BY THE EARLY seventeenth century, the Ottoman sultanate had greatly declined in prestige. Sultans had been relegated to a sedentary, ceremonial role. They were dominated by valide sultans who, as the only indispensable members of the dynasty, were the de facto rulers behind the scenes at Topkapı Palace. Sultans were also overshadowed by grand viziers—it was they who made the day-to-day decisions of government and led military campaigns.
Because they were dispensable, seventeenth-century sultans were the first and only Ottoman rulers to be executed. Osman II had attempted to break this pathetic mould and make himself into a warrior-sultan who engaged in battle with the Christian enemy and left the palace in order to appear as a living person, not just a figurehead, to his subjects. But his efforts were resisted violently and he paid the ultimate price.
To seventeenth-century Ottoman historians, manliness and male virtue were central in the making and unmaking of sultans.1 Prior to the modern era, Ottoman writers, like writers in the rest of Europe, did not distinguish between masculinity and femininity. Instead, in Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire, authors judged people by their male or female virtues and performance of gendered positions. In the Ottoman Empire, manliness was defined by bravery and courage proven on the battlefield—labelled interchangeably gaza or jihad. To understand what this meant for Ottoman sultans, we only need consider the reigns of Ibrahim I (reigned 1640–1648) and Mehmed IV (reigned 1648–1687).
Following Mustafa I’s second deposition, when he was sent to the harem to while away the rest of his days in 1623, Ahmed I’s eldest surviving son, the eleven-year-old Murad, replaced him as Murad IV (reigned 1623–1640) on the throne. Murad IV was overshadowed for the first ten years of his reign by his regent, favourite of Ahmed I and mother of the sultan Kösem Sultan. In these years, the Ottomans lost Baghdad to the Safavids in 1624 and Murad IV failed to take it back in 1630. He managed to reconquer Yerevan, Armenia, in 1635 and retook Baghdad in 1638. After the first conquest, he had his brothers Bayezid and Suleiman put to death; after the second, it was the turn of his brother Kasım.2 To commemorate his military feats, he built the stunningly beautiful, octagonal, blue-tiled Baghdad and Yerevan pleasure pavilions in the fourth courtyard at Topkapı Palace. Following Murad IV’s victory over the Safavids, in 1639 the two rival empires agreed to the Treaty of Zuhab (a town on the Iraq-Iran frontier), which ended over a century of warfare started by Selim I’s defeat of Ismail I at Çaldıran. But within a year of leading his army on campaign, Murad IV died of complications from gout—he was overweight and a heavy drinker—at the age of twenty-nine.3 One chronicler noted with irony that he passed away in the same chamber where he had had his brother Kasım put to death.4 Since Mustafa I, his uncle, had recently passed away, and Murad IV had already had his three other brothers killed, the only one who could inherit the throne was the single living male Ottoman heir, his younger brother Ibrahim.
Ottoman chroniclers declared that Ibrahim I displayed none of the expected male virtues. They condemned him for his alleged lack of manliness as displayed by his inability to control himself or the women of the harem, with whom he spent an inordinate amount of his time.5 As in the rest of contemporary Europe, these virtues included self-discipline; subduing the passions; not being consumed by a drive for luxury, ease, sensuality, and pleasure; and control over others in the household, particularly women. These were features apparently lacking in Ibrahim I, which led to his demise. Like young men in early modern England, he was criticised for lust and idleness—allegedly the outcomes of the absence of self-mastery, the defining feature of manliness. Ottoman chroniclers depicted a topsy-turvy world where female royals made decisions for the sultan and represented the dynasty, while a sultan without virtue sat on the throne.
Ibrahim I was told to procreate lest the dynasty become extinct, and he was accordingly presented many concubines for this purpose.6 But on the other hand, he was criticised for being overindulgent in fulfilling his own desires. He was unable to make it appear as if he could successfully combine procreation and a reasonable enjoyment of sexual relations. One Ottoman writer wrote fancifully that in Transylvania he saw frescoes in the great hall of an elaborate fifteenth-century Hungarian palace. The master painter had predicted the main affairs of each sultanic reign. According to the writer, two centuries earlier the painter had anticipated that Sultan Ibrahim I ‘would be martyred holding his penis in his hand’.7 As evident in this evocative image, contemporaries viewed the problem to be Ibrahim I’s lack of self-control and intimacy with women. Desiring to please them, he became ensnared in the trap of enjoyment that led to his death.
