Although the confrontation between the Ottoman and Portuguese navies in the sixteenthcentury Indian Ocean is commonly described as a struggle between "indigenous Muslims" and "European intruders," in reality the seafarers of both fleets were overwhelmingly Mediterranean in origin. Yet despite these shared origins, the crews of Ottoman and Portuguese ships nevertheless conceived of themselves in different ways: the Portuguese as part of a blood-based "nation," and the Ottomans as part of a cosmopolitan "empire." And ultimately, this difference profoundly influenced relations between the two powers. Since the Ottomans, unlike any of the indigenous peoples of the Indian Ocean, were so obviously racially and ethnically similar to the Portuguese, their self-confident cosmopolitanism posed a threat to the underpinnings of Portuguese ethnic solidarity, just as the strength of their navy posed a threat to Portuguese hegemony at sea.
Yemen with a small war fl eet and headed for the Portuguese-controlled city-states of Africa's Swahili coast. Although ultimately unsuccessful, his expedition was conceived as only the fi rst step in an extended effort to create a centralized Ottoman imperial infrastructure throughout the Indian Ocean basin. And had it not been for the fortuitous intervention of several thousand "Zimba" warriors on the eve of the fi nal encounter between Ottoman and Portuguese forces at Mombasa in March 1589, the available evidence suggests that Mir Ali and his men might very well have carried the day.
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 scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, 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.
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