Download PDF | Honored by the Glory of Islam, Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe, By Marc David Bae , Oxford University Press (2008).
345 Pages
Acknowledgments
I have benefited from the assistance of many individuals who have taken an interest in my work. With the risk of inadvertently leaving someone out, I thank those who have allowed me to conduct research and those who educated and supported me, discussed my work and read it critically. 1 am especially grateful to those who inspired me. I am indebted to Filiz GaSman, Ilber Ortayl, Zeyneb Celik, and Ulkii Altindag and their staffs at the Topkapi Palace Museum Library and Archive for allowing me to conduct research in such an awesome setting.
I am also indebted to the directors of other Istanbul libraries, such as Nevzat Kaya at the Suleimaniye Library, for allowing me full access to their rich manuscript collections and for assisting me. I have been permitted to work in the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archive; the Office of the Istanbul Mufti, Islamic Law Court Records Archive; and the Islamic Research Center. In Berlin I was granted access to the collection of the State Museum of Berlin, Art Library, and in Vienna was given permission to work in the Austrian National Library, Manuscript Collection, and Portrait Collection, Picture Archive and Library, which allowed me to examine Ottoman miniatures.
My interpretation of the texts I read in Istanbul, Berlin, and Vienna reflects the diverse influence of training by many scholars. Chief among them are Carl Petry at Northwestern University, whose stimulating lectures introduced me to the richness of Islamic history and who inspired me to pursue graduate studies in the subject. At the University of Michigan, Fatma Miige Gocek first guided me with patience and humor through the intricacies of Ottoman history and paleography, with James Redhouse on my left, an estate register from an eighteenth-century Armenian grocer of Galata before me, and Professor Gécek on my right. Ron Suny encouraged me to engage with theory and see the big picture, becoming a great mentor first at Michigan and then at the University of Chicago. Michael Bonner, who first introduced me to Islamic chronicles and fatwa collections, and Juan Cole, who alerted me to the political nature of historical narratives, furthered my education in medieval and modern Islamic history, respectively.
Todd Endelman introduced me to the topic of religious conversion. John Woods and Rashid Khalidi eased the transition to the University of Chicago. Fred Donner and John Woods provided excellent models of how best to critically approach Islamic history. Cornell Fleischer taught me how to think historically, paying attention to the nuances of Ottoman narratives, and compelled me to excel. Robert Dankoff patiently taught me Ottoman Turkish, attempting to instill in me Sprachgefiihl, and carefully corrected every inaccurate transliteration and translation that I insisted he read. Joel Kraemer showed me the interrelated aspects of Jewish and Muslim history. It is my hope that each of these scholars can see in this book a reflection of his or her own best work.
Access to collections and linguistic and historical training mean little without a supportive work environment, financial assistance, and time for contemplation. I am thankful to the History Department and School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, for providing a setting that allows me to pursue research and focus on my writing. The School of Humanities supported summer research travel to Istanbul. Fulbright, Social Sciences Research Council, and American Research Institute in Turkey fellowships enabled me to conduct the research for this book in Istanbul, and the Institute of Turkish Studies gave support to its initial writing. A Humboldt Fellowship in Germany allowed me time to complete the narrative. I thank my colleagues and friends Maurus Reinkowski at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg and Gudrun Kramer at the Free University in Berlin, who served as my hosts during my stay in Germany.
One does not write a book alone. Discussions with many colleagues enabled me to better articulate its themes. The fellows of the SIAS Institute, “Hierarchy, Marginality, and Ethnicity in Muslim Societies,” convened by Mark Cohen and Gudrun Kramer at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Princeton University; the fellows at the Dartmouth College Humanities Center’s seminar on conversion, convened by Kevin Reinhart and Dennis Washburn; the fellows in the University of California Humanities Research Institute, “Gender and Sexual Dissidence in Muslim Communities,” at the University of California, Irvine, convened by Nayan Shah; and the questions and comments of audiences at Tulane University, the University of Washington, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft and Bilgi University in Istanbul, the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece, and the Free University in Berlin gave crucial feedback as the argument of the book was developing.
Gottfried Hagen, Selim Deringil, Tony Greenwood, Heath Lowry, Victor Ostapchuk, George Bernstein, James Boyden, Jane Hathaway, and Rifat Bali commented on versions of the argument. Robert Dankoff and Sara Yildiz provided indispensable aid deciphering key passages of Ottoman texts. James Given (Latin), Richard Wittman (German), and Michelle Campos (Arabic) generously provided their linguistic knowledge. Cicek Oztek prepared several of the miniatures, and Johann Biissow facilitated archival matters in Berlin. I am very thankful to Michelle Molina, Anne Walthall, Caroline Finkel, and Esra Ozyiirek, plus the two anonymous readers at Oxford University Press for critically engaging with the text and giving substantial suggestions for revision. Their crucial intervention shaped the book immeasurably. I appreciate the labor of my enthusiastic and responsive editor at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read, and my friend and colleague Eliza Kent for recommending her to me and vice versa.
I would never have had the desire to be a historian nor had curiosity about religion had it not been for my parents, Barry and Sue Baer, who instilled in me a sense of curiosity about other cultures, languages, and places, gave me the greatest gift of raising me in diverse environments in far-flung corners of the globe, and made studious role models. My brother, Steve, taught me not to take myself too seriously. The generous assistance of my grandmother Bernice Wolf Braun enabled me to begin my pursuit of graduate studies. Earlier, her keen interest in my youthful observations of European society, in the form of letters I wrote her from Germany, encouraged my initial interest in history and history writing. My grandfather Harvey Baer respected me enough to argue with me about the interpretation of history. Siinter and Mustafa Ozyiirek took me into their family, removed every obstacle in my path in Istanbul, and shared in my excitement in learning Turkish and uncovering the most surprising aspects of the Ottoman past.
What an amazing journey it has been. From graduate school in Ann Arbor and Chicago, to research in Istanbul, from teaching in California, to launching the latest research projects in Berlin, for over a dozen years my partner, Esra Ozyiirek, and I have pursued knowledge together. She has always pushed me to stretch beyond my expected limits, to never be satisfied with conventions or conventional wisdom. She is as ever one step ahead of me, always inspiring, always challenging. This book is as much hers as mine, and whatever grace and intelligence it possesses is due to her. For her partnership I am deeply grateful.
The official modern Turkish orthography has been used in transcribing Ottoman and Turkish words in the Latin script. Readers unacquainted with Turkish should note the following: c =j as in John, ¢ = ch as in church, § = soft g lengthens the preceding vowel, 1 = similar to the u in radium, 6 = French eu as in deux, tt = French u as in durée, and ¢ = sh as in ship. Diacritical marks have been minimized. For some terms, such as sheikh and pasha, modern anglicized versions have been used.
