God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  Given that Selim had six daughters survive into adulthood, it seems reasonable to assume that his two concubines produced a total of more than just one son. It is possible that all but Suleyman died young, but no mention of such births (or deaths) exists in any of the period’s sources. One possibility is that Selim took what would have been at the time the extreme and unprecedented measure of killing his other sons to spare Suleyman a bloody succession battle of the sort he knew he was about to undertake against his own half-brothers. Both Ottoman custom and the Guardians of the Holy Law sanctioned fratricide, but father–son murder—in either direction—was considered a heinous crime against both God and state. If Selim did in fact kill his other sons, it is not clear why Suleyman would have been the chosen survivor. And again, no sources mention filicide. Even if he did favor Suleyman to such a degree that he wanted him to have no competitors, surely Selim knew that Suleyman might die long before he came close to the throne. No other sons then would mean no successor, the death of the Ottoman dynastic line. In everyday terms, had Suleyman slipped on a rainy cobblestone, choked on a fish bone, or fallen off his horse during a hunt, Selim might have gone down in history as the agent of the empire’s demise, though the logic undergirding the empire’s system of concubinage—the ability to produce many potential successors quickly—made this scenario exceedingly unlikely. In the back of his mind, Selim knew he could always produce another son should Suleyman die.

  In the end, Suleyman survived to inherit his father’s throne. But at the time of Suleyman’s birth, it was not at all clear that Selim would have a throne to pass on.

  CHAPTER

  5

  POWER AT THE EDGE

  The helmet of Uzun Hasan, leader of the Ak Koyunlu

  BETWEEN HIS ASSIGNMENT TO TRABZON IN 1487 AND THE BIRTH of Suleyman seven years later, Selim and his mother solidified their power base on the eastern edge of the empire. Gülbahar’s pious foundation demonstrated that life for Trabzon’s majority Greek Christian population was better under the rule of the Muslim House of Osman than it had been under the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. In fact, nearly everywhere the Ottomans came to rule, the local population recognized the advantages provided by the Ottoman system: freedom of worship, lower taxes, military protection, social stability, and the free flow of commerce.

  Throughout the turbulent decade of the 1490s, empires across the globe pursued armed campaigns to fortify and expand their territory. In China, Ming authorities reinforced the Great Wall to fend off Mongol incursions and to serve as a base of operations for attacks farther west. Spain and Portugal dispatched their navies to the East and West Indies to defend their sovereignty and capture more territory. In Mexico, Aztec forces conquered the central city of Mitla, near Oaxaca, and continued to the south. None of these early modern empires had the capacity to unilaterally impose itself militarily or politically; rather, they had to earn recognition and acquiescence from the peoples they ruled. Given the cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, the Ottomans proved to be masters of such rule, gaining control of territory while ceding enough political and cultural autonomy to win acceptance from populations with competing interests. Selim’s rule in Trabzon was only one example of the larger triumph of the Ottomans’ lightning expansion.

  As Selim moved into adulthood, he assumed more of the daily administration of the city from his mother and their coterie of advisers. He interspersed walks in his palace garden holding young Suleyman’s hand with adjudication of complex tax disputes and evaluation of the city’s need for another pier. By the end of the fifteenth century, Gülbahar and Selim had, in roughly a dozen years, transformed Trabzon into one of the empire’s eastern bulwarks. The later, laudatory Selimname described the order and prosperity of Selim’s governorship this way: “He was a sun, which stayed in the constellation of honour. Through his coming, the dominion found happiness, and the seed of justice was scattered over the world. There was no trace of oppression in his time, and the temperament of the dominion was preserved from suffering.” Elaborating on themes derived from the Circle of Justice, the chronicle continued: “The re‘āyā [people] were comfortable under his protection; in the capital that he invested, everyone found profit.”

