October 17, 2023 • 41 mins
When Mehmed III, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, died, his young son Ahmed took the throne. Tradition dicrated that Ahmed should have killed any rivals to the throne, specifically his half-brother, Mustafa. He didn't. Historians still don't know why, and Mustafa's strange life—as pawn, prisoner, and sultan—continues to raise questions about the nature of power and royalty itself.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Manky Listener discretion advised. On the
twenty second of December sixteen o three, the Ottoman Imperial
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Council assembled for an ordinary administrative meeting in the capital
of Istanbul. The Sultan's Grand Vizier, a man named Kassim Pasha,
oversaw these regular meetings, directing the official business and foreign
policy of an empire which reigned as far as Mecca
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and Algier's Budapest and Cairo. There was really no other
imperial competitor putting up much of a threat. The Habsburgs
remained far to the north, The Safavids in Persia were
captain Czech for now and and while there may have
been a rebellion or two among the ranks of the
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Ottoman Empire's peasant fighters, the Imperial Council had their own
means of brutally ruthlessly disbanding them. To the Grand Vizier,
God seemed to cast his divine light upon the Ottomans.
Just as Kasim Pasha set the meeting in motion, a
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royal secretary from the inner courtyard of the took copy
palace burst into the room, still gasping for breath. All
the servant could do was point toward the letter he
was holding in his hand, a letter that seemed to
come from the Sultan himself. Kasimpasha snatched the letter from
the servant's hands and began reading, but he could barely
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make out any of the words. Was this a joke,
certainly not. It had all of the markings of an
official royal correspondence. All the vizier could read with certainty
was the word babam my father had the Sultan gone mad?
His father had died eight years ago. Frustrated with the letter,
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Kasim Pasha passed it to a senior secretary of the
Imperial Council, who finally was able to divine meaning from
the chicken scratch. It read, you, Cassim Pasha, my father
is gone by God's will, and I have taken my
seat on the throne. You had better keep the city
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in good order. Should sedition arise, I will behead you.
Maybe God's divine light had missed this part of the palace.
Kasim Pasha had only ever been a loyal adviser and
administrator to Sultan Mehmed. Why would Sultan Mehmed test him
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like this, sending him such a strange message. Kasimpasha immediately
wrote the Chief Eunuch of the Imperial Harem, one of
the highest offices of the Palace, for his take on
the strange letter. All he got in response was a
solemn decree come to the audience hall of the Sultan.
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Immediately as the vizier walked through the inner chamber, everything
began to make sense. Sitting upon the throne was not
Sultan Mehmed but his son, a thirteen year old boy
named Ahmed. What stunned kasim Pasha the whole city, in fact,
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wasn't just that the youngest sultan to ever reign had
seized the throne, but more astonishingly, that so much had
been kept secret, Sultan Mehmed's illness, his death, his intention
that his son Ahmed should come to the throne without
any bloodshed at all. Even the Imperial Council hadn't known
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about any of it. Kasimpasha ordered a hasty enthronement ceremony
to be conducted within the palace. The new Sultan's throne
was erected before a lavish gait. The royal clerics and
advisers assembled for an oath swearing, But the entire time
everyone kept glancing at the young sultan's only other brother,
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his half brother really, and only a child himself, a
boy named Mustafa Kasim Pasha, and the rest of the
palace likely expected that Ahmed becoming sultan meant death for Mustafa.
Even though Mustafa at this point may have been no
older than four years old, no one in the city
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could have forgotten the former sultan's barbaric slaughter of his
own brothers as a way of securing the dynasty. Why
wouldn't Mehmed's son Ahmed kill his own brother, the boy
who might one day usurp his throne. Many noble blood
episodes begin with a murder, an assassination, may be a poisoning.
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This episode is about an act of mercy. Mustafa was
technically spared, but what does it mean to be spared
when the rest of your life is written by others.
Mustafa is rarely mentioned in scholarship on the Ottoman Empire,
yet there are few other lives of the period that
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show so plainly that even future Ottoman sultans could not
master their own circumstances. Because Mustafa would go on to
become sultan, although he could not have known that that
day as a child watching his half brother's enthronement ceremony.
If that was to be a day of glory for
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the Odduennce Empire, it was a glory that Mustapha would
never truly be able to baskin dead or alive. I'm
Danish schwartz, and this is noble blood. According to a
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long standing tradition, officially codified in fourteen fifty one, Ottoman
princes were expected to battle one another for the throne
upon the death of their father, the Sultan. In the
eyes of the court and the public, these were tests
of divine grace, who had the mandate or devlet to
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rule every generation. Fratricidal wars spilled the blood of all
potential heirs, minus the winning prince, whose progeny would carry
out yet another round of merciless massacres. Every brother was
a threat. When Ahmed and Mustapha's grandfather took the Ottoman
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throne in fifteen seventy four, he had his five brothers strangled.
When their father, Sultan Mehmed, took the throne in fifteen
ninety five, he had his nineteen brothers strangled some of
them were as young as nine. According to one popular myth,
paranoid about word spreading of the rather unsportsmanlike nature of
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this competition, the Sultan killed the very servants who had
carried out the executions. Of course, no one in Istanbul
needed to know the gruesome details to understand that those
executions meet something of a mockery of what was supposed
to be, in theory, at least, a noble tradition. In
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what world did strangling children prove one's right to rule?
Historians and ambassadors from the period recall a shadow casting
all over the city as nineteen coffins streamed into the
Hya Sophia in descending size. The trauma from that massacre
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may have contributed to the new sultan, Ahmed decision to
keep his half brother Mustapha alive after he took the
throne in sixteen o three. In all likelihood, the Imperial
council decided to keep the younger print around in case
anything unexpected happened to Ahmed. One ambassador wrote that the
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teenage sultan was quote of white complexion and displayed a
weak constitution. Only three months after his coronation, Ahmed contracted
a frightful bout of smallpox that almost broke the nearly
three hundred year line of Ottoman succession, but the disease
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luckily passed without severely harming the boy. It was commonly
understood that Mustapha was, if anything, an insurance policy on
the true air, and he would be an insurance policy
that the Imperial Court wouldn't need as soon as Ahmed
could produce progeny of his own. The boy king had
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to prove his virility before he could ever think of
executing his brother, and the first step to that was circumcision.
Ahmed was the first Ottoman ruler to be circumcised after
he had already ascended to the throne. Normally, for any prince,
circumcision entailed a lavish ceremony that symbolized a boy's transition
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into manhood and therefore political and sexual maturity. In the
cold winter of sixteen o four, ahmed ceremony was likely
a little less public and a little more restrained. The
festival took place in the Palace Harem, where performers treated
the court to staged plays, fireworks, and splendid musical arrangements.
