THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY was marked by a clash of religious claims. This was not a clash between Christianity and Islam. Instead, what rocked the empires of Europe and Asia was an internal sectarian conflict over the right to make the same competing claim. Rulers West and East perceived themselves as the single, universal political ruler and head of a universal religion. At the same time, just as Christian Europeans fought among themselves with pen and sword for the right to call themselves ‘the church’, Muslims, too, fought over who deserved to claim the mantle of leader of the Muslim faith based on correct fulfilment of the Prophet’s legacy.
In the sixteenth century, the dominant view among Christians and Muslims was that an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil would usher in an age of peace. And just as the church in the West split into three during the Reformation, also referred to as the age of confessionalisation, so, too, did the chasm between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims—established already at the outset of Islamic history in the seventh century, when Muslims differed over who had a right to lead the Muslim community after the death of Muhammad—deepen as the Ottomans affirmed their Sunnism and the Safavids their Shi’ism in unprecedented ways. Selim I would engage in an apocalyptic battle with Ismail I of Iran, the Safavid ruler, whom he defeated. Then he conquered Mamluk Egypt and took the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Selim I’s son and successor, Suleiman I, faced Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, in a battle to be the inheritor of Rome. Like Charles V, he would face internal strife from rival religious claimants to his power. As claimant to the Holy Roman Empire, Suleiman I would have a helmetlike crown made that combined European Christian imperial and papal regalia. He would also assist the Protestants in the Reformation. The tenth sultan born at the turn of the tenth Islamic era, Suleiman I was the ‘Master of the Auspicious Conjunction’, the expected universal ruler. He was the first sultan to call himself caliph.
The broad similarities and crucial differences between Christian European and Ottoman historical religious developments would play out on a sweeping scale through the spiritual, political, and military contests between Selim I and Ismail I of the Safavid Empire and between Suleiman I and Charles V of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire.
Taking up where his father Bayezid II had left off, Selim I commanded the wittiest minds in his chancery to compose a suitably insulting letter to Safavid shah Ismail I. In the pugnacious letter, Selim I proclaimed that the ‘obligation of extirpation, extermination, and expulsion of evil innovation must be the aim of our exalted aspiration’.1 Selim I referred to himself as the wise Solomon and the eminent Alexander. He styled himself the ‘slayer of the wicked and the infidel, guardian of the noble and the pious; the gazi, the defender of the faith’ and ‘standard-bearer of justice and righteousness’. He claimed Shah Ismail I was a wicked infidel who introduced evil innovations and had to be eradicated. Selim I addressed his opponent as a mere prince, ‘the possessor of the land of tyranny and perversion, the captain of the vicious, the chief of the malicious’, usurping and malevolent, ‘the peer of Cain’. Selim I proclaimed himself ‘the instrument of divine will’. He accused his Safavid rival of oppressing and massacring Sunni Muslims in Iran, of undermining Islam, of not prohibiting what is prohibited nor allowing what is permitted, but promoting adultery and fornication, shedding the blood of the innocent, eating and drinking that which is forbidden, and denigrating the Qur’an.
Consequently, Selim I considered an Ottoman assault on the Safavids legitimate. He was eager that ‘the thunder of our avenging mace shall dash out the muddled brains of the enemies of the faith as rations for the lion-hearted gazis’. Such a terrible fate would not await the Safavids, Selim I promised, if they ceased oppressing their subjects, repented and returned to the path of Sunni Islam, and submitted to Ottoman rule. Failing that, with God’s assistance, he would ‘crown the head of every gallows tree with the head of a crown-wearing Sufi [Red Heads] and clear that faction from the face of the earth’.
Shah Ismail I responded nonchalantly and sarcastically with an ‘affectionate’ and ‘friendly’ letter, written with ‘good will’, mocking Selim I by repeating many of the Ottoman ruler’s self-proclaimed titles, making fun of his sending such a letter, and taking much ‘enjoyment and pleasure’ from the ‘boldness and vigour’ of its contents.2 He proclaimed that he was baffled why Selim I appeared so angry, when the Ottomans and Safavids had had good relations in the past when Selim was governor at Trabzon. He imagined that domestic political problems compelled his new rival to act this way, and that the attacks were the ‘fabrications of the opium-clouded minds’ of his bureaucrats. Despite the light tone, Shah Ismail I stated correctly that support for the Safavids was widespread in Anatolia, implying that he could provoke armed uprisings at any time. Due to Selim I’s threats, the shah began preparing his armies for war.
Drawing upon the same theme of Turcoman warrior mysticism that had risen in support of Sheikh Bedreddin’s multiple rebellions in 1416 that nearly overthrew the dynasty, Shah Ismail I declared himself the Persian deified God-king, the perfect Sufi spiritual guide, the awaited redeemer, the occulted twelfth Shi’i imam, and even God. Writing poetry in Turkish, addressing himself to the Janissaries and other Ottoman military forces, Shah Ismail I declared that ‘Gazis say Allah, Gazis I am the faith of the Shah. Come before me bow down to me, Gazis I am the faith of the Shah’.3 Writing under the pen name ‘the Sinner’, Shah Ismail I called himself ‘the mystery of God’ and a prophet, the successor to Muhammad. He styled himself as the living Elijah and Jesus, as well as the Alexander of his age and the commander of the gazis. In his eyes, he was the one who had turned away from the Sunnis, whom he labelled ‘polytheists’, ‘hypocrites’, and ‘the damned’. He declared himself the son of Fatima and Ali, the master of the twelve Shi’i imams, and the sixth imam, Jafer as-Sadiq, the one who avenged the murder of Ali’s son Hussein. Finally, Ismail I asserted that he was the spiritual-political-military leader of the Safavid Sufi order and the Safavid dynasty. How could the new sultan Selim I respond to such heady claims?
The clashes between Selim I and Ismail I would set the stage for over a hundred years of conflict that would cause divisions between Sunnis and Shi’is to sharpen and propel the Ottomans towards conquering the Muslim holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.
