BOTH THE OTTOMAN conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the defeat and conquest of the territories of the Mamluk Empire in 1516–1517, including the Middle East, by Selim I made the Ottomans into a naval power with a worldwide vision. Selim I’s conquests doubled the size of the empire and set it on the path for having a Muslim majority in the following centuries. Selim I’s successor, Suleiman I, proclaimed himself the caliph, the universal protector of the entire Muslim-ruled world, the defender of Sunni Muslims from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Advances in military and naval technology—firearms, artillery, and ocean-sailing vessels—allowed the Ottomans to project their power and control oceangoing trade to Southeast Asia. All of this led to a cultural florescence, a rediscovery of overlooked ancient knowledge, the launching of curious Ottoman travellers, the translations of Western works, and the production of new Ottoman maps, atlases, and geographical treatises. If such developments are the major determinants of whether an empire partook in the Age of Discovery, then there was an Ottoman Age of Discovery.1
The Ottomans did not possess a land empire only. From the fifteenth century, theirs was also a seaborne empire. Thanks in part to the influx after 1492 of refugee European Jews and their knowledge of geography, technology, military developments, and politics, and because of the continued use of converts in key positions, the Ottoman maritime empire emerged in the same century as that of the Portuguese.2 Beginning with the reign of Mehmed II, sultans referred to themselves as ‘Lord of the two seas and two continents’. The sultans were the rulers of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Europe and Asia. From Egypt to Indonesia, the Ottomans rivalled the Portuguese in the battle for the seas and played a major role in international trade. Why, then, are the Ottomans not included as major participants in the European Age of Discovery?3 Ottoman writers of the time confute such an exclusion.
Sea captain (or reis) Seydi Ali—the author of The Mirror of Countries (1560), which was based on his travels through India, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran—explains how in 1552 he was appointed Ottoman admiral of the Egyptian fleet. He had ‘always been very fond of the sea, had taken part in the expedition against Rhodes under Sultan Suleiman I, and had since had a share in almost all engagements, both by land and by sea’. He had ‘fought under Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, Sinan Pasha, and other captains, and had cruised about on the Western [Mediterranean] sea’ such that he ‘knew every nook and corner of it’. Seydi Ali ‘had written several books on astronomy, nautical science, and other matters bearing upon navigation’. His ‘father and grandfather, since the conquest of Constantinople, had had charge of the arsenal at Galata; they had both been eminent in their profession, and their skill had come down to me as an heirloom’.4 Seydi Ali was a typical explorer of that era.
The Age of Discovery is conventionally understood as the sixteenth-century European maritime exploration and mastery of the sea that served as the basis for the expansion of global European influence.5 In the accepted story, Muslim powers such as the Ottomans are depicted as obstacles to Western European domination, obstacles to the Europeans’ ‘natural path of expansion’ into Africa and the Middle East.6 When we think of what immediately preceded the Age of Discovery, we imagine the Portuguese and Spanish—and later the Dutch, English, and French—not as being engaged in world trade, but as existing first in a period of relative geographic and intellectual isolation limited to the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Incongruously, they possessed a decisively bold political and religious legitimating ideology that allowed them to imagine conquering the world. This boldness was manifested in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, in which the Spanish and Portuguese divided up the extra-European world between them, despite not even controlling one part of it. As they launched their voyages of discovery, there followed rapid and significant technological advances—particularly in firearms and oceangoing vessels, which were combined into formidable warships as they put cannons onboard carracks. Curiosity gave rise to cultural and intellectual transformation, the blossoming of scholarly and artistic achievements—especially in cartography, geography, and classical studies—and an interest in the outside world and their ability to control it.7
One might be tempted to imagine the brief period of Ottoman control over Morocco and the entire North African littoral during the reign of Murad III as comparable to the European Age of Discovery. Had the Ottomans remained in power there, they might well have expanded down the west coast of Africa. This was uncharted territory for the Ottomans, in some ways as foreign to them as the New World was to the Western European powers. A better comparison, however, lies with the Ottomans’ economic and naval expansion into the Indian Ocean basin.8 Given their lack of development of oceangoing vessels and the Europeans’ comparative advantage, it is easy to disparage the idea that the Ottomans experienced maritime expansion in this age. But the Ottomans actively participated in the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century.
