by Alan Mikhail
IT TOOK OVER A week for the small merchant ship to cover the three hundred miles between Korikos and the city of Rhodes on the northeastern tip of the island; the trip was uneventful, given the sea’s placid summer currents. Yet Cem’s mind was tortured. He talked to no one and hardly slept. He knew well that the longer Bayezit held the throne—and it had already been more than a year—the harder it would be to uproot him. Leaving the territory of the empire once again was, clearly, a gamble for Cem, yet, given his debacle with the Kasıms at Konya, he had little choice. Looking overboard into the limpid blue of the northern Mediterranean, Cem saw the darkness of his circumstances—forced once more to put his fate in the hands of another power. But should he stay in Anatolia, he would surely be hunted down.
While he clearly had his trepidations, Cem could not have known the depth of the political morass into which he was stepping when he reached Rhodes. There, he would become one of the early modern world’s most valuable bargaining chips, a hostage who did not know he was a hostage—at least, not yet. Any entity that gave Cem refuge, however small or unimportant, immediately became a sponsor of Bayezit’s potential demise and could therefore make demands of the empire. Rhodes would be the first of many European powers to vie for Cem.
In the grand game of imperial politics, each party needed the other, even as each tried to outwit the other. Cem bargained for as much support as he could get from the Knights—money, ships, troops, diplomatic protection—to sustain his bid for the Ottoman throne. For their part, the Knights viewed Cem as a stepping-stone toward their larger ambition—a new Crusade to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims. The Knights had started as a Crusading order, and they remained a Crusading order. Cem was useful to them not as a spark to ignite an infernal war with the Ottomans—a war they wanted to avoid at all costs, because they knew they would lose disastrously—but because he bought them time. They wagered that Cem was enough of a threat to Bayezit that they could leverage him for peace, and perhaps money too. A temporary Pax Mediterranea would enable them to rebuild their military strength and financial resources for the planned Crusade.
When he arrived on the island on July 29, 1482, representatives of the Knights met him at the docks with a royal welcome. Carpets embroidered with gold and silver softened his first steps ashore, and he was given a “most beautiful horse” to ride from the coast into the city. Crowds cheered him along the route, which was strewn with flowers. The Knights—as well as Italian, Greek, French, and Flemish merchants on Rhodes—hailed Cem as a prince as well as a kind of celebrity who might tip the Mediterranean’s balance of power against the Ottoman sultan. Cem, the Knights, and the Mediterranean’s Christian merchant communities shared the same political program, but their interests would converge for only so long. After thanking those who had accompanied him from the harbor and handing over the horse’s reins, Cem made the short, steep climb up to the imposing stone walls of the palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes.
Since as early as the sixteenth century BCE, Rhodes had been continuously inhabited. Its location made it a coveted speck on the sea as long as maritime routes were the principal means of long-distance travel. Along with Crete, Rhodes served as the key border crossing from the Aegean—and beyond it, Istanbul and the Black Sea—into the eastern Mediterranean, and then on to Egypt, Cyprus, Syria, the rest of the Middle East, North Africa, and points west. Rhodes also controlled one of Anatolia’s richest supply zones of rare coastal timber, which was coveted for shipbuilding and other uses. The ramparts of the city, first built by the Greeks in the fourth century BCE, had been restored by the Knights of St. John in the early fourteenth century. Not long before Cem approached the walls in the early afternoon of July 30, they had had to do so again.
The Knights Hospitaller receive Cem in Rhodes
Almost exactly two years earlier, Mehmet II had attacked Rhodes with what one of the Knights described as “an Armada of one hundred and nine vessels” with “a great many cannons, bombards and wooden towers with other engines of war” manned by nearly seventy thousand soldiers. This huge force besieged the city of Rhodes for more than two months, with Ottoman infantry advancing to the top of the palace’s ramparts before d’Aubusson was able to mount a counterattack with the help of reinforcements from the king of Naples. In the end, the Ottomans were rebuffed, but not before close to half of the Knights’ three thousand men and more than nine thousand Ottoman soldiers were slaughtered and the palace left in shambles. In the early modern Mediterranean, alliances changed as quickly as the sea’s currents; now the son of the destroyer of the Knights’ palace was an honored guest.