For all of these reasons, Shah Ismail I posed a direct threat to the Ottomans, challenging the loyalty of their troops. He led an upstart, formidable rival empire on their border. His soldiers were recruited from among Ottoman Turcoman devotees, and they venerated the shah as God’s incarnation, as the reincarnation of prophets and ancient Iranian kings, and as a perfect Sufi saint. Shah Ismail I’s fanatic followers in eastern Anatolia, the Red Heads, drew a large following. On either side, the Ottoman deviant dervishes known as Bektaşis, the Janissaries, and the Safavid Red Heads believed in the manifestation of God in humans, Ali’s divinity and supremacy as the ultimate warrior, and his reincarnation in later men. Yet the crucial difference was that the Bektaşis believed Ali to have been reincarnated in Hajji Bektaş, the saint of the Janissaries. The Red Heads believed Ali was reincarnated in Shah Ismail I.4
By propagating Shi’i Islam, Shah Ismail I was challenging the Sunni Ottoman sultan’s claim to lead Muslims. Lacking a genealogy leading back to Muhammad, the Ottomans had no claim to religious authority or hereditary Islamic legitimacy. They could not boast as the Safavids did, tracing their descent allegedly back to Muhammad through Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. Believing as Shi’is that Muhammad had proclaimed Ali his successor, the Safavids presented themselves as Ali’s descendants with the legitimate right to rule Muslim-majority lands. This meant that all other claimants to power, including the Ottomans, were usurpers. It was a popular idea in Anatolia, where many awaited the appearance of the twelfth imam, the occulted successor to Ali, to serve as leader.5 Shah Ismail I declared that he was the awaited one.
The Ottomans’ only claim to legitimacy was their might, and even that was being undermined by Shah Ismail I’s declarations that he was the most virile, manly warrior. Safavid supporters fomented uprisings across Ottoman Anatolia, assisted by Red Head guerrillas. These rebellions gained many supporters, turning Anatolia, from Antalya to Sivas, into a landscape of rivers of blood and floods of fire. The upheaval had ended the reign of Bayezid II, deposed by his youngest son Selim, then governor in Trabzon and supported by the Janissaries, who accused his father of being too reluctant to shed blood.6
Selim I was sanctioned in his policy of war, not surprisingly, by the Ottoman chief military judge (kadıasker) of Rûmeli—the highest-ranking Islamic legal authority at that time—whom he had appointed. The short, blond military judge, Sarıgörez Efendi, declared that the Safavid leader Ismail I and his soldiers, the Red Heads, had ceased to be Muslims.7 He gave the legal opinion that those who killed the Red Heads were the greatest gazis and those killed by them the greatest martyrs. In another fatwa, he opined that the Red Heads were neither Shi’is nor Muslims, but infidels, a worthy target of ‘holy warfare’. They allegedly violated religious law by engaging in pederasty, allowing what was forbidden, and changing the direction of prayer from Mecca to Ardabil in Iran, the location of the shrine of their founding sheikh. The fatwas accused the Safavids of denigrating the Qur’an and the hadith of the Prophet, cursing the first three Sunni caliphs—Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman—destroying mosques, and desecrating the graves of Sunnis. In general, they accused the Safavids of oppression, tyranny, and spreading their ‘false religion’. Most egregious: the Safavids dared to overthrow the Ottoman dynasty. In short, they were accused of attempting to destroy Islam. Because of all of this, the military judge opined that it was a duty incumbent on the Muslim believer to wage war against them and kill them.8
War between the two rival rulers came in summer 1514. First, Selim I attempted to cut off the Safavid economy from Europe by expelling Persian merchants from the Ottoman silk centre of Bursa in northwest Anatolia and prohibiting Persian silk imports and exports passing through the empire. In March 1514, Selim I’s forces numbering more than one hundred thousand troops set out from Edirne on a nearly 1,800-kilometre march across Anatolia. To gain further spiritual sanction for the war, Selim I visited the tomb of the deviant dervish Seyyid Gazi in the town of the same name in northwestern Anatolia and gave alms to the Sufis collected there.9 In the north-central Anatolian towns of Amasya, Tokat, Samsun, Sivas, and Yozgat, they beheaded tens of thousands of Red Heads, each of whom had been registered by name by officials sent out before the army arrived.10 Selim I’s exhausted troops were nearing mutiny after the five-month journey, when finally on 23 August in the blazing heat of summer they met Shah Ismail’s warriors northeast of Lake Van on the plain of Çaldıran.
Selim I’s ten thousand musket-armed Janissaries—whose weapons roared like thunderbolts and spit fire like lightning—several hundred cannons, and ninety thousand troops claimed victory on the battlefield against Shah Ismail I’s seventy-five thousand Turcoman cavalry archers.11 It seems that the Safavids did not possess a single firearm. The Ottomans stopped the Shi’i juggernaut and proceeded to occupy the Safavid capital of Tabriz in northwestern Iran, centre of the Persian silk trade. Just as Osman had abducted the bride of the Christian prince of Bilecik and married her to his son Orhan, Selim I captured Shah Ismail I’s favourite wife, Taçlu Khatun, and gave her in marriage to his military judge of Anatolia.12 After his troops had plundered the city, raping women, boys, and girls, Selim I and his army began the long journey home, taking Tabriz’s leading artists, craftsmen, merchants, and poets with them.
The battle was a major turning point for both dynasties, ending the possibility of a Safavid conquest of Anatolia and disappointing Shah Ismail I’s followers. They could not believe that a divine being could be defeated. Yet he survived, fleeing further east into Iran. The Ottomans may have had the military technology for victory on the battlefield, but they could not hold on to Tabriz, over 1,800 kilometres from Istanbul. They were unable to maintain such a long supply line in winter. They could not expand further to the east.
After the battle of Çaldıran and the defeat of Shah Ismail I, Sunni Kurdish princes and tribal leaders threw in their lot one by one with the Ottomans. A crucial role was played by the Kurdish historian and advisor to the sultan Idris-i Bidlisi, who helped convince them to rebel against the remaining Safavid overlords. The people of Diyar Bakir, a city encircled by five to six kilometres of Byzantine black-basalt walls, rose up and killed or expelled the local Safavid forces and declared their obedience to Sultan Selim I. Safavid commanders, however, besieged the city again for a year before the Ottomans were able to defeat them and claim it as part of the empire in September 1515.13 Much of Kurdistan then came under Ottoman control.
Also in 1515, the Ottomans defeated and annexed Dulkadır principality, a Mamluk client and buffer state lying in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria between the two empires. Selim I sent the severed head of its last ruler, Ala al-Dawla, and those of his sons and vizier to the septuagenarian Mamluk sultan Qansuh Al-Ghawri (reigned 1501–1516), in Cairo.14 The conquest and gruesome parcel was cause for war between Selim I and the Mamluk Empire.
