All Things Medieval

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.

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.

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. Moreover, the Inquisition expanded, first to include converted Muslims, then to include “heretics” of any type in Spanish-ruled lands, including the Netherlands. As it expanded, it gained institutional power, somewhat independent of the kings or Pope who nominally controlled it.

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 they were 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 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. Nobody hates as much as someone who’s trying to separate himself from, in this case, his Jewish heritage. 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

When the King of Hungary created the Order of the Dragon in 1408, one of the knights to receive this honor was the illegitimate son of the Voivode of Wallachia (modern Romania). When the legitimate son died, Sir Vlad of the Order of the Dragon became the Voivode (Old Slavic for rank below the king but above the boyars). Vlad Drakul had three sons: Mircea, Vlad, and Radu (all of these names, strange to us, were quite traditional, like Louis in France). All of these sons could be titled “Drakula,” essentially “Son of the Dragon.”

The Drakula sons were born at a time when Wallachia was a battlefield that sometimes acted as vassal to the Ottomans, and sometimes joined Christian kings in a Crusade effort. The strongest ruler in the area was John Hunyadi, the Voivode of Hungary and Transylvania, vassal to the King of Poland. Hunyadi was a determined enemy of the Ottomans; his career was made of battles, negotiations to find more allies and resources, and attempts to choose the Voivodes around him.

Vlad Drakul joined Hunyadi in a rebellion and was captured; his sons Vlad and Radu were taken from him as hostages. They grew up at Edirne, speaking Turkish, while their older brother had his turn to rule and be murdered. Hunyadi installed a Drakul cousin as Voivode, but Vlad the hostage, who was something like 20, decided to make a play for his inheritance. First he tried to oust his cousin with Ottoman support, but failed. He must have decided that power was going in the Hungarian direction, because next he left the Ottomans to live in Hungary for about six years. At the end of that time, he came back to Wallachia now with their support, as the enemy of the Ottomans.

Radu, meanwhile, seems to have been pretty well assimilated to the Ottoman court. A Greek chronicler asserts that Mehmet II and Radu, who were about the same age, were very close friends—-and further that Mehmet tried many times to make Radu his paramour, while Radu resisted virtuously but stayed on good terms. I’d need real evidence to buy that idea. Resisting sexual advances (reportedly by cutting the prince with a dagger and hiding in a tree) is not consistent with staying on good terms, and Radu’s later nickname “the Handsome” may have suggested the idea. Mehmet may have been bisexual, but it doesn’t mean that Radu was a target. And while Vlad was contesting for the Voivodeship of Wallachia, Radu became a Muslim and lived at the Topkapı Palace.

Vlad killed his cousin in battle, but there were more cousins who were apparently preferred by the locals. The German colony in Transylvania, which dated back to the early years of the Teutonic knights, didn’t support Vlad. He not only razed their towns, he also took captives back to Wallachia and used them for a public demonstration: he impaled them. That’s when his notoriety began. Even then, impaling people alive was shocking.

By 1460, Vlad was solidly in control. His old frenemy Mehmet II required him to come pay homage, but Vlad decided to stay on the Hungarian side. Not only that, he impaled the envoys and began to ravage Bulgaria, killing Slavs and Turks alike. Mehmet brought an army to remove him and install Radu, landing 150,000 soldiers and Janissaries at a Danube port.

Now Vlad cemented his reputation. First, he made a daring night attack on Mehmet’s camp, trying to assassinate Mehmet himself. The Wallachians, an army with some knights but mostly peasants (and probably no artillery), then retreated toward their capital Târgoviște with the Ottomans in pursuit. They destroyed everything in the Ottoman path: poisoned wells, burned crops, flooded land, and dug pit traps. Vlad’s army also sent anyone with an infectious disease to the Turks, so that the weary Ottomans not only went hungry but began to catch the plague.

When they arrived at Târgoviște, the Turks found that Vlad had rounded up about 20,000 ethnic Turks. His peasant army had been busy: the Turks were impaled on 20,000 stakes along the road for miles. The city was deserted, its gates wide. The Ottoman army was sickened and shocked by the impaling: it included men, women, and children; there were babies impaled with their mothers. If Vlad was aiming at shock value, he achieved it, and the Ottoman main army quickly withdrew. They burnt the town where their fleet waited.

Vlad won some more battles, but Radu and the Janissaries remained in the field. Vlad’s peasants could not win, and the nobles were also sickened by his brutality. So Vlad went to Hungary, where Hunyadi’s son Matthew Corvinus had been elected King. Instead of backing him, the king arrested Vlad.