According to his enemies, Ibrahim I’s alleged lack of male virtue led to moral, political, and financial corruption. Ibrahim I allegedly spent most of his life in the ‘prison’ of the harem, surrounded by women.8 To observers, this was detrimental to his ability to be a manly ruler. They linked state affairs going astray with women dominating the sultanate. Men were supposed to dominate politics.9 One author longed for a nonexistent strong and powerful royal man who would put women in their place. Yet this need could not be fulfilled by Ibrahim I, especially considering his behaviour when facing the crisis of being the last living Ottoman male, the last male descendant of Osman.
Ibrahim I’s lack of male virtue was blamed for economic crises as well. The influence of royal women had direct financial consequences at a precarious time. Women allegedly were in charge of a bribery scheme buying and selling government positions, which ruined the empire’s finances. Thanks to the generosity of the leading men of state, rather than supporting one favourite concubine (haseki sultan) as was customary, Ibrahim I had numerous concubines and eight favourites. Supposedly due to these expenditures for maintaining so many women, ‘there was excessive waste and squandering inside and outside’ the palace; ‘revenues coming to the treasury were limited, the salaries of the Sultan’s servants were not being given, and all suffered straitened circumstances and poverty’ so that Ibrahim’s favourite females could live the high life.10 Royal women were accused of sometimes awarding land grants to themselves, rather than to men, which was only the tip of the financial-impropriety iceberg. The sultan bankrupted the leading men of state with his unceasing demands for expensive sable fur. Several Janissary commanders claimed they possessed only gunpowder and bullets and not furs or perfume. There were rumours that Ibrahim I braided his beard with diamonds and wore diamonds on the soles of his shoes.
Palace women were enriched at the Janissaries’ expense as Ibrahim I gave the most lucrative landholdings to his favourites. In the eyes of Ottoman chroniclers, he had to be dethroned in order to protect male privilege. The rule of men was referred to as the law of the land. Men’s satisfaction and prosperity mattered more than those of women.
Misogynistic writers favoured the logic of ‘reasonable and legal’ proposals of ‘rational men’ to the ‘anger and wrath’ of the valide sultan.11 Ibrahim I’s heeding of his female companions’ desires was responsible for turning gender relations upside down and destroying the empire.12 Lacking manliness and male virtue, Ibrahim I’s frivolous disposition led to his associating with women. In wasting his sperm, the man who was supposed to be leading the dynasty and empire also squandered his symbolic and economic capital. Lost to his multiple favourites, he could not even choose who was best. Gender politics and the proper gendered hierarchy of royal men and women were at work in the minds of those who opposed the man who ‘disgraced the honour of the Sultanate’, and of those who justified his overthrow and execution.13
In summer 1648, Janissaries, jurists (including Sheikhulislam Karaçelebizade), and a big crowd referred to by some Ottoman chroniclers as ‘the public’ (representing the will of the people) marched to the third gate, the Gate of Felicity, of Topkapı Palace, site of enthronements. They demanded the dethronement of Ibrahim I and the enthronement of his oldest son, Prince Mehmed, in his place. At the anteroom to the third gate, Kösem Sultan—the spouse of (deceased) Ahmed I, the mother of (deceased) Murad IV and of Ibrahim I, and the grandmother of Prince Mehmed—upbraided the rebels for agreeing to whatever Ibrahim I had desired, stating, ‘Now you want to replace him with a small child. What an evil plan this is. This crime of sedition is your doing’.14
She demanded to know how a seven-year-old could be king. They told her that legal opinions had been issued declaring that it was not permissible to allow a buffoon to rule. When an unreasonable man is the sovereign, he cannot be persuaded to follow a rational path and causes great harm to the realm. When a child sits on the throne he does not actually govern; his viziers do. They debated for hours until the soldiers lost patience and demanded that if the mother of the sultan did not surrender the prince they would storm the harem and forcibly take him. After assenting to their setting up the emerald throne before the gate, the valide sultan ‘tucked up her skirts in fury’ and went inside to get the prince. Some time later, with ‘apparent distress and hatred in her face’ she brought the boy out, asking, ‘Is this what you want?’15 Karaçelebizade set him on the throne. All the ministers took their oath of allegiance to their new child leader, Mehmed IV. But, so the little boy would not be frightened, the hundreds of Janissaries with their oversized moustaches and high caps were kept from taking the oath. After the excitement, the new emperor took a nap guarded by harem eunuchs.16