The east pacified militarily, Selim I’s religious scholars justified war against fellow Sunni Muslims on the specious grounds that their aiding the ‘infidel’ Shah Ismail I had turned them into infidels themselves. So, the sultan turned against the Mamluks in the south. Again, the Ottomans used gunpowder weapons (cannons and muskets) to defeat a Muslim rival armed with swords, bows, and arrows—the weapons of aristocrats and men of leisure who looked down on the musket, which any untrained soldier could use.
In the sweltering heat of summer, in August 1516, Selim I and his army advanced on Aleppo in northern Syria, the great entrepôt at the end of the Silk Road defended by a mighty citadel. At Marj Dabik, forty kilometres north of the Mamluk city, the two armies met. The Ottoman force was composed of at least sixty thousand men, mainly cavalry positioned on either flank, and the elite Janissary infantry armed with firearms and the sultan at the strongly fortified centre, fitted with hundreds of gun carts bearing cannons.15 They met a Mamluk army composed of twenty thousand cavalry and Bedouin Arabs. Despite being surrounded by forty descendants of the Prophet Muhammad ‘bearing copies of the Qur’an on their heads’, according to a contemporary Arab historian, and assorted Sufi sheikhs and the caliph, Mamluk sultan Qansuh Al-Ghawri was killed, the seventy-five-year-old’s head presented to Selim I, and his army defeated.16 Arquebuses had defeated arrows again. The Mamluks’ refusal to use artillery on the battlefield spelled their doom. The Janissary corps defeated an army that, in order to hold on to its elite status, paid the price of not adapting to change. Soon after, the Ottomans began a global arms-trade business, supplying their allies in Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia with firearms, as their enemies, the Safavids, sought arms from Western Europe.17
The Aleppines threw in their lot with the victorious Ottomans without further battle. So, too, did the inhabitants of the rest of the cities of Syria, including Damascus and Jerusalem, where Selim I visited the Mevlevi Sufi lodge, as the Ottoman army swept south without facing armed resistance. Local Muslims complained, however, of the Ottomans’ strange Sufi religious practices.
After an easy victory over regrouped Mamluk forces at Gaza in December 1516, the Ottoman military faced Egypt unimpeded. In January 1517, Selim I and his forces—including fifteen thousand camels transporting thirty thousand water pouches for his thirsty troops—cut across the sand dunes of the Sinai Desert.18 According to the chronicles, they defeated the Mamluk army in twenty minutes at Raydaniyya outside Cairo.19 Although the Mamluk position was defended by artillery pieces that were cast in Cairo and transported to the fort over the previous decade, the weapons were so large they were practically immobile.20 The Ottomans had simply bypassed their fortified position and overwhelmed the defenders with superior firepower. But Selim I and his army faced much resistance from Mamluks along with other troops who did not hesitate to use handguns to defend Cairo, a city as large as if not larger than Istanbul.21 After repeated street fighting and skirmishes in and around the city, ending in the beheading of thousands of Mamluks, only in April was Selim I able to capture and kill the last Mamluk-leader-turned-guerrilla-fighter, Tuman Bey. His death made into a spectacle, Tuman Bey was hanged at the ornate, eleventh-century, twin-minaret Zuwayla Gate, the site of executions and the departure point of the pilgrim caravan to Mecca. The sharif of Mecca, the city’s religious leader, sent Selim I the keys of Mecca and Medina.22 The Ottomans would effectively rule what we now term the Middle East until 1917.
In conquering the Mamluk Empire, the Ottomans gained control over the eastern Mediterranean as far west as Barqah (in today’s Libya) and Egypt—a rich, populous, strategic, agriculture-producing province, with outlets to the Red Sea, including Sawakin in Sudan, and to the Indian Ocean. Having added Syria and Egypt to his domains, Selim I gave the dynasty sizable new populations of Greek Orthodox and Jewish subjects, but more important, prepared the ground for the empire to have a Muslim demographic majority for the first time, along with custodianship of the two holy shrines of Mecca and Medina and control over the hajj routes and the caliph, whom Selim I had captured at the battle of Marj Dabik and brought to Cairo.
A contemporary Egyptian chronicler compared the Ottoman conquest of Cairo and the subsequent three days of looting and massacres of Mamluks to the pagan Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which had ended the Abbasid Caliphate.23 He depicted an alcohol-drinking Selim I as cruel, bloodthirsty, and a pederast, and his soldiers who occupied Cairo as hashish addicts who drank alcohol, assaulted women and boys in the streets, did not fast during Ramadan, did not even pray, and desecrated Muslim shrines and sanctuaries.24 Capturing the caliph, however, gave Selim I and the Ottoman dynasty elevated Islamic authority.
Selim I did not proclaim himself the caliph. He dispatched the caliph, Al-Mutawakkil, descendant of the members of the Abbasid dynasty who had survived the Mongol sacking of Baghdad and taken refuge with the Mamluks, from Cairo to Istanbul.25 Along with the caliph and Christian, Jewish, and Muslim artisans, merchants, and government officials, he also shipped the holy relics of Muhammad there, which the Ottomans encased in gold and precious jewels. These included his mantle, battle standard, sword, bow, beard hair, a tooth, and a footprint, as well as the mantle and prayer mat of his daughter and wife of Ali, Fatima. The holy loot included the swords of Muhammad’s companions, the cooking pot of Abraham, Joseph’s robe, Moses’s staff, and King David’s sword for good measure. The Ottomans also kept relics from John the Baptist taken in their conquests. They included pieces of bone from John’s right hand—which he used to baptise Jesus—placed inside a realistic golden right arm, as well as a large piece of his skull. All of these items are displayed today in the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle and Holy Relics at Topkapı Palace Museum, where a reader chants the Qur’an.
The Ottomans were not alone in collecting sacred relics and believing in their power. A similar Habsburg collection includes gilded reliquaries containing pieces of the loincloth of Jesus, pieces of wood from Jesus’s manger, and pieces of the cross on which he was crucified. The Habsburgs collected bits of the tablecloth from the Last Supper, as well as fragments of the robe of John the Baptist and one of the saint’s teeth.26
As with Selim I and Ismail I’s claims and counterclaims, in the sixteenth century urgent millenarian expectation—the idea that there would be an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil in which good would triumph, ushering in an age of peace—was the shared ideology in European and Asian empires, both Christian and Muslim. It was the rationale for imperial expansion from the Tagus on the Iberian Peninsula to the Ganges in the Indian subcontinent, from Habsburg Central Europe to Ottoman and Safavid Southwest Asia to Mughal South Asia.27 Such prognostications were not the preserve of the famous Nostradamus, French author of a popular mid-sixteenth-century book of prophecies, alone.