Following Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople—won in part by a clever use of naval power in the Golden Horn—the sultan utilised the Italian and Greek expertise at hand to improve Ottoman naval might. He invested in building an arsenal and shipyard in Istanbul that helped him gain control of the Black Sea by expelling the Genoese. He acquired Byzantine manuscripts of Ptolemy’s world map Geographia, commissioned the Byzantine George Amiroutzes of Trabzon to provide a translation into Turkish, and gathered contemporary Italian versions of the same work.9 His naval abilities were limited, however, and the Ottomans failed to take Rhodes in 1480. His son and successor, Bayezid II, expanded the Ottoman navy, recruiting Aegean corsair captains like Piri Reis.10
Bayezid II ordered the construction of what an Ottoman chronicler called ‘ships agile as sea serpents’ to challenge the Venetians in the eastern Mediterranean (including the Aegean and the Adriatic).11 It worked. By 1499, just as the Portuguese reached the western coast of India, the Ottomans controlled much of the eastern Mediterranean.12 At the turn of the sixteenth century, Bayezid II commanded the repairing of the fleet, the building of hundreds of new, better ships, the mobilisation of tens of thousands of oarsmen and sailors, and the manufacture of cannons to be used especially in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and, towards the end of his reign, in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.13
Like Dom Henrique ‘Henry the Navigator’ of Portugal, Mehmed II’s grandson, Selim I, laid the groundwork for maritime empire.14 During Selim I’s reign, the first original Ottoman geographical works appeared, such as The Book of Cathay, an account of a voyage from the Safavid Empire to China, written by merchant Ali Akbar in 1516.15 Western European sources would not analyse Chinese society to this extent for another century. After Selim I destroyed his former ally against the Portuguese and the Safavids, the Mamluk Empire, and annexed Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans—assisted by the Mamluk fleet at Suez and headed by Selman Reis—controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean and expanded into the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean.16 Thereafter, Ottomans devised new taxation policies to extract profits from the trade that passed through these regions, stationing commercial agents across them and even organising trade convoys. Yet it would be an exaggeration to claim they established monopolies like the Portuguese.
The Ottomans were focused not only on the East. They also kept an eye on the Mediterranean. Suleiman I expanded Ottoman naval power against pockets of resistance in the Mediterranean, notably at the island of Rhodes in 1522. In the end, Suleiman I was able to starve the Knights Hospitaller into submission, agreeing to let the surviving knights depart unharmed. They resettled on the island of Malta, given to them for the symbolic rent of one falcon per year by Charles V.17
The Ottoman conquering of ports including Tunis in North Africa (1534), which was retaken by Charles V the following year, was the beginning of a fifty-year struggle with the Habsburgs for control of the western Mediterranean. The Knights Hospitaller would remain a thorn in the Ottoman side at Malta, and Suleiman I came to regret not having slaughtered them all.
In the early sixteenth century, as France and the Holy Roman Empire competed for dominion of European Christendom, they and the Ottoman Empire also sought control of the Mediterranean and the Italian peninsula, to which all had dynastic claims, both real and imagined. Suleiman I found the king of France, François I, amenable in the 1540s to an alliance against his brother-in-law and rival, Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman emperor. Charles V castigated the alliance as outside the bounds of accepted diplomatic practice because François I had made common cause with an infidel, a Muslim ruler.18
Many Europeans found it hard to imagine France asking for Ottoman help against another Catholic power. They forgot about how Christians had been making alliances with the Ottomans since the fourteenth century—Orthodox Christians such as the Byzantines and Serbs, and Catholics such as the Genoese and Venetians. The French were not dissuaded. They needed a powerful counterforce against the Habsburg threat. François I’s defenders argued that making an alliance with the Ottomans did not harm ‘his title and honour of “Most Christian”’.19 While many Christian rulers who supported Emperor Charles V made a fuss that King François I sought and received Ottoman help, his supporters asserted that ‘against an enemy one may make arrows of all wood’.20 François I nursed the pain of having been passed over as Holy Roman emperor in favour of Charles V in 1519. Six years later, before his alliance with the Ottomans, the French king had suffered ignominious defeat at the Battle of Pavia in Italy and was taken prisoner by the Habsburg emperor. He imagined that, together with the assistance of the Ottoman army and navy, he could defeat the Habsburgs and become the premier Christian power.21
The alliance would allow the Ottomans to divide Europe, if not conquer the Habsburgs, their most powerful enemy. The Ottomans hardly viewed the French as their equals, however. In a written exchange between the two rulers, Suleiman I referred to himself as ‘Sultan of Sultans, king of kings, the Shadow of God who bestows the crown to the monarchs on earth, the supreme ruler of the White [Mediterranean] and Black Seas, Rumelia [Southeastern Europe] and Anatolia, Persia, Damascus, and Aleppo, Egypt, Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem, and all of the Arab dominions, and Yemen, and the Sultan the supreme king of many nations’.22 He refers to King François as ‘the governor of the French province’.
