Medieval Islam: origins (sticky)

Islam and the Christian West: in a chronic face-off since 600 AD, and yet we in the West know so little about Islam and its adherents. When I worked on this topic in the past, it became clear to me that many of our misunderstandings come from knowing little of the history. What would it look like, trying to understand America without knowing England’s history? What about comprehending Jesus without knowing anything of either Jews or the Roman Empire? That’s the position we’re in, and usually we don’t even know it.

This time, I want to go through the story of Islam’s emergence in the world by starting before Islam, in Arabia. I want to lay out how Arabian culture shaped Muslim practice, in both sameness/continuation and difference/rejection. I want to spend some time on what we know of the life of Muhammad, and even more importantly, how we know what we know—-and how we don’t always know which things those are. What are the records like? How should they be judged? What are differences between the way Muslims tell the story and the way Western scholars do?

I won’t be writing in a way to persuade anyone to convert to Islam, but I won’t be writing in a way to condemn everything in it, either. It won’t be my business to mark history up with merits and demerits, generally. I think we are all better off when we know more about the same facts, regardless of how we feel about them. A historically neutral tone tells you what the evidence shows and what the records say, including what people say about themselves. When there’s doubt, you can judge for yourself.

So if you want to follow this series through my blog, START HERE. The series will follow chronologically after. What you see on this page, below the sticky note, could be much farther along in the series.

If you want to use the categories search feature to find a section of the story, the life of Muhammad is classified as Islam History A. From the moment after his death through the fall of the Umayyads is Islam History B. The rise of the Abbasids at the expense of the Umayyads begins Islam History C. The Crusades begin at Islam History D. The invasion of the Mongols is at Islam History E. The Ottoman Empire period begins at Islam History F.

The sources I am primarily using for the origins story are:

Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, by Robert Hoyland.

Arabs: A 3000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith.

Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Meraj Mohiuddin and Sherman Jackson.

Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings.

After the Prophet, by Lesley Hazelton.

The Heirs of Muhammad, by Barnaby Rogerson

Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy

The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam, by Peter Crawford.

The Lives of the Twelve: A Look at the Social and Political Lives of the Twelve Infallible Imams. Shaykh Mahdi Pishvai, translated by Sayyid Ali Musawi.

A Historical Research on the Lives of the Twelve Shi’a Imams. Mahdi Mahgrebi

I have read many other books and articles in the past writing stretches, and I frequently check facts and opinions on internet sources, many of which are linked in the essays. Maybe some day I’ll try to collect them in a list. For now, just enjoy reading the essays.

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The Map of Piri Reis, 1513 and 1929

In 1929, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and the new nation of Turkey was going through painful rapid social changes under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Most importantly, they were changing their writing system from Arabic script to Latin. They were also removing Muslim clergy from positions of power and forcing men to shave beards and women to take off veils. And in the middle of all this, the Topkapı Palace was preparing to become a public museum.

In a corner of its library, they found some rolls of parchment and crumbling old books. One of the rolls of parchment turned out to be a sensation: it was a map signed by Piri Reis, a famous Muslim navigator. The map was dated 1513 and Piri’s notes claimed that he had consulted many even older maps. It had been given to Sultan Selim in 1517, probably not long after the mapmaker’s uncle Kemal Reis had defeated Venice in major sea battles.

The map’s parchment leather was the skin of a gazelle, suggesting it had been made in one of the ports of North Africa. In 1517, it may have been 90 cm by 65 cm, at its largest (modern) estimate. By 1929, only about one-third of the map remained, but this included the legend and notes by Piri Reis himself.

He used colored ink to make compass roses and the “windrose lines” that fan out from the compass in a classic portolan map. This map was developed for ship navigation; it showed coastal shapes very accurately, but sometimes its proportions or other measurements were off by modern standards. Still, the portolan map was the first really accurate, useful kind of map, from which our modern projections developed.

The map shows the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America, with the Atlantic and Caribbean Islands. It’s really beautifully done, too, with little paintings of tall-masted ships and sketches of native animals on the land. The parts that are filled in with accuracy and confidence look quite a lot like a modern map, for example, the coast of Brazil is pretty good. At the margins of knowledge, of course, the coast line goes wonky, which has led some people to speculate that aliens helped the ancients map Antarctica and Piri Reis got to see the last remaining copy. It’s more likely that nobody was sure what the remotest coast of South America was actually like; it was easy then to mistake a cape for a peninsula, if you didn’t go beyond it.

What drew the most attention when the map was identified in 1929 was that Reis’s notes claim that he used at least 20 earlier, older maps. He bought maps from the Portuguese showing the Indian Ocean and South America, and of course he used Arabic and Greek maps dating back to the Hellenic period. His most sensational claim was that he used a map from Qulunbu, that is, Columbus. It’s the kind of detail that we might consider a forgery if there weren’t so many other reasons to consider the map authentic.

The discovery set off a search in the Palace and other buildings to see if a map by Christopher Columbus had made its way to Turkey. So far, nothing has been found. It’s more likely that Piri consulted the map in North Africa, used it for some details, but never had it in his possession for long.

In some ways, the map sums up the whole panorama of history that I’ve been writing about: from Mohammed’s successors who set out to conquer the known world, to a Turkish or Moorish sea captain who could consult maps in four or five languages and create a map that’s almost good enough to use today, through its preservation in a Muslim palace in the former Christian capital to its discovery by a German philologist after the Allies had defeated both Germany and the Ottomans in one big final showdown, ending the Muslim empire. And at the end of it all, there’s this fabulous gazelle skin with graceful ships skimming across its leather, heading to the New World with Arabic notes.

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Gunpowder Empires, 1501-1524

We’ve traced the messy patchwork of changing power alliances in the sweep of Asian land between Turkey and China. In 1500, the patchwork was as shifting as ever, although the Ottoman piece grew larger and larger. On its eastern border, the “White Sheep” (Ak Koyunlu) Turcoman alliance ruled a large swathe (including Baghdad), to the Persian border. They were a network of clan chiefs and war leaders, rather than a supreme leader. In Persia, there were regional dynasties like the Shirvanshah in Baku, and a mix of Sunni and Shi’ite tribes with shifting confederations. All this was about to change.

Ismail, the son of Sheikh Haydar, hereditary Grand Master of the Safaviya Sufi Order, was descended also from every ruling family in the region. His mother was the daughter of the White Sheep confederation leader, while her mother was descended from the Byzantine and Georgian royals. Orphaned at age 7, Ismail was raised by scholars in a rural county by the Caspian Sea, speaking Azeri Turkish and Persian.

The region of eastern Turkey, northern Persia, and Azerbaijan had a religious and military movement called the Kizilbash; the name meant “red head” and referred to a 12-gored red turban they wore—-12, to honor the Imams of the Twelver Shi’ite system. It seems to have included both Azeri Turkish and Persian tribes who were united by their Safaviya blend of Sufi mysticism and loyalty to Ali and Hussein, the first Imams driven out by the Sunni Caliphs. The Kizilbash were rejected by other Twelvers as too extreme, since they believed their ruler—the Murshid—was divine, and they initiated jihads against local Christians.

In the summer of 1500, Ismail was 12, and it was time to put him forward as the new Murshid in Erzincan, eastern Turkey. The Kizilbash tribes came to support him. The first military target was the Shirvanshah, who ruled in Baku. That army was defeated, although they allowed him to rule as a vassal. Ismail’s new realm was large enough to be a challenge to the White Sheep of eastern Turkey and western Iran, so next the White Sheep army crossed the Aras River to put down the 13 year old king. In a pitched battle, the Kizilbash forces won—of course! since the Murshid was invincible. Ismail soon added some minor kingdoms in Georgia to his territory. In 1501, he was proclaimed the Shah of Azerbaijan.

