by Alan Mikhail
Tuman and his military advisers huddled in their camp at Raidaniyya. Figuring that the Ottomans, far from home, were probably running low on food and supplies, and that their camels would be drained after the trek across Sinai, Tuman wanted to rush forward and attack them before they had a chance to rest and reprovision in the villages on the way to Cairo. His advisers argued against this on the grounds that they had invested enormous resources in constructing a fortified position at Raidaniyya, that their supply lines from Cairo were operational, and that they had amassed a formidable force of soldiers and weapons behind their wall. Mamluk commanders saw great advantage in drawing the Ottomans into their secure position of strength, and Tuman finally conceded the point. The army held at Raidaniyya.
Selim’s forces loomed closer. Once they emerged from Sinai’s mountainous, sandy terrain onto the flat expanses of eastern Egypt—now marching on the third continent of their long journey—the Ottomans’ progress was swifter. Without uneven footing to worry them, Selim and his soldiers could concentrate on the fighting to come. Each man began to prepare himself in the ways soldiers always did before battle—thinking of his family and his fate, readying his weapon and his soul. Once the rival armies were close enough, each sultan tried to gauge the strength of the other side. Under cover of night, Tuman dispatched spies to the outskirts of the Ottomans’ encampment to assess their forces: more than he had initially thought, but, in his estimation, still far below the number of troops he had at the ready.
Selim wrote a letter to Tuman, inviting him to surrender in exchange for recognition as an Ottoman vassal. The Ottomans had often engaged in this politics of threat and compromise in order to gain territory without war. The tactic might succeed with the prince of a small city-state in Bulgaria, for example, but Tuman scoffed and spat at Selim’s “offer” of vassalage. He was the head of a grand Muslim empire, one of the world’s most significant states. He was the caliph, overseer of Islam’s holiest places. He would never let Selim, sultan of a lesser empire, bully him—or, worse, rule him.
To leave no doubt about his position, Tuman attached his hate-filled rejection note to the head of an Ottoman soldier his forces had earlier captured and now killed for the express purpose of conveying this message—a decapitated rejoinder to the war declaration Selim had sent to al-Ghawri pinned to the head of ‘Ala’ al-Dawla. On the road to Cairo, the stage was now set for war.
CHAPTER
20
CONQUERING THE WORLD
The Battle of Raidaniyya
THE BATTLE FOR CAIRO FINALLY COMMENCED ON JANUARY 22, 1517—and it ended astoundingly quickly. After barely an hour, the Mamluk army was shattered, and in full retreat toward Cairo.
Tuman Bey himself was partly at fault. He had almost no military experience, and had been sultan, and thus leader of the imperial army, for only five months at this point. Perhaps his military advisers should have known better, or perhaps the Mamluk army should have attacked early, as Tuman had suggested. Selim, a master tactician, took note of the fortification at Raidaniyya and turned the Mamluks’ strongest defensive weapon against them. Outflanking the Mamluks, he trapped them against the impregnable wall they had constructed to keep the Ottomans at bay. Furthermore, the Ottoman guns outperformed the outdated and decrepit artillery of the Mamluks; the occasional misfiring of the Ottomans’ own muskets probably cut down more of their soldiers than the Mamluks did. The Ottomans killed more than twenty-five thousand Mamluk soldiers at Raidaniyya. Thus, the battle for Cairo was over before the Ottomans had even glimpsed the city.
The Mamluk capital now lay completely exposed. Most of the inhabitants of the villages between Raidaniyya and Cairo had fled, so provisions stored in these villages were freely available. Although it would be weeks before the Ottomans fully secured Cairo, and months before a full transition of government was effected, what remained of the Mamluks’ territories after their defeat in Syria now also belonged to Selim. Within weeks of the Spanish seizing a city in Mexico they christened El Gran Cairo, Selim had conquered Egypt’s Cairo for the Ottomans. The Mamluk Empire was dead.
