God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world.

The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Middle East, World History, Politics, Religion

513 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at the life and times of Sultan Selim, known as Selim the Grim in European historiography. Selim was one of the great conquering imperial sultans and expanded the realm of Ottoman power across Europe the Middle East and North Africa during his reign. He ended the Mamluk Empire and dealt stunning blows to the Safavids, all while continuing to chip away at Christian Europe. According to the thesis of this book his conquests directly spurred Columbus's excursion around the world to try and find a mythical Grand Khan that would ally with Europe to destroy the Ottomans. Selim evidently also planned to set out into the great unknown of the Atlantic after conquering the Kingdom of Morocco but fell ill and died before his ships could set sail. His sudden death may have been one of those hinge moments of history.

This was a great glimpse into a critical period of Ottoman history during a time that the empire was at its peak. Selim was certainly a great man, though not what one would call a good one. He stood in a long line of ruthless conquerors and warriors that emerged from the steppes of Central Asia to remake the world. As sultan he engaged in sectarian massacres, launched pretty much constant wars and governed his empire as essentially a premodern military-industrial complex. He also did the great things that such men also did in history: building great monuments and ensuring the life of great cities where people from all walks of life were able to flourish to some degree. During his time Salonica became the largest Jewish city in the world and the empire itself remained majority-Christian in its population.

I found that the book was harshly moralistic towards Europe while going quite easy on the Ottomans, despite the fact that with a few important differences (religious minorities were at least allowed to live in the empire but were not in Christendom) they essentially had much in common. The fall of Constantinople and Grenada occurred within the span of one lifetime after all. This is a readable and compelling history that spans far beyond the Ottomans to look at the Americas, Europe and the lasting impact of Selim on the modern world.

[Abdürrahim Özer · Rating 1 out of 5]

If it was a work of fiction, I could give it three stars. Unfortunately the author presents his work as a revisionary/revolutionary historical study, in which case it does not deserve any star, but there is no such option in this website. There is of course glimpses of historical work in this book but you can find even more in wikipedia (which the author uses frequently anyway.) For anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge about the Ottomans, this book is a pain-in-the-neck to read. I think this book is easily one of the greatest scandals by an academic historian.

[Matthew Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ever read '50s propaganda novels? The US is great, we have no problems, everything is fine! Or vice versa with regards to the Soviets?

This is one of those for the Ottoman Empire. It is an orgasmic dump of pro-Ottoman nonsense and rage-filled venting of the spleen at those bad, bad Europeans. Other than the genocide and war, everyone had freedom of religion! Their slave trade was much better than the European slave trade. Other than the murders, torture, and abuse, their politics were fair and just.

One wonders whether or not Mikhail ever heard these words out loud.

It does have some interesting information, it's readable if you can get past the propaganda, and the story is well laid out. Completely skip the sections on Columbus, because those pass from moderate nuttery into bile-spewing madness, but bits where the author covers his subject are occasionally, accidentally good.

At one point Selim establishes his rule by waging war against the Shiites and casually killing forty thousand of them in passing. Some are beheaded, and some stoned or drowned to terrorize the rest. These aren't the enemies he's going to war with, mind. These are Selim's own people, Ottoman subjects, he kills on his way to war. The genocide gets less than a full paragraph, and is bookended by discussions of how much religious freedom the Ottoman empire gave its subjects. 40,000 of Selim's own subjects dead, often by stoning or drowning to terrorize the rest, and Mikhail gives them most of a paragraph before returning to his claims of Ottoman free religion.

The rest of the book is largely the same. Don't read it.

[Patricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The opening didn't bode well. "The ideological wind propelling the white sails of Columbus's three ships was the fifteenth-century world's most exigent political struggle--the one between Catholic Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman empire, contrary to nearly all accounts of world history, was the very reason Europeans went to America.... It was the Ottoman monopoly of trade routes with the East, combined with their military prowess on land and on sea, that pushed Spain and Portugal out of the Mediterranean, forcing merchants and sailors from these fifteenth-century kingdoms to become global explorers...to avoid the Ottomans." OK, interesting thought, but one I would personally argue with, and far less important (which is mentioned, but given far less space) than the larger looming storm cloud of the historical tension between the Ottoman Sunnis and the Safavid Shiites, which keeps many of us still holding our breath today.

Nor, in my opinion, did the closing chapter help, which danced between thoughts on the history of migrant Muslims in North America, 9/11 terrorism, and the sections comparing early Spanish (as well as later Western) attitudes towards native Americans with 15th-century European attitudes towards Islam.

Fortunately, the main story saved it, for the story of Sultan Selim and his immediate ancestors, is well-written and quite captivating. I was riveted, even though this was the umpteenth history of the founding of the Ottoman Empire I have read. The main characters are introduced clearly and described in ways that make them immediately memorable: Some examples: On Osman, the eldest son of Mehmet II, the 1453 conqueror of Constantinople: "Every sultan down to the twentieth century was his blood descendant." On Osman's son (and Selim's father) Bayezit: "...[he] set a daunting standard." On Selim's uncle Cem: "...a bon vivant...his womanizing was legendary". And on Selim himself: "...he was never supposed to amount to much." There are far too many histories covering this topic that require keeping a finger stuck in the page with a family tree to help you remember who's who. There is a family tree, but you won't need it. (And the maps, often the most dismal aspect of many histories today, are excellent.)

Place these characters on stage together with the plot ("From the moment of their birth, half-brothers were set against one another to jockey for the throne... While the eldest son usually inherited the throne, technically any male descendant of Osman was entitled to it, and so most sultanic successions involved bloodshed"), toss in the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, bloodthirsty Crusaders and pirates, assassins, King Charles VIII of France, the Janissaries, and some popes, and you get a rip-roaring of a story, easily read, but at the same time raises questions about the historical validity of some sections.

This is therefore at times an interesting 'alternative' history, which is also in my mind marred by an unnecessary sandwiching between two layers of what I began to think of as unnecessary 'academic white bread'. There have been so many attempts to write an early history of the Ottoman Empire that have lacked the style and readability of God's Shadow, it didn't require any embellishing nor tarting up with intermediary chapters on Columbus, the conquistadors in the Americas, the early slave trade, or 9/11. That said, I would still recommend it to anyone interested in Ottoman history, and especially to newcomers to the subject, with a warning to stay clear when it moves off-topic and not to accept everything your read as gospel truth, but hopefully it will stimulate readers to want to learn more.