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To many, the circumcision festivities felt more like a consolation
than a reflection of the empire's splendor. Here was a
young boy who was often ill, a boy who was
of course childless, and worst of all, was a novice
when it came to imperial administration. For all of the
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inefficiencies and bloodshed of the Ottoman succession system before Ahmed,
it did have the advantage of sending young princes to
provinces as a way of training them for future rule
if they made it that far. Of course, Ahmed and
Mustapha's father, Mehmed, was sent to the nearby city of
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Menisa for over ten years before he was invited to
Istanbul to attempt to claim the sultanate. In that time,
he established an administration of trusted viziers Anders, which he
then brought to the Ottoman capital. When he became sultan,
Ahmed didn't have the luxury of a decade of preparation.
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The court now was beset with factions opportunistic enemies raiding
Ottoman border towns, and the fate of the empire itself
hung in the balance at this point. Sometime around sixteen
oh four, Mustafa nearly disappears from our sources. What we
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know with certainty is that Sultan Ahmed's imperial council locked
Mustafa away in a heavily guarded part of the palace,
a set of private chambers that the servants referred to
as the cage. We can also presume that perpetual isolation
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from the outside world laid a heavy burden on the prince,
not to mention that royal fraturessie was, up to this
point a normal expectation that Mustapha certainly understood from his
gilded palace. Right after Ahmed gained the throne, a Venetian
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ambassador caught a glimpse of Mustafa as a toddler and
wrote that he was nurtured like an innocent little sheep
who must soon go to the butchers. The specter of
execution loomed over Mustafa's entire existence. Meanwhile, Sultan Ahmed occupied
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himself with restoring his vulnerable empire as soon as he
could shake off the influence of his mother and his tutor.
For the last decade, a faction from the empire's very
own soldiers turned to banditry in the provinces, angered by
the sparse pay given for their services. A new round
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of revolts had flared up in sixteen o five, which
the fifteen year old Ahmed, eager to prove himself, wanted
to crush with the might of his army. His mother
wouldn't allow it, but when she died later that year
from a drawn out illness, Ahmed left her mourning ceremony
early for a military campaign, as though God were punishing
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the teenage sultan for his hubris. Ahmed suffered from a
horrifying fever and he was forced to return from the
front lines. His viziers would handle the campaign for the
time being. Maybe that was for the best. Ahmed's reign
would come to be best known for the work he
did within the capital city itself, which might never have
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happened had he been busy out crushing rebels in the provinces.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, known the world over as the
Blue Mosque, is considered the crowning jewel of oddoman architecture
and the second most famous building in Istanbul, only after
the higha Sophia. For that project, Ahmed recruited the help
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of a new court favorite, the powerful chief Eunuch Mustafa
Aga in the Ottoman Imperial court. The chief Unik served
a particularly powerful rule. Eunichs traditionally attended to the women
of the Imperial Harem, but over the years the role
expanded into advising the Sultan as well. The chief eunich
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of Ahmed's reign was named Mustafa Aga. I know his
name is also Mustafa, but he's different from the Mustafa.
Our story is about the sultan half brother away in
his cage. Anyway, Mustafa Aga, the eunuch, had nearly unlimited
access to the private apartments of the Sultan, access to
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the Queen mother and the mothers of the Sultan's heirs.
In that capacity, he controlled the flow of people and
information through the palace, influencing Ahmed for his own benefit
and leveraging a vast network of allies and patrons to
carry out the Sultan's commands. He was a trusted ally
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and a master schemer. When Ahmed wanted to clear the
site next to the Hia Sophia for his own ambitious
mosque project, it was Mustafa Aga who found funding, who
negotiated with the powerbrokers of the city, and who oversaw
the construction. To this day, a verse of sixteen lines
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is etched into the side of the blue mosque. Eight
lines celebrate Sultan Ahmed for his piety and judgment, and
the other eight lines honor Mustafa Aga as though he
were the Sultan's equal. Most importantly, for our story, Mustafa
Aga curried so much favor with the Sultan that Ahmed
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even entrusted him with the supervision of his heirs. By
the time the Blue Mosque was erected in sixteen seventeen,
Ahmed had at least fifteen living children and eight male heirs.
His two oldest sons, Osman and Mehmed, were the healthy,
viable successors that the empire needed so desperately for the
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line of succession to remain intact. Technically, Ahmed no longer
needed to keep his younger half brother, Mustafa alive. Why then,
did execution never come From ages four to nineteen, Mustafa
lived a severely secluded life and remained all but a
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mystery to the people of Istanbul. Historians don't agree on
why Mustapha was allowed to live after the births of
Ahmed's sons, but they do have their theories. One theory
is that Ahmed's favorite consort, Kosam Sultan, the mother of
Ahmed's second oldest son, recognized that her son's chances of
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survival as the second oldest son didn't look good. If
the Sultan's brother Mustafa were killed, that would continue the
tradition of fratricide. And if the beloved firstborn prince Osmond
took the throne, that would mean fratricide for her son,
the second son, Mehmed. It's possible that Kosam Sultan influenced
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Ahmed to keep Mustapha alive and thereby secure her own
son's safety by breaking the tradition of fratricide. Another possibility
lies with the Islamic jurists, whose interpretation and administration of
Sharia law kept the power of the sultan in zech
These jurists were already weary of familial executions during the
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reign of Ahmed and Mustafa's father, and for the Grand
Mufti Asad, the chief jurist of the empire, keeping Mustafa
alive served as a point of leverage in case Ahmed
did anything that upset him and his faction of Islamic elites,
they could, let's say, dethrone this particular sultan without risking
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the complete collapse of the institution. Finally, one last theory
is that Mustafa was simply mad. He was deemed too
mentally unfit to be considered a serious contender for the throne,
and so there would be no point in executing him.
This is by far the most commonly cited theory explaining
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Mustafa's survival, but notice how it conflicts with the other two.
Was Mustafa too mad to rule? Or was he just
mad enough for a court faction to keep under their
control should Ahmed disappoint them. Whatever the reasons for his service,
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Mustafa outlived his older brother in sixteen seventeen, a grave
stomach ailment, probably Typhus, consumed the already weak Sultan Ahmed.
Ahmed's death was a contingency that an inner court faction
led by the Grand Mufti Asad, had already accounted for.
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Asad was the first to hear of the Sultan's death
on the night of November twenty first, when he immediately
convened with other major statesmen to finalize the details of succession.
