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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate:

Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance
of an Ancient Islamic Institution
Giancarlo Casale
University of Minnesota

Abstract

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the
Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the
world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing schol-
arship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of moder-
nity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and
those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to
the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two
opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the
caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in
the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty
of Tordesillas in 1494.

Keywords

Ottoman Caliphate – Indian Ocean – Khutba networks

*  Versions of this article as a work-in-progress were presented at the seminar L’épreuve des
Indes at Sciences Po, at the University of British Columbia History Colloquium, and as the
2012 Stanton Sharp Lecture at Southern Methodist University. I am sincerely grateful to col-
leagues in each of these institutions for their constructive engagement with my ideas, which
have profoundly shaped this paper in its final form.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�5700658-��34�469

486 Casale

Introduction

The Ottoman caliphate is a legal and religious doctrine that defines the sul-
tans of the Ottoman Empire, in addition to being rulers of their own territorial
state, as the protectors and defenders of Muslims everywhere in the world.
Historically, it is a doctrine most closely associated with Sultan Abdulhamid II
(r. 1876-1909), who made the ideology of the caliphate a lynchpin of both his
domestic and foreign policy to an extent unmatched by any previous member
of his dynasty.1 As unprecedented as Abuldhamid’s embrace of the institution
may have been, however, the Ottoman caliphate has a history that long pre-
dates his reign. And equally important, it has enjoyed an afterlife that is still
with us today, nearly a century after the final demise of the Ottoman state.2 In
my own classes in Ottoman history, for example—taught at a public university
in North America, a place as geographically and existentially remote from the
Ottoman Empire as might be imagined—I routinely have students who tell me
that, as pious Muslims, they have enrolled in the course because the Ottomans
“were the last caliphs of Islam.”
And yet, for all its enduring resonance, the historical origins of the Ottoman
caliphate remain shrouded in a surprising haze of uncertainty, with the basic
questions of when, under what circumstances, and even if the pre-modern rul-
ers of the Ottoman Empire ever considered themselves “caliphs” still largely
unsettled among historians.3 On one extreme, there are those who would
argue for a “primordial” caliphate, insisting that the office was passed to the
Ottomans through an uninterrupted line descending from the first caliphs of
Islam and, ultimately, the prophet Mohammed himself.4 And at the opposite

1  See Selim Deringil, The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the
Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London, 1998).
2  For a recent anthology of essays on this subject, see Madawi al-Rasheed, Carool Kersten,
and Marat Shterin, Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts
(London, 2012).
3  The literature on the Ottoman Caliphate is vast. For a general introduction to the subject, see
D. Sourdel, “K̲ h̲alīfa,” in P. Bearman et al. eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill
Online, 2011). In Turkish, a comprehensive review of the literature is in Ş. Tufan Buzpınar,
“Osmanlı Hilafeti Meselesi: Bir Literatür Değerlendirmesi,” Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür
Dergisi 2, no. 1 (2004): 113-131. See also Hakan Karateke, “Legitimizing the Ottoman Sultanate:
A Framework for Historical Analysis,” in Hakan Karateke and Marcus Reinkowski, eds.,
Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden, 2005), 13-54.
4  Examples include Ismail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı’s authoritative survey of Ottoman history in its
most recent edition, a standard reference work among historians in Turkey. See Uzunçarşılı,
Osmanlı Tarihi, 4th ed. Vol. II (Ankara, 1983), 293-295. For a general review of the scholarship

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 487

end of the spectrum, there are those who deny that before the modern era the
Ottomans ever regarded the caliphate as an important basis of dynastic legiti-
macy, arguing instead that the idea was an invented tradition that, beginning
in the late eighteenth century, developed in reaction to the imperial expansion
of Russia and various Western powers.5
In keeping with the theme of this JEMH special issue on Sovereignty and
Early Modern Frontiers, this article seeks to bring new clarity to the history of
the Ottoman caliphate by suggesting an “early modern alternative” to these
two opposing narratives. While acknowledging that the Ottoman caliphate did
indeed represent the creative reinvention of a long moribund institution, in
a manner inextricably linked to the wider currents of world history, it locates
this rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweep-
ing reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of
Tordesillas at the dawn of the early modern world. Moreover, rather than seek-
ing the origins of this rebirth in the Ottoman Empire itself, it looks instead to
the vast maritime frontier of the Indian Ocean, where new notions of universal
sovereignty introduced from Iberia first came into conflict with an alternate
model of universalism characteristic of the region’s Muslim trading commu-
nities. Before outlining this new narrative in full, however, it will be useful to
review in more detail the two dominant (and contradictory) paradigms that
have been used to understand the history of the Ottoman caliphate until now.

The Primordialist Thesis: A “Transfer of the Caliphate”

The “Transfer of the Caliphate” narrative, positing a direct and uninterrupted

line of transmission between the earliest caliphs of Islam and the sultans of the
Ottoman dynasty, corresponds with the official version of history adopted by
the Ottoman state during the final decades of the nineteenth century. It begins
in 1258 with the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, a city that had until then served as
the seat of the Abbasid caliphate. Following his capture of the city, the Mongol
Khan Hulagu (d. 1265) ordered the public execution of the reigning Abbasid

on the Ottoman caliphate from a “neo-primordialist” perspective, see the introductory argu-
ments in Azmi Özcan, Pan Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans, and Britain, 1877-1924
(Leiden, 1997), 1-11.
5  Alongside several authors introduced below, a general summary of these arguments can be
found in Gilles Veinstein, “La question du califat ottoman” in Pierre-Jean Luizard, ed., Le choc
colonial et l’islam: les politiques religieuses des puissances coloniales en terres d’islam (Paris,
2006), 451-468.

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488 Casale

caliph, al-Musta‘sim (r. 1242-1258), after which he tracked down and killed most
of the remaining members of the dynasty. In so doing, Hulagu brought to a
definitive end the temporal reign of the Abbasid caliphs, who for more than
six hundred years had claimed the office by virtue of their descent from the
Prophet Mohammed’s paternal uncle Abbas ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib (d. 653).6
There was, however, one surviving member of the dynasty, a distant cousin
of al-Musta‘sim by the name of al-Mustansir (d. 1302), who managed to evade
capture and take refuge in Mamluk Egypt, the only regional state to success-
fully resist Mongol invasion. Thereafter, for more than two hundred and fifty
years, Mustansir’s branch of the family would be maintained by the Mamluks
in Cairo, in an arrangement that modern historians have dubbed the “Shadow
Caliphate.” While denied any temporal authority, these Shadow Caliphs sanc-
tioned the rule of the Mamluks, a dynasty of slave soldiers that lacked politi-
cal legitimacy of its own. In exchange, the Mamluks supported the Abbasids
financially and maintained the appearance, through various customs and pub-
lic displays, that they were still the titular heads of the universal community
of Muslims.7
This arrangement lasted until 1516, when the Ottoman Sultan Selim “the
Grim” (r. 1512-20) invaded Mamluk Syria, killed in battle the reigning Mamluk
Sultan Qansuh al-Gawri (r. 1501-1516), and captured the last Abbasid Caliph,
al-Mutawakkil iii (d. 1543). Dispatching al-Mutawakkil to Istanbul, Selim
proceeded south with his army and conquered Egypt in the following year.
According to the “primordialist” narrative, he then returned to Constantinople
where, in a public ceremony held at the Eyüp Sultan mosque, al-Mutawak-
kil formally transferred to Selim his title and the insignia of his office. In so
doing, he recognized the Ottoman dynasty as the only house worthy to assume
responsibilities as commander and defender of the universal community
of believers, and for the next four hundred years the office would be passed
on from one Ottoman sultan to the next. It was finally abolished by an act of
the Turkish parliament in 1924, shortly after the declaration of the secular
Turkish Republic.8

6  Sourdel, “Khalīfa,” (Brill Online, 2011).

7  P.M. Holt, “Some Observations on the Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo,” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 47, no. 3 (1984): 501-07.
8  See note 3 above for references supporting this view.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 489

The Revisionist Response: A “Construct of Modernity”

