God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  HAVING GROWN UP IN the 1470s and 1480s, Selim witnessed firsthand the power of religion in international affairs and in his own family. After all, he, together with Cem, his father, and all Ottoman sultans and princes in the empire’s first three centuries, were the sons of Christian converts, female slaves who had often, but not always, been captured in war. Rumors of his uncle’s conversion to Christianity and his potential participation in a Crusade against Islam further underscored for Selim both the political stakes of religion and the religious stakes of politics.

  As participant, observer, beneficiary, and victim, both of the religious politics of the age and his own family’s dynastic structure, Cem could compare what he witnessed in Europe to what he knew of his own empire. By any measure, religious violence in the Mediterranean peaked in the 1490s. Not only did Europe renew its persistent calls for a Crusade against Islam, but the Ottoman Empire furthered its holdings in the Christian Balkans, and Spain’s long-running Inquisition reached its bloody climax. With their conquest of Granada in 1492, the Catholic monarchs defeated the last of Spain’s Muslim kingdoms. As we will see, they expelled nearly all of the peninsula’s Jews and Muslims, then moved to extend their war against non-Christians in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

  Although all religious minorities throughout the Mediterranean were subjected to much hardship, the Ottomans, despite what Innocent thought, never persecuted non-Muslims in the way that the Inquisition persecuted Muslims and Jews—and, despite the centuries of calls for Christian Crusades, Muslims never attempted a war against the whole of Christianity. While considered legally inferior to Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (as elsewhere in the lands of Islam) had more rights than other religious minorities around the world. They had their own law courts, freedom to worship in the empire’s numerous synagogues and churches, and communal autonomy. While Christian Europe was killing its religious minorities, the Ottomans protected theirs and welcomed those expelled from Europe. Although the sultans of the empire were Muslims, the majority of the population was not. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was effectively the Mediterranean’s most populous Christian state: the Ottoman sultan ruled over more Christian subjects than the Catholic pope.

  Of course, Christian leaders did not only target Muslims with their Crusades. As European armies marched out against Islam, they slaughtered many Jews on their way eastward. Some of the survivors, and the majority of Spain’s expelled Jews, eventually made their way to the relative safety of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, to a young Selim, the religious clashes of the early modern world seemed not a matter of Christianity versus Islam but rather of Ottoman Islam’s ecumenical view of the world versus European Christianity’s violent efforts to achieve religious homogeneity.

  POPE INNOCENT VIII, one of the leading proponents of his religion’s savagery, fell ill and died on July 25, 1492, just a week before his Italian compatriot Christopher Columbus set off on his first voyage across the Atlantic. With Innocent’s death, Cem became the property of his successor, Pope Alexander VI. Although he was handsome and gregarious—or perhaps precisely because he was handsome and gregarious—Alexander proved an ineffective political and religious leader. A member of the ruthless Borgia clan, he had many mistresses and sired at least nine illegitimate children. His papacy was dogged by accusations of sexual philandering and financial misdealings to support his children—ammunition for his political rivals’ persistent fiery critiques.

  One of the pope’s adversaries was King Charles VIII of France, who coveted the Italian peninsula and especially the strategically important kingdom of Naples. At the end of 1494, taking advantage of the political weakness created by the chaos of Alexander’s personal life, Charles the Affable, as he was known, thundered an army of twenty-five thousand soldiers, about a third of whom were Swiss mercenaries, into Rome, quickly forcing Alexander to accede to his demands, foremost among them being safe passage for his armies south to Naples. Charles then made another demand: he wanted Cem, who was still a desirable prize after all these years. Alexander reluctantly surrendered the peripatetic prisoner to Charles. The twenty-four-year-old king and his forces, with Cem in tow, reached Naples in February 1495.