In 1543, Suleiman I sent the Ottoman fleet led by the red-bearded, formidable Hayreddin Barbarossa Pasha to assist François I against the Habsburgs. Barbarossa was a man born to a Muslim father and Greek mother on the island of Lesbos.23 He served various Muslim North African kingdoms as a corsair before conquering Algiers for Selim I and becoming its governor. In 1533, he was appointed grand admiral. In 1537, the Ottomans and French planned to launch joint naval attacks against Italy, but they were unable to coordinate their campaigns.24 Six years later, France requested the Ottomans send their fleet to wage war against coastal Habsburg territory. In summer 1543, Barbarossa arrived in Marseilles with 150 ships and as many as thirty thousand men.25 François I desired a joint Franco-Ottoman naval siege of Nice. What is remembered in France today about that failed assault on the city—then a port ruled by the duke of Savoy, Charles V’s ally—is only the myth about a local washerwoman, Catherine Ségurane, who allegedly led local resistance, wiping her bottom with a captured Ottoman banner, ‘which made them flee’.26 She was made patron saint of the city. Every year the Niçois celebrate Saint Catherine’s Day on 25 November.
After the assault on Nice, the Ottoman navy wintered in the French port of Toulon. Most of its population was compelled to abandon the city to the Muslim sailors.27 Until the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, a painting of the Ottoman fleet in the city’s harbour hung in Toulon’s town hall. The caption thanked the Ottomans for coming to assist the French.28 However, François I, who had money enough to appoint Leonardo da Vinci as his premier painter, engineer, and architect, failed to live up to his side of the agreement with the sultan to provision the Ottoman fleet and pay its sailors.29 Plans for a joint campaign against Genoa were not carried out either, although in the summer of 1544 the French supported Ottoman attacks on the Italian coast as the Ottoman fleet was returning to Istanbul.30 When the fleet arrived home, the Ottomans learned that François I had signed a peace treaty with Charles V. But as an example of shifting European alliances, Pope Paul IV (in office 1555–1559) proposed a Crusade against the Habsburgs, including a joint French-Ottoman attack on Naples and Sicily.31 ‘The Turks [Ottomans] will not fail us!’ he proclaimed, although the plans came to nought.32
Benefiting from Spain’s expulsion of its Muslims, the Ottomans utilised the Moriscos—Muslims converted to Catholicism who remained in Spain—as spies and agents. They encouraged uprisings in Spain by supplying firearms and ammunition, coordinating the Morisco attacks with their own naval campaigns in North Africa.33 The Ottomans facilitated contacts between Moriscos and Moroccans and encouraged them to unite with Protestants in the Habsburg Netherlands against their oppressive overlords. Recognising that the Ottomans tolerated religious minorities whereas their own emperor did not, anti-Habsburg rebels in the Netherlands promoted the slogan ‘Rather Turkish than Popish’, even minting the motto on crescent-bedecked coins in the 1570s.34 Whether actualised or not, the threat of Ottoman support of Morisco and Protestant rebellion in that era—Selim II and the Dutch prince William I of Orange sent secret envoys to each other’s courts to discuss such plans—diverted Habsburg forces and helped the Ottomans accomplish their military aims.35
By 1510 the Ottomans were sending naval forces to assist the Mamluks in keeping the Portuguese at bay in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, building and manning a fleet at Suez.36 Throughout the sixteenth century, beginning in the 1530s during the reign of Suleiman I, as they battled the Habsburgs for control of the Western Mediterranean and the North African coast, the Ottomans also attempted to expel the Portuguese from the region stretching from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.37 This led to repeated unsuccessful attempts to capture the strategic Strait of Hormuz, which controls the entrance to the Persian Gulf; the island of Bahrain, jutting into the Persian Gulf from Arabia; and Diu, Gujarat, on the northwest coast of what is today India. The Ottomans annexed Eritrea (1557) and southern Egypt, threatening the Portuguese naval base in Mozambique. Ottoman navies attacked Portuguese shipping as far away as Bengal and sent firearms and special forces to assist Muslim rulers and would-be rulers and promote uprisings from East Africa to Southeast Asia. They used their navies to conquer and control commercial entrepôts and maritime choke points. They sent tax and trade officials throughout the region to maximise customs revenues. They regularly escorted large numbers of imperial-owned ships importing spices from Southeast and South Asia to Egypt. They used the newfound wealth to fill the coffers of Ottoman provinces. South Asia witnessed the growth of Ottoman Muslim merchant communities.
To gain knowledge about their new maritime regions, Suleiman I’s Greek-convert grand vizier and very close childhood friend Ibrahim Pasha (in office 1523–1536) commissioned two works. The first was authored by Piri Reis, the former pirate and navigator, commander of the Ottoman fleet at Suez, and admiral of the Indian Ocean fleet. At his own initiative in 1513, Piri Reis drew one of the earliest surviving maps of the coastline of the New World based on Christopher Columbus’s map, and he presented it to Selim I in Cairo after he had conquered Egypt.38 Importantly, the main focus of his map was the part depicting the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, which Selim I may have used by detaching it from the part depicting the Western Hemisphere. The section containing the Eastern Hemisphere no longer survives. But the existence of the map demonstrates that the Ottomans were interested in the latest Western European discoveries and imagined themselves as rulers of a universal empire. Ibrahim Pasha also obtained the Portuguese court’s official chart of Ferdinand Magellan’s discoveries (1519).