Apocalypticism was the common coin of imperialism in Europe and Asia. Dom Manuel of Portugal (reigned 1495–1521), Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Suleiman I, Safavid shah Tahmasp I (reigned 1524–1576), Mughal emperor Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar I (reigned 1556–1605), and the men serving them saw signs and wonders that they believed were omens of their destiny in leading a universal empire. The world was swept by millenarian expectations. Muslims expected the mujaddid—the renewer of religion of his age, reformer of the world—or the mahdi—the awaited one whose appearance would announce the end-time and the Day of Judgement—to appear in the Muslim year AH 1000, which corresponds to CE 1591–1592.
It is conventional wisdom that Selim I and Ottoman religious authorities presented him as the defender of Sunni Islam in his encounter with the Shi’i Safavid Ismail I. Often overlooked is the fact that after conquering Syria and Egypt, Selim I was described in his own law code as a messianic leader, ‘succoured by God’, ‘world conqueror’, ‘the master of the conjunction’, and ‘the Shadow of God’.28 He was called the renewer of religion of his age, the tenth century of the Muslim calendar.29 Muslims from outside the empire called him the ‘messiah of the last age’ and a ‘divine force’.30 Mirroring the language of Shah Ismail I, Selim I also referred to his servants and soldiers as his disciples and spiritual followers, as if he were head of a Sufi order, as the Safavid leader was. The Ottoman-Safavid conflict was at least partly motivated by competing claims about who the messianic ruler was. Ottoman messianism may not have been as extreme as that of the Safavids, but it was every bit as real.
In keeping with this religious vision, when visiting Damascus on his return from Egypt, Selim I found and restored the dilapidated tomb of the Spanish Sufi Ibn Arabi. It is an event similar to Mehmed II (or rather, his Sufi spiritual advisor) finding the tomb of Muhammad’s companion Ayyub al-Ansari prior to the conquest of Constantinople. Selim I converted Ibn Arabi’s tomb into a site for pilgrimage, as if fulfilling the alleged predictions of the saint that Selim I would discover and rehabilitate his tomb. Selim I did not take the hajj to Mecca and Medina. No Ottoman sultan ever did. He found what he needed in Damascus, the place where Muslims believe Jesus will descend at the end-time.31 It is where, Ibn Arabi claimed, in 1229 Muhammad gave him the complete text of The Bezels of Wisdom, a work recorded for his limited group of initiates that explicates the themes of sainthood, the unity of being, and the perfect human, the critical link between humans and God.32 The perfect human was a saint or ‘friend of God’, a spiritual pole of the epoch who leads humanity to salvation. As the awaited world restorer, the perfect human was the eschatological redeemer who would appear at the end of time to revive religion and prepare the ground for the arrival of the Qur’anic Jesus in Damascus, the harbinger of the final hour. Ibn Arabi claimed himself as one such perfect human. Selim I’s supporters believed he was one too.
Ibn Arabi’s ideas were controversial and spawned a backlash in the Arabic-speaking region where the Ottomans had just asserted their rule. Ibn Arabi had been accused of espousing political ambitions in his time. But for messianic political ambitions, Selim I would be surpassed by his only son and uncontested successor, Suleiman I.
Suleiman I (reigned 1520–1566) became ruler at the age of twenty-five upon the sudden death from unknown causes of his nearly fifty-year-old charismatic father as he travelled from Edirne to Istanbul in 1520. An Ottoman chronicler writing at the end of the sixteenth century related the incredible tale of what happened next, as told to him by his father, who was a confidant of Selim I. In order to promote a pious image of Selim I, the writer narrates how, apparently, when Selim I’s three physicians were washing his corpse for burial, twice the dead man covered his penis with his right hand. So amazed were the doctors by his posthumous act of modesty that they immediately declared ‘God is great!’ and rendered their prayers.33 Selim I’s corpse was then temporarily buried beneath his tent, as his nervous viziers waited for Suleiman to arrive in Istanbul to be enthroned, whereafter they could unbury the cadaver, transport it to the imperial capital, and publicly entomb it.34
Once enthroned, Suleiman I built upon the foundations laid by his predecessors. Along with his father, these included Murad I, who established the Janissaries based on the child levy of Collection recruits, and Mehmed II, who was credited with issuing the law code that established the centralised administration that organised the religious class. Mehmed II had added the title ‘Roman caesar’ to those of ‘sultan’, ‘emperor’, and ‘khan’, thereby integrating Christian, Islamic, Persian, and Turco-Mongol ruling traditions. Referred to as the ‘Master of the Auspicious Conjunction’, Suleiman I would top even his grandfather. This lofty title derives from the fact that he was the tenth sultan, born at the turn of the tenth Islamic era, and thus the expected universal ruler, proved by a reading of the heavens.35
Despite his fortuitous beginnings as a youth referred to as ‘Master of the Auspicious Conjunction’, when Suleiman I and his childhood pal and favourite palace page Ibrahim arrived in Istanbul to take the throne, the viziers and pashas who remained from Selim I’s administration refused to follow the orders of the unproven leader who had not participated in any of his father’s military campaigns. Nor would they listen to Ibrahim, a man appointed to high-level administrative and military positions without any previous government experience. Those early years were marked by the sultan’s inexperience, struggles at court, and tensions in the administration.
To prove himself, Suleiman I turned to the battlefield. He led his armies and navies to Central European and Mediterranean theatres of war that were strategically important, aiming to succeed where his predecessors had failed. The first targets were Belgrade and Rhodes.
At first, Suleiman I intended to march on Buda and defeat the powerful Hungarian king in battle. Leading the army in person, he changed plans and besieged the important citadel of Belgrade, also controlled by the Hungarians, which lay on the route to the Hungarian capital.36 In August 1521, after a monthlong siege of the massive, ancient fortress on the Danube, whose defence force numbered only in the hundreds, the Ottomans used land and sea forces to take the strategic city that neither Murad II nor Mehmed II had been able to conquer. The victory rendered Hungary ripe for the taking the next time the Ottomans attacked.