Except for a basic agreement about the destruction of Abbasid Baghdad in

1258, virtually every other element of the “Transfer of the Caliphate” narrative
outlined above has been challenged by revisionist historians. To begin with,
while acknowledging the existence of a Shadow Caliphate in the centuries
after 1258, they argue that its legitimacy was completely disregarded outside of
Mamluk Egypt, and that even among the Mamluks a marked level of cynicism
towards the caliphate appears to have been the norm. In one famous episode
from 1310, for example, when a losing claimant to the Mamluk throne obtained
a caliphal certificate supporting his position, his rival shot back: “Stupid fellow!
For God’s sake, who pays any heed to the caliph now?”9
As a result, the revisionists argue, the ideal of Muslim political unity that
the caliphate had once represented virtually disappeared after 1258, replaced
by a constellation of competing Muslim rulers who no longer felt the need
for even the fiction of unity previously provided by the caliphate. There were,
to be sure, self-aggrandizing rulers from various parts of the Muslim world—
including some of the earliest Ottoman sultans—who sometimes went so far
as to include “caliph” among their list of titles.10 Yet when they did so, it was
in a manner virtually interchangeable with “sultan,” lacking any implication of
descent from earlier caliphs, much less an exclusive claim to the title or preten-
sions to universal authority.11 Equally important, this general disregard for the
past prestige of the caliphate seems to have been shared by intellectuals as well
as politicians. In the centuries after the fall of Baghdad, Muslim thinkers across
the intellectual spectrum, from the extreme traditionalist Ibn Taymiyya to the
hyper-rationalist Ibn Khaldoun, seem to have reached a basic consensus that
the caliphate as an institution no longer had relevance for the times in which
they lived.12
All of this serves as background to the real crux of the revisionist critique,
which hinges on the almost total lack of sixteenth-century evidence attesting

9  Ibn Taghribirdi, al-Nujum al-Zahira, vol. 8 (Cairo, n.d.), 262, as quoted in Holt, “Some
Observations on the Abbasid Caliphate,” 506.
10  A text from as early as 1421 referred to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I as “Caliph of
God.” Sourdel, “Khalīfa,” (Brill Online, 2011); see also Halil İnalcık, “The Ottomans and
the Caliphate,” in P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge
History of Islam (Cambridge, 1970), 320-3.
11  Veinstein, “La question du califat,” 458-9.
12  Bruce Masters, The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Cultural History (New York,
2013), 53.

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490 Casale

to a “transfer of the caliphate.” Stated simply, no contemporary source (either

Ottoman or Mamluk) that describes Selim’s campaign gives any indication
that al-Mutawakkil’s title was ever bestowed on Selim. Equally lacking are
any contemporary descriptions of the investiture ceremony supposed to have
taken place in Istanbul or any discussions of its significance ex post facto in
sources from later in the century.13 There are even some contemporary authors
(although none who wrote in Turkish or who hailed from outside the former
Mamluk territories) who continued to refer to al-Mutawakkil III as caliph until
his death in 1543.14
In fact, the first bona fide Ottoman source to make explicit reference to a
formal “transfer of the caliphate” dates from no earlier than second half of the
eighteenth century and suspiciously coincides with the signing of the landmark
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca between the Ottoman Empire and Russia in 1774.
Significantly, one of this treaty’s central elements was the Ottoman sultan’s
renunciation of his territorial sovereignty over Crimea in exchange for Russian
recognition of his continuing spiritual authority over the region’s Muslims as
caliph. According to the revisionists, it was only at this late date that the idea
of an Ottoman caliphate received formal legal standing—through an interna-
tional agreement signed with a non-Muslim state, rather than any authentic
inheritance validated by Islamic tradition.15 As such, the narrative of a much
earlier “transfer of the caliphate” served as nothing more than a convenient
fiction of the moment, giving the humiliating agreement a legitimacy that it
otherwise lacked. Over time, however, the story proved so compelling that it
was accepted by the Ottomans themselves as established fact to the point that,
a century later, the sultan’s role as caliph was formally enshrined in the first
Ottoman constitution of 1876.

Modernity and its Discontents: What Went Wrong?

On the surface, it would be hard to imagine a more ironclad case for the
“Construct of Modernity” thesis. Revisionists can claim to have the full weight
of contemporary documentary evidence on their side. They can point to a
convincing set of motives for the later invention of the “transfer of the

13  Ahmed Asrar, “The Myth about the Transfer of the Caliphate to the Ottomans,” Journal of
the Regional Cultural Institute 5, no. 2-3 (1972): 111-120; Faruk Sümer, “Yavuz Selim s’est-il
proclamé calife?”, Turcica XXI-XXIII (1991): 343-354.
14  Holt, “Some observations on the Abbasid Caliphate,” 507.
15  Veinstein, “La question du califat,” 464-466.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 491

caliphate.” And they can also draw support from older traditions of Muslim
thought regarding the caliphate, including an early scholarly consensus that
the caliph could only be a descendant of the Prophet or hail from a particular
Arab tribal lineage (thereby rendering the Ottomans ineligible).16
Even so, the primordial narrative of an Ottoman “transfer of the caliphate”
has proven surprisingly resilient, remaining the official textbook version of
events taught in schools to this day (in both Turkey and elsewhere), and con-
tinuing to be reproduced even by professional historians, including specialists
of Ottoman history.17 This has understandably served as an enduring source
of professional frustration to scholars in the revisionist camp.18 But it is also
a problem with implications far beyond the walls of the academy, since the
resilience of the primordial narrative ensures the coexistence of two oppos-
ing, indeed mutually incommensurate ways of understanding the caliphate’s
history at a moment in which it has assumed an ever more visible place in
various popular and ideological imaginings of political Islam.19 Even Osama
bin Laden, in his first videotaped statement following the 9/11 attacks, made
a famously oblique reference to the Ottoman caliphate.20 And the topic has
become the focus of even greater attention following the sensational procla-
mation in 2014 of a “restored caliphate” by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a.k.a. “Caliph
Ibrahim”), ideologue of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.21 In short, rarely has
there been a more pressing need for historians to lend clarity to a question of
intense relevance to the contemporary world. But with such a large gap con-
tinuing to divide the primordialists and the revisionists, history has more often
served to increase the general level of confusion.
In searching for ways to bridge this gap, an obvious first step is to identify
reasons for the “Transfer of the Caliphate” narrative’s resilience despite the
apparent lack of evidence to support it. Here at least two factors can be sin-
gled out, the first political and the second historical. On the political side, we

16  For an exhaustive collection of both primary source writings and analysis on this topic,
see Carool Kersten, ed., The Caliphate in Islamic Statehood: Formation, Fragmentation, and
Modern Interpretations, Vol. II: Challenges and Fragmentation (London, 2015).
17  See note 3 above.
18  See Veinstein, “Les origines du califat ottoman,” Les annales de l’autre islam 2 (1994): 26.
19  See S. Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (London, 2014).
20  “What’s Osama Talking About?,” Slate.com, October 8, 2001, accessed August 17, 2014,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2001/10/whats_osama_talk-
ing_about.html.
21  Mark Tran and Matthew Weaver, “Isis announces Islamic Caliphate in area straddling
Syria and Iraq,” The Guardian, Monday, June 30, 2014, accessed August 19, 2014, http://
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/30/isis-announces-islamic-caliphate-iraq-syria.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

492 Casale

can point to the highly contested intellectual genealogy of the “Construct of

Modernity” narrative. Notably, the first modern scholars to raise questions sys-
tematically about the historical legitimacy of the Ottoman caliphate were the
Russian orientalist Vasily Barthold and his British counterpart T.W. Arnold, the
former a specialist in the history of Russian Turkestan and the latter a professor
in British India.22 Both openly worked in the service of empires that ruled over
large Muslim subject populations and wrote in the years immediately before
and after WWI, a time when their respective nations were embroiled in an open
military confrontation with the Ottomans.23 Subsequently, in the immediate
post-war period when the abolition of the caliphate became a foundational act
of the secular Turkish Republic, their arguments were passionately endorsed
by those eager to buttress the intellectual legitimacy of Turkish Kemalism and
of secularism in general.24 Ever since, it has been difficult for revisionists to
completely cleanse their historical case of this legacy of political opportunism.
Meanwhile, an altogether more serious problem is presented by the histori-
cal record itself. For despite the lack of contemporary documents attesting to
a “transfer of the caliphate” per se, there is a wealth of substantiating evidence
to show that, in the decades immediately after this event was supposed to have
taken place, the Ottoman sultans did come to embrace the title of caliph and
did so with a systematic insistence that had no real historical precedent in pre-
vious centuries of Ottoman history.25 The earliest evidence for this seems to
date to the very end of the reign of Selim I, albeit in an episodic and cursory
fashion.26 But by the end of the reign of his son Suleiman “the Magnificent”
(r. 1520-1566), the Sultan’s claim to the universal caliphate had been elaborated
and defended by Ottoman political theorists, integrated into the mechanisms

