Inside the Seraglio

Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul

John Freely

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857728708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This is the story of the House of Osman, the imperial dynasty that ruled the Ottoman Empire for more than seven centuries, an empire that once stretched from central Europe to North Africa and from Persia to the Adriatic. The capital of this empire was Istanbul, ancient Byzantium, a city that stands astride Europe and Asia on the Bosphorus. And it was in the great palace of Topkapi Sarayi that the sultans of this empire ruled. Inside the Seraglio - a classic of Ottoman history - takes us behind the gilded doors of the Topkapi and into the heart of the palace: the harem, where the sultan would surround himself with his wives, concubines, eunuchs, pages, dwarfs and mutes and where all the tempestuous events of empire were so often played out. This is the history of a remarkable palace in all its colour and opulence and the story of its influence on a great empire.

Chapter 1

The House of Osman

Istanbul stands astride two continents, Asia and Europe, balanced precariously between two worlds, East and West. Oldest of the world's great cities, known to the ancients as Byzantium and the Greeks as Constantinople, it was the capital in turn of the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The monuments of these empires still adorn its skyline above the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, the waters that divide and surround the city.

The city is at the southern end of the Bosphorus, the historic strait that separates the continents as it flows for thirty kilometres from the Black Sea to the Marmara. Near its southern end the strait is joined by the Golden Horn, a scimitar-shaped stream whose waters merge with those of the Bosphorus as they flow together into the Marmara.

The oldest part of the city, ancient Byzantium, is on the European side of the Bosphorus, a huge triangular promontory bounded on its north by the Golden Horn, on the south by the Marmara, and on its western side by the late Roman walls of Byzantine Constantinople. It is a city of seven hills, six of them rising in succession from the ridge that parallels the Golden Horn, the seventh standing isolated above the Marmara shore just inside the land walls.

The first of the seven hills is at the seaward end of the promontory.

The First Hill was the site of the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors, of which only fragmentary ruins remain on the Marmara shore. Some of these ruins are built into the outer defence walls of Topkapı Sarayı, the imperial residence of the Ottoman sultans, whose cluster of domed pavilions crowns the summit of the First Hill, looking out over the Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn.

The palace of Topkapı is now a museum, but it is still a place set apart from the rest of the city behind its encircling walls, its succession of arcaded courtyards opening off into a labyrinth of cloistered rooms and enclosed corridors, left empty and silent in the gathering darkness after all visitors and staff have departed.

The main entry way to Topkapı Sarayı is Bab-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Gate, where one passes into the first courtyard of the palace. Above the gateway there are two gilded inscriptions in Arabic script, each of them bearing a tuğra, an imperial monogram in interlaced calligraphy. The lower tuğra is that of Mahmut II, the last sultan to live out his life in Topkapı Sarayı, which was abandoned in the mid nineteenth century in favour of new palaces along the Bosphorus. His inscription records repairs to the gate early in the nineteenth century. The upper tuğra belongs to Mehmet II, known to the Turks as Fatih, or the Conqueror, after his capture of Constantinople in 1453. Fatih's inscription records his completion of Topkapı Sarayı in the quarter-century after his conquest of the city:

This is a blessed castle that has been put up with the consent of God and is secure and strong. May God the Most High make eternal the sultanate of the sultan of the two seas, the shadow of God in the two worlds, God's servant between the two horizons, the hero of the water and the land, the conqueror of the stronghold of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmet, son of Sultan Murat, son of Sultan Mehmet Khan, and may He place his position above the north star. Done in the month of Ramazan the Blessed in the year 883 [1478].

