God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  Selim was also one of the first non-firstborn sons to become sultan, the first to have but one son himself, and the first to depose a sitting sultan. Monomaniacally obsessed with accruing power, Selim systematically and ruthlessly eliminated his domestic and foreign rivals, slaughtering two of his half-brothers in order to gain the throne. A nineteenth-century historian described him in the voluptuously sinister prose of that century as a “sanguinary tyrant, whose fierce blazing eyes and choleric complexion well accorded with his violent nature.” Sending a message to the living as well as the dead, he often kicked the decapitated heads of those he executed. Not for nothing did he come to be known as Selim the Grim (Yavuz, in Turkish). “His eyes betray a cruel streak,” the Venetian doge Andrea Gritti wrote. “Ferocious and cunning,” he was, quite simply, “a warmonger.”

  Selim’s life and reign spanned perhaps the most consequential half-century in world history. He proved the most influential of the line of Osman’s thirty-six sultans—more so than even his son, perhaps the Ottoman Empire’s most famous sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent—his legacy shaping the empire until its end in the twentieth century, along with the geopolitical realities of our own day. As with Christ—though Christians would find the comparison invidious, to say the least—there was the empire and world before Selim, and the empire and world after Selim. We all live in Selim’s shadow, a fitting reflection of another of his sobriquets, “God’s Shadow on Earth.”

  Because of his prominence in Ottoman history and world politics, Selim’s life has been chronicled many times. Ottoman histories written both before and after his death provide many details. The foremost corpus of sources is known collectively as the Selimname, the “Book of Selim,” and it grew out of an effort after Selim’s death to paint the sultan in as flattering a light as possible. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ottoman historians copied and adapted earlier texts, creating a set of distinct yet tightly interlinked versions. In using the Selimname—which is indispensable for any understanding of Selim—we must weigh its often laudatory, nearly hagiographic accounts of Selim’s life against other evidence that is often fleeting or incomplete. Combining a critical reading of the Selimname and other Ottoman sources with contemporary materials from Spain, the Mamluk Empire, Venice, the world of the Indian Ocean, and the Americas provides a balanced view of Selim and his empire and underscores the extent of his global influence.

  GOD’S SHADOW THUS SERVES as a revisionist account, providing a new and more holistic picture of the last five centuries, and demonstrating Islam’s constituent role in forming some of the most fundamental aspects of the history of Europe, the Americas, and the United States. If we do not place Islam at the center of our grasp of world history, we will never understand why Moor-slayers are memorialized on the Texas–Mexico border or, more generally, why we have blindly, and repeatedly, narrated histories that miss major features of our shared past. As we chronicle Selim and his age, a bold new world history emerges, one that overturns shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium. Whether politicians, pundits, and traditional historians like it or not, the world we inhabit is very much an Ottoman one. This is a story only Selim can tell.

  PART ONE

  PRINCE

  (1470–87)

  IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:

  Ottoman lineage

  CHAPTER

  1

  PERFUME OF THE WORLD

  Amasya

  ON A BED OF PURPLE VELVET SHEETS AND GREEN-EMBROIDERED pillows in Amasya’s imperial palace, Gülbahar Hatun gave birth on October 10, 1470. Scribes noted that the royal birth occurred on a Wednesday in the early evening. Simultaneously, just outside the walls of the imperial residence in this landlocked city seventy miles from the Black Sea, a roving Sufi mystic with unkempt hair and a bushy beard held court for a small group of devotees and a growing number of curious listeners. He knew nothing of the goings-on of imperial politics, nor was he a trusted adviser or even an acquaintance of Bayezit, the city’s governor, yet he shared his vision of what was occurring within the palace walls. “Today, at this court which is the abode of prosperity, a fortunate child, a chosen son who is destined to attain happiness, will be born,” the mystic prophesied. “The light of the lamp of his dominion will illumine the horizons; the fragrant scents of his prosperity will perfume the nostrils of the inhabitants of the world. He will become sovereign in the place of his father, a protector of dominions in the dynasty of the line of Osmān.” Such bold prognostications were hardly unique in the Ottoman world. A vast collection of soothsayers and learned men of every ilk roamed the empire, claiming to know an unknowable present as well as the future. Predicting the birth of the next sultan was not uncommon for those trading in prophecy, and every so often these merchants—like all fortune-tellers with well-timed intuition—got something right, enough to keep their customers returning for more.

