Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

90 honored by the glory of islam

with other groups, gloated, “By the command of God, all Jewish homes were

incinerated and all Jews were banished from that area,” and “when there was

a great incineration in Islambol the fi lthy homes of Jews residing within Jews’

Gate were destroyed and burned in the fl ames.”^45

The endowment deed for the mosque uses harsh language to narrate

events. More signifi cant is the appearance of the document itself: Sultan Meh-

med IV’s gilded imperial monogram adorns the fi rst page. The history of the

mosque, written for the approval of the sultan and valide sultan, describes the

fi re in the following fashion:

By the decree of God the exalted, the fi re of divine wrath turned

all the neighborhoods of the Jews upside down. The effect of the

fl ames of the wrath of God made the homes and abodes belonging

to that straying community resemble ashes. Every one of the Jew-

ish households was turned into a fi re temple full of sparks. Since

the residences and dwellings of Jews, who are the enemy of Islam,

resembled the deepest part of Hell, the secret of the verse which

is incontrovertible, “those that do evil shall be cast into the fi re”

(Qur’an 32:20), became clear, and in order to promise and threaten

those who deny Islam with frightening things, the verse, “woe to

the unbelievers because of a violent punishment” (Qur’an 1 4:2), also

became manifest.^46

Qur’an 32:20 is an appropriate verse, for it states, “Those who have faith and

do good works shall be received in the gardens of Paradise, as a reward for that

which they have done. But those who do evil shall be cast into the Fire. When-

ever they try to get out of Hell they shall be driven back, and a voice will say to

them: ‘Taste the torment of Hell-fi re, which you have persistently denied.’ ”

Scribes in the main Shariah court of Istanbul also gave meaning to the

Islamization of Jewish neighborhoods. Some sprinkled gold dust on the phrase

“the appropriation of the land of synagogues” in the margin of the Shariah

records.^47 These few fl akes of gold jump out at the modern researcher whose

eyes become dulled by thousands of dusty register pages of monotonous faded

black ink. The presence of the glittering metal refl ects approval of the dynasty’s

action, marking it so that it stands out from the other cases of buying and sell-

ing of property and other mundane transactions that the scribe recorded.

New dynastic and elite perceptions of Jews, visibly manifest in the strik-

ing gold letters of the endowment deed of the Valide Sultan Mosque and

Shariah court records describing the appropriation of Jewish properties, in-

dicate how much attitudes had changed since the reign of the conqueror of

Constantinople, Mehmed II. That sultan had welcomed Jews expelled from