Fatih Mehmet was the seventh sultan in the House of Osman, the Osmanlı dynasty, thirty-six of whom ruled the Ottoman Empire in turn through twenty-one generations of the same family over the course of more than six centuries. The dynasty was named for Osman Gazi, the first of the line to take the title of sultan, ruling from about 1282 until 1326. Gazi, or ‘Warrior for the Faith’, was the name given to those who took up arms to conquer in the name of Islam. Osman was known to early European historians as Othoman, and thus the state that he founded came to be called the Ottoman Empire in the West, though in the Islamic world it was known as the realm of the Osmanlı. Osman's original realm was hardly an empire, comprising merely a tiny principality in Bithynia, the northwesternmost region in Asia Minor. The rest of Bithynia was part of the Byzantine Empire, which by then was in its last decline, and as Byzantium diminished the new Ottoman state expanded apace.

Osman's son and successor, Orhan Gazi, captured the Bithynian city of Prusa from the Byzantines in 1326. Known to the Turks as Bursa, this became the first Ottoman capital, and Orhan used it as a base to conquer the rest of Bithynia and cross the Dardanelles into Europe. Within half a century the Turks captured Adrianople, which they called Edirne, and in the third quarter of the fourteenth century they moved their capital there, giving them a base in the Balkans for their further expansion into Europe.

The Ottomans received their first setback when Orhan's grandson Beyazit I was defeated by Tamerlane at Ankara in 1402, dying soon afterwards in ignominious captivity. This halted Ottoman expansion until the accession of Beyazit's grandson, Murat II, who came to the throne in 1421 and soon afterwards resumed the Turkish march of conquest.

Early in Murat's reign he erected a mosque complex called the Muradiye in the old Ottoman capital of Bursa. Around the same time he also built a palace in the new capital called Edirne Sarayı, comprising a number of pavilions on an island in the Tunca, one of the two rivers that nearly encircle the city.

Murat's third son, the future Mehmet II, was born in Edirne Sarayı on 30 March 1432 to a slave-girl named Hüma Hatun (Lady). Little is known of Hüma's origins, for she was not one of Murat's four wives, but merely a concubine, probably a Greek of humble birth. Murat seems to have had little regard for her or Mehmet, preferring his second son, Alâeddin Ali, whose mother, the Türkmen princess Hadice Hatun, was his favourite wife. The mother of his eldest son, Ahmet, was probably also a concubine, though her name is not listed in the Ottoman genealogical records.

The first years of Mehmet's life were spent in the harem of Edirne Sarayı with his mother. When Mehmet was three years old he was sent off to Amasya in Anatolia, where his half-brother Ahmet was serving as provincial governor. Then in May 1437 Ahmet died suddenly, whereupon Mehmet was appointed to succeed him as governor, though he was only five years old. At the same time his half-brother Alâeddin Ali, who was then seven, was appointed as governor in Manisa. Both of the young princes were under the tutelage of advisors appointed by Murat from among his most trusted associates. Two years later the assignments were interchanged, with Mehmet transferred to Manisa and Alâeddin Ali to Amasya. Before they went off to their new governorates the two princes were recalled to Edirne, where Murat had them circumcised, marking the event with prolonged festivities at the palace. Sheikh Seyyid Natta of Baghdad provided leather tablecloths to be used in the sultan's dining-hall for the circumcision feast, a refinement hitherto unknown to the Ottomans.

Early in June 1443 Alâeddin Ali was murdered by his advisor Kara Hızır Pasha. This left Mehmet as heir to the throne, whereupon he was immediately recalled to Edirne by his father. Apparently Murat also wanted Mehmet to be at his side to help him face a serious threat to the empire, for Pope Eugenius IV had proclaimed a new crusade against the Turks. Mehmet's presence in his father's court at that time is mentioned by the Italian antiquarian Cyriacus of Ancona, who would later be Fatih's tutor in Greek and Latin. Cyriacus, who accompanied a Genoese trade mission to the Ottoman court at Edirne in 1443, reports that Murat received the visitors sitting on a carpet ‘in regal splendour of a barbaric kind’, while young Prince Mehmet stood behind in attendance with his father's vezirs.