Most of what we know of Cem’s sojourn on Rhodes comes from the account of a vice-chancellor and secretary of the Knights named Guillaume Caoursin. Caoursin sought to paint the rule of the Knights in the rosiest hues possible, but, read judiciously, his writings provide invaluable details of Cem’s time on the island. While Cem was always comfortable on Rhodes—with a well-appointed apartment, sumptuous meals every night in the Grand Master’s palace, and frequent hunting trips around the island—he remained worried about his precarious position as a captive diplomatic asset. Caoursin wrote that Cem “observes those around him and always seems a little sad and pensive. . . . He is so fidgety that he can’t stay long in one place.” Still, “even as an exile and a fugitive, he does not lose his aristocratic dignity,” which apparently enabled him “to swim every day in the sea, naked, without prudishness in sight of everybody.” Cem was melancholy on Rhodes, perhaps resigned to his fate, even as he remained committed to achieving the outcome he feared was slipping away. Each day, he drowned his sorrows in luxurious food and wine and distracted himself with Alméida, a slave woman he purchased on the island.
After thirty-four days, the Knights decided to send Cem, against his will, to one of their castles in France—for his own safety, they said, but in reality for their own. Fearing that Bayezit might invade Rhodes to try to capture him, they thought it best to move him as far away as possible. This plan allowed the Knights to maintain control over their royal hostage while removing the imminent threat of an Ottoman invasion. The same day Cem set sail for France, on September 1, 1482, d’Aubusson sent a delegation to Istanbul, offering to hold Cem in France in exchange for an Ottoman guarantee of peace. To their delight, Bayezit immediately agreed to their terms. From the sultan’s perspective, this superb deal allowed him essentially to hire the Knights as prison guards to keep his half-brother far from Istanbul. In return, Bayezit agreed to pay the Knights 45,000 Venetian gold ducats annually to cover the costs of Cem’s imprisonment. Furthermore, Bayezit promised not to invade Rhodes or Otranto, as his father had done two years earlier. The only Ottoman royal ever to go on the Hajj, Cem also earned the distinction of sailing farther west than any member of the House of Osman had gone before. The fraternal struggle for the Ottoman throne now spanned the Mediterranean.
Cem learned of this bargain when he landed in Nice six weeks later, on October 17, 1482. Bewildered, angry, and depressed that the Knights had ransomed him, the twenty-three-year-old prince found himself in an even stranger new land. As on Rhodes, the Knights kept Cem comfortable but under close watch. A prisoner but still a prince, he was placed under a kind of lax house arrest in the well-appointed acropolis of Nice, which was owned by an associate of the Knights, a wealthy Genoese merchant named Gaspare Grimaldi. On Cem’s first night there, Grimaldi’s oldest daughter took a bed-warmer to their new guest, and, if we are to believe the French accounts, offered herself to the prince. Later, her sisters and cousins took their turns spending the night with Cem, suggesting that Grimaldi hoped to marry one of his daughters or nieces into the Ottoman royal family. When allowed to venture beyond the walls, Cem moved on to the city’s female prostitutes and “charming well-made boys / each the son of a noble.” Cem reveled in this sexual diversion. “What a wonderful place is this city of Nice,” he wrote, apparently unconcerned about venereal disease, “a man can stay there and do as
he please!” Alienating at first, the city eventually reminded him of Konya, where he had been governor, with its narrow winding streets and small neighborhood squares. He loved the azure coastline and picturesque red-roofed buildings. His debauches, however, were an unsatisfactory salve for the lost sultanate so far away.
Cem’s exile was only just beginning. He would spend the next seven years being shuffled around southeastern France from castle to castle as local rulers maneuvered to earn the princely purse Bayezit was paying his half-brother’s captors. Cem’s captivity was thus, rather peculiarly, an enormous boon to the region’s economy, as 45,000 gold ducats represented a formidable sum in the mid-1480s.