PS - I would strongly recommend reading Chapter 33 of Professor Abulafia's excellent tome The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean which puts the events of God's Shadow into its historical context and provides a detailed historical account, (including the story behind the Pires Tomé maps referred to in God's Shadow).

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is poorly done history on many levels. It tries to marry a biography of the little discussed/loved Selim, whose conquests treble the size of the Ottoman Empire and make it a majority Muslim empire for the first time, with a much more widely ranging discussion of Turkish influence on the modern world. Splitting the job, Mikhail does each poorly, the first becoming a political biography missing much of the setting and scene of the Ottoman empire and the latter cherry picking history and overstating his conclusions. A good biography would have done much more to put Selim in context, instead we get him as a machiavellian military leader (to boldly claim Selim wrought a reformation in Islamic law and then spend so little time discussing it was infuriating), without good military history. In the discussion of the Turks Selim disappears into the background and Mikhail does an even poorer job of making his arguments. Instead of talking of the role of the Turk in European religious and political thought generally (yes, a book on its own), he focuses on Columbus and makes him "just" a crusader (yes God, but also gold and glory, which from reading Columbus are very much his motives). His ventures into Spanish slavery in the new world, the Reformation, and American history greatly overstate influence and misuse history, while his ending comments about the modern world, slip from amateurish history into apologetics. The latter is fine, but do not do it in a biography of a 16th century Ottoman sultan, and do a better job of using the history (because you are a Yale historian). A mess.

[Eressea · Rating 3 out of 5]

今年讀完的第四本電子書
到四月才四本，看來今年遠遠無法消滅閱讀器現存書籍了...

土耳其史出再多都不嫌多
台灣這幾年雖然也出了不少，但還是跟不上對岸出的速度
不想讀英文只好退而求其次讀簡中
這本據說有些事實查核不足和腦補過頭的問題
不過由於知識不足，也無法判斷到底是那裡有問題
只覺得作者似乎過份強調塞利姆對後世的影響
尤其講到西班牙人在新世界和失地收復運動
最好搭配其他書籍交叉比對
這裡推薦兩本書
西班牙人在新世界看：印加與西班牙的交錯
失地收復運動看：十字架上的新月
這兩本語氣都比本書客觀得多

本書主角塞利姆上承穆罕默得二世，下繼蘇萊曼，讓我想到大清盛世
穆罕默得二世征服君士坦丁堡，對比康熙深化滿人在中原的權力
塞利姆將奧斯曼由基督徒臣民為主的歐亞帝國
轉化為穆斯林為主的歐亞非大帝國
並整頓國家行政體系，貫徹君主權力
對比雍正工作狂將清帝國體制完善
蘇萊曼和乾隆都將國家推到極盛，也種下衰亡種子
大方向來看兩邊的祖孫三代有些類似之處
不過大清在雍正以後的權力繼承比奧斯曼好多了
一樣用心教皇子
大清至少不用在皇帝去世後讓諸子打內戰決定繼位人選
但從結果論來看
奧斯曼國祚六百年，大清只有一半不到的壽命
到底誰比較好，還是不好說XD

史普書很常用定性的描述寫定量的事件
譬如本書常常說奧斯曼治下的基督徒比歐洲某國人口還要多
但沒有一個具體數字做比較，稍具批判思維的話
就會懷疑作者是憑什麼下這種定論呢?
但一般讀者缺乏進一步查證的能力
批判也只能止步於此了

本書譯文流暢
譯者在詩文詔書上用類文言語氣來翻譯，看得出用心
但破折號仍然多了點，難脫翻譯書通病
全書對業餘讀者比較難接受的是
作者堂堂耶魯教授，寫史普書竟然多處引用維基
不禁讓我想到政大某知名東南亞史學者"精美"的國別史
為此本書評價扣一星...

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing (and fluid) read that advances an unusual hypothesis: that the discovery of the new world was not linked as much to scientific progress and curiosity as held by the common wisdom, but primarily instigated by fear of the Turks taking over Europe in late 15th century / early 16th century era, through the prism of Sultan Selim’s reign. This makes sense in light of two simultaneous events: the quasi-monopoly hold of Ottomans over the silk roads, and the advance of the Ottomans in North Africa. The book then provides a rich account of how the west Europeans were obsessed with the Ottomans and the Moors, seeing them wherever they went and under whatever shape their paranoia allowed them to perceive.

However, while interesting as an argument, I think the book tries a bit hard to ‘sensationalize’ its thesis by drawing on obscure details (some of which are hard to prove or verify), assigning them too much value in the process. More importantly, the book also has a few historical flaws – such as the Ottomans calling themselves “Rum” – the reality is that they perceived Byzantines as “Rum” (descendants of Romans) and considered themselves their rulers after the capture of Constantinople, which is not the same thing. In another instance, the author mentions a Venetian diplomatic letter sent to Turks in Istanbul in 1440 (13 years before Turks captured it...)

I took a star off for historical flaws, another for trying too hard to tie loose ends just to advance the thesis, hence the solid 3 stars.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have so many thoughts about this book.

The major issue is that the author is trying to do too much. It's a biography of Selim, or it's an analysis of global geopolitics from the Ottoman perspective, or it's the relation of Islam to the colonization of the Americas and the evolving relationship of Islam to North American, the United States in particular. Some of these topics are super interesting, but they honestly require their own deep dive. For example, in the chapter, American Selim, he briefly discusses a handful of well known American authors with varying understandings/feelings about Islam, but it's a tangent. This would actually be an interesting topic but it was introduced in the second to last chapter and didn't really fit with any points he was trying to make.

The author also falls into the trap that he tries to attribute EVERY major world event since the 15th century to the Ottomans. As a result he grossly over simplifies a lot of topics. The author also ends up contradicting himself all over the place and really reaching for some of the conclusions he presents. Just one example is the claim that Islam is more spiritually attuned with Protestantism because non-Catholic Christians do not have a central Pope. He makes this claim after an exhaustive description of Selim's military campaigns that were SPECIFICALLY designed to establish himself as sultan and Caliph, and therefore the ONLY legitimate leader of global Islam as justification for his imperial conquests.