It is no hyperbole to state that Selim’s victory at Raidaniyya changed the world. With the Mamluks obliterated, Selim united portions of three continents under his rule, nearly tripling the size and population of the Ottoman Empire. As he and his forces marched toward Cairo at a steady, gentle cadence, after nearly half a year of campaigning, Selim surely reflected on just how much he had accomplished. He had spent his early life developing the skills and relationships he needed to capture the imperial palace, and conquered the odds in becoming sultan. Now he had vanquished his state’s foremost enemy, and had journeyed farther to expand the empire than any sultan before him (and, in fact, no sultan after him would expand the empire as much as he did). Selim now controlled more territory than any other human alive, two of the largest cities in the world—Istanbul and Cairo—and an army that rivaled any military force on earth. With the addition of the Mamluk territories, an Ottoman sultan for the first time ruled a majority-Muslim population. Soon Selim would take command of Mecca and Medina, becoming the first true Ottoman caliph (previous sultans had claimed the title, without merit), moving ever closer to fulfilling the prophecy made at the time of his birth that he would possess the world’s seven climes. After 1517, Selim held the keys to global domination in the sixteenth century—control of the middle of the world, monopolization of trade routes between the Mediterranean and India and China, ports on all the major seas and oceans of the Old World, unrivaled religious authority in the Muslim world, and enormous resources of cash, land, and manpower. Selim had become the world’s most powerful sovereign, God’s undefiled shadow on earth.
CAIRO, HOWEVER, PROVED NO place for self-congratulatory daydreaming. Lingering resistance in the former Mamluk capital and the surrounding region made Egypt much more difficult to subdue than anywhere in Syria. The city was vast, with nearly half a million people, its skyline punctuated by domes and minarets. From late January through the spring of 1517, Tuman and a handful of his men who had escaped the bloodbath at Raidaniyya began a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Ottomans, supported by many of Cairo’s denizens who, frightened by the recent mayhem, offered them shelter, food, and arms. Selim, sensibly, avoided entering Cairo for weeks, preferring the safety of his garrisoned military encampment outside the city’s walls. At the same time, Selim allowed his soldiers to loot Cairo. After the fall of a city, Selim sometimes decided, as we have seen, to authorize pillage, in order to reward his men for their fortitude and to strengthen their fidelity; it depended on the message he sought to send to his enemies and his loyal soldiers alike. As a later historian wrote of Selim’s defeat of the Mamluks, the war of 1516–17 proved more pivotal for the empire than the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Selim’s grandfather had allowed his soldiers to plunder Constantinople. It seemed only fitting, then, at least to Selim, that his soldiers should be allowed to revel in their conquest of Cairo.
Selim’s endorsement of his soldiers’ plundering served another strategic aim: it would strike fear in the hearts of those who opposed Ottoman rule and offered safe haven to the Mamluk resistance. In the early weeks of February 1517, Ottoman forces chased down and killed many Mamluk sympathizers and succeeded in driving Tuman and his men into hiding deep in the south of Egypt. Despite the Ottoman destruction of the Mamluk army and seizure of their capital city, low-level violence would continue for months—the Ottomans pursued some in the Mamluk resistance for many years—and it was April before Tuman was finally captured and killed. His body was strung up on one of Cairo’s gates, where it remained for three days for all to see.
Fighting the Mamluks in Cairo
Selim entered Cairo on Sunday, February 15, 1517, in a formal procession attended by enormous celebrations marking the return of peace. After years of tension and hardship, fighting and chaos, Cairo could again enjoy some modicum of normalcy. Many bowed their heads as Selim rode his horse slowly and regally t
hrough the city, dressed in a deep blue robe, his bejeweled white turban towering over the crowds lining his route. A long stream of advisers in full military uniform walked in two stately rows behind him, impressing upon the assembled crowds the arrival of the Ottomans’ new imperial order. “Long live the victorious Sultan Selim!” shouted many along the parade route.
In the city’s central square, in the shadow of the Citadel, the city’s largest and most important mosque, Selim promised to instill order and prosperity across his empire. From this point on, no soldier would molest a citizen or unlawfully seize property, trade would return to Cairo’s markets, and security would be ensured throughout all the newly acquired territories. His administration would fairly assess and collect taxes, inspect roads and public works to make needed repairs, and outlaw forced labor and military conscription practices. Huzzahs erupted across the city. The next Friday, following custom, preachers in all of Cairo’s mosques delivered their weekly sermons in Selim’s name.
