Extract from Crescent Dawn

In December 1512, an envoy from Regent Queen Eleni of Ethiopia arrived at the court of Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor of India, in Goa. The envoy, an Armenian named Mateus, had been dispatched in response to a Portuguese mission that had arrived in Ethiopia seeking the land of the legendary Prester John, a Christian monarch reputed to rule a vast empire somewhere beyond the unbroken chain of Islamic realms that kept Europe hemmed in to the south and east. Ethiopia having survived in near-perfect isolation for centuries, Queen Eleni enthusiastically seized this opportunity to establish close relations with the rising power of the West. She passed on intelligence and proposed an alliance: “We have news that the Lord of Cairo is building ships to fight your fleet, and we shall give you so many men… as to wipe the Moors from the face of the earth! We by land, and you, brothers, on the sea!”

Albuquerque forwarded Mateus to Portugal, where King Manuel I wept with joy at his arrival. Albuquerque dispatched a full report of his own with the embassy, outlining the new strategic opportunities partnership with Ethiopia opened up regarding Portugal’s empire-building in the Orient. A Portuguese fortress at the coastal town of Massawa, allied to Ethiopian control of the African interior, would dominate the entire Red Sea. “All the riches of the world will be in your hands,” Albuquerque informed his king, “and you could moreover prevent any merchandise from Cairo and those ports from entering India except in your ships.”

To Albuquerque, these objectives, easily obtainable in the short term, were but a step towards the ultimate victory of Christian Europe, for “I have in mind greater things than these that we could do if once we gain a footing there, and make alliance with the land of Prester John.” He was aware the headwaters of the Nile River originated in the Ethiopian highlands. Therein lay the key to certain victory over Egypt: “If the King our Lord would send out some of those engineers who make cuttings through the mountains of Madeira, they could divert the flood of the Nile and turn it aside from watering the lands of Cairo, thus in two years Cairo would be undone, and the whole country ruined.”

This plan, almost messianic in its breathtaking geopolitical ambition, spoke to the inner and outer features of the European mindset in this era. The outer mentality was one of limitless optimism. In the space of a single lifetime, Europe had broken the bounds of its marginalization as a peninsula at the western tip of Eurasia. Generations of trial and error in nautical navigation and technology had endowed Europe with unprecedented mastery of the world’s oceans. Now, European fleets progressed unhindered via the coast of Africa to the spice islands of the East Indies, and across the Atlantic to the shores of the New World. It was this naval supremacy that had created the context whereby a Portuguese viceroy in India could receive an ambassador from Ethiopia and dispatch him to his own monarch in Lisbon. A network of imperial command and control on such a globe-straddling scale would have been unimaginable in 1453, the year Albuquerque was born.

That year had another significance, one deeply rooted in the inner mentality of the European consciousness. For it had been in 1453 that the Ottoman Turks had at last conquered Constantinople, the city of cities, thereby extinguishing the Byzantine Empire. Those European merchants and monarchs sanctioning ventures into the unknown in search of gold, spices, and glory were as motivated by the primal instinct of fear as they were by pecuniary gain, religious evangelism, and national identity. The European desire to project power outwards therefore was rationalized as a policy of self-defense.

Prior to the Renaissance, with the sole exception of the spasm of imperialist aggression that drove Alexander the Great to the far bank of the Indus River, it was Europe that bore the brunt of invasion and would-be colonization from Asia, not the other way around. The Black Sea serves as a useful dividing line. From north of its shores came wave after wave of steppe nomads – Huns, Magyars, Mongols – battering against the sedentary states of Europe. From south of the Black Sea advanced powerful empires whose stated goal was to conquer and subsume European civilization – the Persians, the Arabs, and, most recently, the Turks.

This 360-degree panorama depicting the Ottoman siege of Vienna (1529) is as close to a real-time perspective as was possible in the 16th century. Shortly after the siege was broken, a publisher from Nuremberg, Niklas Meldeman, arrived in Vienna and purchased sketches from an artist who had recorded his observations from the spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral. He had this interpretation engraved, the first edition being in print by May 1530.

