by Alan Mikhail
The death of Ya‘kub in 1490 splintered the Ak Koyunlu Confederacy, as fighting broke out between his sons and nephews over who would succeed him. In the ensuing decade, the Ak Koyunlu fell into a vortex of civil war. As the internal struggle debilitated them, neighboring sovereigns became more empowered. To the west, Selim took advantage of his enemies’ vulnerability and, deploying some of his recently attained military resources, enacted retribution on those who raided the countryside around Trabzon. He often sent his fighters to chase the Ak Koyunlu far to the east of Trabzon, sometimes all the way to northern Iran and the Caspian Sea, thus extending his influence throughout the region. At the same time, south of Ak Koyunlu territory, various tribal groups grew in size and power, constantly battling and continually reforging their coalitions.
A later historian of Selim’s reign, who sought to depict the sovereign as superlatively as possible, wrote of the mayhem caused by the Ak Koyunlu’s infighting and fragmentation, “The kingship having been left vacant, every unsound and foolish man was made possessor of a throne. The means of order and regularity became damaged, and the condition of the affairs of state was left neglected and disordered.” The writer continued, “The most despicable men ascended the throne of glory; the vile acquired equal status with the good. The man who did not know became on a level with him who did; mean, petty fellows took precedence. There was no regard left for the old order; everyone would look to an unsound, false person.” In a statement meant to be interpreted as the inverse image of everything Selim represented, we learn the result of the lack of central leadership that prevailed among the Ak Koyunlu:
The carpets of justice and protection were hidden, not spread out, on the face of the earth, and the minds of rulers and sultans were intoxicated by the aromas of inclination and desire. . . . The established usages and laws of the realm had fallen into complete disorder, and evils and corruption had been spread in the traditional order of religion and kingdom.
Although a dramatically slanted view of Selim and his age, this account accurately depicts the Ottoman view of the Ak Koyunlu. Reflected in the mirror of Selim’s perfection and prowess, their failures were manifest. Again invoking themes from the Circle of Justice, this passage employs the imagery of the unfurling of justice and honest rule “on the face of the earth” as a sign of the proper reconciliation of divine and worldly law, “of religion and kingdom.”
Destabilizing succession battles, their inability to coalesce disparate interests into a united whole, and the increasing strength of the powers around them led eventually to the Ak Koyunlu’s disintegration. The final blow came from the most successful of the region’s many independent tribal groups. In 1501, one of the area’s young upstarts, a teenager named Ismail, assumed power over his community, becoming the founder and first shah of the Safavid Empire, which would rule the former Ak Koyunlu territory for the next two hundred years and emerge as one of Selim’s chief adversaries.
FOR THE OTTOMANS AT the end of the fifteenth century, the west proved easier to control than the east. After their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, they reached as far as Italy in the 1480s and, in pushing westward in the Balkans toward Venice, sent shudders through every court in Europe. The Ottoman navy formed a robust line of defense across much of the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. In Trabzon, Selim did his part to consolidate and bolster the empire’s forces in the east, even while building his own personal base of power.
The Ottomans had not yet claimed Jerusalem or North Africa, but their mutually beneficial alliance with their fellow Muslims in Cairo essentially determined the course of European trade in the Middle East and North Africa. Muslims—specifically the Ottomans and the Mamluks—controlled all access to the East from the Mediterranean. Selim in Trabzon was just one of the many Ottoman toll-masters on the routes between West and East, between Europe and Asia. Indeed, when we view the period through the lens of Selim, we understand—in contrast to the traditional, culturally blinded story of European ascendancy during the Renaissance and the so-called “Age of Exploration”—the outsized role of the Ottomans in the shaping of world history. If Europeans wanted to trade with China and India, they would have to either agree to the Ottomans’ terms or circumvent them. The effort by Venetian diplomats in the 1480s to strike a deal with the Ak Koyunlu was just one attempt at circumvention, and a rather feeble one at that. Another Italian would soon try a very different tack.
