God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

The history of the Ottoman Empire-once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power-has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this original and wide-ranging (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470-1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic rise of the West theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.