In the next campaign season the following spring, Suleiman I’s army and navy began an attack on the seemingly impenetrable fortress of Rhodes, which Mehmed II had been unable to seize despite a two-month siege. Even Selim I had abandoned an attempt to storm it.37 But driven by public opinion that demanded he do something about the reported ill-treatment of several thousand Muslim pilgrims captured at sea and used as slave labourers expanding the fortifications on the island, Suleiman I decided to campaign in person to expel the Knights Hospitaller.38
That summer of 1522, with a fleet of as many as 250 ships at his disposal to attack and blockade the island, Suleiman I crossed the turquoise waters separating Marmaris on the coast of Anatolia from Rhodes.39 He watched the progress of the long and difficult siege from the island’s highest point, the site of the ancient acropolis. Employing Christian conscripts as sappers, the Ottomans mined under the citadel walls as part of their efforts. Despite seeing the walls crumbling from below, being ripped apart from above—bombed from siege towers and platforms—or blasted by cannons, the defenders resisted repeated attacks that autumn.40 Even though they were vastly outnumbered—the order’s Grand Master Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam had only six hundred knights and sixteen thousand men at his disposal against a force estimated to be one hundred thousand soldiers—the Knights Hospitaller caused the Ottomans heavy losses over the course of five months.41 Nevertheless, the Ottomans seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of gunpowder. Offered favourable terms of surrender, the knights finally capitulated on Christmas Eve 1522.
Acting like a chivalrous Renaissance prince, Suleiman I allowed the grand master and his surviving Knights Hospitaller and thousands of civilians to leave the island unharmed. But he prohibited Christians from living within the city walls and sent Spanish Jews to settle in their place. He converted the churches to mosques on Christmas Day and put to death the son and grandson of Mehmed II’s fugitive son Cem, cousins who had converted to Christianity on the island.42
Following these battles, his renown assured and his coffers filled, Suleiman I faced the problem of how to express the reasons for his astounding wealth, political power, and military success. To say he owed his favoured position to the success of his father and grandfather would not do. As with the Roman emperor Augustus, the answer was—following Mediterranean, Christian, Jewish, Roman, Persian, and Islamic precedent—to treat him like a god and use divine terms for him. Accordingly, in the preamble to the new law code for Egypt bearing the sultan’s seal and signature promulgated in 1525, Suleiman I is referred to as ‘holy’, the ‘expected one’, ‘the emperor of the time’, the ‘ruler of the spiritual world, sultan of the celestial throne, possessor of the moral qualities of the prophets, saint above all saints, whose face resembles the shining sun’.43
Having conquered the last independent Catholic island in the eastern Mediterranean with great difficulty, Suleiman I then surprised himself with the relatively easy overthrow of the once mighty kingdom of Hungary. He accomplished this in only two hours at the rain-soaked, swampy Battle of Mohács in August 1526, where King Louis II of Hungary drowned in the Danube while fleeing.44 As with the previous two military efforts, the Ottomans had the advantage of superior numbers: Ottoman soldiers outnumbered their opponents at the battle in southern Hungary by two or three to one. But the key factor in all of these successes was a technological one. To prepare for the Mohács campaign, the sultan’s armouries were ordered to make tens of thousands of carbines, hundreds of small guns, and large mortars.45 Crossing two raging, swollen rivers on pontoon bridges, the Ottoman army had the expertise to transport large numbers of troops and heavy artillery to the battlefield.46 Just as the use of artillery on the field had given the Ottomans victory over the Safavid and Mamluk cavalry, so, too, at Mohács did thousands of musket-bearing Janissaries and hundreds of canons give the Ottomans the upper hand over the heavily armoured Hungarian horsemen. After the victory, Suleiman I and his forces marched to the Hungarian capital of Buda, which they looted and burned to the ground, save the royal palace.47 An independent Kingdom of Hungary no longer existed. Next, they hoped, was the turn of the Holy Roman Empire.
Three years later in 1529, Suleiman I launched a brief siege of the Habsburg capital of Vienna. After first retaking Buda, which had been occupied by the army of Charles V’s brother, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Ottoman forces pressed on, despite the campaign season having ended. They were doomed from the onset by adverse weather. Heavy rains caused floods and swollen rivers, which forced the drained Ottoman troops to leave their heavy weapons behind. The sultan’s own chroniclers recorded ‘snow from evening until noon next day’, ‘much loss of horses and men in swamps’, ‘many die of hunger’—so ran the account of the bleak march.48 Slowed by rain and flooded rivers, lacking in provisions, and running out of time, Suleiman I did not arrive before Vienna until the end of September, where he faced a well-garrisoned city. The appearance of Suleiman I at the walls of Vienna nevertheless struck terror in the hearts of Christian Europe.
The Ottomans besieged Vienna with 120,000 soldiers, the majority of whom were land-grant holders, tied to their land and available for only a limited campaign season from spring to autumn. The siege was defeated as much by the rainy autumn weather, floods, overextended supply lines, and transportation difficulties as by defence works and the tactics of the besieged. In the middle of October, the sultan called off the siege.
While gunpowder weapons could usually blow away medieval walls, it took the besieger a long time to transport the right weapons.49 Three to four months travel time from Istanbul, some 1,500 kilometres, was the limit of Ottoman strategic capabilities—they could raid but had not been able to hold Tabriz. And when the Ottomans advanced, the Habsburgs did not offer pitched battle, but retreated to their earthworks and small forts, retarding the Ottoman advance. Vienna’s glorious Ringstrasse, with its wedding-cake nineteenth-century buildings, marks the former wall protecting Vienna. The Ottoman defeat is remembered and celebrated in Austria to this day.
Engaged in a struggle for universal dominion, Suleiman I promoted an identity for himself as the earth’s single monarch and last world emperor before the final judgement. Battling Safavid shah Tahmasp in the east and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the west over the Roman inheritance, Suleiman I aimed to unite East and West under one monarch and one religion by conquering Vienna, Rome, Baghdad, and Tabriz throughout the late 1520s and early 1530s. Suleiman I was unique from his imperial contemporaries in this way. While he wanted to be Holy Roman emperor, Charles V did not challenge Suleiman I to be leader of the Muslims of the world. Nor did Tahmasp wish to rule the West.