  The provincial governorships of Ottoman princes served, by design, both as tests of their leadership abilities and as staging grounds for their later attempts to take over the empire. Some posts, of course, were more lucrative, more prestigious, and more advantageous than others; proximity to the capital was often the greatest advantage a son could have. Of Bayezit’s three eldest surviving sons, Ahmed in Amasya held the governorship nearest to Istanbul. Korkud, as governor first of Saruhan and then Teke in western Anatolia, was not much farther from Istanbul than Ahmed, but both of these postings lacked the prestige of Amasya. In this, and in sending Selim to the most distant city in the empire, Bayezit made clear whom he most favored to succeed him.

  Selim would turn this disadvantage into an asset. If he hoped to pose a real challenge to his half-brothers, he would need a military force that operated beyond the purview of the Janissary Corps. Tucked away in distant Trabzon, he assembled a ragtag coalition that included upstarts, exiles from other states, disaffected soldiers, those passed over for imperial military service, leaders of various ethnic groups throughout Anatolia, and family members of those in his household.

  Princely households—comprised of wives, concubines, children, advisers, tutors, and elite soldiers—created for the prince ties that spanned the empire. Each connection was a spoke in a complex network of semi-independent satrapies, as the various princes sought advantage over their rivals by doling out favors and striking deals. Selim, now in his mid-twenties, with his soon-to-be-hallmark mustache an impressive fixture on his upper lip, created, as other princes did too, what one might call an empire-in-training: a miniature Topkapı Palace, complete with advisers, servants, military officials, and a harem, all in provincial Trabzon. Given the geographic weakness of his posting in remote eastern Anatolia, Selim, more than his rivals, needed an exceptionally strong household, one with an independent spirit, ties across the empire, and unbreakable bonds of loyalty. Because Selim was governor of Trabzon for close to twenty-five years, living there longer than any other place in his life, he was able to forge durable and lasting connections. The regular rotation of governors was meant to prevent this very phenomenon, but his father never rotated Selim out of Trabzon because, he probably wagered, one could do no worse. Bayezit clearly had no fear of Selim—a gross error in judgment that would come to haunt him.

  ONE PILLAR OF SELIM’S support was his partnership with some of the empire’s often vilified ethnic minorities. In the borderlands of Trabzon, Selim recognized the crucial need to cooperate with the area’s powerful minority groups—not just for the success of the overall imperial enterprise in the east but for his own ends. This success rested on a formula of what in the nineteenth century became known as Realpolitik. The empire needed the support of its diverse ethnic groups to thrive, and these same groups required the support of the empire. The dominant ethnic groups in eastern Anatolia were the Kurds and the Karamanids.

  Well before Selim’s day and even down to the present, Kurds have constituted the majority of the population in the rugged highlands and unforgiving landscape of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq and Iran. Although mostly Muslim, they trace their lineage back to pre-Islamic times—practicing, for example, tattooing, a custom formally forbidden in Sunni Islam. Renowned as horsemen, poets, and weavers, the Kurds have, over the centuries and still today, maintained their own distinct culture, Indo-European language, cuisine, and identity. Although the Ottomans were compelled to work with the Kurds, as they could tip the balance of power in favor of any polity that wanted to rule in the upper Tigris and Euphrates valleys, they generally denigrated them, referring to them pejoratively as “mountain Turks” or “failed Turks”—uncouth, uncultured, uncivilized, and unworthy of recogni
tion as an autonomous community with its own distinct identity.

  In his decades in Trabzon, close to the Kurds’ historic power base, Selim achieved a rapprochement with the Kurds. To maintain authority and relative calm in the region, he cut deals with Kurdish chieftains, offering them advantages where other Ottoman officials had preferred the sword. In return, they pledged their loyalty to him. Co-optation nearly always proved more successful than force, so—as with all of the Ottomans’ negotiated deals—Selim and the various Kurdish factions reached an arrangement of maximal mutual benefit. Tribal leaders won open lines of communication with the empire, financial rewards, and local spheres of autonomy. Most important for Selim and his ultimate goal, the Kurds offered him armed manpower resources outside the channels of the imperial military establishment.