This wouldn't be difficult, would it. Ahmed had two viable
heirs of his own, and could therefore resume the long
standing tradition of passing the sultanate to his sons, who
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would then compete for the throne. The chief eunuch Mustafa
Aga certainly advocated for that position, after all, he had
essentially raised the boys himself. But according to Asad's contrived
interpretation of ancient law, Osman and Mehmed, the two sons,
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then aged fourteen and thirteen, were too young for the sultanate,
never mind that Ahmed himself had been only thirteen when
he was enthroned. No, the Grand Mufti proclaimed in the
Secret Council only the nineteen year old Mustafa had the
mandate to rule. The next morning, the forlorn brother of
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Ahmed emerged from his cage after fifteen years in captivity.
In a twist of fate, Mustapha was now a sultan,
but not necessarily a free man. The same court that
had propelled him into power could just as easily stuff
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him back into the recesses of palace chambers. Mustapha Tufah's
sovereignty would come with a heavy price. As in all
succession crisses, the coronation had winners and losers. On the
winning side was the Grand Mufti Asad and his faction
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of jurists, who felt more confident about their power over
the new sultanate. Joining their ranks of winners was Mustafa's mother,
Halime Sultan, who had been locked away in took copy
palace just like her son, but who now emerged into
a position of conspicuous power. On the losing side was
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the chief eunuch, Mustafa Aga, who had spent more than
a decade preparing Osman and Mehmed for rule, no doubt,
a rule that would be amenable to his interests, only
to be sidelined in the last moment by the once
insurance policy half brother. Mustafa, and of course Prince Osman
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felt he had been betrayed as the true heir to
the throne. This succession was abnormal by all accounts. It
was the first time that the brother of the sultan
and not a viable son, inherited the throne. Mustapha Aga
began organizing a coup against Sultan Mustafa almost immediately. He
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called upon an ally in the navy named Ali Pasha,
who could leverage his connections with Ottoman merchants to sow
discontent in Mustafa and support for jan Osman. Getting the
public on his side was another matter. The public had
to be convinced that Mustafa was incompetent. Established law dictated
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that a sultan needed to be old enough to rule,
but it also dictated that he needed to be of
sound mind. The French ambassador to the Imperial Palace recorded
in one of his letters that Mustafa Aga was disseminating
or at least magnifying rumors about Mustafa's supposed madness. According
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to one rumor, the sultan embarrassed his viziers during audiences
as he wouldn't stop unraveling their turbans and yanking their beards.
Another rumor claimed Mustafa would throw money to birds and
fish when he sailed upon the Bosphorus. Mustafa AGA's vicious
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rumor mill presents us with a predicament, how do we
separate fact from fiction? If so many of the sources
we have on Sultan Mustafa are colored by the obviously
biased campaign the chief Eunuch was waging to discredit the
new monarch? Is there a chance Sultan Mustafa wasn't nearly
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as mad as history made him out to be. There
is no doubt that Mustafa wasn't treated the same as
other sultans before him. The coins minted during his reign
still bear the face of his older brother and his father.
But then again, Mustafa may not have ruled long enough
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for the coins to change design. We also know that
while most royal correspondents was handled by a male counselor,
Mustapha's letters were strangely drafted by a female slave from
the Harem who doubled as Mustapha's tutor. Then again, Ahmed
didn't allow Mustapha to have any contact with others, with
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the exception of female servants and his own mother back
when he was imprisoned. We have evidence to support the
idea that Mustapha was an active participant in his administration.
He's reported to have taken great interest in inspecting Istanbul's
arsenal and docs. French ambassador wrote that Mustafa even contemplated
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leading a campaign against the Sephavids. It's also worth noting
that Mustapha had been imprisoned in the palace for fifteen
important developmental years. What manifested as madness might have been
the consequences of that isolation. Either way, for all of
the chief Eunuch's insistence on discrediting the monarch in the
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public eye, his campaign may have actually had the unintended
consequence of suggesting that the new Sultan was in fact
a holy man. Throughout the pre modern world, madness and
holiness converged in unexpected ways. The thirteenth century mystic Saint
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Francis of Assisi honored those that lived as fools in
the eyes of men, but sages in the eyes of God.
The sixteenth century Teresa of Avila gained a noise we're
miss renown for her visions of Christ and bouts of
religious ecstasy. Some of Istanbul's populace saw elements of Mustapha's
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madness as proof of his divinity. They referred to him
as belli or saint. An English diplomat to the Ottoman
Empire had the following choice words for the new sultan.
He is esteemed a holy man that hath visions and
angelic speculations. In plain terms, between a madman and a fool.
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None of these alternative accounts of the sultan mattered in
the court politics that slowly pointed in mustapha AGA's favor.
For the first couple months of Sultan Mustapha's reign, the
only major statesman pushing for Osmond taking the throne had
been the Chief Eunuch and his naval Admiral Ali Pasha.
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But when news broke that Mustafa planned on replacing the
existing Grand Vizier with his own brother in law, the
Imperial Council swerved in favor of a coup. Mustafa Aga
struck a deal with the elite army corps in the city,
the janissaries to swear fealty to Osmon in return for
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a generous shipment of Buyan. Assad, once devoted to Mustafa's cause,
resigned himself to accepting Osmond's inevitable ascension. On the morning
of Monday, February twenty sixth, sixteen eighteen, the Chief Eunuch
guided the Sultan to a remote, suspiciously familiar apartment of
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the palace, making up some excuse along the way. We
can only speculate what it must have felt like when
Sultan Mustafa realized he was being led back to the cage.
Mustapha Aga politely asked the Sultan to wait inside before
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he exited the room, and had a servant lock the
door from the outside. With Mustapha locked away, all of
the court swore allegiance to the fourteen year old Osmon,
and not a peep of outcry was heard in the city.
Mustapha's reign had lasted a little under three months. Osmond
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and his allies in court promptly began erasing Osmond's uncle's
short rule from memory, part of the reason we know
so little about Mustapha in the first place. One courtier
referred to the reign of Mustapha as the false dawn
before Osmond's real dawn. Sultan Osmon was much like his
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father Ahmed. He was extraordinarily pious, so much so that
he opted for simple, ascetic attire over the lavish robes
of his predecessors. He even went so far as to
take up legal wives instead of traditional concubines, and he
banned the consumption of tobacco, a wicked weed introduced by
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the English, which was, according to Osman, corrupting the souls
and minds of his subjects Ahmed may have built a
mosque that recalled the heavens, but Osmon was purifying the
soul of his empire. Osmond was also purifying his court
of competitors. Before heading into a campaign against the Polish,
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he executed his own half brother, Mehmed, but once again
he kept Mustapha alive, as though his uncle no longer
posed a threat after being so severely discredited and dethroned.