Battle raged on the Hippodrome (the city’s main plaza, located just outside the palace) between the Janissaries, who supported Mehmed IV, and the cavalrymen, who backed Ibrahim I. The outcome was predictable. It was as when Ottoman forces battled the Safavids or the Mamluks: Janissary long rifles defeated swords and arrows every time. It was a massacre. The surviving cavalrymen took refuge inside Sultan Ahmed I’s mosque (the Blue Mosque), but the Janissaries showed no mercy. Their bullets ‘rained down on’ the cavalrymen as they were murdered before the pulpit and prayer niche.17 Prayers were not said over the dead, whose bodies were dumped into the Sea of Marmara.18
One of the first imperial decrees issued in the name of the boy sultan declared that Ibrahim I, living under house arrest, was stirring insurrection with the assistance of his loyal followers, including harem eunuchs and palace guards, some of whom wished to reenthrone him.19 Jurists and Janissaries asked the sheikhulislam for a legal opinion about whether it was permissible to have him executed to prevent further rebellion, utilising the same logic used to defend fratricide. Karaçelebizade consented. Kösem Sultan, weeping while praying before the mantle of the Prophet, responded to the decision by asking, ‘Who gave this man the evil eye’?20 Learning of his fate, which was to be the same as that of his older brother Osman II, wearing a skullcap and holding a Qur’an in his hand, Ibrahim I wailed, ‘Why will you kill me? This is God’s book, you tyrants, what authority permits you to murder me?’21 Three weeks after Ibrahim I was dethroned, a reluctant executioner strangled the thirty-five-year-old former sultan with an oiled lasso.22
Ibrahim I was the second sultan to be killed in a generation. If a sultan’s right to rule was justified by his being a war leader, little kept sultans on the throne in the seventeenth century, when they were no longer warrior-kings.
Mehmed IV became sultan at the age of seven, before he had even been circumcised. Predictably, during his minority little Mehmed IV wilted into the background, overshadowed by royal women. Initially, the most significant of these was Kösem Sultan. This wealthy woman built the largest commercial building in Istanbul and served as regent at the beginning of three sultans’ reigns.
Ottoman women serving as regent during a sultan’s minority is comparable to the practice in the rest of Europe, where women royals frequently held a regency. Nevertheless, the political authority of Ottoman royal women should not be exaggerated. Sovereignty may have been held by the entire dynastic family, but women never ruled as sultana, a Western word denoting the royal women surrounding the sultan: mothers, wives, and consorts. They may have exercised power, but they did not hold it. Elsewhere in Europe it was different. England had Mary I (reigned 1553–1558), Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603), and Anne Stuart (reigned 1702–1714). Mary Stuart (reigned 1542–1587) was monarch of Scotland. Queen Christina (reigned 1632–1654) was sovereign of Sweden. Maria Theresa of Austria (reigned 1740–1780) controlled Hungary and Bohemia; she was also empress. Russian women monarchs included Elizabeth Petrovna (reigned 1741–1762) and Catherine II (reigned 1762–1796). The Ottomans had Kösem Sultan.
Kösem Sultan was regent after Mehmed IV’s enthronement. While the grand vizier was responsible for day-to-day imperial affairs and leading the empire in war, the valide sultan and chief eunuch, who had access to men and women in the dynasty, ran the household and palace. With the decreased importance of the sultan and the increased role of Ottoman royal women, at the beginning of Mehmed IV’s reign, when the boy was enthroned as a child, Kösem Sultan and Mehmed IV’s mother, Hatice Turhan Sultan, competed to be the boy’s regent. The former won the initial contest. The two women continued to struggle for power in the palace, along with the chief eunuch of the harem.
A weak sultanate and constant struggle between the valide sultan, the grand vizier, and the chief eunuch meant the Janissaries were a powerful faction at court.23 They were able to make or unmake sultans at will. They revolted nine times during the first eight years of Mehmed IV’s reign, and the grand vizier spent much of his time in office attempting to rein in this elite military force. Although by this time there was no longer any need for the sultan to display manly virtues, that did not mean that all members of the elite were pleased with the influence of the Janissaries at the sultan’s expense, or with the rise of the valide sultan and the chief eunuch. Some pined for a return of the sultan’s display of male virtue and expression of manliness through warfare. The display of such virtues could serve as a rallying cry for those alienated by the rise of these new power holders.