The book gets two stars, because he does provide a decent biography of Selim. The issues arise when he tries to force the history to fit his pre-determined framework.

[Sajith Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was a turning point in history. They soon enforced their control over the trade routes between the East and West. European merchants were denied direct access to Asia, forcing them to procure the wares through Ottoman traders at immense profits to the latter. In the aftermath of this cataclysmic event, a sultan named Selim the Grim (1470 – 1520) assumed the throne. In addition to the trade controls, he sought to overcome his rivals by force and unify the entire Middle East under his banner. The discovery of Americas was an unintended consequence of the European attempt to avoid the Ottomans and to reach Asia by an alternate route through the Western Atlantic. Defeating the Mamelukes who controlled Mecca and Medina, Selim appropriated the title of the Caliph of Islam in 1517. People reverentially called him God’s Shadow on Earth Selim’s territorial expansion upset the balance of power in other central Asian kingdoms and European monarchies. Babur’s expulsion from Samarkand and his eventual invasion of India is an aftereffect of Selim’s ignoring his plea for help and decision to support Babur’s rival. Reformation of European Christianity also owes its origin to Ottoman threat at their doorsteps. All these make Selim the Grim an ideal choice of study with revealing discoveries on the impact he had made in re-forging the flow of history. Alan Mikhail is an American historian who is a professor of history at Yale University. His work centres on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

The political changes that took place in the fifteenth century Near East are neatly summarized in the book. After roughly a century of squeezing the Byzantines, the Ottomans overran Constantinople in 1453 and promptly renamed it Istanbul. Mehmet the Conqueror’s grandson Selim transferred the empire into a global power by subjugating the Shiite Safavid dynasty in Iran and annexing the territory of the Egyptian Sunni Mamelukes. This made them the superpower of the Middle East. For many centuries since 1450s, the Ottoman Empire controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any other world power. The Europeans were losing captives, commercial influence and territory to them. It was the Ottoman monopoly of the trade routes to the East, combined with their military prowess that pushed Span and Portugal out of the Mediterranean, compelling merchants and sailors to become global explorers.

The hero of the book sports an unfriendly epithet of ‘Grim’, because of his ruthlessness in eliminating rivals that included his own half-brothers and nephews. He killed every blood relation that blocked or was likely to block his way to the throne. It is also said that he often kicked the decapitated heads of those he executed. Selim regularly led the raids that brought slaves – mostly Christian, mostly white – into the empire. They were then sold in the Ottoman markets to the highest bidder. The empire collected taxes on their sale. Blacks were also taken as slaves, but they were mostly castrated and employed as eunuchs guarding the harems. Racism was here added to the vice of slavery. Selim enhanced the ferocity of his soldiers by fanning their greed. He let go of his portion of a fifth of the spoils which the fighters could share among themselves. White slaves were used for training as elite soldiers and sex slaves. Teenage Christian boys were seized from their homes and taken to Ottoman centres of power. They were then forcibly converted to Islam and enlisted into a superior military wing knows as Janissaries. The Christian girls were similarly converted and taken as concubines.

A curious thing to note in these recordings of medieval history is the crucial role religion plays in shaping military encounters and its equal disregard in forming opportune political alliances. Political partnerships crossed religious boundaries even in crusades. Pope Innocent VIII colluded with Mamelukes for an attack against Ottomans along with Cem, a pretender to the Ottoman throne. Christian kingdoms had given asylum to Cem as a tactical countermeasure to check Sultan Bayezit who was Cem’s half-brother. Duplicity was integral to early modern negotiations. The Pope offered to keep Cem as a prisoner if Bayezit agreed to a set of conditions like freedom of worship to Christians, unhindered access for pilgrims to Jerusalem and a fee for the proper upkeep of the royal hostage. Bayezit readily agreed and paid 120,000 gold ducats in advance as fee for three years. He also gifted the head of the lance that allegedly pierced Christ’s side during the Crucifixion. The Pope gladly accepted the offerings and duly confined Cem to house arrest till his death.

Mikhail introduces a new idea which claims that the European push to the West that eventually discovered the Americas was a reaction to Muslim pressure in the Near East and was a part of the crusades. Columbus met Queen Isabella many times and proposed a voyage westward to the court of the Great Khan of the East who was believed to be a powerful monarch eager to accept Christianity for himself and his realm. Columbus planned to make him join forces with Christian Europe against the Ottomans and together they would retake Jerusalem in an epic battle that would destroy Islam forever. Isabella prevaricated as long as the fall of Granada, the last Muslim principality in mainland Spain, which continued to defy attempts at subjugation. After the city’s conquest in 1492, which was also the first major victory of Christianity against Islam since its formation, Isabella granted the funds Columbus wanted to organize his fleet. He even carried speakers of several Middle Eastern languages on his New World journeys to communicate with Eastern Nestorian Christians in Asia! The Europeans likened the Aztec Civilization in Mexico to a Muslim one as a psychological device to make an enemy of them. Cortes claims to have seen 400 mosques in Mexico and called Montezuma a sultan.

This book makes a claim that Selim’s rule shaped the modern history of the world and backs it up with plausible arguments of support. The discovery of Americas and Babur’s invasion of India have already been mentioned. In addition to these, Selim began the tussle between Sunnis and Shiites of Iran which continues to this day. He invaded and defeated the Safavids of Iran. The Safavids returned the fury by instigating Shiites residing in Ottoman provinces to rebel. The author affirms that Selim moulded the Ottoman Empire into a global military and political force. The contours of today’s Middle East and Mediterranean remain the same as he set. The histories of the continents he united continue to follow paths he first cleared. The wars he started and led have still not ended.