Aiming to convince Suleiman I to expand Ottoman forces in the Indian Ocean, Ibrahim Pasha authorised Piri Reis to compose the Book of the Sea (1526), the greatest work of Ottoman cartography. It is a comprehensive atlas and navigational guide to the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and Indian Ocean basin that includes the voyages of Vasco da Gama (died 1524) in these areas, Christopher Columbus’s ‘discoveries’, and an explanation of the latest technological developments. Ibrahim Pasha also instructed Matrakçı Nasuh to compose the Description of the Stages of Sultan Suleiman Khan’s Campaign in the Two Iraqs (1537), following the progress of Suleiman I from Istanbul to Baghdad in 1533–1536. It is an illustrated account mapping and describing the new territories, focusing on ports and fortresses, marking distances between halting stations, and distinguishing between friend and foe. Its geographical and topographical information and description of the principal buildings of each city is as valuable as Piri Reis’s Book of the Sea, which showed coastal towns and features. It also celebrates the expansion of Ottoman rule. Nasuh refers to Suleiman I as master of the seven climes, as was Alexander the Great. Suleiman I’s chronicler, Kemalpashazade, author of the Chronicles of the Ottoman Dynasty (begun in 1502), also referred to the ruler as ‘majestic Sultan of sea and land, issuer of edicts for the seven climes, whose awe-inspiring voice penetrates the six corners of the world and commands the attention of all humankind’.
The Ottomans launched their biggest ever fleet in the Indian Ocean in 1538. It was one of the most massive armadas appearing in that ocean since Ming China’s expeditions to the coast of East Africa at the beginning of the fifteenth century, led by the Muslim court eunuch and commander Cheng Ho.39 The Ottoman armada besieged the important port of Diu in Gujarat, India, which, like other ports in the region, had a sizeable community of resident Ottoman Muslim traders with their own head merchant. The siege may have failed in part due to disagreements with the Ottomans’ disparate allies, an assembly of Muslims from East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. But more significant was that, as a consequence of that campaign and after failed earlier attempts in the 1520s, the Ottomans were able to take Aden and Mocha and establish Yemen as a province. This gave them a stable base in the Arabian Sea and a direct link from Istanbul to Egypt through the Red Sea.40
The Ottoman governor of Yemen would carry the title admiral of the Indian Ocean; the Ottoman fleet at Suez would be renamed the Indian armada and its commander admiral of the Indies.41 With their arsenal and shipyard at Suez, Egypt, the Ottomans attempted to build a canal connecting the Red Sea and the Nile (1531–1532). After 1538, the Ottomans were also able to establish rule over Surat, replacing Diu as the main port for trade between the Red Sea and Gujarat. Around 1540, Albanian-born grand vizier Lutfi Pasha advised Suleiman I that although many previous sultans had ruled the land, few had ruled the sea. It was time to overcome Christian Europeans in naval warfare.
Having occupied Tabriz and taken Baghdad in 1534, the Ottomans conquered Basra near the head of the Persian Gulf in Iraq in 1546. Their aims were to take the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow gateway between the Gulf of Oman and the entire Persian Gulf, and to attack the Portuguese in India. From there, they would be able to launch naval expeditions to South Asia. They even planned to send troops and artillery from Egypt to the sultan of Aceh in Sumatra in Southeast Asia. The purpose was to help that Muslim ruler gain control of the Malacca Strait and thus cut off Portuguese access to the spice trade in Southeast Asia and hinder their vessels travelling to China and Japan.
In 1552, Ottoman forces led by nonagenarian Piri Reis sacked Muscat in Oman and besieged the Strait of Hormuz, but without success. Having failed to attack the secondary target of Bahrain and contrary to orders, Piri Reis returned to Suez with the booty and captives gained in the campaign, having abandoned his fleet at Basra. He was arrested and executed for the crime.42 Two years later, the Ottoman fleet of Seydi Ali Reis was ambushed and defeated by the Portuguese off the coast of Muscat. Nevertheless, Ottoman Muslim merchants and commercial agents were dispersed across all the major ports of the region including Cairo, Aden, Mocha, Jidda, Suez, Massawa, Diu, and Goa, filling Ottoman coffers and dwarfing the levels of trade achieved in Mamluk Egypt and by their Portuguese rivals.
