by Alan Mikhail
After 1461, when the Ottomans began to facilitate and benefit from Trabzon’s central role in Eurasian trade, they quickly grasped that they would have to insinuate themselves into the city’s age-old rhythms and customs. Trabzon had long been run by a handful of powerful families who resisted outside interference in their city’s affairs, which, over the centuries, had become nearly inseparable from their own commercial interests. Rather than seeking to destroy or subdue Trabzon’s prominent households, the Ottomans cut deals with them. They paid cash for loyalty, guaranteed market share, and learned how to achieve the delicate balance between stepping back and flexing their muscle. Before, during, and after Selim’s tenure as governor, the overarching aim of the Ottomans in Trabzon, and in their other Black Sea port cities, was to divert into their coffers revenues from tariffs and other taxes. Indeed, the chronological course of the Ottomans’ battles across northern Anatolia in the second half of the fifteenth century traces an inland line parallel to the Black Sea coast, along the overland routes of the silk-and-spices trade—thus forming a commercial highway of sorts from Istanbul to Bursa, Ankara, Tokat, Amasya, and eventually Trabzon. As with China’s expansion westward and Aztec moves eastward, the Ottomans’ military conquests were essentially a search for capital in the form of land and greater access to markets. War and commerce served as the two legs of the Ottomans’ sprint eastward through Anatolia.
After subduing these cities and towns, the Ottomans used their system of Islamic law courts to encourage and regulate trade. In a port city like Trabzon, most small-scale business transactions occurred on the docks. As soon as merchants stepped off their boats, trade representatives would accost them with swatches of purple silk or a sniff of cardamom, trying to entice the new arrivals to their showrooms and offices up the hill. Still on the pier, they haggled over prices, the quality of merchandise, and rates of interest. Larger deals, though, always went through the courts. The logic was twofold. The court system protected the parties involved in financial transactions, while allowing the Ottomans to skim a bit off the top—small recompense for the empire’s function as the ultimate commercial guarantor. No matter their language, birthplace, or religion, all merchants—locals and foreigners—conducting business in the empire relied on its courts for protection. When a Catholic Florentine merchant named Piero, for example, died in October 1478 in Bursa, his estate, with all its unresolved debts and credits, was adjudicated and settled in the city’s Islamic law court. Records indicate that he owed a Damascene spice merchant named Abdurrahman 86,000 akçe (Ottoman silver coins) and had further outstanding debts on raw silk he had purchased from Iranian merchants in Trabzon and elsewhere; fortunately for Piero’s creditors, he was also owed 67,200 akçe by an Italian resident of Istanbul. The judge assigned one of Bursa’s Genoese merchants to be the executor of Piero’s estate, to ensure that all creditors were paid. Such oversight of commerce assured foreign investors that their money and merchants would be safe in the Ottoman Empire. This kept cash and goods flowing between East and West.
At any given moment and for any reason, the Ottomans, as the middlemen of Eurasian trade, could turn off the spigot of silk and spices heading to Europe or dry up the stream of cash and finished products moving east. They used this privileged position to squeeze the Italian city-states in times of war, or to gain more favorable trading terms for the empire’s merchants. When Iran’s Safavid Empire proved particularly menacing, the Ottomans closed the major silk-trading routes west to the Black Sea, robbing their enemies of the cash that fueled their military campaigns.
MOST SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLDS would be unprepared to rule a hub of global commerce like Trabzon, so how did Selim manage to govern a place so complex and potentially troublesome? The short answer was his mother, Gülbahar. As we have seen, the Ottoman policy of “one mother, one son” bound them together, with the expectation that a mother would be her son’s guide even as far as the sultanic throne. Thus, the immature boys sent off to rule in the hinterlands were in reality only the junior half of a partnership; it was the partnership, rather than the boy himself, that was on trial. The dynasty’s slave mothers were, in effect, largely in charge in the provinces, while their still mostly unformed sons—sultans-in-training—were, at least to begin with, hardly more than figureheads.