  Like the Kurds, the Karamanids had also felt the wrath of Ottoman power, but here again the empire eventually settled on a strategy of co-optation rather than outright elimination. Pushed westward from Central Asia as they fled the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the Karamanids were among the many large tribal confederations in Anatolia that resisted the imposition of Ottoman rule. Proud of their Central Asian heritage and famed for their swift horses and ornate carpets, the Karamanids, with their distinctive helmets and flowing beards, were fearsome figures as they surged over the horizon. Their stronghold was the ancient south-central Anatolian city of Laranda, which they renamed Karaman. (A local breed of sheep is the source of a yogurt that has made the city regionally famous.) Karaman stood at the foot of the Taurus Mountains, near an extinct volcano. Its most prominent structure was its fortress, first constructed in the Bronze Age (approximately 3000–1000 BCE) and continuously rebuilt from then through the Roman period, until its last renovation by the Byzantines in the twelfth century. Stretching for more than five hundred miles between Karaman and Trabzon was some of the harshest territory in Anatolia: steep cliffs, narrow mountain passes, punishing wind, little edible vegetation. Despite the daunting obstacles of terrain and distance, Selim was able to establish an alliance with the Karamanids by manipulating his family’s complicated dynastic politics.

  Bayezit’s fifth son, four years younger than Selim, was named Şehinşah. He seemingly had no desire for the throne and spent most of his life—nearly thirty years—in the comfortable governorship of the province of Karaman, which also included the important cities of Konya and Kayseri. Much as Selim had co-opted the Kurds, Şehinşah built alliances with the Karamanid tribal confederation. In fact, he devoted much of his time and energies to ensuring the Karamanids’ well-being, security, and hence loyalty, offering them the choicest grazing lands and several key administrative positions, as he needed their military might to defend the territory he governed from other pastoral powers in the region. Yet of all the strident challenges Şehinşah faced over the course of his governorship, the strongest came from his half-brother Ahmed, then the governor of Amasya. Selfish and self-assured in his birthright as the eldest surviving son, confident that their father would guarantee him the throne, Ahmed coveted the province of Karaman, especially the city of Konya, with its wealth and religious significance as the home of several Sufi orders. He would later capture Karaman during his succession battle with Selim, but the various raids he led in the 1490s to seize the city from Şehinşah failed, largely because of Şehinşah’s alliance with the Karamanids. As a kind of private fighting force, they thus functioned as armed arbitrators of intra-Ottoman clashes. Constant external threats made clear to both Şehinşah and the Karamanid leaders that they shared a vested interest. Operating largely autonomously under Şehinşah’s patronage, the Karamanids grasped that neither Ahmed nor any other leader might be as obliging.

  Ahmed’s insistent belligerency—coupled with Şehinşah’s own lack of interest in becoming sultan himself—led Şehinşah and his mother, Hüsünşah, to support Selim over Ahmed and Korkud in the contest to become the next sultan. Ever since their days in the Amasya harem, this mother-and-son dyad had been closer to Selim and Gülbahar than to any of the other mother-and-son pairs. In the 1490s, the bond materialized militarily in the form of Şehinşah’s offer to lend Selim his Karamanid forces as a kind of mercenary army. As the governor of a rich frontier city, Selim confronted exigent threats from the Caucasus and Iran to his east and was frequently in need of soldiers. Looking beyond his post in Trabzon, he understood as well that such a fighting force would aid him in a run for the throne. Selim promised to pay the Karamanid warriors whatever amount his half-brother paid them, and guaranteed their leaders that they could keep their lands near Karaman in perpetuity. To ensure their loyalty, he enticed them with some land near Trabzon as well. As a result, the Karamanids increasingly came to Selim’s aid, willingly (and self-interestedly) offering their support to a leader who might soon become sultan. For his part, Şehinşah would never see Selim take the throne, dying in Konya in 1511 at the age of thirty-seven. In his last days, he was despondent, having lost his beloved youngest son the previous year, but he would have been pleased to know that the Karamanid force he had nurtured found a new patron in Selim. One of Selim’s payroll registers from the early sixteenth century indeed reveals that he replaced his half-brother as the primary employer of the military components of the Karamanid confederation.