  Cem is handed over to Charles

  Bayezit, as always, was keeping a close eye on Cem’s whereabouts and gauging how his European captors might use him against the Ottomans. From France to Rome to Naples, Cem was steadily edging closer to Istanbul, with progressively more powerful captors pushing him in that direction. Charles posed a more direct threat to the Ottomans than either the pope or the Knights of St. John. Through marriages and other alliances, he boasted many relatives among the noble families of the Balkans. Tracing the roots of their power back to Byzantium and the Kingdoms of Serbia, these predominantly Christian families still reveled in their bygone glory during an era of Christian rule before the Ottoman conquests. Though they retained their landholdings, wealth, and prestige, they harbored an inherent distrust of their Muslim overlords. Bayezit feared that Charles would exploit his familial connections and the insecurity of the Balkans to move, with Cem, into the western provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

  This was a risk Bayezit refused to tolerate, so in 1495 he began mobilizing his forces in and around Istanbul. They strengthened the city walls, reviewed tactical plans for operations in the Balkans, and tested artillery. Military reinforcements were deployed to the empire’s western borders and a battle fleet headed for the Adriatic, tucking into the fjords of the Dalmatian coast to be ready at a moment’s notice. Even in early 1495, nearly fourteen years after Bayezit had become sultan, Cem’s threat to the empire remained so exigent that the mere whiff of his encroachment triggered a massive military mobilization.

  Very soon, however, Cem would no longer pose a threat to Bayezit. When Charles’s army reached Naples, a wilting weariness forced Cem to bed down in one of the city’s castles, now in the possession of the French king, who tasked one of his personal physicians to monitor the captive and afford him all necessary comforts. The doctor kept watch as Cem’s symptoms grew more serious. First his face, eyelids, and throat reddened and swelled. Then he was overcome by a fever, accompanied by shortness of breath. Cem seems to have had an infection, possibly pneumonia. Charles’s physician finally succeeded in stabilizing the patient, cooling him down with cold compresses and bleeding him from time to time, but his condition worsened again and his pulse grew weak and irregular. Charles visited his bedside to offer encouragement. “Be in good spirits, my lord,” he said to Cem. “As soon as you get well you’ll find freedom and salvation, so don’t be upset any longer about being a prisoner.” After Charles left Cem’s room, the Ottoman prince said, “Thank God the words freedom and salvation enter my ears. I have always prayed thus: ‘Oh God, if the infidels want to take me on the pretext of marching on Muslims, then don’t let me see those days, and take my soul first.’ ” Cem promptly lapsed into a coma. He returned to consciousness two or three times over the next few days, long enough on one occasion to have an attendant read out a letter from his mother, who was still in Cairo. Having lived as a prisoner in Europe for thirteen years, Cem finally achieved his freedom, and perhaps his salvation, dying in Naples on February 25, 1495, at the age of thirty-five, a few months before a coalition of Italian city-states forced Charles back to France.

  CEM’S DEATH WAS A major blow to European designs on the Ottoman Empire. His father’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had been a cataclysmic event for European Christians, and the capture of Otranto in 1480 was similarly jolting. In 1481, when Mehmet died, the Ottomans held more territory in Europe than any other polity. Searching for some advantage against its Muslim foe, Christian Europe seized on Cem. Some esurient European leaders thought that if they helped Cem overthrow his half-brother, they could win the powerful Ottoman Empire to their side as a stalwart military partner, thereby putting it in the position of European kingmaker. Cem’s unexpected death fundamentally transformed this geopolitical landscape. While Cem ha
d needed allies in Europe, Bayezit most certainly did not. Undisputed succession had now been achieved in the Ottoman Empire. At this point in the mid-1490s, Europe was weakened, whereas most of Mehmet the Conqueror’s gains were solidified. Bayezit’s Ottomans stood fully in the ascendancy. European delusions of Crusade, reconquest, and the “return” of Constantinople and Jerusalem receded into the distance.

  For Bayezit, Cem’s death represented a new chapter in his reign. The threat that had been hanging over his throne for fourteen years was gone. For the first time, Bayezit could focus single-mindedly on the task of ruling the most powerful state in the Mediterranean.