When Osmon returned from war, dissatisfied with the conduct of
his troops, he made covert plans to reform the army
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with mercenaries he hired from the South, the very same
mercenaries who had rebelled against his father, Sultan Ahmed. Rumors
spread like wildfire, as did contempt within the Janissary Corps.
Not only was Osmond planning on sidelining the beating heart
of the Empire's military, he was going to staff his
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new army with former traders. The Sultan made up some
excuse to begin his recruitment expedition, proclaiming that he was
going to take pilgrimage to Mecca in the auspicious year
of sixteen twenty two. Except no sultan before Osman ever
issued plans to take Haj. Even the mufties the religious
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jurists of the city begged the young Sultan not to leave,
knowing full well he was headed on a collision course
with the Janissary Corps. Sure enough, the city's troops gathered
outdid the Hya Sophia. As Sultan Osman prepared to leave.
They decried Osman's betrayal and demanded that the monarch both
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stay put in the city and execute his closest advisers.
Osman agreed to remain in Istanbul, but he scoffed at
the idea of killing any of his viziers. Enraged, the
crowd turned into a mob, entering the palace, seizing Mustapha
from his cage and forcing all of the courtiers they
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could find to swear allegiance to the man they now
proclaimed was sultan again. As the story goes, the former
Sultan Osman disguised himself amidst the chaos and fled to
the chambers of the janissary's commanders, where, in a poor
attempt to work out a deal, he was assassinated in
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the first regicide the Empire had ever seen. The Janissaries,
the jurists, and the people had just had enough. A
messenger brought the severed ear of Osman to Mustafa as
proof of just that. A little over three years after
he had been deposed in favor of his nephew, Mustafa
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returned to the throne again. The first act of his
second reign was to execute all the conspirators who were
responsible for Osman's death, But it seems that quick act
of justice wasn't enough to settle Mustapha's mind. He wept
before his courtiers for the most unexpected reasons. He had
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bouts of bliss, followed by episodes of rage. It said
that the Sultan often woke up in the dead of night,
calling out to his nephews to relieve him of this burden.
What burden? The burden of being sultan? The burden of
surviving Osman's regicide caused an uproar across the empire. The
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governor of one province in what is now northeast Turkey
led a revolt against the janissaries. Meanwhile, Polish troops took
advantage of the instability and raided border towns. When Mustafa
supposedly called for the execution of Ahmed's seven remaining heirs,
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young children no older than twelve, the Imperial Council finally
dethroned him. Four months after being put upon the throne
a second time, Mustafa returned to his cage, this time
for good. He passed the hours, days, seasons another sixteen
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years within his ornate prison, until he died in sixteen
thirty nine, around the age of forty. Historians regularly described
Mustafa as a sort of puppet, controlled by the jurists,
the janissaries, and his own family. But if the events
of Mustafa's life were any indication, he wasn't alone. Every
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Ottoman sultan after Ahmed had less power to execute the
royal competitors, for one, but also to impose their will
upon the janissaries or to ignore the word of the clergy.
Mustafa was not really unique as a puppet. Rather, there
were just so many more players who could pull the strings.
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Royals could be brought out to dance and then stuffed
back into the closet, from whence they came, not quite dead,
but never quite alive. That's the story of Sultan Mustafa.
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But keep listening after a brief sponsor break, to hear
a little bit more about another of the Sultan's brothers.
There's one nasty little detail we've left out of the
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already tormented life of Mustafa, namely the fact that he
had a full brother named Mohmed, whom Mustapha never actually
got the chance to meet. In fifteen ninety six, when
the Austrians invaded the part of modern day Hungry, then
ruled by the Ottomans, Mustapha's father, Mehmed, saddled up for retaliation.
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It was typical for sultans to lead, or at least
pretend to lead their armies into battle as a way
of signifying their own right to rule. Mehmed undoubtedly felt
that pressure. But after reaching Hungary and catching wind of
an Austrian army some fifty five thousand men strong, the
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king wished to disband his forces and scamper back to Istanbul.
His advisers pushed him to stay, and he relented, but
in the middle of the battle itself, Mehmed again wanted
to flee. His army didn't have that choice. The Austrian
troops drove the Ottomans back to their camps, and then
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they began plundering the tents. Distracted by the promise of treasure,
the Austrians never saw all the Ottoman horse groomers, cooks,
and royal attendants assembling themselves into a makeshift fighting force.
Shocked and disheveled, the Austrians were driven back by an
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army wielding ladles and hammers. Of course, Sultan Mehmed took
credit for the miraculous victory in Hunger. He returned to
Istanbul at the head of a triumphant procession, marching to
the roaring applause of the people. Despite the fact that
he played no real important role in the victory, to
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the people of Istanbul, to the army, and even to
his own sons, he was a hero. His son, Mahmud,
then fifteen years old, implored his father to send him
on a similar expedition, this time against the Sephovid threat
to the east. After all, it was customary for the
sultan to send his sons to the provinces to gain
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experience on the battlefield. Sultan Mehmed, however, couldn't seepass his
own paranoia. Was this a customary right or an attempt
at usurping power from the father? Rumor spread that Mahmud
planned to take his father's throne. The king called upon
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the Grand Mufti, the leading Islamic daist in the empire,
to see if he could secure legal sanction to execute
his son. The Grand Mufti wouldn't entertain an audience on
the matter, so the king went to the second most
powerful jurist in Istanbul, and while that Mufti wasn't particularly
pleased about the circumstances, he relented to the Sultan's wishes.
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An English diplomat in Istanbul at the time recorded the
exchange between king and cleric in a report. In this council,
the Mufti was of the opinion by their law without witness,
the prince Mahammud could not be put to death. Yet,
perceiving that nothing but his death would satisfy the father,
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the Mufti condescended and gave sentence that it's better that
the son were deprived of his life than the father
live in fear and jealousy. It was decided. The Sultan
received his stamp of approval, ordered his son beaten into confession,
and finally executed him in the same way he had
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executed nineteen brothers at the hands of mute servants who
could never tell a lie nor tell the truth. When
the Sultan died only six months later, the very death
that started this episode, when his son Ahmed would take
the throne, They say it was because of the immense
(39:28):
grief he felt at the loss of his son. That
seems too convenient for a story about royal tragedy. After all,
Mehmed was no alien to the execution of close family members.