As Shah of Azerbaijan, Ismail proclaimed the Safavid Sufi Twelver faith as the official and mandatory religion of his realm. He dissolved Sunni organizations and ordered anyone unwilling to convert to Safavid Shi’ism to be executed. In 1502, he defeated the main army of the White Sheep and took over their territory, proclaiming himself Shah of Iran. Over the next eight years, he took city after city, until he had united all of Iran. In every new territory, he enforced Savavid Twelver Shi’ism with executions.

In 1507, 19 year old Ismail started replacing Kizilbash ministers with Iranian (Persian, not Turkish) ones. He felt the Kizilbash who had installed him were too powerful. Now that Iran was entirely Safavid Shi’ite, the Kizilbash were not special. Their religious identity became that of the whole nation. Ismail made no exceptions: when he conquered the territory of always-Sunni Baghdad, he smashed the tombs of the Abbasid Caliphs and some Sunni Imams. By 1510, he ruled Armenia, Iraq, Iran, eastern Turkey, parts of Georgia, Kurdistan, and the Uzbek area of Samarkand. He must have permitted historical Christians to retain their religion as dhimmis paying extra tax, while he enforced Safavid Twelver Shi’ism on Muslims.

In 1511, a pro-Safavid uprising among Ottoman subjects in eastern Turkey led the Ottoman Sultan Selim, son of Bayezid II, to move against Ismail. In 1514, the Ottoman and Safavid forces fought the first battle of what became a 40-year power struggle over eastern Turkey and Mesopotamia.

Gunpowder was the nuclear warhead of the 15th century; those who could afford to buy and train artillery squads tended to win wars. The Ottoman Empire could afford it, and they were probably leading the arms race at that time. The Janissaries had switched from archery to artillery around 1440, so they had now been gun handlers for many generations.  They had an array of gun sizes, from the huge bombards used against Constantinople to the most up-to-date sidearms. They are known today as the first Gunpowder Empire.

Ismail’s forces were doing well against others who did not have gunpowder, but in the Battle of Çaldiran, they lost badly to the gun-firing Ottomans. The Persian horses were not trained to hear gunshots, so they panicked badly, contributing to the loss. Ismail was wounded, and his wives were captured. The Safavid Shi’ites were shocked to see their Murshid actually lose a battle, and probably Ismail himself was shocked and demoralized, having been raised to see his victory as inevitable. Sultan Selim entered Tabriz, Ismail’s capital, in triumph. He could have smashed and ended the Savavid project, but he received word of an uprising in Ottoman lands, so he retreated as quickly as possible.

Ismail reigned through Viziers for another ten years, but he lost his personal authority and seems to have become a drunk. When he died, though, his Safavid state was still strong enough that his son, Tahmasp, became Shah. Before he died, Ismail had begun investing in gunpowder. When Tahmasp took over, there was a musket corp numbering perhaps as many as 20,000. Iran became the second Gunpowder Empire, using its artillery effectively against the more primitive Uzbeks on their eastern border. Their growing gun strength stopped the Ottoman Empire from taking back more territory than they might have. In 1555, the two Gunpowder Empires signed a treaty defining a border.

The Safavids helped the new Mughal Dynasty to regain power in Delhi, India. They were descendants of Tamerlane, so they had some cultural affinity with the Turcomens of Iran. With Iran’s help, they became the third regional Gunpowder Empire, using military technology to intimidate and conquer the people around them who were still using swords and bows. And with this turn toward the modern, the story of Islam in Persia comes to rest.

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The End of Mamluk Rule in Egypt, 1492-1517

1492 was a very bad year in Egypt. It was a particularly bad plague visitation year, in a place with a large aging elite class. The only thing worse than thousands of geezers who still control everything and have all the money piled up is having most of them die within a few months, causing chaos. 200,000 people died in Cairo, and the survivors heard rumors of evil Jinns and visions of the Prophet, both portending disaster and destruction. There were food riots and the Mamluk king, who was about 80, was badly injured in a fall from a horse.

The Mamluk system had been falling apart in the last few decades, which is why they were so dependent on veterans for leadership and even active military duty. Economic hardship had made it more difficult for them to defend their northern territories. They barely held onto Aleppo and Damascus against the Ottomans, but the effort left the treasury drained. The Ottomans now held the lands farther north where Mamluk slaves had been purchased, so in addition to running short on money, they also ran short on slave supply (no doubt driving up the prices). The descendants of Mamluks had always been barred from becoming Mamluks themselves, but they lived in Cairo off their grandparents’ trust funds. There was probably more wealth among individuals than in the treasury. The Mamluks ran so short on soldier recruits that they actually did form some units of Mamluk descendants, but just as they’d predicted, it wasn’t the same.

The gunpowder arms race was another huge issue for them. Mamluk training had traditionally emphasized archery, which took years to learn. At this point in small arms development, bows were actually more effective than arquebuses and early muskets. They didn’t create clouds of smoke, they could be fired more rapidly (and farther), and they probably had much better aim. But it was the large artillery that traditional weapons couldn’t compete with, as we saw in the fall of Constantinople. Field guns light enough to be portable, but heavy enough to be lethal, were impossible to fight back with arrows and swords. A few of them wouldn’t be enough, since they had to be cooled down between shots, but they were very expensive.

There were two ways to obtain large artillery: make it or buy it. Making it meant getting enough bronze or iron, in addition to all the components of gunpowder. Some of these things could not be obtained within Egypt or its remaining territories, so they had to buy even the materials from rivals and enemies. It’s possible, too, that Muslim countries were at first disadvantaged in casting cannon because they had never learned to cast bells, as Christians had done. Early Mamluk do-it-yourself experiments exploded in all the wrongs ways, so for a while they just had to buy imported guns—probably from sellers who didn’t want them to get the best stuff (just as it is today).

The Ottomans had begun to learn these things about two generations earlier, since it was the only way to keep up with the European armies that were pioneering such inventions. Also, the Ottomans were in the stage of vigorous expansion, as the Mamluks had been once. They could afford anything, as they kept conquering more territory. They had a solid tax base and an expanding supply of replacement soldiers. So their armies typically numbered close to 100,000 with large units of field artillery, and even after a crushing defeat, they could quickly replace 10,000 or 20,000 soldiers. By contrast, the Mamluks near the end were doing really well to come up with a few thousand.

The old Sultan was dying, and the jousting to replace him had begun, when Vasco da Gama invaded the Indian Ocean. If it was any empire’s responsibility to fight him away from the ports of East Africa, it was Egypt’s. When the “new Sultan roulette” had finally stopped at an aging mediocrity named al-Ghawri, the Portuguese were harder to dislodge. The Mamluks fortified Jedda and began fighting to regain their ports south of the Horn of Africa. Interestingly, the Ottoman Sultan helped; he sent men and materials for the Jihad. Hindsight makes this much less surprising; whoever “helps” also has men on the ground when the tide turns, and makes the takeover power transition much easier.

Last week we were talking about whether the Portuguese end-run around Africa really made a difference to the vast Muslim empires. Here’s a few lines out of The Knights of Islam: Wars of the Mamluks by James Waterson. He’s quoting Ibn Ayas, a chronicler of the time:

“The prefect of Jeddah collected from the Indian merchants a tenth of their income, an act discouraging them from entering the port at all—which thus fell idle. Their goods became scarce in Egypt, and the town was deserted. Similarly, the ports of Alexandria and Damietta were abandoned because Frankish merchants ceased entering them. European merchandise also disappeared.”

In addition to the Portuguese sea route, Venice had settled a truce with the Ottomans and returned to trading through Constantinople, so merchants could take a northern Silk Road route. Egypt suffered most as the Red Sea passage became irrelevant.

