickly sets out again in 1516 to eventually defeat the Mamluks. Which again, as I said at the beginning, that's how I came to this project.

I wanted to write a history of 1516-1517, this kind of foundational moment for the Ottoman Empire in the Arab world, I felt that we didn't have a really good understanding of that event just empirically on its own, and then also an understanding of its kind of global import. I think in large measure because for Mamluk historians, it's the end of the the story and so they kind of end with the defeat and that's that. For Ottoman historians, to the extent Ottoman historians care about the Arab world at all, this is the foundational moment of it but it's a beginning and from there we go forward. So I think it's fallen between the cracks of these imperial ends and beginnings. So I really wanted to kind of dwell, you know, a decade before, a decade after.

And so I do do that in this part of the book, narrating, you know, the actual blow-by-blow conquest, and then thinking about some of its implications for the empire. Yeah, maybe you could talk about the implications for the empire, because you do such an interesting thing of jumping back and forth between the empire and Europe and even further afield. So it's interesting to hear that the initial inspiration was, you know, what happened in Cairo? What happened in Damascus? Yeah. So, I mean, the implications are huge. I mean, if we start just sort of domestically for the empire, you know, it more than doubles the territory under Ottoman rule. It makes it a majority Muslim empire for the first time in its history,

meaning the majority of the people who live in the empire are Muslims. It brings them Mecca and Medina. It puts them on the Red Sea and therefore in the Indian Ocean, puts them in North Africa. It gives them absolute control of the Eastern Mediterranean. It gives them a legitimate shot at claiming to be the leaders of the Muslim world, the most important Muslim empire, etc. Because of that territorial expansion, all sorts of new kinds of bureaucratic practices need to be put in play. You know, this is really

when you have the massive explosion of the court system across the empire as a governing institution and one of kind of local redress for people, but symbols of Ottoman sovereignty across the Middle East, North Africa, etc. So, you know, hugely, hugely important, right, for the empire itself. It brings them in contact with all sorts of new commodities. This is partly because of its entrance into the Indian Ocean world. So I talk about coffee a little bit, you know, very iconic. But of course, you know, this increases the flow of Indian textiles, Chinese porcelain, et cetera, et cetera. So domestically, but in terms of sort of looking out from the empire, what are the kind

of global implications of this? I mean, one is a, you know, is the entrance of the Ottomans into the Indian ocean world and what that means for India and for the Portuguese in this period and then throughout the 16th century. What does it mean for North Africa and Spanish and Portuguese holdings in North Africa? The Ottomans begin creeping further and further west in North Africa and playing this very complicated game between kind of local rulers, these European empires and their own interests in the region.

Not completely dissimilar from some of what's happening, say, on the western coast of India, but, you know, but not the same. And, you know, it increases in the European imagination a sense of, you know, this gargantuan Muslim empire creeping ever closer, right? I mean, to put it bluntly. Yeah. So, you know, that is hugely important. So the pope is very, very interested, for example, in Salim's maneuvers. And, you know, one of the sources I use in the book is Sunudo, the Venetian chronicler, diplomat, spy. And it's literally week by week reports on what Salim is up to and what's going on. What are the implications for Venetian traders in Alexandria?

How big is his army? What's he doing with the Safavids, etc.? And for Catholic Europe, it doubles down on this sense of apocalyptic portent, right? That the Ottomans are on the doorstep. The devil is at the gates. They've plucked out the eye and they're coming for the second eye, right? And so that kind of language is always there.

You know, the other sort of major thing that I talk about here is the Reformation. And I talk about it in a number of different ways. One is, and just to stick with the geopolitics for a moment, it's clear that the conquests, Selim's conquests, open up a space for someone like Luther in the sense that, as I said, because Catholic Europe is so devoted to this idea of Ottoman threat, their armies are worried about, you know, that kind of impending danger rather than anything else. Once Luther sort of, you know, begins talking against the church, it is the case that they simply don't have the

wherewithal to sort of send a military force to crush him, right? So that gives him some breathing space to maneuver. Beyond that, perhaps much more importantly, you know, Luther writes a lot about the Turks, as he calls them. He's interested in Islam. He's interested in the anti-clericalism of Islam and the iconoclasm that he sees in Islam. He apparently contemplated translating the Quran into German. That never happened. But he writes a lot about, you know, his own sort of fantasies about Islamic theology, I guess we would call it. And then also, you know, what the Ottomans represent

for Christendom. So in some ways, he kind of agrees with Catholic powers. I mean, he is a Catholic, right? That the Ottomans are a threat. He sees the Ottomans, as he calls them, as God's lash of iniquity. That God has sent the Ottomans to torment the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church is corrupted, is venal, the Pope is a sinner, they care more about this world than the next, etc. And so until the soul of Christianity has purified itself, has cleansed itself of sin,

only then will they be able to overcome the Ottomans, you know, on earth. Until then, God will continue to punish Christendom with the scourge of the Ottomans. So for him, they're kind of a call to arms and, you know, for Christendom to cleanse itself and, you know, a sign of God's unhappiness with what's going on in the Catholic Church. You know, he has a lot to say also about Dev Shirmay, you know, a sign of God's unhappiness with what's going on in the Catholic Church. You know, he has a lot to say also about Dev Shirme, for example.