Despite setbacks, elements of the Ottoman administration still retained big naval dreams. One of the most notable was a Serbian Collection recruit, Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (assassinated in 1579 by a deviant dervish), who counted his father-in-law, Selim II, as well as the sultana (the sultan’s wife, descended from Venetian nobles), Jewish courtiers, Venetian ambassadors, and members of the Ottoman Greek elite among his private circle.43 Sokollu Mehmed Pasha sent artillery experts to Aceh and other agents throughout the Indian Basin to incite rebellion against the Portuguese. By the end of the 1560s, under Suleiman I’s successor, Selim II, the grand vizier found that a number of Muslim rulers and factions in the region apparently wished for their territories to be annexed to the imperial domains, including Aceh, Gujarat, and the Maldives. Even Calicut in Kerala and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) desired to be made part of the Ottoman realm and their leaders to convert to Islam.44 A major expedition to Sumatra to make these dreams a reality was prepared in 1567 but averted due to rebellion in Yemen.45 The Ottomans sent hundreds of musketeers to fight as guerrillas on the side of Morisco rebels in Andalusia, Spain.46
With Sultan Selim II being less interested in matters of state, it was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha who took the lead. As part of a broad vision of connecting Muslims across Eurasia, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha in 1568 planned to build a canal connecting the Mediterranean and Suez to improve efforts against the Portuguese in India. In 1569 he proposed another, linking the Don and Volga rivers in southern Russia.47 The canal would connect the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and allow Ottoman fleets to attack Russia and the Safavids. It would also facilitate the trade and pilgrimage of Sunni Muslims from Central Asia threatened by Russian advancement in the Volga basin, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea region, and, in a sense, link them to India. With so much happening in the eastern hemisphere, it would make little sense for the Ottomans to have any interest in the West. Ottoman works analysing the Spanish conquest of the New World, such as Hasan al-Su’udi’s History of the West Indies (1582), focused more on Ottoman strategy regarding the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean than on the Americas, and on the necessity of digging a Suez canal.48
But neither the Suez canal nor the Don-Volga canal was realised. The failure of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha’s global plans for the region stretching from Western Europe to Southeast Asia is blamed by contemporary historians on a Jewish ‘culprit’, Joseph Nasi.49 Nasi is fingered for daring to propose focusing on the Mediterranean and conquering Venetian Cyprus instead. Cyprus had been a Venetian colony for nearly a century. Validated by a legal opinion from his sheikhulislam, Selim II in 1570 broke the peace treaty with Venice and launched an assault on the island in the eastern Mediterranean. To finance the campaign, the sultan confiscated Ottoman church lands and then made their owners buy them back at considerable profit to the imperial treasury.50 Ottoman forces captured Nicosia in the centre of the island in 1570 and Famagusta on the east coast following a nearly yearlong siege in 1571. The victory caused a Christian alliance calling itself ‘the Holy League’ made up of Venice, Spain, the Knights Hospitaller, and the pope to send ships to confront the Ottomans.
Commanded by Don John of Austria, the Holy League navy met the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Corinth near the island of Nafpaktos (Lepanto). Involving nearly five hundred ships of war, the Battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571 was one of the biggest naval battles to have ever taken place in the Mediterranean. The Christian forces included not only hundreds of armed warships but half a dozen large galleys fitted out with very large cannons. The Ottoman fleet at Lepanto did not possess any of the larger ships with heavy cannons and was routed.51 The Holy League was able to sink 200 of the Ottomans’ 230 vessels.52 It was a massacre at close quarters, turning the sea red. Over fifty thousand seamen were lost. Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha responded defiantly to the Venetian representative in Istanbul with a hairy metaphor: ‘A cut off arm does not grow back, but a shaved beard regrows stronger than before’.53 That winter, he rebuilt the navy and used diplomacy to undermine the Christian coalition raised against the Ottomans. In 1573, Venice surrendered Cyprus to the Ottomans. The next year, the Ottomans conquered Tunis.
By the end of the sixteenth century, most of North Africa—including Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—was nominally under Ottoman control. There were failures, however, such as the 1565 siege of the Knights Hospitaller on Malta, who despite Ottoman efforts were able to control traffic in the western Mediterranean. There were setbacks, such as the Battle of Lepanto, memorialised everywhere in Western Europe as a victory, including in a massive early seventeenth-century Italian painting on display at the foot of the main staircase at Ham House outside London.54 But thanks to their century of seaborne activity, the Ottomans had reached the peak of their global political power and prosperity. The Muslim Friday sermon was now read in the Ottoman sultan’s name from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia, and perhaps even in China. Ottoman spies, merchants, and soldiers operated from North Africa to Indonesia. The Ottoman-Habsburg battle for control of the western Mediterranean ended with a truce in 1580. Peace and prosperity were at hand.55
Muslims had achieved the same level of technical advances as the Portuguese and had succeeded in holding them back, making them merely one of many empires engaged in the global trade of the Indian Ocean.56 The Ottomans had incorporated the latest Western European knowledge in maps depicting the entire, connected globe, including a separate landmass which they, too, called the New World.57 The Ottomans had reached the extent of their naval expansion, and the Age of Discovery was over. Why should they venture west across the Atlantic Ocean? They had already achieved much in the East.
