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Traitors who sided with Ottomans/Muslims?

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Lordkaiser

Colonel
Jan 17, 2017
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Do you know examples of historical people, who sided with the Muslims even if they were Christian (or alike) ?

I know about the Merchants like Venice, who wanted to trade even with Muslims, but I mean not so much because of economic benefit, but because of conviction.

For example somebody who was raised by them or was in slavery or anything and later decided to work together with Muslims.
Any famous historical Traitors, Spys or alike?
 
Roderigo de Vivar, El Cid, a Christian Knight allied with Muslim warriors against Christians following his exile, famously followed by using both Christians and Muslims to fend off the invasion of Spain by the cruel Almoravid Muslim’s from North Africa.
 
I'm not sure if you specifically want traitors who betrayed their oaths, or if you're just looking for any people who ended up on the "wrong" side of some conception of a grand struggle with Christians unstintingly on one side and Muslims on the other. For example, there's the case of the Arabic invasion of Egypt. One of the major reasons the Arabic invaders met with relatively little difficulty in maintaining control of Egypt once they had successfully bested the Eastern Roman armies was because they were much more generous to Coptic Christian populace than the Chalcedonian Christians of Asia Minor and Greece had been. In the years leading up to the Arabic invasion, a Greek Orthodox (Chalcedonian) bishop was appointed as military prefect as well as the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria. This was accompanied by the mass confiscations of many of those Coptic churches which had not already been destroyed a decade earlier by the Persian invasion and a general policy of forced conversion to bring the Coptics to heel, driving the Coptic patriarch Benjamin into hiding in the same period. In return for the imposition of the poll taxes that would eventually become jizya, the Muslims by contrast allowed the Coptics to live unmolested in peace with their monastaries and churches restored to them. They even invited the return of Benjamin as head of the Coptic church. It's rather hard to call Benjamin and other Coptic Christians of Egypt traitors for accepting their new Muslim overlords rather than the Christian Emperors in Constantinople when the Muslims offered freedom of worship and the Christians offered repression or forced conversion. Even today, Pope Benjamin I is still considered a saint by the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.
 
Plenty of folks in conquered regions sided with whoever was the ruler at the time. Lots of Greeks (including the Ecumenical Patriarch) continued to serve and play important roles in the post-Ottoman-conquest administration. Can't even really call them traitors: what loyalty did they owe to e.g. the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor?

Likewise in other conquered areas; according to legend, the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Spain was enabled by the Christian Count of Ceuta, whose daughter had been raped by the Visigoth king.
 
I'm not 100% certain, but I recall a mention in a book years back where the battle of Mohacs may have involved one of the smaller Slavic armies unexpectedly lining up with the Moslems, rather than the Christians as previously arranged. The outcome of the battle was already pretty much a foregone conclusion, so the changing of sides by one small contingent probably made no difference other than to avoid having the Ottomans invade and plunder that kingdom. Then again, since the event was so traumatic to the Hungarian culture, it may be a case of writers looking for an excuse for the defeat, and finding a possible scapegoat.
 
Calling them "traitors" is a bit of stretch and somewhat anachronistic. Sometimes you just try to live the best with the cards you were given.

For example, Crusaders used Turkish auxiliary troops against their Muslim enemies. Were they traitors, too?
 
I'm pretty sure more Greeks (and even more Christians) were fighting for the Ottomans than against them in their final sieges of the Roman Empire.
 
King Ferdinand II of Leon was famously allied with the Almohads against Castile and Portugal. And he had a Crusader bull, and the endorsement of the pope.

Politics is messy.
 
The Ottoman privateer and admiral Uluj Ali was born Giovanni Dionigi Galeri in Calabria in 1519, son of a fisherman. When he was 17 he was captured by North Africvan corsaries and became a galley slave. To escape this fate, he converted to Islam, and became first an Ottoman sea captain, then an admiral, later became beylerbey of Alexandria, beylerbey of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, and finally Grand Admiral (Kapudan Pasha) of the Ottoman Empire. He was not an isolated case; most North African corsaries of that era were Christian "renegades".

Cığalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha, born Scipione Cicala, was an Ottoman general, Kapudan Pasha and finally Grand Vizier of the second half of the XVI century. Hi father, Viscount Cicala, was a Genoese corsair in Spanish service; both he and his son were captured at the Spanish débacle of Djerba in 1565 when Scipione was around 20 years old. They were held captives first at Tripoli and later in Istanbul; the father was eventually ransomed, but his son entered the service of the Sultan and enjoyed a meteoric rise. After converting to islam, he eventually married, first one (1573) and then (1576) another great-granddaughter of Sulayman the Magnificent and in 1575 he became Agha of the Janissaries. He took an active part in the Ottoman-Safavid war of 1578-1590, conquering Nihavand and Hamadan in western Iran, and became governor first of Van and later Erzerum. In 1591 he became Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman fleet, and as Third Vizier he accompanied Sultan Mehmed III in the Hungarian campaign of 1596 against the Austrian Habsburgs. He was appointed as Grand Vizier for forty days between 27 October and 5 December 1596, became later governor of Damascus and was appointed Kapudan Pasha for a second time in 1599. In 1604 he assumed command of the whole Ottoman eastern front in the renewed war against the Safavids, but he was heavily defeated near Lake Urmia in Iranian Azerbaijan; he died during the retreat of his army towards Diyarbakir.

As for Ottoman Grand Viziers, most of them were Christian-born converts to Islam during the XV and XVI centuries. In turn, most of them had been abducted from their families during childhood as part of the devshirme (see this Wikipedia list).
 
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After the collapse of Byzantine power after the 4th crusade there was no state powerful enough to effectively protect Orthodox Christians from persecution by the Roman church. The Ottomans policy of religious toleration meant that they were perceived as protectors of Orthodox Christianity by many Greeks and so the Ottoman armies were often enthusiastically supported by many Orthodox Christians prior to the rise of Russia as an Orthodox power.

Many of the Ottoman's forces were supplied by Christian vassal states, and many of these were willing allies of the Ottomans.
 
skanderbeg of albania and vlad tepes of wallachia both served in the ottoman armies, don't know if they fought christian forces while doing so though, vlad's sucessor waged war together with the ottomans against the moldavians

stefan lazarovich of serbia fought on the side of the ottomans in nicopolis (although he did allow sigismund of hungary to evacuate over the danube)

funnily enough one of the byzantine emperors was forced by the ottomans to help them besiege one of his own cities in anatolia
 
Not by any means related to the topic directly, but a similar example of religious dissonance; There was something of a recurring trend of English armies in Ireland making up their numbers by recruiting from the local populations, often to the annoyance of the authorities in London, particularly with the onset of the Reformation and the emergence of religious differences. This doesn't seem to have stopped the practice though, and if memory serves in the 1800s the British Army had about as men Irishmen as Englishmen, despite Ireland having half the population of Britain.
 
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demanvanwezel said:
funnily enough one of the byzantine emperors was forced by the ottomans to help them besiege one of his own cities in anatolia
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The fall of Philadelphia I think, which involved not just one captured Byzantine emperors, but two! Although to be fair apparently the city had been Byzantine in name only for quite some time.
 
Green Beret said:
The fall of Philadelphia I think, which involved not just one captured Byzantine emperors, but two! Although to be fair apparently the city had been Byzantine in name only for quite some time.
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Hehe, that was a fun read. So Sultan Bayezid ordered not just the sitting emperor but also the rival pretender against whom the emperor was embroiled in civil war to both accompany him to the siege of Philadelphia? Bwahaha! What a boss! :D
 
Terming Christians who worked with the Ottomans, who had enormous numbers of Christian subjects, is questionable, at best. But this was quite common, because the Ottomans had one of, if not the, best organized large state at the time, and this meant they had the tax revenue to pay contractors well. One notable example was the siege engineer Orban, who offered his services first to the Byzantines, who couldn't afford to pay him, so he went to the Ottomans, who could.
 
Bogdan Khmelnytsky when started his Uprising actually allied with Crimea (with which Cossacks were hostile and wanted to go to war shortly before Uprising started), who were Muslim Horde, and agreed to let them pillage and get a number of slaves just to get them on his side to crush Poland.

His son, Yurii Khmelnytsky, after losing power went to Ottomans and participated in Ottoman conquest of Podolia and a war with Poland.

Ivan Mazepa, after defeat at Poltava, together with Swedish king went to Ottomans and tried to get on their side and their support to keep fighting in the war - which partially succeeded.

Notably, none of them was excited about working with Ottomans, but they simply were one of better options available to them.
 
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