The Jihad in Europe: Ottomans

“THE JIHAD IN EUROPE The #Ottomans continued their ascent. The #Safavid Persians, who had just adopted Shi’ism in 1501, were a new and potent force confronting the Ottoman sultanate in eastern Asia Minor; as the Ottomans grew in power and confidence, a confrontation was inevitable. There was, however, one obstacle: the Qur’an forbids Muslims to kill fellow Muslims (4: 92), and so these Shi’a had to be declared non-Muslim. A decree therefore went out that “according to the precepts of the holy law,” the Safavid Shah Ismail and his followers were “unbelievers and heretics. Any who sympathize and accept their false religion or assist them are also unbelievers and heretics. It is a necessity and a divine obligation that they be massacred and their communities be dispersed.” 1 The Ottoman sultan Selim then wrote to Shah Ismail: “You have subjected the upright community of Muhammad… to your devious will [and] undermined the firm foundation of the faith; you have unfurled the banner of oppression in the cause of aggression [and] no longer uphold the commandments and prohibitions of the Divine Law; you have incited your abominable Shii faction to unsanctified sexual union and the shedding of innocent blood.” 2 The jihad against the Shi’ites thus justified, the Ottomans defeated them in 1514, and drove them from the eastern regions of Asia Minor. Two years later, the Ottomans defeated the #Mamluks and gained control of Syria and the Holy Land and defeated them again to win Egypt shortly thereafter. Their preeminence in the Islamic world, outside of Persia and India, was now secured, and then cemented in 1517 when the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, surrendered his authority to the Ottoman caliph Selim I. 3 Although the Holy Land had been occupied by Muslims since 1291, the Ottoman presence there was alarming to the crowned heads of Europe, who had long had an opportunity to see the Ottomans up close, far closer than they would have preferred. Pope Leo X tried to organize a new Crusade, and in 1518 called upon the leaders of Europe to stop their infighting and unite against the jihadis, but it was that very infighting that prevented any concerted European effort against the Ottomans. The Ottomans even became a rhetorical weapon in that infighting. In response to Pope Leo X’s efforts toward a new Crusade, the pioneering reformer Martin Luther declared that “to fight against the Turk is the same thing as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod.” 4 In polemicizing against the Roman Church, Luther even charged that the papacy was worse than the Ottoman caliphate, thus making a Crusade against the Ottomans in alliance with the pope anathema to many Protestants: The Pope, with his followers, commits a greater sin than the Turk and all the Heathen.… The Turk forces no one to deny Christ and to adhere to his faith.… Though he rages most intensely by murdering Christians in the body—he, after all, does nothing by this but fill heaven with saints.… The Pope does not want to be either enemy or Turk.… He fills hell with nothing but “Christians”.… This is committing real spiritual murder and is every bit as bad as the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed and the Turks. But whenever men do not allow him to practice this infernal diabolical seduction—he adopts the way of the Turk, and commits bodily murder too.… The Turk is an avowed enemy of Christ. But the Pope is not. He is a secret enemy and persecutor, a false friend. For this reason, he is all the worse! 5 Luther’s broadside was one of the earliest examples of what was to become a near-universal tendency in the West: the downplaying of jihad atrocities and their use in arguments between Westerners to make one side look worse. No Crusade was forthcoming. And so, with their rivals defeated or at bay, the now undisputed Ottoman caliphate could turn its attention once again to Europe. The janissaries were the spearhead of this new jihad effort. As converted Christians, they were more trustworthy as slaves of the sultan than Muslims would have been, as it was widely believed that the Muslims would use their position to favor their relatives and home regions. But the janissaries, cut off from their families and homelands, aroused no such concerns. A contemporary observer explained: “If Christian children accept Islam, they become zealous in the faith and enemies of their relatives.” 6 This was so widely accepted as axiomatic that a Christian visitor, Baron Wenceslas Wradislaw, noted: “Never… did I hear it said of any pasha, or observe either in Constantinople or in the whole land of Turkey, that any pasha was a natural born Turk; on the contrary, kidnapped, or captured, or turned Turk.” 7 Commanding this force of zealous converts from 1520 to 1566 was the sultan who came to be known as Suleiman the Magnificent, who took the Ottoman caliphate to the height of its power. His jihadis defeated the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, whom the Ottomans regarded (in the words of an official of the sultanate) as “professional cutthroats and pirates,” taking the island of Rhodes after a 145-day siege in 1522.8 Ottoman power over the eastern Mediterranean was near total, with only Cyprus and Crete remaining outside the domains of the caliphate. But the Ottomans generally neglected Rhodes, to the degree that the Venetian envoy Pietro Zeno asserted the year after its conquest that “the Sultan has no use for Rhodes.” 