  The Amasya Sufi’s predictions, however, soon veered off in a peculiar direction. “On his body,” he continued, “the mark of which is happiness and the home of which is good fortune, he will have seven moles of royal omen. In accordance with the number of those moles, he will overcome seven rulers from among the evil-natured enemies, and be made triumphant and victorious.”

  The mention of seven moles was no accident—seven is an auspicious number in Islam. Heaven consists of seven levels; seven verses make up the first chapter of the Qur’an; and pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest place, seven times. Most significantly, the number seven pointed to the seven climes. The whole world was divided into seven regions, or climes—an early notion that the earth has seven continents. Seven moles on a newborn’s body would thus mark him as the future sovereign of the known world.

  As Gülbahar gave a final heave—the child’s father, as was customary, was absent from the scene—her weariness turned to joy and her screams surrendered to cries of elation. The newborn was a boy. His name would be Selim. And, indeed, he had seven moles.

  GÜLBAHAR HAD BEEN BORN a Christian in Albania. The story of how she became Prince Bayezit’s fourth consort underscores the increasingly dominant position of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth-century world—the last century before the emergence of the transoceanic empires of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands. The major empires of the fifteenth century ruled over large swaths of territory and controlled the seas, but they rarely sent navies across oceans. Eurasia was home to the Chinese, Byzantine, Mamluk, Venetian, and Spanish empires; in the Americas were the Incas and the Aztecs; in Africa, the Songhai and Mutapa empires. Before their conquest of the Byzantine capital in 1453, the Ottomans entered the region we know as the Middle East overland, as upstarts from the east, surging into territories controlled by the Byzantine, Mamluk, and Venetian empires—some of the world’s largest states at the time, but still orders of magnitude less powerful than the Chinese or the Aztecs. Albania, one of those hinge territories on the border between empires, was batted back and forth between different imperial overlords.

  The Venetian Empire, nestled on the north and east coasts of the Adriatic Sea, increasingly found itself fending off Ottoman raids on its territories in Albania. After their gains in Anatolia, a few decades before they took Constantinople, the Ottomans had crossed the Dardanelles into Europe to open a new phase in their expansion, marching their armies across the Balkans—then held, tenuously, by the Byzantine Empire—and deep into the forbidding mountains and valleys of coastal Albania. Possession of this stretch of coast allowed naval and pirate ships to monitor traffic, and trade, between the Adriatic and the wider Mediterranean; it was a key choke point in the theater of war between Venice and the Byzantines as they vied for control of the Greek peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean. As was their regular practice, the Ottomans cut deals with local notables, promising to respect their autonomy and offering protection. Many preferred Ottoman sovereignty to Venetian rule and agreed to pay the Ottomans taxes in kind or in cash.

  By winning these E
uropean territories, the Ottomans not only advanced closer to the ultimate prize of Byzantine Constantinople but also were able to launch further attacks on the Catholic Venetians. Although many of these military skirmishes took place at sea, Albania was one of the prime terrestrial battlegrounds.

  As the Ottomans accumulated territory in Europe, they integrated people from these captured regions into their imperial system and developed an institution known as the devşirme. Teenage Christian boys were seized and taken to Ottoman centers of power. With all family ties severed, these boys converted to Islam, received every material advantage, and were taught the military arts, becoming a devoted, privileged cadre of Ottoman soldiers. In this way, the Ottomans created a loyal military elite. Some older Balkan Christian men also sought upward mobility by attempting to ingratiate themselves into the empire’s military ranks.

