December 31, 2013

Europa Universalis 3: Building the Islamic Enlightenment, 1533 – 1582

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There is no worse calamity for knowledge and its people than when outsiders intrude

There is no worse calamity for knowledge and its people than when outsiders intrude

Everyone knows that the people of Christendom are lazy and morally weak. What else is to be expected of people who have been led so far from the path of righteousness as to believe Jesus is the son of Allah, the One and Only, who begets not nor is begotten? These people show themselves in all things to be misguided and confused; to eschew work where leisure could suffice; to revile hygiene where baser instincts can take hold; and to turn away from all enlightened thought to superstition and idolatry. Yet, it cannot be said that they are ignorant; for in Northern Italy and distant France lie almost all of the greatest institutions of learning in the modern world. How can it be that such idle and debased people – so weak of thought and ideals that even their skin is pale – could be in possession of all the greatest institutions of learning in the known world?

Of course they did not build that; they inherited this legacy of great thought from their predecessors in the Islamic world, and then they debased it. Their learning comes from the ancient Greeks through those most barbarous of idolaters, the Romans; and from the Arabs did they learn all they know of mathematics and science. Yet in the long dark era of our subjection and chaos, we allowed this learning to slip away, and a golden age of knowledge tarnished irrevocably, so that all that is great about modern science and philosophy is held in trust by the faithless sinners of western Europe.

Have we not sinned as a people, to allow this knowledge to pass from us into the hands of infidels? Did not Ibn Taymiyyah say that the people of the One True Faith should

Seek (beneficial) knowledge,
because seeking it for the sake of Allah is a worship.
And knowing it makes you more God-fearing;
and searching for it is jihad,
teaching it to those who do not know is charity,
reviewing and learning it more is like tasbeeh.
Through knowledge Allah will be known and worshiped

Sadly we have failed to respect this Islamic ideal for many years, and in the midst of our internecine strife we have allowed the unbeliever to take hold of all beneficial knowledge, and to keep it from us. Does our worship of Allah the Most Merciful not suffer because of this lapse in our vigilance over jihad?

However, those times of internecine strife have been replaced with a time of prosperity and glory, under the great Mehumet I, and now we are able to look to the west, to those nations near us that hold so much of the lost knowledge that is our rightful legacy; and we are able now to reach out, and to take that knowledge back. Of course, we cannot take knowledge from the minds of men, even of infidels; nor can we exert control over how new knowledge is found in the hearts and minds of men (and does not Allah decide in His infinite power, as the Great Teacher, what all men will know and when they will know it?) But we can control the physical spaces in which knowledge is gathered, taught, and protected for future generations. We cannot reclaim the mind of the unbeliever, but we can strike out to take physical possession of the places that teach that mind, that form it; and in so doing we can establish  an Islamic Enlightenment, that ensures all knowledge is right and proper, and attendant to its legacy of Islamic principles.

Of course, to do this we must invade and subjugate Northern Italy. But such are the trials of jihad.

Huseyn II reigned for 16 years after he conquered Hungary, and during this time he made some more small gains, taking islands in the Aegean sea that had long been home to pirates and crusaders. Rhodes, Naxos, Crete and Corfu fell to our glorious soldiers, and in the twilight of his years Huseyn II’s scholar and archivist was able to take ship from the most southern edge of the Aegean sea all the way to the tip of Croatia without ever losing sight of the Empire that Huseyn II had built. However, this was not enough for Huseyn II, who had glorious visions of reclaiming not just the physical domain of Islam, but also its cultural legacy. For this reason late in his reign he declared war on the newly-founded state of Naples, which incorporated the city-states of Firenze, Romagna and Siena. Though Naples had military technology far in advance of our own, and was protected by powerful allies, through Huseyn II’s cunning diplomacy we were able to fashion a war in which Naples was isolated from its powerful friends, and through bravery and force of numbers we subdued the entire Italian peninsula in a brutal two year war. Though our brave soldiers faced warfare against modern cannon and forts, in mountains and forests unfamiliar to them, as ever the Christians wilted before the heat of our righteous fury, and the university cities of Firenze, Romagna and Siena were taken. Thus, in the year 1560, did the Islamic Enlightenment begin …

