228 DESTINY DISRUPTED
were twelve, never mingling with ordinary people or taking part in the
rough-and-tumble of ordinary life until adolescence. By the time such a
prince mounted the throne he was quite typically a socially dysfunctional
creature whose main skill consisted of the ability to maneuver through the
maze of harem intrigue.
And very high-stakes, high-intensity intrigue it was, because even
though one prince may have been the heir-designate, the mothers of the
many other princes did not necessarily abandon hope that their own boy
would somehow achieve the throne (which would make mother a power-
figure in the empire.} So the women and their progeny plotted and con-
spired and attempted (and sometimes succeeded at} assassinations of
potential rivals until the reigning sultan died, whereupon the struggle for
power moved from back-room intrigue to front-room fisticuffs. The
prince who came out victorious won the throne not just for himself but for
some whole faction of women and eunuchs within the harem. An Ot-
toman princeling growing up in this environment knew he had some small
chance of ending up as the supreme master of the universe and a much
larger chance of ending up dead before he reached maturity.
This system ended up producing a long line of weak, idiotic, and ec-
centric sultans. But this fact in itself did not account for the decline and
fall of the Ottoman Empire, because by the time the system ripened into
its corrupt maturity, the sultan no longer ran the state. The executive
powers of his position had begun to decay shortly after Suleiman the
Magnificent died. In the Ottoman system, grand vizier became the
power position.
Yet the ungainly court with its enormous harem did hamper the Ot-
toman Empire, because it cost so much and produced so little-produced
in fact nothing, not even decisions. The vizier and other officials had to
run the empire while carrying this court on their shoulders and keeping
the damn thing fed, which made the whole operation ungainly and slow.
Between 1600 and 1800, Safavid Persia was unraveling too. The Euro-
peans were on hand to exploit what happened, but it was the kingdom's
own internal contradictions that pulled it apart. First of all, the usual dy-
nastic rot set in. Princes raised in too much luxury were coming to the
throne dissolute and lazy. Every time one of these flawed kings died, a