An unfortunate streak seen throughout the text is the deliberate effort to please hardline Muslim interests that are inclined to justify violent acts against Civilization. The book comes down heavily on crusades. It is argued that European plans for a crusade against the Muslim world have not yet disappeared. Mikhail makes jihad out to be a pious religious duty enjoined on believers to better the world! According to him, jihad means only a personal struggle to accept the summons to follow the path designated by God. Thus jihad makes one a better individual (p.142) and what we now see in the world is a ‘modern-day distortion’. The author even differentiates between the slavery practiced by Muslims and Christians and says that in Islam, slavery was temporary and provided a conduit for upward mobility. This is in total disregard to historical facts which inform that Muslims were the major slaver-raiders in Africa who coerced unsuspecting black men and women into slavery and then sold them off to Europeans. Condonation of forcible kidnapping of boys and girls into slavery by a modern historian is shocking, to say the least. This book makes an all-out attack against Christian symbols of power in an obvious bid to cozy up to Muslim vested interests. The illicit affairs of Pope Alexander VI are given as an irrelevant aside to the main narrative. The author’s remark that in an Islamic state, non-Muslims enjoyed more legal options between their own religious courts and Islamic sharia courts, or even to claim that they were treated at par with the Muslims, is making a mocking irony of the fate of non-Muslims who were downgraded as Dhimmis. It is such irresponsible writers who help foster a sense of victimhood in young Muslims and make them feel that their religion is wronged in the past and present. The book’s observation that Islam made much of European civilization (p.92) is simply laughable.

The book is easy to read but difficult to appreciate due to the blatant appeasement of jihadi elements. The narration is very slow and diffused in the first half of the book where European explorations to Americas and early modern European history claim most of the narrative. It can be established that as compared to the abundance of background details, the main narrative often pales into insignificance. A lot of Ottoman paintings from Topkapi Palace are included but these fail to impress the readers on account of their lack of depth and fidelity to real lifeforms.

The book is recommended.

[Fatma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers those who have preexisting knowledge about the Ottoman Empire and the Early Modern world an engaging read. However, some of the sources used by the author and quite a few of his claims are shaky at best so in my opinion, readers should treat the book as a stepping stone and look for more "plausible" renditions of the topics talked about in this book and than compare them.

Some knowledge is necessary for the understanding of the book because many things and people are just mentioned without the necessary explanations needed in order to understand them fully. Of course, the author lists his sources at the end (which by the way only includes the references and not an alphabetical list) but adding footnotes with short explanations would have answered many questions I had while reading.

What I like about the book was that it offers a different view of the goings-on of the EM period in Europe and the Middle East. Many aspects that get regularly ignored or rather not fully included by (European) historians - like the Ottoman influence on diverse phenomena like the Reformation or the search for new trade routes - are mentioned by Mikhail which shows us just how connected the world was even before the 19th/20th centuries.

However, this refreshing perspective is soured for me by the many flaws of this book. I will only list a few of them here because others have already summed up the shortcomings of the book nicely:

Factual errors like the mention of a tribe called "Kasims" which didn't exist! There was a man named "Kasim of Karaman" who lived and ruled at the turn of the 15th century but his name was Kasim not the name of the tribe which was called "Karaman"! How can a Yale historian blunder in such a way?
Then, he says that the Turkish town of "Bolu" is close to the place where Selim was governor, Trabzon. Just looking at Google maps, I found out that 860 km lie between both towns if you use the fastest route by car which will still take almost 12 hours. This may seem like a small mistake but one that shouldn't have occurred because a quick Google search shows that it could have been easily corrected.
When Mikhail tells about how the Ottoman sultan accepted the fleeing Sephardis in his empire and resettling them in Thessaloniki, the then biggest Jewish city in the world, and describes the multiculturalism of its population he mentions Jews wearing "tailored Italian suits" in the 16th century? Did Armani already exist by then and had a boutique selling sharp black suits to the upper-classes?
What more, the inconsistency of spelling in many places and above all the fact that the author used Wikipedia (albeit mostly for information about buildings/places but still, as every student knows, Wikipedia should never ever be used in a paper) as a source weakened his arguments considerably.
Mikhail also cites more than a dozen times a book by a man called "Fatih Akce" about whom there is nothing online that I could find but that he wrote a book about Selim and is a "brilliant historian" but no CV, no info about where he studied, where he taught (or still teaches) and what his main sources are.

Thus, I can give this book no more than 3 stars and that mainly because I liked that it was not as dry as other scholarly works and read at many parts like a novel. If only the foundation were as robust as the author's writing skills...

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't often rate a serious historians book with one star but this is an incredibly disappointing book. I don't have any problem with author's looking at historical events so as to challenge preconceived Eurocentric views, Peter Frankopan's The Silk Road is an excellent example, but this author seems to imagine that he is the first historian to have ever challenged anti Islamic/Ottoman prejudice - well he is not - and his writing of history using only English language sources is inexplicable and marks this work as 'history lite'. Overall Prof. Mikhail's grand sweeping assertions of the universal influence and relevance of and historical centrality to everything of the Ottoman empire in general and sultan Selim I in particular makes this not a serious history book but a work of pseudo-history along the lines of Gavin Menzies or Eric Von Dinekin.

I find it instructive that my edition carries praise from Stephen Greenblatt and Orahan Pamuk neither of whom, whatever their other qualities, have any particular knowledge, strength or expertise as historians. While reading this book I was tempted to wonder about the author's. There is plenty of evidence that he likes the novelists perspective as he keeps digressing into utterly fictitious imaginings of various historical figures, thinking this or that or being influenced by sights, sounds even sunsets.

Clearly the author is intent on correcting biased or simplistic views about Ottoman history and aspects of Muslim religion and culture. But he seems to be battling the simplistic prejudices apparent in various USA media, not arguments, views or attitudes present in historical works or academia that have been real, current or prevalent for half a century if not more. He is arguing against a chimera - it is like a historian of the French Revolution writing a history of it that spends its time arguing against the cliches of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

I can't imagine who would gain anything from reading this book.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up from the "New" shelf at the library, in part because I've been reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry VIII, and this is at the same time period and -- as the author argues -- critically influenced western European history in ways that are seldom appropriately acknowledged.

