by Alan Mikhail
As a prince’s introduction to the world beyond the palace and a means to prove the effectiveness of a mother-and-son pair, the circumcision ceremony had to proceed flawlessly. The prince’s mother took charge of the arrangements but, as was then customary, she did not attend the public festivities. The circumcision ceremony thus embodied the dual role of the imperial mother: nurturing parent, and manager of her son’s eventual takeover of the empire. Not only did she soothe her young son after his painful surgical entry into manhood, but she helped to organize the first major international event of his life.
Selim’s circumcision festival came at a nadir in Ottoman–Venetian relations. Before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman and Venetian forces had come close to full-scale war on several occasions, but economic interests in maintaining the flow of east–west trade nearly always prevailed. After 1453, however, war became inevitable, as Ottoman advances in the Balkans further encroached on Venetian territories with the capture of Serbia in 1459.
A few years later, in 1462, an Ottoman military commander of Albanian origins—he had been captured in one of the raids that regularly brought Balkan boys into the empire—defected to a Venetian fortress near Athens. The Ottomans, understandably, demanded his return. When the Venetians refused, war ensued. In truth, the Ottomans used the fugitive as a pretext to justify their invasion of Athens and their continuing expansion in the Peloponnese and on into the Balkans, as far west as Bosnia, which they conquered the following year, and further into Albania soon after that.
This period of conflict finally ended in 1479 with the Ottoman siege of the Venetian-held city of Shkodra (in the north of modern-day Albania), a victory that allowed the Ottomans to project their power further north along the Adriatic coast. The Treaty of Constantinople, signed on January 25, 1479, brought peace to both sides. After decades of war, Ottoman ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean—indeed, on the very doorstep of Venice—became official, as did the Italian state’s vastly diminished regional status. Thus, it was understandable that, just a few months after this ignominious defeat, the Venetian senate was in no mood to send a favored representative to Selim’s circumcision ceremony. They did not send anybody, in fact, snubbing Selim—and, more to the point, his grandfather, Sultan Mehmet II.
BAYEZIT’S HAREM, WHILE LAVISH, was crowded with his twenty-seven children, several wives, and a retinue of concubines. Of his ten boys, sons two through four emerged as viable contenders for the throne: Ahmed, Korkud, and Selim. His firstborn son, Abdullah, died in 1483 at the age of eighteen, and the other six never amounted to much beyond their sinecure posts as governors of various Anatolian towns. Like Selim, Ahmed and Korkud were born to concubines in Amasya—in 1466 and 1467, respectively. All enjoyed similar harem educations in languages, philosophy, religion, and the military arts. Early on, Bayezit seems to have tapped Ahmed as his eventual successor (he would certainly favor him later)—perhaps because he was the eldest surviving son, or perhaps because Bayezit deemed him the ablest. Whatever the reason, his father folded Ahmed into imperial governance long before his brothers. As a boy, he attended meetings, assembled a team of advisers, and developed relationships with important military figures. Despite these advantages, or perhaps because of this privilege, Ahmed grew indolent. As a result, his body became corpulent, his mind sluggish. According to a Greek account from the seventeenth century, Ahmed “only cared for eating, drinking, and sleeping.” He enjoyed the pleasures of life in the palace and saw the throne more as a birthright than as something he had to win from his younger brothers.
Korkud was the most bookish of the three half-brothers. Like many cerebral children with a domineering older sibling, he preferred quiet contemplation to meetings and military exercises. “Korkud,” the same Greek source offered, “had applied himself to literature and displayed no other concerns.” He enjoyed poetry and penned several treatises on theological esoterica. As he grew up, Korkud became far more pious than his brothers, philosophically accepting the vagaries of fate. If Allah wanted him to be sultan, it would happen. During his youth, Korkud did not push for what he considered ephemeral, and generally avoided affairs of state.