In his wisdom, Huseyn II recognized that to rule all these lands would be impossible, so he opted to carve off only the Northern states, and to vassalize Sicily and the Papal State; he then cast the lesser pickings of Southern Italy back to the Napolitan dogs. All praise should be given to Huseyn II for his tolerance: here he stood, at the doors to the Vatican itself, in possession of the very centre of the unbeliever’s faith, but recognizing the value of art and history for itself, he chose not to raze the city and put all its infidels to the sword, as all accepted to be his right; instead he gave the city its freedom, and allowed the curia to remain as a symbol of the lower status of Christianity. Perhaps when intelligent Catholics look upon their vanquished city, they will reflect on who is the One True God. If they do not, perhaps in future they will be chastised again by our glorious armies. For does our Holy Book not say,

If they desist not from their word (of blasphemy), verily a grievous chastisement shall befall the blasphemers among them.

And are not our emperors just in offering this chastisement?

Before his death in 1564 Huseyn II implemented imperial rule across this whole vast land, but sadly his successor Seyfetim I achieved nothing with the fruits of Huseyn’s work or the new-found enlightenment, and died leaving only bastards. After a brief struggle amongst them, Mehmet I cousin of Huseyn II took the throne, and he rules to this day in glory from the centre of our Empire. In his wisdom Mehmet I realized that it is not enough to take possession of the great centres of learning in Christendom, and thus to restore the legacy of Islamic thought to the Empires of Islam; like a wise and learned father, the Ottoman Empire must also chastise those of its more junior and less educated Muslim brethren, and bring the true fruits of Islamic thought to them. Nowhere was this more the case than with the Golden Horde, that great seething sea of barbarity spreading east of our holy land, which was barely Islamic except in name, and ruled by degenerate horse-loving wretches from beyond the great deserts. This Horde was a constant problem on our borders, and served to destabilize all it was in contact with. What the folk of the Horde needed was discipline and education, in equal measure. And who else should offer such, but a loving and firm-handed father?

Thus it was that in the early years of his reign Mehmet I began war upon the Golden Horde. In this war the wisdom of Huseyn II’s belief in the power of education was made manifest. Our soldiers and our culture were so far in advance of the Horde that even our smallest army had but to stride onto the battlefield, and countless throngs of our enemies would be banished. In but two years of warfare a handful of divisions of our mighty army spread out across the Horde, taking its lands in our grip from Dagestan south of our Empire all the way to India. Behind us we left a trail of vanquished armies and unsettled local warlords; as the Horde’s client system fell apart under the pressure of our armies, and the subject peoples saw the vulnerability of their former masters, they rose up against the Khanate. By the time our armies had rampaged across these vast distances to India the land was aflame with rebellion. We retreated again, choosing instead to take only the lands closest to our own; and at the end of this huge crusade, the peoples of Dagestan, Qarabagh, Azow and Astrakhan had been brought into the loving embrace of the Ottomans. Closer to our own shores, those foolish nations that had previously allied with the Timurids, then turned to the Horde for protection, were suitably chastised, their lands taken and their leaders executed; the rump of the kingdoms of Crimea and Candar was left an empty shell, vassal to our will; but the rest of their territories were absorbed into ours. Now our grip on the Black Sea was complete but for those ports held by Poland, and the nearest of our Islamic neighbours who had fallen to the degeneracy of the Horde were back within our grasp. We also possessed the great trading posts of Astrakhan, and were within striking distance of the gold mines of Samara.

