God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  Even before the boy turned seventeen, Selim had tried (and failed) to have him named governor of Şebhane Karahisarı and Bolu, two small provinces close to Trabzon, the only home Suleyman had ever known. This would have allowed Selim to train him in government, thus preparing him for a much better post. Bayezit rejected both requests, which Selim took as evidence of his father’s desire to ensure that Ahmed would inherit the throne.

  In 1511, still smarting from those denials, Selim tried a different tactic. He requested that Suleyman be given one of the provinces in the Balkans—some of the most prized governorships in the empire. As Bayezit aged and Ahmed and Korkud openly declared their intentions to claim the throne, Selim knew he would need a power base closer to Istanbul. Though Selim confidently expected rejection, he persisted, for two reasons. First, the request was a negotiating strategy; it maintained pressure on Bayezit. Second, it served to expose his father’s biased support for Ahmed.

  When every appeal for a Balkan governorship for Suleyman was met with refusal, Selim moved on to request other postings, first in provinces close to Istanbul and then in those increasingly distant. Finally—probably because Bayezit deemed it far away enough from the capital—Selim’s bid for Kefe, in the southeast of Crimea, received approval. Kefe (later known as Kaffa, now known as Feodosia) put Suleyman at some distance from Istanbul, but at least it was a straight shot across the Black Sea—and closer to the imperial palace than Trabzon was. With the Şahkulu Rebellion still raging and the three princes jockeying for advantage, Selim accepted Kefe as the best possible posting for Suleyman. At the same time, an ominous message leaked out from the palace. Within a matter of weeks, Selim learned, Bayezit would abdicate in favor of Ahmed, who, it turned out, had already been instructed to prepare his march on Istanbul from Amasya. Korkud, still in Manisa, also got wind of this message and began making arrangements to set out for the capital, in an effort to get there first. Sensing their opportunities waning, Selim and Suleyman sprang into action to organize their affairs, their men, and the ships they would need to cross the Black Sea. Selim would go first to Crimea to drop off Suleyman, and then head southwest, to Istanbul.

  Because of the modest size of their ships, Selim opted to avoid open water and take a slower but safer course, sailing around the Black Sea’s rugged eastern coast for about two weeks before docking in Kefe. When he and Suleyman stepped ashore for the first time, they were immediately impressed by the city’s strangeness. Crimea’s long history of being ruled by outsiders—from the Scythians to the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mongols, and Genoese—made the arrival of a new governor a rather unremarkable event. Though nominally in possession of the peninsula, the Ottomans kept their touch light, generally deferring to Crimea’s entrenched rulers at the time, the Tatar khans. Suleyman and his father stuck out in Crimea as clear outsiders. As they dropped anchor, these were their first impressions:

  The protected city of Kaffa is the glory and crown of the regions of the happiness-befriended Tatars, and the shelter, refuge and highway of the inhabitants of the Kıpçak Steppe and of vast territories stretching all the way to the country of the church-bell-accustomed Russians and, on another side, as far as Gog and Magog, whose lantern is sedition. [It is] a massive bulwark at the edge of the sea, an impregnable stronghold, which adjoins the apogee, and a great fortress, which is the pivot of the celestial globe. . . . Inside it [is] an extended wall, famous as “the Frankish castle,” whose battlements reach the sky and which is fitted out, in places, with towers rising to the heavenly sphere. [The city has] a beautiful palace, towering above its harbour, which gives joy and imparts gladness; it overlooks the horizons of the world, and its like is not to be found, or rarely, in the inhabited part of the earth.

  Suleyman’s mother, Hafsa, had been born in Crimea, so he knew something of the region from her, but he nonetheless felt it to be alien, perhaps even dangerous, dominated by ethnicities, languages, and cultures he did not understand. “Gog and Magog” denoted a place that existed beyond the inhabited earth, an imaginary realm of monsters and spirits. Although Selim and Suleyman considered their time in Crimea to be a mere stepping-stone to their ultimate goal, they found Crimean society as impenetrable as the high walls of the fortress that greeted them on the shoreline.

