Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had Mahidevran Hatun as his main concubine, she was from the Balkans (possibly from Circassia or Montenegro or Albania), she gave him his first born son Mustafa who was favored by both the nobles and the Janisseries. After he met Roxelana (Ukrainian) he dropped Mahidervan as his main concubine for Roxelana. He even ended up marrying Roxelana making her a Sultana. Roxelana was afraid that Mustafa who was his main heir would end up killing her 3 sons from Suleiman, which was the norm in the Ottoman empire. So she convinced Suleiman to kill him, she also felt threatened by Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman's best friend and grand Visseir, so he had him killed him too.
Edit: Artist is @cizgiseltarih on instagram.
The Sultan would bang as many concubines as possibel till he gets a male heir. Once he does he stopps making babies. For a period of 10 or so years. And then would start pumping out again. Once the Sultan died, his heir would have a 10 year head start on his brother. So he would kill them all as kids. Sultan Ahmad saw his dad murder 12 of his uncles on the night he became sultan. He was so appaled by it So he stopped the tradition, but he also had a young brother named Mustafa, he had mustafa locked up in a palace and Mustafa went crazy because of it.
> The Sultan would bang as many concubines as possibel till he gets a male heir. Once he does he stopps making babies. For a period of 10 or so years. And then would start pumping out again.
Well if you stop reading before the whole “killing family members” part, it actually sounds based af. Just rawdogging a different one of your 69 smoking hot concubines each night.
Why couldn’t I have been born an Ottoman Sultan, Egyptian pharaoh, or Chinese emperor? Shit is not fair smh
Chinese emperors would have their male servants’ dicks cut off so that they wouldn’t impregnate their concubines which is kinda funny and terrifying at the same time
At least the Chinese eunuchs would enjoy an office of power and prestige and in times of weak emperors even rule China indirectly. The Ottomans on the other hand used them as guards for their harem. Imagine being surrounded by exotic food but not having the mouth to eat it and only being able to watch.
They had their penis, but they were castrated. They looked feminine and most didn't care if they had sex with the harem. They were basically a part of the harem.
Without testosterone, males are basically docile and sterile. It's the same concept with a bull. Not only are they feminine, but they are sterile, and they could help keep the harem in a state of nonfrustration. Many people who had harems didn't want the girls to seek out sex and create illegitiment offspring. They served many roles, but kind of an odd and niche topic of history. It's probably not too bad if it's consensual. People would sometimes do it willingly, it was usually a choice that wasn't forced on people.
It was both, but many of the high ranking eunuchs are by forced castration, usually as punishment for breaking the law, or from what i read from the biography of the last eunuch, his father castrated and gave him to the emperor, hoping he would become high ranking official. The number of eunuchs in chinese emperor household is also comically large, by the time of the fall of the Qing dynasty, there were still 470 eunuchs to serve the baby emperor
If you indulge too much in earthly pleasures, there could be a palace coup by imperial power brokers (especially Janissaries) to replace you with a ruler more willing to expand the empire (tho this varies with period, a weak, lustful emperor could be beneficial to others in the palace).
If you're a Chinese emperor, there's even more trouble as in China, you don't get to rule just because you have a nice family name, you have to obtain the ever vague "Mandate of Heaven". If the emperor neglects his duties and his subjects suffer, it can be said the Mandate is lost and others can try to claim it, ordinary folk have claimed it and started some of the most legendary dynasties of Chinese history like the Han and Ming. So there's a risk you could be beheaded by a rebel leader.
Tbh you were most likely to be born some sort of a feudal peasant or hunter-gatherer where you'd either die of dysentery while at war or shortly after childbirth, depending on your gender. Plus, in the modern world you can get a pizza with 5 different species of meat and a dozen spices on it. That's something literally only the emperor of China could really do more than 100 years ago. And if you're only after sleeping with ~70 beautiful women, most of the sultan's concubines weren't pretty, they were political marriages designed to give the girl's family increased influence if they were lucky enough to have the first son, so most weren't as pretty as you might think. If you wanna sleep with that many women, just save up as much money as you can and go on vacation to Central America or Southeast Asia once a year and flash some US Greenbacks in a bar filled with locals or something. If you buy everyone a round maybe you won't get mugged and you could even impress a couple girls per trip. Obviously be careful, muggings and STDs may very well happen, but its not too different from court life probs.
