IN JUST TWO and a half centuries, from the turn of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty had progressed from nomadic chieftains to settled princes to rulers of a globe-girdling empire that stretched from Algeria in the western Mediterranean through the Middle East, and even had influence on the Indian Ocean basin to Sumatra. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had asserted their own vision of empire. One artefact from that century conveys what the dynasty had become.
The British Museum in London owns an outstanding example of the ‘caliph of the world’ Suleiman I’s calligraphic seal, the tughra. The imperial monogram reads, ‘Suleiman Shah, son of Selim Shah, the ever-victorious Khan’.1 The rest of the document is missing, but the fact that the cipher itself has a height of 45.5 cm and a width of 61.5 cm means that it was part of a very large scroll. Written in interlocking Arabic letters in cobalt blue and gold ink, forming a three-dimensional, glittering whole, it is a stunning work of art and expression of power.
Like gold-tipped Ottoman battle standards, the seal has three blue lines rising on the right, ending in loops filled in with gold. They are held up by a base made of the name ‘Suleiman’. Wrapped with curling lines forming an aigrette, the three vertical lines in turn form the base for a giant, battle-helmet-shaped blue loop, racing off to the left. A short, curved dagger leads out to the right. Bold, energetic, swirling, whirling circles and cords of gold and blue flowers fill in the loops and lines. Split palmettes, carnations, lotuses, pomegranates, tulips, roses, and hyacinths dance across the interior of the tughra, forming a spiralling, golden nautilus shell.
The nautilus is the symbol of expansion. Nautilus shell, flowers, dagger, battle helmet, aigrette, battle standard, and gold, the cipher is the concise, beautiful expression of a confident military power and sophisticated culture. It resembles musical notes written in priceless, golden letters. The sultan, represented by the letters of his name, encircles myriad flowers representing the diverse parts and peoples of his kingdom, all under his control, the conductor of a grand orchestra.
The cipher is the symbol of what it meant to be an Ottoman in the sixteenth century, the special characteristics that defined the ruling class, why their armies were so successful, and what their sources of manpower were. Converting enemies into cogs in their military machine, the Ottoman rulers expanded their territory fast, conquering much of the former Roman Empire, their success enabled by their unique political organisation. Central to their distinctive imperial vision and way of life was their use of conversion-based meritocracy as a way to absorb and integrate enemies, an imperial feature esteemed by European observers.
This ‘Ottoman Way’, first described by a diplomat from the Holy Roman Empire, was articulated in class structure, language, law, culture, and ideology. Society was divided into the askeri (the military and the sultan’s salaried servants or holders of fiefs), reaya (commoners and tax-paying subjects), and slave classes. A centrepiece of the system was the timar, a land grant allowing the holder to keep the revenue on the goods produced on that land in exchange for the responsibility of raising a mounted military force to serve the sultan when called to battle. The empire was also based on a gendered religious hierarchy of long-standing Islamic precedent, wherein Muslims were favoured over Christians and Jews, men were advantaged over women, and the free were privileged over slaves. Westerners (Rûmis or Romans) were preferred to easterners. Yet the social order was flexible. Christians and Jews could become Muslim; slaves could be freed. Women could rise in station, especially through dynastic marriage or becoming childbearing concubines to the sultan. The Ottomans created a new language, a composite of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish grammar and vocabulary, written in modified Persian script. This was the language of administration and culture, especially poetry. The Ottoman Way was also expressed in law, as chancellor Celalzade Mustafa and head of the religious establishment Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi harmonised secular law (kanun), based on custom and sultanic decree, and religious law (Sharia) so as to fit the empire’s aims. It was another example of how the Ottomans had long subordinated religious authority to imperial authority and had made secular law equivalent in force to religious law. Ottoman culture was expressed in textile and ceramic art and mosque architecture by Collection recruits in court workshops, including the great architect Sinan, famous for his mosques built for Suleiman I and Selim II.