Portions of chapter 4 previously appeared in “The Great Fire of 1660 and the Islamization of Christian and Jewish Space in Istanbul,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 2 (May 2004): 159-81. Portions of chapter 6 appeared in “17. Yiizyilda Yahudilerin Osmanh Imparatorlugundaki Niifuz ve Mevkilerini Yitirmeleri,” Toplum ve Bilim 83 (Kis 1999-2000): 202-22; and “Messiah King or Rebel? Jewish and Ottoman Reactions to Sabbatai Sevi's Arrival in Istanbul,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 9 (2003): 153-74.
Introduction
Conversion of Self; Others, and Sacred Space
The compound of the leading Muslim religious authority (mufti)
of Istanbul lies in the shadow of the magnificent sixteenth-century mosque of Suleiman in one of the most religious neighborhoods of the city. One building of the complex houses the Ottoman Islamic Law Court (Shariah) Archive. Its small reading room lined with wooden bookshelves built by nineteenth-century sultan Abdiilhamid II has just enough room for a long table seating several researchers and the director of the archive. A pious Muslim from Erzurum, the director favored faded green suits and a brown, knitted skullcap, and fielded calls from the “Hello Islamic Legal Opinion” (Alo Fetva) telephone line. The head of the archive, who has committed the Qur’an to memory, insisted that I inform him of every conversion I located in the yellowed pages of the court registers. He wanted me to interrupt his phone calls or proofreading of Qur’ans or sipping of bracing tea in tiny tulip-shaped glasses. He and the assistant director, whose main function was to serve tea, and several other Turkish researchers would gather behind me and look over my shoulder as I read aloud to them the brief texts written in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. Inevitably, the head of the archive would put his hand on my shoulder and, inexplicably addressing me by the Muslim name Ahmed, state, “Three hundred years ago that Armenian boy or that Jewish man or that Orthodox Christian woman understood the truth and was rightly guided into Islam. Why aren’t you?” This continued for the two and a half years I worked there and on subsequent visits as well.
The director and some of the Turkish researchers used a number of different methods to try to convert me to Islam. The first was social pressure. Two or three times during the day, upon hearing the call to prayer from the Suleimaniye Mosque, the director would put slippers at my feet and a towel on my shoulder and say, “Come, Ahmed, let’s go do our ablutions before praying in the mosque. We're locking the archive; you might as well come with us.” Another method was more intellectual or theological. The head of the archive would often explain that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all are branches of one original monotheist religion, but that Islam—being the last revelation, the final call, and the one whose message had never been corrupted—was its truest form. To convert from Christianity or Judaism to Islam, therefore, was to turn back to the authentic and original form of the erroneous religious practices in which I may have currently been engaged. One day the director, not a young man, sprang from his chair and said, “Ahmed, look at me. I am Ibrahim [Abraham]. My left arm is Ishak [Isaac]; my right is Ismail [Ishmael]. They both spring from the same body. They are branches connected to the same trunk. Why don’t you start using your right side?” At this moment, not being able to humor the well-meaning man any longer and intent on finishing a transliteration of a text in the waning afternoon light from the single window before the archive closed, I rudely said, “Look at that Japanese researcher. He is a polytheist. He is not even aware that there is only one, true God. Wouldn’t it be more impressive to bring such an unbeliever to the true path?” Undeterred, the head of the archive responded, “But he is hopeless. You are much closer. You are already a monotheist. Convert,” he added, turning to an aesthetic appeal, “and you could pray with all the other Muslim brothers in the glorious Suleimaniye Mosque beneath its impressive, lofty dome.”
While conducting my research concerning the change of religion of several hundred Christians and Jews to Islam in late seventeenth-century Istanbul, I became the unwilling target of fervent proselytization. As I have slowly realized, I gained better understanding of conversion from my daily encounters with devout Muslims in the archive than from the brief, frustratingly incomplete narratives of conversion in Ottoman archival records. The director’s exhortations made me realize that one of my original aims, to discover the motivation of the convert, was misguided. I had sought to answer why Christians and Jews became Muslims in the early modern Ottoman Empire only to discover that this was a question that I could not answer by reading the available documentary material, as it does not inform us of the conditions of conversion.
As I began reading seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman chronicles, I realized that in Ottoman Europe (Rumili, Rumelia, “the land of the Romans”), an area stretching from Istanbul to near Vienna in central Europe, Crete in the Mediterranean, and Podolia in Ukraine, when Christians and Jews converted to Islam before the grand vizier, sultan, or other Ottoman official such as a magistrate, his or her change of religion was invariably referred to in Ottoman archival and literary sources as “being honored by the glory of Islam,” which I have chosen as the book’s title. No matter the diverse circumstances in which people left their former religion and entered Islam, whether on the battlefield in the face of certain death or compelled by the sultan, his mother (the valide sultan), or the grand vizier, whether in a conversion ceremony before the ruler or at a meeting of an Istanbul Shariah court, and whether written in gold ink in a presentation copy of a literary masterpiece to the sultan or jotted down in black ink in the inside cover of a Shariah court register, Ottoman writers and bureaucrats labeled it in this manner. They were not concerned with the motivations of the convert and rarely recorded any of his or her intentions in changing religion, let alone the former religion or name.
Subjected to constant proselytization efforts and increasingly familiar with the nature of Ottoman sources, I reversed my research questions. I began to wonder what drove the head of the archive and other convert makers rather than what compels people to change religion. Now my questions were these: Why do people attempt to bring others of the same religion to their understanding of that religion, or try to ensure that people of completely different religions join their tradition? What is the connection between personal piety and proselytization? Who mediates conversion? Because every day I was invited to convert and then pray at the imposing sixteenth-century Suleimaniye Mosque, I also began to think about the effects of conversion on the urban environment: How does conversion affect the religious geography and sacred space of a city? The fact that Constantinople was conquered with much bloodshed in a war conceived on both sides as a struggle against the infidel caused me to also finally ask, What role do war, violence, and changing power relations play in the motivations of proselytizers in converting people and places? These are important questions worthy of investigation because their answers offer broad implications for the way scholars approach and conceptualize religious conversion, while presenting an original reading of Ottoman European history seen through the prism of religious transformation. Answering these questions for the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire provides new insight into the reign of a forgotten sultan, an understudied era in Ottoman history, the changing nature of Islam and understanding and practice of jihad, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Europe, and the history of Istanbul.
Mehmed IV, Conversion, and War on the Path of God
This book is a study of the religious transformation of people and places in early modern Ottoman Europe. It is based on the argument that the intersection of three interdependent modalities of conversion resulted in Islamization: a turn to piety or conversion of the self, the conversion of others, and the transformation of sacred space. These three constitute intricately related concentric rings of change set in motion by conversion to a reformist interpretation of Islam of the most important members of the dynasty and ruling elite (queen mother, grand vizier, sultan). Linked to this argument is a second one: that conversion is best understood in the context of war, conquest, and changing power relations. This book is concerned with conversion during the unique historical epoch of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV (reigned 1648-87), when Islamization occurred according to this pattern. I first describe the intensification of faith of the sultan’s inner circle, including his preacher, grand vizier, and mother, and the sultan, leading to their efforts to bring other Muslims to the same understanding of Islam and the conversion of Christians and Jews and their holy space, especially in Istanbul. Then I examine how the same conviction compelled Mehmed IV and his court to wage war against the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Venetians, seeking to bring foreign Christians to Islam and transform the sacred geography of Europe into a sanctified Muslim landscape accompanying the greatest territorial expansion and extension of the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire.