Meanwhile, just as the Ottomans and Mamluks had settled a truce in the region of Syria, where the Mamluks still held onto a few cities, new pressures came from the boy Shah of Iran. In the years before the Ottomans beat him so badly at Chaldiran, the newly energized Shi’ite Turkish tribesmen were raiding those cities. Then the Mamluk Sultan learned that the boy Shah was sending messages to the kings of Europe, seeking alliances against the Ottomans—and the Mamluks. The Shi’ite Shah wiped out the last Khan of the Crimean Tatars and, Waterson says, he even sent the Khan’s skull as a drinking vessel to Egypt for a “what about an alliance?” gift. The new Iranian kingdom was pretty flexible at that point, ready to ally with anyone who could contribute to its growth or fight anyone who couldn’t.

Egypt’s last Mamluk years, 1511 through 1516, were continually more miserable. The shrinking fighting corps was hardly paid and hardly fed. Any money went into the gunpowder arms race, and the other Mamluks resented that. They kept having near-uprisings and riots. Nobody knew if the army would follow the Sultan into battle—the aging Mamluks had found it harder and harder to leave Cairo, for decades now—-and when the final showdown came, fewer than a thousand Royal Mamluks (the really elite ones) could be mustered.

After the boy Shah was wounded and the Shi’ites’ confidence in his and their invincibility was shaken, apparently the Mamluk Sultan had the poor judgment to send messengers to seek a defensive alliance against the Ottomans—with whom Egypt had a truce. He also rode to his Syrian territories to muster an army (perhaps the smallest force the Mamluks had fielded). If the Ottomans had gone back to Tabriz to finish off the Shi’ite Shah, Egypt might have  been okay. But with the Mamluk forces massed on the border, looking ready to break the truce, Sultan Selim turned aside.

In the decisive battle just north of Aleppo, summer 1516, the Mamluks at first did surprisingly well. Even as veterans and retirees, they still had great discipline and skill. But when the battle began to turn against them, the Sultan had a stroke and fell from his horse. Then it all disintegrated. Aleppo and Damascus both surrendered to the Ottomans.

The Mamluks crowned one last king, but he presided in Cairo only long enough for the Ottoman army to invade. In January 1517, the last Mamluk Sultan placed all the field artillery they had managed to obtain in the front lines to stop the advancing Turks. But he didn’t have sufficient number of guns to keep a steady fire, since they had to be cooled between shots. The Ottoman Sultan entered Cairo in triumph. There was one last battle among the pyramids at Giza, when the Turks mopped up and captured the last Mamluk king. He was carried back to Cairo, where he expected negotiated surrender. Instead, he was publicly hanged, with other Mamluk emirs.

Some Mamluks remained at large and continued to harry the Ottoman conquerors, while some were re-appointed to administrative roles. During their waning years, they started to become legends in their own time. Ottoman students started reading about Mamluks as heros, now that the legacy of Egypt had been adopted. Mamluks were Islam’s answer to Europe’s knights and heros. But while its former glories were bruited abroad, Egypt remained under Ottoman centralized authority, turning into just a province, until Napoleon disrupted the quiet flow of time in the desert.

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Christian Egypt under Mamluk Rule, 1382-1517

In earlier entries, you read about how the Mamluks, slaves raised to fight, became a ruling class with a complete bureaucracy as well as attempts to normalize into a hereditary monarchy. The Kipchak Turk Mamluks had their “Mafia” structure in power from about 1250 to 1382. In 1382, a competing Mamluk network took over, probably the finalization of a process that had been going on for a while. These new Mamluks were Circassians who, like the Kipchak Turks, favored their own ethnic group in spite of the official doctrine that Mamluks had no ethnicity.

There’s another storyline that’s important to notice; if we focus only on the rulers, we miss many other stories. At the start of the Mamluk period, Egyptian Muslims were probably still a minority, though a large one. Between the initial Muslim conquest and the end of Mamluk rule in 1517, about 900 years passed. That’s longer than Americans can easily imagine. At the beginning, and for maybe two centuries, the daily language of Egypt was what we now call Coptic, but it was really just the language of the Pharaohs (all languages change over time). During Greek rule, the Greek alphabet and some symbols derived from hieroglyphics were used to write the Coptic language. However, by the time the Mamluks fell to Ottoman conquest (spoiler, sorry!), Christians had become the minority. The Mamluk period oversaw the key flip in majority/minority roles.

The Muslim conquerors had never set out to convert their new subjects, since they were mainly interested in tribute being paid fully and on time. The tribute rate was set much lower—in fact it was a mere tax—for Muslims. In some periods, life was made easy for the majority Christians and minority Jews. But they were always subject to rules that could be suddenly made much more restrictive, and in certain periods, that’s what happened. One of the basic rules was that houses of worship needed approval from the secular governor to be built or repaired. In restrictive times the Muslim rulers just refused, and the churches and synagogues fell apart. There were constant pressures like this to just suddenly see the light of Mohammed’s truth and join the ruling religion. In very restrictive times, the pressure became more than some could bear and there were waves of conversion.

The Mamluk period was one of the more difficult times. Apparently, there was a Muslim jurist named Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who left many books and precedents. He was so important that he was known as the Elder of Islam, the Sheikh al-Islam. He was educated in Damascus in the most traditional (i.e. least friendly to modernizing) Sunni schools, the Hanbali. He made his first mark at age 30 when he led a party that insisted on the execution of a Christian man who had “insulted Mohammed.” His Hanbali school was anti-wine, anti-music, and pro-jihad. Islam has always had this strain present in its culture; in our time it’s the Wahhabis, in that time it was the Hanbalis. They are all Salafis, followers of the Salaf (first 3 generations of Muslim believers).

Ibn Taymiyya and the Salafis interpreted the Mongol invasions as punishment from Allah for being too soft on unbelievers. Ibn Taymiyya ruled that Muslim governors had no obligation to give building/repair permits to any Christians or Jews, and if their houses of worship ceased to be, so much the better. He was controversial; other schools of Islam sometimes had him imprisoned or put on trial. But he left a strong influence, as we might say today, he shifted the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Whenever life could be made more difficult for Christians and Jews, that’s what should be done. Obviously.

Coptic monasteries and churches continued to function, but they were smaller and had less funds. They could copy books to keep old manuscripts from dying out, but the effort to write theology and history in Coptic stopped. Coptic clergy did not have good relationships with Mamluk rulers, who were mostly first-generation converts and eager to win the approval of the Salafis. In 1354, the rulers seized a huge amount of land endowment from the Church, following three days of riots against Christians.

During the Burji period (1382-1517), Egypt was struck by many calamities, starting with the plague that kept returning (as in Europe). The effects of the plague peaked around the time the Burjis came to power; in Europe, there were peasant uprisings as finally the plague began to cause labor shortages in the countryside to bring in the harvest. Egypt must have seen similar developments. The people in the countryside were more likely to be Coptic farmers. Over the century of Burji Mamluk rule, the Copts not only became a minority as all but the most stalwart believers converted to Islam, they also became the scapegoat for all woes. Riots targeted Coptic churches in cities and towns.

There was a wave of martyrdom. Unlike in the Roman period, when Christians were directly persecuted, the Burji era martyrs were usually converts to Islam who were stricken by conscience and chose to go back. Now they were not just Copts, they were Muslim apostates. Some chose to do this in a very public way, making the announcement in public knowing that they would swiftly be executed. Others did it privately or retreated to monasteries where they were less likely to be hunted down.

By the close of the Burji Mamluk rule, Egypt was the land of mosques and Arabic language that we know today. Its local variant of Arabic was loaded with Old Egyptian words that persisted as borrowings. Its remaining churches were the largest ones in the big cities, where bishops sat, and the smallest ones in the farm villages where they had little to lose. The in-between layer disappeared.

with thanks to chapter by Maged S. A. Mikhail in The Coptic Christian Heritage, ed. Lois M. Farag.

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Vasco da Gama Takes Over the Indian Ocean, 1498-1503

The biggest source of financial power the Muslim Empire had always came from controlling large parts, if not all, of the Silk Road. This was literally a road in some places, with oases and cities along the way to support travelers’ needs for a fee. Goods from China and India were so different from what could be found and made in Europe that they had always commanded very high prices—-and those transportation fees were a big part of the price. If someone could find another route to China and India, the economic power of the Ottoman and Persian Empires would be reduced.