Of course I joined this crusade across the steppes of the Horde. From my vantage point on horseback, as I stood outside my Yurt staring up at the vast Eastern sky, or when we stood in the ransacked rooms of the Khans’ shabby castles, smelling the smoke and hearing the screams of dying prisoners, it became clear to me that the Ottoman Empire offers all of the Islamic world a better, more enlightened way to live; those that do not take it must one day be forced into it for their own good. It was also clear, as I looked into the eyes of freed slaves, or witnessed the violence-charged resentment of ordinary citizens of the Horde, or saw the explosive violence meted out to vanquished armies by the peasants they had previously oppressed, that the Horde was collapsing. Barely an empire any longer, it was held together by the twinned tyrannies of low men and huge distances, and was an anachronism in the modern era. To its north Muscowy grew in confidence; to its East, the Ming empire; to its south a brace of new empires jostling for power. The Golden Horde was going to collapse under internal division, and then be torn apart by these powers; and at some point we, the Ottomans, would have to step in to assure peace and to prevent the worst excesses that we saw in the end times of the Timurids, and were then powerless to stop.

But for now, we can do no more. Exhausted after two years of campaigning on those vast and open spaces, I returned to our capital to discover talk of a new and greater threat than any we had faced before: the Holy Roman Empire was looking eastward, to us; and the head of that greedy and evil Empire was none other than the King of Austria, our closest neighbour. Rumours grew that Austria hoped to retake Hungary from us and forge a new, larger Austro-Hungarian kingdom that would no doubt spell disaster for all Europe. It was our obligation to ourselves and also to all of Christendom to stifle that ambition. In the Autumn of 1582, war with eastern Europe’s greatest power loomed …

 

 

 

December 28, 2013

Europa Universalis 3: The Ottoman Empire, 1399 – 1533

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The Ottoman Empire in the reign of sultan Huseyn 2

The Ottoman Empire in the reign of sultan Huseyn 2

Our Sultan could not have known that those first few strides up the blood-slicked steps of his liege’s throne were the steps that would take our Ottoman Empire into history. Some might argue that he had wit and vision to see the future, but there is nothing in the family life or writings of Sultan Bayezid to make us think his vision was anything but that of the moment. He was a man of small visions and simple goals, I think, and he saw nothing more than a chance to head off brutal events that would lead to the destruction of our unique culture. So he took the moment, and the knife, and before anyone could stop him he made a future for us all. Now I am charged with writing the account of those heady  years, when our Sultans turned our fate around from slavery and subjection to conquest and greatness.

Our first Sultan, Bayezid I, has by now faded into history – he ascended the throne on the first day of the new year of 1389, and though our Empire has learnt to preserve its records better than any of its neighbours, still it cannot be said that much was written of him or his talents. Though our storytellers sing his praises during our many festivals, I think he was perhaps a man of few great traits – a man unsuited to leadership, but blessed with a sense of good timing and incredible bravery. It was only by the grace of those two instincts that he saved us from ruin, for when he ascended the throne we were beset by troubles.

In 1389 our Empire was yet a fragile and nascent thing, stretching from the mountains of Georgia in the east to the edge of Bosnia and Serbia in the west. We were as a minnow in a muddy river near the end of summer, flitting between great and predatory pikes: to our north and east lay the vast and fathomless expanse of land held by the Golden Horde, and to the southeast was the Timurid empire, a dynasty said to have been built on a foundation of numberless corpses. Our sultan Bayezid’s predecessor was ignorant and vain, and as well as squandering the great wealth of our lush lands, he had embroiled us in a war with both the Timurid empire and our two nearest Muslim neighbours, Kandar and Dulkadir. Lest something were done, all of the Ottoman lands east of Thrace[1] would have been divided up between the carnivorous Timurids and their jackal allies.

