HISTORIANS ARE KNOWN for their love of maps, which illuminate not only the physical contours of their geographic subjects but also the ambitious mindsets of their makers. Over two decades ago, I was conducting research in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul for my first book. Off-limits to the hordes of tourists that inundated the palace grounds six days a week, the small library was refreshingly quiet. Located in the former prayer space of a diminutive red-brick mosque built by Mehmed II in the fifteenth century, the library is lined with brilliant blue tiles with intricate green and red floral patterns. A small panel depicts the Ka’ba at Mecca, the black, cube-shaped shrine that is Islam’s holiest place. Containing one reading table for researchers and another facing it for staff to watch over them, the room was freezing cold in winter, lacking heat and often electricity. To write or type on a laptop, researchers had to wear thin leather gloves or winter gloves with the fingers cut off. In summer it was cloyingly hot, humid, and dark, the windows shuttered to block out the sunlight, the dust, and the noise.
The reading room offered one ray of hope, for its internal door led to one of the richest manuscript collections in the world, a place only the library staff were allowed to enter. But one had to come prepared. One could not ask to see just any valuable work from the past, such as, say, something in Armenian, Greek, or Hebrew from Mehmed II’s personal library. Scholars were required to declare their research interests well in advance and have them approved by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry, and Culture Ministry. One could not simply change research topic midtrip. What I usually read were seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicles. Some came in dark-red leather bindings, sometimes frayed or bug eaten, written on paper with a background of marbled swirls, the script accentuated in gold-leaf lettering. What a novelist once wrote about another library is true of that reading room: ‘Books and silence filled the room, and a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mould, a strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets and dust’.1
Although I experienced an acute case of document jealousy whenever the researchers near me were given a golden illuminated Seljuk Qur’an or a sixteenth-century copy of Ferdowsi’s Persian Book of Kings, each scintillating with their brilliantly painted miniatures, nothing was as remarkable as what I saw once thanks to a Japanese television crew filming a documentary on Asian seafaring. One day, I opened the five-hundred-year-old intricately carved mosque door to view the surviving segment of Piri Reis’s famous early sixteenth-century world map depicting Spain and West Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and the South American coastline, bathed in bright artificial light.
The white-gloved Turkish librarians unrolled it, spreading its gazelle-skin parchment out in the small room, revealing its precious, colourful detail inch by inch to the appreciative camera crew. At his own initiative, Piri Reis of Gallipoli, a former corsair and future Ottoman navy admiral, had drawn one of the earliest surviving maps of the coastline of the New World. He based it on Christopher Columbus’s original, which is lost, and even interviewed a crew member from Columbus’s voyages. To produce for the sultan one of the most complete and accurate maps in the world, Piri Reis had consulted ancient Ptolemaic, medieval Arab, and contemporary Portuguese and Spanish maps. Imagining themselves as rulers of a universal empire and rivalling the Portuguese in the battle for the seas from Egypt to Indonesia, the Ottomans were interested in keeping up with the latest Western European discoveries. Why weren’t these connections better known in the West today? Had the Ottomans participated in what is known as the Age of Discovery? What role did they play in European and Asian history?
Like its language, the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1288–1922) was not simply Turkish. Nor was it made up only of Muslims. It was not a Turkish empire. Like the Roman Empire, it was a multiethnic, multilingual, multiracial, multireligious empire that stretched across Europe, Africa, and Asia. It incorporated part of the territory the Romans had ruled. As early as 1352 and as late as the dawn of the First World War, the Ottoman dynasty controlled parts of Southeastern Europe, and at its height it governed almost a quarter of Europe’s land area. From 1369 to 1453, the Byzantine city of Adrianople (today Edirne, Turkey), located on the Southeastern European territory of Thrace, functioned as the second seat of the Ottoman dynasty. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire—or Byzantium, remembered as the Byzantine Empire—served as the Ottoman capital for nearly five centuries, beginning with its conquest in 1453. It was not given the new name of Istanbul until 1930, seven years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic amid the ruins of the empire. If for nearly five hundred years the Ottoman Empire had straddled East and West, Asia and Europe, why had its dual nature been forgotten? Had accepted ideas about it changed?