9 Zeno may not have realized that the Ottomans had not taken Rhodes to put it to any particular use, but simply because the jihad imperative was universal and absolute. In 1526, the sultan ordered his jihad warriors to take Vienna. The armies were under the supervision of Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman’s grand vizier, a Greek Christian who had been captured, enslaved, and converted to Islam as a boy, and who had then risen high in the Ottoman court after befriending Suleiman. When the jihadis arrived at Belgrade on their way to Austria, Suleiman ordered Ibrahim to take it, recounting later in his diary that he told him “it will be but a bite to last him till breakfast at Vienna.” 10 Once Belgrade was taken, Suleiman noted with satisfaction that “the Grand Vezir has 500 soldiers of the garrison beheaded; 300 others are taken away into slavery.” 11 The jihadis moved into Hungary, where they soundly defeated a massive Hungarian force at Mohacs. On August 31, 1526, Suleiman recorded in his diary, speaking of himself in the third person: “The Sultan, seated on a golden throne, receives the homage of the viziers and the beys; massacre of 2,000 prisoners; the rain falls in torrents.” 12 He ordered Mohacs to be burned. Its site came to be known among Hungarians as “the tomb of the Hungarian nation.” 13 Four days later, the jihadis took Buda. Suleiman recorded the details: “Sept. 4. Order to massacre all peasants in the camp. Women alone exempted. Akinjis forbidden to plunder.” 14 The akinjis were the Ottoman cavalry and advance troops. They ignored the antiplunder order, and Suleiman did not punish them for doing so. 15 The jihadis burned Buda and seized the treasures of its renowned library and much of its great art, including statues of Hercules, Diana, and Apollo, for shipment back to Constantinople. 16 Suleiman took the most satisfaction in seizing two immense cannons that Mehmet II was forced to leave behind after one of his campaigns. The Hungarians had put them on display as trophies signifying their defeat of the Ottomans; there was to be no more of that. 17 Suleiman lingered awhile in Hungary, but unexpectedly, he did not make it part of the Ottoman Empire. The historian Kemal Pasha Zadeh, a contemporary of Suleiman, wrote: “The time when this province should be annexed to the possession of Islam had not yet arrived.… The matter was therefore postponed to a more suitable occasion.” 18 He instead chose the next Hungarian king, John Zapolya, and made him his vassal. Apparently, the sultan did not think that the territory could be held securely or governed effectively from Constantinople at that time, and this was reinforced when he set out again in May 1529 and his armies, stymied by heavy rains, took almost four months to return to Buda. 19 Once there, Suleiman crowned his vassal Hungarian king and embarked for Vienna. When they arrived in September 1529, the Muslims plundered and set fire to the villages surrounding the city, and then laid siege to the city itself. This time Luther green-lighted the defense of Christendom against the Turks, and a combined force of Catholics and Protestants, some of whom had just arrived three days before the Ottomans, were inside Vienna ready to defend it against the jihadi onslaught. The bad weather forced Suleiman to leave behind some of his key equipment at Buda, and this hampered the assault by the Muslims, yet they still had a considerable force to throw at the city, and they did. The Christians held firm. Suleiman abandoned the siege in mid-October, burning to death all of his prisoners except those who would be useful as slaves, and set out for Constantinople. Back at Buda, John Zapolya lavished flattery upon his master, congratulating Suleiman for his “successful campaign.” 20 Suleiman tried again in 1532 to take Vienna but wasn’t even able to get into Austria; Archduke Ferdinand of Austria stopped the jihadis in Hungary. However, the sultan did not forget Vienna. He had better luck against the Shi’ite Safavids, from whom he took Baghdad in 1534. On a fortress in Bessarabia (modern-day Mol-dova), Suleiman inscribed a boast proclaiming himself the master of the Safavids, Byzantines, and Mamluks: “In Baghdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan.” 21 The Safavids and Mamluks were not entirely subdued, but he had beaten them both enough to give substance to the boast. Egypt became a valued source for slaves captured from sub-Saharan Africa: at the Turkish port of Antalya, a customs official in 1559 noted the arrival of cargo from Egypt, among which “black slaves, both male and female, constituted the bulk of the traffic. Many ships carried slaves exclusively.” 22 Mindful of his Islamic responsibility, Suleiman oversaw extensive renovations at Mecca, ensuring a pure water supply for pilgrims and opening schools of Islamic theology. In Jerusalem, he had the Dome of the Rock redecorated in the Ottoman style. He was careful always to keep the dhimmis in their place. In 1548, the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, M. d’Aramon, visited the Holy Land and reported: “Jerusalem has been enclosed by city walls built by the Turks, but there are neither ramparts nor a ditch. The town is medium-sized and not much populated, the streets are narrow and unpaved.