Without understanding the role of the Ottomans in the history of the last five hundred years, we cannot hope to understand either the past or the present. The Ottomans stood, in 1492, at the very center of the known world. The Ottoman Empire made the world we know today.

Luther believed that each reader or hearer of scripture had the capacity—indeed, the obligation—to interpret God’s word personally. No human held a monopoly over the interpretation of God’s message, he contended, and therefore no human should command authority over another in his spiritual communion with God.

In stark contrast to the mosaic of squabbling polities that was Europe, the Ottoman Empire ruled across three continents as a unified juggernaut.

the pontiff dispatched “an undistinguished Dominican” friar named Johann Tetzel to Germany to sell indulgences to support construction work on the imposingly ornate St. Peter’s Basilica. Tetzel’s pithy sales pitch became famous: “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

But in order to achieve his long list of military desiderata—destroy the Mamluks, gain access to Africa and the Indian Ocean, win Mecca and Medina, protect the Red Sea from the Portuguese, capture North Africa, and unite the entire eastern Mediterranean under the Ottoman flag—he still had to seize the Mamluk capital, Cairo.

At the center of the sea, Sicily functioned as a gateway between the eastern and western Mediterranean. Whoever controlled Sicily controlled the Mediterranean.

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

Selim concentrated at the center of his empire not just the Middle East’s agricultural and economic riches but, perhaps even more importantly, its intellectual, artistic, and cultural wealth. The Ottomans could thus absorb the traditions of places such as Cairo and Damascus, Tabriz and Aleppo, long-established hubs of Islamic learning and global

In an accident of history, Niccolò Machiavelli, who admired and feared the Ottoman Empire, completed his famous treatise of political philosophy, The Prince, the same year—1513—in which Selim defeated his half-brothers to secure the sultanate that he had gained in 1512.