postscript 255
Rather than the call to prayer silencing the peal of church bells, as at Bozca
Island, Crete, and Kamaniça, a church bell replaced the roar of Ottoman can-
nons, which would never again threaten one of the most important central
European cities, the capital of the Habsburg Empire. Surviving the siege also
is a crescent-shaped, brass, gilded ornament, which had been placed atop the
highest tower of Saint Stephan’s in the early sixteenth century. Its inscription
reads in Latin, “This in your memory, Suleiman. Anno 1 529.”
Following an era in which many places were converted in Muslims’ favor,by the turn of the eighteenth century the opposite process of the Christianiza-
tion of Muslim spaces predominated. Little sign remained of Mehmed IV’s
conquest of Kamaniça. A single tall minaret that remained after the Ottomans
lost the citadel and city to the Polish king was topped with a three-meter-high
statue of Mary, symbolizing the re-Christianization of Islamized places.^2 Just as
Muslims had disinterred the Christian dead when they took the city, Christians
disgraced the buried Muslims after the citadel’s reconquest. That the Ottoman
Empire was a European empire and was considered one by its contemporaries,
and that it had been part of the European political order for centuries, would be
forgotten after late nineteenth-century treaties took away most Ottoman terri-
tory in southeastern Europe.^3
Unlike success in battle, which is easily reversed, conversion may havehad a more durable outcome, if not always the one the converters originally
intended. Purifi cation can never really succeed, for purifi cation movements
inevitably produce new hybrids.^4 The Kadızadeli interpretation of Islam con-
demned any sign of the reconciliation or fusion of diverse beliefs and practices.
Despite the aims of these religious reformers, one of the most long-lasting
consequences of Mehmed IV’s era may have been the creation of communities
of descendants of seventeenth-century Christian and Jewish converts to Islam
that either maintained religious beliefs and engaged in practices that combined
elements of the original and adopted faiths, or created new religions following
their ostensible conversion experience. The converters’ and converteds’ aims
of conversion can be radically different; conversion is not a one-way street, as
converts shape their religion in light of their own interpretation. Mehmed IV
thought that he had converted the messianic claimant Shabbatai Tzevi into
Aziz Mehmed Efendi, a proselytizing force for Islam. His actions and those
of his followers, however, provide another example of the fl eeting effects and
ultimate unraveling of Mehmed IV’s successes.
The Shabbatean movement was not quenched. Despite being a Muslimafter his conversion, Aziz Mehmed Efendi continued to engage in Kabbalah.
He encouraged his followers to retain a belief in his messianic calling and prac-
tice the Kabbalistic rituals and prayers that he taught them. Antoine Galland