I posit a link between Islamic piety and conversion in the seventeenth century. I argue that piety can lead to both conversion within Islam and conversion to Islam. A turn to piety is considered a transformation in a person’s beliefs and practices. Fazil Ahmed Pasha (“pasha” is a title for a military commander, or statesman, particularly the grand vizier), Hatice Turhan Sultan (male and female members of the Ottoman dynasty were referred to as “sultan”), and Sultan Mehmed IV experienced a revival of their faith, an intensification of religious fervor. When the grand vizier, queen mother, and sultan adopted the Kadizadeli tenets preached by Vani Mehmed Efendi (“efendi” is a title for a member of the religious class) and turned belief in a purified, reformed Islam into political policy, attempting to transform the way Muslims practiced their religion, they spurred the conversion of other Muslims to their interpretation of Islam, just as the preaching of Kadizadeli preachers in Istanbul’s mosques led to the similar conversion of other Muslims (as well as resistance to that interpretation). Some Christians and Jews may have been swayed by Islamic piety to abandon their own religion, a sentiment that sometimes makes its way into Shariah court records. More germane to my argument, which concerns the mentality of the convert makers, the piety of Muslims was connected in contemporary writers’ minds not only to conversion within Islam, but to conversion of Christians and Jews to Islam. Vani Mehmed Efendi made the connection between the Turks’ conversion to Islam and the subsequent conquest and conversion of much of Eurasia by their pious descendants. Many contemporary Ottoman historical narratives claim that just as the piety of Hatice Turhan both compelled her to “conquer” Jewish space in Istanbul in order to convert the imperial capital’s sacred geography and to compel Jews to become Muslim, Mehmed IV and Grand Vizier Fazil Ahmed Pasha were incited by their piety to wage both the jihad of personal moral transformation and the jihad of military campaign that would result in the conversion of the religious geography and people from the Mediterranean to Poland and Ukraine.
The first conversion I explore is conversion of the self facilitated by mediators. Complicating the usual depiction of top-down conversions, whereby the king converts, followed by his kingdom, I relate a chain of conversion whereby the sultan was the fourth link following his preacher, grand vizier, and mother. Before exploring conversion, I lay out the context of crisis and political instability in which it occurred. Chapter 1 explores Mehmed IV’s turbulent accession to the sultanate at the tender age of seven following the dethronement (and subsequent execution) of his father, Ibrahim. Chapter 2 analyzes a decade of economic, military, and political crisis during his minority which led to perceptions of a cultural crisis whose resolution was sought in conversion to a purified Islam as advocated by pietist preachers. Chapters 3 to 6 follow Mehmed IV’s coming of age and his turn to piety, as well as that of his former regent and queen mother, the valide sultan Hatice Turhan Sultan, a converted former Christian slave named after the first convert in Islamic history, Muhammad’s wife, Khadija, under the influence of the Kadizadeli movement. Their conversion was mediated by the preacher Vani Mehmed Efendi. The preacher was brought to the attention of Mehmed IV and Hatice Turhan by Grand Vizier Fazil Ahmed Pasha, who had encountered the preacher on a provincial posting and was the first one swayed by his charismatic advocacy of revivalist pietism. Chapter 3 provides the historical background of the Kadizadeli movement through the 1650s. Chapter 5 discusses the Kadizadeli movement led by Vani Mehmed Efendi beginning in the 1660s, which linked “rigorous selfdiscipline” (enjoining good) and “strident social activism” (forbidding wrong).' These Muslims encouraged the interiorization of religion, undergoing a spiritual conversion, a revitalized commitment to the faith. They also promoted rationality in religion, stripping the ecstatic Islam practiced in Istanbul of innovations that they believed ran counter to the practices of the first Muslim community. This included Sufi rituals such as repeating God’s name or dancing to music as a form of prayer and visiting the tombs of Sufis to ask for intercession. Purification requires an opposing practice or person that is to be purified.’ The wrath of the Kadizadelis particularly targeted Bektashi, Halveti, and Mevlevi Sufis, members of orders previously instrumental in facilitating conversion. Kadizadeli-inspired conversion of the self is connected to the conversion of other Muslims in Mehmed IV’s immediate inner circle.
The next ring of conversion encompasses people and places nearest this inner circle. The sultan, usually depicted in the secondary literature, like his predecessors, as an aloof figure unconcerned about the beliefs and practices of his subjects, became an interventionist ruler and convert maker. Chapter 4 examines the Islamization of Istanbul in the aftermath of the 1660 fire. It narrates how places nearest the residence of key palace figures, considered an extension of the sultan’s personal space, were transformed into Muslim space, including the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods closest to Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Just as the hearts of the pietists had turned, so did they turn the heart of Istanbul into Muslim sacred space. Mehmed IV’s reign witnessed the transformation of the religious geography of Istanbul in the wake of the most devastating fire ever to have befallen the city, a connection of conflagration and conversion. The sultan expelled Jews from the city’s main port area and prohibited their return to a wide swath of the peninsula, especially those areas nearest the palace and the monumental imperial mosque, the Valide Sultan Mosque (New Mosque), built by Mehmed IV’s mother. Those who constructed the mosque compared the exile of Jews from Eminénti to Haskéy with Muhammad’s exile of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir from Medina. This act exposes the historical consciousness of this sultan and his mother. They linked their actions to those of the final prophet and considered their actions to be justified because they represented the conquest of infidel places in the present and were associated with future conquests abroad when lamps lit between the minarets of the new mosque illuminated the name of Christian citadels taken by the Ottomans. Christian areas of Galata, the district across the Golden Horn from Istanbul proper, were also Islamized by means of converting church properties to mosques and prohibiting Christians from residing in their vicinity. At the same time, many formerly Christian- and Jewish-inhabited areas of the city saw mosques replace churches and synagogues in the aftermath of the fire, as officials limited the districts that Christians and Jews could inhabit. As Armenians, Orthodox Christians, and Jews began to live in formerly predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, Muslim commoners asked for official interference to expel the encroachers.
The conversion of places nearest the sultan’s inner circle paralleled the conversion of Christians and Jews allowed within that elite group. Chapter 6 presents the story of the conversion of Jewish palace physicians converted by the valide sultan Hatice Turhan. She was praised for her piety, which included both constructing the imperial mosque complex in Istanbul and not permitting a renowned Jewish physician named Moses son of Raphael Abravanel to continue in his post as privy physician unless he became a Muslim. He had to dress as a Muslim and figuratively be clothed in the teaching of Islam and renamed Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi. He was transformed internally and externally. Only after cleansing himself of his former religion could he touch the sultan, examine his body to determine what ailed him, and restore his health. Subsequently, other Jewish palace physicians converted, so that where once Jews had outnumbered members of any other group in this position, after the conversion of Hayatizade there were more convert physicians than Jews.