PART THREE
THE OTTOMAN
(1492)
IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:
World map of Piri Reis
CHAPTER
6
COLUMBUS AND ISLAM
Ottoman map of Chios
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS WAS TWO YEARS OLD WHEN SELIM’S grandfather, Mehmet II, conquered Constantinople. Although we think we know the story of Columbus, it is in fact far more complicated than has been acknowledged. Throughout his life—from his first journeys around the Mediterranean, then down the western coast of Africa, and eventually across the Atlantic—Columbus bumped up against Europe’s borders with the superior Muslim polities of his day. In myriad ways, all of his voyages were a response to the power of the Ottomans and other Muslims in the Old World—the political force that shaped Columbus and his generation more than any other.
As both civilizational kin and territorial rival to Christianity, Islam was Christianity’s most imposing and lethal enemy. In the decades around 1500, it was not the Venetians nor the Spanish nor the Portuguese who set the standard for power and innovation; it was Islam. Islam shaped the ways in which European armies fought wars; it influenced European cuisine and clothing; it drove the direction of the continent’s territorial expansion; and it spurred advances in European astronomy, architecture, and trade. Islam made much of European civilization, both directly and by reaction. To think beyond the familiar narratives handed down to us by generations of historians is to see that Columbus’s life simply cannot be understood without taking Islam into account. Connecting Islam and Columbus, furthermore, revises our understanding of one of the most iconic years in world history: 1492. The Ottomans’ influence on Columbus was a measure of the empire’s global reach.
SO DOMINANT WAS THE culture of Christianity’s Crusades that, even in the small Genoa neighborhood where Columbus spent most of his first two decades with his parents and four siblings, war with Islam was always an acknowledged peril, a part of their everyday world. For centuries before his birth, and indeed long before the rise of Islam and Christianity, forces in the region around Genoa had battled North Africans for control of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In Columbus’s youth, Genoa proved a magnet for Crusaders because of the strong presence of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, who offered free housing and medical care. Columbus and his family likely knew some of these religious warriors, and no doubt he grew up hearing their heroic tales of distant lands and infidel enemies. At the age of nine, between his lessons in Latin and mathematics, navigation and accounting, Columbus would rush down to the docks to bid farewell to fleets of inspired yet frightened men departing for Jerusalem on Crusade.
The city’s San Lorenzo Cathedral, where Columbus would have attended Mass, held important treasures captured during earlier Crusades—an emerald-green bowl said to have been used by Jesus for washing his hands before the Last Supper, and a gold-plated silver reliquary purportedly containing the ashes of John the Baptist. Under the church’s elegant striped arches of white marble and black slate, he would have learned that brave Christian soldiers had risked their lives to “recapture” these items from the hands of the wretched Muslim infidels. Such precious objects from the East were sprinkled all over Europe, from the smallest chapels to the largest cathedrals, and served as reminders that Muslims had held Jerusalem since 638 and that Christians had a God-given imperative to regain the city. Both the substance and idea of the Crusades were infused into the worship services of nearly every European neighborhood church and thus into most Europeans’ lives.
Ge
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Columbus also learned about other Europeans who traveled to the Muslim East. Genoa was primarily a mercantile port, not a military one. Blessed with a deep and protected harbor, Genoa was pushed to the sea by the Apennine Mountains, forced—like Selim’s Trabzon—to spread along a narrow strip of coast. It was “one of the maritime wonders of Europe,” in one historian’s words, a key way-station on the “coastal highway” linking Italy and France. Over the centuries, the merchant families who ran the city developed connections far beyond this stretch of coast. Colonies of Genoese merchants prospered in Beirut, Alexandria, Tunis, Oran, Algiers, Naples, Paris, London, Bristol, Málaga, Jaffa, on various Aegean islands, and around the Black Sea, sometimes even exercising direct political control in these locales. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many of the ports and towns where Genoese held vested interests would be incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Long before Selim became governor of Trabzon, for example, Genoese merchant families had built warehouses and offices in the city, from which they managed their active trade in goods from the East.