22  V. Barthold, “Khalif I Sultan,” Mir Islama I (1912): 203-226, 345-400; for a partial translation
see Barthold, “Caliph and Sultan,” in Islamic Quarterly 7 (1963): 117-35; T.W. Arnold, The
Caliphate (Oxford, 1924).
23  See Abderrahmane el-Moudden, “Sharifs and Padishahs: Moroccan-Ottoman Relations
from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries” (Ph.D. Diss., Princeton, 1992), 1-27.
On Arnold’s role, see also Sean Oliver-Dee, The Caliphate Question: The British Government
and Islamic Governance (Lanham, MD, 2009), 91-102.
24  M. Bozdemir and J.-L. Bacqué-Grammont, “Mustafa Kemal et le califat,” Les annales de
l’autre islam 2 (1994): 87.
25  For a general overview of the evidence, see Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman
Relations: A Study of Political and Diplomatic Relations Between Mughal India and The
Ottoman Empire 1556-1748 (Delhi, 1989), 181-86.
26  İnalcık, “The Ottomans and the Caliphate,” 321.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 493

of Ottoman legal practice, and proclaimed to the world through the iconogra-
phy of state-sponsored art, architecture, literature, and history.27
Recognizing this problem, revisionist-minded historians have responded
with a wide range of theories designed to explain it while still avoiding the
“Transfer of the Caliphate” narrative. Some have pointed to the Ottomans’
rivalry with the Safavids, which increasingly led the Sultans to portray them-
selves as defenders of Sunni orthodoxy against Shi’ite heresy.28 Others have
looked to the intellectual traditions of Hanafi law, the Ottomans’ preferred
school of Shari’ah jurisprudence, which allowed for rulership—and by exten-
sion, the caliphate—to be legitimately claimed by any ruler capable of fulfill-
ing its function.29 Still others have pointed to the influence of medieval Sufi
writings on ethics and morality, which envisioned the caliphate as a state of
spiritual perfection attainable either by a ruler through his justice or by an
individual through moral mastery over one’s self.30 More mundanely, the
death in the 1540’s of al-Mutawakkil III, the last known member of the Abbasid
family, has been proposed as an impetus for learned discussion of who was fit
to succeed him.31 And it has even been suggested that the Ottomans used the
title “caliph” simply out of habit, without understanding or even taking a par-
ticular interest in its larger ideological implications (described as the banalisa-
tion of the caliphate, in the formulation of Gilles Veinstein).32
Despite their diversity, a common thread running through all of these inter-
pretations is a belief that the Ottoman caliphate was a question primarily of
interest to the empire’s Turkish-speaking learned elite, with limited resonance
outside of its rarified circles and, in consequence, of little relevance to the
larger currents of early modern world history. Collectively, they do have the
merit of reflecting the great multiplicity of positions expressed by Ottoman
intellectuals during the course of the sixteenth century. Yet none has provided
an explanation compelling enough, or complete enough, to bridge the divide
between the primordialists and the revisionists.

27  For a comprehensive review and analysis of sixteenth-century Ottoman writings on the
caliphate, see Hüseyin Yılmaz, “The Sultan and the Sultanate: Envisioning Rulership in
the Age of Süleyman the Lawgiver (1520-1566)” (Ph.D. Diss., Harvard University, 2004),
166-204. See also Colin Imber, “Suleyman as Caliph of the Muslims: Ebu’s-Suud’s formula-
tion of Ottoman Dynastic Ideology,” in Gilles Veinstein, ed., Soliman le Magnifique et son
Temps (Paris, 1992), 179-184.
28  See Imber, “Suleyman as Caliph,” 179-184.
29  Masters, Arabs of the Ottoman Empire, 53-54.
30  Yılmaz, “Sultan and the Sultanate,” 176-184.
31  H.A.R. Gibb, “Lutfi Paşa on the Ottoman Caliphate,” Oriens 15 (1962): 287-295.
32  Veinstein, “la question du califat,” 458-9.

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494 Casale

With these limitations in mind, we are now ready to propose a starting point
for an entirely new narrative of the Ottoman caliphate, one that leaves behind
the familiar confines of the Ottoman Empire and its privileged literati and
turns instead to a much different place: the disparate Muslim trading commu-
nities of the Indian Ocean frontier.

The Caliphate Adrift: Universalism in the Post-Mongol

Indian Ocean

Our new narrative begins long before the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in
1258, with the early history of the caliphate. Virtually since its inception, the
Muslim community had been buffeted by bitter disagreements about the
nature of caliphal authority, as well as the legitimacy of various rival claim-
ants to the title. But despite this contentious political history, throughout the
early centuries of Islam there remained a broad consensus about the symbolic
importance of the office, which was seen as the concrete expression of the
ideal of the Umma, or Muslim community, as a unified body politic as well
as a universal community of believers.33 In practical terms, the most power-
ful and eloquent vehicle for communicating this ideal was the weekly public
reading of the reigning caliph’s name in the khutba, or Friday sermon, in con-
gregational mosques. Through this invocation, Muslims everywhere were able
to proclaim their shared allegiance to a unified political community as a part
of their weekly devotional obligations.34
One measure of the transcendent power of this unifying ritual is the fact
that, in surprisingly short order, it spread through trade and missionary activ-
ity to areas of the world far removed from the physical authority of even the
most powerful early caliphs. According to one contemporary Arabic source, it
was introduced by Muslim merchants to the Chinese port of Canton as early
as the year 851.35 And in subsequent periods, as caliphal authority waned, it
was adapted accordingly to preserve its original symbolic function despite
dramatic changes in the political landscape. By the eleventh century, it had
become common for autonomous local rulers to seek recognition from the

33  See Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries
of Islam (Cambridge, 1986).
34  For a discussion of early juristic views about the khutba, see Norman Calder, “Friday
Prayer and the Juristic Theory of Government,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 35-47.
35  J. Sauvaget, ed. and trans., Relation de la Chine et de l’Inde (Paris, 1948), 7.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 495

reigning caliph as “sultans” and to ensure in return that the khutba in mosques
under their jurisdiction were read in the caliph’s name alongside their own.36
In this way, the symbolic ideal of the caliphate survived the long centuries of
institutional decline, allowing believers to ritually reaffirm their membership
in a universal community even as the emergence of rival caliphates and the
progressive devolution of power to local rulers made the reality of political
unity progressively more remote.
It was this theoretical consensus, as much as the physical seat of the Abbasid
caliphate in Baghdad, that was destroyed by the Mongols. In its place, there
emerged a new standard of local, territorially defined sovereignty, whose rise
can be clearly indexed through a critical change to the khutba itself. While the
situation in the decades immediately after 1258 remains unclear, by the four-
teenth century it became standard practice for even petty Muslim rulers to
insist that the khutba be read exclusively in their own names throughout the
territory under their control—and to recognize any failure to do so as an open
challenge to their authority. Significantly, this was the case even in Mamluk
Egypt, the ostensible seat of the Abbasid Shadow Caliphs. With the exception
of the first few years following the caliphate’s transfer to Cairo, all Mamluk sul-
tans required the khutba to be read in their own names rather than that of the
caliph and, in an inversion of earlier practice, demanded that each successive
caliph proclaim an oath of allegiance to the sultan rather than the reverse.37
There was, however, at least one part of the Muslim world that proved a
partial exception to this general rule: the Indian Ocean region, where there
is evidence that a notably higher level of respect for the caliphate seems to
have persevered. In 1344, for example, Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq of Delhi
(r. 1324-1351) is known to have requested an emissary from the reigning caliph
in Cairo to legitimize his rule, a practice repeated by his successor Firuz Shah
(r. 1351-1388).38 Further to the east in Bengal, Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah (r. 1342-
1358) included the epithet “Right Hand of the Caliphate and Helper of the
Defender of the Faithful” among his royal titles—even while leaving open the
question of which actual caliph, if any, he may have had in mind.39 A later
Bengali ruler, Sultan Jalal al-Din Mohammed (r. 1415-1432), sent a delegation to

36  See I. Ahmad Ghauri, “The Sunni Theory of Caliphate and its Impact on the Muslim
History of India,” Islamic Literature 13, no. 6 (1967): 46-7.
37  Holt, “Some Observations on the Abbasid Caliphate,” 504-06.
38  Ian Copland, Ian Mabbet, Assim Roy, Kate Middlebank and Adam Bowles, A History of
State and Religion in India (New York, 2012), 92.
39  Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley, 1993), 41.