WITH THE MAMLUKS DETHRONED, order restored to Cairo’s streets, and commerce once again beginning to flow, Selim commenced the arduous work of organizing the governance of the vast new territories he had just conquered. War was one thing, administration quite another. Throughout his life, Selim had excelled at both, and he now introduced to Egypt the many lessons he had learned in Trabzon, and more recently in Syria: he recognized longstanding property holdings, renewed the assignments of market inspectors and other vital officials, and kept tax rates essentially the same. In the North African provinces of Libya, Tunis, and Algeria, Selim recognized the sitting governors in exchange for their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. The sharifs of Mecca—descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who were responsible for the maintenance of Islam’s holiest sites—also accepted Selim as their new ruler. In return, he promised them whatever resources they needed to manage the annual pilgrimage and maintain the many imposing and ornate buildings they oversaw. In all of these areas—Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and the Hijaz—Selim followed the proven Ottoman strategy of essentially retaining the status quo, making it painless and palatable for the governed to accept the new regime.
Still, the situation in Egypt itself required a slightly different tack. Khayr Bey, the Ottomans’ spy in Aleppo who had been instrumental in their victory over Sultan al-Ghawri at Marj Dabiq, was made governor of Egypt. Khayr had proven himself both loyal to the Ottomans and effective as an administrator; this assignment handsomely rewarded him for his years of patient, risky wagering on the Ottomans over the Mamluks. As the richest and most strategic of the provinces the Ottomans added after 1517, Egypt was one of the most important governorships in the enlarged empire, and the Ottomans lavished a great deal of attention on their new and prized possession. Its vast agricultural wealth generated more tax revenue than any other Ottoman province, and it would soon provide about a quarter of all the food consumed in the empire—from Algeria in the west to Trabzon in the east. Egypt was the most populous of the empire’s recently acquired provinces and the outlet that allowed the Ottomans access to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. Entrusting such a vital territory to Khayr reflected Selim’s supreme confidence in him.
Khayr, however, proved as cruel in Cairo as he had been shrewd in Aleppo—perhaps not surprising in a man who earned his position by being a traitor. In one instance, he ordered the hanging of a peasant who stole a few cucumbers from one of his fields. Many accounts of his governorship mention his miserliness, his love of the bottle, and his obvious drunkenness in front of his advisers. Even inebriated, though, Khayr could be effective as a ruler, since his main task was merely to uphold the administrative structure of Egypt as it existed at the time of the conquest.
OF ALL THE TERRITORIES the Ottomans acquired in 1516 and 1517, one clearly distinguished itself from the rest: the Hijaz. The Ottoman takeover of Mecca and Medina did not simply represent more land and revenue for the empire. It made Selim the “Protector of the Holy Cities,” the caliph—the undisputed leader of the Muslim world.
The ceremony to invest Selim with the caliphate occurred in the spring of 1517, in Cairo. Precedent dictated the symbolic transfer of caliphal power from one sovereign to another in a “public service” before the governing elite of the two states. As a recognition of defeat and conferral of the caliphate on Selim, the Mamluk sultan was to sanctify the Ottoman sultan as “servant of the two sacred cities, the victorious King Selīm Shāh.” Because Tuman, the previous sultan and caliph, was no longer alive, his oldest living relative, a man named al-Mutawakkil III, stood in for him. Given that such transfers of worldly and religious power usually occurred after war, it was often the case that others had to represent a fallen caliph. As Cairo still lacked an official Ottoman residence, and to avoid using his enemy’s palace, Selim convened his political and religious advisers with al-Mutawakkil under the magnificent dome of the Citadel. In the quiet ceremony, Selim knelt to accept the sword and mantle of the Prophet Muhammad from al-Mutawakkil, one of the few times in his adult life he prostrated himself—in deference not to a human, but to his God. These sacred objects connected the political leader who held them to the Prophet himself, who was not only the world’s first Muslim but also the first caliph. As Selim rose with the white goat-hair coat on his shoulders and the simple steel sword in his hand, he fused religious and political power, joining the line of Osman and the line of the Prophet for the first time in history. Selim stood proudly, beaming his delight, and casting the long shadow of God.
With his heavenly mantle and manifold earthly powers, Selim, now forty-six, ruled the Mediterranean coastline continuously from the Adriatic to Algeria—the whole eastern half of the sea. Not since the days of the Roman Empire had the Black, Red, Caspian, and Mediterranean seas been governed by a single polity. Selim had become the early modern Caesar.
