MOORISH LIVES MATTER: Hamlet, Luther, & the Expanding Ottoman Empire

Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? - Hamlet, 3.4.2449-2451

In Patricia Parker's 2003 essay, "Black Hamlet Battening on the Moor" (Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 31), she masterfully discusses the line from Hamlet 3.4 in which, for his mother's benefit, the prince compares his dead father to a "fair mountain" and his Uncle Claudius to a swamp or "moor," analyzing many implications of the phrase as "part of the racialized lexicon of color" (144) in this and other plays. She notes that others before her like Dover Wilson have picked up on at least the double meaning in this passage, a first meaning being geographical (mountain vs. swamp), and a second being a racialized meaning (a fair and good Nordic Arian vs. a dark and evil "moor."

Like Denzel Washington portraying Malcolm X in the Spike Lee film by that name, Parker notes how, for Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, whiteness and light are associated with good, and darkness with evil. Parker cites Kim F. Hall, who has "described the ways in which such portraits contributed to the articulation of racial and class distinctions in a period in which whiteness itself was defined through the differentiating blackness of the Moor." (146) Later (148) she explores "the construction of polarity and difference where none may exist" (which for some readers may recall the RSC production of Hamlet in which Sir Patrick Stewart plays both the ghost of the dead king and also his brother, Claudius).

Besides both the "racialized lexicon of color" and the geographical meaning of the passage, there is yet another realm of meanings one might consider as essential and associated with this passage, a realm associated with religion, fears of competing and expanding military empires, and foreign policy in Shakespeare's day. In the book, God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, author Alan Mikhail notes the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, which not only expanded eastward into Egypt and along parts of north coast of Africa, but also south to Mecca, and north into southern parts of eastern Europe.


[Image: Ottoman Empire after the Treaty of Constantinople, Wikipedia.]

In a Yale Macmillan Center interview, Mikhail's description of what the Ottoman Empire signified to Luther recalls the idea of God raising up an opposing nation as a kind of scourge to correct his chosen people, a biblical concept to which Hamlet refers in calling himself "scourge and minister":

Selim’s territorial expansion posed a spiritual challenge to Christian Europe, then a tessellated continent of small principalities and bickering hereditary city-states. Individually, even together, they were no match for the gargantuan Muslim empire. Seeking to explain this power imbalance, many Europeans found answers not merely in politics but in what they perceived as their moral failings. In a world where religion and politics were conjoined, reversals of fortune represented judgements from God. Ottoman armies thus provoked in Christians existential introspection, sowing fertile ground for challenges to the entrenched social, religious, and political order.

By far the most extensive and consequential of these critiques came from a young German Catholic priest named Martin Luther. He suggested that Christianity’s weakness against Islam stemmed from the moral depravity of the Catholic Church. God had sent the Ottomans as a productive tool, what Luther called God’s “lash of inequity,” to cleanse Christians of their sins. Luther urged his coreligionists to embrace the bodily pain that would lead to spiritual renewal, for only those with purified souls could defeat Islam on the battlefield. Islam—always an abomination for Luther—served as a potent means of critiquing the graver evils of the church. “The pope kills the soul,” he wrote, “while the Turk can only destroy the body.” In addition to serving as an ideological counterpoint, the Ottomans bought Luther time. Because of their military mobilizations to defend against the Ottomans, Catholic powers demurred from sending a fighting force to quell these early Protestant stirrings. Had they, who knows whether any of us would have heard of Luther.

Alan Mikhail's book has not been without its critics, one describing it as a popular book that at times may seem careless with historical facts, and which might fail to give proper credit to the many more careful academics on whose work his own depends.

Yet Mikhail's insight fills in something that is missing from Patricia Parker's analysis: Christianity by Shakespeare's lifetime, and specifically in the Christian kingdoms of Europe, had known a generous share of corruption; Christian scriptures promoted Jesus' idea of Christian unity and holiness, bidding his followers to be one in him he is one with his father (John 17:21), and to be perfect as his father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). The military successes of Muslim leaders and the rise of the Ottoman Empire posed a challenge to Christian self-understanding.

Had Christianity failed its commission, failing to strive for and achieve unity and perfection? Was Islam and the Ottoman Empire succeeding where Christianity had failed? Or is the fact of a large, expanding and victorious military empire not really proof of goodness, holiness, or unity in the deepest sense?

These are the kinds of existential questions Mikhail seems to think the Ottoman Empire may have provoked for Martin Luther and other Christians in Shakespeare's time. They shed light not only upon Shakespeare's treatment of the idea of the "Moor" in Othello, but also upon the corruption that Prince Hamlet perceives in warlike Denmark, a corruption that has infiltrated Hamlet himself. Both tragically and ironically, this prince whose father was murdered himself becomes a father-murderer in this same scene in which he describes his feared uncle as a Moor.

I don't claim to have original insights in these ways, extending Patricia Parker's ideas with the use of Alan Mikhail's. I am just connecting dots that I assume others have probably connected as well, though I have not yet stumbled upon them yet in my research. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my own college theology courses never mentioned Luther's concern with the expanding Ottoman empire as a possible scourge for European Christendom (though others who studied theology at Lutheran colleges or universities may have had very different experiences). My Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature courses never mentioned it either, in association with Othello or with Hamlet's remark about Claudius as a "moor," regarding race, nor as possible inspiration for existential introspection - for European Christendom, or for Prince Hamlet, who grapples with his own share of existential questions.
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LATE ADDITION:
Daniel Vitkus, on a FaceBook group, "Early Modernists," in response to this post, recommends as what he considers better options to Alan Mikhail's book:
" If you want to consider Shakespeare in relation to the context of Ottoman imperial power, see
Jerry Brotton’s This Orient Isle.
On Luther and the Turks, see
Adam S. Francisco, Luther and Islam

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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.

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