by Alan Mikhail
The so-called “Ornament of the World,” Córdoba was a handsome city in southern Spain in which churches became mosques and mosques became churches; where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars had worked and lived together for centuries along the ancient Guadalquivir River; where the three religions overlapped, conversed, and intertwined their beliefs. Around the year 1000, Córdoba was one of the world’s largest and richest cities, with more than half a million residents. It was known as a place of ecumenical learning and, at times, religious cosmopolitanism—a medieval testament to the peaceful convivencia (coexistence) of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Córdoba, however, had been under Catholic rule since the thirteenth century, and thus by Isabella’s day the city’s culture of convivencia had been eroding for more than a century. In large measure, this was a consequence of the rise of the Ottoman Empire. With the balance of power in the Mediterranean tipping to the east, Christian leaders in Spain had adopted a more confrontational stance, lashing out at their mostly defenseless Muslim subjects as an impotent response to what they perceived as the looming threat of Islam.
When Isabella finally agreed to meet Columbus for what would be the first of many encounters, she discovered that they were in some ways kindred spirits, both interested in geography, exotic plants and animals, and fantastical stories of the wealth of far-off lands. They were also the same age—both were born in 1451, she a few months earlier, the same year that Selim’s grandfather Mehmet II acceded to the Ottoman throne. They shared pale skin and red hair. One of the longest accounts of the adult Columbus’s appearance and personality comes from roughly this period (his portrait was never painted during his lifetime). He was “taller than most, and with strong limbs.” His face was described as “oblong,” his nose aquiline, and his light eyes “lively.” Columbus’s “hair was very red and his face ruddy and freckled.” Owing to his Genoese schooling, “he was a good Latinist and a very learned cosmographer, gracious when he wished, but hot tempered if he was crossed.” By all accounts, he and Isabella got along splendidly, with their first conversation described by a courtier as “chatting,” rather than a formal meeting. It helped that Columbus, in the words of another historian, “was clearly a charismatic figure, and women, including the queen, seemed to be attracted to him.”
He laid out his case to the queen of Castile, drawing confidence from the fact that Isabella was, in his words, “devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and dedicated to its expansion and to combating the religion of Mahomet.” He would sail westward to the court of the Grand Khan of the East, convince him to join forces with Christian Europe against the Ottomans, and together they would retake Jerusalem in an epic battle that would destroy Islam forever. He set out his belief that such an apocalyptic war was the only way to ensure the triumph of Christianity over Islam. He vouched that he had both the experience and the knowledge to guarantee this outcome. He buttressed his credentials by explaining that he had studied Marco Polo, Pliny’s Natural History, and Ptolemy’s Geography, and had pored over every map he could find. He regaled Isabella with tales of all he had learned during his days with Henry the Navigator’s sailors—the narrowness of the Atlantic, its currents, the West African coast, and the latitude at which gold could be found in Asia. He told her about the two “Men of Cathay” he had seen in Ireland and the hand-carved wood that had washed up on the beach at São Jorge da Mina. He promised that, should she fund his venture, she would forever be known as the queen of the oceans and the ultimate executioner of Islam.
Her interest piqued, Isabella ordered her advisers to study Columbus’s plan. At that point, in 1486, given the demanding war effort in the Iberian south, she was unable to devote the resources needed to do anything more than entertain Columbus’s fancies. She did, however, offer to hire him as a soldier. Strapped for cash and without other viable patronage options, he agreed, joining the Spanish fight against the Moors. As a soldier in Isabella’s army, Columbus wagered, he would have opportunities to remind her of his plan. In the late 1480s, the Reconquista was on the front foot, winning town after town near Granada, the ultimate prize, whose defeat would eliminate Muslim rule from the Iberian peninsula. In 1488, Spanish forces won important strategic victories by capturing the towns of Vera, Vélez-Blanco, and Vélez-Rubio, east of Granada, in the semi-arid hills toward the coast. Controlling the coast was critical, as rumors swirled that the Ottomans were sending reinforcements—a hundred thousand soldiers and 505 galleys—to support the Iberian Muslims. Whether or not such a long-feared alliance was indeed in the offing, the dreaded Ottoman forces never materialized. Two further Spanish victories tightened the vise around Granada; in 1489, Isabella’s armies captured Jaén, north of the city, and Baza to its east. In both battles, Columbus reportedly played a decisive role.
After the conquest of Baza, two Franciscan friars arrived in Spain from Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre—one of the holiest places in Christendom—carrying a message from the Mamluk rulers of Jerusalem. If Isabella and Ferdinand did not abandon their siege of Muslim territories in Spain, the message read, the Mamluks would destroy the sacred church and kill every Christian living in their empire. Isabella dismissed this as a toothless attempt at intimidation; she would not be deterred from pushing on to Granada. The queen sent away the envoys, dressed in their traditional brown habits, with one thousand gold ducats and a veil for the shrine in Jerusalem that she herself had embroidered. Rather than deterring Isabella and her generals, the Mamluk threat only added fuel to the Catholic zeal for a Crusade to take Jerusalem. Hearing about this and, like Isabella, burning wth anger, Columbus seized the moment to remind her of his own plan to “reclaim” the holy city.
