by Alan Mikhail
IN JULY 1517, Selim’s prized naval fleet finally arrived from Istanbul, laden with supplies to replenish the army for the long march home. He waited for the hottest part of the year to pass before beginning that march on September 13, 1517. The week before his departure, the fleet set sail on its return trip to Istanbul, carrying, in place of the offloaded provisions, a veritable intellectual army of eight hundred Egyptian scholars, artisans, religious leaders, and merchants, including a number of Mamluk dignitaries such as al-Mutawakkil, from whom Selim had received the caliphate, who lived out the rest of his days under house arrest in Istanbul.
Selim concentrated at the center of his empire not just the Middle East’s agricultural and economic riches but, perhaps even more importantly, its intellectual, artistic, and cultural wealth. The Ottomans could thus absorb the traditions of places such as Cairo and Damascus, Tabriz and Aleppo, long-established hubs of Islamic learning and global commerce. This monopolization of human capital further solidified Istanbul’s role as the new center of the Muslim world and the seat of the global caliphate, developments that would influence life in the Ottoman Empire for centuries to come.
After almost two years away, Selim reached Istanbul in July 1518, long after his ships had made landfall. On his way back to the capital, he passed through Jerusalem to see its holy sites one more time and spent several months in Damascus and Aleppo, overseeing administrative affairs associated with the Ottoman transition. In Damascus, he visited the recently completed shrine of Ibn ‘Arabi, which pleased him greatly, and in Aleppo, he enjoyed a few days of hunting and held several meetings in the citadel, awed again by the view of the city below.
Between Chaldiran and his campaign against the Mamluks, he had devoted more than half of his six years as sultan to waging war. His first act upon his return to the city was to go to the Hagia Sophia mosque, next to Topkapı Palace. Surrounded by the exquisite marbles and gold mosaics of the former Byzantine church, Selim thanked God for his safe return and all his successes. He then entered the palace and greeted his consorts. He summoned his old barber, who cut his hair and shaved his beard, and then he took a long, hot bath.
Only two months later, Selim received reports of plague in Istanbul.
Being sultan did not give him immunity from plague, of course, but it did make him less vulnerable than most other humans. The simplest strategy to protect oneself from the disease—running away from it—was the most effective. So Selim and his retinue fled plague-stricken Istanbul for the former imperial capital of Edirne. Although he could not have known it, this would be the last time he stepped on Istanbul’s cobblestones or laid his eyes on the Bosphorus.
LIKE CAMP DAVID FOR American presidents, Edirne was a favorite escape for Ottoman sultans—close to Istanbul but still rural, much quieter than the capital, far from the stresses of palace intrigue and imperial bureaucracy, and a respite from the demands of Janissary regiments and governors for attention and money. Selim loved Edirne’s expansive landscape, towering trees, and tranquility. Residing there from the fall of 1518 to the late summer of 1520, he kept an official schedule to attend to pressing matters, to meet foreign dignitaries, and to monitor his troops, but he also found time to enjoy long days of relaxation. Of course, Selim realized the importance of being present in Istanbul, but, truth be told, he preferred being elsewhere. Over the course of his life, he had spent very little time in the Ottoman capital, so he still found the city rather alien and the walled palace, while opulent, almost suffocating. Thus, leaving Istanbul after only a few months did not bother him. Indeed, Edirne in many ways reminded him of Trabzon. Both were small cities surrounded by nature, where he could balance time with his consorts and advisers with time away from the palace.
Selim’s primary delight in Edirne was hunting. It was not unusual for him to escape to the woods with a small coterie of advisers for as much as a week at a time. For a sultan accustomed to warfare—and one as cunning and skillful as he was—hunting was of the utmost importance. It allowed him to replicate the tactical aspects of military campaigns while avoiding the dangers of death or capture that came with real war. Unlike the crowded city or the intrigue of the palace, the forest afforded Selim space for peace and reflection on noble ideals such as wisdom, justice, and morality. Crisp air, quiet, and infinite sky focused the mind and purified the soul. The countryside offered Selim a chance to test his mind and body, maintain good health, keep his military skills sharp, and build physical stamina. Visitors, who often came from far away, might have to wait in Edirne for days until Selim returned from one of his expeditions, and some observers complained that he ignored important affairs of state and army in favor of chasing game.