Mehmet was by all accounts impetuous and headstrong, unwilling to obey his elders or to accept any criticism or advice, and being separated from his father during the first eleven years of his life there had been no one to control or discipline him. Murat had appointed several tutors for Mehmet, but he refused to heed any of them before the appearance of Molla Ahmet Gürani, a celebrated Kurdish cleric. Gürani was given a switch by Murat and told to use it if his pupil did not obey him. When Gürani told this to Mehmet the prince laughed at him, whereupon he gave the boy the first beating of his life. Mehmet stood in awe of Gürani after that and became a model student, or so say the Turkish sources. Eventually he studied philosophy and science as well as Islamic, Greek and Latin history and literature, which he read with Cyriacus of Ancona and other tutors from both Europe and Asia.

A rebellion by one of his Turkish vassals in Anatolia, the Karamanid emir Ibrahim, forced Murat to leave Edirne with a large part of his army on 12 June 1444. He appointed Mehmet to act as regent in his absence, with the grand vezir Halil Pasha Çandarlı serving as the prince's advisor. Almost immediately after Murat's departure, a Persian dervish of the Bektaşi sect began spreading heretical religious ideas among the troops of the garrison in Edirne. Mehmet found his ideas interesting and offered protection to the dervish and his followers. This scandalized the Mufti Fahrettin, chief cleric in the Ottoman court. Mehmet was alarmed at this and withdrew his protection of the dervish, whereupon Fahrettin incited a mob to burn him and his followers at the stake.

Later in June an insurrection broke out among the Janissaries, the élite corps of the Ottoman army, who demanded that Mehmet raise their pay. This corps was composed of Christian youths who had been conscripted in a periodic levy known as the devşirme, after which they converted to Islam and were trained to take their place in the Ottoman military hierarchy, a number of them rising to the post of grand vezir. Murat had used them with great effectiveness in his campaigns, but now that he was absent they had grown restive, feeling that they could take advantage of Mehmet's youth. After the Janissaries rioted and burned down the Edirne bedesten, or covered market, Mehmet gave in and increased their salary, setting a precedent that would be a constant source of trouble down to the last Ottoman century.

Meanwhile, the threatened crusade materialized, and a large Christian army under the Hungarian nobleman John Hunyadi began marching southward into the Balkans. When Halil Pasha learned of this he sent a message by courier to inform Murat, who immediately marched his forces back into Europe. Murat's army virtually annihilated the crusaders at the battle of Varna on 10 November 1444, with Hunyadi being one of the few Christians to escape with his life.

After his victory Murat returned to Edirne, where soon afterwards he astonished the court by announcing that he was abdicating in favour of his son, who on 1 December 1444 succeeded to the throne as Mehmet II. Murat, who was only forty at the time, then went off to his place of retirement in Manisa, leaving his son, who was not yet thirteen, to rule the empire on his own, with Halil Pasha as his grand vezir.

During the months that followed, Halil Pasha sent repeated messages pleading with Murat to return, insisting that Mehmet was too young and immature to rule. Soon after he came to the throne Mehmet impetuously decided to attack Constantinople, but he was dissuaded by Halil Pasha, who reported the incident to Murat as another instance of his son's unfitness to rule. This led Murat to end his retirement, and in September 1446 he returned to Edirne. Halil Pasha persuaded Mehmet to abdicate in favour of his father, who was immediately reinstated as sultan, while his son withdrew to Manisa.

Meanwhile John Hunyadi had organized another crusade against the Turks, and in September 1448 he led his army across the Danube. Murat summoned Mehmet to join him in Edirne and mustered his army to confront the crusaders. The two armies met on 23 October of that year at Kosova, on the same field where Murat I had defeated the Serbs in 1389. The second battle of Kosova had the same outcome as the first, as the Turks routed the Christians in a three-day battle in which Mehmet had his baptism of fire, leading the Anatolian troops on the right wing of his father's army. Once again John Hunyadi escaped with his life, living to fight on against the Turks for another eight years.