Ottoman ideology in that age rested on several pillars. One was a meritocracy that balanced and properly utilised the diverse human resources at the empire’s disposal. That in turn reflected how the Ottomans created an ‘empire of difference’ that tolerated, rather than sought to erase, diversity—as realised, for example, by granting Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Muslims their own law courts, judges, and the ability to adjudicate marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so on according to their own religion.2 A third pillar was projecting Ottoman power and might both in Muslim-majority Eurasia and in Christian Europe, best articulated by Suleiman I’s mosque built on the highest hill in Istanbul. The magnificent structure expresses Ottoman wealth, power, piety, and harmony.
The Ottomans rose to world prominence in part due to their unique way of forging an elite through conversion to Islam. Visiting foreign dignitaries remarked upon the praiseworthy qualities of Ottoman society, composing favourable accounts of the Ottomans in order to critique their own societies and exaggerating the positive aspects of the Ottoman administration and military so as to galvanise other European powers to meet the Ottoman threat.
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (in office 1555–1562), the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to the Ottoman court, praised the rival empire for being a meritocracy where no man ‘owed his dignity to anything but his personal merits and bravery; no one is distinguished from the rest by his birth, and honour is paid to each man according to the nature of the duty and offices which he discharges’.3 Each man was rewarded according to what he deserved, and government positions were filled by men suited for them. Every subject of the sultan had the opportunity to rise to the top. Busbecq found that the sultan’s highest officeholders were often men of the lowest birth—shepherds and herdsmen. Because the Ottomans valued good training and hard work rather than high birth, Busbecq concluded, they succeeded in everything and expanded the boundaries of their dominion day by day.4
Visiting the court of Suleiman I when thousands of cavalrymen and Janissaries were present, Busbecq gushed as he looked upon all the turbaned heads wrapped in bright white silk. He was dazzled by the brilliance of gold and silver, silk and satin, later describing it as the most beautiful spectacle he had ever seen. The assembly was the sultan’s cipher in human form. Yet despite the display of luxury, he found modesty, too, as every man had the same form of dress despite being different in rank, with no wasteful frippery. What impressed the ambassador the most in that great crowd of soldiers was their absolute silence and discipline. The thousands of Janissaries stood so motionless that he thought they were statues until they all bowed to him simultaneously.
While allowing for the fact that Busbecq used his praise of the Ottomans as a way to criticise the perceived faults of his own society and thus to shame it, he described the idealised Ottoman Way, which was so different from what prevailed in the rest of Europe. While there the elite was made up of blue blood—local, noble families—the Ottomans created much of their own elite from deracinated slaves. The Ottoman Way was grounded in the creation of a loyal class of administrators and soldiers through the Collection, the system in which boys were recruited in conquered territories, brought to the imperial centre, converted to Islam, trained in the palace, and given positions based on their natural abilities.
Busbecq did not realise it, but girls were also recruited in this fashion from conquered territories to be made into Ottomans in the palace. Converted Christian princesses and slaves became the leading women of the royal family. Girls were brought to the imperial centre—first to the Old Palace after 1453, and then from the mid-sixteenth century to the women’s harem in Topkapı Palace—converted to Islam, and educated. They followed a system of apprenticeship, promotion, and ranks. The recruited slave women were taught literacy, how to be Muslim, and to sing, dance, play musical instruments, tell stories, and embroider. Converted slaves taught to forget their past competed with each other to rise in the ranks and serve the dynasty.
Just as European eunuchs strictly policed every aspect of the pages’ lives in the sultan’s palace, so, too, did African eunuchs enforce a strict code of conduct over the women recruits in the harem. Many of these women were married to pages when they left the palace, or to administrators. If they became concubines to the sultan, they could give birth to princes, raising their sons in the provinces and readying them for the day when they, too, would sit on the throne.
This elaborate system of recruitment shows how the Ottomans, unlike their Western European rivals—so intent on ‘purifying’ their realms of all religious minorities—viewed the people they ruled as potential cogs in the machine. Their diverse subject peoples were raw material that could be perfected to serve the needs of the empire as it dissolved and integrated formerly powerful dynasties. By the sixteenth century, the palace recruits were most often converted sons of Christian peasants—first mainly of Greek and Bosnian origin, then of Albanian, and later of Circassian, Abkhazian, and Georgian background, raised in the palace to be a loyal corps of soldiers and statesmen without ties to existing nobility.
