Unlikelihood is the stuff of history. The great men, great in good, evil or absurdity, are necessarily violators of the general rule of human mediocrity. The unlikely is not, because it is unlikely, untrue. Life itself is unlikely.
”In 1876 a professor in Turin discovered a collection of letters written by Sheikh Mansur to the professor’s father. In them Sheikh Mansur reveals that he was in reality an Italian from Turin called Giovanni Battista Boetti. The letters tell an amazing story. Giovanni Boetti had been born near Turin. In the early 1770s he had run away from home and become a monk for the Dominican order. He then travelled as a missionary in Asia Minor and had all sorts of adventures and scandalous intrigues and love affairs. Then at some point Boetti converted to Islam and became a “Mussulman Prophet” with the power to raise and lead an army of thousands of Muslims.
He did his share of miracles, such as grasping a burning brand without being hurt. He proclaimed his revelation, a curious mixture of Christianity, Mohammedanism, eighteenth-century enlightenment, and fantasy. There is one God he asserted, and Chrsit, Mohammed, and the speaker are his prophets. The world had its beginning, but it will never end. Vows, prayers and thanksgivings are offensive to God and are punishable; bapism and circumcision are ridiculous ceremonies. Adultery is a great crime, but fornication and incest are no sins. The faithful are called to impose true religion on the world; they will destroy all Babylons; their names will be immortal.
Converts flocked to the banners of the conqueror. He gathered an army, estimated at different times from eight tousand to eighty thousand men. His soldiers were at first a miscellaneous horde, presumably supplying their own swords and mounts. They accepted the Sheik’s rigorous rule and his example of asceticism. The army ration was rice and water; even coffee and tobacco were forbidden. The army was ready for a Holy War but for a time it was not clear who was to be the enemy. The sheik aimed first at the Sublime Porte. The Porte countered by proposing an alliance against the Russians who were pushing south in the Caucasus.
Now better supplied, Mansur invaded the Caucasus and moved northwest along the Black Sea to the Tatar country, beside the Sea of Azov. There he enlisted many wild Mohammedan Tatars, plus Christian Circassians and Mingrelians. At fisrt the prophet’s campaigns went well; the Russians were bloodily defeated. But Empress Catherine II and her great minister, Potemkin, reacted vigorously. In 1787 Mansur met a well-disciplined Russian army and was surrounded and routed by Russian cavalry after an attempted tactic failed; pushing large rolling structures, primitive tanks, ahead of his infantry.
He fought on, with a diminishing army, sustained by dwindling faith. He was finally taken prisoner when the Russian army stormed Anapa, his fortress on the Black Sea, in June,1791. He was transported to St. Petersburg, and was displayed to the empress and Prince Potemkin. He was then consigned to the Solovetski monastery, on an island in the far northern White Sea. The last record of his existence is a letter written in 179 from the monastery to his father in Piazzano. It is a pious dutiful letter, asking pardon for all his offenses.
But is Boetti’s story too amazing for credence; Could he have been an unwitting, or witting double agent of the Occidental world? The chief source of information is a ”relation” written in French in Constantinople in 1786 by someone who knew Boetti well, if indeed was not dictated by the friar himself. The document apparently berars up well under scrutiny. He disappeared in 1785, and in the same year there arose sheik Mansur, the Prophet who proclaimed a new religion and challenged the Russian armies. But were Boetti and Mansur the same person?
The letter of 1798 to Boetti’s father, if genuine, would prove the case. But authenticity is not guaranteed. variant stories about Mansur the Conqueror were current, all garbling in their own way the Boetti story. In sum, the reluctance to believe that Boetti and the Sheikh Mansur were one rests on the story’s improbability. It seems implausible, but not impossible that a Dominican monk should transform himself into a half Mohammedan illuminate. That an Italian cleric should possess the competence, linguistic, military or spiritual to raise an army of fantatic Tatars and Circassians and lead them into battle is a stretch. It is unlikely that one man should be successively wastrel, mystic, missionary, physician, prophet and insurrectionary general; though certain constants seemed preserved such as adventurousness, turbulence and inconstancy itself.