As I sit down to write this, the provincial government of Quebec is debating a bill that would prohibit the wearing of religious headgear in government employ, that is, targeting yarmulkes and Muslim headscarves. Previously, the same province passed a law prohibiting the wearing of facial covering for provincial licenses and others, presumably to prevent the ten to twelve women in the city of Montreal who actually walk around dressed in that manner from doing so. While the example is a contemporary version of French style secularism (laīcité), it does remind us that the question of attire, religious affiliation, and belonging remain ever near the surface of national politics, stimulating European and Ottoman historians’ interest in religious conversion, one of the many subjects of The Sultan's Renegades.

In an eloquent and well-documented five succinct chapters, Tobias Graf addresses the vexed historical question of “renegades,” predominantly Christian, who in the late sixteenth early seventeenth century were to be found all over the expanding Ottoman realms. In his introduction, Graf is quick to acknowledge the difficulties of tracing renegades in the Ottoman context because of the virtual silence on the subject in the Istanbul archives. He offers instead a study of one hundred eleven cases he extracted from the Habsburg archives in Vienna. Seventy-five percent of his cases whose origins could be documented are German, Italian and Royal Hungarian, making this study, to my knowledge, the first of its kind to bring together a prosopography of examples of Habsburg renegades. He sets his cases in the Habsburg-Ottoman religio-political context and effectively demonstrates the existence and importance of networks dominated by prominent Christian converts, their ambiguity about belonging, and contribution to the politics of diplomacy in the imperial bureaucracies of Vienna and Istanbul alike.

Chapter 1, “An Elite of Converts,” begins with a far-ranging discussion of the meaning of renegades in the Christian context, which, at its most negative, referred to an individual who had left country, religion, and identity behind to join Europe's then greatest enemy, the Ottoman Muslims. Graf amply cites his predecessors, such Eric Dursteler, E. Natalie Rothman, and Tijana Krstiç, who have published on the subject of European-Ottoman trans-imperial subjects. The work has also clearly benefitted from Graf's research group at Heidelberg University on “Dynamic Asymmetries in Transcultural Flows at the Intersection of Asia and Europe. The Case of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire” (vii–viii). The chapter continues with a discussion of the singular importance of households and connections in the Ottoman context, where aristocratic lineages mattered far less than meritocracy, and absolute loyalty to the sultan was expressed as being his slave (kul) (60–61).

The subject of chapter 2, “Turning Turk,” covers the Ottoman Muslim emphasis on orthopraxy, exemplified by the public performance of piety, as contrasted to the European insistence on orthodoxy and the inquisition of one's beliefs. That included the special markers of dress. Trading the hat for the turban (“Turning Turk,” where Turk = Muslim then and now) became the signal of conversion along with the expression of faith (shahada). The additional marker, and the one used for identification until at least the late eighteenth century, was circumcision, making “turning Turk” as much a gender question as not. Though reasons for conversion may have been as various as opportunism, coercion, or genuine emulation, the bodily transformation and “look” of being Muslim predominated the European debate about renegades.

Having ably informed us about the nature of the problem, Graf then provides a wonderful example of the difficulties of tracking the renegades in one Ladislaus Mörth, a seasoned soldier on the Croatian border who joined the entourage in Istanbul of Habsburg Ambassador Friedrich bon Kreckwitz as steward in 1591. Mörth's subsequent conversion was celebrated in what amounted to a performance of betrayal which Sultan Murad III (1574–1595) used to his advantage. Mörth's possible motivations are revealed in the remainder of the chapter to have been driven by a personal, perhaps homoerotic, relationship as well as by what Graf calls religious indifference. Graf uses the ambiguity of this record to rehearse the many ways an individual might or might not inadvertently find himself turning Turk. An interesting concluding paragraph reminds the reader that Europe was well set on the path of purification and redemption in ongoing purges of religious groups, some of whom found a modicum of acceptance in Ottoman Istanbul (117).

It is the orthodoxy/orthopraxy contrast which I find most problematic about this kind of study, stimulated more recently by the reemergence of our current version of redemption in global racist nationalism. There seems to be an insatiable appetite especially for trying to pin down what it was about “Ottoman Islam” that proved so attractive in this brief period of parity between Habsburg-Ottoman imperial visions, while a generation of Ottomanists (myself included) have promulgated the notion of an Ottoman tolerance of difference that has become an internet meme. Happily, Graf eschews the impulse, carefully setting out what realities it is possible to detect, with understandable speculation, in the brief records of lives it is possible to document.

The final two chapters explore the renegades’ connections to both Habsburg and Ottoman inner circles and families as well their involvement in knowledge transfer. The effect is to defuse the religious arguments as paramount and see emerging imperial rivals in the process of consolidating power through established trade and diplomatic communities. By 1600, native Muslim elites demanded access to the Sultan's largesse, prompting the diminishing of such opportunities for advancement from abroad, but never quite eliminating the ambiguity of belonging of those who remained.

The Sultan's Renegades offers a refreshing glimpse into a complex web of relationships and should appeal to historians of empire, the Mediterranean and Eurasia alike. Graf leaves the final word to one of his case studies, Marcus Penkner, who shortly after converting, writes to his brother: “Although I am where I am, I am still yours” (216).