by Alan Mikhail
Bayezit had brought Ahmed to the edge of the throne, but the sultan’s most favored son now felt his father could do no more for him. It was time to take matters into his own hands. He decided that his best option was to raise his own army and conquer as much territory in Anatolia as possible, then move against the Janissary contingents who were conspiring with his half-brother. In essence following Selim’s lead, Ahmed turned on their father too, determined to “become an independent sovereign,” to forge his own empire-within-the-empire as well.
Ahmed pillaged the towns and cities around Maltepe before retreating into the relative safety of Anatolia. In an attempt to supplant his father’s imperial administration, he appointed his own men as governors in Anatolia. Ahmed’s invasion and capture of the important city of Konya—a possession he had long coveted, and one his father had always refused him—represented his final major victory. Breaking through the imperial defenses, he entered Konya, killed the governor (his nephew), took control of the city, declared himself its new sovereign, and began issuing orders in his own name. From this stronghold, Ahmed co-opted a number of pastoral groups as he planned to continue his conquests across central Anatolia.
Ahmed’s insurrection conveniently aided Selim’s grand strategy. From his base in Kefe, Selim had successfully convinced his Janissary supporters to prevent Ahmed from entering Istanbul, thus goading him into a direct confrontration with their father. Ahmed rejected Bayezit’s orders to halt his advance, as well as his commands that Ahmed bide his time. Not surprisingly, Ahmed’s impetuous fury helped to torpedo his bid for the throne; he looked more like an untamed rebel, “his thought and discernment . . . [fixed upon] pleasure and drinking,” than a judicious statesman. Just weeks before, he had been within miles of the palace gates; since then he had killed a provincial governor, destroyed vast tracts of agricultural land, and was behaving like a brigand. Moreover, by ignoring the threat still posed by Shiite rebels in Anatolia, Ahmed was actually aiding their cause by wreaking even more havoc across the region.
Particularly advantageous from Selim’s perspective was that Ahmed now aimed his torrent of violence against Korkud, who was still in Manisa, unable to raise the troops he needed for an advance on Istanbul. His two half-brothers’ steady weakening of each other represented the perfect movement in a symphony of civil upheaval that benefited Selim. Ahmed attacked Korkud in Manisa, completely stunning him. Korkud had no idea his half-brother would launch an attack so far from the capital—indeed, no rationale for it existed other than Ahmed’s near delusional plan to build a new empire in Anatolia. Woefully unprepared, Korkud’s forces were disadvantaged from the start and were easily annihilated. Korkud fled to Istanbul, seeking his father’s protection from a man they both now viewed as a mortal enemy. Arriving at the palace, he told his father, “I came because I was afraid of Sultan Aḥmed.”
Through their own actions and reactions, Ahmed and Korkud essentially delegitimized themselves as viable claimants to the throne. Ahmed appeared deranged and overly aggressive, ignoring the established laws of state and religion; Korkud looked tepid and weak. While the two brothers tore the empire apart, Selim and his Janissary supporters projected strength, calm, and unity. In a situation verging on civil war, the backing of elements of the empire’s longstanding military force was, of course, a powerful advantage. At the same time, many of the military’s top brass as well as imperial administrators who had been supporters of Ahmed lost patience with him as he rampaged across Anatolia, so Selim’s base of support within both the Janissary and bureaucratic establishments was growing. Amid the disorder their father had allowed Ahmed and Korkud to create, Selim stood out as the leader the empire needed, a captain who could navigate the Ottoman ship of state through these storms.
FROM KEFE, SELIM DIRECTED his Janissary allies to voice ever louder public criticism of Bayezit’s failures and to press him ever harder to quell the disorder raging in Anatolia. Eventually, Selim’s military backers presented Bayezit with an ultimatum: rein in your mutinous son or give up your throne.
The noose around Bayezit grew tighter. Above all, he was determined not to become the first Ottoman sultan to be forced to abdicate. Hoping to appease Selim and buy himself more time, on March 27, 1512, Bayezit appointed Selim, in absentia, commander-in-chief of the Janissaries. Important as this post was, it had little meaning on the ground at that moment. As Selim was already the de facto leader of most of the Ottoman military establishment, Bayezit’s “concession” represented not so much a promotion as a simple recognition of the existing state of affairs. More importantly, the title of commander-in-chief of the Janissaries did nothing to bring Selim closer to the title he ultimately sought, that of sultan.