During the first two-thirds of his reign, from the 1520s to the 1540s, Suleiman I engaged in a religious dual with the Safavids in the east and with the Habsburgs in the west, propagating millenarian aspirations about himself. He claimed to be a leader who possessed sanctity and ruled with divine mandate, amalgamating temporal and spiritual authority to impose justice and prosperity in the last stage of history. According to an eschatological prophecy written in poetic form for use as a public address, Suleiman I was a man whose divinity surpassed even that of the Sufi sheikh Ibn Arabi.50 He was allegedly the seat of saintly authority, the messianic ruler, invincible hero, renewer of religion, redeemer, saintly pole of the universe, and universal ruler who would impose a single world religion.51
Such messianic terms were also used to describe Suleiman I by his grand viziers, Ibrahim Pasha (in office 1523–1536) and Lutfi Pasha (in office 1539–1541). The same types of claims were made in the works of Sufi leaders with whom Suleiman I associated, who belonged to an order that saw God in man and believed there were poles of the universe. Sheikh Pir Ali Alaeddin Aksarayı (died 1528) met with Suleiman I and declared him the redeemer. Seyyid Lokman, an Iranian Turcoman and official court historian, wrote that Suleiman I was one of ‘the perfect humans’.52
In the palace, mystics engaged in apocalyptic prognostication. Suleiman I’s court was keen on astrology, magic, the interpretation of dreams, and prophecies both ancient and new.53 The most popular prophecy was written by a Sufi indebted to the work of Ibn Arabi who had instructed Sheikh Bedreddin and who had a close relationship to Murad II.54 It circulated at court, including in pocket-size versions, in the early sixteenth century. Predicting that the world would soon end and that the last universal ruler would arise in the tenth Islamic century from within the Ottoman dynasty, the prophecy’s object was understood to be none other than Suleiman I. For three decades, the sultan employed a geomancer who had fled the Safavid court after the death of Shah Ismail I.55 Calling Suleiman I the last world conqueror, the master of the age, and pole of poles, he claimed that God was speaking through him. He proclaimed that an invisible army of angels, prophets, and saints accompanied Suleiman I into battle.56 A writer of a history of Suleiman I’s reign around 1530 claimed that the army of saints had actually been seen at the Battle of Mohács.57
In precisely the same imperial and religious vein as Suleiman I, Charles V, who had recently been crowned Holy Roman emperor in Bologna by Pope Clement VII and had been met with shouts of ‘Caesar’, inherited Spain, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Sicily, and Germany and defeated France. He claimed to be the successor to Julius Caesar and Augustus—the emperor and world ruler, the reviver of ancient Rome, which he sacked. Would Charles V reunite Christendom and be the new Charlemagne?
Motivated by the same conviction that he was the rightful inheritor of Roman rule and biblical revelation, Suleiman I, to face this rival, donned an astonishing four-crowned golden helmet, a composite of European Christian imperial and papal regalia symbolising the four biblical kingdoms prophesied by Daniel. Topped by a plumed aigrette, the crowned helmet was created by Venetian artisans in 1532, another example of the global Renaissance.58 An astonishing work of craftmanship, the helmet, obtained by Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha for his sultan, was decorated with fifty diamonds, forty-nine pearls, forty-seven rubies, twenty-seven emeralds, and a large turquoise.59 Although such an item was foreign to Islamic kingship customs, the helmet formed part of a set of ceremonial objects, including a sceptre and a golden throne, for use by the Muslim sovereign.60
Just as Charles V had done only three years earlier with a similar crown in Vienna, Suleiman I wore or displayed the crowned helmet on his march through Belgrade en route to Vienna, passing under classical, Roman-style triumphal arches. Mimicking the ceremonial political language of Charles V following his coronation, Suleiman I also rode with his imperial helmet on a horse richly adorned in jewels under a brocade canopy with flags embroidered in jewels. Meeting Habsburg ambassadors in his tent, he sat on the golden throne and displayed the helmet, which the ambassadors assumed to be his imperial crown.61 News of the sensational crown spread in Western Europe, not only through ambassadorial reports but also in pamphlets, folksongs, and prints. It seemed there were two caesars.
As he was attempting to conquer Vienna with his crowned helmet, which incorporated a papal tiara as well, Suleiman I planned to attack Italy and Austria by land and sea so as to conquer Rome and claim the title of Holy Roman emperor. The crowned helmet—which had the appearance of the plumed helmets Muslims imagined ancient monarchs wore—was also referred to as the crown of Alexander the Great.62 The bejewelled mirror that came with it was believed to be the ancient ruler’s mirror that reflected the whole world, proof of his universal sovereignty. Some in Western Europe seemed convinced. The Frenchman Jean Bodin, one of the major political theorists of the sixteenth century, ridiculed Habsburg universal pretensions in favour of the Ottomans’. In his view, the Ottomans had the greater claim to Roman inheritance because they ruled more Roman territories: ‘If there is anywhere in the world any majesty of empire and of true monarchy, it must radiate from the Sultan’. This was because ‘he owns the richest parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and he rules far and wide over the entire Mediterranean and all but a few of its islands. Moreover, in armed forces and strength he is such that he alone is the equal of almost all the princes’.63
As part of his war against the Catholic Habsburgs, Suleiman I sided with their internal enemies, and the rebels’ response was enthusiastic. Protestants argued that it would be better to be ruled by Muslims than by Catholics. They preferred the sultan to the pope.64
The Ottoman threat to the Habsburgs contributed to the success of the Protestant Reformation and the rise and establishment of Protestantism in Europe. The proponents of the new churches found themselves able to use fear of the powerful Ottoman Empire as a bargaining chip in exchange for the granting of concessions by European Catholic powers. Martin Luther declared the Ottomans to be the instrument of divine punishment against the church, the ‘scourge of God’.65 As Erasmus before him, he railed against wars against the Muslim enemy in favour of reforming Christian belief and practice first. His famous Ninety-Five Theses (1517) included his protest against the granting of church indulgences to finance wars against the Ottomans. Time and again, from the 1520s to the 1540s, when the Ottomans threatened the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, Protestants gave their political cooperation to Catholics only in return for religious concessions.66 The Ottoman threat enabled them to consolidate their gains.