The imperial capital also witnessed the conversion of other Muslims to the inner circle’s form of piety, which linked elite and commoner in the Kadizadeli pietistic movement. New forms of belief such as the prohibition of what were considered harmful innovations, the implementation of new laws and regulations such as the banning of alcohol, and the punishment of those who would not change their behavior served as manifestations of the piety that passed through the palace. Chapter 5 explores more deeply Mehmed IV’s newfound piety mediated by the Kadizadeli preacher Vani Mehmed Efendi and links the sultan’s coming of age with the abandonment of Topkapi Palace for the palace at Edirne and the composition of chronicles that emphasize his pious persona. A campaign against Sufis and the illicit behavior of Muslims quickly followed.
Following these conversions of self, inner circle, places, and people contiguous to the inner circle and those of the same religion were conversions of hundreds of Christians and Jews encountered by the pious within the domains of the empire, whose conversions signaled the sultan’s Islamic virtues. Chapter 6 describes how the sultan’s conversion of others led to converts bringing additional Christians and Jews to Islam. Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi became a Muslim rather than prove his prophetic pluck in the presence of the sultan, to whom the rabbi appeared as another antinomian, ecstatic dervish. Engaged in a crackdown on Sufis and Sufi practices, Mehmed IV could not tolerate the rabbis advocacy of conversion to millenarianism, which challenged the sultan’s mediating others’ change to his interpretation of the best means of fulfilling God’s will. Once Shabbatai Tzevi was converted by the sultan, he in turn became a convert maker, translating the phrase “Enjoin good and forbid wrong” into Hebrew and compelling his wife and many of his followers to change religion. The rabbi, who was instructed in the tenets of Islam by Vani Mehmed Efendi, was given a ceremonial gatekeeper position in the palace after conversion, serving as a daily, visible reminder that confirmed the superiority of the sultan’s beliefs.
Chapters 9 and 11 reexamine Mehmed IV’s devotion to hunting and the link between hunting and conversion, calling into question the critical interpretations of hunting advanced by later Ottoman and modern historians of his reign. These chapters demonstrate that Christian peasants who drove the game for the sultan when he held massive hunting parties, and others encountered by him on his frequent, large, and lengthy chases or on the military campaign trail, and those appearing before him and the grand vizier also converted. After their change of religion, converts engaged in ritual ceremonies affirming internal and external transformation, where they publicly proclaimed leaving the false religion and joining the true faith and affirmed the unity of God. Christian men were circumcized on the spot. Converts were re-dressed from head to toe and given Muslim names and purses of Ottoman coins (silver asper, akce) minted for the occasion, which had more symbolic than real value. Because hierarchies of dress were intended to distinguish members of different religions, changing the body by dressing it in new clothing was fundamental to transforming Christians and Jews into Muslims. This practice linked Mehmed IV to his prophetic namesake, who had given his cloak to a convert, and to a millennium of Muslim leaders while ensuring his control over the distribution of signs that marked society’s hierarchies.
The broadest circle of conversion reached deep into central Europe and the Mediterranean, accompanying the greatest extension of Ottoman boundaries. Chapters 7, 8, and 10 follow Mehmed IV out of Edirne into the battlefields, where he made his mark in the middle years of his reign after his impotent minority and before the defeat at Vienna. I discuss how the pious sultan and those closest to him, including his preacher, Vani Mehmed Efendi, are depicted as desiring the conquest and conversion of foreign territories and their inhabitants and places of worship and often being able to fulfill this wish. The preacher accompanied the sultan and grand vizier on military campaigns, brandishing Muhammad's black wool banner, which the Ottomans had used in imperial campaigns since Selim I conquered Egypt, and motivated by the example of the Arabian prophet, inciting the besieging troops in the trenches to fight on the path of God against infidels. He believed that the Ottomans had inherited the mantle of warfare from the Arabs in the struggle against the infidels, which ended in their conversion. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss how, accordingly, Mehmed IV began the well-known jihad for Candia (Iraklion), Crete (1666-69), which, along with conquests in central and eastern Europe (Uyvar/Nové Zamky and Yamk/Raab/Gydér in Hungary, Kamanica/KamenetsPodol’skiy in Poland, and Cehrin/Chyhyryn in Ukraine) several years later signified the greatest extent of Ottoman expansion. Chapter 10 explains how he also launched the siege of the Habsburg capital of Vienna (1683), where the defenders were offered the chance to convert to Islam and the besieging armies were depicted as being on a mission to propagate the word of God. The failed siege actually ended Ottoman conquest in Europe and marked the beginning of withdrawal. Chapters 10 and 11 trace Mehmed IV’s sudden reversal of fortune during and after the siege of Vienna, narrating his dethronement and death and revealing the sources of the negative image of the sultan advanced in subsequent historiography.
The wave of religiously inspired warfare resulted in the successful conversion of many Christians and much Christian sacred geography into sanctified Muslim space and the purification and rededication of Muslim sacred space previously lost to Christian armies such as at Bozca (Tenedos) Island. Mehmed IV’s efforts ensured that the Muslim call to prayer was chanted from church bell towers. The silencing of the pealing of bells demonstrated the truth of Islam, as it was the aural and visible sign of victory.