At the same time, at the far end of the Mediterranean, the Ottomans and the Mamluks tussled in a series of indecisive wars—skirmishes that Cem’s nephew Selim would continue and ultimately win a few decades later. Like the Knights, the minor potentates of southeastern France, and other Mediterranean powers, the Mamluks also coveted Cem as a weapon against the Ottomans, enabling them to terrify Bayezit with the threat that his half-brother might storm the palace. In addition, someone else was lobbying for Cem’s return to Cairo—his mother. She had stayed behind in the Mamluk capital after her son left for his ill-fated attempt to capture Konya and yearned to have him back in Cairo, both out of maternal longing and in order to continue the fight against Bayezit. Thus, the Mamluk sultan wrote to the Knights of St. John, imploring them to return Cem to Egypt in return for the full support of the Mamluk army in any future confrontation with the Ottomans as well as 100,000 gold ducats. Despite these generous terms—more than Bayezit was offering—the Knights refused to relinquish their Ottoman prince. He was proving too valuable, and, besides, other plans were afoot.
Soon after the Mamluk approach, Pope Innocent VIII—famous for his papal decrees on witchcraft and his lifelong efforts to further the Inquisition—convinced the Knights to transfer Cem from France to Rome for, he said, “the general good of Christendom.” The “good,” as he saw it, was that moving Cem closer to the Ottoman Empire increased the threat to Bayezit should Cem be released, and this would serve to check Ottoman advances against Christians in the Balkans. Fearing—though perhaps also seeking—a kind of Mediterranean world war, the pope thus hoped to orchestrate a three-way alliance among Rome, Hungary (at the time, one of the Ottomans’ primary rivals in the Balkans), and Cem against Bayezit. This, of course, was part of the larger goal: the preparation of a new Crusade to “win back” Jerusalem and deliver the death blow to Islam.
When Cem arrived in Rome on March 4, 1489, nearly eight years after his father’s death, he became in essence a reified weapon in Renaissance Europe’s bloodlust against Islam—a more compelling obsession than the classics of antiquity, art, or personal salvation. In the words of one of the foremost historians of the Renaissance, James Hankins, “The humanists wrote far more often and at far greater length about the Turkish menace and the need for crusade than they did about such better-known humanist themes as true nobility, liberal education, the dignity of man, or the immortality of the soul.” In effect, much of the “civilization” of the Renaissance developed from Christianity’s atavistic hatred of Islam.
Reacting against the culture of fire-breathing religious loathing that surrounded him, Cem became ever more pious during his years in Europe. A pleasure-seeking orgiast in his youth and in Nice, Cem paradoxically became a devout Muslim for the first time in his life in the very heart of Christian Europe, the Vatican. Before his European sojourn, his relationship to Islam had been shaped more by politics than by faith. While he was in the Ottoman Empire, then in Mamluk Cairo, and even on his Hajj, Cem’s commitment to Islam had always seemed half-hearted; when he undertook the pilgrimage—the most quintessentially Islamic of Islamic acts—he did so to drum up support for his bid for the throne. In Europe, though, his Muslim faith was both a statement of defiance against his captors and a wellspring of strength against hardship and loneliness. As for so many who turn to religion in times of adversity, Islam represented for Cem a source of both political and spiritual freedom in the absence of physical freedom.
In Cem’s mind, there was no contradiction between emphatically marking one’s political identity as a Muslim in Europe while acting un-Islamically. He loved wine and regularly had sex with both Christian women and boys. According to some accounts of his years in Europe, he may even have married a Christian woman—a possibility that in Europe (but not in the Ottoman Empire) would have required at least a nominal conversion. If he did indeed convert to Christianity, he likely did so through a practice known to Muslims as taqiyya. Usually translated as “dissimulation,” taqiyya allows one to affect a temporary outward conversion to a religion other than Islam, usually for reasons of survival, while inwardly preserving one’s true Islamic identity. Apart from the rumors of this marriage, all other indications point to Cem having remained a Muslim throughout his years in Europe.