The early modern period is traditionally understood as being defined by the forced globalization the maritime powers of Western Europe imposed on the world. But in fact, European empire-building was just one manifestation of a global trend towards expansion and consolidation during this era. The tsars of Russia established their hegemony over Eastern Europe while imposing their authority ever eastwards across Siberia until reaching the Pacific Ocean. The Manchu forcibly usurped the Ming with their own Ch’ing dynasty and then expanded the frontiers of China to their greatest ever geographic extent. And the advance of the Mughals into India culminated with their domination of the entire subcontinent.

Above all else in significance, from the perspective of Western Europe, was the rise of the Ottoman Turks, expanding in all directions, in the process inheriting responsibility for leading the orthodox Muslim struggle against the apostates, schismatics, and polytheists both internally and on every frontier. When Suleiman the Magnificent ascended to the Ottoman throne in 1520 he was faced with the strategic challenge of allocating resources and determining the focus of diplomatic and military policy across no fewer than five separate geopolitical theaters. Starting in Constantinople and moving counterclockwise, these were:

1) The Balkan Front, dominated by the struggle with the Habsburgs.

2) The Mediterranean Front, where the struggle for control of the sea lanes and key islands invited confrontation with Spain, the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, and the Knights Hospitaller.

3) The Indian Ocean Front, where Ottoman commercial and diplomatic interests in India and Africa demanded a response to the empire-building of the Portuguese astride the trade emporiums of the Spice Route.

4) The Persian Front, with its endemic struggle for control of Mesopotamia against the Safavid shahs.

5) The Russian Front, a peripheral theater but one where Ottoman interest in maintaining the Black Sea as a Turkish lake against encroachment by the tsars meant an ongoing commitment to a security perimeter that stretched from the Caucasus to Crimea.

Like the Ottomans, the great empires of antiquity – Persian, Roman, Arab – had all straddled the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the wars these superpowers fought around their peripheries were unconnected. The Nubians in Africa, the Byzantines in Asia, and the Franks in Europe had each in their own way fought to defend themselves from the seemingly inexorable expansion of the Arab caliphate in the 7th to 8th centuries, but they had done so on their own terms, without reference to, let alone alliance with, each other. The critical break with the past manifested in the wars of the Ottoman sultanate was their interconnected nature. For the first time in human history, a hegemonic imperial superpower was confronted by a coordinated attempt at its containment that spanned multiple continents across hitherto unimaginable distances.

This process invites parallels with the core strategic parameters of the United States and its allies in their confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As diplomat George Kennan defined it in the wake of World War II, the Western powers must maintain “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Substitute Ottomans for Russians and you have in its broadest outlines the definition of European policy during the transition from the medieval to the Renaissance eras. European imperatives during this period, therefore, were as much reactive and defensive as they were proactive and expansive.

In practical terms, the extent to which those ostensibly dedicated to containing Ottoman expansion were prepared to actually commit men and treasure to its enforcement was patchy at best. This is not the story of a clash of civilizations between East and West. Europe was not united against the Ottoman challenge; the scandal of the age was the alliance between King Francis I of France and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Conversely, the resistance of the Saadi dynasty of Morocco to Ottoman encroachment played a critical role in denying Constantinople direct access to the Atlantic Ocean, with all that implied for the future course of colonization in the Americas. This reflects the reality that, although religious imperatives were critical to the motivations of all the key actors involved, these in no way fell neatly along the Christian–Muslim divide. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V desired nothing more than to eradicate the Protestant heresy metastasizing throughout his domains, but time and again the threat of Ottoman invasion forced him to stay his hand and indulge his Lutheran subjects with the recognition they demanded in order for them to contribute towards the common defense. Meanwhile, the Sunni Ottomans were locked in an endless cycle of war against the Shia Safavid dynasty that governed neighboring Persia. Nevertheless, however fitfully, the collective effort to constrain the expansion of the Ottoman superpower did ultimately succeed in preventing the sultans from prevailing in a struggle for power that might have proved the decisive tipping point in reordering the trajectory of history as we know it.

You can read more in Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age

The almost claustrophobic intensity of the Battle of Lepanto is captured in this print published the following year to commemorate the triumph of the Holy League. The heavy guns mounted on board each vessel took their grim toll as the lines closed, but once they came together, desperate hand-to-hand action raged across the narrow decks for hours until one side finally broke.

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