6

A PIOUS LEADER FACES ENEMIES AT HOME AND ABROAD

Bayezid II

FACING MULTIPLE THREATS, Bayezid II sought to legitimate the dynasty’s rule with both sword and pen. Because sultans were judged by the success of their military campaigns, the sanctity of their spiritual patrons, and the greatness of their forebears, Bayezid II did what no other sultan had done before him: he was the first Ottoman sovereign to commission historical accounts of the rise of the Ottomans. Attempting to defend his throne against the claims of his exiled brother Cem and those of the Sunni Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, deviant dervish rebellions and assassins, and the new Shi’i Turkic Safavid dynasty based in Iran, Bayezid II commissioned comprehensive histories in both Ottoman Turkish and Persian. The purpose of these works was to ensure loyalty to the sultan and dynasty amid the destabilising calls to rebel from other Muslims. He hoped these histories would serve as propaganda to strengthen the bonds among the dynasty’s followers and supporters, and to mobilise them against their dangerous enemies. To shore up his spiritual authority, the sultan had himself proclaimed a saint, or friend of God. To ensure his political authority, the histories placed the Ottomans firmly within their Turco-Mongol heritage, proclaiming the Oğuz Turks of Central Asia as their ancestors.

BROTHER CEM: BAYEZID II AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESSION

When forty-nine-year-old Mehmed II passed away unexpectedly for unknown reasons—he had long suffered from gout, the painful, disabling, arthritic ‘disease of kings’—in 1481, viziers were unable to keep the death a secret until his successor was enthroned. Without a master to obey, the Janissaries rioted in Istanbul. During the ensuing political chaos, the sultan’s corpse was forgotten in the palace for two weeks, and according to the chief halberdier, stank tremendously before it was finally buried.1 Mehmed II’s grandson Korkud, the son of oldest son Prince Bayezid, was enthroned temporarily to quell the violence.2 Supported by the Janissaries and the Sufis, to whom he promised the return of their endowments seized by Mehmed II, Prince Bayezid raced from his princely governate in Amasya in northern Anatolia to reach Istanbul before his younger brother Cem, who was governor in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Upon Bayezid II’s accession in Istanbul, Cem—supported by the Turcoman in Karaman, central Anatolia, where he had been governor—proclaimed himself as sultan in the first Ottoman capital of Bursa, where he had the Friday prayers read in his name and minted coins, again in his own name—the classic claims of Muslim sovereignty.3 He offered his brother a split kingdom, as in the Mongol empires. Cem would rule the Asian provinces from Bursa, and Bayezid could rule the European provinces from Istanbul. Bayezid refused and defeated Cem’s forces near Bursa soon after. Cem fled to Adana in southern Anatolia, a buffer state between the Ottoman and Mamluk empires, and then to Mamluk territory, which encompassed southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz (in modern-day Saudi Arabia).

From Cairo, Cem took the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the very rare instances when a member of the dynasty went on the hajj. No reigning sultan ever did. The Mamluks, the remnants of the old Turkic Muslim Anatolian Karamanid dynasty, and even the Hungarians wanted Cem to lead the battle against the Ottomans at the head of their own armies. They saw the enemy of their enemy as their ally. After further failed military forays into central Anatolia, in 1482 Cem journeyed to the island of Rhodes, held by the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, known as the Knights Hospitaller. Mehmed II’s Greek-convert fleet commander, Mesih (Christ) Pasha, had failed to conquer it only two years earlier. Never, it seemed, was there a more favourable time for Christian Europe to stop the Ottomans’ westward advance.

But jealousy and rivalry between the pope and the competing kingdoms of Europe made united action impossible. So long as Cem lived and rallied opponents to his side, however, he cast a shadow of doubt over Bayezid II’s reign. Bayezid II feared that he and his brother were repeating the internecine struggle of the interregnum less than a century earlier. While Cem drew support from alienated frontier warriors, Bayezid II killed Cem’s sons and followers and made a deal with the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes. Using a man named Hussein, a Greek convert to Islam from a prominent Byzantine family, as his trusted ambassador, Bayezid II negotiated a deal by which the knights would keep Cem in custody in exchange for an annual payment.4 But the knights sent Cem to France in 1483, where they also kept him as a prisoner. Cem had expected to travel from there to Hungary, where he would lead an army against his brother, not be kept under house arrest in a castle tower.

