Slavery, as we have seen, was even a feature of the imperial family. Every sultan’s mother was technically a slave, having been captured during battle, given over by her family, or acquired through the slave trade.

Fundamental to understanding slavery in the Ottoman Empire, and indeed throughout Muslim history, is the insight that in fact it served as a conduit for upward social mobility.

In the growing global trade war of the early sixteenth century, even the Ottomans’ enemies to the west, the Venetians, lobbied Selim on trade policy. Despite the privileges he had granted Venetian merchants in Egypt, they suffered overall more than the Portuguese from the high tariffs he imposed on spices and other goods moving from the East throug

Because of the unique status he had earned for himself, Selim was the only ruler capable of leading such a program of reform, the only Muslim monarch able to adapt the civilization and institutions of Islam to stand as universal principles of governance. His retooling of the court system for worldly rule represented one of the most monumental admin

to forever end the Shiite threat, the Ottomans would have to wrench the weapon from the Safavids’ hands and shatter it into a thousand pieces.

Coming almost four decades after the 1453 loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Granada was for many Europeans an act of retribution, a Christian rebuttal to the most powerful Muslim empire on earth.

In Lincoln’s mind, California and Jerusalem existed on a continuum. Each represented both a spiritual destiny and a geographic destination for Americans. Such a notion derived from the same mythology of Crusade that drove Columbus west—a redemptive journey to gain the promises of a Promised Land.

By 1520, Selim had grown accustomed to being the ruler of the world’s largest empire, sultan and caliph, God’s shadow on earth.

The largest Jewish city in the world after 1492—indeed, the only Jewish-majority city for two thousand years—rose in the Ottoman Empire. This was the humming port of Salonica (now the Greek city of Thessaloniki), on the hilly northwest coast of the Aegean Sea. Over the next four centuries, Salonica, “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” became the global