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

introduction 23

What makes this book different is that it does not seek to answer why

Christians and Jews became Muslim, which is an unproductive question

based on the source material. Modern studies of conversion have noted that

converts may not be able to pinpoint the reasons or know why they converted,

change their explanations over time, or narrate their religious transformation

according to a set prototype. Facing the extant documentary record, which

views conversion from the standpoint of the converters, a historian can best

hope to accomplish an understanding of the worldview of Islamic rulers who

were active agents in the conversion of Christians and Jews. The aim is to

bring the sultan back into the process, based on the most signifi cant Ottoman

chronicles written during the reign of Mehmed IV and after, as well as legal

sources, archival and other literary sources generated at the sultan’s court,

epigraphic and visual sources.^69 This material provides the historian insight

into how elite men and women at that time shaped, formed, and articulated

their understanding of the moment in which they lived and the cultural value

of conversion in that era.

The unraveling of Mehmed IV’s legacy began at the end of his reign and

continued after his death precisely because he was so successful earlier on.

His achievements in expanding the empire, converting people and places to

Islam, and reestablishing the image of the active ruler ended in catastrophe.

But he also left a standard for sultanic behavior that subsequent sultans and

the advisors and chronicle writers who tried to contain it wanted to forget. The

last thing the bureaucracy and grand viziers wanted was an activist sultan. Al-

though Mehmed IV expanded the empire, he also ruled during the beginning

of its territorial decline, which modern historians imbued with nationalism

have not been able to avoid highlighting. In this book I analyze what came

before the siege of Vienna and ultimately led to it. Mehmed IV’s participation

in a pietistic Islamic reform movement—with its concomitant thrust toward

conversion of Muslims, Christians, and Jews that led to the Ottoman Empire’s

greatest expansion—has to be evaluated in terms of its impact on what later

became divided into European and Ottoman history. In particular, I put that

siege in a new light. This perspective also reminds us that the Ottoman Empire

was very much a European Islamic empire, controlling up to one-third of what

is today considered Europe, and that not only interaction but intricate inter-

relations between the Ottoman Empire and central and eastern Europe—and

among Muslims, Christians, and Jews—were long term and had many dimen-

sions.^70 Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire

was “a full and active member” of the European states; by the end of Meh-

med IV’s reign in the seventeenth century, it “was as integrated into Europe

as it ever would be.”^71 Western European denigration of the empire—and by