Vlad stayed imprisoned in a small castle near Budapest for 14 years. The official cause was a charge that Vlad had actually gone back to the Ottomans, to betray Hungary; but from this time, legends about his cruelty were circulating in Germany and Hungary. Mehmet II had made Radu the Bey—-not Voivode, notice the war of language terms for “ruler”—-of Wallachia, with Janissary support. Radu may have crossed back over to Christian rituals, and he got along well enough with the nobles. He married an Albanian girl and had a daughter. However, Wallachia became an Ottoman stronghold, and its Christian neighbor Moldavia felt (rightly) threatened. Then even Radu died. Now what?

In 1475, at Moldavia’s request, Hungary released Vlad but refused to provide him with an army. Another cousin, Basarab, was now the ruler with Mehmet’s support. Vlad lived in Hungary as a free man for a year or so, but eventually Hungary gave him enough funds to join the Prince of Moldavia. Technically, this was Vlad’s third reign as Voivode, but it didn’t last long since he died in battle. The Ottomans cut him into pieces.

It wasn’t long before biographies of Vlad were being printed in German and Slavic. By now, he was widely known as a sadistic psychopath, which is probably true. But with early movable type, printers could invent new adventures and crimes for Vlad, who was soon on the Strasbourg Best Seller List. He became known as Dracula (his son also used this as the surname for the noble house they established). Probably most of the interest was generated by refugees from the German colony in Transylvania, so that his name became associated with this place. By 1500, about 25 years after his actual death, gruesome woodcuts showed him feasting with impaled bodies nearby, and other stories said he boiled people to death. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to become an undead bogeyman.

Romania, on the other hand, recalled Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler) as a national hero. If he was harsh, it was to uphold public order and national strength. If he executed nobles, it was because they were disloyal. By the 19th century, Romanian literature celebrated his life. In the Communist years, he was lionized, and he is still best known in Romania as one of its strongest kings in history.

The national hero of Albania has the improbable (to our eyes) name of Skanderbeg. He was born George Kastriotis to a family that owned/ruled somewhere between 3 and 20 villages with a castle (“Kastrioti” implies “owner of a kastro, Greek for castle”). When he was 18, he was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court, to ensure that his father would not rebel. He was put into the Palace School with the upper-level devşirme kids; one of his brothers may also have been taken in the devşirme levy. In service to the Ottomans, George was known as Alexander, which is Iskander in Turkish. The Turkish title for any kind of leader or ruler is Beg, but the “g” is pronounced as a y. We often spell it “Bey,” but sometimes in old documents it’s still Beg. So as George rose in the Ottoman ruling bureaucracy, he became Iskander Beg, which became Skander-beg even in his time (when he signed his name in Cyrillic characters, he wrote it that way).

Skanderbeg served the Turks for 20 years, sitting out several rebellions and often governing parts of Albania; then suddenly he defected to the Christian side. His family had remained devoutly Orthodox, although hostage Skanderbeg was expected to follow Muslim daily religious customs. His father and several of his brothers had died by then, and he had adopted his nephew Hamza. In 1443, forces led by the King of Poland (and his regional ruler, John Hunyadi, about whom more later) made the Ottomans retreat, which left the Kastrioti lands free. Skanderbeg left the Turks and went home, taking Hamza and 300 Albanians with him.

From that point on, he led a chronic rebellion against the Turks in his part of Albania. His insider status made him particularly dangerous. Early on, before he was known to have deserted the Turks, he showed Ottoman officials forged documents in the central Albanian town of Krujë. The documents appointed him Bey of Krujë, and once he had taken this role, it was hard to dislodge him. He knew Turkish and Arabic; he knew many of the officials and the structure of the hierarchy; he knew the weak points of the Ottoman army.

Skanderbeg declared to other Albanian and Serbian nobles that he was the successor to their previous Prince, Stefan Lazarević, one of the founding knights of the Order of the Dragon. He set up a standard with a black double-headed eagle, on which today’s Albanian flag is based. He successfully captured a series of castles that became the core of his nascent kingdom. His “court” was multi-ethnic, with Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Italians who had been displaced in the Ottoman wars. They wrote documents in three scripts: Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.

As his power grew, other Albanian nobles joined his cause. Multiple noblemen always lead to bickering and divided loyalty, but under Ottoman pressure, they became more loyal to Skanderbeg, who was the only effective resistance in sight. His forces grew to 10,000 and upward. It was hard for the Ottomans to keep track of his men, since like all guerrilla forces, they could melt away into the countryside and look like simple farmers, or hide in mountain forests. The Albanians won a few pitched battles against the Ottoman army in 1444-6.

The other power in the region was Venice, which first supported the Albanians but then turned on them, choosing to eliminate the smaller threat before making some kind of peace treaty with the larger. Skanderbeg’s forces were beset on two fronts. They won a blistering battle against Venice that led Venice to sue for peace. Albanians joined Serbs and Poles at the Ottoman front; they had already lost a major fortress and soon they were fighting to keep Skanderbeg’s capital, Krujë.