… The so-called temple of Solomon is at the base of the city… round and with a lead-covered dome; around its core are chapels as in our churches, which is all one can surmise because no Christian is permitted to enter the area without threat of death or having to become a [Muslim].” 23 As he grew older, Suleiman’s zealousness for jihad waned. His campaigns against Christian Europe became a distant memory. For some of those around him, this was an indictment. In 1566, when Suleiman was seventy-one years old and had not led an expedition into Europe for twenty-three years, his daughter Mihrimah Sultan reproached the caliph for neglecting his Islamic obligation to lead the armies of Islam in jihad warfare against non-Muslims. 24 Suleiman was stung by the criticism, particularly from a woman, and found no better retort than to get back on his horse. Several months later, outside the fortress of Szigetvar in Hungary, which the jihadis were besieging, the old warrior died in his tent. 25 To avoid demoralizing the troops, his death was not announced for forty-eight days; a page who slightly resembled him was dressed in his clothes and carried in his litter on the journey home, but most onlookers saw through the ruse. 26 The real Suleiman’s heart, liver, and some other organs were buried in a tomb there that became a popular pilgrimage site for Ottoman Muslims; the rest of his remains were taken back to Constantinople—which the Ottomans often referred to as Istanbul (“ to the city” in Greek) or, using the Turkish cognate, Konstantiniyye—and buried there. 27 Russia and a Canal Suleiman’s successor as sultan and caliph, Selim II, immediately faced new challenges. In 1552, the Russian czar Ivan the Terrible annexed the Central Asian Tatar khanate of Kazan; in 1556 he likewise incorporated the Astrakhan khanate into his domains. A large number of Muslims came under Russian rule. In 1567, he built a fort on the River Terek in the Caucasus. Muslims in the area appealed to Selim for help, claiming that because the Russians controlled Astrakhan, they could not safely make the pilgrimage to Mecca, as the route now required they pass through Russian domains. 28 In 1571, the Tatars raided Moscow, yet failed to repeat that victory the following year, and had to give up hope of reconquering the area. 29 Searching for a way to enable the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia to make the pilgrimage to Mecca without running afoul of the Russians, an Ottoman imperial official sent this order to the governor of Egypt: Because the accursed Portuguese are everywhere, owing to their hostilities against India, and the routes by which Muslims come to the Holy Places are obstructed and, moreover, it is not considered lawful for people of Islam to live under the power of miserable infidels… you are to gather together all the expert architects and engineers of that place… and investigate the land between the Mediterranean and Red Seas and… report where it is possible to make a canal in that desert place and how long it would be and how many boats could pass side-by-side. 30 The canal was not built. But the idea of one remained alive. Cyprus and a Treaty Selim II was known to have a fondness for wine—so much fondness, in fact, that he has gone down in history as Selim the Sot. His favorite wine came from the island of Cyprus, which was under the control of the Republic of Venice. 31 And so in 1571, the Ottomans accused the Venetians of aiding pirates from Cyprus that attacked Ottoman vessels and seized the island. This was in violation of a peace treaty that Selim had concluded with the Venetians, but a Muslim cleric issued a fatwa for Selim, explaining that a peace treaty with infidels could be set aside for the greater good of Islam. A land was previously in the realm of Islam. After a while the abject infidels overran it, destroyed the colleges and mosques, and left them vacant. They filled the pulpits and galleries with the tokens of infidelity and error, intending to insult the religion of Islam with all kinds of vile deeds, and by spreading their ugly acts to all corners of the earth.… When peace was previously concluded with other lands in possession of the said infidels, the aforenamed land was included. An explanation is sought as to whether, in accordance with the [sacred law], this is an impediment to the Sultan’s determining to break the treaty. ANSWER: There is no possibility that it could ever be an impediment. For the Sultan of the people of Islam (may God glorify his victories) to make peace with the infidels is legal only where there is benefit to all Muslims. When there is no benefit, peace is never legal. When a benefit has been seen, and it is then observed to be more beneficial to break it, then to break it becomes absolutely obligatory and binding. 