The Franciscans’ visit to Baza demonstrated that Muslim powers also viewed Spain as the crucible of a global war between Islam and Christianity. Both the Mamluks and the more dominant Ottomans saw southern Iberia as a Muslim borderland that had to be defended against Christian armies. Yet even as the Mediterranean’s two major powers, Spain and the Ottoman Empire, jockeyed for territorial and civilizational influence and supremacy, they shared similar aspirations for universal rule, parallel dynastic structures, and comparably heterogeneous subject populations. In the 1490s, they also shared the perception that multitudes of internal and external enemies posed never-ending threats to their respective realms. For the Spanish, the primary danger came from Muslims. For the Ottomans, the peril came not from their empire’s Christians—still the majority of the population—but rather from Shiite Muslims, both in Anatolia and off to their east: the raiders against whom Selim was ranging his formidable army.
IN JULY 1491, in her elaborate regal encampment at Santa Fe, just outside Granada, Isabella prepared for what she hoped would be the final offensive. Her forces had successfully surrounded the city. Close to a decade of war had stretched its resources: food shortages were rampant, military morale was low and manpower was depleted, and many of the advisers of the king of Granada, Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad XII—or Boabdil, as he is more commonly known—were resigned to defeat.
Granada had once been a wealthy city of about thirty thousand, exporting silk, leather, ceramics, nuts, and olives throughout the Mediterranean. Nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains at the confluence of four rivers, the region around Granada produced enormous quantities of pomegranates and also copious amounts of millet which was ground in the city’s 130 water mills. Atop a hill in the city’s eastern sector, seemingly floating on air, stood the majestic Alhambra complex, with reflecting pools, towers, gardens, filigreed porticoes, and façades of splendid Islamic calligraphy. The Arabic word Alhambra means “the red woman,” a reference to the red clay of the region which was used to build this elegant fortress and its palace.
Columbus, camped with the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella outside Granada’s walls, bided his time with the other soldiers. After failing to get support for his expedition from numerous monarchs across Europe, he was frustrated, desperate, and poor, reduced to the
lot of a mercenary soldier. It had been six years since he first approached the ambitious but cautious Isabella. That promising meeting was now hardly more than a fleeting memory, but he chased her down once again in Santa Fe to remind her of his plan. She shooed him away, but, annoyed as she was, promised him an answer once the siege was over.
After years of fighting and months of negotiations, Boabdil, ensconced with his family and advisers under the muqarnas—stalactite vaulting—of the Alhambra’s ceilings, formally surrendered on January 2, 1492, ending more than seven centuries of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula. The long, punishing strangulation of Granada had succeeded. On January 6, the feast of Epiphany, the Spanish, with Columbus among them, triumphantly entered the city of pomegranates. In one of his first acts in the conquered emirate, Ferdinand marched up the hill to the Alhambra complex with a large silver cross Pope Sixtus IV had given him to gird him in battle—clear evidence of the Vatican’s keen interest in this war between Spanish Catholicism and Islam. This most important of Moorish structures in all of Spain—the palace and fortress of centuries of Muslim rulers, the city’s citadel and most distinctive feature—was now in Catholic hands. On the day when Christians believe the Magi of the East brought gifts to the newborn Christ, Ferdinand, “darker-complexioned than Isabella,” presented his queen, “white and fair,” with the gift of the red Alhambra that they had yearned for so long to seize. All of Spain was now united under the flag of Catholicism.
With tears in his large, hazel-colored eyes and anguish on his bearded, saturnine face, Boabdil left the palace for the final time via a bridge that came to be known as the Bridge of Sighs. He fled to North Africa, where he reportedly died several years later in Fez. The Muslims who remained in Spain were given three years to leave, as were its Jews. In the millennial minds of Isabella and Ferdinand, their victory was preordained by God, a sure sign that their plans for a global Crusade would ultimately succeed. Just as in Spain, they resolved, Islam would be eradicated from the world.
Only days after the Spanish victory, one of Ferdinand and Isabella’s court historians wrote that Granada was “the extinction of Spain’s calamities.” The euphoria of conquest made hyperbole the language of the day. Another historian asked the sovereigns rhetorically, “Will there ever be an age so thankless as will not hold you in eternal gratitude?” The Catholic victory at Granada “redeemed Spain, indeed all of Europe.” Church bells rang out across European cities and the pope ordered days of festivities. Celebratory bullfights were organized across Spain, as were reenactments of the siege of Granada. Coming almost four decades after the 1453 loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Granada was for many Europeans an act of retribution, a Christian rebuttal to the most powerful Muslim empire on earth. Not surprisingly, this feeling of revenge was most palpable in Spain, where, as we have seen, the threat of Ottoman support for the peninsula’s Muslims was pungent. In the words of a Spanish court historian, the conquest of Granada “was famed and celebrated through all the realms of Christendom, and it extended to the farthest and most remote lands of the Turk and Sultan.” While no doubt a true watershed of the last millennium, the fall of Granada, in fact, did little to stop Ottoman advances, in the Balkans and Central Europe or North Africa and the Middle East; and, moreover, there would be Muslims in the Iberian peninsula for more than another century, until their final expulsion in 1614.