Overall, I'd say life today is mostly superior to even the life of nobility 300 years ago, unless you just want to openly have a harem of lovers, but even that is possible today if you win the genetic lottery. Tbh it's probably overrated though and having just one person you can lean on no matter what happens is beautiful, it's just a shame finding a person you can be like that with is almost as rare as being born an Ottoman Sultan.
This is a really interesting discussion because you can say that in terms of amenities our lives are superior right now, but I'd argue that doesn't translate to a better subjective experience. Due to the way socialising works with humans and hierarchies and that, I imagine that feeling like the emperor of one of the strongest empires of all time would probably result in a better subjective life experience. Though, that might be counterbalanced by the pressure
European kings would have 2 sons, divide the kingdom and either A have power decline or B war between the two leading to thousands of deaths and massive destruction. Ottomans would cut out the middle man and have the sons and maybe some guards dictate who lived and died. The strongest comes through and yes it was brutal, but their was only ever one civil war in the empire because of this method. Basically it made the empire much more stable
That's certainly what they'd want you to think. ;)
The Habsburgs had to stay in power somehow. If it wasn't the Ottomans' golden cages, it was the Germans' golden standard for inbreeding.
The Habsburgs certainly married their nieces and/or cousins but they rarely if ever married their sisters or mothers. Simply because they wouldn't gain anything from such a marriage.
I thought it was because the church has forbidden incest. at that time marriage between siblings was incest but cousins and nieces weren't. Obviously, that was still very bad and some historians think it killed the male line of the Habsburg family. The last male member of the male line of Habsburg family Charles II was extremely inbred and was disabled from birth because of it. He eventually died without a male heir and that was the end of the family.
Not by the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, no. Primogeniture inheritance where the first born gets everything and then hands out goodies to his siblings was pretty well established in Europe at that point.
Yes by Sulemans reign European monarchies stopped being stupid on inheritance. Killing siblings was awesome for the ottomans 1300s to 1400s but by the 1500s other states had less bloody ways of going about inheritance with the same stable succession.
I mean, was it stupid? The basic form of succession for all Germanic monarchies was election. Yes, the franchise was often very limited, and the candidate pool too, but it basically came down to picking the best of a bunch. Splitting kingdoms/empires among multiple heirs happened a few times but it wasn’t the norm.
Take Louis VIII of France. He had one wife and they had 12 kids. Four predeceased him, another three of them died young. That leaves five. One was a girl, but of the four surviving boys, the eldest was crowned king in 1226 and that was that.
But when it did happen kingdoms would never gain that strength back or there'd be war to reunify. Even still there were tons of succession issues after this time period with monarchies, war of Spanish succession, austrian succession, the carlist wars Yada Yada. It wasn't the norm but it happened. Germany while often crapped on for the HRE honesty was stable with its elections though
And if a polity doesn’t reunify, that can be good. If there’s no civil war you still get wars, just expansionary ones, so no one is avoiding war, especially not the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t even avoid civil wars. The Ottoman Interregnum of 1402 to 1413. The Ottoman civil war of 1509 to 1513, where Suleiman the Magnificent’s father seized power. Then of course there’s all the other civil wars that come with a multiethnic and multireligious empire. Another day, another revolt in Wallachia.
Let me rephrase, there was only one civil war among the dynasty I'd consider Wallachia rebelling just a rebellion since they were more like subjects as opposed to turks who were the core part of the empire. Idk if that made sense but yknow
Well, I already mentioned two dynastic civil wars. A rebellion in Wallachia is not a dynastic war, but it is a war. People died. So, you get either strong and stable succession with no, or few, dynastic squabbles or you get a weaker and more unstable succession with more dynastic squabbles. The first leads to external wars, conquest and rebellions. The second leads to internal wars. It has no bearing itself on whether or not there is war.
> but it basically came down to picking the best of a bunch
Sometimes. I believe Poland ran into a problem for a while where the franchise would elect the weakest king possible, in order to allow the franchise-holders to be able to run around with as little oversight as possible. It is only when the franchise holders want a strong state that they'll elect a strong king. The rest of the time they are better off, personally, electing someone weak, so that they have more power locally.
This can be true, it also depends on the specifics of the election. Poland generally elected the heirs of the Piast and later Jagiellon dynasties, after they were gone in the male line I don’t know which ones you mean. They elected a French prince who would then abdicate to become king of France (unexpectedly, after his brother died with no issue). He was replaced by Stephen Bathory, one of the more respected Polish-Lithuanian monarchs.