In 1498, Vasco de Gama landed a Portuguese ship at Calicut, the same Indian harbor where Ibn Battuta’s China-bound ships had been wrecked by a storm. Portuguese ships had been working on the goal of reaching India for much of the 15th century, pushed in early stages by Prince Henry “the Navigator.” The Prince did not actually sail, but he used his influence and money to get ships to sail incrementally farther down the coast of Africa. Each cape—beyond which land could not be seen until you actually rounded the cape in person—was a limit that captains believed they could not cross without grave danger. Prince Henry kept pushing them and commissioning new voyages until finally the first cape was rounded, then the second…and then they realized there was no real reason not to keep going.

The Portuguese were part of the Reconquista effort through all these years, and their greatest adversary was the Muslim fleet of corsairs in the Atlantic Ocean. The accounts of exploration that I remember from school left out this key motive: to reduce the power of the Silk Road and thus strip the Muslim kingdoms of some of their wealth—-which would reduce their power to buy and train slave armies, which would hamper their ability to keep taking over more of Europe. It was a far-seeing strategic push.

Vasco da Gama’s ships passed around the Cape of southern Africa at the close of 1497 (they named Natal Province to mark Christmas Day). As they worked their way north again, in the Indian Ocean, it wasn’t long till they were back in Muslim territory. Mozambique was a busy Arab port, and so was Mombasa. In this part of the Indian Ocean, Arab ships could proceed without fear of meeting hostile ships, so they generally went unarmed. Vasco da Gama’s men may have acted as pirates a few times, looting ships for supplies.

The Portuguese were making inquiries about hiring a pilot who could navigate them to India. They got no takers—-in fact a lot of hostility—until they found a town near Mombasa where an Indian pilot agreed to come on board. From there, they went straight to India.

What made any of these long voyages possible was the discovery of predictable cyclical wind patterns. The Portuguese first found Brazil by catching the South Atlantic gyre westward to South America, then eastward to Africa. They didn’t understand the winds of the Indian Ocean, which reverse course when the monsoon season changes. The summer monsoon winds had made their trip to India relatively short, but they did not wait long enough for the winter monsoon winds to turn. The return voyage back to Africa took five times longer, and when they arrived in Malindi, where they had hired their Indian pilot, they had scurvy and many sailors had died. Da Gama had to reduce his fleet to two ships, but those two were able to return, catching the South Atlantic gyre to turn north along Africa. One of his ships arrived at Lisbon in July, 1499, to tell the news.

While da Gama was gone, the King of Portugal had married a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. After her death, he married her younger sister. The dynastic marriages were empire-building steps, hoping to put a Portuguese prince on the Aragonese throne. As a condition of these matches, Portugal had ordered the forced conversion or expulsion of Jews.

The purpose of Portugal’s voyages to India, too, was empire-building. They wanted to do individual trade with Calicut, but they wanted more, too. At best, they wanted tribute, while at least, they wanted serious influence. Subsequent Portuguese fleets colonized Mozambique, where Muslim rulers had been unwelcoming before. It made a good layover place to get more supplies or repair ships after the stormy southern passage. The South Indian Ocean along Africa was no longer a Muslim lake.

Vasco da Gama commanded the fourth India Armada voyage in 1502. By then, Portuguese traders had gotten into a dispute with Arab traders in Calicut, and many of them were killed in a riot. Portugal held the king responsible, so this fleet was larger—20 ships—and armed. Its mission was conquest: to blockade Calicut’s harbor and force the king into a position of tribute.

Along the way, da Gama opened trade in East Africa’s city of Sofala while resting in Mozambique, whose Muslims were now eager to make up for past slights. He left simple consulates at both places—or as they are called, factories. The factor was the person who acted (Lat. facere) for another party, so where he lived was the factory. But at his next stop, Kilwa, he did more. The Sultan of Kilwa was brought on board ship (effectively a captive) to sign a treaty that included a huge gold tribute to Portugal, and when he did not want to sign, da Gama threatened to level the city with his guns.

On the Indian side, da Gama had an even more aggressive approach. On an island off the south coast of India, he picked up a guide and translator, a Jew from south India—-where there had been Jewish settlements for centuries. They started sailing south to Calicut, following the coast. After they battled an Indian pirate, their translator said the pirate’s home city was a hornet’s nest of piracy, so da Gama attacked it with guns, fire, and an armed landing party. It’s not that da Gama objected to piracy, he just wanted to be the perpetrator, not the victim.

Given the example of his burnt town, the Raja of the Vijayanagara kingdom chose to sign a treaty with the Portuguese. What else could he do? He had no idea how big this threat was; da Gama was not acting like the small party that he really was. So the Raja’s port city, Bhatkal/Batecala, would pay an annual tribute in rice, expel Muslims, and refrain from trading with Calicut. The joke’s on da Gama, in a way; the kingdom was a wealthy horse-trading center, but he perceived the port as a little fishing and farm trading town and didn’t ask much tribute. It’s interesting that the Raja of Vijavanagara didn’t mind expelling Muslims, because we know from Ibn Battuta that India was a Hindu-Muslim battleground much of the time. The Hindu Raja may have seen distant Portugal as a valuable ally against the Sultan of Delhi.

Then Vasco da Gama did something really appalling. Muslims in India had chartered a ship to carry them to Mecca. The ship was owned by a Muslim in Calicut, so da Gama decided the war against Calicut was starting now. He boarded the ship and looted it. Then he had the passengers locked in their cabins and set the ship on fire. The spectacle was gruesome. It took the burning ship several days to sink, and anyone who jumped into the water was speared like a whale by da Gama’s soldiers. Da Gama saved only twenty Muslim children so that they could be baptized and raised as monks in Portugal.

When they arrived at Calicut, the ruler started to negotiate as to their losses in the riots a few years before. Da Gama made it a precondition of talks that all Muslims would first be expelled, and then he seized some fishermen as hostages. Calicut’s reply was that da Gama had already avenged his dead many times over (when he sank the pilgrim ship) and had already looted more value than they had lost, in his piracy, and Calicut was not going to expel anyone. After hanging his hostages from the masts, da Gama began to bombard the city with his ships’ guns. His ships had brought along a lot of powder and shot; they bombarded the city for two days.

Da Gama let Calicut rest for a few days; he sailed to the next city, Kochi, to make a treaty. There, the Indian Christians we talked about previously, who may have first heard the Gospel from St. Thomas, contacted him and asked to become subjects of the King of Portugal. To da Gama, this must have felt like a first embassy from the legendary King Prester John!

The ruler of Calicut was not finished defending his city against the invaders. Inviting da Gama back for a parley, he had a flotilla of small ships surrounded da Gama’s huge flagship. Calicut’s tech disadvantage was overcome by getting so close to the tall ship that it couldn’t operate its guns and had to defend with low-tech methods. A few weeks later, da Gama passed Calicut again, and the city now had hired Arab ships from the Red Sea. These ships were much closer in technology to the Portuguese, resulting in a full naval battle. The Portuguese narrowly won it.

Da Gama’s fleet set sail for home in 1503, leaving a patrol behind to assist the two cities that had made trade treaties, Batecala and Kochi. Da Gama reached Portugal with a large mass of spices, but his patrol was not enough to help defend Kochi, which the ships of Calicut burned down. Then some Italian passengers from da Gama’s ships slipped out of Kochi and went to Calicut, revealing themselves as military engineers and agents of rival Venice. The next batch of naval battles by Mediterranean powers would take place off the coast of India.

The Portuguese dominated the spice trade in the Indies for about a hundred years. At the same time, they were colonizing Brazil—but that’s not part of the story of medieval Islam.