Selim’s passion for hunting even entered into the record of Ottoman–Venetian diplomacy. From Edirne in late 1519, Selim asked the bailo—the Venetian ambassador in Istanbul—to send him two Italian hunting greyhounds, dressed in full livery. He also asked the Venetian representative to send him “two small docile hairy” dogs, presumably for his entertainment at home. Selim the “warmonger,” sultan of the seven climes, evidently had a soft spot for what, today, we call lap dogs.
Between 1518 and 1520, Selim implemented a series of measures aimed at solidly administering and properly defending his hugely expanded domains. Across his realms, he appointed governors and judges, updated and expanded law codes, streamlined market regulations, and issued countless orders on administrative matters ranging from taxation to mosque and church reconstruction to vegetable prices. In August 1518, for example, the prices of oats and vegetables skyrocketed in Syria, leading to protests in the markets and bazaars. That summer too, the Janissaries, who had supported Selim in his bid for the throne, came to collect on their investment—demanding higher salaries, better assignments, and more influence in the empire’s economic and political affairs. Selim well understood how vital the army had been to his rise and how crucial they would be to his future, so he did all he could to appease them, lavishing on them money, appointments, and supplies. Meanwhile, visitors poured in, seeking an audience with Selim to congratulate him on his conquests, curry favor, and beg for protection and patronage. Officials from as far afield as India and Hungary traveled to Istanbul and then Edirne to meet one of the world’s most powerful humans—who, by all accounts, enjoyed the attention.
Trade and economic policies had always played a central role in the empire’s geostrategy. They would be decisive factors, Selim knew, in any future military ventures. Having been the globe’s middlemen for centuries, the Ottomans had now extended their sphere of influence with new territories on the Arabian peninsula that allowed them to project their power into the Indian Ocean. When Piri Reis presented Selim with his world map in Cairo, the sultan, smartly, had wagered on East over West. Despite the recent opening of the Atlantic, the majority of world trade—with its attendant consequences for the movement of plague—still operated between the Mediterranean and Asia. Indeed, it would be more than a century before the Atlantic trade began to outpace Eurasian trade. Selim’s newly achieved dominance of the entire eastern Mediterranean allowed him to exert almost complete control over the commerce between East and West, making the Ottoman Empire the world’s primary economic geopolitical power.
Possession of Yemen allowed Selim to slash further holes in the global silk trade. He maintained the overland embargo that he had imposed just before the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, which forced Iranian silk merchants eastward in search of other, maritime routes to Europe and overland routes to India; now, his eastern navy could directly interfere with those trade networks. An unintended consequence of this was to foster a closer alliance between the Portuguese and the Safavids, as the European maritime power began shipping Iranian silk from the Persian Gulf around the Horn of Africa and into Europe. As Selim looked more and more toward the Indian Ocean, especially after his capture of Yemen and increasing interests in the coffee trade, he quickly realized that pushing the Safavids into the arms of the Portuguese was dama
ging to Ottoman interests. Thus, he proposed a set of treaties with India’s Muslim rulers for joint operations against the Portuguese. Lisbon’s representatives in the subcontinent wrote anxiously to their king: “[The harbor of] Diu is waiting for the Ottomans with open arms.” Another Portuguese envoy, after returning to India from Malacca, wrote of the expectations of India’s Muslims: “With the news of the Ottomans, I have returned to find everywhere in rebellion.” In October 1518, Selim—still in Istanbul before leaving for Edirne—made Portugal’s fears a reality when he received an ambassador from the ruler of Calicut, who had traveled thousands of miles by ship and by caravan to seek an agreement of cooperation against the Portuguese. Selim enthusiastically entered into this alliance in February 1519, dispatching from the Red Sea thirty ships and thousands of sailors—a significant commitment for the Ottoman navy. He also instituted high tariffs on Portuguese merchants in Alexandria and other Ottoman port cities—thus advantaging Venetian merchants, as well as those from Dubrovnik and elsewhere. Such machinations aimed to keep goods from India flowing through the Mediterranean, instead of around Africa on Portuguese ships.