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496 Casale

Egypt with his own request for authorization from the Abbasid caliph.40 While
on the island of Sumatra, at the far eastern edge of the Indian Ocean, a great-
grandson of the penultimate Abbasid caliph of Baghdad was welcomed and
maintained at the court of the Sultan of Samuderai-Pasai. A surviving mon-
umental gravestone there in the name of his son, ‘Abdullah b. Muhammed
al-Abbasi (d. 1406), indicates that he too remained a venerated figure in
Samuderai-Pasai throughout this life.41
Leaving behind the powerful sultanates of the subcontinent and Southeast
Asia, and turning to the islands and port cities of the western Indian Ocean,
we find an even more enduring and evocative survival of the caliphate. Here,
throughout the centuries following the fall of Abbasid Baghdad, Muslim
merchant communities expressed both a communitarian identity and an
allegiance to the ideal of Muslim universalism by building and maintaining
extensive trans-regional maritime “khutba networks.” These networks had
multiple iterations over time and space and were configured through formal-
ized relationships with a number of different rulers and dynasties (ranging
from the powerful Delhi Sultanate in northern India to the Rasulid emirs of
Yemen).42 But as Elizabeth Elbourne has recently argued, they shared several
common characteristics both consistent and unusual enough to be worthy of
special attention. First, they could be surprisingly geographically extensive,
bringing together regions as far removed from one another as the Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf, and the Malabar Coast of India. Second, they were a typical fea-
ture of communities of Muslims outside of the Dar al-Islam, in other words,
of Muslims who were either living under non-Muslim rule or whose polities
were geographically isolated from other Muslim states (and had never been
part of a politically unified caliphate). Third, rather than reflecting the submis-
sion to a particular ruler’s authority within a given territory, khutba networks
were expressions of a largely voluntary relationship of group allegiance, or
tā‘a, which connected a core polity with constituent members of autonomous
Muslim communities across diasporic trade networks.43

40  This request was followed several years later by the much more dramatic step of Jalal al-
Din declaring himself “Caliph of Allah in the Universe.” See Eaton, Rise of Islam, 57.
41  Elizabeth Lambourn, “From Cambay to Samudera-Pasai and Gresik—the Export of
Gujarati Grave Memorials to Sumatra and Java in the Fifteenth Century CE,” Indonesia
and the Malay World 31, no. 90 (July 2003): 235-244.
42  On the khutba network of the Rasulids, see Eric Vallet, “Les Sultans Rasūlids du Yémen,
protecteurs des communautés musulmanes de l’Inde (VIIe-VIIIe/XIIIe-XIVe siècles,”
Annales Islamologiques 41 (2007): 149-176.
43  Elizabeth Lambourn, “India from Aden—Khutba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late
Thirteenth-Century India,” in Kenneth Hall, ed., Secondary Cities and Urban Networking

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 497

Because of the central role reserved for the khutba and its explicit conno-
tations of communitarian identity through allegiance to a ruler—as opposed
to affiliation through kinship or through simple confessional ties—these net-
works appear quite distinct from other known diasporic trading communities
of the pre-modern Indian Ocean, such as the Jewish merchants of the Cairo
Geniza, the Muslim Seyyids of Hadramaut, or the Armenian merchant dias-
pora centered in New Julfa, Iran.44 But they were equally distinct from the
land-based societies of their Muslim contemporaries, since here the invocation
of a ruler in the khutba was not intended to mark his territorial sovereignty.
Instead, as believers living in the most remote corners of the Muslim world,
whose identities and livelihoods depended on an ability to maintain notional
ties with the Islamic heartlands, their use of the khutba commemorated the
geographically transcendent, pan-Islamic identity that had once upon a time
constituted the basis of “the caliphate.”
To affirm this, of course, is not to deny that a healthy dose of politics informed
the decision to name one ruler as opposed to another in a given maritime com-
munity’s khutba.45 But an indication that such practical considerations could
exist side by side with a more expansive commemorative impulse can be seen
in the unique way that khutba networks reconfigured the formulation of the
khutba itself. Rather than simply announcing the name of the designated land-
based ruler to whom they professed allegiance, the ruler’s name was instead
typically read alongside the names of the original Abbasid caliphs of the eighth
century. This recalled the much earlier and once widespread convention of
naming in the khutba the reigning caliph alongside the local sultan to whom
his authority had been delegated. But now, the names evoked were those of
the long dead caliphs of Abbasid Baghdad, not the “Shadow Caliph” then sit-
ting in Cairo. Since similar practices are undocumented for any place outside

in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1000-1800, ( Lanham MD, 2008), 55-97. I thank E.L. for sharing
some of her findings with me before publication and for her critical engagements with
some my own earlier work, which has been influential in helping to formulate my ideas
presented here.
44  For an introduction to the Geniza, see S.D. Goitein’s classic study A Mediterranean Society:
An Abridgement in One Volume (Berkeley, 2003); On the Armenians of New Julfa, see
Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks
of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, 2011); and for the Hadrami Seyyids,
Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim (Berkeley, 2006).
45  Eric Vallet, for example, has argued that the best documented khutba network of the post-
1258 period developed as the result of attempts by the Rasulid emirs of the Yemen to
portray themselves as successors to the caliphs in Baghdad. See Vallet, “Sultans Rasūlids
du Yémen,” passim.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

498 Casale

the Indian Ocean littoral, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was here
intentionally adopted as a tool of public memory, to make explicit the special
attachment of local communities to a lost age of Muslim unity.46
Meanwhile, the consolidation of khutba networks coincided with a sec-
ond, more widespread transformation of post-1258 Islam, namely an unprec-
edented resurgence in the popularity of the hajj or holy pilgrimage to Mecca
and Medina. While the hajj, in theory, constitutes one of the five “Pillars of
Islam” incumbent on all believers, Richard Bulliet has recently argued that
it formed a comparatively unimportant part of Muslim piety before the thir-
teenth century. Under the reign of the Fatimids, lasting until 1171, Mecca had
only enough guest facilities and access to food and fresh water to accommo-
date a relatively small number of visitors. Beyond the holy places themselves,
there were no major religious or educational institutions based there. And the
Fatimids imposed a stiff levy on pilgrims traveling to the city, further limiting
the number of people with the means to make the journey.47
By contrast, between 1200 and 1500 Mecca underwent a massive building
boom, as dozens of madrasas, sufi lodges, and guesthouses were constructed
through voluntary pious endowments—thereby expanding the city’s ability to
accommodate pilgrims but also transforming it into a major center for edu-
cation and commerce. Over the same period, Hajji became a ubiquitous title
of respect from Morocco to Indonesia, marking those who had returned from
pilgrimage as especially pious and deserving of deference (surprisingly, there
are no recorded instances of pilgrims before 1200 being referred to with the
honorific Hajji).48 And with the rising prestige of the pilgrimage, it was also
during this period that the hajj narrative, of which Ibn Battuta’s Travels stands
as the most unusual and famous example, first emerged as a popular Muslim
literary genre.49
In Bulliet’s view, these developments speak to a general transformation after
1258 in which “pilgrimage to Mecca replaced the caliphate as the central unify-
ing entity in Islam.”50 Importantly, he locates the origins of this transformation

