Most Americans do not know that their morning cup of coffee connects them to the Ottoman Empire, and only a few of them realize that this historic Islamic state helped give birth to Protestantism, the dominant doctrine of Christianity in America, or that European explorers who "discovered" the Americas, did so because of the Ottomans and other Muslims controlling Trade between Europe and Asia.

Thus began the writer Alan Michael, Professor of History at Yale University, in his article in the Washington Post, highlighting the role of Sultan Selim I (1470-1520) in discovering the new world and the American lifestyle that begins with morning coffee.

Michael says that when Americans think of the Middle East, they often see it as a theater of American wars and a key region for its oil, and yet "we all owe important parts of our culture and history to the most important empire in the history of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and specifically to one sultan." He lived half a thousand years ago. "

Sultan Selim I

September of this year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Selim I, the ninth sultan of the Ottoman Empire whose life spanned more than half a century of world history.

The writer mentioned that Selim I's victories in the wars of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus doubled the Ottoman lands almost 3 times more than the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, the German Catholic priest Martin Luther, the Italian diplomat and political philosopher Niccol Machiavelli and others of his contemporaries.

Slim's victories literally changed the world.

In 1517, Selim and his army marched from Istanbul to Cairo and defeated their foremost rival in the Islamic world, the Mamluk Empire.

Selim ruled more lands than almost any other country in his time, and he held the keys to global domination, as the American newspaper puts it.

Slim controlled the center of the world, had a monopoly on trade routes between the Mediterranean Sea, India and China, and had ports in all the major seas and oceans of the ancient world.

His religious authority in the Islamic world became unrivaled, and he had enormous resources of money, land and manpower, and he was called "God's shadow on earth."

The defeat of the Mamluks completely changed the global balance of power between the two major geopolitical forces of the era: Islam and Christianity.

In this period, religion was not just a matter of personal belief, but an organized logic of politics around the world.

In 1517, Selim annexed Mecca and Medina, and converted his empire from a Christian majority to a Muslim majority, making him a sultan and caliph of the Muslims.

Challenge and response

Selim's dominance of lands posed a spiritual challenge to Christian Europe, which was at that time a continent of small emirates and bickering hereditary city states, which were not - individually or collectively - comparable to the giant Islamic empire.

In an attempt to explain this imbalance in the balance of power, many Europeans found answers not only in politics but in what they considered their moral failures, in a world where religion was associated with politics, and the reflection of wealth represented judgments from God.

To a large extent, the most comprehensive and influential of these criticisms came from the German monk Martin Luther, who pointed out that the weakness of Christianity in the face of Islam stems from the moral deviation of the Catholic Church, as the corruption of the Pope eroded the Christian spirit from the inside, making the entire body of the Christian world fragile, And thus vulnerable to external enemies, according to the American newspaper article.

The Protestant reformer Martin Luther benefited from the European conflict with the Ottomans, and this gained him time.

Due to the military mobilization against the Ottomans, the Catholic (anti-Protestant) forces were unable to send additional forces to suppress the early Protestant movements.

As a result, Luther and his supporters were able to gain a foothold to spread the Protestant faith across German cities, and then eventually spread throughout the world.

"Cafe in Istanbul", watercolor by Maltese artist Amadeo Priziosi from 1850 to 1882 (Wiki Commons)

Discover the coffee

Control of the global coffee trade was one of the drivers of the Ottoman Empire’s economy from the time of Selim until the early 18th century. In fact, Selim’s army was the first to discover the coffee plant during its incursion into Yemen, and the Ottomans discovered how to prepare coffee, and established cafes devoted solely to drinking it.

The Ottoman café was a major landmark of the empire's culture, and these cafes gathered the Ottomans of all kinds, and their popularity attracted the attention of the government, which sent its eyes to it to seek public opinion, and later Europeans adopted cafes and other Ottoman entertainment habits during the early modern era, and Istanbul's cafes played a prominent role in popularizing the café and coffee. Globally.

Great Cairo

Selim I's power proved that his influence reached far beyond Europe and the Middle East, across the Atlantic, to North America.

In 1517, weeks after his Ottoman forces marched to conquer Cairo, the first Europeans landed in Mexico.

When the waves pushed them towards the Yucatan Peninsula (in Central America), three Spanish ships saw a major Mayan city, larger than anything any of them had ever seen.

This city is today Cape Katouche, near Cancn.

But in 1517, these Spaniards called it "El Gran Cairo", meaning "Great Cairo."

The report of the American newspaper considered that Cairo was in the eyes of the Spaniards a great, mysterious and bloody capital, as for centuries it sent ships to the families of the inhabitants of the Spanish settlements in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and threatened the imperial capitals, as well as its control of Jerusalem, and it prevented the Europeans from trading with India and China.

The name given by the Spanish explorers to the Maya city explains that they were deeply haunted by the imagination of Sultan Selim.

The writer considers that this behavior is evidence of European weakness, as Christians - even in the Caribbean - were still affected by the Ottoman ghosts.

The Ottomans continued to be major players on the world stage from the reign of Selim until the end of their state after World War I, after more than 6 centuries of rule, when European powers began to overtake the empire in the 19th century.

Mikhail concludes by saying that thanks to Selim I, "the Ottomans enjoyed more power, controlled more lands, ruled more people, and lasted longer than almost all other countries."

"Understanding this history helps us see the integral status - which is usually overlooked or rejected - of Muslims in our common past. While Islam is often portrayed as a contemporary threat, it is, in fact, an integral part of our history and culture, and a rich force." And constructive in our intertwined past. America, Protestantism, and coffee has an Islamic history. "