As many authors have, Mikhail points out the ways that non-Muslims lived better in the Ottoman Empire than Jews or Muslims did in Christian ones -- at least after the convivencia. "In exchange for payment of the jizya, the sovereign was obliged to protect dhimmi rights to freedom of worship and the open exercise of each community's religious laws. In stark contrast to Spain's bloody Inquisition, Muslim policies allowed non-Muslims to practice their religious without fear of death." (144)

"The Mayflower began its seafaring life trading with Muslims in the Mediterranean. (387). John Smith fought the Ottomans in Hungary and Wallachia, where he was held captive for two years and served as a slave.

"Islam was the mold that cast the history of European racial and ethnic thinking in the Americas, as well as the history of warfare in the Western Hemisphere (396).
Points out that Selim also perpetrated genocide and deepened the rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, creating a list of all Shiites "age seven to seventy" living in a number of major towns (258).

Gift giving: "The increasingly bellicose Ottoman-Mamluk competition for the caliphate manifested itself, perhaps oddly at first glance, through gift-giving, one of the primary tools of early modern diplomacy. Around teh world, sovereigns used gifts not only as markers of alliance between states but, even more so, as missives of one-upmanship in a politics of rivalry adn threat. Two gifts from the middle of the fifteenth century reflect how the unmatched prestige of the caliphate figured prominently in the increasingly acrimonious relations between the Mamluks and the Ottomans. In 1440, the Mamluk sultan sent to Istanbul a Qur'an purported to have belonged to 'Uthman . . . In sending such an obviously precious and sacred object to their rival, the Mamluks sought to impress upon the Ottomans their wealth and power as the caliphs of the Muslim world and possessors of the heritage of Islam." Their point: the price of the gift was something with which they could easily part.

A few years later, Selim sent to Mecca and Medina two thousand florins of gold and seven thousand florins for the poor -- bypassing the Mamluk sultan in an attempt to win them over (273).

"Ottomans had gained valuable knowledge of firearms from their wars in the Balkans, and also from Jewish gunpowder experts who had fled to the empire from Spain after 1492" (288).

Given a map showing the whole world, Selim tore off the New World and tossed it away -- he could have dominion over the wealthy, known half - he had no need to take such risks. (313).

Coffee drove the economy of the early modern world mor ethan spices or textiles, "and the Ottomans' dominance of the coffee trade helped them eventually to surpass their earlier rivals, the Portugese, in the Indian Ocean economy. Factors in its rise: geographic spread, universality, addictive character, material durability, high profit margins "worked to merge capital and culture like no other commodity ever had" (319). By 1720s, Java had replaced Yemen, claiming 90% of Amsterdam coffee market. "Without the slave labor of the Americas or the colonial labor regimes of the Dutch East Indies, Yemen had a comparative disadvantage. . . Today, coffee is the world's second most traded commodity -- the first being another Middle Eastern export, oil" (320).

Mikhail argues that this practice was the model for the Spanish Requirement such that "America's native peoples had to pay simply for existing as non-Christians in a Christian state." (145) -- and this is after he points out that the whole reason Spain and Portugal had to look to Africa and the New World was that the Muslims already controlled the known world outside western Europe - and threatened even that.

Mikhail points out that many of the slaves from West Africa was Muslims, and that they quickly made common cause with the Taino in the Caribbean: "fearful that thir African slaves were teaching their Taino slaves what they termed 'bad customs' - a standard Spanish euphemism for Islam.

Points out how sugar production came from Islamic countries, then under the Portugese in the Caribbean relied on Muslim slave labor, and was in high demand due to Selim's conquests in Egypt disrupting the sugar trade from there (154).

Points out that Europeans feared all Muslims everywhere, whereas Muslim states often incorporated many Christians (the Ottoman empire was majority Christian for the first half of Selim's reign) (180).

Martin Luther "wrote reams about the Ottomans, whom he always referred to as 'the Turks' He studied Islam deeply, and even contemplated sponsoring the first German translation of the Qur'an. Many Islamic concepts, as we will see, would influence is own notions of religion." - -Never learned that in Lutheran Sunday School (371). Besides -- it was the constant threat of Turkish invasion that kept the Holy Roman Empire from quashing his movement (373). "Without the looming threat of the Ottomans, the great sweep of the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible." The idea that redemption could be "won by something other than piety" (Indulgences) had its origin in the Crusades, when participants were promised absolution in advance in case they died fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem (375).

Especially after being so immersed in the hot mess that was England at the turn of the 16th century, it becomes so clear that any tale of how Europe became dominant is a "just-so" story -- Mikhail details how the Islamic courts were an improvement to subjects, who could, "protect major assets, adjudicate an estate, accuse a spouse of adultery, or register the costs of a new construction project" -- sounds like prerequisites of capitalism to me, but it didn't happen - or not as much as in Scotland and England (383).

[achen]

譯筆非常流暢。說是史書但讀起來如小說般精彩，尤其是前面的篇章，看到後面有些流水賬。另外，書本內容感覺寫得比較浮誇，偶爾擅自臆測歷史人物想法的表述也顯得過於主觀。
作者在此書提出了比較新穎的觀點，以鄂圖曼帝國的塞利姆一世所處於的時代為中心世界，將哥倫布會發現新大陸的原因歸為是為了對抗鄂圖曼帝國/穆斯林而做出的嘗試。
作者想要通過此書，帶出15-16世紀的鄂圖曼帝國蘇丹如何影響並塑造現代世界（這樣的伊斯蘭視角真是雄心勃勃啊，只是感覺說服力並不強…

[Sena Yetim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beetje te veel romantisering en fictie. Weinig waarheid plus Süleyman werd geschreven als een soort profeet achtig wezen. Terwijl elke sultan wel eens dode lichamen heeft hangen in hun kasten.

[Anubis · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointment.

Despite loving the time period, and hating how little info there is out there on Selim, i've been weary of purchasing this book for a long time. I finally gave in and purchased it despite reading a lot of the bad reviews, but hey, almost 4 stars on average, should be good right? Well, it's not.

The first thing that has annoyed me with the book is simply how little the authors actually knows about the period. He presents things as facts, yet a quick online search proves him wrong. I can get over my quirks where he keeps calling Constantinople as Istanbul, which is far less correct. But i can't get past the fact that the author states how "Istanbul" had over 500.000 people during the time of Bayezid I. It might seem like a small mistake, but an expert can't just increase the number of people x4 of the city to make it seem more cool.