46  Lambourn, “India from Aden,” 80; on the history of this practice in the India subconti-
nent, see Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 186-8.
47  Richard Bulliet, “Religion and the State in Islam: From Medieval Caliphate to the Muslim
Brotherhood,” University of Denver Center for Middle East Studies Occasional Papers 2
(2013): 6-8.
48  Bulliet, “Religion and the State,” 8-9.
49  F.E. Peters, The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to the Holy Places (Princeton, 2004), 109-43.
50  Bulliet, “Religion and the State, 8.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 499

in what he calls the “Muslim South,” the rapidly expanding portion of the
Muslim world that had never actually been a part of the caliphate.
Within this larger “Muslim South,” the Indian Ocean stood as a region where
the connection between Muslim identity and the hajj were particularly pro-
nounced. Islam had been originally introduced here, and continued to spread,
primarily by means of trade. And pilgrims who traveled to Mecca from the
Indian Ocean, rather than organizing themselves in hajj caravans and following
routes designed specifically for pilgrims (as was frequently the case elsewhere
in the Dar al-Islam), did so by following the pre-existing maritime routes that
had long served the intercontinental transit trade between the Indian Ocean
and the Mediterranean.51
Finally, alongside khutba networks and the resurgence of the hajj, a third
important innovation attributable to this post-caliphal period is the emer-
gence of a new ceremonial title: Khadim al-Haramayn, or “Servant of the
Two Holy Cities” of Mecca and Medina. Significantly, its first documented use
was by Salah al-Din al-Ayubi in the year 1191, while he was in the midst of an
open dispute with the reigning caliph in Baghdad. Since the role of protecting
the Holy Cities (and the pilgrims headed there) had traditionally been part
of the caliph’s responsibilities, Salah al-Din seems to have claimed it with the
intention of diminishing the caliph’s standing. Subsequently, it became a title
generally associated with the rulers of Egypt, and with the Mamluk sultans
specifically from the reign of Baybars (r. 1260-77).52 In this role, along with a
general responsibility to ensure the safety of pilgrimages and the holy places
of the Hijaz, the Mamluks assumed the prestigious charge of preparing the
kiswah, or ceremonial covering sent annually to the Kabbah, a privilege previ-
ously reserved for the caliphs. They also seem to have financed a great deal of
the charitable building projects in Mecca.53

51  For a general introduction to the literature on this subject, see Michael Pearson, Pious
Passengers: The Hajj in Earlier Times (London, 1994). For a more recent review of the
literature with specific reference to the hajj from southeast Asia, albeit with a primary
focus on much later periods of history, see Eric Taglacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast
Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (New York, 2013).
52  B. Lewis, “Khādim al-Ḥaramayn,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill Online,
2014).
53  Before the reign of Baybars, the privilege of sending the kiswah was briefly claimed by
the Rasulids of Yemen, who took control of Mecca and Medina and briefly toyed with
claiming the caliphate for themselves. See Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “The Mahmal Legend
and the Pilgrimage of the Ladies of the Mamluk Court,” The Mamluk Studies Review 1
(1997): 90. On Mamluk charitable endowments in Mecca, see Bulliet, 9-10.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

500 Casale

While a few Mamluk sultans harbored grander aspirations for their role as
“Servant of the Two Holy Cities,” for the most part the title remained limited
to these ceremonial functions and never became a foundational component of
Mamluk legitimacy.54 It does seems to have been viewed with comparatively
greater reverence among the Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean, but
even among them it never eclipsed the memory of the caliphate nor did it
pass from the realm of piety and symbolism to practical politics. Lambourn’s
study of khutba networks, for example, reveals no instances in which an
Indian Ocean community named the Mamluk sultan, in his role as “Servant
of the Two Holy Cities,” in their Friday prayers. Nevertheless, in the absence
of a credible claimant to the title “caliph,” the notion that the Sultan of Egypt
had a unique responsibility to defend the safety of the hajj in his capacity as
Khadim al-Haramayn became a pervasive idea that would later have impor-
tant consequences.55
To sum up, in the post-1258 world there were at least three important sur-
vivals of the ideal of pan-Islamic unity formerly embodied in the caliphate.
The first was the institution of the khutba network, by means of which volun-
tary associations of diasporic merchants publicly invoked the memory of the
caliphate. The second was a dramatic trans-regional rise in the popularity of
the hajj, which became a unifying force that in some ways replaced the sym-
bolic space previously occupied by the caliph. And the third was the new office
of Khadim al-Haramayn, which attributed the part the caliphs’ ceremonial role
most closely associated with the hajj to a new person (i.e. the reigning sover-
eign of Egypt). Importantly, all of these were in a certain sense “depoliticized”
survivals of the caliphate, preserving its unifying function without overt refer-
ence to questions of territorial sovereignty or dynastic legitimacy. And all three
were innovations that had either originated among the maritime Muslim com-
munities of the Indian Ocean frontier or had particular resonance for them.

After Tordesillas: Reconfiguring the Caliphate in the Age of

Global Empires

From this starting point, the Indian Ocean was primed for a radical re-polit-
icization of the ideal of the Muslim Umma at the tumultuous turn of the

54  For a relevant case study, see Malike Dekkiche, “Diplomacy at Its Zenith: Agreement
between the Mamluks and the Timurids for the Sending of the Kiswah” in Amalia
Levanoni, ed., Egypt and Syria Under Mamluk Rule: Political, Social and Cultural Aspects
(Leiden, 2014).
55  Bulliet, “Religion and the State,” 10.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 501

sixteenth century. Importantly, however, the initial catalyst for this process
was not the Ottoman conquest of Egypt or any political event in the Indian
Ocean itself but rather the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the historic agreement
signed between the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal immediately following
the return of Columbus from his first voyage to the New World. According to
this treaty’s sweeping terms, the two rulers agreed to partition the entire extra-
European world, each promising to recognize the other’s exclusive rights to the
exploration, conquest, and exploitation of their respective hemispheres. Then,
buttressed by this agreement and a series of related Papal bulls, Portugal’s
King Manuel I (r. 1495-1521) sent Vasco da Gama on his history-making voyage
to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and, upon da Gama’s safe return
in 1499, claimed a new imperial title: “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and
Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.”56
As later events would show, King Manuel’s ambition in making this claim
was not to directly usurp the territorial sovereignty of existing rulers in mari-
time Asia. Rather, in a manner highly reminiscent of the earlier Abbasid
caliphs of Baghdad, he hoped to be recognized as these rulers’ superior, a
“king of kings” or universal emperor, whose authority transcended the physi-
cal possession of any specific territory. Also like the Abbasid caliphs, Manuel
articulated this claim through the language of holy war, justifying his role as
necessary to defend the universal Christian faith and to ensure its propagation
in a new region of the world. However, in a significant departure from earlier
conceptions of universal empire in both the Muslim and the Christian tradi-
tion, Manuel’s claim focused not simply on sovereignty but on the rights of
“navigation and commerce.” As such, it was a claim that would be ultimately
expressed not through territorial conquest but through control of the vast
trade and transportation infrastructure that crisscrossed maritime Asia.57
While the overwhelming emphasis of existing scholarship on the Treaty
of Tordesillas has been its impact on the subsequent European colonization
of the New World, it would be difficult to overstate the implications of Manuel’s
ideological innovation for the Muslims of the Indian Ocean.58 Because
Portuguese ambitions to control “navigation and commerce” were concerned
first and foremost with the transit spice trade between the Indian Ocean and

56  Luís Filipe Thomaz, L’idée imperial manueline,” in La Découverte, Le Portugal et L’Europe:
Actes du Colloque de Paris les 26, 27 et 28 Mai 1988. (Paris, 1990), 105-130.
57  Antonio Vasconcelos de Saldanha, “Conceitos de espaço e poder e seus reflexos na titu-
lação régia portuguesa da época da expansão,” in La Découverte, Le Portugal et L’Europe:
Actes du Colloque de Paris les 26, 27 et 28 Mai 1988. (Paris, 1990), 35-103.
58  On Tordesillas and the New World, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies
of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-1800 (New Haven, CT, 1995).

