Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

142 honored by the glory of islam

The sultan was less likely to engage in military campaigns or command

armies as he was usually not trained in the arts of war; instead, he was com-

pelled to live deep in the palace, literally in the cage of the harem, surrounded

by eunuchs, boys, and women. Ever after Mehmed II refused to stand at the

sound of martial music, the primary component of a sultan’s identity had

become less ghazi and more a Caesar.^11 Abolishing a frontier custom symbol-

izes how the imperatives of rule had changed during the transition of the

sultan from the head warrior of a march principality to the emperor of an

imperial state that ruled continents yet marginalized warriors. While Me-

hmed II’s son Bayezid II and grandson Suleiman I would still campaign in

person—Suleiman I took his last breath at the age of seventy-two while lay-

ing siege to Szigetvár in Hungary—after Mehmed IV’s predecessor in name,

Mehmed III, at the end of the sixteenth century, the male head of the Otto-

man dynasty usually was more sedentary than mobile, more often engaged in

ceremony than battle. And on the rare occasion that they were compelled to

head the imperial army, the weaker constitutions of sedentary sultans guar-

anteed that they usually did not last long. Ahmed I, for example, was felled

by fresh springwater; he “was happier in his garden than in Anatolia where

wolves prowled.”^12

The lives of sultans had been marked by mobility, the childhood of sultans

by a princely governate. Living in small towns in Anatolia, future sultans were

taught the arts of war and governance. Once a sultan died, his sons raced to the

capital in order to be enthroned, battling and ultimately killing their brothers

in the process. Mehmed III had been the last prince sent out to train in the

art of war and governance in the provinces and the last to enforce the law of

fratricide, killing his nineteen brothers when enthroned. Thereafter the throne

passed from prince to prince, brother to brother, in descending order of age.^13

Beginning at the turn of the seventeenth century more often than not sultans

were passively placed on the throne or even against their will rather than fi ght-

ing for it or actively claiming it. While mercifully left alive, Ottoman princes

were neutralized in the palace, hermetically sealed from the world, confi ned

and condemned to a life of isolation. There they waited for death, or a chance

to rule without having been trained for the position.^14

Sultanic reigns were inevitably shortened by the age of the sultans upon ac-

cession since they had spent decades isolated and inactive.^15 The two men who

succeeded Mehmed IV each died in the fourth year of their reign. Whereas the

early sultans had been quite mobile, after Mehmed II they began to travel only

for military campaigns or pleasure.^16 Instead, residing in the palace, they spent

the dynasty’s wealth but not the empire’s because the two treasuries were sepa-

rated. In these circumstances, in which the dynasty and the empire became