There's ofc a bunch of other mistakes and assumptions where your head can start to hurt. The author swings from being super sure what Selim was looking at when being on a boat, to talking into tons of probablies of perhapses. We read about young Columbus and it's all conjecture on what he was doing as a kid, how that affected his mindset, and how that shaped his future. Like seriously? Young Columbus started to hate Islam when he was watching Crusaders embark from the holy land from Genoa? I mean who doesn't know of the mighty crusades of the late 15th century?

He also makes his own assumptions, which are deeply flawed, without any proof whatsover, and they are presented as "groundbreaking research", instead of the pure conjecture which they are.

I'm also not going to talk about his super biased point of view. I consider myself quite well educated on the subject, and despite being an European myself i can definitely agree that for a lot of people living under the Ottomans was better than under the feudalism of Europe. This is a fact. However, the bias in this book is absurd. It makes the Ottomans look like angels and the Europeans like huge barbarians only focused on greed. Even the reasons he gives for this are things that you learn about in elementary school.

Do yourself a favor, and don't read this book. It's a waste of time, and you won't learn much more than what you can by reading online. The book also focuses more on things happening around Selim than with him, but it's there where the propaganda is the worst.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this as a belated birthday gift from a friend who teaches philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Having only read one other book about the Ottoman Empire, I welcomed the opportunity to deepen my understanding and appreciation of its role in human history.

On one hand, this is a biography of Selim (1470-1520), sultan and first Turkish caliph, whose reign brought about the greatest expansion of the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, this is a history of the Empire itself within the context of world history and, on this score, it is self-consciously revisionist, the author being at pains to show how the Empire dwarfed its European contemporaries during the late 15th and the 16th centuries. Along these lines author Mikhail notes that, until the conquest of Mamluk's, most inhabitants of the Empire were Christian and that there were more Christians in the Empire than in any European state--facts previously unfamiliar to me.

The book ends with two chapters covering current events. The first is about Western, especially U.S., fears of Islam, fears which are substantially projective in that Western powers and the Church have persecuted Islam far more than they've been harmed by it. The second is about the current president of Turkey, Erdogan, and his adoption of Selim's mantle in an effort to enhance Turkey's position in the Muslim world.

[Osama · Rating 5 out of 5]

يتناول هذا الكتاب القيم قصة واحد من أشهر خلفاء الدولة العثمانية السلطان سليم الأول. يبدأ الكتاب بلمحة عن جذور التاريخ الإسلامي، وفكرة الخلافة وتطورها منذ صدر الإسلام، مرورا بالدولة الأموية والعباسية ثم الفاطمية. والتشعبات الكثيرة التي تلت ذلك، انتهاءا بالمماليك ثم نشأة الدولة العثمانية. كما يتحدث الكتاب بالتفصيل عن الصراع بين العثمانيين والصفويين، وكذلك صراعهم مع البيزنطيين وسيطرتهم على قسطنطينوبل التي سميت أسطنبول بعد ذلك. كما يركز الكتاب على الصراع بين العثمانيين وأوروبا، وكيف أدت السيطرة العثمانية على طريق الحرير، والبحر الأحمر والأبيض، لاختناق الأوروبين وبالنتيجة توجهت البعثات الاستكشافية غربا واكتشف كولومبوس العالم الجديد معتقدا أنه وصل للهند. والملفت للانتباه انجذاب العثمانيين واطماعهم في ثروات الأرض الجديدة. ويختم الكتاب بشرح انهيار الدولة العثمانية وتقسيم أراضيها من قبل الدول الاستعمارية. يركز الكتاب كثيرا على الصراع الديني المتجذر بين الغرب والشرق ويقدم أمثلة كثيرة في الفترة التاريخية التي حكم فيها سليم الاول أقوى سلاطين الدولة العثمانية وأكثرهم دموية.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm probably being a bit harsh here. Briefly, the story of Sultan Selim the Grim takes up only about half the book; the remainder is the author's attempt to hammer home some points of view that might be a little over-wrought. (Note: his story was not unfamiliar to me) I have read some reviews from some reputable scholars that have also questioned the author's sources; some saying that his sources don't say what he says they do. There is no doubt that Selim's influence was considerable and laid the groundwork for his son, Suleiman the Magnificent's accomplishments. But some of opinions are pretty much reaches; for instance, his ideas that the Spanish "discovery" and conquest of the Americas was primarily Muslim-driven. All-told, the story of the titled personage takes up only half the book. Had the author expanded on that, I think it would have been more effective.

[Sendey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad book. Filled with pro-ottoman propaganda.

[Hend · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alan Mikhail’s Shadow of God is a sweeping and ambitious attempt to place the Ottoman Empire—and Sultan Selim I in particular—at the very heart of early modern global history. The book argues that events in the Ottoman world were not peripheral but central to shaping Europe, the Americas, and the larger world order that emerged in the sixteenth century.
The book Shadow of God paints an ambitious portrait of Selim I, situating him at the crossroads of East and West, between Christendom and Islam, and between the Ottomans and the Safavids. The narrative is rich, with vivid descriptions of Selim’s campaigns—from his brutal confrontation with the Safavids, to his conquest of Egypt, to his dream of reaching North Africa and perhaps even crossing the Strait of Gibraltar like the conquerors of old.
Mikhail does not shy away from personal detail—he recounts how Selim’s mother supported him during his youth in Trabzon, and how Selim later overthrew his father and sent him into exile. This personal struggle adds depth to the image of Selim as a prince hardened by adversity, a man who would eventually die in the very same place where he had once fought a decisive battle against his father, Bayezid.
It is worth noting that, while Mikhail consistently frames Columbus as a devoutly militant Christian—driven by crusading zeal to find a western route to strike at Islam—other historical interpretations offer a strikingly different view. Several independent sources suggest that Columbus may have been a converso or even a Jew in disguise, seeking to escape persecution in Spain after 1492. From this perspective, his voyage could be read less as a Christian holy mission and more as a desperate search for survival and opportunity.
One of the book’s most striking juxtapositions is the parallel drawn between Martin Luther and Sultan Selim I. Both men emerged at the dawn of the sixteenth century, and both unleashed forces that would transform the worlds they inhabited.
Luther, by nailing his theses to the church door in 1517, shook the foundations of Catholic authority and opened the path to the Protestant Reformation. Selim, by turning his armies eastward and southward, conquered the Mamluks, absorbed the holy cities of Islam, and turned the Ottoman realm into a vast empire stretching across three continents.
Mikhail portrays each as a figure of defiance against established power: Luther against Rome’s spiritual monopoly, Selim against the Shiʿi Safavids and the Christian West. Yet the comparison goes deeper. The rise of the Ottomans under Selim intensified Europe’s fear of Islam and the “Turkish threat,” creating precisely the climate in which Luther’s fiery call to purify Christianity could resonate. In this telling, the Reformation and the Ottoman expansion were not parallel but entangled events, each shaping the meaning and urgency