The system was not as perfect as Busbecq described.5 Recruits remembered their homelands. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a grand vizier born in Bosnia of Serbian origin, would build the famous bridge over the Drina river in Višegrad and restored the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć.6 Recruits retained their languages and dress. They maintained relations with family members, ensuring that relatives also rose in the administration or military. There was vicious competition between recruits from Southeastern Europe (Albania and Bosnia) and those from the Caucasus (Abkhazia, Circassia, and Georgia). There was also rivalry between Albanian and Bosnian factions in the administration and military. A Bosnian-origin intellectual depicted Albanians as rebellious, cowardly, stubborn, ignorant, violent, and ugly.7 Such group competition created ethnic stereotypes: Albanians were impulsively violent, Abkhaz were masturbating simpletons, and Circassians were filthy thieves. The Collection was established to hinder men of the same origins from going beyond expressions of solidarity to foment rebellion, from becoming more loyal to their ethnic group than to the sultan.
Istanbul during Suleiman I’s reign became one of the largest cities in Europe, with as many as 350,000 inhabitants, one-third of whom were Christian.8 As noted earlier, Suleiman I welcomed Jews and Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain; they settled in the same neighbourhood in Galata as the Roman Catholics.9 Each district in Istanbul took on a particular ethno-religious character, although most neighbourhoods had diverse populations. There were no ghettoes as in Christian Europe. By the end of the seventeenth century, Istanbul had an estimated population of half a million, including 210,000 Christians and 40,000 Jews.10
Thus Istanbul was a microcosm of the empire, a veritable alphabet of diversity: Abkhaz, Albanian, Arab, Armenian, Ashkenazi, and Austrian; Bosnian and Bulgarian; Catalan, Circassian, Cordovan, Crimean, and Croatian; Dalmatian; Egyptian; French; Georgian, German, and Greek; Hungarian; Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, and Italian; Jewish; Karaite and Kurdish; Laz; Macedonian and Moldovan; Palestinian, Polish, and Portuguese; Ragusan, Roma, Romaniot, and Russian; Sephardic, Serbian, Sicilian, Spanish, Sudanese, and Syrian; Tatar, Turcoman, and Turkish; Uzbek; Venetian and Vlach; Wallachian and Western European; Yemeni; and Zaza. And for O, there were the Ottomans, who transcended all national and ethnic categories.
The sheikhulislam—formerly the mufti of Istanbul, the leading jurisconsult—gave legal opinions on juridical questions concerning conformity of political decisions with Islamic law. Under Ebussuud Efendi, who held the position under Suleiman I and Selim II, the sheikhulislam became the head of the entire religious hierarchy, making all pedagogical and judicial appointments. He was like a Christian patriarch. Nothing like it had been seen in Islamic history. Just as the grand vizier was the sultan’s deputy executing political authority for him, the sheikhulislam was his deputy executing religious authority in his name. The sheikhulislam made all nominations to religious posts, appointed judgeships, and sat atop a system of promotion. The mufti of Istanbul had been an independent figure, but the sheikhulislam was made part of the imperial administration, head of the religious class.
Religious law became an arm of sultanic power, legitimising practices or actions that violated Islamic law. The Collection should not have been allowed, as it entailed enslaving the ruler’s subjects and forcibly converting them to Islam. Likewise, the slave status of the ruling class, not merely the soldiers, was also unusual.
Ebussuud Efendi declared that rent-producing properties endowed with cash, a moveable good, were licit, contrary to the view of practically any other Muslim scholar. The interest paid the salaries of preachers and filled the pockets of the endower, which should have been illegal due to the prohibition on interest. Ebussuud Efendi rationalised that it was customary practice, as it was by then the prevailing mode of endowment, and that it was good for prosperity, although it was rare before the Ottoman age.11 The sheikhulislam found legal grounds to permit the launch of the siege of Cyprus in 1570, which violated a peace treaty to which the Ottomans had agreed. He justified the massacres of Shi’is and Yazidis in eastern Anatolia on the grounds that they were unbelievers.12 He legalised taxes on wine and pork. He manufactured legal fictions to allow Jews to build or repair their houses of worship that by the usual interpretation of Islamic law should have been destroyed. This was yet another example of the sheikhulislam creating the legal basis for imperial rule, even when it went against Islamic law and custom.