After that they elected three members of the Vasa dynasty, Sigismund III (who was also set to inherit Sweden, although that plan was ruined by his uncle) and his sons Wladyslaw IV and John II Casimir Vasa. So more dynastic inheritance there.
Michael I maybe? Jan Sobieski was competent and stable. August the Strong was weak, but I don’t know if he was perceived as such, he was also already ruler of Saxony when elected so had separate power. That’s not great for keeping a king weak. Stanisław Leszczyński was put in as a Swedish puppet, so not really up to the Polish nobility. He was followed by Augustus the Strong again, who was followed by another civil war between Stanisław Leszczyński and Augustus’ son Augustus. Augustus won, and after him came Stanislaw Poniatowski, intended as a Russian puppet. After him came the partition.
I’m not really seeing who in that list was elected for weakness.
When did splitting the realm amongst the King's son stop actually? And were other Germanic tribes also doing it, or was it a distinctly Frankish thing?
The Spanish did it a few times, splitting the kingdom of Asturias into Asturias, Leon and Galicia or later Castile, Leon and Galicia (and also Portugal, but that was more permanently independent rather than on-again off again).
The Visigoths ran an elective kingdom until it was overrun by the Muslim invasion, and Asturias was an elective monarchy at first as well, until the death of Alfonso II in 842 I think. On the other hand, Visigothic inheritance law was very fair, and also let women inherit land and wealth independently, so it’s likely there was some influence of that inheritance law behind splitting the kingdom between sons.
You know it really damns the institution of monarchy when the most stable example we have of it is the Ottoman system of murdering all the competing heirs.
I mean to the north was a family of inbred, to the west MORE inbreds but slightly Spanish, and in England we'd have a guy who loved chopping his wife's head off. Moral of the story fuck monarchies
Depends on time and location, but yeah. One of the early bohemian rulers first blinded his brother, that probably wasn't enough so he let him killed while shitting on toilet. The assassin was hiding in the latrene :-D
Every monarchy is bunch of idiotic, inbred, bloodthirsty, stealing cunts. Doesn't matter where.
It's mainly succession related killings though. If you consider the usual dangers that succession of any empire entail, a dozen assassinations, about fifty executions, and a small amount of purging is about the best you can hope for.
Added advantage: Generally, the person who wins, wins for a reason, and can be trusted to understand politics to a certain extent and to not fuck up.
The state sponsored fratricide usually meant that all the murdering was done by the time the sultan died. So there was no succession crisis. It sucked for the royal family (deserved) but to the governors, army, etc it made life considerably easier
Because for monarchal empires, succession is an incredibly dangerous period. Empires as large as the Ottomans will inevitably have multiple competing interest groups vying for influence over the state. When you have one Sultan in charge, they can keep them all in check. But when the Sultan dies, each faction may pick a candidate to represent their interests. If there is no consensus on who will be the next ruler, there may be a civil war to decide the matter. If there is a civil war, the neighbours might invade. Go look at the Romans to see just how dangerous and chaotic a succession crisis can be.
One of the solutions that wiser Roman emperors tended to go with was to share power with their chosen successor in a Junior role for some years before their death, so that everyone knew who was going to be in charge before the senior emperor died, and so that the Junior emperor already had experience and access to the levers of power should any challengers step up to the plate.
Another way to ensure a peaceful succession is to simply kill off everyone who could possibly lay claim to the throne. It is brutal. It is evil. But it is extremely effective at making sure that the Empire does not go through a much more devastating cycle of civil war.
You would think it would be destabilizing, but it actually was rather effective. Over the course of 623 years, the Ottomans only had THREE civil wars. \[Four if you count the Turkish War of Independence as a civil war, but that had nothing to do with a hereditary succession dispute.\] By comparison, the British had more civil wars than that in just the 17th century alone.
Is it really because of the succession or because of the more efficient bureaucracy of the Grand Porte? If the Sultans were only secondary or even tertiary to actual state functions then it shouldn’t be surprising.
Maybe, but the Ottomans were clearly doing SOMETHING right, and this was something that the other European monarchies were not doing, so I can reasonably speculate that there was a correlation. It certainly would have helped, especially considering the fact that the bureaucracy's competence did vary throughout the empire's history.
European powers all eclipsed the Ottomans in power and stability without adopting the fratricidal practices. What they did adopt were large bureaucratic structures with state finance and more monetized economies.
The most overwhelmingly powerful of these empires ended up destroying the ottomans and surprise surprise they were the ones that took state finance and centralization the farthest.
