God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhail
Though God’s Shadow is the first book I’ve read by Alan Mikhail, I know from listening to an interview with him on the Ottoman History Podcast that it’s something of an aberration: usually a chronicler of the common people and environmental history, this is Mikhail’s first book following an elite figure. That elite figure is none other than Sultan Selim I, ruler of the Ottoman from 1512-1520, whose legacy—as an incredibly successful expansionist sovereign and the first Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to also hold the title of Caliph—far surpasses what might have been expected of his brief reign. While making Selim’s life events and undertakings as sovereign vivid and coherent, it is nonetheless evident from God’s Shadow that Mikhail feels no particular preciousness or adulation towards royal or powerful figures. The book uses the life of Selim more as a skeleton around which to drape the layers of muscle and flesh that are religious, economic, military, and cultural context on a global scale, beginning before Selim’s birth and proceeding up to and beyond his death to craft a new argument for how 1492 should be understood.
In conventional Western accounts of 1492, the Ottoman Empire—and, indeed, the entire Islamic world—is absent, as if it had no bearing on the events of that history-altering year. In fact, Mikhail explains, the Ottoman Empire was a driving force behind European embarkation for the “New World.” When Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet II, took Constantinople in 1453, this was yet another crippling blow delivered to Christendom by a Muslim power. Hemmed in territorially and politically by the massive power of the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires alike, Columbus first journeyed across the Atlantic in search of a mystical Eastern Christian King who he thought would come to the aid of Christendom in Crusading against the Muslims, which they’d been doing for centuries with little success.
The hegemonic power of the Muslim world—and the way it was perceived by Christendom as an existential threat—also informed the way early Christian Crusaders/Conquistadores (for they were usually one and the same) understood the Americas and the people who lived there. Mikhail details how these Christian invaders of the Americas understood Indigenous Americans through their lens of Muslims as both the ultimate other and the ultimate evil. He also explains how the early years of the transatlantic slave trade were inflected by this same fear of Muslim power, as Christian slavers attempted to either convert enslaved Muslims before transporting them to the Americas or avoid their importation altogether, so terrified were they that these enslaved Muslims would “infect” this new “promised land” with Islam.
In addition to this powerful re-framing of 1492 and its surrounding years, Mikhail also crafts a fascinating and informative account of Selim’s expansion of the Ottoman Empire across the Middle East and North Africa, the differences between the Ottoman’s style of ecumenical imperial administration and European Christian kingdoms’ monocultural Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and how the enmity between the Shiite Safavid Empire and the Sunni Ottoman Empire deepened fragmentations that continue to deepen to the present day. This book is invigorating, engaging, and necessary for a more fully informed understanding of how our world came to be the way it is today.