The Ottomans armed Morisco (Muslims converted to Catholicism) rebels in Habsburg Spain; encouraged ties between Moroccans and Moriscos, as well as between Protestants and Moroccans; organised Mediterranean naval support of uprisings; allied themselves with Calvinists in Hungary; and sent secret agents promising military aid to Lutherans in the Habsburg-ruled Netherlands and German-speaking lands who were against the pope and the Holy Roman Empire.67 Protestant soldiers reportedly claimed it would be better to fight for the ‘Unbaptised Turk’, Sultan Suleiman I, than for the ‘Baptised Turk’, Emperor Charles V.68 Such siding of Protestant Christians with the Muslim sultan damaged Charles V’s ability to recreate a European spiritual monarchy, with territorial repercussions. Suleiman I informed the Protestants that Muslims shared their iconoclasm and opposition to the pope. In 1555, Lutherans obtained official recognition, in part as a result of Holy Roman emperors having been more concerned with fighting the Ottomans in Hungary than with attending to internal German affairs.
Charles V was more focused on conquering the Italian peninsula than on handling the strife at home in Germany. And his son Ferdinand, whom he established in Germany while he campaigned, was more engaged in defending Hungary and his Hungarian inheritance from the Ottomans. In 1526, the pope refused to call a council to debate on reforms. But when the nobles declared that they would not send forces against the Ottomans until such a council met, Ferdinand agreed to a diet in the town of Speyer, at which an edict outlawing Martin Luther and his writings was temporarily suspended. The upshot of this delay was that the anti-Catholic Christians were able to establish Lutheranism in Germany in exchange for sending troops to fight the Ottomans. Suleiman I’s armies conquered central Hungary and made Transylvania into a vassal land—cannons beating cavalry again—following the Battle of Mohács in 1526.
In 1530, the Diet of Augsburg proclaimed a death sentence for the Lutherans. But the Holy Roman Empire was still threatened by the Ottomans in Hungary, and this grave threat was its primary concern. In 1532, Charles V accepted Lutheran support against the Ottomans in return for guaranteeing the existence of Lutheranism until a council could be convened. The pope refused to convene the council, and by 1540 Lutherans had secured far-reaching guarantees. Lutheranism had to be tolerated due to the international situation. Suleiman I’s Ottoman forces had taken control of central Hungary, and his ally François I of France, Charles V’s archrival for control of Christian Europe, was attacking Italy. Not until 1546 could the Holy Roman Empire attempt to put the Lutheran movement down, but by then the split between Lutherans and Catholics had become irreconcilable and was finally acknowledged in 1555 with the Peace of Augsburg. The growth and eventual acceptance of Lutheranism in Germany is attributed in part to the aspirations of Ottoman imperialism.69
The Protestant Church struck root in Hungary for one primary reason. With the use of Counter-Reformation tactics designed to enforce religious conformity and political centralisation, the Habsburgs had estranged many Hungarians to such an extent that they preferred Ottoman rule.70 And with Ottoman rule, they opted for Protestantism as well as Islam. By 1550, the majority of the Christians in the now Ottoman province of Buda and the vassal land of Transylvania had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism or Islam.71 A dazzling, golden, bejewelled, orb-shaped crown would be made by Sultan Ahmed I (reigned 1603–1617) for the Hungarian Stefan Bocskay, who led a Calvinist revolt in upper Hungary against Habsburg rule. Bocskay was rewarded by the Ottomans by being crowned in Pest in 1605 as the ruler of Hungary. He may not have lasted long in power, dying suddenly the next year from illness, but the crown made of gold and precious stones—including alternating bands of rubies, emeralds, pearls, and opals topped with a gigantic oval emerald in place of a cross—is still on display in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna.
Although he sided with religious rebels in the Habsburg Empire, Suleiman I still faced competition for his spiritual role and the source of the dynasty’s legitimacy within his own empire. He faced large-scale, violent rebellions in central Anatolia from deviant dervishes, such as that led in 1527 by the Sufi Kalender Çelebi, heir of Hajji Bektaş and leader of his shrine in central Anatolia, whose supporters destroyed the first army sent to defeat it. His devotees raised their banners and beat their kettledrums and blew their horns in support. A Bektaşi poet proclaimed, ‘O Ottoman! This world will not be left to you. Do not assume that Son of the Shah will not avenge this blood on you’.72 Kalender Çelebi was killed by Ottoman forces, ending his rebellion, and the shrine of Hajji Bektaş was closed for nearly three decades. Also in 1527, Istanbul-trained scholar Molla Kabiz preached that the Qur’an was not superior to nor did it supersede the Torah and Gospel, but was rather dependent upon them. He also taught that Jesus was superior to Muhammad.73 Molla Kabiz refused to recant and was publicly executed.74
Two years later, the same fate was met by the boy sheikh İsmail Maşuki. Maşuki was a member of a deviant dervish order that followed the teaching of Emir the Cutler, who died in 1476. Like the Sufi Baba Tükles, who had converted a Mongol ruler, Emir the Cutler had allegedly emerged unharmed after dancing into a fire, only his robe singed.75 Maşuki had developed a considerable following by claiming that man was eternal and that everything made illicit in Islamic law was licit, including drinking alcohol. He proclaimed that because they were exceedingly enjoyable, adultery and sodomy were not forbidden but encouraged. He preached that the five pillars of Sunni practice—the five daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca, alms giving, and profession of the faith—were not necessary for the enlightened to follow. In his view, there was no Day of Judgement but there was reincarnation. Souls migrated from one person to another. Man creates himself. In short, everyone is God. For these shocking proclamations, already espoused by Sheikh Bedreddin, he and twelve of his disciples were beheaded in 1529 before a great crowd that had gathered at the Hippodrome in Istanbul to see the bodily punishment meted out to one who challenged conventionally held truths.76
In 1561, the Ottomans executed the deviant Bosnian dervish Sheikh Hamza Bali for claiming to be the pole of the universe. Only Suleiman I was allowed to make such a spiritual claim. A follower of Hamza Bali would assassinate the grand vizier in revenge, probably intending to kill Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi, who had issued the legal opinion permitting Hamza Bali’s execution. Writers in the sultan’s circle proclaimed Suleiman I as the pole. They declared that political success required saintliness and that, as the saint of saints, the sultan was sovereign in both worlds. His eschatological role was to be the last world emperor before the end-time. This was not a matter of theological orthodoxy. It was the assignation of the locus of all radical spiritual claims, whether made by Savafid Shi’is or by Ottoman Sunnis, to their proper place—the body of Suleiman I.