32 Lepanto The Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman central government was known) financed the Cyprus campaign by selling monasteries and churches out from under the Christians who owned them. 33 But Selim the Sot was to pay a heavy price for his Cyprus wine: in response to the Ottoman action in Cyprus, Pope Pius V called another Crusade and formed the Holy League, which consisted of the Papal States, Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Knights of Malta, the Duchy of Savoy, and several Italian duchies, and was intent upon destroying the Ottoman Empire as a maritime power. On October 7, 1571, the Holy League and the Ottomans, both with over two hundred ships, met in what was until then the largest sea battle ever at Lepanto, in the caliphate’s domains in Greece. The commander of the Christian forces, Don John of Austria, told his men just before the battle: “My children, we are here to conquer or to die as Heaven may determine. Do not let our impious foe ask us, ‘Where is your God?’ Fight in His holy name and in death or in victory you will win immortality.” 34 It was to be in victory. The Christian triumph was total: the Ottoman fleet was completely destroyed, and as many as forty thousand jihadis were killed. Eyewitnesses recalled that the sea was red with blood. 35 For the first time in a major battle, the Christian Europeans had defeated the Ottomans, and there was rejoicing throughout Europe. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, lost his left hand at Lepanto and was known thereafter as El Manco de Lepanto, that is, the One-Handed One of Lepanto. Referring to his own injury, and himself in the third person, Cervantes said: “Although it looks ugly, he holds it for lovely, because he received it on the most memorable and lofty occasion which past centuries have beheld—nor do those [centuries] to come hope to see the like.” 36 He recalled the Battle of Lepanto as “that day so fortunate to Christendom when all nations were undeceived of their error in believing that the Turks were invincible.” 37 When Pope Pius V heard the news, he thought of Don John of Austria and murmured words from the New Testament: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” 38 When he learned of the catastrophic defeat, Selim was enraged, and declared that he was going to order that all the Christians in his domains be executed. 39 But cooler heads prevailed, and this order was not issued. By the time the grand vizier Mehmed Sokullu met with Barbaro, the ambassador from the Republic of Venice to the sultanate, in Constantinople a few days after the battle, the Ottomans were determinedly downplaying the significance of the battle. “You come to see how we bear our misfortune,” said Sokullu to Barbaro. “But I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.” 40 The Ottomans did indeed rebuild their fleet, and the Holy League was not able to follow up on this victory with further effective strikes against the caliphate. The shorn beard did indeed grow back. Nonetheless, Lepanto became a celebrated name throughout Europe and was clear proof that the Ottomans could, after all, be beaten. The last casualty of Selim the Sot’s seizure of Cyprus was Selim himself. In 1574 he visited a Turkish bath, where he drank a whole bottle of his prized wine from Cyprus. Soon after, he slipped on the marble floor and cracked his skull, dying at age fifty. 41 His successor, Murad III, was enamored of women as much as Selim was of wine, to the degree that the price for sex slaves in the slave markets of Constantinople doubled as the demand from the imperial court alone began to exceed the supply. Murad was the father of over a hundred children. 42 Murad was also mindful of jihad, launching an attack against Shi’ite Persia in 1578 that included the Ottoman seizure of Christian Georgia, where the Muslims quickly converted the churches into mosques. 43 In 1587, Murad seized the Church of the Pammakristos in Konstantiniyye, which had been the seat of the patriarchate of Constantinople since the fall of the city in 1453, and converted it into the Mosque of Victory (Fethiye Camii). 44 The jihad against Europe also continued, when it was possible to continue it amid increasing political instability. At Keresztes in northern Hungary in 1596, the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet III, bearing the standard of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, decisively defeated a Christian force of thirty thousand men. 45 Ten years later, however, the Ottomans concluded a treaty with Habsburg Austria that demonstrated how weak the sultanate had become. In the past, when temporary truces had been concluded between the Ottomans and Austria, they had been contemptuously headed “Graciously accorded by the Sultan, ever victorious, to the infidel King of Vienna, ever vanquished.” 46 This new treaty, however, treated the Ottoman sultan and the Austrian emperor as equals. And the decline continued. In 1621, the seventeen-year-old Osman II, who had become sultan upon the deposition of his uncle Mustafa the Mad (whose nickname reveals the reason for the deposition), led a jihad force against Poland, but was so ignominiously defeated that the janissaries deposed him as well. He was murdered soon afterward. 