  Three Ottoman ships at sea

  The Tatar khans, who counted Genghis Khan as one of their ancestors, descended from a long line of rulers of Central Asian origin who had steadily migrated westward to escape the Mongols. They had ruled Crimea since the early fifteenth century, and would continue to control it until the end of the eighteenth century. Selim and Suleyman understood that they would have to ingratiate themselves with the khans in order to rule effectively. Therefore, after getting their bearings in Kefe, Selim left Suleyman in the city and set off to meet the leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mengli Giray Khan, in his ornate palace in western Crimea, a complex complete with a mosque, harem, cemetery, and gardens. Mengli—short, stocky, and with a wispy beard—had distinguished himself by defeating the last remnants of the Mongol Empire in Crimea and securing the khans’ independent rule over the peninsula. Once in charge, he quickly established the slave trade as one of his major sources of revenue. Between 1450 and 1586, for example, his armies led eighty-six slave raids, or about one every eighteen months, into Ukrainian territory alone. In 1520, the year of Selim’s death, slavery poured a stunning 10,000 gold ducats into Crimea’s coffers. Mengli used the income from slavery to build several fortresses, including the one that had greeted Selim and Suleyman on the coast.

  Though Mengli and Selim had never met, they were already connected, as it was Mengli who had gifted Hafsa, Selim’s concubine and Suleyman’s mother, to the Ottoman court in the 1490s, in the hope that his gift would forever link the House of Giray to the House of Osman. Should Hafsa become the mother of a sultan, she would be one of the most powerful people—man or woman—in the Ottoman Empire, and this would elevate the status of the Girays. Thus, she was the figure who bound the two ruling families together—again evincing the central role of women, even concubines, in early modern imperial politics. Although this was never mentioned in the correspondence about Suleyman’s posting to Kefe, Hafsa’s personal ties to Crimea probably played a part in Bayezit’s decision to send her son there, as Bayezit had long sought to deepen his relations with the Crimean khans. When Selim paid a visit to Mengli, he was therefore both smoothing the path for Suleyman’s governorship and meeting his concubinal “father-in-law” for the first time. Selim respectfully referred to Mengli as his uncle, a term of deferential endearment for his son’s “grandfather.” As with much else among the Ottomans, family was politics and politics family.

  Mengli served as protector and patron for both Selim and Suleyman, so Selim did his best to act the part of both dutiful “familial” relation and humble guest. As relayed in the Selimname—first composed decades after Selim’s death, though still credible—Selim described Mengli as “firm and honest, pious and a true Muslim . . . his character sound. . . . He was a Sunni, holding the correct doctrine, a successful monarch, and a saintly-natured, well-bred person.” For Mengli, meeting a potential Ottoman sultan (perhaps two) proved a moment pregnant with opportunities for himself, his family, and his state. He therefore spared no expense in spoiling Selim during his visit. According to the Selimname:

  [Mengli] came to meet him with the army of the happiness-scattering Tatars, with all his attendants and followers, whose distinguishing mark was grandeur, and all his children and princes, his chief subjects, his sons and his noblemen. As far as the ceremonies of hospitality were concerned, he rendered [Sultan Selīm] all such services as were due, showing him, in many different kinds and forms, the respect and honour befitting an emperor and the esteem and deference proper to a world-ruler. He provided him with food in abundance, and was not remiss in showing consideration and deference. Their meeting became a source of tranquillity and joy, and a cause of all kinds of gladness.

  Hafsa<
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  All of this happiness-scattering and gladness could not, however, dispel the pall of anger and resentment hanging over Selim. He had sailed to Crimea not to meet Mengli but to put in motion his plan to take over the empire, kill his half-brothers, and perhaps even commit patricide into the bargain. However this plan turned out, Selim had embarked on a path that might forever reforge the Ottoman Empire. No amount of Tatar hospitality could overcome such acrimony.

  WHEN NEWS REACHED AHMED that his half-brother was in Crimea and plotting an advance on the palace, he became enraged. Ahmed had pressed Bayezit to deny Suleyman any governorship at all; and Crimea, though remote, was still dangerously close to Istanbul. Several overland routes led westward into the Balkans, and many of its ports were within easy striking distance of the capital. Growing increasingly impatient as he waited for final word from his father that he should begin his march toward the palace, Ahmed lobbied Bayezit to order the governors of all the provinces between Crimea and the capital to monitor their roads to prevent Selim from making a move southward. Bayezit issued the orders, adding that any soldier found to be aiding Selim or Suleyman would be summarily executed.

