This chapter explores how the three Middle English Otuel romances grapple with concerns about the power of non-Christian empires, Christian military vulnerability, and rash crusader conduct caused by the Mongol conquests, the Mamlūk recovery of Acre, and Ottoman victories at Nicopolis and Constantinople. The first part of the chapter reads the Otuel romances against the development of a dialectic of fear and hope in contemporary political discourse: fear about Christendom’s vulnerability and hope that a powerful non-Christian ally would infuse the Christian community with much-needed strength. The second part of the chapter discusses how these romances engage with and adapt what I call “reverse Orientalism”: a pan-European mode in which Muslim figures (real or imaginary) are made to look down on and offer damning critiques of Christians.

Following the Battle of Mohács in 1526 the kingdom of Hungary was divided into three parts: the north and west came under Habsburg rule, the east formed the new principality of Transylvania while the rest was occupied by the Ottomans. That division created a favourable environment for the spread of the Reformation. The new religious ideas had already spread quickly to Hungary after 1517 with merchants and students from the German-speaking communities of the royal free cities being among the first to adopt and disseminate them. Even the royal couple, King Louis II and Queen Mary of Habsburg, showed a receptiveness to the Reformation through their relationship with Prince George of Brandenburg. However, after Mohács 75 per cent of Hungary’s medieval parishes collapsed and different variants of Protestantism won wide support across all three areas into which the former kingdom was divided. Antitrinitarianism also gained many adherents in those parts of Hungary that were not subject to the Habsburgs. Between the Catholics, Protestants and Antitrinitarians, as well as the substantial Orthodox Christian communities in the region, and the Muslims in Ottoman areas, Hungary became remarkably multi-confessional. However, the Catholic Church retained enough support across all three areas to form the basis of a remarkable renewal under Habsburg auspices in the seventeenth century.

The opening chapter builds on a wide-ranging corpus of documents and texts, but at its core is a set of narrative accounts written South Asian hajj pilgrims between 1739 and 1857. Taken together, the sources illuminate how the hajj from India acquired distinctly “imperial” characteristics from the Mughals onward, and how Indian pilgrims hence also took mental stock of the later unraveling of empire through a signal watchword: “revolution” (inqilāb). The chapter begins by showing how Mughal patronage of hajj created ties of loyalty and subordination between the empire and its subjects. Taking readers from the classical Mughal era to the Sepoy Rebellion, it then reveals how – despite successive waves of regime change and revolution in both India and the Islamic world – the expansion of hajj equaled in South Asians experiencing pilgrimage as an interregional and even “global” undertaking, whose articulations, in turn, they recorded through personal narratives of travel firsthand accounts that offered views of mobility from the decks of Indian Ocean ships and from caravan journeys through the Arabian desert. At the broadest level, the chapter ultimately also contributes to recent scholarly efforts to situate the “age of revolutions” in non-European and global contexts.

Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

This chapter shows that the sixteenth century was not dominated by European actors but rather by three post-Timurid empires in west Asia, that expanded the reach of the Chinggisid sovereign norm and world ordering into new territories. These empires were the Ottoman, the Mughals and the Safavid, and together they ruled over a third of the world's population and controlled much of the world's resources. They also developed their own version of the Chinggisid sovereignty model, inflected by Timurid influences and varying according to local cultural repertoires. This was the notion of 'millennial sovereignty' as captured by the concept of sahibkıran, essential a ruler marked by conjunction astrology for great distinction. Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rulers competed with each other (and Charles V) for the title of sahibkıran. Their world order was connected through intellectual network of astrologers and other occult scientists who legitimised universal empire projects. This chapters develops a comparative narrative of these three empires and their rulers' universal empire dreams in the sixteenth century.

In Chapter 3, the narrative moves eastwards, to the south-western Arabian Peninsula, as well as forwards in time, to the early twentieth century. In the midst of escalating imperial competition for control of the southern Red Sea coastline, the Ottomans and various Europeans vied for military clients along the coast. Through the careers of two militia leaders, Shaykh Nasr Ambari and his lieutenant and successor Ahmad Fatini, we see colonial chaos spurred the creation of entirely new socio-political groupings. Ambari and Fatini’s men – the Zaraniq – emerged as a band of mercenaries and sea raiders from the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula in the late nineteenth century. At the height of their power in the 1910s, they numbered some 10,000 men and their families. The Zaraniq began perpetrating acts of violence against shipping to enhance their value as proxies. In the process they brought local shipping to a standstill. But the strategic, realpolitik alliances that underpinned their rise were ephemeral; after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the group dissipated and by the late 1920s, their leadership was dislodged. Colonial chaos proved highly disruptive to the region’s stability.

The Kurdish principalities that were renown since the Middle Ages have soon developed an ambiguous relationship with central states. They used the social and political specificities of their lands and the binarity of imperial powers situation in order to thrive. The Mamluk (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and Ottoman (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) eras seem to share some features as for the Kurdish configuration. Both realms intended to integrate while keeping a differentiated Kurdish space aside their core territory as a resource against Iranian (Ilkhani and Safavi) attacks. Although the Mamluks did not fully aggregate a Kurdish entity, two centuries later the Sublime Porte finally made this leap and created a fully Ottoman Kurdistan. The circumstances under which autonomy was granted to Kurdish principalities that recognized the one and only Ottoman rule were multifaceted. To take a few factors at stake, the troubled political situation that preceded the incorporation of Kurdistan, the deal that the Ottoman bureaucrats, among which the infamous Idrîs Bidlisi, crafted for the Kurdish mirs as well as their religious siding, were crucial. However, the process of full integration of Kurdish lands into the Ottoman imperium resumed at the end of the nineteenth century by crushing the weapons it once utilized against their neighbours.

The reign of al-Mustansir represents a continuum to al-Nasir's in terms of the stability of a caliphal state centered on the region of Iraq and Khuzistan. With the primary focus of Mongol invasions on Russia and Eastern Europe, the Abbasids thrive with affinity to the Ayyubids and Rum Seljuks. The Abbasid construction of the Mustansiriyya madrasa marks a new type of patronage for a project that diverged from previously endowed structures, such as caravanserais and Sufi lodges. The inclusion of all four Sunni sects of jurisprudence changed the idea of the madrasa while the generous support for students indicated Abbasid affluence. New wavesin the arts (the Baghdad school of manuscript painting) and architectural decorative forms (the girih and the muqarnas) flourish alongside developments in Arabic calligraphy with the famous Yaqut al-Musta'simi. A situation of Mongol belligerence and Abbasid disarray in the reign of the last caliph, al-Musta'sim, accelerates the pace to the conquest of Baghdad in 1258. A shadow Abbasid caliphate lives on in Mamluk Egypt until the Ottoman conquest in 1517.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the book and provides the reader with background information regarding the main themes in the volume.It opens with an overview of Persian historiography across the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, providing a brief overview of each empire.The chapter then examines recent studies on connected histories and the Persianate world. This is followed by a summary of the “state of the field,” noting recent scholarship on Persian historiography under the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, and studies on Persian historiography during the early and middle periods of Islamicate history. Next, the chapter presents an overview of each of the subsequent chapters in the book. It concludes with notes on terminology and transliteration.

The Introduction lays out the state of the art of scholarship on history and religious change in medieval Anatolia, arguing that historians’ preoccupation with the Seljuq and Ottoman periods has led to neglect of the rich source material for the Mongol period. It considers approaches by previous scholars such as Vryonis, Köprūlü, Ocak and Kafadar.