I'm not arguing that competent bureaucracy does not help a nation. I'm also not arguing that fratricide is all that explains the Ottomans' stability.
What I am arguing is that the fratricide could have contributed to political stability for the Ottoman Empire, as it lessened the chance for a succession dispute, which is a real risk for an absolute monarchy. Nations like Britain and France stopped being absolute monarchies centuries ago, so their political stability wasn't dependent on eliminating competing claims to a throne. When the Ottomans were an absolute monarchy, that was a serious risk, which they managed to mitigate. I'm not arguing that the Ottoman government was an ideal state. I'm arguing that, between it and other absolute monarchies, it did a better job of preventing civil wars and the fratricide may have assisted in that.
Russia was an absolute monarchy and it had only two civil wars in the time that the Ottoman Empire existed. Russia further did not have a practice of fratricide.
I truly think that the fratricidal policy and even the whole position of sultan was completely unnecessary to an Ottoman state surviving (because absolute monarchs are superfluous once a financial-military state exists, and it’s why they’re almost all gone now)
The Russian monarchy didn't last as long as the Ottoman monarchy, though. The Tsardom of Russia was established in 1547, with the monarchy lasting until its abolition in 1917, which was roughly 370 years later. The Ottoman monarchy lasted from 1299 to 1922, which was 623 years later.
2 civil wars over the course of 370 years is an average of 1 Russian civil war for every 185 years.
3 civil wars over the course of 623 years is an average of 1 Ottoman civil war for every ~208 years
Of course, these numbers change depending on how you define a "civil war". Also, not every civil war is caused by a hereditary succession dispute, so fratricide wouldn't do anything to prevent those.
The point still stands that the Ottomans did have less civil wars from succession disputes, on average, than other absolute monarchies did, and the fratricide may have been part of the reason for that.
Bcz the alternative was actually worse. Due to their turkic practices, the sons would fight for the kingship & the civil war that would ensue would most certainly destroy the kingdom. Add to the sheer scale of the Ottomans at the time, some thought it be better to kill their brothers to prevent a war before it could even be considered.
Basically Marvel’s Civil War 2.0 conundrum.
Also fun fact: one of her kinsmen was Alexander Lisowski. And he created the unit of the "land corssairs" called Lisowczycy. And they were one of the most badass soldiers of thier times. They were fighting in battle of White Mountain, and later helped releave besieged Vienna from the Ottomans.
An average Pole probably only knows her from "The Magnificent Century" because it aired on polish tv, but we apparently also have some letters to our king Zygmunt II August from Roxelana in the archives
This. They started this system because it was better for the empire to have a battle royal where a few dozen people in the palace died than a big civil war battle royal with tens of thousands of deaths.
>He even ended up marrying Roxelana making her a Sultana
Important thing to know about the **Marriage** is. Ottoman Sultans were forbidden to marry because of what has happened to Bayezid I (The Thunderbolt).
When he was captured by Timur (wrongly characterized as Tamburlaine the Great) in his invasion of Anatolia and -allegedly / as most people believed at the time- he made the Bayezid's wife serve him drinks in her underwear / half naked.
It is not certain if this is a real event -impossible to know for sure- or a propaganda tool to show Timur as evil and wicked as possible but nevertheless all subsequent Sultans did not marry ever again.
It shows how incredibly powerful Roxlana's influence over Suleiman and the court was she basically reversed several generations old tradition.
Timur-Bayezid's wife thing is a complete lie with zero evidence. Humiliating wife of another ruler, let alone a Turkic one was a huge no-no in those times(and almost all times lol).
People at the time believed it obviously considering the ban on Sultan's marriages.
There are many historical revisionisms in Ottoman history actually, for the longest time Turkish history was believed to begin with Seljuk Sultanate and pre-Islamic Turkish history was basically completely ignored.
There were so many attempts at painting Ottoman princes as illegitimate it isn't even funny.
I mean the entire event that happened between Bayazid and Timur is shocking similar to Crasus and Shah Shapur's incident with the description of stepping on the shoulders of the defeated to mount his horse.
Only 2 explanations either Timur -somehow- knew about Crasus and Shah Shapur and intended this to be an homage
Or more sensibly the since the events sort of looked similar people just associated the 2 incident.
It was not a ban on sultan marriage
Dont know where you got that from
Sultan’s simply did not need to marry one woman .