In 1489, in exchange for keeping Cem in his kingdom, the king of France was offered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in the event that the Ottomans seized the city from the Mamluks. The lance that had pierced Jesus, other relics, and a large payment were also part of the deal.5 But concurrent negotiations between the Knights Hospitaller and Pope Innocent VIII (papacy 1484–1492) led instead to Cem being sent to Rome to remain in the custody of the pope.

Despite the Ottomans paying the costs of Cem’s upkeep, Pope Innocent VIII’s successor, Alexander VI, wished to place Cem at the head of a papal Crusade. But this was not to be. French king Charles VIII (reigned 1483–1495) invaded the Italian peninsula in 1495 just as Pope Alexander VI was seeking help from the Ottomans against the invaders. Charles VIII claimed it as a first step in his own Crusade, but it also came to no avail. Charles VIII captured Rome and reclaimed Cem, who died shortly after in Naples.6 In 1499, the corpse was finally sent to the Ottoman Empire for burial in the persimmon tree–dotted royal cemetery in Bursa.

All the while, the Ottomans had engaged in diplomacy with the relevant European powers to keep the claimant to the throne away from the empire. To accomplish this aim, Bayezid II pledged not to attack Rome or Rhodes and offered payments for the pope keeping Cem under house arrest. Both sides kept to their agreement, and war and Crusade were avoided. All these efforts served to engage the Ottomans ever more directly with Christian Europe, confirming that the Ottomans were an essential element in Renaissance diplomacy and making Ottoman figures part of European Renaissance culture, including Cem, who was depicted as a Renaissance prince. Cem appeared in paintings and in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528)—a popular advice book for Renaissance court life, published in many languages—which demonstrated that the Ottomans were considered part of a Europe-wide court culture. Until he died, Cem remained a danger, as Muslim and Christian powers rallied around him against the empire, threatening to lead their armies in battle against the Ottomans.

SUNNI SULTANS OF THE MAMLUK EMPIRE

One of Cem’s allies against his brother had been the rival dynasty based in Cairo. The Mamluks challenged the Ottomans for control over eastern Anatolia and northern Syria. The Mamluks’ boast of being the custodians of the two holy shrines of Mecca and Medina, as well as of Jerusalem, and the protectors of the Abbasid caliphs mocked Ottoman claims of being the leading Islamic power. The caliphs were descendants of the members of the Abbasid dynasty who had survived the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258. Residing in Mamluk Cairo, the Sunni caliph was the successor to Muhammad and the four rightly guided caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali) and thus theoretically the supreme head of the Sunni Muslim community.

Capturing Egypt and its rich agrarian lands and profitable commercial artery of the Red Sea, connecting Europe to the spices and textiles of South Asia and China, would be a great windfall. Mehmed II had died while embarking on a campaign against the Mamluks to conquer Aleppo and Syria in 1481. Bayezid II picked up where he had left off, attempting alternately to destroy the Mamluks and to keep them at bay through the Dulkadır, Mamluk clients who were sometimes their ally and at other times their enemy. Bayezid II waged war against the Mamluks from 1485 to 1491, gaining little territory despite naval and land campaigns.7 The two sides ultimately made peace, the Ottomans acknowledging Mamluk control over Syria and southeastern Anatolia.

DEVIANT DERVISH REBELS AND ASSASSINS

It was not only Mamluk control of the holiest sites in Sunni Islam that challenged Bayezid II’s claims to being the most important Muslim leader. A number of charismatic religious leaders claimed they had a right to rule in place of the sultan in that era. Ibn Arabi’s development and propagation of key mystical concepts had firmly taken hold. Especially significant during Bayezid II’s reign was Ibn Arabi’s notion that there is one living figure who is the pole of the universe. This idea produced a challenge to Bayezid II’s authority. The pole was allegedly the one person in each epoch who is proximate to God—literally the centre of the universe and pivot as well. The entire heavens turned about the pole, and God was supposedly manifest in him. Believers in poles and their deputies need not bear allegiance to a political authority such as a sultan. Instead, in their view, the existence of the pole necessitated that everyone, ruler and ruled, had to consult him, since all actions in the world took place with the pole’s knowledge and initiative. He was the support upon which everything in the world depended, to whom everyone must bear liege as the only legitimate spiritual and political authority.