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The Later Spanish Inquisition, 1494-1609

The Inquisition in Spain ran through the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, ending only in the time of Napoleon, whose brother was appointed King of Spain. But its nature changed after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Its rate of executions slowed, and at the same time, it became an institution built into the society. The Pope began to have more control, too, and whatever deviations it had taken from canon law ended.

First and perhaps most importantly, Tomas de Torquemada became too old and visibly weak to carry out his duties as Grand Inquisitor. In 1494, the Pope appointed four assistants whose mandate included reining in the runaway Inquisition. Torquemada died in 1498. He had presided over the most hysterical stage of the program, when fear grew and grew, and they became more and more careless about due process.

His successor was Diego de Deza, Archbishop of Seville and tutor to Ferdinand and Isabella’s heir, who had just died. Deza had a record of getting Muslims and Jews to convert, probably using strong-arm harassment tactics, which to him would have seemed quite appropriate. He hated Conversos; all the more so, since it turned out he had Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. Let’s assume that the Pope succeeded in trimming back some of Torquemada’s excesses, still Diego de Deza seems to have been another “damn the torpedos full speed ahead” sort of guy. People lodged complaints against him, saying he enriched himself by confiscating property, and that his officials had “no regard for God or justice.”

One of Deza’s changes was to skip the thirty-day period in which people might confess. After 1500, the Edict of Grace was not proclaimed, but instead, they went straight to the Edict of Faith, which asked for denunciations. By Deza’s time, types of torture had been institutionalized, mostly ways of putting stress and pain on joints with weights or with the “rack.” They were not supposed to cause permanent harm or bleeding, and canon law when followed put time limits on periods of pain.

Those who were convicted ended the process in an auto-da-fe, which is actually an anachronism since the term is Portuguese for “act of faith,” and the Portuguese Inquisition didn’t start up until after 1530. It was a celebration of the Mass, but during the ceremony they had confessions and penances, including some death sentences. Perhaps more and more often as time went by, executions by burning were carried out immediately, so that “auto-da-fe” has come to mean “public burning.”

In 1499, Archbishop Cisneros came to Granada to speed up the conversion of the Muslims. As the prelate of Toledo, he had already been involved in reforming the Franciscans, who had become soft and corrupt. Many of them were living in luxury and some kept concubines. Cisneros required them to be celibate, to live in their parishes, and to actually preach and confess. Some monks fled to North Africa and converted to Islam rather than give up their women. Cisneros was austere by nature, so he had no sympathy for them.

When Cisneros arrived in Granada, he had no sympathy for the Muslims there, either. He announced there would be a mass conversion, and it began with burning books in Arabic—except for medical books. Thousands of manuscripts went into a bonfire in the public square. His action was a clear violation of the Alhambra Treaty, which had promised no such destruction of Muslim culture. The countryside rose in rebellion. That actually made things easier for the crown, since open war ended the treaty. As the rebels were killed, the survivors were given the choice of death, conversion, or expulsion.

By 1500, Cisneros stated proudly that there were no Muslims and no mosques left in the city. (A few years later, he led an expedition to attempt conquest of Oran, in North Africa. The separation between continents that we take for granted was not at all evident to people at the time.) In 1502, a decree from Queen Isabella made it official: Islam was outlawed.

The Inquisition continued to expand. While the king and queen had begun the process, the Inquisition’s leadership took control and made their own decisions, such as cutting out the Edict of Grace. Some Muslims had converted to Christianity before this, but after 1502, they were in the same position as the Jewish converts. The number of “Moriscos,” ex-Muslims, went way up. The Inquisition began trying some of them.

Moriscos had to leave their doors open on Thursday night and Friday morning, to make sure they were not doing ritual bathing before prayers. Soldiers on routine patrols would look into each house. Now there was a death penalty for practicing either Judaism or Islam, so anyone caught with a Koran or Talmud, or carrying out Jewish or Muslim slaughter rules, or doing any other practices, was arrested.

Isabella died in 1504, Ferdinand in 1516. The Grand Inquisitor, Cisneros, became the Regent until Ferdinand’s grandson Charles in the Netherlands could come take over. Cisneros was a strict, efficient Regent. In one year, he set up permanent courts (with a center at Madrid, perhaps the first step toward Madrid’s becoming the national capital) and a standing army. He demolished castles in Navarre, in case anyone up north thought about rebellion. He died within days of young Charles’ arrival.

The Spanish Inquisition became more bureaucratic after that time. Its Castilian and Aragonese branches united, perhaps the first step in the young king’s new model of “Spain” as a unified country. The Inquisition’s rate of convictions and executions dropped from a high of 40% to single digits, particularly during the reign of the fifth Grand Inquisitor. While any number of deaths for “wrong beliefs” is too many, 3% is much less like mass hysteria than is 40%, and it is within a margin that people can learn to live with.

Cultural Muslims (Moriscos) got better at hiding the marks of Islam, and after a few generations there was no real difference (if there ever had been). The ruling elite families found it much harder to hide, so covert Muslim faith was more likely to linger among the poor, especially in the countryside. By the time a 1609 royal decree expelled even the Moriscos, it’s likely that some of their persecutors were their own descendants, now their fiercest enemies—-such is human nature. That’s how it had been among the Jews, too.

Benzion Netanyahu’s scholarship on 15th century Spain argues that testing these people for doctrine was only ever a fig leaf. The real motive, he writes, was ethnic cleansing and reckless exercise of power. The more power the Inquisition had, the more it could take. The more power it had, the more it could tell the king what to do. Ferdinand had been reluctant to destroy his economy by expelling Jews and Muslims, and moreover, it was a specific breach of 1492’s treaty that ceded Granada to the crown. By being cruel and unfair, the Inquisition provoked some Muslims to rebel, and then the king could claim that the treaty was broken. And so ended eight centuries of Muslim life in Spain.

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Battle over the Talmud: 1475-1520

During the medieval period, the Church sometimes held formal debates with Jews, hosted by universities. One of the recurring topics was whether the Talmud should be allowed in a Christian society. Debate leaders on the Christian side were often converted Jews who had become Franciscan or Dominican friars. At the conclusion of the Disputations of Paris (1242) and Tortosa (1415), the Talmud was banned and publicly burned. At the Disputation of Barcelona (1263), Rabbi Nachmanides was expelled from Aragon and the Talmud officially censored.

But in each case, the effect was damaging but not lasting. In 1416, for example, the King of Aragon cancelled decrees against the Talmud and specifically protected the Jews. Obviously, it’s a bad situation to be dependent on a change of personnel. Just to put in a plug for our American system, one reason that Jews have flourished here is our commitment to rule of law, and for the laws to be fair to all. This notion hadn’t developed yet in medieval France or Aragon. We know what happened in the next generation of rulers in Aragon: the Inquisition and expulsion.

Meanwhile, in the city of Trent, in what’s now northern Italy, a two year old boy disappeared on March 23, 1475. The city was part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Hapsburg family of Austria. The boy’s father reported him missing and, at the same time, said that he suspected the Jews had taken the child. It was Good Friday, a time when feeling against Jews ran high, and the father suspected that the child’s blood had been used in making matzoh for Passover. This was the rumor that had been circulating for several centuries, never quite substantiated (since it was far from true).

The Jewish community of Trent pitched in on the city-wide search for the boy, worried that they were being framed. Then, on Easter morning, the cook in a wealthy Jewish household found the child’s body in a ditch when he went out to get water. The Jews reported their find to the Podesta (the elected ruler of a medieval Italian city), but of course the ruling Christians took the body’s location, near a Jew’s house, to mean that the Jews were guilty. Most of the Jews were arrested, tortured, and questioned. Sixteen men were executed by burning at the stake, and the others were expelled. A Papal investigation and proclamation reasserted general protection for Jews, but in nearby cities, there had already been pogroms against them.

The child, Simon, was canonized and in 1515 the city began building the Palazzo Salvadori on the ruins of the synagogue. The Palazzo includes a stone bas-relief showing the child being stabbed to death over a basin. Apparently, QAnon rumors in 2022 picked up on the image as evidence that the blood libel is true.