Suleiman I ordered Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi and Chancellor Celalzade Mustafa to align Islamic law and secular canon law. Ebussuud Efendi centralised the religious institution as Celalzade Mustafa bureaucratised the civil administration. Through the laws and regulations enacted under Celalzade Mustafa’s supervision, the basic institutions of the imperial system received final form and were systematically applied. This entailed collecting and codifying canon law codes to compile a comprehensive and coherent body of legislation. The aim was to establish consistency in principle and resolve conflicts of practice as the ‘sheikhulislam of canon law’.13 The legitimisation of dynastic law was a central element in the consolidation of the empire and its bureaucracy. Suleiman I began to be referred to as ‘the lawgiver’.
Christian Europeans may have developed secular institutions in the seventeenth century, but as we see during the reign of Suleiman I, the Ottomans had already made religious authority secondary to sultanic authority and had made secular law equivalent in force to religious law. They were ahead of all other Christian and Islamic polities in this regard. But sultans remained vigorous proponents of Islam.
At the end of Suleiman I’s reign, the emperor turned to a life of religious devotion. By that point, the Ottomans had unified administration, aesthetic taste, and secular and religious expression, and had fashioned them in their own unique way. Their robes of honour, monumental mosques, carpets, ceramics used in public banquets, and the sultan’s cipher all projected the image the Ottomans desired: they were grand, yet devout. The Suleimaniye Mosque complex, built in Istanbul from 1550 to 1557, displays a mature architectural synthesis, decorated with the best products of the imperial workshops.
Just as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ended his days retired in a monastery, by 1550, thirty years into his reign, Suleiman I turned away from ecstatic messianic claims and apocalypticism—as well as from his former appreciation for sumptuous textiles, gold, jewels, wine, and music—and turned instead to piety.14 The sultan opposed the importation of luxury goods and the use of ornament. Thereafter dressing modestly and no longer practising goldsmithing, Suleiman I opposed figural images and the display of jewels and gilding on religious architecture. The melancholy sultan ordered musical instruments destroyed, stripped his private apartments of all luxury, and began to wear only green woolen vests, as Muhammad reportedly had. The tapestry depicting Charles V went into storage. According to the Habsburg ambassador, the sultan’s expression in 1555 was ‘anything but smiling, and has a sternness which, although sad, is full of majesty’.15 The Treaty of Amasya that same year ended the ruinous struggle with the Safavids, providing a stable eastern frontier and dampening the likelihood of Shi’i-inspired deviant dervish uprisings in the realm. The last years of Suleiman I’s reign were increasingly shaped by the Sunni-Shi’i split, when his court turned from ecstatic belief in the end-time and Day of Judgement to a Sunnism we would recognise today. From the 1540s, Suleiman I considered himself sultan and caliph, which would be the standard title for Ottoman rulers thereafter.16
The Safavids also converted from religious extremists and ecstatic believers in the impending end of history to Shi’is recognisable to their descendants today. Suleiman I’s contemporary Shah Tahmasp—son and successor to Shah Ismail I and a great painter and calligrapher—also spent the end of his reign in pious contemplation following the establishment of peaceful relations with the Ottomans.
From 1550, standardised Ottoman fashions emerged. The royal textile workshop made its own ceremonial robes. A new, non-figural floral Ottoman ceramic industry came into being, its workshops in the hands of Collection recruits. Palace-trained recruits produced the distinct imperial Ottoman artistic and architectural style. The centralised Ottoman system produced its own masters from within. Beginning in 1538, the chief architect was Sinan, an Armenian Collection recruit from Kayseri in central Anatolia. Collection recruits in the service of Suleiman I created Ottoman designs, distinct from Persian, Turcoman, and European precedents, that would be the model for future generations, especially in mosque building. Taste was not imported but spread outward throughout the domains of the empire from the centre.
Suleiman I’s turn towards Sunni piety was best articulated in his mosque complex. The magnificent structure expresses Ottoman wealth, power, and religiosity. He constructed it as a crown for the city, capping its highest hill. Rising after the signing of peace treaties with the Habsburgs (1547) and Safavids (1555), appearing as a sign of Sunni Islam’s apparent victory over Catholicism and Shi’ism, the mosque is grave, austere, and imperial.17 Replete with a soaring dome, it propagated the magnificence of Suleiman I and his dynasty.