According to this view, there were three other pillars and seven substitutes who ranked beneath the pole and through whom God preserves the universe. Ranking below the pole as deputies, deviant dervishes participated in the preservation of the world order by immersing themselves in the love of God and reaching out to help the oppressed and powerless to restore order and justice over and against their oppressors. Their oppressors included worldly rulers such as Bayezid II.

To counter the rising threat of deviant Sufis, Bayezid II promoted an image of himself as a pious sheikh. His Sufi leanings were of the quietist variety. He permitted Istanbul’s first Mevlevi lodge to be built on the site of a Byzantine monastery and refurbished the Konya shrine to the namesake of the Mevlevi, Rûmi, whose followers included members of the elite. Bayezid II also assumed the title of a saint, or friend of God, which was the designation of deviant dervish Hajji Bektaş, a figure revered by the Janissaries and whose shrine the sultan made sure to visit. Turning to writing, Bayezid II had his own ‘miracles’ and ‘wondrous deeds’ recorded in an ecstatic life story recited to the public. But the deviant dervishes refused to accept Bayezid II’s authority.

These included the followers of Otman Baba. Otman Baba took the ideas of three earlier deviant dervishes—Barak Baba, Kaygusuz Abdal, and Sultan Şüca—and propagated them among the Abdals of Rûm, the outlandish and extreme shaven and near-naked deviant dervishes who had been present since Osman’s reign. Beardless Barak Baba (died 1308) of Tokat in Anatolia traced his spiritual descent from Hajji Bektaş and Baba İlyas-i Horasani and wandered from place to place naked save for a loincloth.8 Allegedly able to communicate with animals, he attached buffalo horns to his turban. His hundreds of narcotic-taking disciples played tambourines and drums as he engaged in animal-like dance movements and wailed like a monkey. He was nicknamed ‘Hairy Dog’ because he swallowed a morsel spit out by his master, Sarı Saltuk, a ‘dragon-slaying’ dervish and gazi proselytiser of Islam in Europe.9 Kaygusuz Abdal dressed in a fur cloak, shaved his moustache, beard, eyebrows, and hair, and enjoyed hashish.10 His contemporary, holy man Sultan Şüca, also shaved his facial hair, went around naked, and spent winters in a cave.

Otman Baba was an ascetic wanderer who likened money to faeces. He drank used bath water, proclaiming that, since everything was a manifestation of God, everything was pure—an echo of Ibn Arabi’s unity of being concept. Claiming to be the reincarnation of Adam, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Ali, and Hajji Bektaş, or even God, he had a close relationship with Mehmed II while at the same time denouncing mainstream Sufis and the religious class.11 Mehmed II allegedly accepted Otman Baba as the ‘true’ (spiritual) sultan.12 Otman Baba’s followers believed that he was the pole of the universe in that age and that his disciples ranked just below him as his deputies.

In 1492, one of Otman Baba’s Kalenderi (also called Torlak) disciples attempted to assassinate Bayezid II while he was on a military campaign in Albania. Bayezid II responded brutally. He ordered the torture and execution of Otman Baba’s followers and deviant dervishes in the Edirne region and a hunt for them in Southeastern Europe, deporting them en masse to Anatolia, where they looked for another radical leader. They soon found one.