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

502 Casale

the Mediterranean, it was the Red Sea, through which this trade necessarily
flowed, that became the natural focus of their activity. And since trade routes
to and from the Red Sea were trafficked principally by Muslim merchants—
and were inextricably linked with pilgrimage to Mecca—the legitimacy of the
Portuguese crown’s new claims would be measured in direct proportion to its
ability to prevent Indian Ocean Muslims from travelling to the Red Sea. In other
words, for the first time in history a non-Muslim power emerged in the Indian
Ocean that was not only capable of preventing disparate Muslim communi-
ties from maintaining contact with one another by means of the maritime hajj
but was actually compelled to do so according to the terms of its own claims to
transcendent universal sovereignty.
It should be added that King Manuel’s Portuguese subjects embraced
these new terms of sovereignty—and their responsibility to enforce them—
most enthusiastically. Within the first decade of their arrival in the Indian
Ocean they had organized armed naval patrols throughout the region, to the
Persian Gulf, Africa’s Swahili coast, the Malabar coast of India, and as far east
as Malacca. In all these places they systematically targeted Muslim shipping,
attacking on sight and seizing or sinking ships wherever they found them (fre-
quently sending them to the ocean floor with all hands on deck). By far their
most ferocious attacks, however, were reserved for the mouth of the Red Sea,
since, due to the unavoidable rhythms of the monsoon, traffic along the over-
lapping commercial and pilgrimage corridors converged here at the same pre-
dictable times each year.59
As a result of this sustained and organized violence, it was simply impossible
for the hajj to continue, as it had since 1258, as a de-politicized, organically per-
formative ritual of Muslim unity. Instead, with both their livelihoods and their
eternal souls at stake, Muslims of the Indian Ocean needed a new and explic-
itly political ideology that would allow them to motivate constituencies, mobi-
lize resources, and coordinate diplomatic and military operations on a scale
commensurate with the Portuguese. And among the possible options for such
a response, the most obvious was to transform existing “khtutba networks” into
something they had not been before: an infrastructure of political allegiance
to a single land-based Muslim sovereign who, by the terms of this allegiance,
would be compelled to act on their behalf.
But who would this sovereign be? Initially, the Mamluk Sultan Qansuh
Ghawri seemed by far the most viable candidate. As the ruler of Egypt, he was
already acknowledged as Khadim al-Haramayn. He remained the protector of

59  For a general introduction to this period, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese
Empire in Asia, 2nd ed. (London, 2012), 59-78.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 503

al-Mutawakkil iii, the Shadow Caliph who continued to reside in Cairo. He

directly ruled the Meccan port of Jiddah, along with most of the other strategic
ports of the Red Sea. And his treasury was heavily dependent on taxes from the
transit spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, giving
him an immediate financial interest in protecting the hajj.
All of this prompted Qansuh Gawri to directly intervene against the
Portuguese, organizing two major naval expeditions in 1507 and 1515. This made
the Mamluk Sultan not only the special focus of Portuguese aggression, but a
natural magnet of loyalty for Indian Ocean Muslims.60 Gujarat, for example,
became a particularly prominent center of anti-Portuguese resistance and was
the destination of the first Mamluk naval expedition in 1507. Three years later,
upon his accession to the throne of Gujarat, Sultan Muzaffar Shah ii (r. 1511-
1526) promptly sent a delegation to Cairo to have his enthronement confirmed
by both al-Mutawakkil and Qansuh Ghawri.61
Yet however promising Qansuh Ghawri may have initially seemed as protec-
tor of the hajj and champion of Islam in the Indian Ocean, his prospects, and
his life, came to an abrupt end with Sultan Selim I’s invasion of Mamluk terri-
tory in 1516.62 As I have argued elsewhere, before the dramatic and largely unex-
pected turn of events culminating in Selim’s conquest of Egypt, the Ottoman
state was only minimally informed about Indian Ocean affairs.63 As such, it is
possible that Selim was initially uninterested and perhaps even unaware of the
implications of his conquest for the ongoing struggle against the Portuguese.
But from the perspective of the Muslims of the Indian Ocean, the implications
of Selim’s conquests were self-evident: it was he who would now be the focus
of their allegiance, and he would be expected, as the defender of the universal
community of believers, to intervene on their behalf.
Appreciating this dynamic, namely that Selim did not claim the role of
caliph but was rather acclaimed as such by people living entirely outside the
territories under his control, is extremely helpful in making sense of an oth-
erwise confusing and apparently contradictory chronology in the surviving
historical record. As has frequently been noted by revisionist historians, there

60  For a detailed study of the triangle of relations between Mamluk Egypt, the Muslims of
maritime India, and the Portuguese, see Jean Aubin, “Albuquerque et les négotiations de
Cambaye,” Mare Luso-Indicum 1 (1971): 3-63.
61  Ibn Iyas, Journal d’un Bourgeois du Caire: Chronique d’Ibn Iyās, vol. 1, Gaston Wiet, ed. and
trans. (Paris, 1945), 176-77, 279.
62  See J.-L. Bacqué-Grammont, Jean-Louis and Anne Kroell, Mamlouks, Ottomans et Portugais
en Mer Rouge: L’Affaire de Djedda en 1517 (Cairo, 1988).
63  Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York, 2010), 13-33.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

504 Casale

is virtually no evidence to suggest that Selim aspired to the office of caliph or

of Khadim al-Haramayn before his conquest of Egypt, remaining silent about
both in all of his pre-conquest correspondence with the Mamluks.64 Nor did he
make a visible effort to claim these offices immediately following his conquest,
failing to make any systematic mention of them in the various fethnāmes sent
to announce his victory to officials and dignitaries of his realm, to vassals and
foreign rulers, and to his heir, the future Sultan Suleiman.65
Instead, as recently noted by Nabil al-Tikriti, the earliest known text to
have associated Selim with the caliphate in a systematic way is, surprisingly,
an advice treatise by the renowned Persian intellectual Idris-i Bidlisi. Dating
from the very beginning of Selim’s reign in 1513, and thus several years before
his invasion of Mamluk territory, it naturally makes no mention of his con-
quests nor of an explicit connection between Egypt and the caliphate. But the
circumstances under which the treatise was composed nevertheless make it
highly suggestive: rather than being produced at Selim’s behest, or while Bidlisi
was actively employed at the Ottoman court, it was instead written and sent
unsolicited to Selim from Mecca—where Bidlisi had temporarily retired from
public life after declaring a desire to perform the hajj.66
Similarly, the first public acknowledgement of Selim as Khadim al-Hara-
mayn would come four years later from the Sharif of Mecca. Immediately fol-
lowing Selim’s conquest of Egypt, while he was still in Cairo, the Sharif sent
an official delegation headed by his own son to meet the sultan and, in a ges-
ture heavy with political significance, to hand over to him the keys to Mecca.67
It was only after this public act that Selim, in a letter to the ruler of Shirvan,
seems to have for the first time referred to the “exalted caliphate” (khilāfet-i
ālīye) and to the insertion of his own name in the khutba of Mecca, reasoning
that the failure of the Mamluks to protect the hajj routes had made it incum-
bent on him to assume this role.68 Then, in the following year, it was an Indian
Ocean Muslim, Malik Ayaz of Gujarat (d. 1522), who, as the governor of Diu,