The monumental Suleimaniye complex is a grand city within the city, where a Sunni Muslim could fulfil his social, religious, educational, economic, and bodily purposes—to pray, study, learn, heal, sleep, eat, drink, relieve himself, bathe, trade, and shop. It has Suleiman I’s mosque at its centre, surrounded by a tomb for the sultan and one for his wife, Hürrem Sultan (died 1558), as well as another for its architect, Sinan. The other buildings include law schools, a medical school, a school for studying the sayings of Muhammad, a Qur’an school for children, a hospital, a hostel, a soup kitchen, a public bath, fountains, latrines, a caravanserai, and shops. From the grassy knoll beside the mosque, one looks down upon the Bosporus, green-grey as a moss-covered ship’s iron. The sultan’s mosque complex provided for all of his Muslim subjects’ spiritual and physical needs for posterity, reflecting the idea that the sultan is the star at the centre of the Ottoman universe.
The mosque complex was given Sunni Islamic as well as biblical meaning. Suleiman I’s mausoleum is similar to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which stands atop Solomon’s Temple (Suleiman I was called ‘the Solomon of the age’).18 The mosque was modelled on Hagia Sophia, which had been built as the ‘new Solomonic temple’, its first builder, the emperor Justinian, declaring, ‘Solomon, I have surpassed you’!19 Just as Justinian brought marble columns from the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek to build the Hagia Sophia, so, too, did Suleiman I ship a column from the same place, which Muslims referred to as a palace Solomon made for the Queen of Sheba. While the mosque connected Suleiman I to his biblical namesake, its inscriptions likened the four columns that support the central dome to the four Sunni caliphs—Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali (the first three cursed by Shi’i Muslims)—and the mosque itself as the Ka’ba, the Muslims’ most sacred site on earth.20 A piece of the Ka’ba’s black stone was set into the gate of the sultan’s tomb.
The mosque’s inscriptions also promote an imperial Sunni Islam. The foundation’s inscription, composed by Ebussuud Efendi, articulates the sultan’s God-given right to rule, his role as defender of Sunni Islam and Islamic law, and his position as a just ruler declaring and codifying secular law. It declares that the mosque is the site for continual public prayer, reflecting the emphasis in the second part of Suleiman I’s reign on conformity to normative Sunni Islam, replacing his earlier eschatological beliefs. The rest of the mosque inscriptions, which all come from the Qur’an, refer to the ritual duties required of Sunni Muslims.21 ‘There is no God save God and Muhammad is God’s messenger’, the Sunni profession of faith, is inscribed on the main entrance to the mosque’s courtyard.
Ottoman mosques built prior to the conquest of Constantinople boasted inscriptions not only from the Qur’an but also from the sayings of Muhammad and Persian poetry, and had many references to Ali, the pivot upon whom Shi’i Islam is based. But the Suleimaniye Mosque is arranged so as to condemn Shi’ism and the Safavids as false and to promote normative Sunni Islam as the true faith, enforced by the caliph and lawgiver, Suleiman I.
Travelling to campaign against the Safavids in 1534 and 1548, Suleiman I had visited the shrines of deviant dervishes in Anatolia.22 At the shrine of Seyyid Gazi in northwest Anatolia, Suleiman I visited the tomb, giving alms to the barefoot, half-naked, tattooed itinerant dervishes with self-inflicted burn wounds and shaved heads. He spoke with men ‘chained with iron chains like hunted lions, fastened with yokes on their necks like camels, and wearing nose-rings’, some of whom were intoxicated by hashish.23 A decade later, Suleiman I turned against such Sufis and their practices, taking their shrines away from them.