Sometimes it takes a novel to help us understand the true nature of a thing. Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle weaves a tale of identity swapping that questions the received wisdom about East and West, the Ottoman Empire, and the rest of Europe. Set in the seventeenth century, at the height of Ottoman confidence and territorial expansion, the book begins with an Ottoman Muslim astrologer known as Hoja being given custody of an Italian slave in Istanbul. The slave, a young, unnamed scholar who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hoja, had been captured by pirates and sold in the Istanbul slave market. The narrator, whom we believe at this point to be the Italian, declares the resemblance between himself and his new custodian to be eerie. Upon first sight, he thinks he is looking at himself. Eager to learn about the scientific and intellectual advances in Western Europe, Hoja promises to free his doppelgänger once the Italian has taught him everything he knows, from astronomy to medicine. What he really wants, however, is to understand everything about his lookalike, seeking an answer to the question ‘Why am I what I am’?2
Hoja and the slave spend months sitting opposite each other, writing down all their recollections in an effort to discover the character of the other. At first, Hoja is incapable of answering the question of who he is, other than by declaring what he is not. The slave insists that Hoja write about his faults: ‘He had his negative sides like everyone else, and if he delved into them he would find his true self’. By writing about his own faults, Hoja would come to understand how others have become who they are. The slave, who hopes to gain his freedom by turning the tables and proving himself superior to his master, believes that, through this process of self-reflection and faultfinding, Hoja might find himself as contemptible as his slave. What they end up with instead is a sort of equality. Standing next to each other, gazing into the mirror, they see how the two of them are in fact one and the same. Hoja decides that they will switch identities and places. He will take up the slave’s life in Venice, and the slave will take up his in Istanbul.3
Using their combined scientific knowledge, Hoja and his slave create an incredible new weapon, which is used by the Ottoman army at the siege of the novel’s namesake white castle in Poland. The pure white castle set against the background of a black forest, however, is ‘beautiful and unattainable’. Stuck in a swamp, the weapon fails. Disgraced and fearing for his life, Hoja sets off for Venice in the guise of the Italian slave, while his Italian double takes up Hoja’s life as an Ottoman scholar.4 Because people the world over are so similar to one another, it seems, they can easily switch places.
While the reader is led to believe that the two men exchange lives at the white castle, by the end of the novel one cannot determine who is narrator, who is master, who is slave, or even whether master and slave are the same person. Through his doubled character Hoja, Pamuk asks the reader to consider where the boundary between East and West lies, and whether Muslim and Christian—the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe—are so different after all. As the Italian declares of his Turkish doppelgänger in the end, ‘I loved him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself’.5
Like Pamuk’s novel, The Ottomans demonstrates that the Ottoman Empire is not, as it is usually perceived, unrelated to Europe. The Ottomans ruled over an empire that was partly in Asia but also partly in Europe. It was a European empire that remains an integral part of European culture and history. By this I do not mean that the Ottomans are a part of European history because they occupied Europeans’ territory and minds—causing fear and distrust, curiosity and admiration.6 This is not a book about the place of the Ottomans in European political thought. This is a book that asks the reader to look at Europe—both as an idea and as a geography—as a whole, to conceptualise a Europe that is not merely Christian. Imagine, if you will, a Europe that is Europe whether it is ruled by Christians or by Muslims. Imagine that the boundary of Europe did not end at the walls of Vienna—the edge of the Holy Roman Empire, the scene of two failed Ottoman sieges. How then might we define Europe, and who might we include as rightfully belonging to it?