In 1651, palace guards backing Mehmed IV’s young mother, Hatice Turhan Sultan, strangled the seventy-year-old Kösem Sultan, perhaps with her own plaits. Thereafter, Hatice Turhan—who had been given as a gift to Kösem as a newly converted Russian captive—served as Mehmed IV’s regent. The valide sultan always stood by his side. She was present when Mehmed IV met with the grand vizier, asking questions or responding to Mehmed IV’s questions.24 She stopped at nothing to ensure she led the dynasty and became the one charged with the well-being of its name. Writs of the grand viziers customarily addressed to the sultan were directed to his mother the regent instead. The valide sultan was the real decision-maker and de facto ruler of the dynasty.25 Even when the sultan was twelve, his mother proclaimed, ‘My lion is still a child’.26
Hatice Turhan was opposed by many due to her young age. Female elders were respected and given greater freedom, as they were beyond their childbearing years. Young women, by contrast, were not considered mature enough to be able to control themselves and to concentrate on non-sexual, important matters. To gain prestige and promote a pious image, Hatice Turhan endowed the New Mosque (Yeni Cami) in Istanbul. It included the largest royal tomb complex—with the catafalque of its sponsor taking pride of place—and the nearby Egyptian Bazaar.27 She paid for the repair of two fortresses on Gallipoli, the peninsula on the Aegean Sea and Dardanelles guarding the entrance to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul, and built mosques, schools, public baths, barracks, shops, and markets for them.28 Beginning in 1656, Hatice Turhan’s power was challenged by the first of many men of the Köprülü family in palace service. Mehmed Köprülü served as grand vizier until 1661. His five years in office were marked by cruelty and repression, as well as fiscal austerity. He even had the Greek Orthodox patriarch Parthenios III executed in 1657.
But the real challenge to Hatice Turhan’s power came from her son. Unexpectedly, when he entered his twenties in 1663, Mehmed IV attempted to break free from being overshadowed by women regents and grand viziers alike.29 At twenty-two, he turned his back on the harem in Istanbul and moved to the old Ottoman frontier warrior capital of Edirne. He aimed to return to an earlier model of a pious, mobile, virtuous, manly, holy-warrior sultan waging military campaigns in Europe. For the two decades after he moved to Edirne, he employed an official chronicler and a number of writers of conquest books. They promoted the message that he was no sedentary sultan idly sitting by in a bureaucratic empire. His writers depicted him constantly on horseback, hunting, throwing the javelin, and waging military campaigns with equal vigour. He enjoyed watching the local oil-wrestling festival where, accompanied by drum and horn, men wearing only trousers made of buffalo hide, their skin glistening with a mixture of olive oil and water, attempted the nearly impossible task of gaining purchase on their slippery opponents and pinning them to the ground. Like an oil wrestler, Mehmed IV was depicted as manly, strong, tanned, and rough, a big man with a solid chest, thick arms, wide hands, and broad shoulders.30 Responding to the gendered critiques of his father, Ibrahim I, Mehmed IV’s chroniclers promoted the view that the sultan was a mobile gazi who had broken out of the harem cage in Topkapı Palace and now spent most of his reign motivated by religious zeal to bring war to the Christian enemy throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.31
Depicted as having recaptured male power from women, Mehmed IV evoked an earlier age when sultans were manly military leaders. This calls to mind one of the competing models of male virtue in medieval Western Europe, that of the knight, whose claim to manliness was based on the fundamental measures of courage displayed in battle against other men and dominance over women. Unlike his father, too busy indulging in non-martial pursuits in the harem, Mehmed IV was considered an earthy, rough, simple leader more comfortable on horseback than sitting on a throne. And far from being presented as a sedate font of peace and reconciliation, the peripatetic Mehmed IV was depicted as eagerly promoting war and overseeing battle. Unlike most other seventeenth-century sultans, he pursued conquest. His armies penetrated enemy territory with swords and missiles, sold the wives of the enemy into slavery, and replaced the signs of their existence (churches) with those of the conqueror (mosques) to demonstrate potency.