Many stereotypes about Muslims have been used to answer the question of why, despite their wealth and splendour and advanced military technology, the Ottomans (and Muslim kingdoms more generally) never ‘discovered’ the Americas. Or why they were never bold enough to venture west into the unknown world. Did they have no vision for world hegemony like other empires?
As a civilisational indictment, the Ottomans and other Islamic empires were assumed to be insular. The Ottomans were described by an influential modern Turkish historian as impervious to change, ‘self-satisfied, inward-looking and closed to outside influences’.58 To be ‘inward-looking’ was to lack intellectual curiosity about the ‘other’, to be adverse to change and progress, to be ‘anti-modern’. The Ottomans allegedly ‘never fully broke away from the values and outlook of Near Eastern culture, sanctified’ by Islamic law, ‘and never wished to understand the mentality’ that had allowed Western European empires to rise. While European Christians sought to describe the Ottomans in objective terms, it was said, the Ottomans, ‘convinced of their own religious and political superiority, closed their eyes to the outside world’. In 1580, the observatory in Istanbul, built in 1577 by the chief astrologer, astronomer Takiyyüddin Mehmed—which was considered no less advanced than the most modern in Europe—was blamed by the sheikhulislam for an outbreak of plague and razed. This fact was adduced in support of the conclusion that this meant a ‘clear victory of religious fanaticism over the rational sciences’—a spectacular accusation to be inferred from one event.59
In this interpretation, Islam supposedly held the Ottomans back from venturing across oceans. Religion was used to explain how the West rose to global hegemony and colonised Muslim-majority societies. To explain the Ottomans’ alleged lack of interest in other societies, some posited that Islam was so conservative that it hindered progress, capitalism, and the use of the printing press, and that it kept Muslims from benefiting from European scientific developments. The Ottomans were depicted as little more than warriors from Central Asia. Any adoption of Western knowledge was trivial and had no effect on their core Islamic beliefs.
Like the Romans, they were alleged to have had no interest in venturing to sea. Muslims played no role in international trade, the story went, as they apparently felt repugnance for commerce and left it in the hands of Christians and Jews or even foreigners instead. They could construct only a land-based empire grounded in an agricultural economy, not a maritime empire like that of the superior Greeks, which was based on control of commercial entrepôts and trade in commodities.
Muslims also allegedly viewed Christian Europe as ‘an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, from which the sun-lit world of Islam had little to fear and less to learn’.60 Although Western Europeans had long been curious about the Ottomans, the Ottomans were alleged to lack a reciprocal interest in Western European developments and ignored what was happening there, seeing even political and economic changes as irrelevant.61 They only ‘found it necessary from time to time to collect and compile some information, but until the end of the eighteenth century their information was usually superficial, often inaccurate, and almost always out of date’.62 What kept them back was an alleged feeling of superiority, when they were anything but: ‘Masked by the imposing military might of the Ottoman Empire, the peoples of Islam continued until the dawn of the modern age to cherish the conviction of the immeasurable and immutable superiority of their own civilisation to all others’.63
But such stereotypes are easily countered. Ottoman society was open to newcomers. For example, there was a constant stream of Western European Jews who brought to the empire new geographical and medical knowledge and translated many important works while holding positions at court from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The fact that Hebrew printing presses thrived in the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century is also overlooked, as if Jews were not part of Ottoman society. Islamic religion and culture did not hinder cross-cultural trade. Ottoman trade was not solely in the hands of its Christian and Jewish subjects. Ottoman Muslims traded in lands not ruled by Muslims. From the fourteenth century, Turkish merchants appeared in Byzantine Constantinople. By the fifteenth century they were engaged in international commerce in Ancona and Venice. In the sixteenth century Ottoman Muslim merchants operated in South Asia and Java. There were so many Muslim merchants in Venice in the late sixteenth century that, fearing how they were ‘leading boys away, keeping company with Christian women’, authorities constructed an inn to house them and laws to regulate their residency in the Venetian Republic.64 Venice, which introduced the Jewish ghetto to Europe, was also the only city with a Muslim residential compound, the Fondaco dei Turchi, a former palazzo on the Grand Canal that included a mosque.65
No Ottoman religious authority hindered Ottoman subjects—neither elite nor commoner—from international trade or trading with foreigners. They did not fear ‘cultural contamination’ from interaction with Christians—or Hindus or Buddhists for that matter. On the contrary, Ottoman authorities regularly intervened with foreign rulers to assist and protect their subjects—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—who traded abroad and complained of being arrested or of having their goods confiscated by local authorities.