Along with being depicted during his reign as pious and God-fearing, a ruler who spread the faith within and without his domains, Mehmed IV was also described as a warrior for the faith against the infidels. Contrary to earlier periods, the terms “mujahid” and “jihad” were commonly used by authors during Mehmed IV’s reign interchangeably with “ghazi” and “ghaza” to designate warriors and warfare against Christian powers, whether the Habsburgs, Romanovs, or Venice. Mehmed IV was depicted as a ghazi, the one who “spreads a clamor to the East and West, a cry of horror and lament to all lands of the infidel and all peoples,” and vanquishes the enemy with prophetic zeal.’ Mehmed IV’s move to the former capital of Edirne, an “abode of glory, power, and victory,” is described in the context of a noble intent to personally wage perennial war against the infidels.* The sultan “incited all to ghaza and jihad.”° One writer narrates how Ottoman soldiers “exerted and endeavored to obtain the rewards of ghaza and jihad.”°
To the chronicle writers of Mehmed IV’s era, he was a warrior fighting ghaza and jihad against the infidel. The sultan’s official chronicler, Abdi Pasha, promotes the view that he was a throwback to an earlier era, for Mehmed IV acted to inculcate the position with greater symbolic and real power. He wished both to return to an age when sultans were mobile, active military leaders and warriors, bringing war to the heart of the Christian enemy, and to instill it with new meaning—breaking out of the cage in the palace of Istanbul and spending most of his reign in Edirne and Rumelia, the heartland of the empire, having contact with commoners, intervening in their lives, and, motivated by his religious zeal and working with his pious mother, grand vizier, and spiritual advisor, engaging in policies of religious patronage that Islamized people and places, promoting the image of a worthy, virile Islamic sovereign. Mehmed Halife served the sultan in one of the wards of the palace and wrote in the mid-16Gos, when Mehmed IV first established himself as a warrior king. In a section of his history entitled “The Praiseworthy Moral Qualities of Our Felicitous Sultan,” he claimed that Mehmed IV “acted in accordance with [Qur’an 22:78] ‘Wage jihad for the cause of God, with the devotion due to God,’ and followed the path of his great ancestors and illustrious forefathers, may God bless their souls, waging ghaza and jihad and proclaiming the true religion to unbelievers night and day.””? Anmed Dede, writing in Arabic toward the end of his reign, labels Mehmed IV “the mujahid, ghazi king, deliverer of conquest and ghazi.”®
This book offers a unique lens through which to view seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe. It is neither a comprehensive historical survey nor a biography, but a reinterpretation centered on recognizing the link between conversion and conquest in this period of history. Mehmed IV’s turn to piety, along with that of his mother, grand vizier, and royal preacher, converted him to a more rigorous and severe interpretation of Islam. This in turn compelled him to at least facilitate by means of group ceremonies and at times compel the conversion of others—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, following face-to-face encounters—to his path of Islam. Related to this conversion in both senses, a revival of faith for those already members and a change of religion for those not yet believers, Mehmed IV waged war throughout central and eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, reviving ghaza, and sent his military forces to conquer many citadels, hundreds of cities, and thousands of villages, leading campaigns in person as well. In this way, the sultan, enthroned while a child, became a brave warrior praised for his manliness. He also proved himself as sultan. While his mother handled ceremonial matters that gave his reign further dynastic and Islamic legitimacy and, more important, cover, Mehmed IV was free to move his court to Edirne, which would serve as his capital for two decades. There he appointed a court historian and even named the work. This spatial and symbolic move away from Istanbul and his mother confirmed the coming into being of the sultan as man and ruler. He was conscious of the momentousness of the relocation that would mark his reign and thereafter wanted a sultan-centered narrative to record what he experienced. In Edirne he became a good rider and mobile ghazi, leading jihad and the hunt, residing most often in a tent, rarely setting foot in Topkapi Palace or Istanbul. Contemporary writers linked the sultan’s hunting to waging war, pious behavior, and Islamic zeal. Conversion of self, others, and sacred space and war on the path of God referred to as both ghaza and jihad are intersecting themes that marked Mehmed IV’s reign.
Theorizing Religious Conversion: Connecting Conversion of Self, Others, and Sacred Space
Although this book is based on a detailed investigation of the reign of one Ottoman sultan, I also adopt an interpretive stance worth considering for the study of religious conversion in other times and places. I take an integrated approach to conversion, linking conversion of self, others, and space, and include the dimension of power and the context of war and conquest. This is one of the few works that examines the intricacies of religious change in its individual (personal) and social and political (public) aspects and places it in historical context. I argue that conversion is a decision or experience followed by a gradually unfolding, dynamic process through which an individual embarks on religious transformation.’ This can entail an intensification of belief and practice of one’s own religion, moving from one level of observation to another, or exchanging the beliefs and practices in which one was raised for those of another religious tradition. In both cases, a person becomes someone else because his or her internal mind-set and/or external actions are transformed. In the case of intensification, where one formally did not give other than cursory thought or attention to the theology of one’s faith or engage in or keep wholeheartedly to its requirements, one devotes one’s mind and body fully to understanding and embracing the religion. Whereas some scholars still posit an artificial distinction between “exterior” and “interior” conversion, I argue that conversion has an internal component entailing belief and an external component involving behavior, leading to the creation of a new self-identity and new way of life. In Sunni Islamic law, faith has three elements: internal conviction, verbal affirmation, and the performance of works; the first is the internal component of conversion, the latter two the external elements.”
The internal component includes a change in worldview, a turning toward a new axis or set of ideals that motivate converts to transform themselves and their environment. Converts reject or denounce their past and former beliefs and practices, or indifference in the case of revivalists, labeling them wrong when compared with a different future on the path of the new, conceived as being right.'' The convert accepts a new reference point for his or her identity, a new foundation of salvific power, and commits to a new moral authority.”
Whereas the internal component demands a change in consciousness, the external requires commitments to another salvific community, devotion to piety or the new religion, which entails changing the way the individual behaves and the adoption of a new social identity. The external sign of transformation is important for the individual, the religious community he or she abandons, and the one he or she joins. Conversion here is begun by rituals of rejection and bridge burning, which hinder return to the original way and allow the convert to demonstrate commitment to the new religiosity or religion, to transition into it, and to be incorporated by the members of the group he or she is joining. Converts change their daily private and public routine; learn another sacred tongue; dress differently; act and move according to a different choreography of ritual and prayer; consume certain food and drink and no longer consume others; surround themselves with a new group of people and separate from others, even family members, including spouses who do not follow the new piety or faith; and face the consequences of their decision, which may lead to newfound popularity with some members of society and a cutting of ties with others. Conversion leads to social mobility offered by a change in status and communal affiliation. The convert engages in rituals of deconstruction, which demonstrate a severing of former beliefs and behaviors, and in symbolic acts of reconstruction.
Part of demonstrating that one is a new person may entail public testimony praising the new piety or religion, promoting one’s commitment to it to prove oneself in the eyes of one’s new coreligionists, and condemning those left behind.'* Converts continually engage in rituals that symbolize the change, allow them to perform piety, embody the new religious identity, and play a role in society that satisfies expectations and consolidates their new place and involvement with the group.” Yet there are instances when a convert to another religion cannot or does not wish to completely reject or break away from former beliefs and practices, but instead continues to engage in some of them despite privately and publicly changing religion. There may be an adaptation or modification of the former and new ways of life, potentially encouraged by the converter or mediator as a temporary means of ensuring religious transformation."
Most scholars writing about religious conversion today have moved away from the school of thought associated with the eminent William James, based on an uncritical reading of converts’ narratives that emphasizes the (Protestant) individual’s psychological experience of conversion. Historical sources, especially Ottoman material, seldom provide insight into the converted, so the psychological approach developed first by James is limited in its utility. Instead of such an interiorist approach, which focuses on an individual in isolation, scholars emphasize the social and historical context and aspects of conversion, arguing that conversion is motivated by social relationships and interpersonal bonds. Arguing against James, they maintain that conversion, which entails internal and external transformation, whether revivalist or transition to another tradition, does not occur in a vacuum, is not merely the result of an individual’s studied reflection of his or her relation to the divine or the transformation of an individual living in solitude.” Nor does conversion concern only an autonomous quest for spiritual meaning, the isolated interior path of selfrealization, or a moment in a single individual’s private personal destiny.’* It is not only the life of the mind that matters, but also the life of the social being, for conversion is not only deeply private, but also deeply social.”