Ten days after arriving in Rome, and fuming about his mistreatment at the hands of the Knights, Cem met privately with Pope Innocent. When the tall, rotund pope tempted him with the worldly power that would come from leading a new Crusade—leadership Cem could only undertake as a Christian—he reportedly vowed never to help Rome or indeed any Christian power against a Muslim empire, his own or any other, “even for the rule of the whole world.” In this, of course, he was demonstrating his anti-European politics as much as his steadfast belief in Islam. Furthermore, he demanded that Innocent release him immediately so that he could travel to Cairo and live the rest of his life in a Muslim land. Unaffected by these protestations, the pope promptly ordered Cem returned to his prison cell.
Cem was twenty-nine, and had been on the run for close to a decade. “Stocky and robust,” as described by the cleric Matteo Bosso, he had been well taken care of while he was shuttled from exile to exile, prison to prison. No longer an unmoored libertine, he finally admitted defeat. In a series of letters to his half-brother, he expressed remorse for challenging Bayezit’s claim to the throne and pledged allegiance to him. Cem even wrote that he forgave Bayezit for killing his three-year-old son while he was in France. Humbling himself at his half-brother’s feet, a broken Cem apparently would have done whatever was asked of him in order to live out the rest of his days in freedom in the Ottoman Empire—or, failing that, in a Muslim land such as India, Iran, or the Arab world. While there is no way to confirm whether or not Cem’s intentions were sincere, Bayezit took no chances. Interpreting Cem’s pleas as a potential ruse, he rejected them.
Despite Cem’s strident unwillingness to support a new Crusade, Pope Innocent remained hopeful. The shockwaves from the 1453 fall of Constantinople still reverberated in Europe’s ears, roaring again in 1480 with the Ottomans’ capture of territory on the Italian peninsula. The medieval Crusades, despite what Western students have imbibed for centuries, were far more than discrete military adventures—they amounted to a nearly unbroken strategy across centuries, an ongoing European military stance against the Muslim world that peaked and waned as needs dictated. Plans for Christian Crusades against Islam continued well into the seventeenth century, and it could be argued that they have not yet disappeared. From a European Christian perspective, the ascendancy of the Ottomans at the expense of Europe fueled notions that Armageddon was near, so it was more than ironic that Pope Innocent now looked to the Muslim East for help. Clarifying that his interest was in a Crusade specifically against the Ottomans, rather than all of Islam, Innocent dispatched envoys to Cairo seeking Mamluk support for a new war against their coreligionists.
In a kind of early modern entente cordiale, Christian Europe and the Mamluks knew they needed each other against the superior military power of the Ottomans. Each side had previously made overtures to the other, but achieving common cause continued to prove elusive—for reasons not of religion or culture, but of politics. In 1489, the fly in the ointment was Cem. The Mamluks made Cem’s return a condition of any alliance with the pope. The pope ref
used, thus scuttling any hope of a joint papal–Mamluk fighting force. Innocent then turned to the European powers, who once again swiftly declined his invitation to join a fresh Crusade. Political conditions in the Mediterranean skewed so heavily in favor of the Ottomans that most European leaders judged a Crusade at this time to be a suicide mission.
Unable to rally the interest and manpower he needed, Innocent, like the Knights of St. John before him, settled for something less than total war and entered into negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. Having Cem in Rome, of course, increased the pope’s leverage. He threatened to release the Ottoman prince, intimating that Cem would ally with the Hungarians against the Ottomans in the Balkans even while knowing full well that he would not, and pushed for guarantees that the Ottomans would never invade the Italian peninsula again, would allow Christians freedom of worship in the Ottoman Empire, and would afford safe passage to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims. If Bayezit acceded to these demands, the pope pledged to continue to hold Cem hostage—albeit still insisting on a fee. From Bayezit’s perspective, this was a splendid deal, for his overriding goal in the years around 1490 remained keeping Cem at bay in Christian Europe. Besides, he had no intention of invading Italy, and he had already upheld Ottoman Christians’ freedom of worship and offered protection to European Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem. Not only did he agree to Innocent’s terms, he offered several other small concessions. He handed over to Rome the head of the lance that allegedly pierced Christ’s side during the Crucifixion, one hundred Moorish slaves, and an advance payment of 120,000 gold ducats to support three years of Cem’s captivity. This sum was a pittance for the Ottomans, yet it was the equivalent of an entire year’s income for the papacy.