  As best we know, Gülbahar’s father was one such man who converted to Islam in order to enter Ottoman military service. He gained further potential social advantage by giving his daughter to the sultan as a concubine. This would pay untold dividends, if she gave birth to a son. Indeed, Gülbahar’s father could entertain the prospect of becoming the Ottoman sultan’s grandfather—a stunning turn of events for a man who started adult life as a lowly Albanian regular. For Gülbahar herself, the benefits were likewise considerable. Not only would she live a more comfortable life in the palace than she would in her native village (where, instead of being owned by a sultan’s son, she would simply have been owned by her husband), but she also had the chance of becoming the mother of a sultan and therefore the most important woman in the empire—truly one of the most powerful women in the world. Because, in this period, Ottoman sultans and princes produced sons not from their wives but from their concubines, all Ottoman sultans were the sons of foreign, usually Christian-born, slaves like Gülbahar.

  Probably shy and apprehensive at first, Gülbahar would have had support from at least some of her fellow concubines in making the jarring transition to a prince’s harem. Others, however, asserting their dominance in the harem hierarchy, would have delighted in making this young woman’s new life excruciating. Gülbahar—as we can surmise from her later life—was able to navigate her new situation deftly and maximize her opportunities.

  ALIENATION PERVADED THE LIFE of the Ottoman royal family. As a seventeen-year-old concubine, Gülbahar had barely spotted Bayezit in the harem courtyard before their sexual congress, her reputed coquettish charms and alluring beauty having been enough to pique his interest. In the coital union of master and concubine—uncouth and functionalist—love rarely played a part. Sultans and princes focused on producing as many male heirs as possible, to ensure the continuation of the dynasty and therefore the empire in a world in which death—during childbirth, in battle, from disease—was commonplace. Since Bayezit already had three sons, Gülbahar must have feared that her own son, if she bore one, might not be favored by his father. Such was the life of a younger Ottoman prince—celebrated at birth, then, at best, luxuriously ignored.

  For the sultan, or a sultan-in-waiting like Bayezit, having many sons was a double-edged sword. Leaving behind a son was every sultan’s ultimate duty, since the empire would fall if the line of Osman died out. Yet each new male descendant of Osman, in the most Darwinian of terms, represented an existential threat to his father, as a potential successor who might eye the throne a little too prematurely. More directly, he was a threat to his half-brothers. A refrain heard throughout the Ottoman Empire went, “There are no ties of kinship between princes.” From the moment of their birth, half-brothers were set against one another to jockey for the throne, with their mothers acting as their strongest advocates. The mother–son relationship within the imperial family proved more important, both personally and politically, than any other. Fathers remained aloof, and the system ensured that sons viewed their father and half-brothers as enemies more than kin. Sophocles could not have scripted it better.

  Succession was never straightforward in the Ottoman Empire. While the eldest son usually inherited the throne, technically any male descendant of Osman was entitled to it, and so most sultanic successions involved bloodshed. A sultan might favor one son over the others, but that guaranteed nothing. This was as true for Bayezit and his half-brothers as it was for Bayezit’s sons. Bayezit thus bequeathed to his ten sons not only his almond-shaped eyes but also murderous fraternal rivalry, which their mothers fostered. The triumphant son and mother took the palace; the losing sons were killed. Their mothers lost not only their children but also the prestige and fortune that accrued from being the mother of a prince—or, clearly better, the mother of the sultan. The best these women could hope for was exile to the palace of the former Ottoman capital, Bursa—a kind of imperial retirement home for the forgotten mothers of murdered princes. Obviously, no son and no mother would aspire to such a fate.

  As a laboratory for the mercilessly fierce politics of that era, the harem perfectly incubated future sultans. The leader of the Ottoman Empire had to be conniving and ruthless, and he had to be a brilliant strategist—all this in order to outwit and outsmart his rivals, whether Venetians, Safavids, Hungarians, or his own siblings and sons. The prince who emerged from the harem stronger than his half-brothers, the thinking went, would become the sultan most suited to ensuring that the Ottomans remained the strongest geopolitical power in the world.