The struggle to defend Krujë from the Ottoman siege took all the resources Albania could muster, and in the aftermath of saving his city, Skanderbeg’s fortunes ran low. Other nobles chose to work with the Ottomans, while he held out. His rescue came when the King of Aragon offered to make him a vassal of Aragon and its ally against Venice, Naples. Aragon had formal overlordship in Albania, in exchange for sending material support for Skanderbeg’s fight. A hundred Spanish soldiers were stationed at Krujë, sort of like American advisers in the Vietnam or Syrian wars. King Alfonso V was probably considering launching a new crusade from Albania; he signed treaties with other Albanian noblemen, too. Skanderbeg married the daughter of one of the other Albanian feudal lords, and he was back in business.

In the years before Constantinople fell, while Mehmet II was preparing his army and guns, the Albanians saw significant victories against Ottoman forces. When Europe reacted in shock to the fall of Constantinople, the King of Aragon increased his support to Albania. He sent a Spanish Viceroy to rule Albania, Greece and Serbia in his name, and with the Viceroy came a new crusade flag. Spanish and Neapolitian troops joined Skanderbeg. Together, they turned to take back the Albanian fortress of Berat, which the Ottomans had occupied. After a long siege, the Ottoman commander promised to surrender, but Skanderbeg carelessly took the promise for the deed. He left, with half the army. The Ottomans rallied and slaughtered the rest of the Albanians and Neapolitans.

By this time, Skanderbeg’s young wife had given birth to a son. All this time, his brother’s son, Hamza, had followed him like a son. Apparently he had viewed himself as a prince in waiting; when a new heir was born, Hamza gave up hope. He actually defected back to the Ottomans and helped lead an army of 70,000 into Albania to put an end to his uncle’s rebellion. Amazingly, the Albanians came out of nowhere and soundly beat the Ottoman army at the Battle of Ujëbardha,  Hamza was not killed, but he was captured and put in some kind of prison at Naples.

The Ottomans intensified their efforts to end the Albanian rebellion once for all. Three successive armies advanced to Albania and were defeated, in 1461. Mehmet II finally signed a ten-year truce with Skanderbeg. By this time, Skanderbeg had been in high-level talks with two Popes who both kept wondering about starting up a new crusade and asking him to lead it. In 1463, only two years into the truce, Pope Pius II preached crusade, and Albania joined. Once again, Skanderbeg was at war with the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope died before he could get his promised forces actually into the field, but the truce had already been broken. The new Pope had no commitment to the effort that his predecessor had set in motion, and the Kingdom of Naples could not spare much. Skanderbeg was an old man by this time, in a body that had experienced much wear and tear. He still managed to destroy a major Ottoman army sent against him, again lifting a siege against his hometown of Krujë. By this time, he had been fighting the Turks for about 30 years and several generations of fighting-age men had grown up revering him. They flocked to join him, and they kept winning miraculous victories.

Skanderbeg could not live forever, though. It’s clear that his personal strategic genius had been behind most of Albania’s striking success. He had kept the nobles as united as possible, formed international alliances to keep their effort afloat, even successfully intervened to help the King of Naples. He had lifted three sieges of Krujë and beaten Ottoman armies much larger than his many times. But finally, he died of malaria. A nephew (not Hamza) stepped in to take his place, and Venice was still at war with the Ottomans and tried to maintain cooperation. But it wasn’t the same. When Mehmet II circled back again, the fourth siege of Krujë succeeded, and the nephew’s alliance with Venice soon fell apart. Albania became Ottoman territory, with pockets of resistance.

Albanian lords who had followed Skanderbeg fled to Naples, settling around Apulia and Calabria. King Ferdinand had a castle and estate set aside for Skanderbeg’s widow and son, in Galatina right at the Italian boot’s farthest heel. The descendants of these Albanians are still a distinct ethnic group in Italy, known as the Arbëreshë. Their Albanian language still preserves the oldest forms, when the majority of Albanian speakers in the homeland took on several centuries’ worth of Turkish borrowings.

Mehmet II wanted to become the legitimate Byzantine Emperor, in addition to being its Turkish conqueror. Now they pulled out a long-ago event forgotten by the Greeks: remember that one renegade son of an Emperor had converted to Islam and married a Turkish girl? The family of Osman was descended from that very same 12th century couple! (True? Who knows.) Further, Orhan had married a Byzantine Princess Theodora in 1346. Mehmet was not descended from her, but they didn’t count inheritance that way; he felt his great-great-grandfather should be counted among the heirs of the Emperor, by right of marriage. Were the people convinced? Probably not, but for those who needed a fig leaf to hang on acceptance of the occupation, perhaps it helped.

Mehmet had the money and manpower to rebuild the city in a serious way. There was, of course, a great risk that the kings of Europe would mount another Crusade and use the same wall breach that he had made. I wonder if he had the giant bombard melted down to prevent its later use against him, too. An awful lot of defensive wall cannons could be made from the metal, and nobody was sentimental about the gun. Orban, the master metalworker, had been killed by one of his other guns exploding during the siege.