  Bayezit’s unfettered rule would not last long. Soon his own sons would rise to challenge him. Selim, now twenty-four, understood that, although birth order in large measure determined one’s fate, it was not everything. Bayezit had triumphed not because he was the eldest, but because he was the more serious and warlike, the more shrewd and ruthless. As the third surviving son, Selim knew he was not likely to become sultan—up to this point, the eldest had almost always been his father’s succeessor—but, having seen Cem die demoralized and diplomatically prostituted in exile in Naples, he was determined not to let his uncle’s fate become his own. Possessed of an adamantine force of character, Selim set his sights on winning the throne, an act he knew would require killing his older half-brothers. He had learned from the example of Cem’s life that an Ottoman prince could trust no one—especially his own blood.

  PART TWO

  GOVERNOR

  (1487–1500)

  IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:

  Selim with advisers

  CHAPTER

  4

  LEARNING THE FAMILY BUSINESS

  In the Trabzon market

  TO WIN THE OTTOMAN THRONE, SELIM AND HIS HALF-BROTHERS had first to prove their mettle by governing a city in the east of the empire. As Bayezit’s sons scattered across Anatolia, Selim was particularly disadvantaged, being appointed governor of the city of Trabzon, almost as far from Istanbul as one could go and still be in the empire. Trabzon (formerly Trebizond), sits at the southeastern corner of the Black Sea, at the junction of trade routes to the East. Selim arrived there aged seventeen, in 1487—about eighteen months before Cem was transferred from France to Rome—accompanied, as was the custom, by his mother. He was tasked with integrating this recently conquered city into the imperial administration, but more important, from his point of view, was the job of building the foundation of independent support he would need if he were to compete for the sultan’s throne. As he was an official representative of the empire, this would necessarily have to be a surreptitious undertaking. As well as his mother, his concubines and servants made the long journey with him, along with a cadre of imperial attendants and advisers. Over the twenty-plus years he would spend on the eastern fringes of the empire, Selim’s small household would serve as his scaffolding of care, comfort, and protection.

  As he sailed along the Black Sea to Trabzon—perhaps occasionally spotting the famous Black Sea dolphin, remarked on since antiquity—Selim absorbed the verdant green of the soaring Pontic Mountains, which push so close to the coast that the settlements of the northern Anatolian shore appear like a ribbon of humanity between water and stone. Like most of the region’s towns, Trabzon grew the only way that geography allowed, up into the hills, but still the port city’s drab sand-colored streets and buildings held close to the deep indigo sea, its source of sustenance and commerce, its primary connection to the world. Like Istanbul, Amasya, and most other cities in the empire, those along this coastline boasted ancient roots. First settled in the eighth century BCE, Trabzon became a Christian stronghold in the third century CE. Its remote location, combined with the natural defense provided by the Pontics, forged it into a stalwart outpost that fended off outsiders for most of its history. Over the centuries, its Christian rulers rebuffed streams of conquering armies, sometimes governing it as a sovereign city-state, sometimes aligning with one or more of the larger polities around it. When the Ottomans made their first attempts to seize the city, they faced the same fate as most previous attackers: Trabzon’s well-armed populace successfully frustrated the newcomers’ numerous incursions. In fact, the city distinguished itself as the last of Byzantium’s client states to fall to the Ottomans, surviving independently for eight years after the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Mehmet II needed no fewer than two hundred galleys in Trabzon’s harbor, plus eighty thousand infantry and sixty thousand cavalry coursing down through the mountain passes, to finally subdue Trabzon in August 1461.

  By the time Selim arrived there twenty-six years later, the city was still only beginning its slow transition from a millennium of Christian rule. It was, so to speak, a frontier zone, a region of such tenuous ties to Ottoman hegemony that Selim would have to work hard to bring the area squarely within the fold. The religious makeup of the city did not help; more than 85 percent of the population adhered to some form of Christianity, mostly Orthodoxy, making Islam a small minority faith. Turkish culture barely registered. In Trabzon as elsewhere, the Ottomans’ conquests resulted in minority rule over peoples very different from themselves, both religiously (in the case of Christians) and culturally (in the case of Greeks, Arabs, Serbs, and others). Like other imperial powers, the Ottomans cut deals with local strongmen and promised massive protections for the majority population.