In 1666, Mehmed IV relaunched his father’s earlier campaign for Crete, the largest island in the Mediterranean. Over twenty years earlier, the partly successful effort had begun under Ibrahim I, whose red-brick, pink-domed mosque crowns the island’s windswept, hilltop fortress of Rethymno, located in between Chania and Candia on the north coast of the island. Ibrahim I had been able to conquer several of Crete’s cities, but not the entire island.
Under Mehmed IV, the Ottomans successfully captured the entire island by taking its last stronghold, the seemingly impregnable fortress of Candia (Iráklion) in 1669. The sultan did not want to be like his father, who had waged an inconclusive eight-year military campaign for Crete before he was deposed. Mehmed IV’s honour was on the line. The sultan challenged the grand vizier to take up the campaign for Crete and said he would personally join the battle, ‘preferring to suffer hardship on the path of God’, according to one of his conquest book chroniclers.32 Mehmed IV employed the metaphor of sexual impotence, tying victory to the empire’s honour and by extension to his own, for he sought to prove his potency on the battlefield: he told his grand vizier that prolonging the siege would render the empire ‘impotent’.33 During the campaign, he called his army to discipline, bravery, and virility, stating that it would bring shame upon Islamic zeal should his army just ‘pull out’.34
Mehmed IV’s jihad was successful ‘because of the zeal, patience, virility, and bravery in battle’, according to the author of the island’s conquest book.35 This then led to gendered transformations of the island’s buildings. Tall bell towers became minarets. Churches were converted into mosques or public baths. In an act of symbolic violence, a nunnery, an abode of virginal Christian women devoted to a peaceful life of prayer, was converted into a Janissary barracks. It became the quarters of converted Christian men who dedicated their lives to waging war on behalf of an Islamic empire.36
Mehmed IV played a direct role in battle, making his presence known and even determining when his forces should fire their cannons. When he arrived before a citadel, Mehmed IV often sent a message to its defenders to turn it over without a fight. If the citadel was taken by force, he would annihilate them.37 On one occasion, the defenders responded to the sultan by saying, ‘Other than the builder, no hand had ever touched the citadel since the day it was built. It is a virgin citadel. Because of this, we prefer to spill our blood [like a virgin who has never been touched]’. On the sultan’s command, Ottoman forces bombed the citadel to pieces.
Mehmed IV wanted his legacy to be as a warrior for the faith. His writers responded. Mehmed IV was ‘the hero who defeats and destroys the enemy’.38 Like Osman II, he dared invade Poland twice in person, in 1672 and 1673, launching an arduous campaign in a distant land untouched by ‘the hooves of the horses of the gazis’.39 Mehmed IV was ‘the high-flying royal falcon’.40 This apt imagery, in contrast to the images used when he was a minor, is that of a focused, driven, active, vigorous, powerful, swift, deadly, and ruthless attacker. The falcon sultan swooped down upon his prey, joined by his soldiers, also described as falcons attacking ‘the nest of polytheist [Catholic] crows’.41
Writers emphasised Mehmed IV’s subduing of women vicariously through his warriors’ feats of sexual possession and conquest. The ‘white castle’ of Kameniçe (Kamenets-Podolskiy), the Carpathian fortress perched on a lofty rock in Orhan Pamuk’s novel of the same name, was ‘an impregnable citadel’ located in the southeast corner of Poland (today Ukraine) bordering the northern region of Moldova, the key to Poland and Ukraine.42 But it stood no chance, being attacked by thousands of manly braves who staked their lives for the cause of gaza.43 When the warriors beheld the city within the citadel, they felt a sense of wonder and disgust. Accordingly, they converted those areas into ‘places of beauty of the gazis’ and ‘places of worldly pleasure of the believers’. The term ‘places of beauty’ also means the bride’s apartment where the virgin unveils herself for the first time to her husband.
Along with military campaigns, Mehmed IV also sought to burnish a glorious image by Islamising territory and converting his subjects to Islam. In all of the conquered territories, Mehmed IV ordered the great churches be converted to mosques. He also personally converted people. Mehmed IV was constantly on the move in Southeastern Europe. He engaged in massive, Mongol-style hunting parties for which he forced thousands of Christian and Jewish peasants to serve as his drovers, flushing the game towards him as he waited on horseback with arrows, axes, blades, and bullets.44 During these occasions, thousands converted to Islam in his presence when he either compelled them to change religion or facilitated their doing so at conversion ceremonies.