Avoiding the pitfalls of studies that focus on the social to the exclusion of the spiritual, I unite a study of the piety and religious conviction of converts with the social effects of their religious change. In so doing I advance scholarly discussions of the social aspects of conversion by focusing on motivations of the converter, insofar as these can be gleaned from their historical context, and concentric rings of conversion set into motion as the most powerful people in the dynasty and administration are convinced to change their religious outlook. Conversion is influenced by contextual situations and personal relations. An important element in the process of conversion is an encounter with an advocate, mediator, or external agent who exposes the individual to the new way of being and, through dynamic interplay and dialogic encounter with the convert, brings him or her to the advocated manner of piety or faith.” In Islamic societies, Sufis or magistrates frequently served as mediators in conversion.”' Here I focus on the mediating role of preachers and the sultan. Interaction with the mediator, especially when followed by the establishment of affective, interpersonal bonds and a relationship, leads to change and commitment by the convert.” The way the instigator communicates the message, whether through propaganda, proselytization, teachings, or the examples of pious individuals, brings others to piety or a new religion.*? Conversion can have its rewards when the converter offers the convert gifts of money and other financial and social incentives such as tax breaks, pardon for crimes, and clothing.™ The giving of clothes, especially robes of honor, signals both a change in social status of the convert and his or her introduction into an ongoing relationship with the agent of conversion: “The hand of the giver left its ‘essence’ on the robe.”» The object serves to embody the recognition of the conversion, serving as a reminder of the transformation. Converts display the effect of the adoption of a new moral system on the body, such as when Muhammad offered his mantle to his former opponent, Ka‘b ibn Zuhayr, who recorded the occasion in his poem, the “Mantle Ode,” symbolizing the acceptance of the convert into the community.”
Intellectual or religious, political, and social contexts and constraints, situated within events that are not always of the convert’s choosing, lead to potentially radical social results and ramifications, whether the convert is the ruler, whose conversion compels him to launch military conquests, or his subject. Whether involving a single person or the masses, religious change can be one of the most unsettling and destabilizing political events in the life of a society, affecting members of the pietistic movement and those who come into contact with them, not to mention the religion abandoned and the one joined.”
Focusing on the converter, I argue that having undergone an intensification of faith or changing to another religion, converts tend to articulate their enthusiasm for the religion in private practices and public actions. If they are revivalists, they may attempt to bring members of the original faith to their new understanding of its significance for everyday life, and then convince members of other religions to join the newly discovered old religion. Converts to piety are especially zealous in compelling through their words and actions less observant members of their own religion to become awakened and heed the religion’s tenets, which they have reformed, devoting themselves to what they consider a purified version of the faith.” After all, “religious revivals grow by the conversion of new adherents.”” When a ruler’s aims and those of pietists converge, it establishes the most conducive environment for the conversion of members of the sovereign’s religion and his subjects committed to other religions. As in Christendom, where “the missionary and the warrior traveled and worked together in the process of extending both Christ’s kingdom and that of the king,” pacifying foes and expanding the kingdom, the proselytizer in Islamic societies received “protection, endowments (often on a very grand scale) ... the status that came with association with a king, the infectious example of a royal conversion,” and “access to royal powers of coercion,” all of which would spread the religion in areas of recent conquest and intensify it among subjects at home.” Perhaps adopting the methods, strategies, style, techniques, and mode of encounter of the individual that first compelled him or her to change religion, the convert serves as a mediator in converting outsiders. This confirms the validity of his or her newly chosen path, for there is nothing more self-validating than having others undergo the same transformation he or she experiences and in having associates in the new lifestyle.
The conversion of peoples is incomplete without the conversion of space, place, and the landscape.*! Few scholars, however, have linked conversion of self and others to a major impact on the built environment, or the spatial dimensions of religious change. If the ruler (usually male) of a society converts, whether to piety or a different religion altogether, he converts holy spaces of other religions to his own, including the most grand and significant structures located in the capital and major cities of his state, or constructs new edifices celebrating and announcing his personal decision. Female members of the royal family and male members of his retinue may do likewise. When the masses change religion, this occurs on a much wider scale, as all those new believers and those compelling their conversion demand spaces where their newfound faith can be articulated and demonstrated. Either way, we witness the ultimate transformation of sacred space as cityscapes reflect the revival movement or demographic change, and the sacred geography of the countryside is likewise transformed. Throughout lands conquered, colonized, and ruled by Muslims, the conversion of sacred space and the establishment of Muslim institutions led to the conversion of the population, just as the conversion of the population led to the transformation of holy sites.>* Over time, churches, synagogues, and fire temples were destroyed or appropriated and converted into regular and congregational mosques, shrines, and Sufi complexes to serve the needs of and accommodate a population undergoing a radical change in religious demography.”
The layered history of transformed buildings and glorious new masterpieces in turn become tools of proselytization, “theaters of conversion” that set the stage for religious change.** The changed landscapes are readable to all passersby as didactic instruments promoting conversion and communicating its reward: divine favor. When a religious sanctuary or house of worship of one religion is modified to conform to the new religion of the convert, the preserving of the sanctity yet adaptive use of the same sacred space by the victorious religion sends a message to those who formerly worshipped there: the sanctification of the same site means holy space serves another belief system. If those who venerate the familiar spot and have memories of praying there want to continue revering older sacralities, they ostensibly have to do so in another form. To facilitate conversion of others, the converters of a place may use “expedient selection,” choosing to emphasize, accommodate, and even repackage those elements of belief and practices of their religion most resembling those of the possessors of the former house of worship who offered rituals there.*® Visitors may engage in similar rituals in the same place, but the converters’ aim is for their hearts to eventually be changed.* This allows those whose buildings were taken over to comprehend the new religion within the framework of their own religion. The converters may expect some former accretions to continue for a while, believing that after old locales and rituals are given new meaning the new practices will eventually lead to the new beliefs wiping away the old. Syncretism, the reconciling or fusing of diverse beliefs and practices, is not an exchange between equals. It is usually a temporary phenomenon, for in the end the religion with the most power behind it tends to subsume the other and completely take over the sacred space.” To not claim already sanctioned sites for the conquering religion is to allow echoes of the previous religion to remain unmarked, its power unappropriated.*
Conversion has intellectual and social contexts, and the transformation of holy space by conquerors, rulers, and pietists causes us to also pay attention to the fact that it does not occur in a vacuum free of political framework or power relations. Religious conversion efforts come in waves that are historically contingent. Peaks of such movements arise out of specific historical circumstances conditioned by economic, political, and social factors seen by people who convert as a period of crisis that serves as the catalyst of religious change.*? Each wave has its own characteristics, whether conversion to Islam in seventeenthcentury Ottoman Europe, or conversion to Christianity in colonial Africa and Latin America. Conversion takes place in the context of political events, including the breaking down of societies in the wake of foreign invasion, conquest, and occupation.” The aims of the converters may be considered to form their politics of conversion. When conquerors obtain power over the political, they also acquire the power to frame meaning, including values, ways of being and perceiving the universe, and the activities of the everyday, such as architecture, dress, social structure, and language.’
