BOOK RECOMMENDATION: GOD’S SHADOW

It’s been a very long time since I last posted a book recommendation here in this blog.

Time to remedy that.

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When you use European sources to research Barbary corsairs, you discover a curious thing. Barbary corsairs—and the Islamic society to which they belonged—seem in large part to have been quietly erased from standard European histories.

I’m not suggesting that there’s any sort of malignant conspiracy going on, and the sources are certainly there (and most people have, of course, heard about Barbary corsairs and about Islam), but the standard histories of Europe tend to ignore or gloss over the influence of both the corsairs themselves and the larger Islamic civilization they were part of.

It’s almost as if the prominent adversarial role that Islamic civilization played for so many centuries is, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore (American President Bill Clinton’s Vice President and the loser of the 2020 presidential election to George W. Bush), “an inconvenient truth.” The narrative of European history is so much simpler and more reassuring with Islam conveniently swept to the peripheries.

But, inconvenient or not, Islam did play a crucial role in European history.

And that is what this week’s book deals with.

The book is God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, by Alan Mikhail.

As the title indicates, God’s Shadow is a biography of the Ottoman Sultan Selim (sometimes known as “the Resolute” or “the Grim”), who was the son of Bayezid II (who in turn was the son of Mehmed II, known as the Conqueror, for his conquest of Constantinople in 1453), and the father of Suleiman the Magnificent, whose reign was the longest of all the Ottoman Sultans.

God’s Shadow is more than a simple straightforward biography, though. It’s a fascinating exploration of the profound influence that the Ottoman Empire and Islamic civilization has had on Europe.

Take Christopher Columbus, for example.

The standard characterization of Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic goes like this:

“It was a decisive turning point in the history of the entire world… It marked the most critical moment in European overseas expansion, for it united Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas in a single world system, for the first time inaugurating the global era in which we live today. Columbus’s intrepid voyage across uncharted seas and the momentous consequences that flowed from it have made him a historic figure of mythic proportions.”

According to this standard version of the story, Columbus convinced King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile (the Spanish royal power couple who underwrote the expenses of his expedition) that he would find

“an alternate (and shorter) route to the riches of the East… [This was] a business arrangement between Columbus and the Spanish Crown. They envisioned a voyage of exploration, a reconnaissance, in search of the fabled wealth of the Orient, its gold and spices… It was to be a commercial enterprise.”

For anybody even vaguely acquainted with the story of Columbus, this all sounds perfectly familiar.

Here, however, is Alan Mikhail’s take on the subject in God’s Shadow:

“The story of Columbus and his generation of explorers is undoubtedly one of crusade. These sailors explicitly defined most of their expeditions in religious terms, as crucial contributions to the global civilizational war between Christendom and Islam. Like all Europeans of his era, Columbus grew up with this crusading yeast baked into his daily bread. Without understanding the role of anti-Muslim crusading in all of Columbus’s voyages—even before his transatlantic crossing—we cannot fully explain their lasting and consequential outcomes.”

Mikhail’s characterization may seem surprising—perhaps even, to some, outrageous—but he presents a very convincing case.

The standard version of Columbus’s life, for instance, clams that “his ideas were also decisively influenced by his reading of Marco Polo’s account of China and its riches… The commercial wealth and urban splendor of China as described by Marco Polo became a magnet that drew Columbus westward.”

Mikhail, however, provides a different perspective:

“A major figure in Polo’s tales was the Grand Khan… whose opulent court and persona especially fascinated Columbus… But what most intrigued Columbus about the Grand Khan was that, according to Polo, though he was not a Christian, he wanted to become one… This fable of a Grand Khan who had seen the light of Jesus stoked the European imagination like nothing else… [and] kindled a belief in Europe that a global Christian alliance to conquer Jerusalem was possible. According to the fantasy, once the Grand Khan converted, the Muslims holding Jerusalem would be surrounded by Christians who, in one fatal, apocalyptic pincer movement, would destroy them forever.

[Columbus] concluded that in order to capture Jerusalem for Christendom as part of the global destruction of Islam, one needed to head west not east—bypassing the Ottomans altogether. By crossing the Atlantic, one could find… the Christian sympathizing Grand Khan in China and thus take Jerusalem from the east, by the back door.”

This notion that Columbus—like other Europeans of his time—was strongly motivated by an animus towards Islam rests on yet another aspect of European history that gets downplayed or even outright ignored: for those of Columbus’s generation, the Ottoman Empire was a genuine existential threat.

Columbus was two years old when Constantinople fell. Everybody he knew would have been aware of what a serious threat that event was to the survival of Europe and, moreover, would have been conscious of—obsessed with—the danger it represented.

Moreover, Ferdinand and Isabella were not simply wealthy royal patrons of Columbus’s voyage. They were leaders of a holy crusade against Islam. Columbus served as a soldier in their army when it finally overran Grenada, the last of the Muslim kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula—in 1492.

Mikhail characterizes the situation like this:

“It is hardly a coincidence that Europe’s war on Islam and Columbus’s voyages transpired at the exact same time. In the minds of Columbus and the Spanish sovereigns, the two were pieces of the same global war: Christianity against Islam… As part of their global strategy against Islam they [the Spanish monarchs] dispatched their navies eastward in the Mediterranean to fight the Ottomans, endeavored to clear the Iberian Peninsula of Muslims, and sent Columbus and his fleet off to the west to Asia in an attempt to surprise and surround the Muslims of the Middle East…

As a solution to the problem of Muslim power in the Mediterranean, Columbus’s proposed adventure was a desperate act in desperate circumstances. In the larger picture, the triumph at Grenada was dwarfed by Ottoman incursions even further west in the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa. And the Ottoman (and Mamluk) hegemony over trade with the east enabled them to control contact with eastern merchants and levy exorbitant tariffs on European traders, and even blockade the trade routes at will. With few viable options against the Ottomans, and buoyed by her victory, Isabella was willing to gamble on a perilous trip across an unfathomable ocean.”

It’s in this sense that the story of Columbus is “one of crusade.” It’s a story that has long been neglected.

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I’ve gone into the Columbus issue in such detail here because it provides an example of how illuminating God’s Shadow is. The book, however, is not about Columbus. It’s about Sultan Selim. Mikhail describes Selim’s life in vivid detail, following him from childhood to old age. Woven throughout, however (as the subtitle the Making of the Modern World makes clear), is the notion that the Ottomans (and Islam) have played a decisive role in European history for centuries, and Sultan Selim is presented as one of the major architects of that Ottoman/Islamic role.

God’s Shadow is narrative history. That is, history told as a story rather than as a dry presentation of dates and events. So not only is it enlightening; it’s also a thoroughly engaging read.

That’s a winning combination.

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The excerpts providing the standard description of Columbus’s exploits come from the Introduction to Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents, by Geoffrey Symcox & Blair Sullivan. The quotes from God’s Shadow come from chapters 6 and 7, titled “Columbus and Islam” and “Columbus’s Crusade.”