by Alan Mikhail
As in Bougie, the Ottoman threat was so menacing to both the Spanish and the Muslim North Africans that it turned enemies into allies. Such Christian-Muslim alliances were rare, of course. Decades earlier, Cem had attempted to broker one between the Mamluks and the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. The adversary that motivated all of these efforts to forge unique bonds of politics over religion was the Ottoman Empire, a sign of its primacy in the early modern Mediterranean.
Aware of the partnership against him in Morocco, Selim understood that he would have to devote enormous military resources and personnel to the western Mediterranean. His preparations, like those of his enemies, therefore demanded a delicate rebalancing of many priorities. Above all, he wanted to be sure that an invasion of Morocco would not compromise his ongoing efforts against the Safavids and their Shiite allies within the empire. By February 1519, Selim had ordered sixty thousand Ottoman troops from the Balkans to head south to Nicopolis, on the western coast of Greece, a port which offered a perfect launch pad for the North Africa campaign. The Ottomans held all of the surrounding region, so the movement of men and supplies overland to the coast from Istanbul, the Balkans, and mainland Greece was expedient and safe. From Nicopolis, it was a straight shot across the heart of the Mediterranean—away from any coastline and away from Sicily, Malta, and other pirate hotspots—to the sandy shores and lagoons of Tripoli in Libya, which was by this time an Ottoman stronghold. By March, Selim had also assembled an impressive fleet in the Aegean: 120 heavy galleys, 150 light galleys, 30 transports, 68,000 guns, and enough cannons to outfit 112 galleys. At the same time, he fortified Ottoman territories all along the North African coast. In July, for example, the Ottoman navy secured the island of Djerba, at the corner of the Tunisian coast, a key hinge of control between Tripoli and Tunis.
Meanwhile, Spain continued to funnel soldiers and supplies to North Africa. In November 1519, it dispatched one of the largest fleets in its armada to collect troops on the volcanic island of Ischia, near Naples, and also mobilized troops from its various other Italian possessions. Selim was just about to embark his forces when news of these maneuvers reached him, and decided to hold his ships in port to allow time to better assess his enemies’ shifting troop levels and resources, even asking the Venetian bailo in Istanbul whether he had received information about Spain’s forces via his Mediterranean spy networks. Selim had no interest in dispatching to North Africa any more of his precious troops than necessary, especially since he was still deliberating about reinforcements for his eastern front against the Safavids, but he knew as well that it would be dangerous to send too few. In March 1520, he finally settled on eighty thousand as the appropriate number of troops to deploy for the North Africa expedition.
Even as both sides committed vast resources and beat the drums of war, they attempted to engage each other diplomatically. Ottoman and Spanish ambassadors traveled back and forth between Selim’s headquarters in Edirne and Charles’s mobile court (given the attention his enormous empire required, he was always on the move, from the Low Countries to Spain, Germany to Italy). These negotiations stalled, because each side thought it held a military advantage and would therefore benefit from a war. Spain drew confidence from its historic hegemony in the western Mediterranean and its alliance with the Saadians; Selim believed that his empire’s enormous resources, its recent territorial gains, and his judicious troop deployments would carry the day.
As a sign of the futility of these negotiations, the two sides spent more time discussing the rather minor issue of the travel of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem than they did on the much more pressing matter at hand, their impending military confrontation. As part of any peace, the Spanish demanded guarantees of safe passage for Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, while Selim retorted that he had already put such guarantees in place. After his conquest of Jerusalem in late 1516, three years earlier, he had granted Christians and Jews full autonomy over their affairs and had welcomed the world’s Christians to Jerusalem as esteemed guests of his empire. This situation had changed in 1517, when Pope Leo X declared a new Crusade against the Ottomans, making Selim increasingly wary of European Christian visitors in his empire. Crusaders had posed as pilgrims before. Selim therefore imposed a quota on the number of pilgrims, and ordered mandatory inspections of their ships and lodgings. Still, confident in his military superiority over a Habsburg Spanish Empire with shifting priorities, and understanding how impossible it would be for Europe to mount a Crusade, Selim agreed, yet again, to guarantee the protection and free passage of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Both sides recognized the increasing uselessness of these discussions. As the geopolitics of the moment tilted increasingly toward war, it was soldiers, not pilgrims, that would matter most.