In the growing global trade war of the early sixteenth century, even the Ottomans’ enemies to the west, the Venetians, lobbied Selim on trade policy. Despite the privileges he had granted Venetian merchants in Egypt, they suffered overall more than the Portuguese from the high tariffs he imposed on spices and other goods moving from the East through the Red Sea and Egypt. They continued to complain about the Iranian silk embargo, especially since, unlike the Portuguese, they lacked the advantage of an alternative southern route around Africa. By March 1519, Venetian trade in Egyptian ports had all but dried up. Eventually, the two powers managed to reach an agreement, driven largely by the pleas of Ottoman merchants, who earned handsome profits from their trade with Venice. Selim obliged his merchants, but only under certain conditions. He would grant Venetians in Ottoman ports a special discounted tariff rate if, in return, Venice would guarantee favorable prices on the goods it sold in the Ottoman Empire.
VENICE AND HUNGARY REMAINED the strongest entities on the empire’s western border, and Selim worked to neutralize both by negotiating new treaties with each of them. He had signed a peace accord with Venice in 1513, to prevent the island republic from aligning with Shah Ismail. In 1517, he renewed the treaty, agreeing that Venice could retain its control of Cyprus as a tributary colony, despite its proximity to Syria and Anatolia. Security along the long Ottoman–Hungarian border, however, proved much more difficult to maintain than peace on the Mediterranean islands the Ottomans and Venetians regularly traded back and forth. While Selim and King Vladislaus II of Hungary had successfully reached an agreement in 1513, border skirmishes over taxation and territorial sovereignty regularly erupted, so the two sides frequently had to pump new life into their peace treaty—in the winter of 1518 and the summer of 1519, for example. In 1519, Selim also renewed the empire’s peace treaty with Poland.
Stability in the relations between the Ottomans and their European enemies was, in fact, not ultimately secured by treaties, but rather driven by Renaissance Europe’s internal fragmentation. King Francis I of France and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V both styled themselves Europe-wide (even universal) rulers, and their contentious rivalry divided much of the continent among their respective allies, who fought frequent proxy wars against each other. Still, glimmers of European peace began to flicker in the mid-1510s—only to be doused once more by the first stirrings of Martin Luther’s Reformation in 1517. After Selim’s victory over the Mamluks that year, Pope Leo X, almost as a reflex, called for yet another Crusade against the Ottomans. According to Venetian accounts, Selim laughed when he heard this. Selim—and undoubtedly the pope himself—knew full well that Europe was far too internally fractured to mount the robust, unified campaign they would need to challenge the Ottomans.
With Europe more or less neutralized, in the fall of 1518 Selim began to contemplate his first major offensive since his defeat of the Mamluks. With the addition of Egypt to the empire, the sea routes to North Africa took on greater importance and therefore so did the island of Rhodes, halfway between Istanbul and Alexandria, and still controlled by the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. This limestone fleck, with its rocky shores and forests of pine and cypress, became a priority for Selim. Ottoman ships needed a way-station between the imperial capital and the empire’s largest and most lucrative province, in order to resupply and rest before venturing out of the Aegean into open sea. A base of operations such as Rhodes—at the mouth of the Aegean, and at the corner of Anatolia—would enable the empire to quickly dispatch aid to vessels in distress, control the movement of ships in and out of the Aegean, defend against the ever-present pirates, and generally project Ottoman naval power into the Mediterranean. Holding Rhodes, moreover, would provide security for the heavily forested areas of southwestern Anatolia, one of the empire’s few sources of the large, tall, straight trees essential for ship construction. Given their maritime ambitions, the Ottomans, like their neighbors in Venice, closely guarded their forests as a precious asset.