  Once a concubine bore a son, sexual relations ceased. It was a single equation: one woman, one son. Within the harem in Amasya, each mother and son occupied separate quarters, but encountered the others daily in the harem’s passages and salons. Women like Gülbahar were the mothers of potential future sultans—a status that brought responsibilities and advantages, opportunities and risks. Above all, royal mothers had to keep their sons alive; secondly, they had to ensure that their sons received a princely education. In those early years in Amasya, the precocious Selim learned Ottoman Turkish (the language of the imperial administration), Arabic (the language of the Qur’an and the key to the religious sciences), and Persian (the language of literature and poetry). A prince’s education also included lessons in archery, medicine, writing a royal edict, and hunting. Meanwhile, Gülbahar and her attendants taught him how to pray, dress, and carry himself as a future sultan. Thus, the harem—often an object of fantasy and myth, more opulent and well appointed than anything a commoner could have imagined—functioned in reality more as a schoolhouse than a seraglio.

  WHEN SELIM WAS BORN, Bayezit had been the governor of Amasya for sixteen years. Every Ottoman prince was sent off during his youth to be a provincial governor, a key role in which to prove his mettle. As the eldest son of Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, Bayezit was set a daunting standard. A year after that conquest, he was posted to Amasya with his mother and—not surprisingly, given that he was just seven—a whole coterie of advisers and attendants. He remained there for the next twenty-seven years until, in 1481, he became sultan and moved his extensive household—which included the eleven-year-old Selim—to Istanbul.

  Amasya was a sleepy agricultural town in northern Anatolia with a temperate climate, renowned for its apples, tucked into a narrow valley cut by the Green River and bounded on nearly all sides by rugged mountains. Sheer cliffs protected the town and guaranteed Amasya a remarkably consistent shape over the centuries, as structures could be built only along the slender banks of the river. As with many towns and cities in Anatolia, Amasya had been continuously inhabited for close to seven thousand years by the time Bayezit arrived there.

  Bayezit on the throne

  Neither a hub of trade nor a locale of great strategic importance, Amasya distinguished itself over the centuries as both an intellectual center—Strabo, the ancient Greek geographer, was born there—and the adolescent home of generations of future sultans. Almost all princes, not just those dispatched there to be governor, journeyed to Amasya to imbibe all a sultan would need to know. With its gaze fixed outward on the wider world, Amasya
functioned as a sort of Ottoman West Point. There, future sultans studied statecraft, warfare, equitation, economics, history, and administration, and learned how to balance the interests and passions of competing bureaucrats and family members. Like other Anatolian towns and cities, Amasya had established communities of Armenians, Greeks, Bosnians, Jews, Turks, and others. Thus, as a microcosm of the diversity of the Ottoman Empire, Amasya was an ideal venue for preparing potential sultans for rule.

  In the exceedingly cosmopolitan empire, the harem ensured that a non-Turkish, non-Muslim, non-elite diversity was infused into the very bloodline of the imperial family. As the son of a mother with roots in a far-off land, a distant culture, and a religion other than Islam, Selim viscerally experienced the ethnically and religiously amalgamated nature of the Ottoman Empire, and grew up in provincial Amasya with an expansive outlook on the fifteenth-century world. Although his elevation to the throne was far from certain, Selim entered his teenage years conscious of the map Gülbahar laid down to prepare him to navigate the world beyond the harem walls.

  EVEN AS YOUNGSTERS, all Ottoman princes, ever so gingerly, were exposed to the delicate and perilous world of early modern diplomacy. One of the primary vehicles for showcasing a new male in the line of Osman to foreign leaders was the imperial circumcision festival. Somewhat like bar mitzvahs, these lavish ceremonies—which tended to occur nearly every year, given the structure (and collective fertility) of the royal family—celebrated the entry of a boy into manhood. They also served a diplomatic function: they were a pretext for inviting foreign envoys, heads of state, and other international dignitaries to the imperial palace in Istanbul, a new structure in the recently conquered city that would eventually be named Topkapı Palace. Along with the gift-giving, congratulatory messages, and an endless parade of sumptuous dishes, Ottoman officials and their counterparts could deepen their ties in a social setting and conduct business on the side. Selim’s circumcision festival occurred in the summer of 1479, when he was almost nine. He and his parents traveled the four hundred miles to Istanbul so that the many foreign guests, as well as emissaries resident in the city, could easily attend the ceremony.