  At the turn of the sixteenth century, most of the era’s expanding empires faced this same challenge: minority rule. Whether in the Americas or in Asia, small bands of military elites conquered vast new territories, thereby gaining the right to rule over huge populations. The ascendant Muslim Mughals, for example, moved south from Central Asia to India, where they governed an enormous restive population of Hindus and other non-Muslims. The Aztecs, in their conquest of the Yucatán peninsula, ruled over peoples who shared neither their culture nor their worldview. And European global expansion in this period brought the continent’s armies face to face with peoples they had never before encountered, in places they did not fully understand. These early modern empires changed the ethnic, linguistic, economic, and religious landscape of the world, creating new cultural synergies and new political possibilities even as they foreclosed others.

  SELIM FOUND HIS NEW home to be a dizzying entrepôt teeming with goods and people from all over the world. Given its strategic location on the southeastern corner of the Black Sea, Trabzon had long been an important way-station on the Silk Road, with trade goods coming overland from the East through the mountain passes, then making their way to the West by ship. The entire line of port cities on the southern coast of the Black Sea—from Istanbul eastward to Amasra and Sinop, and then finally Trabzon—served as a critical trading zone for Europeans seeking goods from India, China, and Central Asia. Merchandise, travelers, armies, even vermin, as well as ideas and technologies, were funneled through Trabzon. Like other nodes of global commerce, Trabzon became a highly cosmopolitan city, with many long-ingrained traditions of urban governance and social relations. Selim’s first task was to stamp an Ottoman imprint on a city that predated the empire by millennia.

  The Venetian itinerant Marco Polo arrived in Trabzon in the late thirteenth century, following established trade routes from Italy eastward. Like many travelers before him, he was foul-smelling and exhausted as he transferred from ship to caravan, sporting his signature red hat. More than twenty years later, in 1294 or 1295, he returned to the city as his final point of departure from Asia back home to Venice. Robbed, during this second sojourn in Trabzon, of much of the fortune he and his men had accrued during their decades in the East, Marco Polo and his entourage departed the city weary and embittered.

  In the covered market, Sri Lankan cinnamon met Murano glass. Tall bags of brown wool rested on the gray cobblestones, with flaming Indian red pepper and iridescent yellow turmeric glowing like lava and fire. The spice district—riddled with the stray scents of peppers and ginger, then cassia, and, inevitably, the
piercingly aromatic odor of cardamom—transitioned gradually into a warren of vendors hawking porcelain and gemstones from China, a more tranquil part of the market where purchases were made annually rather than weekly. Intricately woven Persian silks and wools carpeted whole sections of the cobbled ground, while rhubarb, cattle hides, and cottons from Russia and the Caucasus were piled high. Beyond the market’s arched gate, its central thoroughfare spilled out to a plaza with sweeping views of the sea, before the road disappeared downward into the residential part of the city. Here men congregated, caught up with the gossip, and exchanged news.

  Like other Silk Road cities, Trabzon, despite its distance—or perhaps because of its distance—from Byzantine Constantinople and later Ottoman Istanbul, boomed as a place of enormous wealth, attracting to its western shoreline and its dusty eastern gates Indians, Italians, Russians, Greeks, Iranians, Armenians, Arabs, Georgians, and many others. With long hair and even longer cloaks, Venetian and Genoese merchants were among the most frequent traders in Trabzon, eager to quench the increasingly Asian appetites of their customers back home. Acting as middlemen, these merchants offered primarily gold and finished textiles in exchange for the desired Eastern products. Europe produced little that the East wanted or needed; the major commodity Europeans had to trade was cash.