Although it failed to placate him, the appointment did offer Selim a justifiable path back to Istanbul, with no need for a display of his military might. Imperial representatives traveled to Kefe to escort Selim to the capital to take up his new post. While Bayezit hoped Selim’s arrival in Istanbul as an administrator would save his sultanate from complete dissolution, Selim—though always wary of a trap—viewed his return as the first step in the process of his coronation. Thus, his journey back to the capital functioned more like a victory parade, with drummers and horn players leading the way. In an Ottoman version of a Potemkin march, his supporters gathered large crowds of soldiers and commoners alike to applaud him in all the towns through which he processed, tossing flowers and sweets at his horse’s feet. Needless to say, this angered Bayezit’s representatives, but they could do nothing to stem the tide. As the ever-laudatory Selimname described the prince’s return to Istanbul, “the dust of his happiness-promoting feet was desired at the exalted court, so that it might be applied to the inflamed eye of the state as collyria [eye balm] of antimony and zinc.”
When the cavalcade reached the outskirts of Istanbul, Bayezit’s men left Selim and his retinue to set up camp in an area outside the city walls known as Yeni Bahçe. This part of the city stood over the channel of a forgotten ancient river and boasted numerous vegetable gardens and orchards (yeni bahçe means “new garden”). Having spent six years in the imperial palace as a child, Selim was returning to the capital for the first time as an adult. He had lived with his mother in the harem of Topkapı Palace, overlooking the Bosphorus; he had undertaken his daily lessons there and run around its cobblestoned courtyards. Standing outside the capital now, at the age of forty-one, Selim was eager to return to the elegant imperial residence of his youth—as sultan.
CHAPTER
16
ONE AND ONLY SULTAN
Selim’s coronation
THE DECISIVE WEAPON THAT WON MEHMET II, SELIM’S GRANDFATHER, Constantinople in 1453 was a cannon that could shoot a projectile of over a thousand pounds more than a mile. Cast in Edirne, then the Ottoman capital, the cannon required two hundred men and a hundred oxen to pull it, and two months to make the journey from Edirne to Constantinople—a distance that normally took two days on horseback. A group of engineers preceded the cannon, preparing the road for the weight of the enormous wheeled contraption. Mehmet positioned the cannon just outside Constantinople’s western wall. When he gave the order to commence the attack, the cannon fired its one shot, exploding the ancient stones like a pile of dirt. Ottoman troops then streamed unrestrained into the beleaguered city as its hungry and terrified residents scattered in all directions.
Selim’s camp at Yeni Bahçe stood several hundred meters to the south of the spot where the wall was destroyed by his grandfather nearly sixty years earlier (it had since been rebuilt). After taking a night to recover from his long march from Crimea “in a tent whose height was as that of the heavenly sphere,” Selim arranged for a visit with his father. His entrance into the city proved far easier than Mehmet’s. Accompanied by a group of palace attendants, Selim and his entourage walked into the walled city that afternoon, past Istanbul’s bakers and butchers, across squares dominated by fountains and others shadowed by mosques. He proceeded through th
e capital—the Abode of Felicity (Dersaadet), as it was known—as though he had already become the sultan of the seven climes, “with thousands of manifestations of majesty, splendour and good fortune.” In the light of early evening, as he approached the palace—no doubt with expectant dread, and suspicious still that this might all be a trap—and passed through its three gates, Selim focused his thoughts on strategy. While he would not need to smash through Istanbul’s walls to seize the palace, capturing it would nevertheless shake the whole edifice of the Ottoman dynasty and cause the world to tremble.
