Valide Sultan Nurbanu died on December 7, 1583. In her will, she specified that all her slaves be freed. Sultan Murad III ordered that his mother be buried next to his father, Selim II, in his tomb within the walls of Hagia Sophia—the first time a manumitted slave was laid to rest beside a sultan. The practice of fratricide did not end with Nurbanu. Nineteen small coffins followed that of Murad III, when his son, Mehmed III, took the throne in 1595. Nor was the law abolished, ever. The executions of Mehmed’s half brothers were, however, the last case of mass fratricide in the House of Osman. Mehmed was known as Adli, the Just.
It is not known who gave the order to kill Mehmed’s many half brothers, but a reasonable inference that it was not Mehmed himself can be drawn from his decision to protect his own sons—at least from one another—by keeping them inside Topkapi Palace for his entire reign.
This sequestration was formalized into a system called Kafes, or “the cage,” and it marked the beginning of lasting changes in Ottoman succession, in the quality of princely pretenders, and in the might of the Ottoman Empire. That it coincided with the rise in female dynastic power should not be misconstrued. Nurbanu had transformed the harem not into a “sultanate of women” intended to undermine male rule, as often alleged, but into a political institution designed to uphold and shield that rule—especially as the sultans after Suleiman succumbed one after the other to apathy and fear. Like the system that preceded it, the cage aimed to contain rivalries among princes and it succeeded in perpetuating the dynasty. It did this at the expense, though, of princes whose lives were drastically contained and of royal mothers whose chances to improve anything at all shrank from a spectrum to a point. The specific misery of the next twenty generations suggests that the highest level of misfortune may indeed not have been death.