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

84 honored by the glory of islam

fi re conveys the horror of the event: “Thousands of homes and households

burned with fi re. And in accordance with God’s eternal will, God changed the

distinguishing marks of night and day by making the very dark night lumi-

nous with fl ames bearing sparks, and darkening the light-fi lled day with black

smoke and soot.”^12 People were terrifi ed and thought it was the end of time.

Losing hope that their homes would save them, men, women, and children

had sought shelter and refuge for their lives and belongings in the inner court-

yards of the large royal mosques, especially Suleimaniye and Bayezid, or other

buildings considered safe, but the fl ames did not spare them there either:

“Wherever people sought refuge saying ‘we will be saved,’ the opposite oc-

curred.”^13 People burned along with their possessions as the wind made the

fl ames rain upon them like hail. This fi re spared neither a single grain nor a

copper coin.

Contemporary writers frequently referred to burning candles when de-

scribing the fi re. Relying on a Sufi motif, Nihadi writes that hundreds of

people, “renouncing all things save love for God,” burned like moths that ea-

gerly fl y round and round a candle until they ultimately burn.^14 The merciless

fl ames burned countless people along with their goods, and the survivors,

“naked and weeping, barefoot and bareheaded, were driven and brought to the

Hippodrome” and the inner courtyards of Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmed I’s

mosque. More than one hundred thousand men and women, Muslim, Chris-

tian, and Jewish, came to the Hippodrome out of fear of the violent fl ames

of the fi re; the throng grew into such a great crowd that people could barely

move or breathe.^15 Feeling the fervent fl ames, the heat of a swelteringly humid

July day, and the crush of the pressing crowd made the people fear they would

drown in sweat.

Miraculously, the fi re died down on the third afternoon, which brought

inexpressible relief to the suffering people.^16 Two-thirds of Istanbul was de-

stroyed in the confl agration and as many as forty thousand people lost their

lives. Writing soon after the inferno, Vecihi Hasan Çelebi claimed that in only

forty-eight hours, “that graceful city that was like paradise the sublime was

turned upside down, destroyed and leveled and reduced to ash by the violent

fi re, and not a trace of the inhabited, prosperous city remained.”^17 Writing a

generation later, an anonymous chronicler claims that even the thought of the

storm of wind-driven violent fl ames was enough to cause terror.^18

Without food or water for days, many people were on the verge of death.

Thousands died in the famine and plague in Thrace that followed the fi re, which

Mehmed Halife related were perceived as either signs of the end or caused by

people’s sins.^19 Only rats that feasted on unburied corpses were satiated. Of-

fi cials were executed for being negligent in extinguishing the fi re.^20 Because