With the blood libel apparently substantiated through trial evidence and publicized through the German-speaking Hapsburg territories, the stage was set for increased Northern European persecution of Jews. Just as past waves of persecution had often been led by converted-Christian Jews, a converted-Christian Jewish man took the lead in the early 16th century.

Johannes Pfefferkorn was born in Nuremberg, trained as a kosher butcher. In 1505, now living in Cologne, he became a Christian and was hired as an administrative assistant at the Dominican Friary. There, he began to write very short books against Jews, demanding that they and their books should be legally suppressed. Pfefferkorn’s first book was Der Judenspiegel (“Mirror of the Jews,” I think), printed in 1507. He attacked Judaism, but as a kosher butcher, he knew the blood libel wasn’t true. Jews have strong prohibitions against eating or even touching blood.

Pfefferkorn’s angle was that Jews should be converted to Christianity by force, and for their own good. The obstacles, he said, were usury and the Talmud. As a side note, the idea of money-lending as a sin was soon (1515) to expire, thanks to a Christian man who was becoming very wealthy lending money to Emperor Maximilian. Perhaps he, too, supported blocking Jews from money-lending so that he would have less competition. Maximilian had already expelled Jews from his lands in Austria.

In 1509, influenced by Pfefferkorn’s books, Emperor Maximilian ordered all Jewish books to be collected and delivered to Pfefferkorn so that he could burn them. The orders were carried out in Frankfurt, Mainz, and other cities. But the Jews appealed to the Archbishop of Mainz to hold an evidentiary hearing. For a year, he sought informed opinions from scholars at German universities and others—-the Inquisitor of Cologne, a rabbi-turned-priest, and most significantly, an independent Greek and Hebrew scholar named Johannes Reuchlin.

Reuchlin emerged as the defender of the Jews at this time. He had begun life as a typical Latin-learning student in Germany, but when he was assigned as companion to a German prince heading to study in Paris, he joined the growing ranks of Greek scholars. Greek was a brand new subject of study in Paris, following on the influx of Greek teachers coming as refugees from captured Constantinople. Traveling with another German prince to Italy, he made friends with the Pope’s secretary in Rome and later came back to study Hebrew with one of Rome’s great Rabbinic scholars. He knew Pico della Mirandola, a nobleman and scholar who introduced Hebrew Kabbalah study to the Christian world. In 1506, Reuchlin wrote a Latin-Hebrew dictionary and grammar.

Reuchlin gave his opinion to the Archbishop that apart from two short minor works, the Talmud and other books of the Jews were too important and valuable to suppress. He even proposed that German universities should create posts for professors of Hebrew and ask the Jews for library suggestions. His opinion caused the Emperor to hesitate to continue condemning Jewish books.

Pfefferkorn wrote a pamphlet that alleged Reuchlin had been bribed by the Jews. Reuchlin replied with his own pamphlet, defending himself and attacking Pfefferkorn. But their war escalated to include supporters on each side. Theologians at the University of Cologne got the Inquisitor to condemn Reuchlin’s pamphlet. In 1513, Reuchlin was called in for a trial before the Inquisitor at Cologne, and the case eventually was appealed to Rome. Other German scholars defended Reuchlin. Martin Luther rescued Reuchlin by posting his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, so that Reuchlin looked like a traditionalist by comparison. Now in old age, he achieved his goal of establishing Hebrew studies at German universities.

Meanwhile in Venice in the same year of 1517, a young German printer published the first complete Rabbinical Bible. This massive work included not just the Hebrew text, but also an Aramaic translation (the Targum) and commentaries. The printer, Daniel Bomberg, was not himself a Jew, but a converted Jew got him interested in Hebrew books and served as editor. And in 1520, the first complete printed copies of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds were also printed, in Venice. For the Bible and the Talmud, he obtained the permission of Pope Leo X.

Bomberg’s Talmud and Hebrew Bible set the standards for later publications. He included the chapter and verse numbers established by the Latin Vulgate Bible right on the page with the Hebrew text, and that became standard. His Talmuds became the standard for page layouts, including that their page numbers are still used for reference.

But the war over the Talmud wasn’t going to be settled so easily. Even within the printer’s lifetime, the battle began again. Pope Paul III proposed to censor the Talmud in 1548, but Daniel Bomberg successfully argued back that old manuscripts should not be altered. After his death, by 1553, the Talmud was again censored and burned in some parts of Italy.

The period when the Babylonian Talmud was being written isn’t in my proper area of study, but I have some personal opinions about why some parts of it are stridently anti-Jesus. Its two parts, the Mishna and Gemara, seem to have been compiled between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Islamic conquest of Iraq. During those same years, the Christian church was separating from its Jewish root. I think that both Jewish and Christian writings from this time should be seen as similar to what people say during a divorce, when anger is running highest.

The initial point of departure seems to have been during the Jewish uprising that made Rome finally ban Jews from the land. During this war, the leading rabbis declared the rebellion’s leader to be the Messiah. Although the Temple had been destroyed in 70 AD, Jewish believers in Jesus were still integrated with other Jews throughout the land. They had been part of the rebellion in many places, but they withdrew from it in protest of the new Messianic pronouncement. The rebellion failed and the Roman executed its leaders in grisly ways; many of these leaders were rabbis. The two movements, traditional Jews and Jesus-believing Jews, now separated from each other socially with mutual sense of betrayal.

So after 120 AD, we see early Christian writings that are stridently opposed to rabbinical teaching. Some Christian anti-Semites go back to these early writings to support claims that Jews are unacceptably bad. But we see the other side of the “divorce” in Jewish writing of the same time. For centuries, the two sides badmouthed each other, I supposed until the rise of Islam gave them other things to think about. My personal opinion is that the claims on both sides should be viewed with the same skepticism that we should give to the shrillest accusations between a divorcing couple in a custody fight.

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Movable Type Crosses to the East, 1493

Around the time Orban’s huge bombard was breaking down the walls of Constantinople, Gutenberg printed the first Bible with movable type. As with all past inventions, we take it for granted without stopping to understand just how many things had to be just right to make movable type work. Ink. It has to be thick and quick-drying, which is a whole chemistry experiment. Paper. It has to be strong enough while still being cheap (Europe’s paper industry was mature by 1450, but just barely). And the type itself: too many issues to even list accurately. The machinery that holds it together and presses the paper: so many things can go wrong. Gutenberg got it all to work at the same time.

After his first run of Bibles, though, Gutenberg lost control of his invention, or as we’d say today, his IP. His financial backer accused him of misuse of funds; they went to court, and the printer lost. His assets—the press and half the Bibles—were handed over to his backer, who hired his assistant to take over.

Gutenberg still had his mind and ideas, and he found another funding source and started over. But in those days, the patent system was not operating, so control over IP was maintained only by physical control, like doors and locks. He’d lost that. I wonder if his ink formula was actually the greatest secret, since I’ve read some of the ink recipes of the time and they were primitive. In any case, with his assistant taking over, other assistants learned the trade and within 20 years there were competing German publishing companies in Strasbourg, Cologne, Augsburg, Basel, and Lubeck (where the powerful Hanseatic League operated).

One of these companies, Ravensburg, set up a press in Valencia, Spain in 1473 (around when printing came to London too). By the time of the Spanish Inquisition, most university/cathedral cities had German-made presses. The third Grand Inquisitor, the reforming Franciscan Cisneros, funded a Bible printed in six languages to try to jump-start more Biblical scholarship. This massive work, showing not only Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but also some Aramaic, Syriac and even Chaldean, was printed in 1522 with the Pope’s blessing. Significantly, the first book printed in Portugal was a Torah, the first five books of the Bible, printed by a Jew named Eliezer Toledano. So we know that in 1489, on the eve of the Jewish expulsion, at least some Jews–perhaps ones with connections in Germany–knew the formulae for ink and type.