Removed from the capital and the rest of the imperial family, the empire’s princes learned from their mothers how to govern, tamp down dissent, manage personalities, project their authority, and balance state budgets. In Trabzon, Gülbahar and Selim worked together diligently to integrate the city more fully into the empire. The most important theoretical underpinning of their efforts, and of Ottoman rule generally, was a philosophy of government known as the Circle of Justice. Adapted from a long tradition of political ideas originated by the Sumerians, the governing principles of the Circle of Justice describe a compact between a sovereign and the populace he rules. In summary form, the Circle of Justice is often expressed in the following way (sometimes elegantly written in a circle):
No power without troops,
No troops without money,
No money without prosperity,
No prosperity without justice and good administration.
The ultimate success of a ruler thus derives from his ability to recognize the mutually constitutive relationships between political power, military force, prosperity, and justice for his people. With no beginning and no end, the Circle of Justice suggests that power resides in the totality of the whole, not in any one place or person. Every point of the circle is equal and essential. God, of course, stands above all, casting his shadow on earth through the person of the sultan. Such a theory of governance, though perhaps never explicitly invoked by Selim or his mother, served as the foundation of their rule in Trabzon.
In the end, however, it was the messy day-to-day struggles, pressures, and forced compromises involved in the running of a bewilderingly multidimensional frontier town—not the idealized statutes of the Circle of Justice—that informed their decisions. In addition to successfully expanding the volume of commerce passing through Trabzon, the team of mother and son demonstrated their competence by solving mundane problems—not unlike the actions of municipal governments in the twenty-first century. When a fountain in one of the city’s central squares ran dry, Gülbahar and Selim appointed someone to make it flow again. When roads became rutted, they allocated funds to recobble them. When a resident had a dispute with a neighbor or a dishonest merchant, he complained not to lower-level officials but directly to the governor and his mother. Together, the two hobbled thieving bureaucrats, oversaw the city’s police, and ensured fair market prices. Above all, as imperial officials did throughout the realm, they levied taxes, the essential revenues that fortified the empire’s coffers.
Although international trade propelled Trabzon to global prominence, its success would have been impossible without the foodstuffs grown in and around the city. Indeed, the prosperous people who were an essential part of the Circle of Justice were not merchants but rural farmers. As the overwhelming majority of the population, peasants produced most of the empire’s cash in the form of tax revenues from assessments on what they grew. In Trabzon, in addition to cultivating copious amounts of wheat, barley, and other staples, farmers grew specialized delicacies in mass quantities for trade, the most important being cherries and hazelnuts. The region around Trabzon was then, and remains today, the world’s most prolific producer of these crops. Forming a checkerboard pattern, the farms of red cherries and brown hazelnuts dominated the landscape around Trabzon, much as they do even now.
Some of these lucrative small farms were distributed as recompense for military service; in exchange for paying a specific amount of tax to the state and maintaining a modicum of order among the peasant farmers living on the land, soldiers could farm and manage—but not own—these plots. Others were sold at auction to the highest bidder, in an exchange of leasehold land for cash instead of military service. This form of imperial
incorporation allowed the empire to outsource the quotidian complexities of land management, as well as the inherent risks, while ensuring a steady income stream and ultimate control over the land. Furthermore, the reliance of leaseholders on the recognition and permissions of the empire tied them ever more loyally and closely to the Ottoman system.
This delegation of authority over land to individuals proved a great boon to the imperial administration, sparing governors much of the minutiae of land and people management. Still, Selim and Gülbahar could not escape all of the intricacies of property contestations, taxation, and anxieties over crop yields. This was fifteenth-century life, after all. Livestock wandered onto fields, damaging crops. Droughts and floods regularly destroyed cultivated plots. Given the profit incentive, landholders often tried to extract too much from those working their fields, sparking small-scale peasant rebellions or the wholesale abandonment of land. As governor, one could only delegate so much; Selim served as the final arbitrator. If Selim wanted the Ottoman throne, he would first have to prove himself capable of dealing with such trivial matters as tracking down a runaway horse.