As the walls and gates rose, Mehmet sought to repopulate the city. So much emptiness could not be defended, governed, or taxed. He ordered a levy of Muslims, Christians and Jews to be shipped in from around his Empire: bring in 5000 new families by September! He sought to keep Greeks from fleeing with every promise at his disposal. He set up a Grand Rabbi and an Armenian Patriarch to show his good intentions, in addition to the Greek Patriarch whose churches he had preserved. Of course, he also turned the city into his pious Muslim capital with mosques, madrassas, and shrines.

In 1459, while the repopulation and rebuilding was still in progress, he built an Imperial Palace. They first called it the New Palace, or Yeni Sarai, while Mehmet temporarily lived in what is now the university. It’s possible that the Italian word “seraglio,” which means a secluded harem, was based on the Persian-Turkish word “Sarai,” but nobody is sure. Later, the New Palace’s main gate was called Topkapı, which means Ball Door, that is, Cannonball Gate. The palace, which was the main residence of Ottoman Sultans until about 1665, became known by the same name, though it was formally called the Palace of Felicity. It’s now a museum.

The Topkapı Palace was built right in the Old City, on the main street that led to the Hagia Sophia. The old Imperial Palace was a ruin, so they just used the same site, some of the same walls and acropolis, and probably many of the old stones. Mehmet chose that his personal quarters would be on the highest point of the Golden Horn peninsula, with walls and gardens running down to the water. It’s probably the model C. S. Lewis used for the great palace in Tashbaan, Narnia’s southern enemy, so if you know those scenes you can fill in the details. Turkish TV has also produced shows about the Ottoman Sultans where you can see them looking down from their personal balconies on the whole city and the water.

There were inner courtyards with rings of outer ones, though it was not round as Baghdad had been. The shapes were irregular, probably following the topography, but perhaps for another purpose. Mehmet II was the heir of the grandfather who had won a civil war among four brothers; it was important that he design a family residence that could be defended if necessary, and that would provide safe haven and escape at need. Hence there were secret passages and secluded areas with grill-covered windows so that the family could move about unnoticed, if needed. A too-regular design would be too easily mapped. Along the waterfront, on the Golden Horn side, there were summer houses and boat houses. (At need, the royals could slip away by boat as Lewis’s protagonist does.)

The innermost (Fourth) courtyard had a rule of strict silence among servants; the Sultan could enjoy perfect silence in the middle of the big city. Equally inaccessible was the harem, which this time did mean a place for multiple wives (as it did not originally mean at the Alhambra). If you were outside the Palace and managed to get through the Topkapı Gate, you would be in outer courtyard, where there was an old Byzantine church and some other official buildings, like the Mint. The next gate you’d have to pass through looks a lot like the iconic gate of Disneyland, and then you would be in in the Second Courtyard, where the Janissaries lived. This area was large, with a number of official buildings, and a golden throne for the Sultan. Peacocks wandered the Second Courtyard. To enter the Third Courtyard, where the Grand Vizier’s official meetings were held, you had to pass through the Gate of Felicity.  The main throne room was also in this zone, as were the harem and the apartments of the Sultan’s mother. There doesn’t seem to be a special gate to get to the final inner zone; it must have been set apart just by passageways, doors, walls, and gardens. And this is where the secret passages would have been.

The oldest building in the innermost Fourth Courtyard is a square watch tower, built with very thick walls and only small, high windows. Mehmet II apparently installed his chief physician (probably a Jew) there, with a royal pharmacy. His son’s chief tutor also lived in this super-secure house. The innermost courtyard is still large enough for a number of terraces and smaller buildings, used as summer or prayer retreats by the later Sultans who built them. Here his heirs lived and studied; there is even a special room (built later) for circumcising the boys. Of course, there is also a mosque.

The Palace was probably finished in the late 1460s but it continued to be added to by later Sultans. The city’s rebuilding was considered (by historians) as “complete” after a census in 1478 showed its population was back up to about 80,000. By 1500, it was again the region’s largest city. It’s unlikely that its population from that point had any familial, historical connection to the pre-conquest population. The new citizens were Muslim, Christian, and Jews, but they were descended from the prisoners of war shipped in for resettlement.

Meanwhile, Mehmet was not sitting still. Conquest fueled his income and secured his borders. Rebuilding his new city led to conquering more and more of the old Empire it had ruled. What was still unconquered in Serbia was under Ottoman control before the Palace had been designed. Remaining Greek and Thracian ports were next, and then other parts of the Black Sea coast. The last of the “Empire of Trebizond,” one of the Greek Byzantine governments-in-exile from the Fourth Crusade, fell in 1461.