So it was that Bayezid slew our aging and vainglorious ruler, and ascended the blood-slicked steps to the throne, from there to guide our empire out of those dark times and into the bright light of eternal rule. Standing now at the window of my study in modern Dalmatia, looking over the gentle waves of the Aegean sea and listening to the call to prayer from a thousand sun-washed minarets in this great and peaceful city, I like to imagine that Bayezid’s throne was a beautiful monument to his glory, set in a great marble-pillared room, gleaming bands of sunlight from lead-light windows transforming the whole into a glowing space just one step from the ineffable heaven to which we all must one day return; but I know more likely it was a small and squalid chamber, the floor covered in dirty rushes and the throne little better than an animal-hide coated stool, perhaps set two steps up on a rough stone platform. Or perhaps the throne was behind a screen, to protect the sultan from his many enemies. Such were the times, and such were the men who risked our entire culture with their dissolute antics in the palace of our rulers.

So it was that Bayezid I began his great works. First, noticing that the Timurid empire was always warring with itself, and realizing that the Ottoman Empire was in no position to defeat such a voracious and barbaric culture, our Sultan by cunning diplomacy convinced them to accept a temporary peace, that they might focus on their own troubles. By the grace of Allah the Granter of Security, the Timurids miraculously relented in their threats of war, and called their puppet nations to heel. In the following 15 years until his death, Bayezid used this time to restore peace and stability to the core of our empire: from Serbia and Bosnia on the edge of Europe to the edge of Georgia in Asia, he restored dignity and nobility to our land. During this time trade, art and culture flourished, and the government grew in strength and sophistication. But Bayezid I knew that trouble lay in our future, and that the colonial powers of Europe and Asia could not long resist the temptation to pluck the ripe fruit of the Ottoman Empire. Such is the fate that awaits a nation straddling two great cultures, and realizing this Bayezid focused his preparations in peacetime for the coming war. He focused on building the size of our army, and developing the nation to support it as one in times of war; and near the end of his reign he annexed the Dalmatian coast, giving our glorious troops a chance to test their arms against European armies and eliminating the threat from the many upstart city-states along that beautiful stretch of sea. During this time too, all of the region once known as Bulgaria embraced the teachings of the Prophet (may peace be upon him), and turned to the one true faith.

Sadly, Bayezid I did not live to see the full fruit of his dreams, and he was replaced in 1404 by Musa I. Musa was a war-like and active leader, and for 9 years of his 29 year reign our empire was at war. First the armies of the Ottomans looked east, to secure our eastern borders against the Golden Horde, and in a brief but bloody two year war were able to capture the whole of Georgia and much of the Crimea. With the modern-day port of Kaffa in our grasp, Crimea our vassal and Georgia conquered, Musa I gained near-complete control of the Black Sea, with only Poland and the rump of the Byzantine Empire sharing access. Our glorious armies also conquered Trebizond, putting the coup-de-grace on the last province of a once-great empire, and then turned west, to conquer most of Greece as far as Athens. This was a time of war but also of peaceful expansion, with our kingdom learning much about foreign nations, and sending ambassadors and traders as far afield as distant Paris and remote Novgorod.

Musa I died peacefully in 1433, and was replaced by Abdullah I, who ruled only for 7 years that were spent consolidating the Ottoman culture in Georgia and Greece. He died young, and a regency council ruled in the place of his successor, Suleyman I. Under a regency council little can be done abroad or at war, and the 5 years of the regency council as well as the 8 year reign of Suleyman I were times of little note; during this period our Empire did not grow, though it flourished, and Suleyman I – though he styled himself “the Magnificent” – was in truth too much a drunkard and a layabout to enact great plans of state. However, despite being raised by a wine-soaked fool, Jem I succeeded Suleyman  in 1453 to achieve great things. In three years of brutal battle while still a young man, Jem I managed to conquer all of Eastern Hungary and parts of Wallachia, reducing the once-proud kingdom of Wallachia to a humble vassal and extending our empire so that finally the tide of the one true faith washed up against Europe. All of christendom looked on in shock as the One True Faith spread its influence as far as borders of Hungary and Poland.