John Covel, the chaplain to the English ambassador, was a guest at the two-week-long circumcision festivities of princes Ahmed and Mustafa at Edirne in 1675, where thousands of boys and men were circumcised amid musicians and jugglers present to divert their attention. Covel observed that he saw many hundreds of the two thousand ‘cut’ [circumcised], and the Ottomans, rather than hinder his seeing, made way for him. There were many ‘of riper yeares, especially renegades that turn’d Turks’. He saw ‘an old man which they reported to be 53 yeares old, cut’. He also saw a twenty-year-old Russian who ‘came to the tent skipping and rejoicing excessively; yet, in cutting he frowned (as many of riper ages doe)’. Covel concluded, ‘There were at least 200 proselytes made in these 13 days. It is our shame, for I believe all Europe have not gained so many Turkes to us these 200 years’.45 In fact, so many Christian and Jewish men, women, and children converted to Islam before Mehmed IV in the 1660s and 1670s that in 1676 he was compelled to order the compilation of ‘The Statute of the New Muslim’ to stipulate correct procedure to follow.46
Mehmed IV, along with his mother Hatice Turhan Sultan and Grand Vizier Fazıl Ahmed Pasha (in office 1661–1676), also endured the worst conflagration Istanbul had experienced—which they would use to similar ends.47
It was already a typical hot, humid, dusty Istanbul summer day on 24 July 1660 when a young man’s tobacco smoking set off a fire that within forty-eight hours reduced two-thirds of the city to ash and suffocated with smoke or burned alive forty thousand inhabitants.48 The fire began in a straw store near Firewood Gate in the city’s harbour of Eminönü. The flames quickly jumped to adjacent timber stores and engulfed them. Thanks to the prevailing Poyraz winds, the fire raced across Istanbul, whose building stock consisted of nearly adjoining timbered structures located on narrow streets in dense neighbourhoods. Fire patrols were useless against an army of flames that ‘split into divisions, and every single division spread to a different district’.49 The spires of the four minarets of Suleiman I’s mosque burned like candles. Even mansions and palaces were incinerated as the soot and smoke turned day to night and flames illuminated what was supposed to be the dark night. Seeking escape from death, hundreds of thousands of terrified Istanbulites, ‘naked and weeping, barefoot and bareheaded’, crowded into the open space of the Hippodrome.50
Scapegoats were sought. Was it divine punishment because religious scholars violated Islamic law? Was it brought down by merchants who cheated their customers? Was it caused by the insubordination of slaves to masters, soldiers to officers? Or was it because Istanbulites did nothing other than engage in adultery, fornication, sodomy, and pederasty?51 What good could come from this suffering?
Following the massive fire in July 1660, the dynasty and viziers made the decision to Islamise the area from the walls of Topkapı Palace in the east all the way to the centre of the peninsula in the west, as well as the heart of Galata, across the Golden Horn from Istanbul, which had burned in another fire in April. An imperial decree expelled Jews from a wide swath of Istanbul so that they would not rebuild their homes, houses of worship, and shops. This included the harbour area of Eminönü, Istanbul’s main port and commercial district and home to most of the city’s Jewish population, where Hatice Turhan Sultan had decided to build her New Mosque.52 The plots of land on which synagogues and Jewish-owned homes had burned and the properties the congregations possessed accrued to the state treasury and became state-owned land, sold to Muslims at auction. Among the synagogues was one built by Jews who had migrated from Aragon, Spain, less than two centuries earlier. Whereas since the conquest in 1453 Ottoman authorities had contravened Islamic law by allowing new synagogues and churches to be built and old ones to be rebuilt, after the fire in July 1660 they applied the letter of the law, prohibiting reconstruction of destroyed houses of worship.