Yet, alongside admiration, the book also emphasizes betrayal and tragedy. The treachery of Khayr Bey, who defected to the Ottomans during the decisive battles against the Mamluks, is portrayed as pivotal: a betrayal that sealed Cairo’s fate and dismantled centuries of Mamluk rule.
Still, the book is not without flaws. Mikhail occasionally stretches evidence to fit his thesis, sometimes presenting conjectures as fact. A striking example is the misrepresentation of the Abbasid caliph as the “brother” of Tuman Bay, which is historically inaccurate. Such errors undermine the authority of an otherwise well-researched and engaging narrative.
Finally, the book highlights how Erdoğan himself has attempted to appropriate Selim I’s legacy. he often invokes Selim’s name, and casting himself as the heir to the Ottoman Sultan who expanded Sunni Islam’s reach.
However, while the storytelling is engaging, I find the book tends to exaggerate Selim’s importance in global history. The depiction of him as a near-world-shaping figure—standing alongside explorers like Columbus or reformers like Martin Luther—feels inflated. The Sunni-Shi‘a rivalry that Selim inherited was centuries old, not something he created or transformed. His wars with the Safavids, though bloody and consequential, were continuations of existing sectarian and political hostilities. Likewise, his victory over the Mamluks owed as much to treachery within their ranks—such as the betrayal of Khayr Bey—as to Selim’s own brilliance.
Despite this, Shadow of God remains a powerful work. Its prose is energetic, and its central argument—that Selim and the Ottomans deserve recognition as major architects of the modern world—is both compelling and provocative. It is a book that will spark debate, not just among historians but among anyone interested in how empires, faith, and power shaped our shared history.

[Ming Wei · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, I did not know how powerful and big the Ottoman Empire was at the peak of their power, they had some very intelligent leaders, this book provides lots of information, at a pace that allows the reader to absorb at their own pace. Well worth reading for anybody interest in historical events, no editorial errors, decent book cover.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was an interesting twist on the history of the period showing how much greater an influence the Ottoman Empire had on Western history as well as that of the Middle East.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is some great history in here and details about the Ottoman Empire and Sultan Selim, whom I’ve never heard of before or didn’t know in detail. I didn’t know how harems worked in the Empire but recognize a similar system in other cultures. I loved learning the detail in the conflict with Spain and the Ottomans which affected politics in all continents sans Antarctica. One thing surprised me was attitude in the beginning and last chapters of the book. Apparently the author believes that schools in the United States don’t teach that pressures from the Ottoman Empire caused Spain and Columbus to look West to go to Asia. I don’t know what state standards and curriculum he looked at for proof that it isn’t taught. All states accept federal money so their standards are similar to the Common Core therefore national. I’ve taught this in Social Studies and I’ve seen others do the same. I also did a project with students to look up their ethnicity or nationality and history in the United States. A Turkish student found indications that Turks/Ottomans have always migrated to North America with Europeans. They came as sailors and merchants. Because they form Turkish Societies they were often under the radar as Muslims. He also speaks with praise about President Erdogan. Erdogan does dream of reviving the Ottoman Empire and is very involved in East Africa in what interpret in nefarious ways. I treasure the history he brings about the Ottoman Empire but concerned about the view that when teaching history Americans ignore them. We do at least in high school, and the attachment to Erdogan is very concerning. He actually compares him admiringly to Selim.

[Brad Angle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author tries a little too hard to persuade us of the importance of the Ottoman Empire, but the history was quite interesting and definitely made this Westerner rethink some fundamental ideas about Renaissance Europe.

[Leili V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book should have been titled “A Contrived Version of History in which Columbus, Martin Luther, and Erawan are Obsessed with Islam,” or, “A Biased Book about Columbus with Minor Reference to Moorish History in Spain,” as it is in no way an actual biography of Selim himself. I did not learn much about the Ottoman Empire, even. Note to author: next time you write a biography, maybe tell a little bit more about the main focus before discussing his death??? Also, just stating that you think he was pretty cool or that you think a particular power changed the world at the end of a very verbose and vacillating chapter (or whole entire novel) without giving any examples or evidence is, well, poor writing, to say the least. According to you, he invented capitalism, reformed Islam, and was quite lovely to the mother of his son and his son, but we never actually see any of these things in this book. What about his daughters—we only hear that they exist after you tell of his death. I sadly have to agree with the Good Readers that call this piece of work apologist. Like, I took away from this that it was chill to rape and pillage cuz everyone else did, all Muslims were Ottoman (including the Moors), and everyone, I mean *everyone* (in the past, present, and future) is/was obsessed with Selim and Islam, because he of course exemplified it to the max (please excuse my mad eye roll here) and he was such a super rad dood.

[Wes F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you realize that the new/3rd bridge over the Bosphorus waterway dividing Europe & Asia--opened with fanfare by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016--is called the Yavuz ("Grim") Sultan Selim Bridge? Did you know that Christopher Columbus sailed westward in 1492 under the Spanish crown's flag in order to find a back door way to attack & retake Jerusalem from the Muslims?

