Review of GOD'S SHADOW: The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped the Modern World
1492 (and much more) reset with facts and fervor ...
This very readable, clearly deeply personal history of one of the Ottoman’s Empire great sultans left me both thrilled and frustrated. Alan Mikhail is the head of the Yale History Department – a serious outfit over the years. I have many books published by professors from that distinguished department on my shelves. I mention this at the start because my disappointment resonates more deeply because of this fact. The book’s flaws are apparent (as pointed out by its most serious critics) but much more importantly, not ones I would expect from the head of Yale’s History Department. Before I begin to discuss the frustrations and joys of this book, I must say it is very accessible in every way. He is a terrific writer and unpacks history in a compelling and vivid fashion. Further, his use of maps and illustrations is superb. Why is it so rare to get a great narrative with the proper type and number of maps always leaves me befuddled.
You will not think about 1492, the Crusades, Christopher Columbus, Christianity or the Americas the same way when you finish this book. Mikhail wanted to right a correction in the traditional Eurocentric narrative around that epic moment in history when the old world met the new. It has always been a story of intrepid explorers and the riches, the horrors and the empires that followed. It was always the first chapter in the eventual colonization of the world by European powers. It was always the opening shot in the rise of America. While Mikhail does not dispense with some of these “truths”, his adjustment is profound. He makes the utterly persuasive case that it was the presence of the powerful Ottoman Empire and its increasing dominance of the Mediterranean and the trade with the East that propelled the West to seek alternate routes to the Far East and South Asia. It was the enormous success of Islam, a success that had for years threatened and even occupied parts of Christian Europe, that provoked hundreds of years of Crusades and that became an obsession and a rallying cry motivating and rationalizing the religious violence of that time. He even suggests that it was the presence of the “Turk” at Europe’s borders that triggered Martin Luther’s “protest” within the Catholic Church in 1517. It is a lot to swallow. Included are descriptions of an empire that compared to its Christian counterparts was diverse, tolerant and socially mobile. The facts are so compelling that I wrote a separate section under “The Wall” that captures just a sliver of all that he presents. Throughout it all, he describes the expansion of the empire under Selim with true miniseries flair. As one “blurb” states, it has the feel of a real time “Game of Thrones”.
Yet … I almost didn’t finish it. The proselyting exhausted me. With evangelical fervor, Mikhail never fails to underscore the comparative barbarity and backwardness of Europe and Christianity. He doth protest too much. His zealousness undermines his credibility. Comparing one version of slavery with another was the point where I stopped. Slavery accounted for almost 30% of the Ottoman Empire’s revenue at one point and had been part of it and all the Middle Eastern empires for thousands of years. In Mikhail’s hands, however, slavery under the Ottomans and other empires was a source of diversity and social mobility. It certainly was compared to the barbarity of the European model but to practically turn it into a virtue is simply going too far. When Selim massacres 40,000 of his own subjects while marching to fight the Safavid Shiites, he gives it a modest almost forgiving acknowledgement after spending pages and pages describing, respectively, Spanish and Christian atrocities in the Americas and during the Crusades. Okay … it is a bit of a polemic and his Acknowledgments suggest it was a very personal and intense project. My issue is that he is not an enterprising journalist or amateur historian. He is the head of the Yale History Department and it is upsetting to think that there was nobody around to suggest he rein things in a bit and by doing so giving this fascinating and important book the measured credibility it deserves.
God’s Shadow: The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped the Modern World
by Alan Mikhail (2020)
400 pages