An imperial decree copied into the Istanbul Islamic law court register reveals that a year later authorities also razed and destroyed nearly two dozen churches that had been rebuilt after the fires of April and July and seized their property for redistribution to Muslims.53 At a time when the Ottomans were at war with the Habsburgs, it is no coincidence that Catholics in the city—who were allowed to build churches only in Galata, across the Golden Horn from Istanbul—were most affected by the loss of churches, some of which would be replaced by mosques. A scribe at the Islamic law court wrote a hadith, a saying attributed to Muhammad, in the margin of an entry recording the appropriation by Muslims of formerly Christian property: ‘God builds a home in Paradise for the one who builds a mosque for God on earth’. These policies illustrate how tolerance is a power relation. Tolerance can be given, and it can be taken away. The fire was used to usher in an Islamisation rebuilding campaign across the city.
Those who constructed the New Mosque compared the banishment of Jews from Eminönü with Muhammad’s banishment of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir from Medina in the seventh century by choosing the Qur’anic chapter ‘Exile’ (or ‘Banishment’, al-Hashr, 59) to adorn the gallery level near the royal lodge.54 ‘Exile’ narrates how God cast unbelieving Jews out of the city of believers. And, in what could be seen as a reference to recent events, the chapter warns that in the world to come those Jews will be punished in hellfire.
Writers praised Mehmed IV and emphasised the sultan’s engagement in a pursuit—gaza—that only royal men could pursue. Hatice Turhan’s Islamisation of a Jewish neighbourhood in Istanbul through the construction of a mosque complex was depicted as a conquest of infidel land.55 This was a far cry from the way royal women had been depicted earlier. With a gazi warrior on the throne and male privilege restored, it was again acceptable to praise the religious piety of a valide sultan. And in an era when gaza was emphasised, it was natural to compare the conversion of the sacred geography of Istanbul to jihad.
Islamising space in the imperial capital nearest Topkapı Palace, Mehmed IV’s court also converted Jews in his inner circle. A number of well-known Jews were compelled to convert to Islam before the sultan or valide sultan at court in the 1660s. Hatice Turhan offered the prominent Jews nearest the sultan, especially the staff of privy physicians, the non-choice of converting to Islam or losing their coveted palace positions. Jewish physicians in earlier centuries had occasionally converted and become chief physicians while in palace service. In the seventeenth century the practice became the norm. The sultan’s court did not maintain its sixteenth-century attitude, which had allowed Jews to treat the sultan as head physician without converting.56 When this attitude changed, so did Jews’ ability to function in office as Jews.
Jews had had a privileged position with the royal family and resided mainly in the heart of the city. By the end of the 1660s, the geographic position of the Jews reflected their fall from importance. Most Jews in Istanbul by then resided on the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, and those who remained in the most important palace positions were now Muslims.57
Following the fire and construction of the New Mosque and the compulsory conversion of physicians, the political position of Jews had become so weak that none could intervene to change the decision to banish them from much of the peninsula of Istanbul. Those Jews who remained best positioned in the palace were involved in their own struggle to retain their posts. The son of a Jewish tailor who learned medicine from Jewish doctors was quickly replaced by a madrasa-trained Muslim. Coinciding with the rise of the wealthy Greek lay elite known as the Phanariots, named after the Istanbul district of Fener (Phanar), where the Orthodox patriarchate was located, Greeks became the predominant group practising medicine in the palace.58 Whereas a century earlier Jewish physicians had treated the sultan and were trusted by him to serve as translators and negotiate international treaties, by the late seventeenth century this role had been taken by Christian physicians.59 If there had ever been a Jewish ‘golden age’ in the Ottoman Empire, it was over.
Coming to power when Janissaries and jurists were the kingmakers, deposing and executing sultans, including his own father, Mehmed IV and his supporters were determined to reclaim the central role of the dynasty and its male head by displaying manliness through military campaigning and espousing Islam. Wherever he appeared, Mehmed IV was a convert maker. Embodying the empire of conversion, he brought thousands of Christians and Jews to Islam: Jewish palace physicians, Christian peasants recruited for his massive hunting trips, members of ambassadorial retinues, prisoners of war, war-weary civilians, and individuals brought to his palace in other circumstances. One of these was Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish messiah whose followers believed he would become sultan and make Mehmed IV his personal slave. Sabbatai Zevi’s messianic uprising is significant for the history of the dynasty because it reminds us how in every age deviant dervishes (even including, as in this case, Jewish mystics) fomented popular uprisings and posed a powerful threat to the Ottomans. Mehmed IV’s response to Sabbatai Zevi’s claims also shows how the dynasty’s and Ottoman elite’s approach to Islam had changed over the centuries.