A letter from a Venetian diplomat in Istanbul gives us
a more likely explanation. It was probably the plague or
(39:51):
maybe a stroke. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood
(40:15):
is created and hosted by me Dana Schwort, with additional
writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward,
Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and
produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising
producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams,
(40:39):
and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Manky Listener discretion advised. On the
twenty second of December sixteen o three, the Ottoman Imperial
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Council assembled for an ordinary administrative meeting in the capital
of Istanbul. The Sultan's Grand Vizier, a man named Kassim Pasha,
oversaw these regular meetings, directing the official business and foreign
policy of an empire which reigned as far as Mecca
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and Algier's Budapest and Cairo. There was really no other
imperial competitor putting up much of a threat. The Habsburgs
remained far to the north, The Safavids in Persia were
captain Czech for now and and while there may have
been a rebellion or two among the ranks of the
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Ottoman Empire's peasant fighters, the Imperial Council had their own
means of brutally ruthlessly disbanding them. To the Grand Vizier,
God seemed to cast his divine light upon the Ottomans.
Just as Kasim Pasha set the meeting in motion, a
(01:24):
royal secretary from the inner courtyard of the took copy
palace burst into the room, still gasping for breath. All
the servant could do was point toward the letter he
was holding in his hand, a letter that seemed to
come from the Sultan himself. Kasimpasha snatched the letter from
the servant's hands and began reading, but he could barely
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make out any of the words. Was this a joke,
certainly not. It had all of the markings of an
official royal correspondence. All the vizier could read with certainty
was the word babam my father had the Sultan gone mad?
His father had died eight years ago. Frustrated with the letter,
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Kasim Pasha passed it to a senior secretary of the
Imperial Council, who finally was able to divine meaning from
the chicken scratch. It read, you, Cassim Pasha, my father
is gone by God's will, and I have taken my
seat on the throne. You had better keep the city
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in good order. Should sedition arise, I will behead you.
Maybe God's divine light had missed this part of the palace.
Kasim Pasha had only ever been a loyal adviser and
administrator to Sultan Mehmed. Why would Sultan Mehmed test him
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like this, sending him such a strange message. Kasimpasha immediately
wrote the Chief Eunuch of the Imperial Harem, one of
the highest offices of the Palace, for his take on
the strange letter. All he got in response was a
solemn decree come to the audience hall of the Sultan.
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Immediately as the vizier walked through the inner chamber, everything
began to make sense. Sitting upon the throne was not
Sultan Mehmed but his son, a thirteen year old boy
named Ahmed. What stunned kasim Pasha the whole city, in fact,
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wasn't just that the youngest sultan to ever reign had
seized the throne, but more astonishingly, that so much had
been kept secret, Sultan Mehmed's illness, his death, his intention
that his son Ahmed should come to the throne without
any bloodshed at all. Even the Imperial Council hadn't known
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about any of it. Kasimpasha ordered a hasty enthronement ceremony
to be conducted within the palace. The new Sultan's throne
was erected before a lavish gait. The royal clerics and
advisers assembled for an oath swearing, But the entire time
everyone kept glancing at the young sultan's only other brother,
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his half brother really, and only a child himself, a
boy named Mustafa Kasim Pasha, and the rest of the
palace likely expected that Ahmed becoming sultan meant death for Mustafa.
Even though Mustafa at this point may have been no
older than four years old, no one in the city
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could have forgotten the former sultan's barbaric slaughter of his
own brothers as a way of securing the dynasty. Why
wouldn't Mehmed's son Ahmed kill his own brother, the boy
who might one day usurp his throne. Many noble blood
episodes begin with a murder, an assassination, may be a poisoning.
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This episode is about an act of mercy. Mustafa was
technically spared, but what does it mean to be spared
when the rest of your life is written by others.
Mustafa is rarely mentioned in scholarship on the Ottoman Empire,
yet there are few other lives of the period that
(05:37):
show so plainly that even future Ottoman sultans could not
master their own circumstances. Because Mustafa would go on to
become sultan, although he could not have known that that
day as a child watching his half brother's enthronement ceremony.
If that was to be a day of glory for
(05:59):
the Odduennce Empire, it was a glory that Mustapha would
never truly be able to baskin dead or alive. I'm
Danish schwartz, and this is noble blood. According to a
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long standing tradition, officially codified in fourteen fifty one, Ottoman
princes were expected to battle one another for the throne
upon the death of their father, the Sultan. In the
eyes of the court and the public, these were tests
of divine grace, who had the mandate or devlet to
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rule every generation. Fratricidal wars spilled the blood of all
potential heirs, minus the winning prince, whose progeny would carry
out yet another round of merciless massacres. Every brother was
a threat. When Ahmed and Mustapha's grandfather took the Ottoman
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throne in fifteen seventy four, he had his five brothers strangled.
When their father, Sultan Mehmed, took the throne in fifteen
ninety five, he had his nineteen brothers strangled some of
them were as young as nine. According to one popular myth,
paranoid about word spreading of the rather unsportsmanlike nature of
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this competition, the Sultan killed the very servants who had
carried out the executions. Of course, no one in Istanbul
needed to know the gruesome details to understand that those
executions meet something of a mockery of what was supposed
to be, in theory, at least, a noble tradition. In
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what world did strangling children prove one's right to rule?
Historians and ambassadors from the period recall a shadow casting
all over the city as nineteen coffins streamed into the
Hya Sophia in descending size. The trauma from that massacre
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may have contributed to the new sultan, Ahmed decision to
keep his half brother Mustapha alive after he took the
throne in sixteen o three. In all likelihood, the Imperial
council decided to keep the younger print around in case
anything unexpected happened to Ahmed. One ambassador wrote that the
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teenage sultan was quote of white complexion and displayed a
weak constitution. Only three months after his coronation, Ahmed contracted
a frightful bout of smallpox that almost broke the nearly
three hundred year line of Ottoman succession, but the disease
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luckily passed without severely harming the boy. It was commonly
understood that Mustapha was, if anything, an insurance policy on
the true air, and he would be an insurance policy
that the Imperial Court wouldn't need as soon as Ahmed
could produce progeny of his own. The boy king had
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to prove his virility before he could ever think of
executing his brother, and the first step to that was circumcision.
Ahmed was the first Ottoman ruler to be circumcised after
he had already ascended to the throne. Normally, for any prince,
circumcision entailed a lavish ceremony that symbolized a boy's transition
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into manhood and therefore political and sexual maturity. In the
cold winter of sixteen o four, ahmed ceremony was likely
a little less public and a little more restrained. The
festival took place in the Palace Harem, where performers treated
the court to staged plays, fireworks, and splendid musical arrangements.