As printing spread all over Europe, what about the Muslim world? It was an interesting exception to the general enthusiasm for movable type. When Muslims had seen Chinese block printing in earlier centuries, it was one technology they did not bring west. During Mongol “Muslim” periods, the rulers issued paper currency on the Chinese model, and it was certainly block-printed. But that seems to be all.

As we see with Bibles, printers prioritized religious texts first, because at first there was not much vision for general book marketing. Among Muslims, the lack of vision for printing ran deeper. They were against translating the Quran, since they saw the script itself (adopted around Mohammed’s time) as holy. Qurans had to be beautiful and hand-copied. The Christian world would soon have infamous battles over Bible translation, but there was never any sentimentality about hand-held pens vs. type. Muslim authorities also worried that a printer could introduce error or deliberate sectarian interpretations into the Quran, which would then be disseminated far faster than hand-copying could achieve. It’s likely there was also some economic reasoning, too, from a politically powerful scribal industry. In any case, Bayezid II prohibited printing books in Arabic in 1483, perhaps in response to some enterprising booksellers’ requests.

The first printing press set up in Constantinople, then, was the work of Sephardic Jews who had recently arrived in Ottoman ships, David ibn Nahmias, and his son Samuel. The Nahmias family probably came from the city of Hijar, Spain, where there was a Jewish/Hebrew printing press. They probably traveled through Naples, where they used a stopover to see what printers were doing there. Their first book came out in 1493: it was a book of Jewish law, the Four Laws of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher. (this information is from a thesis posted online)  In 1505, they published a Torah with commentaries. About a hundred books in Hebrew were created in the first 30 years, probably with other printers setting up competing shops.

In the East, printing remained the trade of Jews for a long time. In 1567, an Armenian Christian who had learned printing in London began to print books in Constantinople, in his Armenian script. His first priorities were prayer books and liturgical calendars; he worked for about two years before the Ottoman officials stopped him. The first Greek press in Constantinople (the subject of the thesis I’m footnoting) didn’t get going until a Greek currant trader brought a press from London in 1627. In the late 1500s, a Maronite monastery in Lebanon set up a small press, but only in Syriac.

In Europe, they did create Arabic movable type. The Pope commissioned an Arabic prayer book in 1514 as outreach to the Arabic-speaking world. King Francis I of France commissioned a polyglot Book of Psalms that included Arabic, in Genoa in 1516. King Francis was very interested in developing the printing press; he also created the first royal library for establishing copy rights. But most of the publishing was by and for universities. We don’t really think about this now, but Arabic was a scholarly language taught in medieval universities (Latin by contrast was taught in every market town). Much of Aristotle’s work was still in “original” form in Arabic, since the Greek originals had been lost to fire and plunder. So professors of Arabic published grammar books and Quran commentaries, as well as poetry and history.

The first Ottoman press in Arabic didn’t open until 1729! Unlike other presses, its mandate was specifically to print anything but religious books. The Maronites in Lebanon finally got permission to print Christian books in Arabic, and western missionaries followed. Printing apparently didn’t really arrive in Egypt until Napoleon’s brief invasion. Muslim acceptance of printed Qurans came only in the 19th century.

It seems likely that the Ottoman Empire’s rejection of the printing press marked that region’s loss of academic prestige. People often ask, if the Arabic language used to be an important scholarly language, why did the Middle East sink into scientific irrelevance? There are many answers, but this is probably the big one.

(In case the linked thesis disappears, it is: “The First Greek Printing Press in Constantinople (1625‐1628),” NIL OZLEM PEKTAS. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College) June 2014)

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The Fall of Granada, 1492

Granada’s fall was as inevitable as Constantinople’s. In both cases, there was a sorting process in which boundary territories that had wavered between Islam and Christendom had final settlements. By the time each last enclave fell, it was well surrounded and demographically overwhelmed. The processes that created both falls were separate and had been going on for centuries, but they concluded within 40 years of each other. And in both cases, the conclusion was only possible when one side became wholly unified.

Ferdinand and Isabella achieved national unity with their marriage, though not easily. Isabella’s brother was King of Castile, and he was very opposed to her marriage. He had a daughter but her paternity was widely challenged, so that was Isabella’s opportunity. By marrying the heir to Aragon, she could raise an army to win a civil war: and she did. By 1479, they had been married for ten years and were joint monarchs with equal power.

However, they did not create a country called “Spain.” Aragon and Castile remained separate countries; it was not a given that the Inquisition begun in Aragon would spread to Castile. The monarchs outlived their two oldest children, who died as young adults with no heirs. Ferdinand remarried after Isabella’s death and might have produced a separate Aragonese heir leading to disunion, but there was no new heir. Their three daughters had children, and the oldest of these was also heir to Austria. Although the boy’s mother was declared insane, Charles became his grandfather Ferdinand’s heir as well as his father’s heir to Austria. He was able to maintain unity and then some: under Charles, Spain was part the first empire on which the sun never set. In this empire, the identity of individual kingdoms mattered less. They became a confederation that was eventually called “Hispania.”

Granada’s fall may have been inevitable, but its location was so favorable to defense that it could hold out for ten years of general war and siege. The Emir of Granada was a young man, too, who came to power just as the Spanish monarchs set up camp. He was captured in one battle, but was permitted to hold power as long as he paid tribute and did not attempt to defend his other cities, like Malaga. Finally, only his city and fortress itself remained, and instead of continuing to collect tribute, the King and Queen asked for surrender.

On January 2, 1492, the city surrendered peacefully in a formal ceremony and soon after, the Emir went into exile in Morocco. The Treaty of Granada provided that Muslim citizens were free to leave or stay, and their rights would be protected in either case. Muezzins would be free to call, nobody would be forced to convert, nobody would have to wear special badges like the Jews. Property was protected, application of the law would be equal. Muslims who stayed in Granada did well for about six years, with limited self-rule, such as a city council. But many Muslims left in 1492 and 1493, following the Emir.

The object lesson before Granada’s Muslims was very clear, because their port was soon jammed with evicted Jews. Would their turn come, if they didn’t leave now?

Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Jewish eviction order from their occupation of the Alhambra Palace. Their Inquisition had been urging the expulsion of the Jews, but until Granada fell, they were reluctant. Apparently Jews were a key part of the tribute-paying system, needed until they had direct rule. The Alhambra Decree gave Jews four months (from March 31 to July 31) to be baptized or leave. After that date, remaining Jews would be executed.

They were permitted to take their property with them, but providing it was not in gold or silver coin. That was a pretty big “but.” Land was not portable to begin with, nor were animals beyond one or two horses. Many Jews had extensive libraries, but it was hard to travel with scrolls and large books. The market was flooded with books, dishes, furniture, clothes, land, houses, and businesses. Muslims were already leaving Granada, selling their businesses and houses too (though they were not forbidden to take coins). Essentially, barring them from taking coins meant stripping them of possessions that they couldn’t carry in their arms or a small cart.

Or they could be baptized, joining the Converso population in its insecure existence, but keeping their property. Historians estimate that about half of the remaining Jews converted, while half left (absolute numbers? probably something between 50,000 and 100,000). Because Spain’s name in Hebrew was Sefarad, the Jews who arrived in North Africa, Italy, Greece, and Turkey were known as Sefardic. They spoke their own Yiddish, a Hebrew-Spanish blend called Ladino, written like Yiddish in Hebrew letters. Their community in Spain went back to Roman or even Hellenic/Greek times and was distinctly different in culture from the Jews of Northern Europe.

Fleeing Jews could cross into Portugal or pay for passage to North Africa. That’s probably what most of them did; crossing the Strait of Gibraltar was the shortest voyage and many probably had relatives in business on the southern rim of the Mediterranean. Both of these easy answers were disastrous; Portugal was only a few years from persecuting and evicting Jews, and Morocco refused to let Jewish refugees enter many of their cities. Jews who survived and were not sold into slavery returned to Spain to be baptized.