SHI’I TURCOMAN SAFAVID DYNASTY IN IRAN

Bayezid II’s most dangerous enemy was Shi’i shah Ismail I (reigned 1501–1524), who founded the Safavid dynasty in Tabriz (Iranian Azerbaijan) in 1501. The Safavids had undergone their own religious conversion and political transformation from Sunnis to Shi’i dervishes. Sheikh Junayd had transformed the thirteenth-century Sunni Sufi Safavi order at Ardabil (Iran), founded by Sheikh Safi al-Din, into a movement of radical mystic Shi’ism in eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. He organised the order’s zealous followers into a military force made up of Kurds and Turcoman known as the Red Heads, named for their headgear. When Shah Ismail I was enthroned in Tabriz in 1501, he demanded their devotion in exactly the same way the head of a Sufi order demands devotion from his disciples. The Red Heads cried, ‘God has come’. Ismail I depicted himself as both the perfect Sufi spiritual leader and the Persian God-king. Writing poetry in Turkish, he proclaimed himself ‘God’s mystery’, the son of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and son-in-law and cousin Ali, and even God.13 The Red Heads saw Ismail I as their saviour. They spread the Safavid call in Ottoman domains in Anatolia, where many former supporters of the recently defeated White Sheep confederation joined them.

Shah Ismail I proclaimed himself the emperor of the world and the perfect spiritual guide. His soldiers were his disciples, willing to be martyrs for their new king. How could Bayezid II challenge that? He could battle him with propaganda or warfare. He preferred the former. He was terrified lest Ismail I become a latter-day Timur. The Safavids drew their strength from many Kurds and Turcoman living in the Ottoman Empire. Both Bayezid II and Ismail I competed for the claim to sovereignty among the same Muslims in eastern Anatolia.

Until the end of his reign, Bayezid II faced Safavid-supported apocalyptic rebellions in Anatolia, whose firebrands believed the end-time had come. The largest was that of a disciple of Shah Ismail I named Shahkulu in 1511, who, like Sheikh Bedreddin, led a revolt that gained widespread support not only among radical Sufis—the deviant dervishes—but also among Kurdish and Turcoman cavalrymen and other disaffected men of high station. The revolt convulsed much of Anatolia in bloodshed. Instead of referring to Shahkulu as ‘the slave of the shah’, the literal meaning of his name, the Ottomans labelled him ‘the slave of Satan’. Shahkulu claimed to be God, Muhammad, and the redeemer. The apocalyptic movement was crushed with a great amount of bloodletting near Kayseri in central Anatolia, not too far from Hajji Bektaş’s dervish lodge and mausoleum. But half a dozen more such messianic revolts would convulse the land until the end of the sixteenth century.14

The initial clash between Ottomans and Safavids was not, however, a struggle between Sunnis and Shi’is, or between Sufis and ‘orthodox’ Muslims. Bayezid II supported some Sufi orders, such as the Halveti, which had spread first in Amasya province, where Bayezid had governed as a prince. Much of Sufism in that age in both Ottoman and Safavid domains was characterised by devotion to Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad. Today this reverence would be considered a characteristic of Shi’ism alone. Just as the Red Heads were disciples of the Safavid order, the Janissaries were referred to as the corps of the Bektaşis. Both Red Heads and Bektaşis assigned primary dedication to a ‘divine’ Ali, as they elevated sainthood over prophethood. They venerated Ali, whom they considered to possess secret, divine knowledge. They also believed in the transmigration of souls and in Ibn Arabi and Sheikh Bedreddin’s concepts of the unity of being, and desperately waited for the return of the Mehdi, the redeemer.15

The Safavid dynasty posed a clear and present danger to the Ottoman dynasty. After crushing the White Sheep federation of Turcoman tribes centred in Tabriz in 1501, the Safavids controlled the provinces of Diyar Bakir and northern Iraq and the cities of Erzincan and Erzurum. The founder of the dynasty and first leader, Shah Ismail I had several strategic advantages. He was head of a Sufi order. As the grandson of White Sheep ruler Hasan the Tall, who had married Sheikh Junayd’s sister, he was related to the White Sheep Turcoman dynasty, which had until recently ruled eastern Anatolia, Iraq, and western Iran (Azerbaijan). Because his grandfather had also married a Byzantine princess, he was also related to the Byzantine dynasty. Rather than being an Iranian, Shah Ismail I was yet another revolutionary Greco-Turk. The Safavids thus had both religious and political legitimacy on their side. They were Sufi masters demanding total obedience from their disciples. They were inheritors of the throne of an eastern Anatolia Turcoman dynasty through a matrilineal line (which would be disputed by other claimants), as well as that of the Byzantines, whose final days of rule had been in Trabzon. In contrast, the Ottomans had no legitimacy or authority to rule Anatolia, other than by might. And they were not the strongest Turcoman power, either.

