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

introduction 21

were also commonly used to designate the soldiers who battled them for spir-

itual and material rewards. Jihad was understood as a combination of moral

self-discipline and enjoining good and forbidding evil within the community,

and public action to reassert Islam in society, a reform movement targeting

Muslims as well as war against the infi del abroad.

The discussion of ghaza and jihad is relevant to explaining the ways this

study also contributes to the history of conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Em-

pire, the third way this book departs from previous historiography. It is impor-

tant to recognize that modes of conversion changed, and these changes were

historically signifi cant. Previous scholars have discussed how the Ottomans

were able to facilitate the near total conversion of Anatolia and urban south-

eastern Europe by rising to power through conquest and jihad, establishing a

unifi ed Islamic state with Muslim institutions, including dervish lodges, en-

couraging Sufi s to preach and propagate Islam to Turkish nomads, Christians,

and Jews, and recruiting Christian boys to serve the sultan.^58 Dervishes acted

as an avant-garde to colonize and proselytize, and institutions and incorpora-

tion followed the trailblazing path of Sufi s uncontrolled by political power.^59

Sufi s who had a close relationship with the sultan played a role in conversion,

including the Halveti dervishes, who boasted of sultans among their ranks;

the Mevlevi dervishes, who girded the Ottoman sultans with a sword as part of

their enthronement ceremonies at the tomb of Muhammad’s fl ag-bearer Abu

Ayyub al-Ansari in Istanbul; and the Bektashis, named after thirteenth-century

Sufi Hajji Bektash, who served as the patron saint of the elite infantry corps of

converted Christian recruits known as the Janissaries, who were members of

the order.^60 From the sixteenth century a Bektashi was assigned to the corps as

spiritual guide. The Bektashi-Janissary link points to how, along with promot-

ing Sufi proselytization, sultans also based their administration and military

on the continuous recruitment, conversion, and training of Christians.^61 Until

the end of the seventeenth century, the dynasty used the devshirme, the levy of

Christian boys who were converted and trained to be the administrative and

military elite.^62 According to the Ottoman historian Sa‘deddin, by the end of the

sixteenth century two hundred thousand Christians had become Muslim by

this process.^63 Ottoman expansion, the proselytization of Sufi s, and the creation

of the Ottoman elite led to the conversion of the lived environment from cen-

tral Europe to Yemen. One of the fi rst acts of the Ottomans upon conquering

Christian cities was to convert cathedral churches into Friday mosques in the

captured citadels and urban areas. The city that underwent the greatest trans-

formation of its sacred geography was the former Byzantine capital of Constan-

tinople, which was remade to suit an Islamic dynasty, the process launched by

the conversion of Hagia Sophia, the religious and political center of Orthodox