Language is crucial, because conversion can be synonymous with translation. Proselytizers translate the doctrine of their religion into the language of those they are attempting to convert, finding parallels, equivalences, and antecedents in their mode of expression and belief system while the convert translates and assimilates ideas into his or her own language and idiom.” The convert to Islam may speak Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, for the first time and adopt an Arabic name harkening back to the beginnings of the Muslim era. Converts declared that they left the false religion and entered the true religion. This signifies the communal basis of religious identity and the religious base of communal identity.” Entering the religion is equivalent to joining the community. Conquest transforms the religious geography, as temporal power creates a new environment that allows previously unimaginable religious possibilities to be realized.** Institutions of the conquering religion replace those of the defeated religion, and a new political authority permits the colonization of the territory by coreligionists.* At the same time, conquest, translation strategies, and capturing of sacred spaces compel indigenous accommodation to or transformation and subversion of the new forms of belief and practice.*®
Historiography: Mehmed IV, Conquest, and Conversion in Ottoman History
While speaking to scholarship on religious conversion, this book also intervenes in a number of historiographical debates concerning Ottoman history. I offer a reinterpretation of the history of the second half of the seventeenth century in Ottoman Europe, a relatively understudied although crucial period, entering fundamental debates concerning the reputation of Mehmed IV, the understanding and implementation of ghaza and jihad, and religious conversion. This book is distinct in three main ways. First, it presents Mehmed IV in a new light. For generations of modern scholars, the chaotic state of affairs at the beginning and end of Mehmed IV’s reign, the former the period of his minority between 1648 and 1656, the latter the debacle between the failed siege of Vienna in 1683 and Mehmed IV’s dethronement in 1687, have constituted all that was deemed worthy of knowing about this sultan’s epoch. In contrast to contemporary accounts about Mehmed IV, many of which have not been published or utilized by modern scholars, later chronicles have depicted him as weak, ineffectual, and a spendthrift. This sultan has been either overlooked or treated harshly by moderns, who, when they have written about his reign, have been overly critical or dismissive, as they mainly rely on the published eighteenth-century chronicles of Naima and Silahdar, arguing, for example, that “although he reigned in a very important period of Ottoman history, he was not a very important figure.”*” Because Mehmed IV apparently had neither agency nor significance, there has not been a single study in any language devoted to him for thirty years. Modern scholars who have written about Mehmed IV display disapproval of religious piety and an inability to take religious faith seriously, neither accepting that religious zeal could be anything other than a destructive force intimately tied to ignorance, nor even allowing that the sultan’s religious feelings could have been sincere. The failure of the siege of Vienna turned Mehmed IV and the Kadizadeli movement into a historical dead end, another reason he is denigrated and little studied. Rescuing that dead end is an important historical task, for it is important to understand not only what happened in the past, but what might have been. Readers familiar with Mehmed IV’s poor reputation as a hapless fool, manipulated by the ignorant zealots around him, who wasted his reign hunting and satisfying his pleasures in his harem while the empire crumbled, will be surprised to meet the pious Mehmed IV who here rides to war converting Christians and churches in his wake. This book explains this shift in historical memory by focusing on his achievements and putting them in the context of what was considered to be important to rulers at the time.
The Mehmed IV described in this book also stands in contrast to his depiction in the secondary literature, which rarely extends analysis of changes in the institution of the sultanate to the second half of the seventeenth century.” Studies do not extend beyond the point at which Mehmed IV is still a minor, or skip over the second half of the seventeenth century altogether.” It is unfortunate that scholars have been so reluctant to reconsider conventional wisdom, since, contrary to most other sultans after Mehmed III (reigned 1595-1603), Mehmed IV’s life is evidence that sultans could still matter and not be hidden in the palace like a pearl in an oyster, aloof, secluded, and sublime, hermetically sealed from the world, confined and condemned to a wilted life in the harem.
The second way this study is different lies in how it enters the longestrunning debate among scholars of Ottoman history through its analysis of ghaza and jihad. Until recently, the prevailing argument concerning ghaza was that it was an ideology of “holy war” by which Ottoman sultans “both fostered and were themselves impelled by the ghazi urge to conquer the infidel lands for Islam,” since “the Holy War or ghaza was the foundation stone of the Ottoman state.”*' According to this view, still emphasized in Turkish historiography, the principal factor and dominant idea, the very reason and will to exist of the early Ottoman enterprise and cause of its success was struggle against Christians.” More recently, scholars have cast doubt on this thesis, arguing that the terms “ghaza” and “ghazi” were deployed merely as literary devices, serving to legitimate early Ottoman expansion against Muslim as well as Christian enemies, and that the term “ghaza’” or “jihad” was an ideological gloss given to the earlier term for raid and plundering (akin) deployed before the Turks became Muslims.* The most influential recent history of the rise of the Ottomans argues that ghaza consisted of predatory raids against the ever-shifting current enemy, fighting not for a set of beliefs, but for one’s own side in military campaigns undertaken for honor and booty, and that individuals frequently changed sides and identities, establishing alliances, falling in love, marrying, and converting. Another study goes so far in zealously divorcing the material and spiritual realms that it declines to take seriously the religious motivation for ghaza. It expunges it of any religious meaning and implies that zeal for plunder and zeal for religiously motivated war are two opposite and distinguishable motivations.» This approach fails to recognize that ghaza emphasizes the plundering of the infidel enemy’s land and wealth. It is intimately tied to religion since it can only be undertaken against those labeled infidels; warring against the infidel enemy, seen as an incumbent duty whether labeled ghaza or jihad, can occur only in conditions defined by the religion.**
In this study I argue that the second half of the seventeenth century, a period that has not been considered in the debate because scholars have been most concerned with the relation between ghaza and the achievements of the early Ottomans, was an era in which the terms “ghaza” and “ghazi” were put to considerable use promoting the pious image of the sultan. Ottoman authors depicted Mehmed IV as a ghazi waging ghaza in the sense of ghaza that Paul Wittek claimed for the early Ottomans: as the sword of God purifying the earth of the filth of polytheism, a champion of Islam devoted to the struggle with Christians.°’ The terms “jihad” and “mujahid,” the one who engages in jihad, were also commonly used to designate the soldiers who battled them for spiritual and material rewards. Jihad was understood as a combination of moral self-discipline and enjoining good and forbidding evil within the community, and public action to reassert Islam in society, a reform movement targeting Muslims as well as war against the infidel abroad.