Turkish speaking and at one with the Ali-devoted Turcoman religious culture of eastern Anatolia, the Safavids controlled the upper Euphrates, which was crisscrossed by the major trade routes linking Iran to Southwest Asia and the international entrepôt of Aleppo, terminus of the Silk Road. From this position, they controlled the export of silk produced in Iran, particularly the route passing from Tabriz to Van to Bitlis to Diyar Bakir to Aleppo. As long as Aleppo lay in Mamluk hands or those of its allies, the Safavids controlled the trade from eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq to the Mediterranean. As a rich source of revenue as well as the symbol of wealth and prosperity, the Ottoman silk industry, centred in Bursa, was crucial to the economy of both empires. The Safavids threatened to put this industry in a precarious position.

WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE DYNASTY

Facing all these grave religious, political, and economic threats, with internal opponents linked with external enemies, alternative candidates for the throne, and competing models for rule—such as the divine Sufi sheikh and gazi, the Safavid shah—Bayezid II responded with military and diplomatic weapons when he had to. But he also responded with pen and ink. The writing of history was consonant with imperial ambitions. Sovereigns were judged both by the success of their military campaigns and by the greatness of the works composed in their honour—their cultural capital. Patronising literature made a ruler appear worthy of his sultanate. Bayezid II’s court encouraged or employed writers to glorify him and his dynasty, to increase his prestige and assert his claims. While these men may not have been official historians, they nevertheless backed the dynasty. Whether gazis, Sufis, or learned Persian men of state, they were lavishly rewarded for presenting pleasing chronicles to Bayezid II’s court.16

The Ottomans had been constantly changing their understanding of who they were and what mattered to them. It was not until the fifteenth century, the second of their more than six centuries in power, that the Ottomans decided to commission writers to record the dynasty’s exploits for posterity. And when they did so, all writers seemed to be in agreement. They accepted the class system, with the sultan at its apex. They assumed it natural that the Ottoman dynasty had a right to rule, that succession should pass from the sultan to one of his sons, and that their subjects should unquestionably bear them liege. None tried to connect the royal family to Muhammad’s lineage or to Genghis Khan’s. Such claims could be easily disproved. Instead, they all agreed that the Ottomans had descended from the Turkic Oğuz tribe of western Central Asia and were the successors of the Seljuks of Rûm.

The earliest accounts of the Ottomans, dedicated to but not commissioned by the dynasty, however, had referred to Osman’s forefathers and the Oğuz as travelling companions on the road to gaza, holy war. These accounts said they were comrades in arms and did not claim that Osman’s father, Ertuğrul, was a descendant of the Oğuz.17 By the reign of Murad II, however, when Timur’s heir Shahrukh demanded like his father that the Ottomans recognise his suzerainty, the Ottomans refused and created a genealogy making Ertuğrul a leader of the Oğuz. The motivation was to proclaim their descent was not any way inferior to that of Timur. They owed no one their liege, certainly not the Mongols. If Ertuğrul was sent to Anatolia by a Seljuk sultan, and later named as the successor of the last Seljuk sultan before that empire collapsed, then the Ottomans were their legitimate political heirs. It was at this time that the first Chronicles of the Ottoman Dynasty, which included the Seljuk succession story, appeared, and the stories that make up The Book of Dede Korkut, which narrates the exploits of the Oğuz, were first written down.18

According to The Book of Dede Korkut, the Oğuz were a people whose main value was manliness, a trait that both men and women could possess. Manliness was bravery, not turning in flight from the enemy. A boy would not be named until he cut off heads and spilled blood.19 The ideal wife rose before the husband, mounted his horse, and brought him some heads before he reached the enemy.20 Brave, manly warriors on horseback who believed the best horses were sired by a supernatural stallion, the Oğuz wore golden earrings and sported moustaches.21 Their march was accompanied by the sound of war drums and kettle drums and horns and pipes. They carried horse-tail banners and standards, wooing maidens or mates through their displays of valour. For entertainment, they watched bulls wrestle camels, or men wrestle bulls. They went hunting and hawking. They were honest, heroic, falcon-like warrior chieftains, steppe nomads who lived in tented encampments. Their felt tents lay over a wooden frame in the shape of a beehive, with golden-framed smoke holes.22 They herded tens of thousands of sheep, goats, and camels, and rode Arabian horses. They hunted and fought with strong bows, lances, maces, spears, and swords.

