Selim I - The Ninth Sultan of The Ottoman Empire: America, Protestantism And Coffee All Have a Muslim History
By
Alan Mikhail
August 20,
2020
Alan
Mikhail is professor of history and chair of the department of history at Yale
University and author of the new book "God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His
Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World."
(iStock)
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Most
Americans don’t know that their morning cup of coffee connects them to the
Ottoman Empire. Few are aware that this bygone Muslim state helped to birth
Protestantism, America’s dominant form of Christianity, or that the European
explorers who “discovered” the Americas did so because of the Ottomans’ and
other Muslims’ stranglehold on trade between Europe and Asia. In fact, some
Americans don’t even know what the Ottoman Empire was. When Americans think of
the Middle East, they often view it as a theatre for American wars and a region
essential for its oil. Yet all of us owe important parts of our culture and
history to the most important empire in Middle Eastern history, the Ottoman
Empire, and specifically to one sultan who lived half a millennium ago.
This
September marks the 500-year anniversary of the death of a singular, but
forgotten, historical figure — Selim I, the ninth sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Selim’s life and reign spanned perhaps the most consequential half-century in
world history, with reverberations down to our own time. He nearly tripled
Ottoman territory through wars in the Middle East, North Africa and the
Caucasus. More than Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, German Catholic
priest Martin Luther, Italian diplomat and political philosopher Niccolò
Machiavelli or others of his contemporaries, Selim’s triumphs literally changed
the world.
Kuru, A. (2019). History. In Islam, Authoritarianism, and
Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (pp. 67-236). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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In 1517,
Selim and his army marched from Istanbul to Cairo, vanquishing his foremost
rival in the Muslim world, the Mamluk Empire. Selim now governed more territory
than nearly any other sovereign. He held the keys to global domination. He
controlled the middle of the world, monopolized trade routes between the
Mediterranean and India and China, and possessed ports on all the major seas
and oceans of the Old World. His religious authority in the Muslim world was
now unrivalled. And he had enormous resources of cash, land and manpower.
Lording over so much, he fittingly earned the title
The defeat
of the Mamluks completely shifted the balance of global power between the two
major geopolitical forces of the age: Islam and Christianity. In this period,
religion was not simply a matter of personal faith but the organizing logic of
politics across the world. In 1517, Selim won Mecca and Medina, the holiest
cities in Islam, transforming his empire from having a majority Christian
population to a majority Muslim one and making him both sultan and caliph, the
chief political leader of his empire and the head of the global Muslim
community.
The
Ottomans and the Shiite Safavid rulers of Iran would wage war throughout the
1500s and 1600s, early iterations of the Sunni-Shiite religious and political
divide within Islam that continues to roil the Muslim world today. It was
during Selim’s day that for the first time a state self-identified as a Sunni
state and another as a Shiite state to then battle for supremacy in the Middle
East.
But Islam
was far from the only religion upended by the Ottomans’ explosive expansion.
Selim’s territorial dominance posed a spiritual challenge to Christian Europe,
then a continent of small principalities and bickering hereditary city-states.
Individually — or even together — they were no match for the gargantuan Muslim
empire. Seeking to explain this power imbalance, many Europeans found answers
not merely in politics but in what they perceived as their moral failings. In a
world where religion and politics were conjoined, reversals of fortune
represented judgments from God.
consequential
of these critiques came from Martin Luther. He suggested that Christianity’s
weakness against Islam stemmed from the moral depravity of the Catholic Church.
The pope’s corruption corroded the Christian soul from the inside, making the
whole of the body of Christendom brittle and therefore vulnerable to external
enemies.
In addition
to serving as an ideological counterpoint, Selim’s Ottomans bought Luther time
to sow discord: Because of their military mobilizations to defend against the
Ottomans, Catholic powers demurred from sending additional fighting forces to
quell these early Protestant stirrings. As a result, Luther and his supporters
were able to gain a foothold to spread the Protestant faith across German towns
and then eventually around the globe.
Economically,
the Ottoman Empire was a powerhouse through its sheer size and the shrewd
leadership Selim displayed in controlling such a vast geographic area. One of
the drivers of the empire’s economy from Selim’s day through to the early 18th
century was the control of the global coffee trade. In fact, it was Selim’s
military that first discovered the plant with bright red berries during its
incursion into Yemen.
The
Ottomans figured out how to brew this berry, and with it created institutions
devoted solely to drinking coffee: We (and Starbucks owner Howard Schultz) have
Selim to thank for the coffeehouse. Few of us appreciate that an Ottoman sultan
was the first to turn commerce into geopolitics, monopolizing the supply of one
of the world’s original mass consumer goods.
Selim’s
power proved so great that his influence reached beyond even Europe and the
Middle East, across the Atlantic to North America. In 1517, within weeks of
Selim marching his Ottoman troops to conquer Cairo, the first Europeans landed
in Mexico. As swells pushed them toward the Yucatán Peninsula, the three
Spanish ships that had sailed from Cuba sighted off in the distance a grand
Mayan city, larger than anything any of them had ever seen. This city is
today’s Cape Catoche near Cancún. In 1517, though, these Spaniards christened
it El Gran Cairo, the Great Cairo.
That year’s
conquest of two Cairos — one Mayan, one Mamluk — illustrates just how deeply
Selim haunted European imaginations. Egypt’s most famous city proved a
touchstone: Even on the other side of the world, it conjured up for the Spanish
the image of a gargantuan metropolis of grandeur, threatening mystery and
bloodthirsty fantasy. For centuries, Cairo had sent out ships to torment
Spanish settlements in North Africa and on the Iberian Peninsula. It had
captured and imprisoned Christians and dispatched threatening missives to
European capitals. Cairo controlled holy Jerusalem, and prevented Europeans
from trading with India and China. All of this power was now in Selim’s hands.
The conquest of a vast Mayan city, while clearly a major victory for the
Spanish, could not match the potency of Selim’s Muslim clout. If anything, it
evidenced European weakness — that even in the Caribbean, Christians were still
possessed by Ottoman ghosts.
The
Ottomans persisted as central players on the world stage from Selim’s reign
until their demise in World War I, after more than six centuries of rule. When
European powers began outpacing the empire in the 19th century, they also wrote
the Ottomans out of the history of how our world came to be. Europeans
projected Ottoman weakness in the present back into the past to portray their
own ascendancy as somehow inevitable.
Overcoming
this view to see the reverberations of the Ottoman Empire in the “New World”
and across the globe helps us to grasp the omnipresence of Ottoman influence.
It helps us to recognize what Europeans understood for centuries: that thanks
to Selim, the Ottomans wielded more power, controlled more territory, ruled
over more people and endured longer than nearly all other states. Understanding
this history helps us to see the integral, usually overlooked or rejected,
place of Muslims in what is our shared past. While Islam is often portrayed as
a threatening other in America today, as diametrically opposed to what we
quickly accept as “the West,” it is actually an integral part of our history
and culture, a constructive force in our richly interwoven past. America,
Protestantism and coffee all have a Muslim history. Our nation — and world — is
indeed very much an Ottoman one.
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Alan Mikhail is professor of history and chair of
the department of history at Yale University and author of the new book
"God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the
Modern World."
Original
Headline: The Ottoman sultan who changed America
Source: The Washington Post
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-history/selim-i-ninth-sultan-ottoman/d/122694