Religion, Statecraft and Conquest, circa 1400-1600

The Ottomans emerged from the competing Turkish emirates of medieval Anatolia, and it was they who prevailed and who put an end to the thousand- year existence of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.

Conversions from Christianity to Islam in the Balkans did happen, but gradually, and for a variety of reasons. The Ottoman army was clearly a melting pot and the Christians fighting alongside Muslim soldiers did convert. Little is known about the details of this process but it certainly happened, since by the sixteenth century a regular Ottoman soldier who was a Christian was seen as an anomaly that could not be tolerated. Even prior to that, a recent study has cautioned against assumptions of an easy mix among Muslim, Christian and convert soldiers, facilitated by Ottoman tendencies towards latitudinarianism and syncretism. Hagiographies of fighter saints from the time celebrate violence against Christians, such as the spearing of 400 Christian monks or turning an infidel on a spit.

Over the course of the sixteenth century most cities in the Balkans became majority Muslim, in part due to Muslim immigration from Anatolia and in part due to Christian conversion. These conversions were the result of some combination of urbanisation (Christian converts tended to be new arrivals to the city), social pressure and the high prestige that the conquering religion enjoyed. However, although it is impossible to know the exact mix of motivations, forced conversion by the state was not a factor.

Let us turn now to the issue of persecution of Muslims within the empire. The conquest of Constantinople, now Istanbul, was of course a monumental step in Ottoman history, but it has not traditionally been seen as consequen­tial in terms of state policy towards those seen as heterodox Muslims. That would come later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the rise of Safavid power in Persia. Unlike the Mamluks in Egypt, who were the Ottomans' political rivals, the Safavids were both a political and a religious threat. This was because they adopted Shi'a Islam and appealed to the restless Turcoman populations of eastern Anatolia on that basis.

The first pro-Safavid uprising in eastern Anatolia occurred in 1511 and is known as the Sahkulu rebellion, after one of the rebellion's leaders.^[111] An Ottoman army was sent after the rebels, with limited results (although Sahkulu was killed), but in 1514 the Ottomans, under Selim I, decisively defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, on the border between today's Turkey and Iran. Despite this military victory, the Ottomans were now determined to wipe out the Safavids' followers - known derisively as the kizilbas or redheads, after the red headgear they wore - within the empire.

In the past the Ottoman persecution of the kizilbas was seen as a localised and historically particular exception to the norm of imperial toleration, little more than security measures adopted in the face of an imminent Safavid threat directed against Ottoman domains. Now some historians are suggesting that it may well have been part of something larger, namely part of a lengthy and determined project on the part of state authorities to make the empire, and its Muslim subjects, a properly Sunni Muslim polity.^{[113] [114] Casting doubt on earlier ideas of Ottoman indifference to religious matters, there is now a great deal of evidence that the Ottomans pursued a policy of ‘Sunnitisation'.11 Moreover, the records also show that such measures began long before the rise of the Safavids and, though they intensified as a result of the threat from the east, cannot be seen solely as a response to external factors. Already in the waning years of the reign of Mehmet II (1451 -81), the sultan appointed an official called a namazci, whose task it was to punish (typically with a fine) those who failed to observe the five daily prayers.[115] Later on, in 1530, a ferman (sultanic decree) was sent out to every corner of the empire, commanding the con­struction of mosques in villages that did not have them.[116]}

The list of measures taken is longer than this. What interests us is whether Sunnitisation involved violence. There is limited evidence from the sixteenth century that suggests that, in the main, it did not. Another imperial decree, this one from the second half of the sixteenth century, ruled that it was no longer sufficient to fine people for missing prayers; if they persisted in their dereliction, imprisonment and even capital punishment could be imposed, but we do not know the extent to which this was implemented.^[117] If, on the other hand, the persecution of the kizilbas was part of a programme for enforcing religious orthodoxy, then it seems that the Ottomans were more willing to use violence in pursuit of religious ends than was previously thought.