Shrewd even in his earliest days, Selim observed these fraternal crevices. He saw an opportunity to set himself apart from his older brothers by holding the middle ground between the two—crafty and political like Ahmed, deep-thinking and munificent like Korkud. Unlike Ahmed, though, Selim was not lazy, and, unlike Korkud, he did not retreat into books. As a boy, he was—again, as the Venetian doge Andrea Gritti described him—“more ferocious and cunning than his brothers . . . extremely generous, and at the same time a warmonger”: winning attributes for anyone who hoped to rule a world empire. Even with their struggle for the throne many years away, Bayezit’s sons developed a deep hatred for one another. As rambunctious youngsters, they chased one another through the harem courtyards for sport; as grown men, they would chase one another around Anatolia with armies.
Before one of them could take over the empire, though, their father first had to become sultan. If Bayezit failed to seize the throne, they would likely be killed.
WHEN SELIM WAS TEN, his grandfather, Mehmet the Conqueror—a man he deeply respected and loved (far more than his father, according to some observers), a leader whose style he would seek to emulate—suffered severe abdominal pains while on a military campaign just east of Istanbul, the capital he had won a few decades earlier. Having spent most of his adult life at war, he was soothed by the sound of horses galloping outside his tent, but even so a deep panic gripped him. Religious men and doctors came to succor him, and his closest advisers hovered at his bedside. Around four o’clock on the afternoon of May 3, 1481, at the age of forty-nine, Mehmet—the greatest sultan the empire had yet known—drew his last breath. Tearfully, the grand vizier closed the eyes of his now soulless sultan and began to organize the transfer of the body to Istanbul’s Fatih Mosque, which Mehmet had built to be his eternal home.
Suspicious circumstances surrounded the sultan’s death. All evidence pointed to poison, a ubiquitous fear in the halls of the palace. Disgruntled advisers and military commanders, foreign agents, and above all Mehmet’s own sons all had their reasons to dispatch the sultan. Because poison was difficult to trace back to a specific source, and could kill from afar slowly over time, it was an ideal weapon; an assassin could administer a concoction that would lead to death months later. Without exaggeration, however, the Ottoman sovereign’s body was perhaps the most protected corporeal form on Earth—palisaded by an elaborate system of food sampling, physician surveillance, and water management—so dosing him with poison approached the impossible. Palace administrators, for example, forced the imperial chefs to serve their own children from the sultan’s plate before it was delivered to him. During the recent years of war between Venice and the Ottomans, Venice had made at least a dozen attempts on Mehmet’s life, and some believed that Venice had bribed one of the sultan’s personal physicians, a Persian, to kill him. Others believed that one of his sons was the culprit. But despite the many rumors, at the time and since, the exact reason for the sultan’s death remains a mystery.
Mehmet died, fittingly, just a few kilometers from the grave of Hannibal of Carthage, the renowned military commander and strategist of antiquity. Hannibal had battled the Roman Empire in the third century BCE; eighteen hundred years later, Mehmet crushed the last remnants of the Romans in the east—the Byzantine Empire. Mehmet’s empire would assume the mantle of the Romans—something Hannibal was never able to accomplish. After decades of neglect and depopulation, Constantinople—now Mehmet’s Istanbul—experienced a rebirth, instilling fear in every European leader from Henry VI of England to Pope Nicholas V, who saw this as a sign of impending eschatological violence, with Mehmet as the Antichrist and the Ottomans as the devil’s foot soldiers. From the second Rome, the Ottoman sultan might mobilize a strike on the first, a cataclysm that seemed all too real to Europeans in 1480, when Mehmet seized the
tiny port city of Otranto on the Italian peninsula. With his demise, however, and the subsequent Ottoman retreat from Otranto, the outlook brightened, encouraging Europeans to believe that God might be on their side after all.