He's interested in, are these people truly Christian or not? Right, what does conversion mean in this kind of context of, you know, being taken by a foreign power and fighting for that power against Christendom? And he has interesting things to say about that. In some ways, kind of like Columbus, Islam is there in the sources, you know, and so we have to grapple with that and, you know, think about what that means. And so that's, so, you know, I want to connect Selim in 1517 to Luther in 1517. So that's one of the ways that I do it.

And of course, you know, Luther remains and Selim dies in 1520. But and Luther has a whole other history of interaction with the Ottoman Empire after Selim. So something that I found interesting about the book was how many implications you see for how we understand the world today. Could you talk about that? Sure. So I guess I could answer that in lots of ways. I mean, one is this idea that I pointed to already of what does it mean if you excise Islam, the Ottomans, the Muslim world from canonical stories of, quote unquote, the making of the modern world? And we could wrestle about, is Luther so important? Is Columbus so important?

I'm happy to do that. I think they are. I think lots of people think they are. I think those narratives need to be grappled with in real ways. And it strikes me, as I've been saying, that Islam is all over those stories, and we have taken them out. So what are the implications of taking them out?

Islam is not a part of the making of the modern world. It stands apart. It is outside. It is other. It is enemy, etc. So part of what I want to do is reinsert Islam into those stories and to think about what it might mean. One, for changing our understanding of those stories,

and then what it might mean going forward if we think about the last 500 years as very much shaped by Salim's age, what that might mean for our present in the sense of if you have a historical narrative in which Islam is always outside enemy-other, it's going to be very easy to consider it outside enemy-other in the present. enemy other, it's going to be very easy to consider it outside enemy other in the present. So quite modestly, you know, I hope that my book will help to change some of that. Also, I think it's, again, you know, the sources make this very clear. Charles V, who is, you know, in some ways most responsible for the expansion of European empire in the Americas, writes very, very little about the Americas in his,

you know, his vast corpus of work. He writes a ton about Islam and the Ottomans, etc., etc., etc. And when you start, like, cluing into these flashes in Columbus, in Luther, etc., you see that there is an unbroken through line in, let's say, the history of the Americas of Islamic presence, of Muslim presence in one form or another. We spoke about Columbus. We spoke about slaves, obviously slavery and the role of Muslim slaves in New World slavery will continue into the 18th century, into the 19th century. I mean, as something as almost trivia-like, but again, indicative of a lot, is John Smith, the first governor of Virginia, is a slave in the Ottoman Empire for a couple years, right?

That experience is not irrelevant, right? His seal has the head of three severed Turks on it. Clearly, that experience meant something to him if he chose to to um put put those heads on his seal um the mayflower the iconic symbol of you know crossing was a ship that traded in the eastern mediterranean before it ever crossed the atlantic all of these sorts of things. Barbary pirates are a constant sort of torment for British and other European ships crossing the Atlantic throughout the 17th century. I guess my hope is, you know,

in terms of thinking about the present in this book, is that if you clue into some of these narratives, you can tell very different stories about how we got to where we are today. And maybe with those different stories, you know, we can imagine different things. And I mean, I guess also a pessimistic reading of it is just how deep and long the roots of Islamophobia are. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm, Absolutely. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm I struggled with this in the book that I do think that, you know, for for folks like the Spanish conquistadors in the first couple of decades in the new world And I don't want to resurrect that in any kind of way. But that strain of Islamophobia is real, right?

And I don't think it's irrelevant, as you're saying, to the fact, again, we could debate this, but I would stand by the claim that, you know, today, globally, no other group is more vilified than Muslims. I mean, around the world. From China to South America to the United States to Australia, in the Muslim world itself. So that is real.

But again, I want to be careful there because I don't want to say that there are these two civilizational forces that have always been at each other's throats. We have plenty of examples, and I have plenty of examples in the book of, you know, positive, quote unquote, interaction between, you know, Muslims and non-Muslims. Another thing I've been thinking about just in the course of this conversation is, you know, some of your first books were about street dogs in Cairo or peasants in the countryside of Egypt. Did you envision yourself writing a book about a sultan and this biographical mode? And was that strange for you? Yeah, thanks for that question.

I mean, in some ways, this book is everything I critiqued in my first book. You know, it's very imperial. It's about the 16th century, you know, it's very imperial. It's about the 16th century, you know, for the most part. It's Istanbul based. It's sort of, you know, traditionally political. In the introduction to my first book, I had this section where I talk about how, you know, I'm working on the 18th century, the most under worked on century, maybe not anymore. You know, I'm working on peasants, non-elites.