Unlike in Christian Europe—where church councils determined orthodoxy, condemned nonconforming beliefs as heresies, and persecuted the dissenters as heretics—in the Ottoman Empire such views were seen as challenges to the sultan’s spiritual and political authority. Suleiman I opposed those who disputed his religious authority as the Sufi perfect man, the redeemer and renewer of the age. Two of the three trials against Sufi dissenters during this period—that of Molla Kabiz and İsmail Maşuki—occurred during the first twenty years of Suleiman I’s reign, when propaganda at court was anything but what we would today recognise as normative Sunni Islam. The Sufi executed in the third trial, Hamza Bali, was seen as a threat in part for the support he enjoyed among the Janissaries—whose devotion, like the Shi’is, focused on Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. Likewise, Suleiman I implemented a number of practices that had been engaged in earlier by Mehmed II as part of bureaucratisation, expansion, empire building, and centralisation that were not an imposition of orthodoxy.
In addition to the ubiquitous use of millenarian claims in both East and West, the sixteenth century was characterised by a challenge to the right to call oneself a true believer. Following the Reformation, Christianity in Western and Central Europe split into the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches. As religious rivals pursuing common strategies and goals, each church promoted piety and individual spirituality, the internalisation of church teachings, the drawing of dichotomies between faiths, and the quest for uniform orthodoxy. They utilised violence to ensure religious homogeneity in the territories they ruled. Book burnings, inquisitions, heresy trials, the persecution of dissenters, and the burning of ‘witches’ were frequent and vicious. Most of the latter victims were women, usually old, poor, and widowed or single—women not considered to be controlled by a man and thus not conforming to male standards of female behaviour.
Just as the church in the West split into three denominations during the Reformation, so, too, did the chasm between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims deepen in the same era. Selim I’s attacks on Shah Ismail I are similar to the aspersions Martin Luther cast on the Catholic Church. As Selim I condemned Shi’i ‘temporary marriage’ as adultery and fornication, Luther excoriated monks and clergy in Rome for their mistresses and prostitutes. The Sunni-Shi’i split was rooted in Islamic history in the seventh century following Muhammad’s death. They debated who had the right to rule the community: men chosen by consensus or members of Muhammad’s family, the latter calling themselves the shi’at Ali (partisans of Ali). That sectarian split became more pronounced in the sixteenth century, catalysed by the Safavid threat and attracting the support of Turcoman in Ottoman Anatolia, with the Ottomans affirming their Sunnism in unprecedented ways. Suleiman I ordered a mosque to be built in every Muslim village in the empire, which was meant to centralise as well as Islamise and stamp out pro-Safavid or deviant-dervish alternative interpretations of Islam. Such alternative interpretations were demonstrated partly through the forcible sorting out of the two denominations through conversion, deportation, war, banishment, and massacre. Ottoman historians boasted about how Selim I massacred tens of thousands of Shi’ites, a bloodbath that was similar to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, in which Catholics in France slaughtered thousands of Protestants (called Huguenots) and mutilated their corpses.77
For their part, the Safavids butchered large numbers of Sunnis while compelling the wholescale conversion of Iran’s Muslim population from Sunnism to Shi’ism under Shah Ismail I and his successors in the sixteenth century. To effect this change, the Safavids also brought in Shi’i scholars from Ottoman territories such as Lebanon, who were conversant in both interpretations of the faith, to help define and police the boundaries of Shi’i belief. Soon the Shi’i call to prayer, which includes the line, ‘I testify Ali is the friend of God, I testify Ali is proof of God’, rang out from minarets three times a day across the Safavid Empire.
Yet in the same century, the Janissaries repeatedly marched off into battle against the Shi’i Safavids while extolling Shi’i propaganda. Their standards were emblazoned with the phrases ‘saint’ or ‘friend of God’, ‘Hajji Bektaş is the manifestation of the divine light of Ali’, and ‘There is no one as valiant as Ali, there is no sword of God other than Ali’s sword’. They vowed to avenge the seventh-century killing of their ‘shah’, Ali’s son Hussein, at Karbala in Iraq. The same banners declared, ‘Long live my Sultan, may he reign for a 1000 years’. What mattered, once again, was loyalty, not ideological purity, as in Reformation Christian Europe. The Janissaries were never made into normative Sunni Muslims, yet the explicit expression of the rival faith was permitted at the centre of empire. Whereas in Reformation Europe the religion of the ruler became the religion of the subjects, in the Ottoman Empire authorities tolerated a significant community of Shi’is in Lebanon.
But to understand this age of confessionalisation and how the great empires of Europe and Asia participated in it, it is worth bearing in mind that the Islamic institution of the caliphate was not the same as the Christian institution of the papacy. Because they were more concerned with public behaviour than private belief, Muslims lacked institutions with which to pronounce and repress ‘heresy’, such as the Inquisition, or to discipline authority and institutions of ‘orthodoxy’.
The Ottoman imperial council did hear cases of subjects uttering abominable statements about Islam. Yet, it was no Inquisitional authority, as most trials were concerned with treason and social upheaval. The authorities could pardon the offending party if he pledged political allegiance. It would therefore be a mistake to use the terms ‘orthodox’, ‘heterodox’, and ‘heresy’ in the absence of institutions with authority to pronounce true religion and punish those who did not follow it. Although the distinction between Sunni and Shi’i sharpened during this period, what mattered was not confessional divide—as in the split between Calvinist, Catholic, and Lutheran in Christian Europe—but allegiance to a dynasty.
As for loyalty to the ideal that the Ottoman sultan was the messiah, one group surpassed all others in the fervency and tenacity of this belief. Jews who had migrated to the Ottoman Empire from Spain and Portugal following their forced conversion to Catholicism or expulsion perceived Ottoman sultans as carrying out God’s plan for them. The ingathering of European Jews in the sultan’s domains would lead Jews East and West to place the Ottoman sultan at the centre of their apocalyptic drama.
In the first seven chapters, the reader has encountered a narrative of the Ottoman dynasty from its origins at the turn of the fourteenth century through to the middle of the sixteenth century. At this point, we will break the narrative flow in order to devote the next five chapters to exploring several major themes that emerged, before returning to the story of the changes faced by the dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century. The themes are the ingathering of Jews, Jewish utopian views of the empire, and ecstatic, messianic depictions of the sultan; the development of the Ottomans as a maritime power and their participation in the Age of Discovery; the unique Ottoman way as expressed in class structure, law, culture, and ideology; the role of women and eunuchs in the palace and dynastic politics; and the culture of same-sex desire.