Boabdil hands over the keys to Granada to the Spanish
The destruction of the kingdom of Granada spelled the end of Muslim rule in Europe, apart from Ottoman holdings in the Balkans. Not until the twentieth-century formation of Albania and Bosnia would another Muslim state arise on the continent. Granada represented the first major Christian victory over Islam since it had emerged in Arabia in the seventh century. With this defeat, Europe buried centuries of its centrally formative Muslim history, which had commenced in 711. The active suppression of over seven hundred years of Europe’s domestic Muslim history began in January 1492, and it continues in various guises to the present day—making our story of Selim, the Ottomans, and Islam vital as a corrective to current understandings of the past.
AS ISABELLA AND FERDINAND’S troops streamed over the hills of Granada and along its picturesque stone lanes, elated and exuberant, Columbus could think only of his “project of discovering a world.” Although he shared in the joy of the conquest, he could not help but feel “melancholy and dejected in the midst of the general rejoicing, [as] he beheld with indifference, and almost with contempt, the conclusion of a conquest which swelled all bosoms with jubilee, and seemed to have reached the utmost bounds of desire.” What Columbus most wanted from the fall of Granada was a response from the parsimonious Spanish queen. Isabella finally made good on her promise. Against the judgment of her advisers and her husband and trusting her own intuition, she agreed to fund Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic.
As a solution to the problem of Muslim power in the Mediterranean, Columbus’s proposed adventure was a desperate act in desperate circumstances. In the larger picture, the triumph at Granada was dwarfed by Ottoman incursions ever farther west in the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa. And the Ottoman (and Mamluk) hegemony over trade with the East—manipulated in places such as Trabzon by Ottoman officials such as Selim—enabled them to control contact with Eastern merchants and levy exorbitant tariffs on European traders, and even blockade the trade routes at will. With few viable options against the Ottomans, and buoyed by her victory, Isabella was willing to gamble on a perilous trip across an unfathomable ocean. And if Columbus’s plan—risky and far-fetched though it seemed—could contribute in even a minor way to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and Islam, then it would prove to be a more than worthy investment of her resources. Christ the forgiving savior would finally march upon the entire world as a belligerent, and Jerusalem would be won.
CHAPTER
8
NEW WORLD ISLAM
Aztec dance
IN COLUMBUS’S MIND, SPAIN’S GLORIOUS RECONQUISTA OVER ISLAM surely would lead to Christianity’s global Conquista over the vile religion. Hoping to do his part to advance Europe’s Crusade, he set sail from the Andalusian port of Palos de la Frontera on the evening of August 3, 1492, a summer when Sultan Bayezit marched his armies to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and raided Transylvania.
The year 1492 is seen as a historical caesura, a rupture between all that was old and all that is new. For some, it is the year the modern world began; for others, it is the year the independent sovereignty of the Americas ended. To understand 1492 properly and fully, however, we must understand the continuities that made and shaped it. We must eschew the mythology about a secular Western march of progress. On their three square-sailed ships, Columbus and his eighty-seven crewmen carried across the Atlantic their long history of warring with Islam and their sense of inadequacy in the face of the Ottoman colossus. He and his royal patrons were launching a new phase in an epic war that already had lasted more than half a millennium. Having failed to capture the Jerusalem of the Old World, after 1492 Europe looked to a New Jerusalem across the ocean as a promised land free of Islam. Columbus sailed west on Crusade.
The opening lines of Columbus’s logbook relate this explicitly: “On 2 January in the year 1492, when your Highnesses had concluded their war with the Moors who reigned in Europe, I saw your Highnesses’ banners victoriously raised on the towers of the Alhambra, the citadel of that city, and the Moorish king come out of the city gates and kiss the hands of your Highnesses.” In the very next sentence, Columbus pivoted to his overarching goal of finding and converting the Grand Khan, whom Marco Polo had vowed would help Christendom surround and defeat Islam:
In that same month, on the grounds of information I had given your royal Highnesses concerning the lands of India and a prince who is called the Great Khan—which means in Spanish “King of Kings”—and of his and his ancestors’ frequent and vain applications to Rome for men learned in the holy faith who should i
nstruct them in it, your Highnesses decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to see these parts of India and the princes and peoples of those lands and consider the best means for their conversion.
Yet even the three ships—La Niña, La Pinta, and the flagship Santa María, names that every American schoolchild must memorize—which Columbus believed would enable him to defeat Islam owed a debt to the enemy. Spanish and Portuguese shipbuilders took a navigational leap forward at the end of the fifteenth century by borrowing a technology from their Muslim rivals: the lateen sail, a triangular sail joined at 45 degrees to a ship’s mast. Combining lateen sails with traditional European square rigs offered advantages of speed and maneuverability without sacrificing the stability of the square sail. The result was large ships that performed like smaller vessels. The “combined rig made possible a change in the nature of exploring voyages,” quickly becoming the preferred means for crossing the Atlantic. In maritime historian J. H. Parry’s words, “the Arabs were their teachers.”
