The history of the Ottoman Empire - once the most powerful kingdom on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power - has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. In this bold account, historian Alan Mikhail powerfully recasts Ottoman history, telling the story of Ottoman world conquest through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim. Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father's ten sons. Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. Yet as Mikhail shows, with personal charisma, military prowess, and the guidance of his gifted mother, Selim was able to claim power over the empire in 1512 and, through sheer force of ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim - known to his subjects as God's Shadow on earth - fostered a religiously plural society, encouraged learning and philosophy, and even penned his own verse. Drawing on previously unexamined sources in multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail's game changing account uses Selim's life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic History and jingoistic rise of the west theories that have held sway for decades. A revisionist in the best sense of the term, God's Shadow radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim's Ottoman Empire in the history of the modern world.