Rather than being inward looking and conservative, Ottoman merchants like those trading in Venice introduced products and innovations that had profound effects on Ottoman cultural, economic, and social life. New innovations included changing commercial practices, agricultural activity (cultivating tobacco), culinary habits (consuming tomato paste), leisure activities (card games), and personal items (watches, clocks, eyeglasses).66 Coffee—first brewed by Ethiopians and then consumed by Sufis in Yemen in the fifteenth century—became a global commodity in the sixteenth century after the Ottomans conquered the region, exporting the bean from the port of Mocha. The first coffeehouses opened in Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and then in Istanbul in the midst of the sixteenth-century seaborne expansion.67 None other than the Ottoman grand admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa Pasha added a coffee chamber to his home in Istanbul, where ‘sugary sherbets and musky coffee flowed like rivers’ at his banquets.68 One can gain a sense—or earthy smell—of the intoxicating, innovative effect of coffee by visiting the sweetest-smelling corner of Istanbul today, in the same neighbourhood where the first coffeehouse in the city was established in the mid-sixteenth century. The coffee roaster is located in the bustling alley just outside the western entrance of the Egyptian or Spice Market, where such new consumer products as coffee would have been sold. Why would the Islamic empires need to journey west when the richest and greatest states at the time were all located in the Mediterranean and the East? Intent on promoting a triumphant vision of Western hegemony, such views fail to consider the rest of the story.
The Age of Discovery was in fact an accident. Seeking to take over trade with the East, the Western European empires ended up lost in the Americas, a mishap that would fortuitously serve as a windfall funding their rise to power. From the Western European point of view, the Muslim kingdoms were an obstacle. Rather than take the direct route across the Mediterranean and Red Sea and then through the Indian Ocean to the Malabar Coast of India, centre of the world spice trade, Vasco da Gama travelled all the way down the west coast of Africa, around the cape, and then up the east coast in 1497 because the Ottomans and the Mamluk Empire in Egypt controlled the eastern Mediterranean trade. He aimed to find a passage to India to break their monopoly. Lacking the necessary maritime knowledge, da Gama hired an Arab or Gujarati navigator in Kenya to pilot him and his crew to India. When they arrived in Calicut the next year, they were met at first by South Asians astonished that the Europeans did not know Arabic. They sent for Castilian- and Genoese-speaking Muslim Tunisians residing in Calicut who asked them what in the devil they were doing there and why they had travelled so far.69 Da Gama was astounded, for he never imagined he would hear his language spoken so far from Portugal. He replied that he was seeking cinnamon (spices) and Christians.
When Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, he was searching for a new route to India that bypassed the Mamluk-controlled eastern Mediterranean, and so made sure to take a translator who spoke Arabic. Columbus wrote in a letter addressed to the king and queen of Spain, ‘In this present year 1492, after Your Highnesses completed the war against the Muslims who ruled in Europe’—whom he refers to as ‘the enemies of the false doctrine of Muhammad’—and ‘after having expelled all the Jews out of your realms and dominions… Your Highnesses in this same month of January commanded me to set out with a sufficient armada to the said regions of India’ to ‘convert the people there to our Holy Faith’.70
Columbus envisioned a crusading plan to gain the assistance of powerful monarchs in the East—who reportedly desired to become Christian—and together take Jerusalem, which at that time was controlled by the Mamluks, for Christendom.71 Filled with messianic hopes, he carried a popular book of prognostication with him, and would later write his own. Approaching Cuba, he compared the silhouette of a mountain to a mosque. Judaism and Islam haunted Columbus’s imagination. As Columbus knew then, 1492 witnessed interrelated events—the expulsion of the Jews, the defeat and subjugation of Granada (the last Muslim kingdom in Spain), and the colonisation of the Americas. The latter led to the genocide of the native population and importation of African slaves to exploit the continent’s wealth for Spain’s enrichment.
The Spanish Christian war against Spanish Jews and Spanish Muslims to ‘purify’ the peninsula went hand in hand with the voyages to the Americas. Columbus’s voyages were financed by confiscated Jewish and Muslim wealth. Columbus could not depart from Cádiz; he had to settle for the port of Palos (today called Palos de la Frontera) because the shipping lanes were filled with tens of thousands of fleeing Jews. They fled first to North Africa (Morocco mainly) or to Italy, and the majority continued on to the Ottoman Empire, where they reestablished their lives in the ports of Salonica (today Thessaloniki, Greece) and Istanbul. After facing burnings of holy books and forced conversions, like the Jews, the Spanish Muslims were also given the choice of baptism or expulsion. The last Muslims in Spain would be expelled over a century later, between 1609 and 1614.
