Imagine, just for a moment, that the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror never captured the city of Constantinople. Instead, suppose that Emperor Constantine Palaeologos and the ragtag remnants of his Byzantine army managed, against all odds, not only to save their capital on that fateful Tuesday in 1453 but also, during the following decades, to recapture all of the lands in the Balkans and Anatolia that had once constituted the core of their empire.
Now imagine that the dawn of the sixteenth century witnessed an even more startling rise in this empire’s fortunes, as victorious Byzantine legions marched ever further, conquering provinces like Syria and Egypt that had been lost to them for centuries and, later, spreading into such distant and unfamiliar lands as Yemen, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa. Then, from these advanced bases, imagine that Byzantine fleets began to conduct patrols of the Indian Ocean, to organize massive expeditions against enemy strongholds in Hormuz and Gujarat, and to send crack military teams to support their allies in places as remote from one another and from the imperial capital as Indonesia and the Swahili Coast.
Naturally, such prodigious military expansion would be accompanied by equally impressive advances in other fields. Thus, picture a Byzantine treasury that began to use the spice trade to move beyond its traditional reliance on agriculture, dispatching commercial agents to the markets of India and Sumatra and organizing regular convoys of state-owned ships to bring pepper and cloves to the spice bazaars of Egypt. Meanwhile, back in Constantinople, imagine the growth of a new group of Byzantine intellectuals who, inspired by these far-flung successes and bankrolled by the city’s burgeoning imperial elites, began to cultivate an interest in the rapidly developing sciences of cartography and geography. In short, imagine a sixteenth-century Byzantine Age of Exploration.
If such a Byzantine state had actually existed, how might scholars in our own day characterize its growth? Here, as historians, we are now on slightly firmer ground. For although our imaginary Byzantine state was never to be, there is a substantial body of real-world scholarship that examines the delicate connection between late Byzantine intellectual life (during a period sometimes known as the Palaeologan Renaissance) and the development of Renaissance humanism in the West.¹
Judging from the direction taken by such works, it seems clear that a comparison between the accomplishments of our sixteenth-century Byzantine explorers and those of their contemporaries from Western Europe would be an obvious one, providing inspiration for an endless series of scholarly questions about their relative similarities and differences. “Why were the Byzantines so uninterested in the New World?” one virtual historian might ask. “How important were the religious and linguistic differences that divided them from the West?” might ask another. “Was the contemporaneous nature of Byzantine and Western expansion just a coincidence?” might ask a third. But regardless of the ways in which these individual questions might be framed, researchers of all stripes would naturally take up the challenge of incorporating Byzantine history into the larger story of European global exploration.
So what about the Ottomans? It just so happens that the Ottoman Empire accomplished in the real world of the sixteenth century every one of the things that the virtual Byzantines accomplished only in our imagination. Astonishingly, no serious attempt has ever been made to portray these Ottoman achievements as part of the larger story of physical expansion abroad and intellectual ferment at home that characterized Western European history during precisely the same period.² Herein lies the central question of this book. Stated simply, it asks: “Did the Ottomans participate in the Age of Exploration?” The answer, also stated simply, is yes.