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To many, the circumcision festivities felt more like a consolation
than a reflection of the empire's splendor. Here was a
young boy who was often ill, a boy who was
of course childless, and worst of all, was a novice
when it came to imperial administration. For all of the
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inefficiencies and bloodshed of the Ottoman succession system before Ahmed,
it did have the advantage of sending young princes to
provinces as a way of training them for future rule
if they made it that far. Of course, Ahmed and
Mustapha's father, Mehmed, was sent to the nearby city of
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Menisa for over ten years before he was invited to
Istanbul to attempt to claim the sultanate. In that time,
he established an administration of trusted viziers Anders, which he
then brought to the Ottoman capital. When he became sultan,
Ahmed didn't have the luxury of a decade of preparation.
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The court now was beset with factions opportunistic enemies raiding
Ottoman border towns, and the fate of the empire itself
hung in the balance at this point. Sometime around sixteen
oh four, Mustafa nearly disappears from our sources. What we
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know with certainty is that Sultan Ahmed's imperial council locked
Mustafa away in a heavily guarded part of the palace,
a set of private chambers that the servants referred to
as the cage. We can also presume that perpetual isolation
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from the outside world laid a heavy burden on the prince,
not to mention that royal fraturessie was, up to this
point a normal expectation that Mustapha certainly understood from his
gilded palace. Right after Ahmed gained the throne, a Venetian
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ambassador caught a glimpse of Mustafa as a toddler and
wrote that he was nurtured like an innocent little sheep
who must soon go to the butchers. The specter of
execution loomed over Mustafa's entire existence. Meanwhile, Sultan Ahmed occupied
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himself with restoring his vulnerable empire as soon as he
could shake off the influence of his mother and his tutor.
For the last decade, a faction from the empire's very
own soldiers turned to banditry in the provinces, angered by
the sparse pay given for their services. A new round
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of revolts had flared up in sixteen o five, which
the fifteen year old Ahmed, eager to prove himself, wanted
to crush with the might of his army. His mother
wouldn't allow it, but when she died later that year
from a drawn out illness, Ahmed left her mourning ceremony
early for a military campaign, as though God were punishing
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the teenage sultan for his hubris. Ahmed suffered from a
horrifying fever and he was forced to return from the
front lines. His viziers would handle the campaign for the
time being. Maybe that was for the best. Ahmed's reign
would come to be best known for the work he
did within the capital city itself, which might never have
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happened had he been busy out crushing rebels in the provinces.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, known the world over as the
Blue Mosque, is considered the crowning jewel of oddoman architecture
and the second most famous building in Istanbul, only after
the higha Sophia. For that project, Ahmed recruited the help
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of a new court favorite, the powerful chief Eunuch Mustafa
Aga in the Ottoman Imperial court. The chief Unik served
a particularly powerful rule. Eunichs traditionally attended to the women
of the Imperial Harem, but over the years the role
expanded into advising the Sultan as well. The chief eunich
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of Ahmed's reign was named Mustafa Aga. I know his
name is also Mustafa, but he's different from the Mustafa.
Our story is about the sultan half brother away in
his cage. Anyway, Mustafa Aga, the eunuch, had nearly unlimited
access to the private apartments of the Sultan, access to
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the Queen mother and the mothers of the Sultan's heirs.
In that capacity, he controlled the flow of people and
information through the palace, influencing Ahmed for his own benefit
and leveraging a vast network of allies and patrons to
carry out the Sultan's commands. He was a trusted ally
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and a master schemer. When Ahmed wanted to clear the
site next to the Hia Sophia for his own ambitious
mosque project, it was Mustafa Aga who found funding, who
negotiated with the powerbrokers of the city, and who oversaw
the construction. To this day, a verse of sixteen lines
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is etched into the side of the blue mosque. Eight
lines celebrate Sultan Ahmed for his piety and judgment, and
the other eight lines honor Mustafa Aga as though he
were the Sultan's equal. Most importantly, for our story, Mustafa
Aga curried so much favor with the Sultan that Ahmed
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even entrusted him with the supervision of his heirs. By
the time the Blue Mosque was erected in sixteen seventeen,
Ahmed had at least fifteen living children and eight male heirs.
His two oldest sons, Osman and Mehmed, were the healthy,
viable successors that the empire needed so desperately for the
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line of succession to remain intact. Technically, Ahmed no longer
needed to keep his younger half brother, Mustafa alive. Why then,
did execution never come From ages four to nineteen, Mustafa
lived a severely secluded life and remained all but a
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mystery to the people of Istanbul. Historians don't agree on
why Mustapha was allowed to live after the births of
Ahmed's sons, but they do have their theories. One theory
is that Ahmed's favorite consort, Kosam Sultan, the mother of
Ahmed's second oldest son, recognized that her son's chances of
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survival as the second oldest son didn't look good. If
the Sultan's brother Mustafa were killed, that would continue the
tradition of fratricide. And if the beloved firstborn prince Osmond
took the throne, that would mean fratricide for her son,
the second son, Mehmed. It's possible that Kosam Sultan influenced
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Ahmed to keep Mustapha alive and thereby secure her own
son's safety by breaking the tradition of fratricide. Another possibility
lies with the Islamic jurists, whose interpretation and administration of
Sharia law kept the power of the sultan in zech
These jurists were already weary of familial executions during the
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reign of Ahmed and Mustafa's father, and for the Grand
Mufti Asad, the chief jurist of the empire, keeping Mustafa
alive served as a point of leverage in case Ahmed
did anything that upset him and his faction of Islamic elites,
they could, let's say, dethrone this particular sultan without risking
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the complete collapse of the institution. Finally, one last theory
is that Mustafa was simply mad. He was deemed too
mentally unfit to be considered a serious contender for the throne,
and so there would be no point in executing him.
This is by far the most commonly cited theory explaining
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Mustafa's survival, but notice how it conflicts with the other two.
Was Mustafa too mad to rule? Or was he just
mad enough for a court faction to keep under their
control should Ahmed disappoint them. Whatever the reasons for his service,
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Mustafa outlived his older brother in sixteen seventeen, a grave
stomach ailment, probably Typhus, consumed the already weak Sultan Ahmed.
Ahmed's death was a contingency that an inner court faction
led by the Grand Mufti Asad, had already accounted for.
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Asad was the first to hear of the Sultan's death
on the night of November twenty first, when he immediately
convened with other major statesmen to finalize the details of succession.
