One very interesting take on this problem has been advanced recently by the Yale historian Alan Mikhail, in his new biography of Selim I, in whose short, early 16th century, reign the Ottomans became, in his opinion, a global power. This concept may seem counter-intuitive, given the Empire’s geographical location in the middle of the massive, Eurasian landmass, which they did not fully dominate – while the Ottomans were, of course, much less able to project power to the Americas, for instance. But the argument is an interesting, thought-provoking one, because Mikhail is explicitly challenging the familiar view many hold today concerning the “rise of the west” by introducing an Ottoman element into the argument, in ways that allow him to explicitly assert that “the Ottoman Empire made our modern world”. His thesis looks something like this:
- By tripling the size, and reach, of the Ottoman Empire, Selim created a sort of existential threat to the Christian powers of Europe
- Ottoman naval power came to dominate the Mediterranean, and this was what drove Iberian explorers out into the Atlantic – to the south, rounding Africa and opening up trade with the Indies, in the case of the Portuguese, and to the Americas, in the case of the Spaniards
- In addition, both Columbus and Henry the Navigator were explicitly voyaging in the hope of meeting the “Grand Khan” (in essence a figure forged in memories of the Mongol empire) that both believed offered a potential counterbalance to rising Ottoman power. Both set out to create the conditions for Holy War, but instead stumbled into points of access to massive economic wealth
- In the meantime, the first early modern “superpower”, Spain, was forging itself by completing the “Reconquista” of the Iberian peninsula – a revival of a very old and long-standing conflict whose timing owed everything to the fear that the Muslims of Granada would make common cause with the newly-powerful Ottoman state. It was the same basic fear, Mikhail argues, that prompted Ferdinand and Isabella to finance Columbus – his voyage was not so much to “find a new route to the Indies,” as is so often stated, as explicitly a voyage in search of the Great Khan.
- On the Ottomans’ southern and eastern borders, Selim was responsible both for the defeat of Ismail I and his Safavid, Shia Persia (Battle of Çaldiran, 1514), thus ensuring that Sunni, rather than Shia Islam would predominate until the present day, and with the destruction of Mamluk power in Egypt and for the seizure of the Holy Places – Mecca and Medina, which gave the Ottoman sultans – now also “caliphs” – claim to the religious loyalty of all Muslims, a potentially dramatic further extension of their power that continued to worry their western enemies as late as World War I, when the Ottoman sultan attempted to call for jihad against the allied powers
- The Ottomans and the rising threat they represented had further knock-on effects that the Turks themselves neither really realised, nor could control. For Mikhail, for instance, it was Pope Leo X’s obsession with the “Turkish menace” – at the cost of contemplation of “the dignity of man or the immortality of the soul” – and the concomitant costs of his projected crusade against them that inspired Martin Luther to denounce the papal initiative as an attempt to distract attention from Catholic corruption and helped to catalyse the Reformation. For Luther, Selim and his successors were God’s “lash of iniquity”, created as a means to punish Christian sinners
- Ultimately, Mikhail argues, it was the unprecedented century and a half of Ottoman success, from roughly 1450-1600, that is the underlying reason why, even today, the west, and especially the US, considers Islam as an existential threat; the same period also offers a model for Turkish nationalism currently being pushed by President Erdoğan
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