ONCE SELIM AND HIS mother had established their administrative control, they dedicated themselves to a thoroughgoing program of Ottomanization, aimed at replacing Trabzon’s Christian and Greek character with a more distinct Muslim and Turkish ethos. They made their first moves in this direction by bringing in Ottoman Muslim bureaucrats from elsewhere in the empire. This reflected a longstanding Ottoman tactic for maintaining a monopoly of authority: the regular rotation of officials among vastly different parts of the empire, so that no one administrator could develop too much power in any one locale. Selim effectively cleared out the city’s bureaucracy and brought in an entirely new slate of administrators loyal only to him and his vision of total Ottomanization. Selim and Gülbahar also curtailed the reach of the city’s large trading families, who had historically helped themselves to much of the municipal tariff revenues, using a deft balance of force and persuasion to direct record amounts of money from Trabzon’s international commerce into the imperial coffers.
In addition to appointing their own officials and taking control of more cash, mother and son sought to redesign the urban landscape. As Ottoman Muslims replaced Greek Christians in the city’s administration, minarets now jostled with bell towers in the city’s skyline (it would be another few decades before the Ottomans converted some of the city’s churches to mosques). The city walls received a facelift of plaster and stone, which caught the sun reflecting off the sea. Relying on the advice of urban planners imported from the empire’s older cities, Gülbahar and Selim refurbished streets, planted trees, and increased the number of water faucets throughout the city. Carved in the stone over these spigots were verses from the Qur’an and the seal of Sultan Bayezit, a reminder of the authorities that sponsored these sources of free, precious water. Some streets were redirected and others closed off to create a series of open plazas where carefully placed features projected Ottoman governance—charitable soup kitchens, fountains, hospitals, military offices, and schools. Over the years, Trabzon’s physical landscape slowly morphed into something more similar to older Ottoman cities like Bursa or Amasya.
Perhaps most significant in the process of making Trabzon Ottoman was the newly endowed pious foundation that, under the direction of the Christian-to-Muslim convert Gülbahar, forever changed the city. The Islamic institution of the pious foundation, vakıf in Turkish, allowed one to endow a set of structures, plots of land, or businesses that could be held in perpetuity, with the revenue supporting a specific charity or other public good. Because these foundations were meant to endure forever, sponsoring one became a visible way to mold an urban landscape, both during and after one’s lifetime. Gülbahar established the most opulent, imposing, and socially important pious foundation in Trabzon’s history. At its center was the city’s most exquisite mosque of that era, the Gülbahar Hatun Mosque—a sumptuous square stone structure with an ornate dome. Selim completed the mosque after his mother’s death, but its planning and construction began during her lifetime. Its pencil-thin minaret soared higher than the many other minarets built in the period. “Gülbahar’s needle” became a favorite of Trabzon’s countless ravens and crows, constant competition for the imam who climbed to this highest point in the city five times a day to call the pious to prayer. Within the complex’s walls was a school where children absorbed lessons about God and the world and recited the Qur’an. A soup kitchen provided the poor with a warm meal of lentils, bread, and rice on Trabzon’s many chilly evenings. The foundation also held what would become the city’s most renowned library, offering meditative respite from the clamorous world outside. The institution’s financial holdings included residential and commercial properties elsewhere in the city and beyond, notably Trabzon’s lucrative but fetid dye houses on the outskirts, as well as some farmland and water mills. The revenues earned from the rents on these properties and from the sale of agricultural products supported the work of the foundation’s public mission and funded the upkeep of its physical structures. Some of this money also paid for the salaries of the teachers, cooks, scribes, and imams needed to run its various institutions.
Gülbahar Hatun mosque complex
The most popular and profitable of the foundation’s holdings were its two bathhouses, one for women and one for men. Bathhouses were not just spaces of cleanliness and heat, but also of single-gender conviviality, conversation, and escape. Temporarily leaving behind life’s worries, one entered the bathhouse once or twice a week to enjoy a scrub and a massage, as well as to learn about city affairs, to see friends, and to complain about one’s job or family. Bathhouses provided both a necessary hygienic function and a recreational one, and became ubiquitous across the Ottoman Empire.
