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

20 introduction

Meh med IV’s life is evidence that sultans could still matter and not be hidden

in the palace like a pearl in an oyster, aloof, secluded, and sublime, hermetically

sealed from the world, confi ned and condemned to a wilted life in the harem.

The second way this study is different lies in how it enters the longest-

running debate among scholars of Ottoman history through its analysis of

ghaza and jihad. Until recently, the prevailing argument concerning ghaza was

that it was an ideology of “holy war” by which Ottoman sultans “both fostered

and were themselves impelled by the ghazi urge to conquer the infi del lands for

Islam,” since “the Holy War or ghazā was the foundation stone of the Ottoman

state.”^51 According to this view, still emphasized in Turkish historiography, the

principal factor and dominant idea, the very reason and will to exist of the early

Ottoman enterprise and cause of its success was struggle against Christians.^52

More recently, scholars have cast doubt on this thesis, arguing that the terms

“ghaza” and “ghazi” were deployed merely as literary devices, serving to legiti-

mate early Ottoman expansion against Muslim as well as Christian enemies,

and that the term “ghaza” or “jihad” was an ideological gloss given to the earlier

term for raid and plundering (akın) deployed before the Turks became Mus-

lims.^53 The most infl uential recent history of the rise of the Ottomans argues

that ghaza consisted of predatory raids against the ever-shifting current enemy,

fi ghting not for a set of beliefs, but for one’s own side in military campaigns un-

dertaken for honor and booty, and that individuals frequently changed sides and

identities, establishing alliances, falling in love, marrying, and converting.^54 An-

other study goes so far in zealously divorcing the material and spiritual realms

that it declines to take seriously the religious motivation for ghaza. It expunges

it of any religious meaning and implies that zeal for plunder and zeal for reli-

giously motivated war are two opposite and distinguishable motivations.^55 This

approach fails to recognize that ghaza emphasizes the plundering of the infi del

enemy’s land and wealth. It is intimately tied to religion since it can only be

undertaken against those labeled infi dels; warring against the infi del enemy,

seen as an incumbent duty whether labeled ghaza or jihad, can occur only in

conditions defi ned by the religion.^56

In this study I argue that the second half of the seventeenth century, a

period that has not been considered in the debate because scholars have been

most concerned with the relation between ghaza and the achievements of the

early Ottomans, was an era in which the terms “ghaza” and “ghazi” were put

to considerable use promoting the pious image of the sultan. Ottoman authors

depicted Mehmed IV as a ghazi waging ghaza in the sense of ghaza that Paul

Wittek claimed for the early Ottomans: as the sword of God purifying the earth

of the fi lth of polytheism, a champion of Islam devoted to the struggle with

Christians.^57 The terms “jihad” and “mujahid,” the one who engages in jihad,