It took a few weeks for news of the sultan’s death to spread throughout Europe, and the elation was literally explosive. Fireworks pierced the night skies and church bells tolled in every European capital. On the day of Mehmet’s death, the earth itself had jolted the island of Rhodes with tremors—another cosmic omen. “This second Lucifer, this second Mohammed, this second Antichrist,” this seizer of the second Rome, had departed. “It was fortunate for Christendom and for Italy,” wrote the procurator of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, “that death checked the fierce and indomitable barbarian.” With Mehmet’s death, Europe received a much needed, albeit momentary, respite from the periodic Crusades it felt obligated to wage against its Muslim enemies, for example, after 1453—though then, as on many occasions, feelings of Christian duty fell short of actual war, since European powers often could not organize a proper fighting force. More practically, with Armageddon averted, numerous European princes’ financial obligations to the Ottoman Empire—which were considerable—now appeared potentially renegotiable.
In contrast to Europe’s elation, a mood of impending chaos and mounting crisis pervaded the Ottoman Empire. The succession struggle that inevitably followed a sultan’s death was only beginning. As a perceptive, crafty ten-year-old, Selim would watch this dramatic spectacle unfold and learn a great deal about politics and violence, and also about his own family.
CHAPTER
2
EMPIRE BOYS
Bayezit and Cem battle
WHEN NEWS OF MEHMET’S DEATH REACHED AMASYA, BAYEZIT set out immediately for Istanbul, taking only his most trusted advisers and military men. He could be sure that his younger half-brother Cem (pronounced “Jem”) was on the road as well—and whoever arrived first at the palace usually kept the throne. Distance from the seat of power invariably proved a major factor in Ottoman succession struggles, and the location of Cem’s governorship gave him a slight head-start.
Selim had heard about Cem, but had never met him. As, from his child’s perspective, he absorbed the uncertainty and panic that pervaded the palace and the empire, he began to understand the brutal realities of his own future. This crisis foreshadowed the crisis that would come when Bayezit himself died; Selim would then find himself in the perilous position his father found himself in now. That is, if Bayezit succeeded in seizing the throne. If he did not, Selim’s future would be short indeed.
Gülbahar’s role as Selim’s mentor and adviser proved key in this moment. She alone could explain to him the complicated and potentially deadly world of imperial succession, and teach him how to navigate it. They would eventually leave Amasya, the only home Selim had known, and follow Bayezit to the palace. Each mother-and-son pair could have also considered a strategic alliance with Cem. Although sons were generally pitted against fathers and brother against brother in the Ottoman dynastic system, succession jumbled these interests, creating one of the few instances in which sons—usually—supported their fathers unconditionally. Only after a father had secured the sultanate could his sons become his primary challengers for power.
The questions facing those outside the Ottoman Empire were similarly weighty. With the leader of the largest and, thanks to Mehmet, strongest polity in the Mediterranean now gone, power shifted decisively toward Europe. Ottoman succession battles always inspired the empire’s enemies to hope that they could claw back some lost territory. As the conqueror not only of Constantinople but also of parts of Italy and Albania, Mehmet had proven more consequential than any sultan before him, so his demise proved equally significant as a moment of possibility. Would Europe unite long enough to wage an effective war against the Ottomans, and perhaps mount the Crusade for Jerusalem that had been dreamed of for centuries? And would Europeans regain some control of the precious trade with the East? The world waited on geopolitical tenterhooks as the Ottoman dynasty worked out its family quarrels. Soon the struggle would spill beyond the borders of the empire.
BAYEZIT AND CEM WERE nearly polar opposites. Bayezit was a serious, even dour man. A devout Muslim, he enjoyed studying Islamic philosophy and supported the empire’s religious establishment by building mosques, hospitals, and colleges. The Venetian ambassador to Istanbul described him as “very melancholic, superstitious, and stubborn,” a comment perhaps inspired by Bayezit’s removal of the paintings by Italian artists his father had commissioned for the palace. Cem, on the other hand, was a bon vivant. Handsome and charismatic, he enjoyed hunting and sport, poetry and wine. His womanizing was legendary, with much-embroidered tales of maidens throwing themselves at his feet. On the inside of his favorite wine chalice, he had had seven lines engraved, to represent the seven climes. Each draft of wine thus exposed a new line, drawing him closer to possessing the entire world. In his drunkenness, he would be able to see the earth laid open in front of him while he imagined his power over all of creation. Ultimately, his shrewd political acumen and desire for the throne surpassed his love of wine and women.