It is conventional to interpret the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as a severing of the eastern lands of the Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) from Europe.7 But does European territory cease belonging to Europe when it is ruled by Muslims? According to the Ottomans, their advance into Europe meant that they were the inheritors of Byzantium and were thus to be considered the new Romans. These Muslim rulers of Europe saw themselves as the rightful inheritors of Rome, not by virtue of the incorporation of territory alone but because of their vision of building a universal empire. The Ottomans have been referred to as Europe’s Muslim emperors and caliphs as often as they have been seen as the Middle East’s caesars and ‘the Romans of the Muslim world’.8 Why not refer to them simply as Romans? Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Turks referred to the Ottoman rulers as caesars and their dominion as the Roman Empire, and, beginning with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, some Western European writers did too. Some posited that the Ottomans were descendants of the Trojans. Others worried about the legitimacy of Ottoman claims to the inheritance of Roman rights. One sixteenth-century papal advisor noted that the sultan ‘often says that the Empire of Rome and of the whole of the West belongs to him by right, as he is the legitimate successor of the Emperor Constantine, who transferred the empire to Constantinople’.9 Why have we forgotten what Europeans thought five hundred years ago?
In fact, the Ottomans have been treated as poorly as the Byzantines. Both the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire—whose legacy the Ottoman dynasty inherited and whose capital city it made its own—were long-lasting, centralised empires that to this day stand outside the standard Western narratives about the formation of Europe.10 Both are held up to later, Western European benchmarks of development and history such as the Renaissance and Reformation and found lacking. Think of what comes to mind when we use the term ‘Byzantine’ today: medieval, backward, Oriental, exotic, religiously distinct, and unfathomable due to the hurdle of language and orthography. Because the religiosity of both empires has been overemphasised, their secular aspects are less often investigated. At a certain point in both their histories they have been portrayed as decadent, corrupt, and in a state of irrevocable decline. Both the Byzantines and the Ottomans have been depicted predominantly in the negative as the antithesis of the West.
But when we consider how these empires thought of themselves, we realise how false these views are. Both empires saw themselves as the heirs to Rome and claimed Europeanness. The Ottomans called their Southeastern European provinces Rûmeli (land of the Romans). Rûm was the Turkish way of saying Rome, the core territory of the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and western Anatolia.11 This view of the Ottomans as insiders raises the question of who owns or inherits an empire, who a civilisation, who a continent? What do we count or discount as historical continuity? Who bears historical responsibility for what? What happens when both history and responsibility are shared?
The histories of the Byzantines and the Ottomans are subject to the nationalist and religious agendas of their modern-day counterparts—the Byzantines to the Greeks, the Ottomans to the Turks. Today, these agendas are tied to visions of restoring history formerly belonging to ‘their’ empire, such as when Turkish ‘neo-Ottomanism’ glorifies former conquests and denies former atrocities. History is used for political ends whenever Greek donors endow university chairs in ancient, Byzantine, and modern Hellenic or Greek studies that ignore that the Ottomans ruled what is today Greece for over five hundred years, or when the Turkish Republic endows chairs in Ottoman studies that gloss over the significant inheritance of Byzantine and Greek peoples, institutions, and attitudes. The way we remember the past would look quite different if we instead referred to both the Byzantines and the Ottomans as Romans, which is how they viewed themselves.
Acknowledging the Ottoman dynasty as part of European history allows us to see that the Ottomans were not separate from the Roman Empire and did not seek to be, but rather claimed to inherit universal rule over that former empire. They did not evolve in parallel with Europe; their story is the unacknowledged part of the story the West tells about itself.
The Ottomans actually partook in many aspects of European religious and political development long attributed to Western Europeans alone. Recognition of this shared history of dynasties and societies in the whole of Europe emerges when we focus on the Eurasian empire of the Ottomans. Rather than being an attempt to prove that the Ottomans measure up to Eurocentric standards, acknowledging their role in European history causes us to expand the meaning of that history and rewrite its basic concepts and frameworks—things such as the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, as well as the meaning of millenarianism and messianism, sexuality and pleasure, absolutism and limited government, slavery and Orientalism, and world war.