64  Karateke, “Legitimizing the Ottoman Sultanate,” 25.

65  Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 181.
66  Nabil al-Takriti, “Idris-i Bidlisi’s 1513 Treatise on Caliphal and Sultanic Protocols”, in
Marinos Sariyannis, ed., New Trends in Ottoman Studies: Papers presented at the 20th CIéPO
Symposium, Rethymno, 27 June-1 July 2012 (Rethymno, 2014), 741-756.
67  Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 183; also Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The
Hajj under the Ottomans 1517-1683 (London, 1994), 147-8.
68  Feridun Ahmed Bey, Mecmū‘a-yı Münşe’āt-ı Feridūn Beg (Istanbul: Takvīmẖāne-i ‘Âmīre,
A.H. 1264-5), vol. 1, 437-444, quoted in Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 183.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 505

became the first foreign ruler to spontaneously acknowledge Selim as “Caliph

of the Faith” in a letter congratulating him on his victory.69

Closing the Circle: The Ottoman Caliphate in the Indian Ocean

For the Ottomans, this spontaneous acclamation of Selim as both “Caliph”

and “Servant of the Two Holy Cities” was a potentially two-edged sword, pre-
senting both unexpected dangers and unanticipated opportunity. On the one
hand, the notion that the Ottoman sultan was now responsible for protecting
Muslim merchants and pilgrims throughout the Indian Ocean (and presum-
ably, elsewhere too) implied that his legitimacy—if he failed to fulfill these
obligations—could be called into question by events far outside of the empire’s
borders, beyond his control, and possibly even unknown to him. On the other
hand, if the sultan were able guarantee the safety of the Indian Ocean hajj, or
at least make a credible effort to do so, he might reasonably expect a measure
of allegiance in return from Muslims throughout maritime Asia, regardless of
whether or not they were actually Ottoman subjects.
Admittedly, the earliest documents in which such a quid pro quo is spelled
out explicitly do not appear until the second half of the sixteenth century
(under circumstances to be discussed shortly). But against the background
of events sketched out above, it is highly suggestive that the first systematic
attempts to elaborate a claim to the caliphate by the Ottoman state itself
can be dated not to Selim’s reign but to the early years of the reign of his son
Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566). These efforts were directly connected
with the consolidation of Ottoman rule in Egypt and were spearheaded by the
grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha (d. 1536), Suleiman’s closest confidant and a lead-
ing proponent of Ottoman military engagement in the Indian Ocean.70
The first evidence for this connection between Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha, and
the Ottoman caliphate dates from 1524. In the immediate aftermath of a serious
anti-Ottoman rebellion in Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha was personally charged with
restoring order to the province. Upon his triumphant return to the capital a
few months later, he was married, celebrating his nuptials in a spectacular

69  Feridun Beg, Mecmu‘a-yı Münşe‘at-ı Selā t īn, (Istanbul, A.H. 1264-75/A.D. 1848-1858), vol. 1,
397.
70  See Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, 34-52.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511

506 Casale

state wedding that was orchestrated in direct collaboration with the sultan.71
As such, all the festivities organized on the occasion, extending over a period
of two full weeks, were heavy with symbolism regarding the dynasty and its
evolving claims to legitimacy. Of particular note was a symposium in which
leading scholars were invited to publicly debate the meaning of the most
important Qur’anic passage relating to the caliphate, which ascribes the title to
the biblical King David. Unfortunately, the details of this debate have not been
recorded. But since Suleiman was known to actively encourage comparisons
between himself and King Solomon, his biblical namesake, it can hardly have
been lost on the audience that Solomon was David’s son, just as Suleiman was
the son of Sultan Selim.72
Then, in the following year, Ibrahim Pasha oversaw the promulgation of the
Kanunnāme or “Lawbook” of Egypt. This was in substance a compendium of
taxes, customary laws, and various regulations governing the new Ottoman
administration of the province. But it included a long introductory prologue
which, composed in both prose and rhyming verse, stood apart as a work of
political rhetoric that was reproduced and circulated in multiple copies inde-
pendently of the main body of the “Lawbook.” Drafted by the Ottoman chancel-
lor Celalzade Mustafa in direct collaboration with Ibrahim, this introductory
text has been described in a recent study by Snjezana Buzov as nothing less
than “the political and legal manifesto of Suleyman’s early reign.”73 More to the
point, it stands as the first document issued directly by the Ottoman chancery
to assert a claim to caliphal sovereignty for the sultan based on his conquest
of Egypt.74 In a passage composed in florid verse, it directly relates this claim
to Selim’s victorious campaign over the Mamluks, at one point comparing the
province to a garden and the caliphate to a rose that had been left to wilt by
poor Mamluk stewardship:

71  On the political significance of this event, see Ebru Turan, “The Marriage of Ibrahim
Pasha (ca. 1495-1536): The rise of Sultan Süleyman’s favorite to the grand vizierate and the
politics of the elites in the early sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire,” Turcica (2009): 3-36.
72  Hasan Bey-zâde Ahmed Paşa, Hasan Bey-zâde Târîhi: Tahlil-Kaynak Tenkidi, 3 vols., ed.
Ş.N. Aykut (Ankara, 2004), 36, cited in Yılmaz, “Sultan and the Sultanate,” 178. See also
Kaya Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century
Ottoman World (New York, 2013), 52.
73  Snjezana Buzov, “The Lawgiver and his Lawmakers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the
Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 29.
74  Buzov, “Lawgiver and his Lawmakers,” 31.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 507

Though a rose approached the autumn of its death

The breeze of spring of eternal grace blew and
In the garden of the caliphate a new rose blossomed.
Such a rose, with its color the face of victory!75

Echoing earlier language from Ibrahim Pasha’s wedding symposium, the text
then goes on to describe Selim as “David of the Caliphate” and follows with
a passage in which Ibrahim Pasha, speaking in the first person, proclaims
Suleiman “the best among the successors to the authority of the caliph,”
exhorting him to embrace his predestined role as his father had before him.76
Suleiman accepts the charge, thus rendering “the Seat of the Caliphate the
envy of the Ethereal Sphere.”77
Four years later, the jurist Hüseyin b. Hasan al-Semerkandi presented
an extended rearticulation of these ideas in the treatise “Subtleties and the
Discoverer of Secrets” (Latā’if-i Efkār ve Kāşif-i Esrār). While divided into sev-
eral chapters on various topics, this work’s central section was a narrative of
the universal caliphate, but presented in the format of a world history. Rather
than starting with the origins of Islam, it thus begins with Adam, identified by
al-Semerkandi as the first caliph, and then follows its narrative through various
pre-Islamic dynasties (by way of King David and later Alexander the Great) all
the way to the Abbasids. It then concludes with the Ottoman caliphate, which
begins in al-Semerkandi’s narrative with Selim’s conquest of Egypt—not with
the beginning of the dynasty or with the conquests of any earlier sultan.78
Al-Semerkandi’s text was both commissioned by and personally dedicated
to Ibrahim Pasha. Equally significant, it was completed in 1529, the same
year in which preparations began in the Ottoman arsenal at Suez for a mas-
sive naval expedition to India—a project long championed by Ibrahim Pasha,
which would have provided irrefutable proof of his sultan’s suitability for
the role of sovereign and defender of the universal community of believers.
Unfortunately for Ibrahim, he later fell victim to palace intrigues and did not
live to see his project completed. But in 1538, two years after Ibrahim’s execu-
tion and nine years after the completion of Semerkandi’s treatise, a fleet of

75  Buzov, “Lawgiver and his Lawmakers,” 209.

76  Buzov, “Lawgiver and his Lawmakers,” 212.
77  Buzov, “Lawgiver and his Lawmakers,” 213.
78  Yılmaz, “Sultan and Sultanate,” 68.

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508 Casale

over seventy vessels eventually did set sail to India from Suez, beginning the
history of direct Ottoman military involvement in maritime Asia.79
With the departure of this fleet, we are finally ready to complete the cir-
cle and return to the Indian Ocean, where a full-blown revival of the concept
of the Universal Caliphate—now in a thoroughly Ottoman guise—began to
take shape in the following decades. By far the clearest evidence for this dates
from the 1560s and emerges from a series of diplomatic exchanges between
the Ottomans and the Sultan of Aceh, Ali Ala’ad-Din Ri’ayat Syah (r. 1539-1571).
In the first letter of this exchange, sent from Aceh in 1564 and addressed to
Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan is repeatedly addressed as
“caliph” by Ali Ala’ad-Din Ri’ayat Syah and is assured that in this capacity his
name is read in the khutba in all the mosques of Aceh. Moreover, the letter
indicates that Suleiman is being similarly named in the khutbas of Sri Lanka,
Calicut, and the Maldives—all places strategically located along the maritime
trunk routes to the Red Sea, and strongly suggesting a direct continuity with
the khutba networks of earlier centuries. In a marked departure from the ear-
lier ‘apolitical’ nature of medieval khutba networks, however, these commu-
nities’ recognition of the sultan as defender of the universal Umma was now
expressed in direct expectation of weapons, ships, and technical expertise in
return, in order to continue the ongoing fight against the Portuguese.80
Elizabeth Lambourn, in a critique of my own earlier work on this diplomatic
exchange, has suggested that I went too far in describing it as the direct result
of Ottoman diplomacy, and its outcome as the fulfillment of the Ottomans’
specific foreign policy objectives. As she points out, several elements of the
original letter sent from Aceh to Istanbul mirror precisely the documentation
of khutba networks from much earlier periods, particularly with regard to the
precise language used to describe the khutba itself and the invocation of the
sultan’s name therein. Rather than a simple act of submission to an expansive
Ottoman state, this suggests in her view a proactive reinvention of the tradi-
tional khutba network on the part of Indian Ocean Muslims who, recognizing
the new reality of the Ottoman caliphate, used the khutba as an ideological
lever to influence Ottoman policy in their favor.81

79  Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, 42-65.