The discussion of ghaza and jihad is relevant to explaining the ways this study also contributes to the history of conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire, the third way this book departs from previous historiography. It is important to recognize that modes of conversion changed, and these changes were historically significant. Previous scholars have discussed how the Ottomans were able to facilitate the near total conversion of Anatolia and urban southeastern Europe by rising to power through conquest and jihad, establishing a unified Islamic state with Muslim institutions, including dervish lodges, encouraging Sufis to preach and propagate Islam to Turkish nomads, Christians, and Jews, and recruiting Christian boys to serve the sultan.** Dervishes acted as an avant-garde to colonize and proselytize, and institutions and incorporation followed the trailblazing path of Sufis uncontrolled by political power.*® Sufis who had a close relationship with the sultan played a role in conversion, including the Halveti dervishes, who boasted of sultans among their ranks; the Mevlevi dervishes, who girded the Ottoman sultans with a sword as part of their enthronement ceremonies at the tomb of Muhammad’s flag-bearer Abu Ayyub al-Ansari in Istanbul; and the Bektashis, named after thirteenth-century Sufi Hajji Bektash, who served as the patron saint of the elite infantry corps of converted Christian recruits known as the Janissaries, who were members of the order.® From the sixteenth century a Bektashi was assigned to the corps as spiritual guide. The Bektashi-Janissary link points to how, along with promoting Sufi proselytization, sultans also based their administration and military on the continuous recruitment, conversion, and training of Christians.“ Until the end of the seventeenth century, the dynasty used the devshirme, the levy of Christian boys who were converted and trained to be the administrative and military elite. According to the Ottoman historian Sa‘deddin, by the end of the sixteenth century two hundred thousand Christians had become Muslim by this process. Ottoman expansion, the proselytization of Sufis, and the creation of the Ottoman elite led to the conversion of the lived environment from central Europe to Yemen. One of the first acts of the Ottomans upon conquering Christian cities was to convert cathedral churches into Friday mosques in the captured citadels and urban areas. The city that underwent the greatest transformation of its sacred geography was the former Byzantine capital of Constantinople, which was remade to suit an Islamic dynasty, the process launched by the conversion of Hagia Sophia, the religious and political center of Orthodox Christianity, into the main royal mosque of the city, and the construction of many sultanic and grand vizieral mosque complexes.“ Ottomans linked the construction of mosques, replete with mementos of victory that served as triumphant memorials within the imperial domains, to victorious ghaza and jihad from Bulgaria to Baghdad.® In celebration of successes abroad, sultans also ordered churches in the imperial capital to be converted into mosques.” The transformation of sacred spaces continued to be an important element in the process of conversion.
In contrast to the first three centuries of Ottoman rule, when propagation of Islam by dervishes and the recruitment of servants of the sultan, facilitated by war and conquest, were probably equally significant forces of religious change, the seventeenth century, this book argues, was a turning point in the history of conversion in the Ottoman Empire. Gone are encouragement of Sufi proselytization, no longer promoted by the sultan and the leading men and women of the dynasty, and the devshirme, which was phased out. While the abandonment of the devshirme was the outcome of demographic change, since the Muslim population had greatly expanded to become the majority and there was no longer a need to rely on converted Christians to fuel the empire’s expansion, turning away from affiliating with and supporting Sufi groups who had once been an essential element in the conversion of the population of Anatolia and southeastern Europe was directly related to the conversion to reformist pietymindedness by the sultan and his court, which took an active role in Islamizing people and places in Istanbul and elsewhere in Ottoman Europe.
Although conversion has come under renewed scrutiny by scholars able to read Ottoman archival sources, the most recent published studies present only half of the picture because they do not utilize literary sources such as chronicles, do not contextualize their studies within imperial politics or developments in Islam, and, most surprisingly, do not engage the scholarly literature on religious conversion.” Offering detailed accounts of archival documentation of conversion in Bursa, Trabzon, and southeastern Europe, their largely ahistorical accounts attempt to provide the reader with insights into the mentality, personality, psychology, mind-set, attitude, and motivation of converts and not on those who converted them.® In studying the process of conversion, it is important to juxtapose different types of historical record because none gives a complete picture. The problem with earlier arguments is that they rely too much on archival sources, which are so formulaic as to say nothing that a critical historian could claim speak to the actual motivations of the convert. The only way to build on previous scholarship and understand such archival sources as petitions to the sultan is to put them in the context of other documentation, especially chronicles.
What makes this book different is that it does not seek to answer why Christians and Jews became Muslim, which is an unproductive question based on the source material. Modern studies of conversion have noted that converts may not be able to pinpoint the reasons or know why they converted, change their explanations over time, or narrate their religious transformation according to a set prototype. Facing the extant documentary record, which views conversion from the standpoint of the converters, a historian can best hope to accomplish an understanding of the worldview of Islamic rulers who were active agents in the conversion of Christians and Jews. The aim is to bring the sultan back into the process, based on the most significant Ottoman chronicles written during the reign of Mehmed IV and after, as well as legal sources, archival and other literary sources generated at the sultan’s court, epigraphic and visual sources.” This material provides the historian insight into how elite men and women at that time shaped, formed, and articulated their understanding of the moment in which they lived and the cultural value of conversion in that era.
The unraveling of Mehmed IV’s legacy began at the end of his reign and continued after his death precisely because he was so successful earlier on. His achievements in expanding the empire, converting people and places to Islam, and reestablishing the image of the active ruler ended in catastrophe. But he also left a standard for sultanic behavior that subsequent sultans and the advisors and chronicle writers who tried to contain it wanted to forget. The last thing the bureaucracy and grand viziers wanted was an activist sultan. Although Mehmed IV expanded the empire, he also ruled during the beginning of its territorial decline, which modern historians imbued with nationalism have not been able to avoid highlighting. In this book I analyze what came before the siege of Vienna and ultimately led to it. Mehmed IV’s participation in a pietistic Islamic reform movement—with its concomitant thrust toward conversion of Muslims, Christians, and Jews that led to the Ottoman Empire’s greatest expansion—has to be evaluated in terms of its impact on what later became divided into European and Ottoman history. In particular, I put that siege in a new light. This perspective also reminds us that the Ottoman Empire was very much a European Islamic empire, controlling up to one-third of what is today considered Europe, and that not only interaction but intricate interrelations between the Ottoman Empire and central and eastern Europe—and among Muslims, Christians, and Jews—were long term and had many dimensions.” Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was “a full and active member” of the European states; by the end of Mehmed IV’s reign in the seventeenth century, it “was as integrated into Europe as it ever would be.””’ Western European denigration of the empire—and by extension its head, the sultan—at the end of the nineteenth century as “the sick man of Europe” conceals a background of Ottoman European history when the empire and sultan were anything but.
I have traveled a long path from my original archival research. Many others are sharing that journey now. Today researchers no longer have the thrill of touching the original Istanbul Shariah court records in the intimate and dusty reading room where they are kept, the fear of spilling tea on historical documents, or the gentle but not so subtle proselytization efforts of the director, who has since retired. Saved from the proselytization efforts of the gentle memorizer of the Qur’an, researchers today may be exposed to the earnest efforts of university-age reward seekers, for all of the court records have been microfilmed and sent to the new Islamic Research Centre located on the Asian side of the city in a nondescript suburb. Although this effort has ensured the survival of the records (and that tea will no longer be spilled by nervous PhD candidates on their yellowed pages), it also guarantees that today’s researcher, sitting at a microfilm reader in an air-conditioned library and staring at a screen, viewing texts whose important writing in the margins has been cut off in the copying process and whose original gold or red ink is illegible, will not have access to the insights I gained starting a decade ago, when the subject of my research and the subject of my life intersected. I did not become the Muslim the head of the archive would have desired. But in the end his earnest proselytizing efforts compelled me to write a book explaining the conversion to piety of Muslims and the circumstances that motivated them to convert Christians and Jews and their churches and synagogues in seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe.
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