Muslim ghosts haunt Spanish history. Miguel de Cervantes, who believed it would be better to die in battle than not to have fought for God and king, was wounded by the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto. Several years later, he was captured at sea and enslaved in Algiers. After his release he gained fame through his novel Don Quixote (1605–1615), a fundamental text in the Western literary canon, written as the last Muslims were expelled from Spain. Cervantes’s conceit is that the history of Don Quixote he relates is a relic of the former Spanish Muslim culture, for it is from an old Arabic book written by a fictional Muslim historian found in the market in Toledo and translated by a Moor into Castilian.72 Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-Slayer, became the patron saint of Spain after the Muslims were expelled. In churches throughout Spain, such as at Córdoba, one can view statues of him astride a horse whose hooves are crushing the heads of Muslims.
The Muslims, too, fled to North Africa and then to the Ottoman Empire, taking up abode in the very same neighbourhoods in Istanbul as the Jews, especially in Galata, where a Catholic church was converted into the ‘Arab Mosque’. Just as the Jews and Muslims of Spain were subjected to forced conversion, massacre, and expulsion, so, too, would the native peoples in the Spanish colonies of the Americas face forced conversion, massacre, and genocide. But, along with the story of how fleeing Jewish, converso, and Muslim European refugees found shelter in the Ottoman Empire, becoming valued subjects in their new home—something unimaginable in the Europe they left behind—these tragic elements of the story are dropped from the triumphant version of the Age of Discovery.
Western expansion occurred overseas as Portugal, Spain, and then France, the Netherlands, and England conquered territory in the ‘unknown’ Atlantic world. The Ottomans, by contrast, conquered territory in the ‘known’ world of Europe and Asia. Despite setbacks, in a little over a century from the conquest of Constantinople the Ottomans grew into a maritime power, partly by incorporating Christian renegades into the highest ranks of their navy. Controlling sea lanes, the Ottomans enlarged their coffers by tapping into the rich vein of trade in spices and silk. Acting as custodian of the most holy Islamic pilgrimage sites, they gained legitimacy among Muslims.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese aimed to control shipping routes in and out of the Red Sea, establish a monopoly over the spice trade in the Indian Ocean, defeat Mamluk Egypt, and take Jerusalem for Christendom. But it was the Ottomans who accomplished most of these goals, recapturing the third-holiest Muslim city for Islam.73 In the sixteenth century the Ottomans became a commercial maritime power nearly comparable with Portugal and Spain. From the beginning, the Ottomans deployed an innovative, monetised political and economic system in these regions, utilising tax farms and paying officials in cash, instead of in land grants.74 The Ottomans never established a monopoly over the spice trade, nor did they ever aim to do so.75
We could believe in the triumphant, dramatic narrative of Western European intellectual and cultural superiority giving rise to a curiosity to venture into the world and the subsequent oceanic voyages, discoveries, construction of colonial empires, and deserved global dominion. We could view Muslims as outsiders or hindrances to this effort, or as passive recipients of enlightened European rule. Or we can add the Ottomans to the Age of Discovery as an expanding, seaborne empire, making new discoveries of its own, growing its territory manyfold, and reaching the pinnacle of wealth and splendour.
Should we believe the Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque, duke of Goa, who reported to his king in 1513 that even the rumour of the Portuguese navy coming caused Mamluk and then Ottoman ships to vanish, deserting the Red Sea? Or should we accept the claim of Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who reported to his government in 1525 that the Ottoman navy in the Red Sea, whose ships resembled fire-breathing dragons, was so powerful that none but those who saw the ships could believe it nor describe them, that their very existence meant the inevitable annihilation of the Portuguese navy? We were formerly inclined only to accept the first; now we may also consider the second. Both are exaggerated and display the same mindset.
In his The Mirror of Countries, while narrating his visit to the court of the Mughal emperor Humayun in the 1550s, the Ottoman admiral Seydi Ali relates what he had learned about China. He had been told in the Gujarati port of Surat by Ottoman Muslims that in China, diverse Muslim worshippers desired to have the Friday sermon read in the name of their own rulers. But Ottoman Muslim worshippers appealed to the khan of China, declaring that only their emperor was the custodian of Mecca and Medina. The khan, who was not a Muslim, agreed, decreeing that the sermon could be read only in the name of the Ottoman sultan. The Ottoman dynasty was apparently recognised as the suzerain of all Muslim communities stretching from Istanbul to China. Impressed by the story, the Mughal emperor addressed Sultan Suleiman I as ‘Caliph of the World’.76 Such a title would not have been bestowed had it not been for Ottoman efforts establishing themselves as a seaborne empire in the Age of Discovery.