Jem I’s vision of uniting Hungary, Bulgaria, Transylvania, and all the Slavic states with Ottoman under the banner of the One True Faith was not completed before he died, though, and internal unrest prevented his successor Huseyn I from continuing this mission; for 25 years the Ottoman Empire lived at peace with its neighbours under his reign. By now the Timurid Empire, which 100 years ago we so feared, had collapsed under the weight of greed and corruption that its leaders were so famed for, and its last provinces sat on our borders warring only with themselves. Those nations that this degenerate gang of barbarians once held on such a tight leash had now fled to new owners, as the lowly gutter dogs that they are, and where once we were threatened by vassals of Timurid we were now flanked by the Golden Horde’s two chained lions, Candar and Dulkadir. Nonetheless, Huseyn I skilfully built relations with the Golden Horde, somehow finding common ground with their filthy, fur-clad leaders, and our Empire bided its time as we waited for an empire built on greed and bloodlust to begin consuming itself. While we waited, though, that last principality of the Timurids gave up its fight with itself; its leaders came on their knees to us and begged to be allowed to join the Ottoman Empire, that they might share in its grace and peace. Truly, God is Great.

After Huseyn’s death in 1509 our current glorious emperor, Huseyn II, ascended the throne. His plans of completing the conquest of Hungary were delayed, however, by the western powers. In 1510 the distant kingdom of Castille noticed our expansion – perhaps word of the beauty and munificence of our Imperial lands reached the Castillian King in his dismal narrow-windowed castle, sparking his jealousy – and a warning was issued. Our people barely new of these great and distant powers of France, Castille and Britain, and we thought our affairs and theirs completely disconnected, but this was to prove far from the case. Because the people of christendom follow a religion based on idolatry and cannibalism, they must always be jealous and frightened in the face of the Prophet (may peace be upon him); though we had no conflicting interests and our Caliphate has only ever sought peace, the infidels of Castille sought to chastise us from their distant cities. For seven years they sent ships full of pale-skinned minions to harry our shipping lanes and blockade our ports, and in one dismal year they even landed their sweaty and ill-prepared troops on the western shores of our Greek conquests. But here, too, we showed them the teachings of the One True Faith: our fleets sank and destroyed their fleets, and when they had the temerity to land men on our hallowed shores we defeated them, drove them back into the sea, and tossed the survivors from the cliffs of Montenegro. After 7 years a mealy-mouthed, pale-skinned wretch came to us begging peace, and though in truth our glorious armies were preparing to launch an invasion of Castille, Huseyn II showed his famous mercy, and brokered a peace that until this day has been unsullied.

With this peace, Huseyn II gained the chance to focus on his grand plan, and within just the last few years it has been completed: after war with Austria, Bohemia and Hungary our glorious empire has captured the remains of Hungary and all of the outlying territories of Bohemia. Behold the map! Our Empire is now so vast that as an ambassador in Georgia sits down to dine on dates and flat bread with one of the Khans of the Horde, here on the Dalmatian coast an artist will be just setting up his easel to paint a picture of court ladies taking a light lunch of olives and pastries; or North in the Mountains of Carpathia a shepherd might be settling down to a morning break of nuts and dried mutton. Truly, our Empire has grown beyond the dreams of humble Bayezid as he grabbed the reins of power, intent only on guiding us out of the darkness. Now, we have become the Empire of the Sun, its territories so far-flung that they hold the whole of a day in their grip. And even now, as I sit here in my study contemplating this great sweep of history, I hear our ruler looks in the same direction as me, across this tranquil Aegean sea to the coast of Northern Italy, whose universities and libraries hold the secrets of a thousand years of learning. Were our Janissaries to take those hallowed halls, then surely an Islamic Reformation could begin, in which the whole world looked to the crescent sun of the Ottomans for knowledge, as well as the wisdom of the One True Faith. Is this the future of the Ottomans, to teach Europe of Asia, and Asia of Europe … and all of them to learn the One True Faith, that is greater than all that has come before it in all of time …?

Yes, I think this is our future … let us see where it will take us …

—

fn1: Istanbul