As a boy in this vibrant commercial city, Columbus likely spent hours at Genoa’s docks, where, in addition to watching Crusaders sail off to the east and workers haul cargo and repair vessels, he would have seen ships, sailors, and wares arriving from Ottoman ports. It is likely that he saw Ottoman merchants, wearing unusual garb and speaking a language he could not understand. Undoubtedly he would have known about the Ottoman Empire and about Genoese trading interests in Black Sea cities such as Sinop and Trabzon, and he must have sensed the anxiety of Genoa’s merchant community about Ottoman advances in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. He was ten in 1461, when Selim’s grandfather captured Trabzon, jolting Genoa and once again underscoring the immediacy of Ottoman dominance.
Columbus also learned important lessons about the East from the still unpublished work of Marco Polo, which was circulating in Genoa in manuscript. Although Polo was Venetian by birth, he had an important connection to Columbus’s hometown: he had been captured by the Genoese in the Battle of Curzola in 1298, and it was while he was imprisoned in Genoa that he regaled a cellmate, a man named Rusticello, with the tales of his travels in the East. As an escape from their dreary predicament, Polo transported Rusticello from Venice to China and back, and it was Rusticello, not Polo, who would eventually record—and embellish—these now legendary stories. When Polo traveled through Trabzon, in the late thirteenth century, the city’s Genoese community was thriving—a fact that made the recent loss of the city to the Ottomans all the more personal.
A major figure in Polo’s tales was the Grand Khan (most likely a fictionalized version of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan), whose opulent court and persona especially fascinated Columbus. Polo supposedly reached this court far off in Asia—beyond Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Afghanistan—where he discovered a jewel-encrusted paradise of luxury, learning, and power. But what most intrigued Columbus about the Grand Khan was that, according to Polo, though he was not a Christian he wanted to become one. Thus, even though he had reached the pinnacle of wealth and power without the benefit of Christianity, the Grand Khan seemed to grasp the “truth” of the religion and might become a convert, thereby gaining for Christianity the souls of all his subjects, too. This fable of a Grand Khan who had seen the light of Jesus stoked the European imagination like nothing else. For Christians, he offered the mirror of everything Islam should have been—a civilization formed outside the realm of Christianity, yet one that recognized its own bankruptcy in the face of the glories of the supreme true religion.
The illusion of a Grand Khan of the East with Christian proclivities was not entirely fiction. The germ of this idea lay in the historical reality of the Eastern Nestorian Church, a branch of Syriac Christianity that spread from the Middle East throughout Central Asia and to parts of China. Although Christianity reached China in the first half of the seventh century, it was only in 1275 that the Yuan Mongol emperors of Beijing appointed that city’s first Nestorian archbishop, and it was this Christian denomination that Polo encountered in China. At the end of the 1280s, the Mongols dispatched a Nestorian envoy to Pope Nicholas IV in Rome with the following message:
Today many Mongols are Christian. There are queens and children of kings who have been baptised and confess Christ. The Khans have churches in their camps. And as the King is united in friendship with the Catholics and proposes to take possession of Syria and Palestine, he asks your aid for the conquest of Jerusalem.
Given the Crusading fervor of the times, such statements kindled a belief in Europe that a global Christian alliance to conquer Jerusalem was possible. According to the fantasy, once the Grand Khan converted, the Muslims holding Jerusalem would be surrounded by Christians who, in one final, apocalyptic pincer movement, would destroy them forever, smashing the glistening Dome of the Rock that dominated Jerusalem’s skyline and thus “retaking” the holy city. Although none of this ever came to pass, Catholic–Nestorian lines of communication remained open, even after the Ming took China from the Yuan in 1368. Well into the fifteenth century, descendants of the Yuan Mongol Grand Khans sent representatives of the Nestorian faith from China to Italy. Several of these envoys arrived in Italy during Columbus’s youth—in 1460 and 1474, for example. Even though they were far from being the ecclesiastical allies many Europeans had imagined, the Nestorians of China were enough of a reality to keep Christian hopes alive in the fifteenth century.