  At the same time, and with his father’s blessing, Ahmed devised further subterfuge. Acting the part of sultan-in-waiting, he drafted a letter to Mengli offering him independent sovereignty over the province of Kefe in exchange for imprisoning Selim and Suleyman in Crimea. Along with the letter, Ahmed sent a royal rescript officially granting Mengli the province.

  As it so happened, the emissary carrying Ahmed’s message arrived at Mengli’s court while Selim was enjoying his visit with the khan. Seeing Selim, the emissary ordered him to return to Trabzon at once. Selim scoffed. That this man, a mere emissary, could treat a prince so rudely only further proved the corruption of his father’s rule—and, by extension, the rule of Ahmed if he should gain the throne. Selim declared that he would never accept such an order, “even if Gabriel descended from the sky and the Messenger [that is, the Prophet Muḥammad] wished it,” and gave the emissary a message to take back to the sultan: he demanded an immediate face-to-face audience with his father, along with the governorship of the province of Silistra on the flat plains of the Danube valley, in what is today Bulgaria. The city of Silistra, strategically located along one of the major north–south axes through the eastern Balkans and controlling access to the sea, is about three hundred miles north of Edirne, the former Ottoman capital, where Bayezit had temporarily moved his court in 1509 after an earthquake damaged the palace in Istanbul. With his demand of this posting for himself—one he knew would be refused—Selim was sending his father a clear message that he would not stop his march toward the throne. Selim further instructed the emissary to tell the sultan that the face-to-face meeting would be to discuss the pressing issue of the empire’s decline. Selim’s couching of his threats and insults in the formal language of a request added to the ignominy of his affront, in effect saying: “Dearest Father, I humbly ask for the honor of a meeting with your excellency to confer about how your many faults and weaknesses have led to the deterioration of our empire and how I, your dutiful son, might overthrow you to become sultan in your stead.”

  As Selim berated the emissary, Mengli opened Ahmed’s letter. When he read it, “a tumult beset the Khan’s heart, and he became troubled in mind.” The offer of independent rule was of course very attractive—independence is, needless to say, the goal of all political leaders—but Mengli struggled to weigh the dividends and costs of such a deal with Ahmed. Regardless of his connections to Selim, through Hafsa and now Suleyman’s governorship, Mengli wanted what was most advantageous for himself and his family: to cast their lot with whichever half-brother would win the Ottoman throne. In the summer of 1511, it was impossible to determine who that would be.

  As the various possibilities surged through Mengli’s anxious mind, one of his sons, Mehemmed Giray, who was present at this meeting, was unconditionally ecstatic. The Girays finally would have the chance to acquire all the lands of Crimea, to impose their sovereignty over its peoples, ports, and fortresses. Putting Selim and Suleyman in prison or under house arrest seemed a small price to pay for so much in return. Young, ambitious, and impetuous, Mehemmed, who shared his father’s looks but not his personality, pushed him to accept the offer immediately and unequivocally. Imploring his son to be more circumspect, Mengli managed to convince Mehemmed that they should at least ask Selim if he would make them the same offer of independence should he become sultan. Wisely, Mengli did not want to pick a side at this point in the princes’ fraternal struggle.

  The following night, the khans hosted a lavish banquet in honor of Selim and Suleyman. Bathed in warm candlelight and digging into mounds of mutton, rice, and okra, the guests became increasingly inebriated as the night wore on and, as the evening’s jovial mood floated from meats and vegetables to sherbets and fruits, took turns standing to toast Mengli and their visitors. After dark, Mehemmed stood up. He turned first to Selim, offering him exaltations and the most superlative flattery. Everyone cheered and drank after each solemn tribute that Mehemmed made to Selim, Suleyman, and the unity of their families. Mehemmed then raised his cup again and, as the Selimname relates, said, “Sultan Selīm, your father has little time left, and the sovereignty of the throne of Rūm [the Ottoman Empire] is yours. Your accession to the seat of empire is close at hand. At that time, I shall ask something from you as a favour.”

