102 ISLAM AT WAR
decisive victory. Cem and his surviving followers fled to Egypt and took
refuge with the Mamluks. This was one of the rare occurrences in which
the succession was decided by civil war, and not the strangler’s silk.
Bayezit’s first military operations made some territorial gains in Mol-
davia. A short war with the Mamluks was little more than a series of
skirmishes. A major war began brewing in 1496 when Ottoman ports were
closed to Venetian grain merchants. In 1497 a Venetian ship filled with
Christian pilgrims for the Holy Land was captured and its passengers sold
into slavery. Venice responded by building up its fleet, which forced a
similar response from the Ottomans. On July 4, 1499, the Ottomans seized
Lepanto, in western Greece, inflicting a major blow on Venetian naval
power in the Adriatic and Aegean. Venetian ports were taken in Morea
(modern Greece) and raids devastated Venetian holdings in Croatia and
Dalmatia, penetrating to the gates of Venice and capturing Durazzo on
August 14, 1501. Later in the year, a crusader fleet moved into the Aegean
with the goal of taking Lesbos, but it was dispersed by a storm and failed
in its endeavors. Venice sued for peace.
When Bayezit abdicated in 1512 he had doubled the size of the Ottoman
Empire. A worthy successor to the great Mehmet, Bayezit was succeeded
by Selim I, sometimes known as “Selim the Grim.” He received that title
because of his sadistic streak and the endless stream of carnage that oc-
curred in his reign. On his succession he had his five nephews and two
brothers strangled. As a devout Sunni, he considered the Shiites as here-
tics, and in order to deal with their heresy, he had a census taken. When
70,000 were identified, he sent out special teams of executioners that
murdered 40,000 of them. In 1514 Selim began a campaign against the
Safavids in Persia. He defeated the Persian army before the gates of Tabriz
and, upon his victory, ordered the Muslims that he had taken prisoner,
executed. After Persia he brought renegade parts of Anatolia back under
control. From there, in 1516, he moved against Syria. In 1517 he moved
against Cairo and defeated the Mamluks in battle. After defeating the
Mamluks, several hundred Mamluk prisoners were executed on the spot
despite promises that if they surrendered they would be spared. Fully
25,000 of the defenders of Cairo were killed in the battle. Another 50,000
of the city’s inhabitants were also killed in the pillage that followed.
In the last days of his reign, Selim decided that all Christians in the
empire should be put to death, but the wise intervention of the mufti pre-
vented the implementation of his plans. Selim’s desire to murder the Chris-
tians was based on the same religious fervor that had earlier caused him to
slaughter the Shiites, whom he had also seen as heretics and apostates.
Selim clearly believed in and practiced murder for purely religious reasons.