I'm looking at Egypt, you know, a province, not the center, etc. So, yeah, this is very different. No, I didn't know that I was going to write this book. I did. I really enjoyed writing this book. I think in part because it's very different. I think in part because it's very different. I think I'm not a historian who, you know, there are many esteemed historians who spend careers working on essentially the same topic in different kinds of historians. There are, you know, there are foxes and hedgehogs. So, you know, this is a very different kind of book. And I enjoyed it for that, for that reason, I think, you know, if you want to, if one is interested in, in sort of narratives of continuity, I think,

you know, it's the 1516, 1517 kind of link that I would point to in the sense that, you know, as a historian of the Ottoman Empire in the Arab world, you know, that's the foundational moment. And so I did sort of initially come to this wanting to think about that. But again, it went in all kinds of other directions. Do you feel like thinking about environmental history has shaped this kind of global history approach in this book? Totally. So that's another continuity, right? You know, if one, again, is interested in continuities between earlier work and present work, totally. I mean, I think, as you well know,

in doing your own work, that environmental history is a very good way of doing global history with the Middle East. And this is in some ways another way of doing, a very traditional way, right? Of kind of geopolitics and empires and wars and things of doing the Ottoman Empire and global history. So no doubt that that was, you know, that that in some ways fed into this in lots of ways. Yeah, I was also wondering about audience, which we kind of alluded to earlier, I noticed this line in the acknowledgements,

which was two colleagues in Ottoman history. And you said this book is for them and not for them and hopefully in productive ways. And I wonder if you could talk more about that and this question of audience. Okay, thanks for picking up on that. Yeah, you know, this is the Ottoman history podcast, so sorry, but it's not written for Ottomanists in some ways.

Of course it is. But I really hope that early modern historians outside of the Ottoman Empire, historians generally, Americanists will read this book and see that there's something for them. You know, if they come away from it thinking, wow, I've never really thought about Islam

in the history of the early Caribbean or whatever, that will be very satisfying to me. For Ottomanists, I hope they will see this book as a way of, one way potentially of doing global history, of thinking about the Ottomans in relationship to other parts of the world, I would love to see more scholarship about Islam and the Atlantic. I think that there's a lot there in various periods one could work on. So, you know, that could be about the Ottoman Empire or not. But, you know, I hope that that's a contribution to Middle East studies in some way. But yeah, but, you know, I hope that that's a contribution to Middle East studies in some way. But yeah, but, you know, it's kind of an invitation to those outside of Ottoman history to think about our empire a little more deeply or at all.

And that's one of the reasons that I try to write it as engagingly and as kind of welcomingly as possible. You know, when you publish something, you're sort of alone with it for all these years. And then with this book, especially, I didn't, you know, because it's not a kind of middle of the road academic monograph, I didn't farm out pieces to articles beforehand. I didn't present really at conferences and things. Of course, I've asked certain people to read certain sections. There are very few people who have read the whole thing through. I mean, whenever you put something out in the world, I think even if you've presented it before and things, I think one is always, you know, curious, excited, nervous about its reception.

I, you know, I can predict critique already. I can predict critique from Ottomanists. I can predict a kind of critique from the right about Islam and America Yeah, I can I can predict that but I can also I can't predict, you know, but but I hope that people will see what I'm trying to do in the book and will that people will see what I'm trying to do in the book and will take away some things from it that will, as I said, change how they think about the Ottoman Empire, the early modern world,

Europe and America. And that's my intention and ambition for Ottoman historians, professional Ottoman historians, that they will also take away a lot from this book. What are you excited about thinking about or writing about now? I mean, it is interesting. I do think this book has, and I've been working on this for a while, so has put me into a different headspace.

So I have, I think, a couple more environmental history pieces, like article-length things that I want to do that have been simmering for a long time and I hope one day I'll be able to do them. You know, I don't anticipate like a next, my next huge project, book length project would be an environmental history. I don't necessarily think Egypt, although it might be, I have a kind of idea that I'm not going to tell you about, but that, you know, is Egypt focused. I am interested in other ways of thinking about Islam in the early modern world that are not necessarily about Islam in the Middle East. So, you know, I've been reading

more and more about early modern Europe, qua early modern Europe, and thinking about Muslim communities in Europe. So that's something that I might start working on. Of course, we're always thinking about projects. Thank you, Sam, for being willing to do this. And do you want me to say, don't you guys want a bibliography? That's Alan Mikhail. His new book is God's Shadow, Sultan Salim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, published by the LiveWrite imprint of W.W. Norton and Company.

In the book, you can find much more about the topics we discussed, as well as much that we didn't have time to discuss, including analysis of the political uses of Sultan Selim in Turkey today, such as the naming of the third Bosphorus Bridge after him. I've taken to calling him Erdogan's Andrew Jackson. You can find a bibliography, some beautiful images, and production notes on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. You can also join us on Facebook, where our community of listeners is over 35,000 strong. That's it for this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care.