HISTORY GONE WRONG? 401rather than inventors. They understood the value of cannon and espe
cially of siege artillery, but they depended on Christian technicians to
do the founding. As the gap between Christian and Muslim guns grew,
the Turks could not even make use of pieces captured in battle.^6
Ditto at sea: the Ottomans replaced their battie vessels with more of
the same, while Christian naval armament improved. Listen to the Ot
toman historian Selaniki Mustafa Efendi reporting on the arrival in
1593 of the vessel that brought the second English ambassador to the
Sublime Porte: "A ship as strange as this had never entered the port of
Istanbul. It crossed 3700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns, besides
other weapons. The outward form of the firearms was in the shape of
a swine."^7 This image unconsciously testified to ignorance: these pigs
(significant symbol: Christian fare, taboo to Muslims) were iron naval
cannon, made in England in quantity as nowhere else. That ship and
a few others like it could have blown the Ottoman fleet (and the Venet
ian to the bargain) out of the water before it got close enough to ram
or grapple. Meanwhile the Ottomans tried to keep up by importing
large quantities of war materiel: muskets, gunpowder, saltpeter, iron,
blades. In spite of papal interdictions on arms sales to Muslims, in de
fiance of clerical anathemas and excommunications, much of this ar
mament came from England, which also sold to Spain. But then, what
to expect from conscienceless heretics?
And not only armament. Over time, trade relations between Eu
rope and the Levant reversed. Eastern craftsmen had once supplied
Europeans with fine cloth, carpets, tapestries, faience, and the like in
exchange for metal (copper and tin), slaves, and money. From the six
teenth century on, Europe made and sold the manufactures in ex
change for dried fruit, spices, cotton, cereal. The same for silk: in the
Middle Ages Europe had bought Byzantine silk fabrics; now it im
ported raw silk, and local producers in Turkey found it hard to com
pete with European buyers for the raw material. And paper: this writing
material was eagerly adopted in the Middle East (eighth century) from
Chinese example; forage was short, hides were scarce, and so was
parchment. The new technology took root slower in Europe, where
parchment was relatively abundant; but once European makers learned
to produce paper, they far surpassed their Levantine predecessors and
were soon selling large quantities in the East.^8 Even such substances as
coffee and sugar that had originally come to Europe from the East now
went the other way—in the case of sugar, after refining and processing.^9
Islam's greatest mistake, however, was the refusal of the printing