Mehmet had become a father for the first time in January 1448, when his concubine Gülbahar gave birth to a son, the future Beyazit II. Little is known of Gülbahar's origins, but she was probably Greek, since the concubines in the imperial harem were almost always Christians, although high-born Muslim women were sometimes taken in as wives of the sultans in dynastic marriages. Murat arranged for such a marriage the following year, though without consulting his son until the plans were completed, which made Mehmet very resentful. The bride chosen by Murat was the princess Sitti Hatun, daughter of the emir Ibrahim, ruler of the Dulkadırlı Türkmen tribe in eastern Anatolia. The wedding took place in Edirne Sarayı in September 1449, followed by a celebration that lasted for two months, with music, dancing and competitions in poetry in which Anatolian bards sang verses in praise of the bride and groom. The bride was apparently quite beautiful, as evidenced by her portrait in a Greek codex preserved in Venice, as well as by the testimony of contemporary chronicles. But Mehmet seems to have had no love for Sitti, who never bore him a child, and he left her behind in Edirne when he moved to Istanbul after the Conquest. Sitti died in Edirne in 1467, alone and forlorn, buried in the garden of a mosque built in her memory by her niece Ayşe.

Mehmet's mother Hüma Hatun died in September 1449, after which she was buried in the garden of the Muradiye mosque in Bursa. The dedicatory inscription on her tomb records that it was built by her son Mehmet ‘for his deceased mother, queen among women - may the earth of her grave be fragrant!’

The following year Mehmet's concubine Gülşah gave birth to his second son, Mustafa, who would always be his favourite. Later that year Murat fathered a son, Ahmet, nicknamed Küçük, or Little, to distinguish him from the late Prince Ahmet, the sultan's first son. Küçük Ahmet's mother was the princess Halima Hatun, daughter of the emir Ibrahim II, ruler of the Çandaroğlu Türkmen tribe in Anatolia. By this dynastic marriage, together with that of his son Mehmet, Murat cemented alliances with two powerful tribes against his most formidable enemy in Anatolia, the Karamanid Türkmen, who blocked the expansion of the Ottoman empire eastward in Asia Minor.

Early the following year Murat began work on building several new pavilions in Edirne Sarayı. But the project had barely begun when he died on 8 February 1451, stricken by apoplexy after a drinking bout. He was forty-seven years old and had ruled for three decades, most of which he had spent at war. Murat's death was kept secret by the grand vezir Halil Pasha so that Mehmet could be summoned from Manisa. He arrived fifteen days later and was immediately acclaimed by the army as sultan, one month before his nineteenth birthday.

When Mehmet came to the throne for the second time he was girded with the sword of his ancestor Osman Gazi, the Ottoman equivalent of coronation, in the presence of all the vezirs and nobles of the court. After the ceremony Mehmet reappointed Halil as grand vezir, although he loathed his father's old advisor. Mehmet felt that Halil had sabotaged his first attempt to rule as sultan, and he suspected that the grand vezir had been taking bribes from the Byzantines and other enemies of the Ottomans. Nevertheless he allowed Halil to continue in office for the time being, while he waited for the right moment to eliminate him. Halil had just as deep a hatred for Mehmet, as the contemporary Greek historian Doukas reveals in writing of the grand vezir, whom he describes as ‘a friend of the Byzantines and susceptible to bribes’. Doukas quotes Halil in calling Mehmet ‘insolent, violent and savage’, as compared to the deceased Murat, who had been ‘a sincere friend and a man of upright conscience’.