WITH HIS EMPIRE’S RECENT expansion, Selim’s Ottomans now trod the soils of Yemen, Gujarat, Algiers, and Ethiopia; they pulled their ships into ports across the Mediterranean, the Red and Black seas, and the Indian Ocean; they fought Christian and Muslim armies from eastern Europe to Central Asia; they traded goods in Baku, Oman, and Indonesia. Now they were about to push for the empire’s first territory on the Atlantic.
In May 1520, as Europe convulsed with revolts in Spain against its Habsburg ruler and Luther’s Protestant challenge churned the Catholic hierarchy, a man named Ali Bey, one of Selim’s dragomans (interpreters), arrived in Edirne carrying a gift for his sultan: a new mappamundi, this one inscribed in Italian and Latin. Like the map Piri Reis had unfurled for Selim in Cairo in 1517, this new world map enchanted and amazed the sultan, as Venetian sources relate—though, unlike Piri’s map, it has not survived and therefore not received the attention from historians it deserves. When Selim first saw it, he immediately rose from his throne to examine it more closely. He laid it out on a table, circled it as one would a sacred shrine, and pored over it with his advisers. He traced the coastlines with his eyes, taking in the shapes of the continents—all the world’s known territories, from west to east, north to south.
This time, Selim did not rip the map in half. In the flickering candlelight of that warm evening, he instructed a secretary to cross out all of the map’s Italian and Latin names and replace them with their equivalents in Ottoman Turkish (as they had appeared on Piri’s 1517 map). As the man set to work, the entire world slowly transformed from Italian and Latin to Ottoman, enacting a new conquest of the imagination on parchment. Costantinopoli became Istanbul, Egitto became Mısır, Insula Hispana (Hispaniola) became Vilayet Antilia. On this map, in Edirne, Selim now possessed all of creation.
The comparison between Selim’s reactions to these two maps reflects an important transformation in his worldview between 1517 and 1520, one most scholars have not appreciated. With his conquest of the Mamluk Empire, he had become increasingly confident that his empire was the vanguard of global power, and in 1517, he had correctly understood that world domination meant controlling the Mediterranean and the territories to the east of the sea. The lands Piri had depicted on the other side of the Atlantic had seemed negligible, the attempt to conquer them a risk worth taking only for the weaker, more desperate Europeans. By 1520, Selim seems to have decided that he wanted that “negligible” territory—he wanted the Americas. And because he now knew that his route to the Americas went through Morocco, he redoubled his resolve to conquer that territory. In the words of Abbas Hamdani, one of the few historians who has taken Selim’s interest in the Atlantic seriously, “As the Ottomans were engaged in a counter-crusade in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea against those very powers who had discovered these new lands [the Americas], they appeared ready to pursue their enemies on into and perhaps across the Atlantic. . . . Ottoman interest in North Africa and their desperate drive toward the western shores of the Maghrib [North Africa] are themselves evidence of the Porte’s [i.e., the sultan’s] intentions. If the Ottomans did not reach America, it is because they failed to gain the Atlantic coast.”
By 1520, Selim had grown accustomed to being the rul
er of the world’s largest empire, sultan and caliph, God’s shadow on earth. The east, and now clearly the west, too, fell within his sights. Seizing Morocco would allow him to invade north into Spain, cross the ocean to the Americas, and extend his dominion down the western coast of Africa as well. Surely, Selim now imagined that virtually all of the territories on the western portion of Piri’s map—the half that survives, the half that he previously chose to ignore—could be his. Selim knew territorial expansion would be his most lasting legacy, and he therefore aspired to make reality match the vision he created by preserving the world intact, this time, and having all of its place names translated into Turkish. He intended to make the whole world Ottoman.