At his first meeting with his father, Selim lavished deferential respect on the man who was still sultan, showing him “excellent kindness and perfect compassion and tenderness.” He bowed before Bayezit and kissed his ruby-encrusted gold ring, which was engraved with his imperial signature. These ceremonial formalities, though, quickly turned to business. Speaking quietly, Selim presented his father with a dramatically insolent choice: either abdicate now—willingly, peacefully, and with dignity—and discreetly leave the palace for a comfortable retirement, or watch Selim’s Janissaries seize the palace and the empire by force, ravaging the city on their way. Should Bayezit choose the latter path, Selim added, he could not guarantee his father’s safety—or even his life. Bayezit glared down from his throne and scoffed at the insult. He had summoned Selim to Istanbul to make him head of the military, not to forsake the empire. Furious and disheartened, he dismissed Selim from his presence.
Holding on to his belief that he could appease Selim with something other than the sultanate, and and perhaps hoping that their father–son bond might still carry some weight, Bayezit summoned his son again the next day to discuss a strategy for dealing with “the evils” of Ahmed in Anatolia. Selim yearned for war against Ahmed, but he wanted to lead the imperial army against his half-brother as sultan, not as another sultan’s commander-in-chief. This second meeting proved as disastrous as the first, with father and son trading insults and outright threats. For about a week, they continued their meetings, each more acrimonious than the last. From Selim’s perspective, the end of his father’s sultanate was already a fait accompli, obvious to all. Whether or not Bayezit was willing to admit it, his empire had fractured and essentially turned on him. Would he have to be removed by force, or would he cooperate and abandon his throne peacefully? Not surprisingly, Bayezit refused to countenance such disrespect. “As long as I am within the sphere of good health,” he declared, “I shall not give [the] Sultanate to anyone.”
Interpreting his father’s answer as a clear rejection of the offer to avoid armed conflict, Selim felt he had license to use force. A few days later, he stormed into the palace with an enormous retinue of Janissary soldiers and commanders—his allies, who had long wished for an aggressive sultan on the throne. Slaughtering the guards at the palace gates, they threatened and killed their way into and through the various quarters of the palace. After securing each section, they marched into the inner throne room, the sanctum sanctorum of Ottoman power. Never before had such violence entered that domain. As Bayezit sat enthroned on the dais, underneath a portico of dark marble and gold filigree, Selim drew his sword, threatening the life of the sultan, the most powerful man in the empire, one of the world’s leading political figures, his own father. Frail and eminently powerless in that moment, Bayezit scanned the room, hoping for solace and direction in the eyes of anyone there. He saw none. In that elegant chamber where he had, until now, welcomed only pliant advisers and bowing servants, Bayezit saw his own impending death. The sultan, the Selimname relates, wept. Dropping his chin to his chest in anguish and resignation, Bayezit surrendered his empire to Selim.
ON THAT DAY, SATURDAY, April 24, 1512, the Ottoman Empire ineradicably changed. As Selim’s men led a despairing, enervated Bayezit out of the palace, he became the first sultan in Ottoman history to relinquish his throne before his death, while Selim became the first non-eldest, non-favored son to succeed his father as sultan. According to the Selimname, “everyone was flying, like birds and winged creatures,” with “delight-filled pleasure at the news” of Selim’s capture of the throne. A gamut of emotions raced through him: relief and excitement, satisfaction and consternation. As never before, the empire had both a sultan and a living former sultan. One had deposed the other, with no clear precedent as to whether or not such an act was legitimate, or how the two men should now behave with regard to each other, or how the imperial elite and the empire’s subjects should view them. It was far too early to grasp the enormous implications of what had happened. On that mild spring evening, the only certainty was that Selim held the throne.
As news of what had occurred inside the palace spread beyond its walls, Istanbul erupted into celebration. “The most brilliant sun rose over the world; grief departed from the world entirely. . . . Happiness invaded [people’s] hearts.” The capital had been in dire straits for months, with grave uncertainties about the future of the empire, the Janissaries in open revolt, and people mostly locked down in the relative safety of their homes. The streets had become military zones as pro-Selim and pro-Ahmed forces battled to control neighborhoods—torching buildings, stealing limited resources, and causing general havoc. Although the existential questions facing the empire remained unsettled, and clearly not everyone supported Selim, Istanbul’s residents could at least exhale as the tumultuous month of April 1512 finally ended.