During the later years of Suleiman I’s reign, when his mosque complex was constructed, Sufi lodges were converted into madrasas and the sultan promoted the empire’s centrally controlled religious class and normative Sunni Islam at the expense of the Islam of deviant dervishes, including the persistent followers of Sheikh Bedreddin. The Janissaries also tried to distance themselves from the practices of deviant Sufis, such as we see in a petition to Suleiman I in the mid-1550s, proclaiming, ‘Unlike the Janissaries of old times, we do not indulge in wine, women and young boys’. Instead, ‘we perform our canonical prayers five times a day and constantly pray for you’.24
The Bektaşis, with whom the Janissaries had been intimately linked since the age of Murad I, were also transformed in this era from a deviant dervish group to a reputable Sufi order. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bektaşis shaved their hair and beards, were devoted to Ali and his sons Hasan and Hussein, dressed in felt, and travelled about chanting prayers, banging drums and tambourines, and claiming to be saints. They wore caps symbolising heads, as they were ‘beheaded dead people’, meaning that they had already killed their egos.25 But by the mid-sixteenth century the group had transformed themselves into a mainstream Sufi order that absorbed other deviant dervish groups—Kalenderis (or Torlaks), Haydaris, and Abdals of Rûm—who had openly articulated Shi’i beliefs, as well as their lodges and their tombs. While other groups of dervishes were pressured to disappear, the Bektaşis thrived because they were tied to the Janissaries, who saw Hajji Bektaş as their patron saint.26 As a way to gain control of the radical Sufis in the realm, the dynasty had incorporated the Bektaşis into a key imperial institution—its military elite.
The Mevlevis, by contrast, had been attached to the political elite from the beginning. They were politically passive and dependent on Ottoman patronage. The sheikhulislam approved every sheikh chosen by the head of the order: the grand çelebi in Konya, a descendant of Rûmi who girded the sultan at enthronements. Suleiman I built a hall for whirling meditation and a mosque at the Mevlevi complex in Konya, and a marble sarcophagus for Rûmi. The sultan’s Sunni piety allowed only for the toleration of obedient dervishes.
For Friday prayers, Suleiman I paraded through the streets of Istanbul to his mosque, preceded by thousands of silent, marching Janissaries, administrative officials on horseback, and good-looking palace pages. All along the route, massive crowds bowed their heads in grave silence when seeing the normally hidden sultan. According to an eyewitness, the French ambassador to Istanbul, ‘a single glance from [the sultan], as from Medusa, would transform men into marble or silent fish, for they hold the very firm opinion that their lord is the shadow and the breath of God on earth’.27 The only sound heard was that of horse hooves hitting cobblestone streets. The day before, the sultan’s horse would be held aloft by ropes and denied food, so as to guarantee it would trot carefully, with a measured gait.
Like his intricate imperial cipher, Suleiman I’s mosque, built of material and by craftsmen assembled from diverse parts of his realm, was the expression of wealth and power. It demonstrated his control over vast territories and peoples, the spoils acquired through victorious military campaigns, and his ability to command it all in the name of religion and empire. Court ceremony demanded complete silence when the sultan appeared in public. The sultan and those around him used a unique sign language to express their wishes and commands. In the presence of thousands of troops and officials, silence conveyed the status of the ruler, leaving foreign visitors in awe of his apparently complete power over his servants.
Ambassador Busbecq, who witnessed a silent and disciplined assembly of Janissaries gathered before the sultan, warned Charles V that his empire had much to fear from the Ottomans. He depicted their enemy as having all the resources of a powerful empire, its strength unbroken, its soldiery experienced in warfare, its army unified and disciplined.28 The Habsburgs, by contrast, were weak and lacked spirit. Their army was neither hardy nor well trained. Their soldiers were disobedient, and the officers were greedy, without discipline, reckless, drunk, and debauched. For Busbecq, worst of all, the Ottomans were accustomed to victory, while the Habsburgs were used to defeat. He trembled to think what the future would bring when he compared the Ottoman system with his own.
But Busbecq’s European compatriots paid little heed. They were more interested in gossip about the sultan’s personal life. They were especially curious about the women of the harem. Long misunderstood, the institution of the harem, how it developed, and the women and eunuchs of the palace deserve closer scrutiny. Within the empire’s social hierarchies, gender, too, could be a path to social mobility—and a source of upheaval when those social hierarchies were overturned, particularly in the home of the sultan. It was events in Suleiman’s private life that caused him to turn to piety in the second half of his reign.