To feast, they ate mutton stew and slaughtered horses, red camels, white and black sheep, and cattle. They also sacrificed them to give thanks. They drank fermented mare’s milk, as well as strong wine. They ate garlic and meat roasted on the spit, milk, cheese, cream, yoghurt, and a salty yoghurt drink from their herds. Enormous dogs and slingshot-wielding young boys drove the animals across the steppe. They were ever-wary of grey wolves, although they venerated them. The Oğuz migrated between the valleys in winter and mountains in summer, seeking pastures with their tents and their livestock. They sought the shade of trees and cool streams in the summer, threatened by drought. At their gatherings, the nobles drank red wine from golden goblets served by slave girls.

The historical and genealogical effort, including choosing the Oğuz as ancestors and making themselves the legal successors of the Seljuks, was part of a propaganda war against competing Turcoman empires and principalities in Anatolia, Central Asia, Iran, and the Arabic-speaking region. The Dulkadır, Black Sheep (Karakoyunlu), Karamanids, and White Sheep were all battling for control of eastern Anatolia and proclaiming their own illustrious descent, real and fictitious, from Central Asian khans. Many of these rivals also claimed descent from the Oğuz. The Ottoman circulation of genealogies during the reign of Murad II showing that they were descended from ‘the senior son of the senior son of Oğuz Khan’ was an obvious effort to make them the most legitimate Turkic dynasty in the region.23 It would answer a need to explain who the Ottomans were and how descent and political appointment brought them to power. And it would silence rival claims to the throne.

Hardly confident, the Ottomans still found a need to explain what had happened after Timur’s invasion in 1402 and during the interregnum, including the insurrection of Sheikh Bedreddin. The volume of history writing increased during Bayezid II’s reign. Bayezid II sought to articulate a new imperial consciousness, in both simple Turkish and sophisticated Persian, to improve the image of his predecessor and father, Mehmed II, in the face of negative reactions to his harsh policies and to validate his own claims against his rivals for the Ottoman throne. Mehmed II’s building of a more unified, centralised empire—turning away from the gazi holy warriors and towards the Ottoman-trained Christian recruits, the Janissaries—had strained the populace with its unending military campaigns and consequent unending demand for new fiscal sources.

Upon returning from the military campaign of 1484–1485 in Southeastern Europe and his conquests of the Moldovan Black Sea ports of Kilia and Akkerman, which Mehmed II had been unable to take, Bayezid II ordered the collecting and recording of oral histories about the dynasty and the writing of new general histories of the Ottomans in Turkish.24 The effort continued until the first decade of the sixteenth century. The Kurdish former chancellor of the White Sheep was ordered by Bayezid II to compose an elegant history in Persian.25 Bayezid II desperately needed to recapture the loyalty of disaffected members of the elite by recalling the great deeds of the dynasty and his place in it. Bayezid II’s policies differed greatly from Mehmed II’s—he returned foundations and landholdings seized by his father to their owners while promoting a more pious image—and he wished to put the best spin on them.26

Above all, these works demonstrate that what mattered was loyalty to the dynasty. The accounts express a lingering fear about the threat of deviant dervishes. They are haunted by the rebellions of Sheikh Bedreddin during the interregnum at the beginning of the fifteenth century, which they narrate in great detail. When the Safavids suddenly emerged on the Ottoman eastern frontier a century later, Ottoman writers began to refer to Sheikh Bedreddin and his disciples as Shi’is and Red Heads, an allusion to the contemporary followers of Shah Ismail I.27 Sheikh Bedreddin had revolted in unstable regions recently retaken by the Ottomans. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans feared the Safavids would do the same, and they faced revolts in border regions as well as in their heartland provinces.

