introduction 5
Romans”), an area stretching from Istanbul to near Vienna in central Europe,
Crete in the Mediterranean, and Podolia in Ukraine, when Christians and
Jews converted to Islam before the grand vizier, sultan, or other Ottoman offi -
cial such as a magistrate, his or her change of religion was invariably referred
to in Ottoman archival and literary sources as “being honored by the glory of
Islam,” which I have chosen as the book’s title. No matter the diverse circum-
stances in which people left their former religion and entered Islam, whether
on the battlefi eld in the face of certain death or compelled by the sultan, his
mother (the valide sultan), or the grand vizier, whether in a conversion cer-
emony before the ruler or at a meeting of an Istanbul Shariah court, and
whether written in gold ink in a pre sentation copy of a literary masterpiece to
the sultan or jotted down in black ink in the inside cover of a Shariah court
register, Ottoman writers and bureaucrats labeled it in this manner. They
were not concerned with the motivations of the convert and rarely recorded
any of his or her intentions in changing religion, let alone the former religion
or name.
Subjected to constant proselytization efforts and increasingly familiarwith the nature of Ottoman sources, I reversed my research questions. I began
to wonder what drove the head of the archive and other convert makers rather
than what compels people to change religion. Now my questions were these:
Why do people attempt to bring others of the same religion to their under-
standing of that religion, or try to ensure that people of completely different
religions join their tradition? What is the connection between personal piety
and proselytization? Who mediates conversion? Because every day I was in-
vited to convert and then pray at the imposing sixteenth-century Suleimaniye
Mosque, I also began to think about the effects of conversion on the urban
environment: How does conversion affect the religious geography and sacred
space of a city? The fact that Constantinople was conquered with much blood-
shed in a war conceived on both sides as a struggle against the infi del caused
me to also fi nally ask, What role do war, violence, and changing power rela-
tions play in the motivations of proselytizers in converting people and places?
These are important questions worthy of investigation because their answers
offer broad implications for the way scholars approach and conceptualize reli-
gious conversion, while presenting an original reading of Ottoman European
history seen through the prism of religious transformation. Answering these
questions for the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire provides new insight
into the reign of a forgotten sultan, an understudied era in Ottoman history,
the changing nature of Islam and understanding and practice of jihad, rela-
tions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Europe, and the history of
Istanbul.