CHAPTER
23
ETERNITY
Selim on his deathbed
IN THE CENTER OF A KIND OF VENN DIAGRAM OF GREEK, BULGARIAN, and Turkish cultural zones, Edirne was not only the Ottomans’ second capital city from the late 1360s until 1453, but also is distinguished as the home of the oldest continuous athletic competition in the world. Every year since 1346, Edirne has hosted an olive oil wrestling tournament. Exactly as the term suggests, men wearing only leather shorts lather themselves in olive oil and wrestle on a grassy field until one either pins the other on the muddy, slick ground or raises him above his shoulders. Wrestling is one of the oldest sports in the world, and evidence for oil wrestling exists across the ancient Mediterranean, from Greece and Rome to Assyria, Egypt, and Iran. The Ottomans continued the tradition when they entered the Middle East—yet one more way in which they inherited the legacies of the great ancient Mediterranean empires.
The figure of a wrestler fittingly symbolizes Selim. He had been a combatant his entire life—first against his own family, then against the Safavids and Mamluks, and now against the Spanish in the Mediterranean and the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Selim’s ambitions in Morocco, however, presented him with a far more formidable test than any he had faced to this point. Part of the challenge of olive oil wrestling is, obviously, the difficulty of grasping one’s opponent. Instead of simply grabbing at a slippery arm or leg, one must develop a strategy, first, to avoid losing one’s own footing, and then to lure one’s foe into a compromising position. Leverage, balance, and distraction prove crucial for success. In Edirne in the summer of 1520, Selim in many ways stood like a wrestler, having to weigh his multiple military engagements and trying to anticipate his enemies’ maneuvers to plan his own countermoves. He had seen the European powers weaken themselves through infighting, he had amassed troops and supplies in Algeria for an overland offensive, and he had readied his northern Mediterranean forces to move quickly on Morocco.
Olive oil wrestling in Edirne
If Selim had captured Morocco, he would have completely reforged the history of the world after 1520. In a Catholic European doomsday scenario, he might have allied with Spain’s non-Catholic enemies on the continent, perhaps even with the surging tide of Martin Luther’s nascent Protestant movement, to surround Spain and conquer the whole of Europe. Islam would prevail over Christianity, Ottoman ecumenicalism over European intolerance. The voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama had catapulted northwest Africa from being a tucked-away corner of the Mediterranean to serving as the strategic hinge of a new transoceanic world. Morocco was one of the keys to global dominion in the sixteenth century.
WHILE STROLLING THROUGH THE palace gardens in Edirne, discussing invasion plans with his advisers, Selim sat down to relieve his sore back. Long hours standing tall on his horse while hunting often stiffened his joints. He assumed his back pain would be temporary, as it always had been, and that he would be fine after a little rest. He sat, stretched, and thought nothing of it. He asked to see the mappamundi again, and requested updates on the situation in Rhodes, which he still contemplated invading. As the Aztecs and the Spanish warred in Mexico that summer of 1520, Selim dined with his consorts in Edirne, enjoying the cool breezes of the lingering evenings.
In August, he consulted one of his physicians about the pain in his back, pain that now felt different from the usual ache, more “like the prick of a thorn.” His chief physician, Hasan Can, found what looked like a pimple with a whitened tip, and prescribed an ointment. After a few days of treatment, the pain remained. Growing impatient and wanting immediate relief, Selim instructed a bath attendant to pop the pustule, softened by the warm steam. The attendant obeyed, causing Selim to writhe in intense pain. Over the following days, the agony continued; after a few weeks, his back became so painful that he could no longer ride a horse. Still, he kept up his normal schedule of council meetings, consulting with his advisers, and receiving foreign dignitaries and visitors.
Selim did his best to keep his excruciating pain a secret, yet rumors started to swirl. Word spread that his eyes began to yellow. Some speculated that the boil was in fact a plague bubo and that he was close to death; he could have contracted the disease during the 1518 outbreak in Istanbul, and moved to bucolic Edirne to recuperate rather than escape. No evidence exists to support this claim.