Viewing the history of the Ottomans as part and parcel of European history allows us to understand the origins and meaning of concepts and practices such as religious tolerance, secularism, modernity, and even genocide in a different light. We recognise that they began with Muslim Europeans. The conventional claim of European history that Europeans first had to figure out how to live with people of different religions only in the sixteenth century, due exclusively to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, begins to seem improbable. In that story, only then was the concept of tolerance first debated and became a reality of daily life.12 Tolerance, modernity, and secularism emerged for the first time, we are told, in Western Europe only after the ‘wars of religion’ that raged roughly from 1550 to 1650. The first concrete steps were supposedly taken with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a series of treaties that instituted the principle of tolerance of religious minorities. From 1650 to 1700, Europe entered what is celebrated as the Enlightenment, symbolised by John Locke’s seminal essay of 1689, ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’, which opened the way towards a live-and-let-live approach to religious difference and the secular, modern age. With more and more intellectuals promoting tolerance, some enlightened European rulers began to institute it in the eighteenth century.
But the historical record demonstrates that the principles and practices of toleration had already been established at the onset of Ottoman rule in Southeastern Europe in the fourteenth century, a fact made especially visible in Constantinople after the Ottoman conquest of that Byzantine city in 1453. Ottoman religious tolerance was based upon Islamic precedent already introduced to Europe in eighth-century Muslim Spain, and upon nomadic, pre-Islamic Mongol antecedents from the Eurasian steppe—that crossroads of Europe and Asia out of which the Ottomans grew. While full toleration did not exist in medieval Christian Europe, it did exist in medieval Islamic Europe, including in Ottoman domains. Ottoman tolerance is European tolerance.
Why, then, aren’t the Ottomans conventionally included in the history of religious tolerance in Europe? By the time Western Europeans first encountered questions about how to live together, the Ottomans had already figured out the answers to them. These included what rights and privileges each religious group would have, where different groups would worship, how they would pay for the upkeep of their religious community (including its houses of worship and schools), how charity would be raised and distributed, whether people from different groups could intermarry, where they could live, how they could interact socially and economically, how holidays would be celebrated in public, and how each religious group would be governed and its relation to the government.13 In the view of one mid-seventeenth-century English writer, Ottoman toleration of many religions was preferable to the violent enforcing of one, as occurred in Christian Europe.14 Religious civil wars and persecution of those with dissenting beliefs actually continued in Catholic- and Protestant-majority areas of Europe into the eighteenth century.
While Christian Europeans have laid claim to originating the institutions of secularism in the seventeenth century, the Ottomans had for centuries been subordinating religious authority to imperial authority and had made secular law equivalent in force to religious law, surpassing any other European or Islamic polity in this regard. They even institutionalised practices that clearly violated Islamic law and custom in favour of secular law. Why is this not part of the story we tell about when modernity and secularism began?
Although the Ottoman Empire embraced tolerance, religious conversion was vital to its success. The Ottoman dynasty emphasised religious change beginning at the top. In Ottoman Turkish, the only terms for ‘conversion’ denote conversion to Islam. Conversion can go in only one direction; there is no term other than ‘apostasy’ for when a Muslim becomes a Christian or a Jew. One cannot say, ‘A Muslim converted to Christianity’. Accordingly, apostates were executed. Tolerance is not the same as celebrating diversity, coexistence, equality, multiculturalism, or mutual acceptance.15 To tolerate means ‘to suffer, endure, or put up with something objectionable’.16 The tolerating party considers its own religion to be true and the tolerated groups’ religious claims to be false. John Locke famously refused to include Catholics in his conception of tolerance. Tolerance is in fact the expression of a power relationship. Its presence or absence can be wielded as a warning or a threat against a vulnerable group. Tolerance is a state of inequality where the powerful party, such as the ruler, determines whether a less powerful group may exist and to what extent members of that group may be allowed to express their difference. A ruler or regime may discriminate against a group while at the same time tolerating its members being different from the members of the ruling elite. This was how Ottoman tolerance functioned in terms of class, gender, and religious difference.17
In the Ottoman Empire, certain groups—women, Christians and Jews, slaves—were legally subordinate to others—men, Muslims, the free. All religions were not deemed equally valid. Some groups were proscribed, such as Shi’is (Muslims who believe their leader must be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his family), dissident Muslim groups, and Buddhists. Ottoman society was plural, and individuals could at times change groups or positions of power, yet each group had a fixed place within the hierarchy based on class, gender, and religion.