Genoese ships were also willing to take refugees, and a significant number of the Jews settled in Genoa. If Christopher Columbus was a Sefardic Jew from some earlier emigration wave to Genoa, it’s ironic that he’s best known for being associated with Ferdinand and Isabella. Some Italian ships probably took them to other cities, but the fall of the Medici family had turned Florence against Jews.

The exit route Ferdinand and Isabella never saw coming was that Sultan Bayezid II, son of Mehmet II, sent the Ottoman navy under Kemal Reis (Captain Kemal) and his nephew Piri, who later became a very famous explorer and mapmaker. They probably arrived first to invite Muslim refugees on board, and stayed for the Jews. Apparently, the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople had a very cordial relationship with both sultans, father and son, because Muslim rulers had great respect for impartial judgments. Now in his 70s, he urged Bayezid to import as many of his co-religionists as would come. It’s not clear to me if refugees paid for passage, but in any case, they were given instant citizenship, which was more than Northern Europe would do.

This longest route, the least likely and most unforeseen, was probably the safest at that times. Sefardic Jews settled large colonies in Thessalonika and Smyrna—renamed Izmir in Turkish. Some also settled in other cities including Constantinople. They were immigrants with high skills who quickly settled into existing neighborhoods and expanded commerce. It’s probably an exaggeration to say that the Ottoman rise in power over the 1500s was fueled by these Sefardic immigrants, but some historians do say it. It was certainly a wise choice for the Ottomans to make Spain’s loss their gain.

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The Spanish Inquisition Begins, 1478-92

Inquisitions were normally a program run by priests who answered to the local bishop, who answered to the Pope. They were the answer to a very active concern: what about false teachers who might lead the illiterate astray? Inquisitions had been run, periodically, for several centuries in many places. They were guided by canon law which was based on Roman law, answerable to local bishops and the Pope. Most of the time, they imposed penance and re-educated heretics. Their worst punishment was exclusion from the Church, so that the offender was outside the protections of canon law.

This background helps us understand why the Inquisition in Spain became so infamous, because it didn’t follow this model. It was not overseen by bishops and the Pope, nor was it run by canon law, nor did it stop at imposing penances. Instead, it was run by a priest directly appointed by King Ferdinand and answerable only to him. As it ran and grew year after year, the Popes tried to stop it at times. It is probably a good example of how mass hysteria can create a feedback loop, magnifying the problem.

The original problem was that many Jews in Spain had converted but remained culturally tied to their Jewish relatives and communities. Since Jews had been closely associated with Muslim rulers, often serving as officials, they were viewed as a foreign “5th Column.” The converted Jews, Conversos, were additionally seen as traitors by their Jewish relatives. The Inquisition’s roots seem to lie here: the Conversos had many enemies on all sides. An Inquisition was needed to find the ones who were not fully converted and straighten them out.

Canon law had some basic protections for the accused built into it. For example, anonymous denunciations were not permitted. If torture were used to persuade someone to confess, the confession was thrown out if the person recanted it when the torture was over (as many Templars had done). There were some rudimentary standards of evidence. But in Spain’s Inquisition, canon law was not followed. Anonymous denunciations were permitted and encouraged, and torture was used freely. This Inquisition, instead of imposing education and penance, convicted heretics as traitors to the King, therefore to death. It also, not incidentally, confiscated their property and fired them from their jobs.

Like anything, it began small. In 1478, the Pope gave Ferdinand and Isabella authority to name inquisitors in Castile. In 1481, the first six heretics were burnt at the stake. The Pope opposed sending Inquisitors into Aragon, objecting in 1482 that already many people, especially powerless and poor ones, had been seized, tortured, convicted and executed without evidence and often falsely. The Pope was concerned that the Inquisition was sending souls straight to Hell, rather than saving them. But King Ferdinand threatened to take the Inquisition from the Pope altogether, so that’s when the infamous Torquemada, Isabella’s personal priest, was appointed, and it was clear that he answered only to the King. Two years later, the Pope announced an appeal process to Rome, but the King announced a death sentence for anyone who tried it. At that point, the Pope had no control.

Torquemada’s Inquisitors would come to your town, and its officials proclaimed a 30 day amnesty: confess and do penance, abjure your heresy, and you would be spared. Once enough Conversos had been convicted and burnt alive, thousands of others rushed to confess to something, just to stay on the safe side. As the numbers grew, so did the Inquisition, since the problem seemed to be bigger than they had supposed.

Abjuring your heresy was not as easy as it sounded. The penitent heretic first had to don a sackcloth robe with yellow crosses, then must turn informer on other Conversos. If he ever stopped cooperating, he’d be considered Relapso and executed. Meanwhile, as a penitent, he could not practice medicine or law, bear arms, keep a tavern, carve stone, travel by horse or cart, wear jewels, or grow a beard. The status of penitent heretic was inherited by the children and some grandchildren.

Meanwhile, anonymous denunciation were welcomed, and any evidence of Shabbat observance was accepted: did you see your neighbor stocking up on food the day before Shabbat? buying meat from a Jewish butcher? lighting candles? not having a smoke-trailing chimney on Shabbat itself? Denunciations within families were definitely encouraged, with records of husbands denouncing wives and vice versa, children their parents, and so on. It may have been a convenient way to end a bad marriage or remove a hated father with a large estate, sort of like Agatha Christie plot premises. And denouncing your work colleague? Way to get a promotion! Your neighbor? Sweet, that extra lot will come in handy when it’s at city auction. Many royal officials and private citizens got rich off the Inquisition.

How many Jewish-origin Catholics were convicted of heresy and burnt as traitors? One historian (Henry Kamen) estimates about 2000, total. Other estimates begin at 12,000 and start climbing to 30,000 and on. Some say millions. We can infer, I think correctly, that under Torquemada the Inquisition didn’t keep careful records. By contrast, the medieval Cathar Inquisition kept such good records that historians can use them to reconstruct societal conditions in those towns. The high numbers in this case are probably wrong, because we know that additionally, tens of thousands of Jews left or were baptized, and their total number was not that great. But even the lowball estimate is shocking in its implied rate of arrests, and it too is probably wrong (like Ibn Khaldun, modern historians have a bias toward rejecting big numbers).

The Inquisitors became convinced that Jews were seducing converts to slip back into Judaism. They told the King that there must be a final solution or it would keep getting worse. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella reluctantly agreed to expel all Jews. Not all Conversos, but all practicing Jews.

To put this into perspective, everyone had been expelling Jews for the last few decades. German cities expelled Jews in the 1420s, and cities in Italy were expelling them during the years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Medici family protected Jews in Florence, until their fall from power, and then Florence sent the Jews away. France and England had expelled them in previous centuries. So Jews were moving to Italian cities at first, then as these were closed, they were moving eastward to Austria and Poland. Poland and Bohemia didn’t really want Jews, but it needed them.

And, of course, Spanish Jews and Conversos had been fleeing all during the Inquisition and its precursors. The problem is that Spain had been a very good place to live, and many of these Jews had lived there since Roman times, like the Jews of the Rhine Valley. Emigrating might mean saving your life, but it could just as easily mean losing it to robbers, pirates, or starvation and exposure to weather. Arriving in a new place, it would take several generations to rebuild, and meanwhile your family was at the bottom, where survival was unlikely. If there was any way to placate the Inquisition and stay, it seemed safer.

Christopher Columbus may have been a Spanish Jew whose parents fled earlier, settling in Genoa, so that he could come from Genoa to seek funding from what would have been his king. Michel de Montaigne was a Jew; France had expelled its Jews in 1306, but apparently some refugees were able to settle there again. Montaigne’s family was not of original French Jewish (northern) extraction, but from Spain.

In parallel developments, Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint Aragonese-Castilian forces were just finishing off the last Muslim ruler, the Emir of Granada. So in 1492, a lot of people were about to sail the ocean blue.

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