Mikhail, a renown historian from Yale University, does an excellent job in this book of outlining the life & times of Turkey's greatest sultan, who expanded the Ottoman Empire like no other sultan. Sultan Selim expanded his empire down into the Middle East--taking Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem--and also into N. Africa--conquering Egypt & all its vast Mamluk Empire holdings.

Read about his fascinating life and times and further exploits in this very readable & engaging historical study on the Ottoman sultan who did more to shape the modern world than almost anyone else in history.

I borrowed this from the library and read it on my iPad. Had to borrow it 2x, with a gap in-between, but it was worth the wait.

[Daphne]

Den slags populærvidenskab der får en ud af sengen om morgenen. Parallelt udlægges den osmanniske sultan Selim I (1470-1520) og den italienske søfarers Columbus (1451-1506)'s livsbaner og ambitioner. Det er en meget appellerende og personbåret historie om forholdet mellem den sene renæssances Sydvesteuropa og det Sydøstlige Middelhav (aka "Østen" og "Vesten") med et touch af Sydamerika, inklusiv meget pirrende insights i hvordan europæernes fobisk-fanatisk-frygtsommelige forhold til osmannerne formede ikke bare Columbus & co.s ØNSKE om at rejse mod Vest men også at islam derfor informerede hele SYNET på de oprindelige folk og kulturer europæerne mødte i the Americas, idet europæerne troede at de var muslimer. Page turner.

Dog ikke helt sikker på at jeg deler Mikhails forståelse af at sultan Selims ændringer af det osmanniske domstole tæller som en islamisk reformation (parallel til Luthers)... men altså.

[Younus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good bio of a very underrated sultan

[Derek Osbourne · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to "The Times" the book is "Fascinating.....Gripping" and according to the "Times Literary Supplement" it is "Compellingly readable." Certainly it is very readable - the style is accessable and, when Mikhail lets his imagination run to describe specific events, such as meetings and battles it is, indeed, quite compelling.

However it is his claim, which he considers is an original view and should make us all change our interpretation of history, that the the Ottoman Empire, and Sultan Selim in particular, directed the history of Europe and the development of America is an astonishing reach for which he provides no real evidence.

He seems to assert that it is a new idea that the Ottoman blocking of the trade routes to India and China led to the exploration west across the Atlantic in 1492. Oddly I recall learning that when I was at secondary school in the 1960s. His assertion that Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors saw the native Americans as Muslims and were obsessed with the idea that the muslims had already reached America, or east Asia as they thought it was, is unconvincing relying on a few quotations and explorers comparisons between the dress or dances of native Americans as being "like the Turk". He notes that Mark Twain made the reverse comparison when he visited Jerusalem. Yet this seems to me to be using descriptive expressions so that the reader can connect with what is written from their own experience.

Certainly the Pope, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese had been at was with muslims almost constantly since the muslim Arabs first burst out of the Arabian peninsular in the 7th century and it was the French (or rather the Franks) who stopped the Islamic tide in the West at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. It is hardly surprising then that the conquistadors and other explorers and adventurers fron the Mediterranean had spent time fighting them and took that experience to the New World. Hatred for "the Turk" and the muslims would have been deeply embedded in culture and miltary thought. It does not follow that all the actions of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas were a result of that.

He then stretches the argument further by giving the same anti-Turkish motivation to the actions of the British (properly the English, incidentally, as Great Britain as a country did not exist at the time) in their drive westwards. Here he uses the comments of religious emigrants and an adventurer or two who mention the Turk and who may have fought against them. Yet the compulsion to go west for the English, and indeed the French, was as much rivalry with the Spanish and the French as rivalry with the Ottomans. England had fought many a war against the French and a number against the Spanish but were not to fight a proper war against the Ottomans (as Great Britain, by then) until the Anglo-Turkish War of 1807. Wars against the Barbary Pirates were not wars against the Ottoman state.

Occasionally Mikhail seems to ignore or enhance facts to sometimes suit the argument or perhaps he doesn't want to disrupt his narrative flow when, for example, he says that Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for an unbroken period since the 7th century ignoring the fact that it was the capital of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem for periods in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Whilst I think he is stretching the notion of the Ottomans being responsible for the Reformation, the biggest stretch of all is his proof of the "obsession" in the United States with Islam by quoting from the debates about the US constitution about whether "even a moslem could become President" - in the debates about the extent of religious freedom and the secular state. This, surely, is not a sign of the "obsession" but rather stating an extreme position far from the existing religious demographics of the new United States in order to explore the implications of a political decision - it is no more than a perfectly valid debating device.

Whilst Mikhail is clearly antipathetic to the anti-muslim rhetoric of much of modern American, and Western, political debate it is not, I think, valid to trace that as a constant thread and obsession through Western history back to the Spanish experience of fighting the Moors and the Byzantine wars against the Turks. Nor is it valid to say that it was the Ottoman Empire, and particularly Selim, God's Shadow, that directed and defined Western history from the fifteenth century onwards.

This is a readable book certainly, especially the specific chapters about Selim himself, but I am inclined to agree with Turkish novelist and academic, Orhan Pamuk, that Alan Mikhail is and "original and INVENTIVE historian." (my caps)

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this book. It was supposed to be 1300+ pages but the last 300 were footnotes. If you read it do it in paper not electronic. There were no links from the text to the notes and I did not even know they were there until I had finished.

Forgive me if you know this stuff but Selim was head of the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s. He started with a majority Christian territory and captured the Mamluk Empire and north Africa almost to Morocco. After that the Empire was majority Muslim but it always contained many Christians, Jews and Muslims who were not Sunni. If you paid your taxes you could do what you wanted. His son is more written about (Suleyman the Magnificent) probably because there was more material available. The author contends that Suleyman mainly held onto what he received at his father's death and didn't make a mess of it. The author is a bit repetitious but he cites lots of things that he says prove that the existence of Muslims was incredibly important to European and American life and politics mainly in the ever present sense of a threat. Columbus, steeped in anti-Muslim sentiment, convinced Queen Isabella I of Castile to finance his mission so he could make an end run and strike the Muslims from the East. The natives of North America were perceived to be almost Muslim and therefore totally worthless or threatening. There are lots maps and drawings which were too small to see on the electronic screen. There is a gratuitous last chapter on Erdogan of Turkey.