47 New Rigor After a period of lax enforcement, in 1631 the sultan Murad IV attempted to ensure that the Ottoman decline was not a result of incurring the divine wrath by lax enforcement of the Sharia. He issued a decree restating the dress restrictions for dhimmis, to ensure that they would “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9: 29): Insult and humiliate infidels in garment, clothing and manner of dress according to Muslim law and imperial statute. Henceforth, do not allow them to mount a horse, wear sable fur, sable fur caps, satin and silk velvet. Do not allow their women to wear mohair caps wrapped in cloth and “Paris” cloth. Do not allow infidels and Jews to go about in Muslim manner and garment. Hinder and remove these kinds. Do not lose a minute in executing the order that I have proclaimed in this manner. 48 Murad may have believed that this had worked in 1638 when he defeated the Safavids and took Baghdad (which the Persians had seized back from the Ottomans in 1623). And indeed, the fortunes of the empire began to turn, if ever so slightly. His successor, the sultan Ibrahim, in 1645 took the jihad back to Christian Europe once again, after pirates operating from Malta captured a Turkish ship on which was one of his favorite sex slaves. 49 Ibrahim, in a wild fury, ordered the killing of all the Christians in Ottoman domains. Once his noblemen talked him out of that, he ordered that all Christian ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire be imprisoned, and upon learning that the Maltese pirates were French, contemplated jihad against France. France, however, was far away; Crete, a possession of the Republic of Venice, was closer. Ibrahim decided to seize it, but in the end, it took the Ottomans twenty-four years to do so. 50 Worries about the divine wrath returned in 1660, when a fire destroyed much of Constantinople. The Ottomans blamed the city’s Jews and expelled them from the city. Inscribed in the royal mosque in the city was a reference to Muhammad’s expulsion of the Jews from Medina; the mosque’s endowment deed includes a reference to “the Jews who are the enemy of Islam.” 51 Allah’s wrath, presumably, was averted once again. Sobieski to the Rescue With the jihad for Crete finally concluded successfully, the Ottomans again moved against Poland, this time more successfully than before. In 1672, the sultan Mehmet IV defeated a substantial Polish force and won significant territorial concessions north of the Black Sea. The Polish king Jan Sobieski would not, however, accept this, and went to war with the Ottomans again four years later. Again the sultanate was victorious, winning even more territory than it had before. 52 Jan Sobieski, although forced in 1676 to accept the terms of a humiliating peace treaty, was still not willing to accept this as a result. He would be heard from again. His third chance came in the late summer of 1683, when Mehmet IV assembled a large force of jihad warriors and set forth once more into Europe, intent upon succeeding in bringing it to heel where his illustrious forbears had failed. At Osijek in the Ottoman domains of Croatia, the forces of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg count Emmerich Tekeli joined the Ottomans. Tekeli was the sultan’s vassal king of western Hungary, set up to challenge and harass the Habsburgs. Tekeli’s troops carried a standard inscribed “For God and Country” and “Kruczes,” or “men of the cross,” thereby earning Tekeli a place among the long list of Christian servants of the jihad, going back to Count Julian and continuing to Pope Francis. 53 Mehmet’s grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, urged him to try again to take Vienna, arguing that it was the key to the conquest of Europe and that if he conquered it, “all the Christians would obey the Ottomans.” 54 The jihadis duly placed Vienna under siege once again but did not count on Jan Sobieski, who hurried to the city with a relief force. Approaching Vienna, Sobieski saw the arrangement of the sultan’s forces around the city and remarked, “This man is badly encamped. He knows nothing of war, we shall certainly defeat him.” 55 In the dawn hours of September 12, he did. His forces descended upon the surprised jihadis with fury, with Jan Sobieski himself leading the charge. As the Polish king approached the very heart of the Muslim camp, the Tatar khan, another vassal of Mehmet IV, saw him and exclaimed in shock and horror: “By Allah! The King really is among us!” 56 The Ottoman siege was decisively broken, and Christendom once again saved. The warriors of jihad fled in confusion. Four years later, the Ottomans made one last stand in Central Europe, facing the Austrians at Mohacs, where they had won such a decisive victory in 1526. But these were no longer the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. The warriors of jihad were beaten so badly that Austria established control over much of Hungary and threatened Ottoman holdings in the Balkans. The jihadis would not return to the heart of Europe for several centuries. When they did once more strike the West, it was in the New World metropolises of New York and Washington. The day of that strike was September 11, 2001. Many have speculated that the mastermind of that jihad decided to set it on the anniversary of the high-water mark of the jihadi advance into Europe, the day before the defeat of the jihadis and the acceleration of the Ottoman decline set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the jihad’s becoming a dim memory in the West. In any case, after Vienna, Europe would, for a considerable time, get a respite.”

— The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS by Robert Spencer