It was the imagination—not reality—that mattered, for only imagination could propel Europeans to reach these Christians in the Far East. To Columbus and other pious Catholics, even if the khans were not Christians—or not yet Christians, or the wrong kind of Christians—they were still better than Muslims or Jews. And while Jews and Muslims could be forgiven for being born into their invidious religions, their unforgivable sin was refusing conversion once the light of Christianity had been revealed to them. This “problem” was nowhere more evident than in Spain, where western Europe’s largest Muslim population and one of its primary Jewish populations resided. Although some Spanish Muslims and Jews did in fact convert—even as many Christians doubted their sincerity—most Iberian Jews and Muslims rejected conversion out of hand. This was their supreme blasphemy: willful rejection of the truth.
Thanks mostly to Polo, European Christians believed the Grand Khan to be more open to conversion than the recalcitrant Muslims and Jews. The historical record, however, says otherwise. Most evidence points to the fact that, although a few members of the khans’ families accepted Nestorian Christianity—and those mostly for exigent political reasons—the Mongol khans themselves never did. Nonetheless, after centuries of failed Crusades, and with the spectacular growth of Ottoman power blocking European access to the Asian trade, a desperate Europe’s only hope against Islam seemed to be a mythical potentate thousands of miles away. The Travels of Marco Polo, which encouraged this hope, remained one of Europe’s most widely printed texts for over half a millennium.
YET ANOTHER FANTASY ABOUT the religious conflict between Christianity and Islam captured Columbus’s imagination during his youth: the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. When Muslims first seized Christian Spain in 711, the story goes, seven bishops were able to escape with their faithful followers. As Muslim soldiers streamed inland, each bishop stole one of the ships left at Gibraltar by the invaders. This armada eventually reached an island in the “sea of darkness,” where all disembarked. To combat any temptation to return to Spain—which they rightly assumed was now lost to the infidel Muslims—the bishops burned the ships. They then built seven cities, each governed by one of the bishops and populated by the flock in his care. Supposedly these cities were fashioned entirely of gold—rescued from Spain by the Christians to keep it out of the invaders’ hands. Embellished over the years, this saga further stirred European imaginations. For would-be Crusaders, the Seven Cities of Cibola represented a vast repository of gold that could fund the holy army needed
to retake Jerusalem from the infidels, and enrich them personally too.
Where, though, to find this island? Over the centuries, explorers, ambassadors, and mapmakers posited its existence somewhere in the Atlantic. The 1325 map of Dalorto, for example, depicted the island of Cibola as located west of Ireland. But, given their proximity to continental Europe, the more southerly islands of the eastern Atlantic offered the first tantalizing possibilities. These islands were only vaguely known to exist, and they were little visited—perfect fodder for the imagination. But over the course of Columbus’s lifetime, as the Azores, the Canaries, and the Cape Verdes were explored, no golden cities were unearthed from the islands’ volcanic soil.
Such failures, rather than vanquishing the fantasy, only served to fuel hopes even more. As Europeans extended their ventures farther across the Atlantic, and eventually deep into the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, the chimerical golden isle, though perpetually elusive, continued to sparkle. Its projected location was pushed ever farther west; it functioned as a kind of talisman of the unknown, calling Europeans siren-like forward. In the Americas, the most famous seeker of the Seven Cities in the mid-sixteenth century was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. When he returned empty-handed from what is today the southwestern United States, Cibola was shunted out into the Pacific. Decades before Coronado’s journey, however, Columbus believed firmly that the Seven Cities existed somewhere in the Atlantic, and that they would provide the gold needed to wrest Jerusalem from Muslim hands.
