Status Updates From The Ottoman Age of Exploration

"Yet paradoxically, all of this had been accomplished not despite the Portuguese but because of them, for it was they who had first introduced a new kind of global politics into the world of the Indian Ocean, thereby creating the conditions that allowed the Ottomans to formulate their own globally informed political response."

"What Mir Ali may have lacked in personnel and supplies, however, he more than made up for in swagger and reputation. In January 1586, when he sailed into Mogadishu, his first port of call, he received nothing short of a hero’s welcome from the inhabitants of the city. Once informed of the reasons for Mir Ali’s visit, the town notables enthusiastically swore allegiance to the sultan..."

"Sokollu developed contacts in places like Transoxiana and Central Africa that were equally beyond the reach of any contemporary European power. Sokollu Mehmed and his soft empire were thus protagonists of the first order in the history of global expansion in the sixteenth century."

"Most important, the Ottoman dynasty’s authority as caliph of the universal community of believers was recognized on a scale never equaled before or since, receiving formal expression in the Friday sermons of Muslim houses of worship from the Horn of Africa to Indonesia."

"Finally, it should be emphasized that Sokollu’s imperial project was a truly global affair, and although his attention was often focused on the Indian Ocean, it was by no means limited to it. During his grand vizierate, Ottoman military operations stretched from Morocco to Sumatra and from Madagascar to Astrakhan. Diplomatic relations extended from England and Muscovy to Ceylon and Samarkand."

"This singular document provides a fleeting but invaluable glimpse into the bureaucratic infrastructure supporting Ottoman dynastic pretensions in the Indian Ocean. As it clearly shows, preachers in Calicut not only read the Friday sermon or ẖuṭbe in the name of the Ottoman sultan but also were paid to do so by regular shipments of gold from the Ottoman treasury."

..Lutfi was thus able to confirm Sokollu Mehmed’s greatest hope: that the Muslims of maritime Asia were ready to.. adopt the concept of a universal Ottoman sultanate as a collective pan-Islamic political ideology. The grand vizier thus sensed an... opportunity to... extend Ottoman influence across the Indian Ocean and responded by directing all of his... energy, enthusiasm, and organizational acumen toward this goal.

"In other words, because of Ottoman control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the two Rumis (Hoja Bakhshi and Kara Hasan) claimed that the Ottoman sultan was already recognized, at least in some sense, as the de facto suzerain of Muslim communities even as far away as China—a status ostensibly confirmed by the Great Khan himself."

"This is a theme continually emphasized throughout the author’s[Seydi Ali] account of his travels, as he records vociferous expressions of 'inkıyād ve itā‛at' (“devotion and obedience”) to the Ottoman dynasty in various Muslim ports of call from the Hadramaut to Baluchistan to Gujarat."

"Sokollu’s genius was to combine an appreciation of the vast rhetorical potential of Ottoman claims to universal sovereignty with an understanding of the technical prerequisites of building and maintaining a global network of communications—the principal vehicle through which these claims could be expressed...

"Ottoman merchants were developing a vast network of commercial relations... As a result, traffic in pepper and luxury goods through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf soared to new heights, not only surpassing the volumes achieved during the height of the Mamluk monopoly in the fifteenth century but also eventually outstripping the rival Portuguese trade around the Cape of Good Hope."

"Thus, rather than the definitive turning away from the Indian Ocean that Rustem Pasha may have hoped for, the years of his grand vizierate developed into a protracted tug of war between the grand vizier himself and an emerging coalition of his opponents, hereafter referred to as the “Indian Ocean faction.”"

"Suleiman’s armada, consisting of nearly seventy vessels in all, was the largest that had been seen in the Indian Ocean... And all of this was accomplished despite the total absence of forests in Egypt and Arabia, meaning that every plank used in its construction was shipped to Egypt from elsewhere in the empire and then hauled overland to the arsenal in Suez across more than a hundred miles of desert."

"Thus, by the spring of 1538, as Hadim Suleiman's... had managed to construct an enormous transoceanic coalition, linking Istanbul with allies across the entire breadth of the Indian Ocean from Shihr and Gujarat to Calicut and Sumatra. It was arguably the most geographically extensive alliance ever assembled—one that could hardly have been conceived of more than a few decades earlier."

"The emirs of the gulf states of Bahrain and Katif also followed suit, and nominal Ottoman suzerainty was thereby confirmed over the entire western Persian Gulf. A new, northern maritime frontier had been established with the Portuguese."

"By the following year—as reports of ongoing progress continued to circulate—speculation about the canal was dominating political discussions even in Paris, amid rumors that the Ottomans would seek a peace with Charles V in Europe in order to devote themselves entirely to a coming naval campaign in India."

"Within two years of the Ottomans’ arrival in Yemen, a vast nexus of forces from across the Indian Ocean thus appeared to be coalescing under the Ottoman banner into a concrete anti-Portuguese alliance... And yet, in a cruel reversal of political fortunes, it was precisely at this moment of heady success that the two Ottoman commanders, Selman Reis and Hayreddin al-Rumi, fell into a bloody personal dispute."

"Significantly, this process was mirrored almost exactly in the Ottoman Empire, thanks to the patronage of Sultan Mehmed II during the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Of the several examples of Ptolemy’s Geographia today extant in Ottoman collections, the oldest is an undated Byzantine manuscript, probably from the late 1300s, that passed into Mehmed’s possession following his conquest of Constantinople..."

"Despite a precocious Portuguese start, by century’s end it was not they but the Ottomans who had conquered a weakened Mamluk state, the Ottomans who controlled the bulk of the transit spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and the Ottomans who held Jerusalem (and Mecca and Medina as well) for the honor of Islam...