BAYEZID II’S FATAL THREAT: HIS OWN SON, SELIM

Despite his efforts by sword and pen, Bayezid II was incapable of defending the dynasty from its internal and external enemies. Bayezid II may have considered himself a saint on par with Ibn Arabi and Sheikh Bedreddin, but even greater claims and deeds awaited his youngest son and successor, Selim. Selim I (reigned 1512–1520) is uniquely depicted in contemporary portraiture with a large golden hoop earring and handlebar moustache, but no beard. He looks like a Janissary. This may not be coincidental. Based in the princely governorship of remote Trabzon, Selim had faced the brunt of Safavid incursions. He had gained a great reputation among military men for his confrontations with the Safavids, slaving raids, and successful battles to the northeast in the Caucasus against Christian Georgia. A panegyric account of his 1508 Caucasus invasion boasts that the raid netted large numbers of enslaved women, girls, and boys. It takes pride in mass rape as collective violence:

Selim rewarded his supporters with authorisation to violate girls, wage combat, and pillage. But what he wanted for himself was the sultanate.

In 1511 he deposited his teenage son Suleiman in his governorship in Kefe (Caffa, today Feodosia), the great slaving port in the Crimea, the peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea. Crimean Tatar raids into Eastern Europe and the northern Caucasus may have netted two million slaves between 1500 and 1700, a number comparable to the Atlantic slave trade in the same era.29 From the Crimea, Selim travelled with his army by sea to Akkerman in Southeastern Europe.

From there they marched on Edirne, where Bayezid II and his court had settled due to a massive earthquake in Istanbul two years earlier. The natural disaster rained stones from the city’s towers on terrified people who scrambled to escape and had even thrown down ‘lofty minarets, which touched the heavenly sphere’.30 Bayezid II consented to Selim’s demands for a governorship nearer Istanbul—which was Selim’s ruse to be nearer than his brothers to the imperial capital when the elderly sultan died—and also declared he would not abdicate for his favourite son, Ahmed. Unappeased, Selim readied his army for battle near Çorlu, midway between Edirne and Istanbul, against the imperial army led by his father, who, because of his advanced age, sat in a carriage rather than saddled a horse. Despite his brave reputation, when the battle commenced and the battlefield was choked with the smoke of cannon fire, Selim ‘slackened the bow of war immediately. He did not draw a sharp sword against his father’. He fled the battlefield and returned to Kefe.31

Aware of these events, Prince Ahmed marched on Istanbul from southwestern Anatolia with his army so that Bayezid II would declare him sultan. But when he reached the imperial capital, the Janissaries rebelled, for they favoured Selim. They considered Ahmed ‘effeminate’, a man devoted to pleasure, drinking, and music, his only desire ‘to kiss the mouths of rosebud-lipped beauties and to clasp the waists of those whose tall figures resemble cypresses’.32 And in contrast with his elderly and ill sixty-year-old father, Selim had a reputation for being eager to take action against the Ottomans’ enemies, especially the Safavids. With the Janissaries preventing him from entering Istanbul, Ahmed retreated and Selim returned with his army. While Ottoman chronicles insist that Bayezid II voluntarily abdicated, in reality, Selim I deposed his father.33 He declared, ‘I can no longer restrain myself, my father is senile and allowing the empire to fall into ruins’.34 In April 1512, after forcing Bayezid II to abdicate, Selim I was enthroned in his place. He sent his father in the imperial carriage from Istanbul to retirement in pleasant Dimetoka (today Didymoteicho, Greece), south of Edirne. But Bayezid II never made it. Suspicions are that Selim I had him poisoned en route.

Over the course of the next year, Selim I faced rival claims to the throne from his brothers, princes Ahmed and Korkud. Leaving his eighteen-year-old son Suleiman in the palace in Istanbul, in case he fell in battle, Selim I crossed Anatolia with his army, hunting his brothers and their supporters. Midforties Korkud was found hiding in a cave outside Manisa near the Aegean coast and strangled. Ahmed was also strangled after being defeated in battle by Selim I at Yenişehir, east of Bursa. Their sons were executed, in accordance with Ottoman law.

Despite his mercilessness, Selim I’s brief reign was to inspire messianic claims typical of the Reformation era. Such claims would lead to similar sectarian splits in Islam as those rocking Western Christianity.

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