Around the time that Bayezit became the governor of Amasya in the mid-1450s, Cem assumed the governorship of Konya, another ancient Anatolian town. Konya had seen the apostle Paul arrive to spread the gospel; during the Renaissance, it would become a renowned center of carpet production. It is most famous today as the home and burial site of the Persian poet Rumi, whose death in 1273 inspired his followers to found the Mevlevi Sufi order, based on his teachings of universal love and the unification of God and man. The order’s use of music, mystical poetry, whirling hypnotic dance, and even wine to unite man with God made it one of the most distinct religious orders in all of Islam. No doubt the Sufis’ combined message of love and worldly pleasure appealed to Cem during his governorship of the city, though there is no evidence that he actually joined the ranks of their brotherhood.
Mehmet’s grand vizier, Karamani Mehmed Pasha, who had closed the sultan’s eyes for the last time, supported Cem for the succession, whom he and other imperial functionaries viewed as the more pliable of the two sons, easier to influence and control. Conspiring to keep news of Mehmet’s death secret for as long as possible, he furtively implored Cem to rush to Istanbul and seize the throne before Bayezit was any the wiser. But the grand vizier was no match for the Janissaries—the empire’s elite and powerful military corps. They had long supported Bayezit, as they considered he would be more likely to support their agenda for a militarily aggressive, expansionist empire. Because Mehmet died while on campaign, the news of his death was no secret to the Janissaries. Immediately they sent word to Bayezit and bolted into action, thundering into Istanbul with armaments and horses to secure the palace until Bayezit could arrive. Although the grand vizier and his allies tried to prevent this, the soldiers easily overwhelmed the civilian administrators, slaughtering many of them in the streets and taking over much of the city. They soon captured the grand vizier himself and killed him, too. Without a sultan, without a clear successor, and now without a grand vizier, the empire fell into a fragile and parlous state of turmoil.
One of the most powerful constituencies in the empire, the Janissaries were a unique fighting force in the early modern world. The Ottomans’ professional military, always at the ready for battle, far outshone any force in Europe, where states had to round up an army of mercenaries and irregulars every time they went to war. Not only was this cumbersome and slow, but the recruits were woefully unreliable and undertrained, often fighting for personal gain rather than for the interest of the state. It was no wonder, observed Niccolò Machiavelli, that the Ottomans were in the ascendancy in the Mediterranean. Machiavelli was correct in his assessment of how the Ottoman army stacked up against European armies, but he missed a salient point. The very same advantages of strength that the standing army afforded the empire could also be turned against it. While theoretically
the Janissaries were subservient to the sultan, the reality was much more complicated. They took sides, as in the succession battle between Bayezit and Cem; they used the threat of violence against organs of the state and sometimes the populace at large to exact money, resources, and power; and they almost always pushed for war, hungry for their portion of the spoils seized in battle and the opportunities for pillage. Thus, to keep the Janissaries happy, sultans had to cut deals with them, grant them favors, and keep their ranks flush with newly captured recruits. In contrast to Cem’s foppish lifestyle, Bayezit’s serious, stoic nature earned him the Janissaries’ support.
For nearly three weeks, the throne remained vacant, as Bayezit and Cem sprinted from Anatolia to Istanbul. Bayezit arrived first, reaching the outskirts of Istanbul on May 21, 1481. After killing the grand vizier, the Janissaries had imposed strict controls on the city—enforcing a curfew, patrolling the streets, chasing down rabble-rousers, and securing neighborhood squares. The normal chaos of a city of half a million people—the steady hum of vegetable and fruit peddlers, merchants hawking their wares, and crowds of men socializing on street corners—had hushed to an eerie calm. He rendezvoused with a detachment of Janissaries at a prearranged city gate, and they formed a phalanx around him to rush him through the city to the palace.