ONE NIGHT IN THE spring of 1517, in the tent that served as his headquarters in Cairo, Selim was deep in discussion about Egypt’s taxation system when a visitor was announced. Though the hour was late, Selim agreed to see the man. Piri Reis, a former pirate turned captain in the Ottoman navy, walked slowly forward, holding something in his hands. He had sailed to Egypt just after Selim invaded, on one of the first Ottoman ships to dock in Alexandria. With his tightly wrapped white turban and thick beard making him look more scholar than sailor, Piri riveted his eyes on the carpeted floor in front of Selim. No subject of the empire was considered worthy enough to look directly into the face of the shadow of God.
Selim and Piri had met a few years earlier in Istanbul, when Piri arrived at the palace as a representative of the navy to report on recent expeditions in North Africa. Selim had forgotten this meeting, but naturally Piri remembered it. One of Selim’s secretaries removed the object from Piri’s fidgety hands. It was a scroll. Selim unfurled the drab gazelle-skin parchment and was transfixed by the vibrant colors inside. Purples and oranges, silver and crimson inks, perfectly straight lines and jagged squiggly ones created a map of the entire known world—the result of three years of careful labor. Selim had heard of the Americas and the West Indies, but this was the first time he had seen their shape (as it was then thought to be) and their distance from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds he knew so well—the worlds he had just conquered.
As his eyes bounced from coasts to castles, oceans to islands, Selim—according to Piri’s account of the meeting—plied Piri with questions. Piri described the years he had spent poring over dozens of maps as he sailed the Mediterranean. Arab and Italian cartographers had long depicted the outlines of the Mediterranean’s craggy coastline, and Piri had also learned a great deal from Portuguese maps of West Africa. The great innovation of his map, though, was to make the world whole—to add the New World to the Old. Piri’s was the first world map ever to include the Americas.
Piri delighted Selim with the story of how he had acquired Columbus’s Atlantic maps from his uncle Kemal Reis, whose capture of the five Kn
ights Hospitaller ships had so impressed Khayr Bey during his visit to Bayezit’s court. During a raid off the coast of Valencia in 1501, Kemal had seized a group of Christians, one of whom had sailed on three of Columbus’s four voyages across the Atlantic. When Kemal’s men searched his belongings, they discovered several maps from those voyages. They also found a feather headdress and an odd black stone (perhaps obsidian), which the captive said he had carried back from the New World.
Inspired by these discoveries, Kemal apparently sailed west from Valencia in August 1501 through the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have made his ship the first Ottoman vessel to enter the Atlantic. He and his men were said to have raided ports along the Iberian coast and then to have veered southwest toward the Canary Islands, before heading back along the Moroccan coast and returning to the Mediterranean.
Combining his expertise in Old World cartography with the maps his uncle passed on to him (he may have even interviewed his uncle’s Spanish captive), Piri gave shape to the world from China to the Caribbean. According to his notes on the map he gave Selim and later writings about it, Piri combined elements from more than a hundred maps into this one—among them the maps used by Columbus (Piri refers to him as the “Genoese infidel Colon-bo”), Arab maps of China and India (the best resources then available about those regions), Portuguese maps of West Africa and parts of India, and earlier Turkish and Italian maps of the Mediterranean. As Piri wrote, “I have made maps in which I was able to show twice the number of things contained in the maps of our day, having made use of new charts of the Chinese and Indian Seas which no one in the Ottoman lands had hitherto seen or known.” Borrowing from Spanish and Portuguese accounts of the New World, the translations of which he had likely secured from fellow sailors, the text accompanying Piri’s map speaks of the Americas and their peoples. It relates, for example, that people in the New World possess “four kinds of parrots, white, red, green and black. The people eat the flesh of parrots and their headdress is made entirely of parrots’ feathers.” He mentions the Spanish interest in finding gold in the New World and Columbus’s efforts to secure a patron for his voyages. The map’s text also notes that “the Portuguese infidels have written in their maps” of “white-haired monsters,” “six-horned oxen,” and “oxen with one horn.” Piri remained true to the place names given by Columbus, rendering them in Ottoman Turkish, and also true to the shape of the New World shown on Columbus’s maps, in which Cuba is attached to mainland North America and Hispaniola is oriented north–south. Ottoman Turkish text surrounds depictions of Native Americans, and West Africa seems remarkably close to South America. Uniting worlds that had always been kept separate, and infinitely more comprehensive and detailed than anything Columbus, or anyone else for that matter, had had at their disposal, Piri’s map was the most complete world map ever created.