80  For a transcription and analysis of this letter, see Giancarlo Casale, “His Majesty’s Servant
Lutfi: The Career of a Previously Unknown Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Envoy to Sumatra
Based on an Account of his Travels from the Topkapı Palace Archives,” Turcica 37 (2005):
43-81.
81  Elizabeth Lambourn, “Khutba and Muslim Networks in the Indian Ocean (Part II):
Timurid and Ottoman Engagements,” in Kenneth R. Hall, ed., The Growth of Non-Western
Cities: Primary and Secondary Urban Networking, c. 900-1900 (London, 2011), 131-158.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 509

With the benefit of Lambourn’s recent work on premodern khutba networks,

in conjunction with new evidence about the evolution of the Ottomans’ views
on the caliphate presented in the pages above, I am now happy to endorse
her position. In fact, I am ready to go one step further and propose that the
very idea of a universal Ottoman caliphate, actuated by Selim’s conquest of
Egypt and realized through the sultan’s protectorship over the hajj, may itself
have been originally developed by Muslims of maritime Asia. Under this sce-
nario, the concept would have been first introduced into Egypt by means of
the Indian Ocean trade routes, tentatively acknowledged by Selim only after
he was spontaneously acclaimed as caliph by Indian Ocean Muslims, and then
embraced and actively promoted in Istanbul only following Ibrahim Pasha’s
return from Egypt in 1524.
Once it had become a part of the general Ottoman political discourse
through these means, the Ottoman caliphate was then reconsidered and
rearticulated in subsequent decades with reference to juristic theory, Sufi
ethics, anti-Shi’ite polemics, and other intellectual traditions that had more
resonance in an internal Ottoman context. Eventually, although the exact his-
tory of this process remains to be written, it seems that the original political
connotations of the Ottoman caliphate became obscure, particularly after the
1570s as the period of direct Ottoman involvement in the politics of the Indian
Ocean drew to a close. By the end of the sixteenth century, the title itself seems
to have been generally de-emphasized in Ottoman political thought, with a
corresponding rise in the use of Khadim al-Haramayn. Thereafter, protector-
ship over the hajj would continue as an important focus of Ottoman dynastic
legitimacy within the empire, but in a manner that cast the sultan as a pious
benefactor par excellence rather than a universal political leader.82
Outside of Ottoman territory, however, the ideal of a revived world caliph-
ate, led by the Ottoman dynasty and directly connected to control of the Red
Sea pilgrimage routes, would prove much more resilient. In fact, by the closing
decades of the sixteenth century, this idea seems to have approached some-
thing close to a hegemonic status in many parts of the Muslim world, to the
extent that even the Ottomans’ most powerful rivals felt compelled to engage
with it. This is evident, for instance, in the posturing of the Mughal Emperor
Akbar following his conquest of Gujarat in 1573, a victory that, significantly,
gave him control of a maritime outlet onto the Indian Ocean for the first
time. Soon thereafter, Akbar initiated a massive program of state financing of
the hajj, began to publicly express a desire to have his name (rather than the
Ottoman sultan’s) read in the khutba of Mecca itself, and struck coins in which

82  On the Ottomans’ symbolic use of the title Khadim al-Haramayn and the vast administra-
tive structure established to oversee the hajj, see Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans.

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510 Casale

he proclaimed himself ‘the Great Sultan, the Exalted Caliph.”83 Meanwhile,

at the extreme opposite edge of the Muslim world, we find a similar logic at
work in Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco’s insistence that it was he, and
not the Ottoman Sultan, who had a unique claim to the caliphate because of
his noble lineage as a Seyyid.84 Al-Mansur’s subsequent campaign of conquest
against the Songhai “caliphate” of sub-Saharan West Africa—a campaign, in its
own way, as unprecedented as the Ottoman expeditions to Gujarat or Sumatra
earlier in the century—was justified largely in terms of al-Mansur’s right to
enforce his exclusive claim to this title.85
By the seventeenth century, the Ottoman caliphate would become, at least
for a time, less visible in international political discourse. But it never com-
pletely disappeared, and by the middle of the eighteenth century began a
noticeable resurgence which, at least originally, seems not to have had any con-
nection with European imperialism’s gradually expanding footprint. In India,
for example, the first Mughal correspondence since the sixteenth century to
address the Ottoman sultan as “caliph” dates from the 1740s, and accompanied
a plea for Ottoman assistance not against the aggressions of Europeans but
Nadir Shah of Iran, a Shi’ite ruler.86 Only much later, in the 1780s, did similar
pleas from Tipu Sultan of Mysore involve a request for help in the struggle
against the “infidel” British—in exchange for a promise to read the Ottoman
sultan’s name in the khutba.87
Fascinatingly, the reigning Ottoman sultan at the time, Selim iii, politely
declined this offer. Instead, he granted Tipu Sultan “permission” to read the
khutba in Tipu’s own name, and otherwise remained uninvolved in the inter-
nal politics of South Asia or resistance to British expansion in the region.
Thereafter, at least until the reign of Abdulhamid II, this hesitancy would
remain a consistent feature of Ottoman foreign policy, as subsequent “caliphs”

83  Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “A Matter of Alignment: Mughal Gujarat and the Iberian World
in the Transition of 1580-1581,” Mare Liberum 9 (July, 1995), 467; also Farooqi, Mughal-
Ottoman Relations, 189-92; On Akbar’s striking of coins, and reference to Delhi as Dar
al-Khalīfat, see D. Sourdel, “K̲ h̲alīfa” (Brill Online, 2011).
84  Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Idea of the Caliphate between Moroccans and
Ottomans: Political and Symbolic stakes in the 16th and 17th-Century Maghrib,” Studia
Islamica, no. 82 (1995): 103-112.
85  For a recent treatment, see Richard Smith, Ahmad al-Mansur: Islamic Visionary (New
York, 2005).
86  Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 197.
87  See Özcan, Pan Islamism, 10-11, 40.

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Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate 511

repeatedly turned down appeals for help from co-religionists in places as

diverse as Russian Turkistan and Dutch Indonesia.88
But if the sultans of the Tanzimat, already faced with the daunting chal-
lenge of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, proved reluctant to
embrace their international role as caliphs, we need not interpret this as a sign
that the title itself was invented or otherwise lacking in historically grounded
authenticity. Instead, these nineteenth-century sultans were simply repro-
ducing a pattern first established in the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman
caliphate had originally been formulated by—and for—Muslims living in the
wide and interconnected world beyond the borders of the Ottoman state. By
recognizing this pattern, we can finally make sense of the long and seemingly
contradictory history of this venerable institution. And just as importantly, we
can appreciate the deep historical reasons why, nearly a century after the final
demise of the Ottoman Empire, its “caliphs” continue to captivate the hearts
and inspire the minds of believers today.

88  On central Asia, see Özcan, Pan Islamism, 24-7. On Southeast Asia, see Anthony Reid,
“Aceh and the Turkish Connection’, in Arndt Graf et al., eds., Aceh: History, Politics and
Culture (Singapore, 2010), 26-38.

Journal of early modern history 19 (2015) 485-511