Selim the grim biography of christopher

Faber must take a rather dim view of British readers’ historical awareness these days. This is a biography of one of the greatest Ottoman sultans in the empire’s 600-year history, yet the publishers cannot bring themselves to mention his name in the book’s title. Perhaps they thought Selim I was too obscure, and maybe they’re right, but their reticence is not shared by Alan Mikhail’s American publishers, who rightly give the sultan his due. Never mind. Mikhail, chair of Yale’s history department and a specialist in Ottoman history, makes it his mission to demonstrate how this utterly compelling leader helped define his age, bending the world to his will. And he succeeds with a flourish.

Selim’s reign may not have been long —he only ruled from 1512 to 1520 — but he managed to fit an awful lot of conquest in. So much so that by the time of his death the Ottoman empire had almost trebled in size.

On the eve of its demise after the First World War, the Ottoman Empire could still claim to be one of the largest empires in the world. It owed its impressive size not to the feats of its most famous sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, but rather to his father, Selim the Grim, whose expansionist exploits established borders that would survive largely intact for 400 years. God’s Shadow makes the case for Selim’s impact beyond those borders, with the ‘discovery’ of America, capitalism, the Reformation and the Sunni-Shia divide all owing something to this Turkish sultan. Indeed, for Alan Mikhail it was the Ottomans who pulled the strings that drove the early modern era. If the Conquistadors rampaging through the Americas were the hurricane, then Selim and his Ottomans were the butterfly that first flapped its wings. It’s a refreshing, if not entirely convincing, attempt to reorientate perspectives and jostle the Ottomans into that most coveted and crowded of spots: the centre of world history. 

Mikhail’s mixture of biography and revisionist history is told over two generations. While his admiration for Selim might blind him to certain realities, the book does offer a new prism through which to view the formation of the ‘New World’. With the wind in their sails, the Ottomans straddled the Middle East, able to play toll keeper to international trade, dictating tariffs and forcing Christian merchants to take drastic measures to bypass Ottoman territory. In Christopher Columbus’ case, that meant crossing the Atlantic in the expectation of finding Asia’s eastern coast, thus opening free lines of communication with India and China. That he hit North America was merely a consequential, if initially disappointing, accident. 

As one of the sons of the sultan Bayezid II, Selim (1470-1520) grew up in the Ottoman harem, a Darwinian schoolhouse-cum-political bear pit, where only the ruthless survived. His ferocious cunning, shrewd intellect and

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https://www.psbooks.co.uk/gods-shadow518456God's Shadowhttps://www.psbooks.co.uk/media/catalog/product/5/1/518456_7d3f13da10871b7bfb6a3820269e1906.jpg7.999.99GBPInStock/Clearance/Clearance/Categories/History/Clearance/Categories/View All Clearance TitlesSelim I (1470–1520), known as Selim the Grim, is the piv

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.

Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520).

Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. With personal charisma and military prowess—as well as the guidance of his remarkably gifted mother, Gülbahar—Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim—known by his subjects as “God’s Shadow on Earth”—fostered religious diversity, welcoming Jews among other minority populations into the empire; encouraged learning and philosophy; and penned his own verse.

Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail’s game-changing account “challenges readers to recalibrate their sense of history” (Leslie Peirce), adroitly using Selim’s life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories that have held sway for decades. Whether recasting Christopher Columbus’s voyage