This wouldn't be difficult, would it. Ahmed had two viable
heirs of his own, and could therefore resume the long
standing tradition of passing the sultanate to his sons, who
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would then compete for the throne. The chief eunuch Mustafa
Aga certainly advocated for that position, after all, he had
essentially raised the boys himself. But according to Asad's contrived
interpretation of ancient law, Osman and Mehmed, the two sons,
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then aged fourteen and thirteen, were too young for the sultanate,
never mind that Ahmed himself had been only thirteen when
he was enthroned. No, the Grand Mufti proclaimed in the
Secret Council only the nineteen year old Mustafa had the
mandate to rule. The next morning, the forlorn brother of
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Ahmed emerged from his cage after fifteen years in captivity.
In a twist of fate, Mustapha was now a sultan,
but not necessarily a free man. The same court that
had propelled him into power could just as easily stuff
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him back into the recesses of palace chambers. Mustapha Tufah's
sovereignty would come with a heavy price. As in all
succession crisses, the coronation had winners and losers. On the
winning side was the Grand Mufti Asad and his faction
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of jurists, who felt more confident about their power over
the new sultanate. Joining their ranks of winners was Mustafa's mother,
Halime Sultan, who had been locked away in took copy
palace just like her son, but who now emerged into
a position of conspicuous power. On the losing side was
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the chief eunuch, Mustafa Aga, who had spent more than
a decade preparing Osman and Mehmed for rule, no doubt,
a rule that would be amenable to his interests, only
to be sidelined in the last moment by the once
insurance policy half brother. Mustafa, and of course Prince Osman
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felt he had been betrayed as the true heir to
the throne. This succession was abnormal by all accounts. It
was the first time that the brother of the sultan
and not a viable son, inherited the throne. Mustapha Aga
began organizing a coup against Sultan Mustafa almost immediately. He
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called upon an ally in the navy named Ali Pasha,
who could leverage his connections with Ottoman merchants to sow
discontent in Mustafa and support for jan Osman. Getting the
public on his side was another matter. The public had
to be convinced that Mustafa was incompetent. Established law dictated
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that a sultan needed to be old enough to rule,
but it also dictated that he needed to be of
sound mind. The French ambassador to the Imperial Palace recorded
in one of his letters that Mustafa Aga was disseminating
or at least magnifying rumors about Mustafa's supposed madness. According
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to one rumor, the sultan embarrassed his viziers during audiences
as he wouldn't stop unraveling their turbans and yanking their beards.
Another rumor claimed Mustafa would throw money to birds and
fish when he sailed upon the Bosphorus. Mustafa AGA's vicious
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rumor mill presents us with a predicament, how do we
separate fact from fiction? If so many of the sources
we have on Sultan Mustafa are colored by the obviously
biased campaign the chief Eunuch was waging to discredit the
new monarch? Is there a chance Sultan Mustafa wasn't nearly
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as mad as history made him out to be. There
is no doubt that Mustafa wasn't treated the same as
other sultans before him. The coins minted during his reign
still bear the face of his older brother and his father.
But then again, Mustafa may not have ruled long enough
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for the coins to change design. We also know that
while most royal correspondents was handled by a male counselor,
Mustapha's letters were strangely drafted by a female slave from
the Harem who doubled as Mustapha's tutor. Then again, Ahmed
didn't allow Mustapha to have any contact with others, with
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the exception of female servants and his own mother back
when he was imprisoned. We have evidence to support the
idea that Mustapha was an active participant in his administration.
He's reported to have taken great interest in inspecting Istanbul's
arsenal and docs. French ambassador wrote that Mustafa even contemplated
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leading a campaign against the Sephavids. It's also worth noting
that Mustapha had been imprisoned in the palace for fifteen
important developmental years. What manifested as madness might have been
the consequences of that isolation. Either way, for all of
the chief Eunuch's insistence on discrediting the monarch in the
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public eye, his campaign may have actually had the unintended
consequence of suggesting that the new Sultan was in fact
a holy man. Throughout the pre modern world, madness and
holiness converged in unexpected ways. The thirteenth century mystic Saint
(25:48):
Francis of Assisi honored those that lived as fools in
the eyes of men, but sages in the eyes of God.
The sixteenth century Teresa of Avila gained a noise we're
miss renown for her visions of Christ and bouts of
religious ecstasy. Some of Istanbul's populace saw elements of Mustapha's
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madness as proof of his divinity. They referred to him
as belli or saint. An English diplomat to the Ottoman
Empire had the following choice words for the new sultan.
He is esteemed a holy man that hath visions and
angelic speculations. In plain terms, between a madman and a fool.
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None of these alternative accounts of the sultan mattered in
the court politics that slowly pointed in mustapha AGA's favor.
For the first couple months of Sultan Mustapha's reign, the
only major statesman pushing for Osmond taking the throne had
been the Chief Eunuch and his naval Admiral Ali Pasha.
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But when news broke that Mustafa planned on replacing the
existing Grand Vizier with his own brother in law, the
Imperial Council swerved in favor of a coup. Mustafa Aga
struck a deal with the elite army corps in the city,
the janissaries to swear fealty to Osmon in return for
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a generous shipment of Buyan. Assad, once devoted to Mustafa's cause,
resigned himself to accepting Osmond's inevitable ascension. On the morning
of Monday, February twenty sixth, sixteen eighteen, the Chief Eunuch
guided the Sultan to a remote, suspiciously familiar apartment of
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the palace, making up some excuse along the way. We
can only speculate what it must have felt like when
Sultan Mustafa realized he was being led back to the cage.
Mustapha Aga politely asked the Sultan to wait inside before
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he exited the room, and had a servant lock the
door from the outside. With Mustapha locked away, all of
the court swore allegiance to the fourteen year old Osmon,
and not a peep of outcry was heard in the city.
Mustapha's reign had lasted a little under three months. Osmond
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and his allies in court promptly began erasing Osmond's uncle's
short rule from memory, part of the reason we know
so little about Mustapha in the first place. One courtier
referred to the reign of Mustapha as the false dawn
before Osmond's real dawn. Sultan Osmon was much like his
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father Ahmed. He was extraordinarily pious, so much so that
he opted for simple, ascetic attire over the lavish robes
of his predecessors. He even went so far as to
take up legal wives instead of traditional concubines, and he
banned the consumption of tobacco, a wicked weed introduced by
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the English, which was, according to Osman, corrupting the souls
and minds of his subjects Ahmed may have built a
mosque that recalled the heavens, but Osmon was purifying the
soul of his empire. Osmond was also purifying his court
of competitors. Before heading into a campaign against the Polish,
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he executed his own half brother, Mehmed, but once again
he kept Mustapha alive, as though his uncle no longer
posed a threat after being so severely discredited and dethroned.