In practice, tolerance of diversity meant creating an empire that was built on the maintenance of difference. The Ottomans did not seek to make all subjects into Muslims or even into Ottomans, the members of the ruling elite. Rather, they fostered institutions—such as the patriarchates, the spiritual offices and jurisdictions of the Armenian and Greek church leaders—that allowed Christians and Jews to go about their personal lives, enjoying cultural, religious, and linguistic rights without much interference or limitation.
Yet at the same time, religious conversion was used as a means of integration into the Ottoman Empire’s highly stratified social fabric. The empire recruited its elite from the cream of the crop of conquered peoples, especially their youth and women, thereby ensuring the dynasty’s greatness and the subject peoples’ subordination. Conquered Christian and Muslim royalty, military and religious leaders, and commoners were all incorporated into the imperial project from the beginning. The Ottoman dynasty intermarried with European royal houses, including the Byzantine and Serbian—yet another reason to include this Muslim imperial family within European history. As cruel, unjust, and violent as it was, especially for women, slavery allowed individuals to be incorporated into the elite levels of society when women joined the harem and boys were inducted into the administration and military. Christians were made into members of the Ottoman ruling elite through cooperation, subordination, or conversion. Like other empires in history, the Ottomans oversaw large-scale demographic change through conversion of the ruled population. What are today the countries of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Serbia, and Turkey underwent massive religious conversion in the Ottoman centuries. Christians and to a lesser extent Jews became Muslims, and the landscape was Islamised to a great extent, the most important churches replaced by mosques, seminaries by madrasas (Islamic colleges), convents by Sufi (mystic) lodges.
Although such regimes as the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250–1517) relied on converted slave soldiers, from whose ranks arose the sultan, the Ottoman Empire relied mainly on converts to make up key elements of its ruling family dynasty, administration, and military, converting massive numbers of people in the process over its first three centuries. It defined membership in essential ranks of the elite class by religious conversion and continually changed its interpretation of its religion. As the astute seventeenth-century English resident of the Ottoman Empire Sir Paul Rycaut observed, ‘No people in the World have ever been more open to receive all sorts of Nations to them, than they’, and ‘the English call it Naturalisation, the French Enfranchisement, and the Turks [Ottomans] call it Becoming a Believer’.18 It truly was an empire of conversion, fostering extensive population change while tolerating the existence of religious groups at variance with the ruler’s religion—nearly until its tragic end.
Tolerance and intolerance were not opposites.19 Tolerance, discrimination, and persecution always went together. At the same time that social and legal hierarchies preserved the peace for centuries, discrimination and division were a fact of daily life and opportunities. For centuries, the Ottomans were open to receiving every type of person as a Muslim, whatever his or her language or background, whether a slave, a commoner, or a member of the elite. But then, in later years, the Ottomans turned away from incorporating diversity and tried to save the empire by remaking it first into an Ottoman Muslim polity and later a more Turkish one. The consequence was that tolerance—such as it was—was replaced by ethnic cleansing and genocide, leading ultimately to the dynasty’s demise.
In the late nineteenth century, a group of intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire merged European Enlightenment thought and Islam, resulting in compelling experiments with constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy. These efforts failed, however, leading to mass bloodshed, including massacres of tens of thousands of Armenians in the 1890s and in 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915. Along with earlier Ottoman religious toleration, why isn’t this genocide considered a part of European history? The fact that German generals and soldiers assisted the Ottomans in committing mass murder during the First World War does make it part of European history. But more importantly, accepting the Ottomans as a European empire allows us to recognise the Armenian genocide as the first genocide committed by a European empire in Europe, one that began in Istanbul. Viewing the Ottomans as part of European history does not mean the Ottoman contribution was always positive. The story of the Ottoman dynasty and its empire that is told in these pages seeks neither to glorify the house of Osman nor to condemn it, but to present all that makes it both different and surprisingly familiar for the general reader.