At the end of 1518, between hunts around Edirne, Selim began planning an invasion of Rhodes, giving orders to ready ships, oarsmen, weapons, and supplies. Ironically, with these moves, Selim temporarily unified European powers as no European leader could. News of the preparations gave immediate concern to Venice and, of course, to the Knights who ruled Rhodes; many other states, too, sought a peace that would prevent the Ottomans from strengthening their hand in the Mediterranean so dramatically. In the spring of 1519, as Hungary, in the midst of a deep financial crisis, negotiated one of the many renewals of its peace treaty with Selim, its diplomats in Edirne attempted to insert into the document guarantees that the Ottomans would not invade Rhodes, as well as language that would secure Ottoman peace with all of Europe’s Christian powers. Not surprisingly, given his strong position, Selim initially rejected the inclusion of such a sweeping statement, preferring to negotiate agreements with each of Europe’s weaker powers individually.
As part of his effort to win the Ottoman throne, Cem, Selim’s uncle, had fled to Rhodes in 1482. Unlike Cem, Selim would never see the island for himself. In the summer of 1519, he postponed his plan to invade Rhodes, because his old nemesis, the Safavid Empire, had become a threat once more, stirring up the Shiites in eastern Anatolia. Facing down an impending move by the Safavids and their Ottoman Shiite supporters was far more urgent than capturing Rhodes. Thus, Selim grudgingly signed the treaty with Hungary in July 1519, ensuring a temporary respite for Rhodes and some relief for Europe’s other anxious rulers. Only in 1522 would Rhodes finally fall to the Ottomans, with Suleyman completing the project his father had begun.
THE SAFAVIDS, FAR TO the east, had recovered from the rout at Chaldiran four years previously. The Shiite threat endured; Selim had been unable to finish the job in 1514 because his troops’ insistence on returning home had forced him to halt his advance at Tabriz. So, in Edirne in the fall of 1518, Selim devoted himself, once again, to preparing for a war against the Safavid scourge that had occupied so much of his life. If Selim was indeed the warmonger that a contemporary observed him to be, the Shiites of Iran and Anatolia shaped his warmongering life more than any other enemy. Ventures such as a campaign for Rhodes paled in comparison to Selim’s determination to destroy the Safavids.
As before, Selim’s first step was to eliminate support for the Safavids within the empire itself. This was a far greater challenge than it had been in 1514. In addition to the old pockets of Shiites in central and eastern Anatolia, there were Shiite populations spread across the Middle East who resented their new Sunni overlords. From Edirne, Selim sent orders to Aleppo to deport several rich Shiite families thought to be supportive of the Safavid shah. Also worrisome was the sizable Shiite population of Tripoli, the hilly town on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon. Even though it was distant from the Safavid border, Selim sent two hundred troops with sixteen cannons
as a preemptive show of force against any potential Shiite agitators in the city. Despite the suppression of the Şahkulu Rebellion and Selim’s purges as he marched toward Chaldiran, Shiites remained numerous in the vastly enlarged territory of the empire. In 1518, six years after Bayezit’s death, Selim was still cleaning up the mess his father had created when, in his attempt to suppress Shiite unrest, he dispersed eastern Anatolian populations to the west. In Bursa, for example, the empire’s first capital and one of the oldest Ottoman cities, nestled in the shadow of western Anatolia’s great snowy mountains, officials now purged two hundred families suspected of Shiite sympathies.
Given its proximity to Iran and many important Shiite religious sites, Baghdad presented a particularly acute challenge. In contrast to the undulating topography of Anatolia, Baghdad sprawled over the flat terrain that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had smoothed over millennia of floods. At the far eastern edge of Selim’s empire, it was the primary frontier city between Ottoman Sunnism and Safavid Shiism. Baghdad’s large Shiite population proved a bulwark of resistance to Ottoman rule, helping the Safavids secure the upper hand for most of the first third of the sixteenth century. After several failed attempts to invade the city, only in 1534 would the Ottomans finally break through to capture Baghdad. Here, in the first half of the sixteenth century, began the epic military and political struggle we know today between the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq.