When Osmon returned from war, dissatisfied with the conduct of
his troops, he made covert plans to reform the army
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with mercenaries he hired from the South, the very same
mercenaries who had rebelled against his father, Sultan Ahmed. Rumors
spread like wildfire, as did contempt within the Janissary Corps.
Not only was Osmond planning on sidelining the beating heart
of the Empire's military, he was going to staff his
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new army with former traders. The Sultan made up some
excuse to begin his recruitment expedition, proclaiming that he was
going to take pilgrimage to Mecca in the auspicious year
of sixteen twenty two. Except no sultan before Osman ever
issued plans to take Haj. Even the mufties the religious
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jurists of the city begged the young Sultan not to leave,
knowing full well he was headed on a collision course
with the Janissary Corps. Sure enough, the city's troops gathered
outdid the Hya Sophia. As Sultan Osman prepared to leave.
They decried Osman's betrayal and demanded that the monarch both
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stay put in the city and execute his closest advisers.
Osman agreed to remain in Istanbul, but he scoffed at
the idea of killing any of his viziers. Enraged, the
crowd turned into a mob, entering the palace, seizing Mustapha
from his cage and forcing all of the courtiers they
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could find to swear allegiance to the man they now
proclaimed was sultan again. As the story goes, the former
Sultan Osman disguised himself amidst the chaos and fled to
the chambers of the janissary's commanders, where, in a poor
attempt to work out a deal, he was assassinated in
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the first regicide the Empire had ever seen. The Janissaries,
the jurists, and the people had just had enough. A
messenger brought the severed ear of Osman to Mustafa as
proof of just that. A little over three years after
he had been deposed in favor of his nephew, Mustafa
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returned to the throne again. The first act of his
second reign was to execute all the conspirators who were
responsible for Osman's death, But it seems that quick act
of justice wasn't enough to settle Mustapha's mind. He wept
before his courtiers for the most unexpected reasons. He had
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bouts of bliss, followed by episodes of rage. It said
that the Sultan often woke up in the dead of night,
calling out to his nephews to relieve him of this burden.
What burden? The burden of being sultan? The burden of
surviving Osman's regicide caused an uproar across the empire. The
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governor of one province in what is now northeast Turkey
led a revolt against the janissaries. Meanwhile, Polish troops took
advantage of the instability and raided border towns. When Mustafa
supposedly called for the execution of Ahmed's seven remaining heirs,
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young children no older than twelve, the Imperial Council finally
dethroned him. Four months after being put upon the throne
a second time, Mustafa returned to his cage, this time
for good. He passed the hours, days, seasons another sixteen
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years within his ornate prison, until he died in sixteen
thirty nine, around the age of forty. Historians regularly described
Mustafa as a sort of puppet, controlled by the jurists,
the janissaries, and his own family. But if the events
of Mustafa's life were any indication, he wasn't alone. Every
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Ottoman sultan after Ahmed had less power to execute the
royal competitors, for one, but also to impose their will
upon the janissaries or to ignore the word of the clergy.
Mustafa was not really unique as a puppet. Rather, there
were just so many more players who could pull the strings.
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Royals could be brought out to dance and then stuffed
back into the closet, from whence they came, not quite dead,
but never quite alive. That's the story of Sultan Mustafa.
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But keep listening after a brief sponsor break, to hear
a little bit more about another of the Sultan's brothers.
There's one nasty little detail we've left out of the
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already tormented life of Mustafa, namely the fact that he
had a full brother named Mohmed, whom Mustapha never actually
got the chance to meet. In fifteen ninety six, when
the Austrians invaded the part of modern day Hungry, then
ruled by the Ottomans, Mustapha's father, Mehmed, saddled up for retaliation.
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It was typical for sultans to lead, or at least
pretend to lead their armies into battle as a way
of signifying their own right to rule. Mehmed undoubtedly felt
that pressure. But after reaching Hungary and catching wind of
an Austrian army some fifty five thousand men strong, the
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king wished to disband his forces and scamper back to Istanbul.
His advisers pushed him to stay, and he relented, but
in the middle of the battle itself, Mehmed again wanted
to flee. His army didn't have that choice. The Austrian
troops drove the Ottomans back to their camps, and then
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they began plundering the tents. Distracted by the promise of treasure,
the Austrians never saw all the Ottoman horse groomers, cooks,
and royal attendants assembling themselves into a makeshift fighting force.
Shocked and disheveled, the Austrians were driven back by an
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army wielding ladles and hammers. Of course, Sultan Mehmed took
credit for the miraculous victory in Hunger. He returned to
Istanbul at the head of a triumphant procession, marching to
the roaring applause of the people. Despite the fact that
he played no real important role in the victory, to
(37:13):
the people of Istanbul, to the army, and even to
his own sons, he was a hero. His son, Mahmud,
then fifteen years old, implored his father to send him
on a similar expedition, this time against the Sephovid threat
to the east. After all, it was customary for the
sultan to send his sons to the provinces to gain
(37:36):
experience on the battlefield. Sultan Mehmed, however, couldn't seepass his
own paranoia. Was this a customary right or an attempt
at usurping power from the father? Rumor spread that Mahmud
planned to take his father's throne. The king called upon
(37:57):
the Grand Mufti, the leading Islamic daist in the empire,
to see if he could secure legal sanction to execute
his son. The Grand Mufti wouldn't entertain an audience on
the matter, so the king went to the second most
powerful jurist in Istanbul, and while that Mufti wasn't particularly
pleased about the circumstances, he relented to the Sultan's wishes.
(38:22):
An English diplomat in Istanbul at the time recorded the
exchange between king and cleric in a report. In this council,
the Mufti was of the opinion by their law without witness,
the prince Mahammud could not be put to death. Yet,
perceiving that nothing but his death would satisfy the father,
(38:42):
the Mufti condescended and gave sentence that it's better that
the son were deprived of his life than the father
live in fear and jealousy. It was decided. The Sultan
received his stamp of approval, ordered his son beaten into confession,
and finally executed him in the same way he had
(39:05):
executed nineteen brothers at the hands of mute servants who
could never tell a lie nor tell the truth. When
the Sultan died only six months later, the very death
that started this episode, when his son Ahmed would take
the throne, They say it was because of the immense
(39:28):
grief he felt at the loss of his son. That
seems too convenient for a story about royal tragedy. After all,
Mehmed was no alien to the execution of close family members.
A letter from a Venetian diplomat in Istanbul gives us
a more likely explanation. It was probably the plague or
(39:51):
maybe a stroke. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood
(40:15):
is created and hosted by me Dana Schwort, with additional
writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward,
Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and
produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising
producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams,
(40:39):
and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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