  Selim responded: “Prince, what is it that you aim for and desire?”

  Mehemmed glanced at his father, who gazed at his son knowingly. Mehemmed then said to Selim, “Give us possession of the territories of Kaffa, with the fortresses and seaports which are situated within them, and let us have free disposal of them in the days of your reign.” Everyone in the room froze; the dinner’s boisterous conviviality dissolved.

  Selim took a moment to measure his words. “Prince,” he replied, “we are sovereign monarchs. In the practices and laws of sovereign monarchs, and in their customs which have been observed from of old, the giving away of regions and countries has no place. Monarchs take countries, [but] they do not give countries to anyone. Whatever you ask for in the way of jewels, silver, gold, rubies and other precious stones, all kinds of gems and money, goods and chattels and royal estates, it will not be refused; let it be given. Only do not make fortresses or countries the object of your desire.”

  Flummoxed, Mehemmed sat down without uttering another syllable. Selim—calculating and politically hungry—would not accept insolence, and would never facilely surrender the power and territory his family’s empire had won with flesh and fire—especially not to an upstart like Mehemmed. Years of plotting and torment, the blood of war, and a steely determination had delivered Selim closer to the sultanate than ever before, but much danger still lay ahead. His detour through Crimea, with all the challenges it posed for his war preparations, was at best an annoying necessity.

  At the end of the long evening, after Selim had retired, Mehemmed stormed over to his father, yelling, “Did you pay attention to the words of this scoundrel?” While Ahmed, anticipating his own ascension to the throne, had promised the khans territory, fortresses, sovereignty, and power, Selim, who was enjoying their hospitality and protection, refused even to consider making the same offer. Mehemmed took this not only as an insult and a sign of disrespect but as a declaration of war. By this point in the evening, Mehemmed was embarrassed, livid, thoroughly drunk, and determined to teach Selim a savage lesson. Despite his father’s protestations, Mehemmed marched out to collect his troops.

  Realizing that only ill could come of this, Mengli summoned his other son, Sa‘adet. Despite being younger than Mehemmed, “of a tender age and beardless, with rosy cheeks, a rosy face and well-arched eyebrows,” Sa‘adet had something his brother did not: “intelligence and sense.” Fearing the potentially dire consequences for the House of Giray if Mehemmed attacked Selim, Mengli ordered Sa‘adet to accompany the Ottoman prince in order to protect
him from Mehemmed, and to do whatever Selim asked of him. Thus, ironically, in order to keep his own imperial family from being involved in another family’s deadly fraternal struggle, Mengli created a fraternal struggle between his sons.

  Sa‘adet and his men set out at once for Selim’s camp to help the Ottoman prince and his retinue make their escape from Crimea. Gathering their possessions, they boarded boats waiting to ferry them across the northern Black Sea to Akkerman, a port on the Dniester River estuary just north of the Balkan peninsula, which the Selimname termed their “skirt of safety.” At daybreak, Mehemmed, still enraged, arrived at Selim’s camp with thirty thousand soldiers in tow. They found the Ottomans’ tents empty and abandoned. Mehemmed spat in disgust at the deserted camp and dispersed his soldiers.

  SELIM HAD USED HIS time in Crimea to ready his forces for the march southward to overthrow his father. For more than a decade, he had been preparing for the summer of 1511. Now, his efforts to cultivate relationships among the Janissaries and to build alliances with disgruntled soldiers, mercenaries, and other potential soldiers coalesced. As the battle for the throne neared, Selim was eager to spend all the political and military capital he had accumulated during his years in the east. As well as his network of armed men distributed across the empire, he needed a concentrated force in the Balkans. Thus, he dispatched some of his most trusted lieutenants to the military commanders of provinces between Kefe and Istanbul, making them promises of cash and future political appointments in exchange for their support in a war against his father and half-brothers. His track record against the Safavids, as well as in Georgia, demonstrated to these potential Balkan allies that he was a military leader they could trust, one who would succeed at all costs and fulfill his promises, just as he had in the east. Selim’s victories would also be theirs.