The ascension of a new sultan had always been a time of celebration, but now, a sultan’s ascension came with another’s descension. There was, as well, no imperial death to commemorate. Neither bureaucrats nor commoners knew whether to mourn or celebrate. Perhaps mourn and celebrate?
Any celebration Selim enjoyed had to be brief. From the perspective of some contemporary imperial officials, as well as some later historians, Selim’s actions amounted to an unlawful coup. (A work like the Selimname sought to dispel such notions.) The natural death of a sultan or his demise on the battlefield had always stood as the only legitimate reasons for the accession of a new sultan. Therefore, Selim’s most pressing concern was what to do with his reviled father. Execution seemed gratuitous, unbecoming to a royal, and a dangerous precedent. Nevertheless, Selim needed to remove Bayezit from the imperial stage. Realizing that he would have to face accusations of illegitimacy throughout his reign, Selim wanted to avoid criticism as far as possible. He could get rid of anyone who raised questions, of course, but that would only cast further suspicion on his bona fides. The least problematic solution would be to dispatch his father to some distant locale. After keeping Bayezit imprisoned in the palace for a few weeks, Selim’s advisers selected the city of Dimetoka—“a charming town with a pleasant climate,” just south of Edirne (and today in Greece)—as the ideal spot for the deposed sultan’s comfortable but forced retirement.
There were, of course, inherent risks. Selim had to consider seriously the possibility that his father might try to regain the throne. Bayezit would, Selim knew, retain widespread support throughout much of the empire, and he still had solid connections with some military officials and imperial administrators. He might easily raise an army against his son, especially from the area around Edirne, where he had spent many years residing in the city’s imperial lodgings. Thus, Bayezit’s “retirement” would have to function as a form of secure and serene house arrest. Selim organized an entourage of servants to accompany his father to Dimetoka and to attend to his well-being in his new home, instructing them to be kind and deferential but never to allow him to converse with military men or imperial officials. As a public relations ploy designed to dispel any notions of impropriety, and perhaps even to suggest that Bayezit had willingly transferred his sultanate to Selim, the ninth sultan rode on horseback alongside the enclosed carriage that carried the eighth sultan out of Istanbul. At dawn, in what must have seemed a surreal procession, vanquished father and victorious son moved slowly through the city for all to see. At the gate that led to the road to Edirne, Selim bade farewell to his father
, embracing him before watching him disappear—a polite, if odd, gesture, rather like seeing off a guest at the threshold of one’s home.
It remains an open question as to whether or not Selim knew it then, but this was the last time he would see his father. On May 26, 1512, Bayezit died en route to Dimetoka. In its characteristic locution, the Selimname says of Bayezit’s death that “the provisions for the remainder of his existence had fallen to the lot of the beggar of death.” Given the circumstances, Bayezit’s death seems suspicious. Perhaps Selim instructed the men he sent with his father to kill him in a way that made his death seem natural. Some contemporary sources assert that Selim had his father poisoned. But perhaps Bayezit did indeed die of natural causes, his spirit broken from having lost his throne to a reviled and defiant son. Whatever the truth, Bayezit’s death on the road to Dimetoka surely pleased Selim, particularly since it occurred outside Istanbul, providing him with plausible deniability. Later historians, hoping to avoid the suggestion that any sultan’s reign could be illegitimate—even the first to involve the overthrow of a sitting sultan—were loth to assign blame for Bayezit’s death to Selim.
Bayezit’s body was wrapped and transported back to Istanbul for burial in the mosque, “paradise-like in form,” that he had constructed for himself years earlier. Selim spared no expense on an elaborate funeral and a luxurious burial, bestowing upon his father all the respect and riches appropriate to a sultan. He ordered a high, vaulted, exquisitely adorned mausoleum to be erected over his father’s tomb. He made the celebration of his father’s life a public affair, with prescribed mourning hours, Qur’anic recitations, great processions, and countless ostentatious commemorative rituals. All of this, of course, was shrewd calculation; Selim hoped that such extravagance would bury with the body any rumors that he was somehow implicated in his father’s death.