The empire’s best doctors—an ecumenical group of Muslims, Jews, and Christians—traveled to Edirne from Istanbul. They debated the proper course of action, recommending rest and suggesting various topical solutions. Nothing worked; Selim’s pain intensified. His personal physicians urged him, despite his growing weakness, to return to Istanbul, where he could receive better care. He agreed, but insisted that his procession back to the capital appear as normal as possible—a simple return to the palace. However, he was so wracked by pain that he had to be wheeled on a cart.
Inside his opulent tent and surrounded by a phalanx of advisers and soldiers, the sultan stayed hidden so that no subject of the empire could see him in this ignoble state. The procession stopped in Çorlu, the nondescript halfway point between Edirne and Istanbul, to allow him a respite from the ordeal of travel. The last time he was in Çorlu, he had been leading an army of irregulars against his father the sultan. Vigorous and violent then, he was now a debilitated man. Even the simple journey to Istanbul was proving too much for him, and so he rested in Çorlu, fading in and out of consciousness, barely strong enough to summon his physicians, closest advisers, and military men to his bedside. He kept his consorts away. When he ordered his men to recite the “Yā-Sīn” chapter of the Qur’an, they dutifully obeyed what would prove to be their sultan’s final command. Selim mumbled the verses along with them, surely focusing his hazy thoughts on its lessons about the hereafter and resurrection. In that moment—though we of course cannot know for certain—perhaps Selim imagined Suleyman’s reign as the empire’s next sultan, or remembered his beloved mother’s devotion to his own success; perhaps he recalled his despised father and his dead half-brothers; perhaps he ruminated on his unfulfilled dream of world domination. He closed his eyes. His advisers crouched over their frail and immobilized sovereign. They watched as Selim’s chest moved up and down and his lips twitched.
And then, a few minutes later, only stillness. God’s shadow had died.
SELIM DREW HIS LAST breath early in the morning of September 22, 1520, mere weeks before his fiftieth birthday. The cause of death was most likely plague, or perhaps anthrax contracted from his horse. A few months earlier, in June, the Aztec ruler Montezuma, whom Cortés described as a sultan, also died, probably at a similar age. Coming within months of each other, these two deaths could not have been more significant for the course of world history. Montezuma’s demise allowed the Spanish to march on the Aztec capital, with the empire yielding to its final destruction the very next year, 1521. This opened the floodgates of European colonization in the New World. Had the Spanish lost to Montezuma, the last half-millennium of world history would have been quite different. Similarly, a victory for the Ottoman Empire in Morocco would have redirected global history onto a completely new trajectory. Selim’s death forever quieted that possibility. His designs on Morocco, his Caribbean aspirations, his war against the Safavids, his grand plans for the
Ottomans in China—all screeched to a halt. Ottoman soldiers held their secure position in Algeria. Selim’s naval flotilla remained in port in western Greece. No Ottoman Morocco, no Ottoman unification of North Africa, no Islamic retaking of Spain, no Ottoman outpost on the Atlantic—and no Vilayet Antilia.
AS THE HALF-DOZEN OR so advisers in Selim’s tent in Çorlu prayed over their sultan’s corpse, they resolved to keep his death a secret until they arrived in Istanbul. They held their regular council meeting on the day after his death and sent word through the encampment to prepare to march that afternoon. Careful to keep the body hidden, they resumed their procession to the capital as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Just before leaving Çorlu, however, they dispatched a single messenger to Manisa, swearing him to absolute secrecy, to inform Suleyman, still Selim’s only son, of his father’s death. Ideally, Suleyman would arrive in Istanbul and safely and completely possess the realm before news of his father’s death spread. In this space between sultans, the longtime loyalists feared the disorder that might arise in a leaderless empire.
Selim’s chief physician, Hasan Can, oversaw the several undertakers and corpse-washers who cleaned and readied the body for transport from Çorlu to Istanbul. He reported that, on two separate occasions during the washing of the body, Selim moved his right hand to cover his naked penis. Those who saw this miraculous event proclaimed their wonder and respect for Selim, praying to God for their sovereign’s eternity. The apocryphal detail, clearly, was meant to testify to Selim’s modesty, piety, and uprightness, and vouch for his dominion and power even in death. Given the dubiousness surrounding the legality of his accession to the throne, such a story was designed to attest to his eternal virtue.