Gülbahar did not leave any writings, letters, or a diary. In the absence of such first-person accounts, we are fortunate to have her foundation as documentation of her life and worldview, as her achievements, which have not been fully recognized by past scholars, deserve our attention. The buildings Gülbahar endowed in perpetuity reveal her personality and interests. First, she clearly cared for Trabzon’s disadvantaged. Her soup kitchen kept the hungry fed; her school educated children for free; and the library she built offered knowledge to all who cared to enter. Second, her foundation suggests to us the level of her devotion to her adopted faith, and to the Ottoman Empire. Using quintessentially Islamic legal precepts that make these pious foundations distinct from similar institutions in other religious traditions, Gülbahar built an infrastructure to support Islam in Trabzon, where it was still a minority religion. Her mosque and Qur’anic school played a key role in the city’s transformation—which mirrored her own—from Greek Orthodoxy to Ottoman Islam.
Above all, Gülbahar’s foundation evidenced her intense commitment to the city of Trabzon. Probably more than anywhere else in her life, Gülbahar felt at home in Trabzon, and thus was profoundly interested in stamping her mark on the city. While for Selim this posting was merely a stepping-stone to his ultimate goal, Gülbahar reveled in the power she was able to exercise there. From her lowly status as a slave, Gülbahar had risen to the top of the imperial structure with her successful governance of Trabzon. In her late thirties and early forties during her years there, she was a powerful figure of provincial rule. She held audiences almost weekly, where all bowed to her. With her high-arching eyebrows like angular hats over her dark, deep-set eyes, she shot daggers at those who prostrated in deference to her. Yet she knew that her administrative authority would soon wane, since the older Selim grew, the less important she would become. If he became sultan, her role as adviser would be diminished by the retinue of imperial functionaries. If he did not, either he would be killed or he would be given some other position in the bureaucracy, a position in which his mother would likely have little or no influence. So, in many ways, she ran Trabzon as her capital city.
In perhaps the strongest statement of her
devotion, she made her bond to the city eternal by demanding to be buried in a tomb she helped design. Gülbahar died in 1505, and in 1514 Selim made good on his vow to build the tomb. An octagonal structure, it rises beside the mosque of her pious foundation, like a giant stone mushroom next to a gargantuan tree, smaller no doubt but no less beautiful. The complex, now known simply as the Lady’s Foundation, endures as a prominent, still active institution in the city today.
GÜLBAHAR AND SELIM REMAIN forever connected to Trabzon for other reasons too. Most significantly, his children—her grandchildren—were born there. Since producing potential successors was a prerequisite for becoming sultan, Selim knew well that he had to achieve this during his governorship. Uncovering the full genealogical picture of Selim’s progeny proves vexing, but even without clear answers, one essential thing is certain: at the age of twenty-four, Selim became, on November 6, 1494, the father of a son who would come to be known as Suleyman the Magnificent. Suleyman would rule longer than any other sultan in Ottoman history and expand the empire’s territory even beyond his father’s gains.
Suleyman’s mother, Hafsa, was fifteen at the time of Suleyman’s birth. Hailing from Crimea, Hafsa—plumpish, with long auburn hair and a prominent forehead—was one of Selim’s two concubines. When her son assumed the throne after Selim’s death, Hafsa became in her own right the most powerful woman in the empire, the first of the so-called Sultanate of Women, the name given to a century in which the mothers of sultans (and less often their wives) wielded enormous influence in imperial affairs—yet more evidence of the central role of women, and slave women no less, in Ottoman history. Hafsa and Selim’s other consort, Ayşe, each bore him three daughters. As best we know, Selim had only the one son, which would have been highly unusual, given the reproductive politics of the empire. Indeed, when he took the throne, Selim became the first sultan to have only one son—yet another unique fact about him.