  In addition to his strategic alliances with the Kurds and Karamanids, Selim employed a veritable army of soldiers for hire. More than any other force, warfare forged the politics, culture, and economy of the Ottoman Empire, with the Janissary Corps at the pinnacle of the empire’s military hierarchy. With their tall hats and long swords, the imposing soldiers of this professional, salaried army were afforded every resource and luxury and trained as the Ottomans’ elite fighters, the ultimate protectors of sultan and state, the envy of Machiavelli and countless other observers. The Ottoman state and its imperial military, however, did not possess a monopoly on armed violence. Countless other warriors—militiamen, ruffians, seasonal soldiers, even some disaffected former Janissaries—stood ready to fight. Mercenaries, brigands, and private soldiers proliferated throughout the countryside. Rural folk often possessed arms and employed violence, or sometimes the mere threat of violence, to gain money, influence, and power. On occasion, even soldiers from other states took their weapons to the Ottoman Empire, offering their services to whomever would pay. Awash in cash as the governor of a rich commercial city, Selim stood more than ready to pay these mercenaries to enable him to seize the throne.

  The same payroll register provides a detailed snapshot of Selim’s armed forces, which numbered 1,770 salaried soldiers. To put this number in perspective, Bayezit, as sultan, employed 7,000 salaried soldiers. As supreme commander of the Ottoman army, Bayezit of course had nearly infinite military and financial resources, as well as enormous responsibilities for the defense of his realm, so this comparison of the militaries of father and son shows how truly impressive Selim’s collection of warriors was. In Trabzon, an outpost of empire, he assembled a fighting force equivalent to more than a quarter of what the world’s most powerful sovereign had at the ready.

  Although Selim’s personal aim was to capture the Ottoman throne, the building of this powerful military coalition aided the empire’s larger goal of expansion and consolidation. Selim’s negotiations made the Kurds, Karamanids, and disparate groups of marauding fighters stakeholders in the Ottoman imperial project. Even as he planned to use them against his father the sultan, he was bringing them into the imperial system. Unlike his half-brothers, who presided over more stable and secure internal provinces, Selim had to deal with the constant pressures of border security. Looking beyond the weakness of his current posting, Selim cultivated the crucial tactical relationships that he would later utilize against them.

  IN THE 1490S, ferocious wars raged in Burma, resulting in the rise of the First Toungoo Empire; Jewish and Muslim refugees from Spain streamed east and south across the Mediterranean; and the native peoples of the Americas fended off strangers fr
om across the ocean. The rocky lands east of Selim’s outpost in Anatolia buckled into chaos in that decade too, as, between the fall of one state and the rise of another, no single power controlled the Caucasus and northern Iran. The nearly continuous fighting among numerous small principalities and tribal groups fractured the region between the Black and Caspian seas. Much of this warfare spilled over into eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire, either as raiders pillaged towns for resources and slaves, or as various factions attempted to create alliances with power brokers within the empire.

  From the fourteenth century—when the Byzantine Empire still controlled most of Anatolia—through to the 1490s, the Ak Koyunlu Confederacy ruled the Caucasus and northern Iran. This loose coalition of nomadic tribes collaborated to raid and trade and eventually to establish and control farms and raise revenue. Primarily Turkmen peoples, they shared with the Ottomans lineages stretching across Central Asia; the Ottomans and the Ak Koyunlu (literally, “White Sheep”) were then, in essence, cousins. Determining when, why, and how the coalition adopted (or received) the name “White Sheep” proves difficult. Some historians ascribe it to a breed of sheep the group excelled in raising, while others think it derived from a ritual totem. The Ak Koyunlu reached their peak in the 1460s and 1470s, when they united under a single figure—first a chieftain named Uzun Hasan, and then his son Ya‘kub, who seized power after killing his older brother. These two leaders formed marriage alliances with the Byzantine Empire and even pursued diplomatic relations with Venice and the pope, thereby becoming another potential Muslim ally for Europe against the common Ottoman enemy. This projected Venetian–Ak Koyunlu alliance—Christian and Muslim, lagoon and nomad—which would have squeezed the Ottomans, never materialized.