Mehmet also retained another of his father's old vezirs, Ishak Pasha, whom he appointed as beylerbey (governor) of Anatolia, ordering him to conduct Murat's remains to Bursa for burial in the Muradiye. Directly after his accession Mehmet went to the harem of Edirne Sarayı. There he received the congratulations of Murat's women, who also offered him their condolences on the death of his father. The highest-ranking of Murat's wives at the time of his death was Halima Hatun, who fifteen months before had given birth to Murat's last son, Küçük Ahmet. The question of succession had been a matter of contention in the Ottoman dynasty, leading to two civil wars, and so Mehmet decided to settle the question at once by ordering the execution of Küçük Ahmet. While Mehmet was talking with Halima Hatun, one of his men was strangling her infant son in his bath. Mehmet justified the murder of his half-brother as being in accordance with the Ottoman code of fratricide, which had been practised on several occasions by his ancestors to prevent wars of succession. Appropriate verses from the Kuran were quoted, such as ‘The execution of a prince is preferable to the loss of a province’, and ‘Death is better than disquiet.’ Mehmet later had the code enacted into law, as stated in his imperial edict: ‘Whichever of my sons inherits the sultan's throne, it behooves him to kill his brothers in the interest of the world order. Most of the jurists have approved this procedure. Let action be taken accordingly.’

Soon after Mehmet's accession he had to deal with another insurrection by the Janissaries, whom he once again appeased by raising their pay, though much against his will. Mehmet vented his rage on the commander of the corps, Kazancı Doğan, having him whipped and dismissing him from his post. He then reorganized the Janissaries in such a way as to take more direct control of the corps, which he was to use with great effectiveness in his subsequent campaigns.

The following year Mehmet set in motion his plan to besiege and conquer Constantinople, which was by now totally cut off from the outside world except by sea. During the summer of 1452 he constructed the great fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore of the Bosphorus, directly opposite Anadolu Hisarı, which Beyazit I had built in 1397. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Dragases, was powerless to stop Mehmet from building the fortress, which completely isolated Constantinople from its grain supplies on the Black Sea, setting the stage for the coming siege.

The siege began on 6 April 1453, when Mehmet set up his tent outside the gate of St Romanus and ordered his artillery to commence the bombardment of the city. The bombardment continued at intervals for seven weeks, interspersed with attacks by the Janissaries and the Anatolian infantry, while Constantine led the entire civilian population in repairing the damage to the walls. Constantine rallied the Greeks and their Genoese allies in their desperate defence of the city, hoping for help from the Christian powers of Europe. But help never came, and after a last pitched battle the Turks broke into the city early on the morning of Tuesday 29 May 1453, the emperor Constantine dying in the final struggle before the defenders were forced to surrender.

Constantinople had been captured by the Turks and the world of Byzantium had ended, bringing to a close the history of an empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years. The House of Osman had replaced the Palaeologues, the last of the dynasties that had ruled Byzantium, whose ancient Christian realm was now part of a new and powerful Muslim empire.

Chapter 2

Mehmet the Conqueror

Mehmet made his triumphal entry into the city early that May afternoon, and as he passed through the Adrianople Gate he was acclaimed by his troops as Fatih, the Conqueror, the name by which he would thenceforth be known to the Turks. The city that Fatih had conquered had been known to the Turks as Kostantiniye, but after the Conquest its name in common Turkish usage became Istanbul, a corruption of the Greek ‘stin poli’, meaning ‘in the city’ or ‘to the city’.

The most detailed account of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople is the History of Mehmed the Conqueror by Kritovoulos of Imbros, a Greek who came to the city shortly after its fall. Kritovoulos describes ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Turkish Spelling and Pronunciation
• Maps
• 1. The House of Osman
• 2. Mehmet the Conqueror
• 3. The House of Felicity
• 4. Süleyman the Magnificent
• 5. The Sultanate of Women
• 6. An Organ for the Sultan
• 7. Regicide
• 8. The Procession of the Guilds
• 9. Three Mad Sultans
• 10. The Hunter Caged
• 11. A Cage for Princes
• 12. Tulip Time
• 13. Murder in the Music Room
• 14. The Auspicious Event
• 15. On the Shores of the Bosphorus
• 16. The Year of the Three Sultans
• 17. Imprisoned Sultans
• 18. The Fall of the House of Osman
• 19. The Gathering Place of the Jinns
• Glossary
• Ottoman Sultans (The House of Osman)
• Genealogy of the Sultans
• Mothers of the Sultans
• Bibliography