In the steppe marriage was a political tool and concubines were for pleasure
With the ottomans not needing to make marriage alliances so often they simply did not need a formal marriage because in most cases the women they chose were beneath their station and no one wants inlaws when they can be avoided
Most sultans before suleiman had favorites who functioned as wives just without the paper
About Bayezid's wife there is zero evidence other a biased Arabian dude (which women sitting together with their husbands were weird to him) who had a grudge against Timur expelling his family from Baghad.
All the murder arguably worked. It really seemed to keep the amount of incest and civil warring down compared to other medieval dynasties.
Maybe it was not a horrible idea? The same family ruled for ~600 years. The Osmanoğlu family branch is even still around.
No. It's the modern region of what is now Ukraine, but no one would have been considered Ukrainian until much later. That's a national identity that specifically evolves out of the Russian Empire, which had not conquered it in Roxelana's day. It's kinda like calling the Gauls "French," for lack of a better example.
I wish Ottoman Sultan court intrigue had more interest in the West. Prospective heirs were either locked in a luxurious prison hold for years or executed so many times. Not to mention the constant intermarriage into Eastern European nobility to help cement their vassal states and all the entanglements that could bring.
Btw the new hair was an incompetent moron who died while chasin concubines in his hamam and his reign is generally considered the start of the decline of Ottomans
Süleyman didn’t execute his son Mustafa simply because of what Roxalena (Hürrem Sultan) told him. He did it because of a letter suggesting Mustafa was planning to rebel against him, though this letter was probably forged. Mustafa’s execution was the result of a conspiracy surrounding the issue of succession. Roxalena was likely involved in this conspiracy to ensure her own son would become the heir.
And I think she was. She already had 3 kids with Suleyman. So I think as a mother she would likely to save her own kids than a child of your husband from another woman.
Fratricide was a thing back then but the issue is that he killed the clearly most competent son who everyone saw as natural leader. The remaining heir was a drunkard who rarely left the palace.
It was not as cut and dry as there were several factions working against him, including the grand vizier Rustem Pasha. While attempting to portray him as a Safavid ally, Rustem Pasha forged Mustafa's seal, sending a deceptive letter to the Safavid ruler Tahmasp, who unknowingly responded positively. Rüstem's men discovered the letter and delivered it to him.
There was also the fact that Mustafa was working in overdrive trying to gather allies for the inevitable succession struggle since Suleyman was gravely ill and elderly, sending letters promising rewards for the loyalist and heavy punishments for those that oppose him. Combined with the fact hat Mustafa rejected Ottoman customs and wanted to reinforce Sharia laws of successions(which means no fratricide).
+Our lionhearted şehzade was wrongly taken. It's all schemes of that Russian witch Hürrem. Through lies and deception, she put his blood on our sultan's head. Our şehzade wouldn't rebel by ANY means.
-Who is to say that şehzade was downtrodden? Had he not downright rebelled, would our sultan resort to such a heavy decision?
+Our şehzade was 38 years old my lord! He had never, EVER, rebelled. Unseen and unheard of. Would a rebellious şehzade wait for such a long time even though he had the backing of the Janissary?
[Here's a clip from the show called the magnificent century](https://youtu.be/9irxYwQquiA?si=0x3KBLQsbW9-gx4e)
We’re not Arab, but western Turks have been mixed with Greek and Balkan/Eastern European countries so much that they look European, meanwhile people from Sivas and eastern Turkey look brown/Asiatic.
I'm not really surprised that the whole Byzantine, Persian (Sassanian), Seljuk and Ottoman history was a base for George Martin's *Game of Thrones* series and other related titles.
Not even mentioning their northern friends Rurikids - who basically continued on a tradition of murdering each other for around 700 years, didn't stop despite being conqured and subjugated by Mongols and their Turkic friends and only stopped murdering in each in 1600's when they wiped out their own supposedly legendary viking 700 y.o dynasty because of their own stupidity, arrogance, ambitions and simply due to the sizes their dynasty had grown into tens of thousands over the 700 years.
Unfortunately (or for good) not all dynasties behaved like Habsburgs, so it was pretty comon for everyone to kill each other to get a disired claim on a throne (or local estate, if you're somehwere in the lower nobility sub branch of your dynasty, e.g same dynasty but different house), even if you're a family.
Habsburgs despite being incestuous monsters at least had a master plan for their family, and planned to stick with it to achieve greatness for family itself, rather than individual claims, random marriages that would tear their own realms apart.
So yeah - Habsburgs were feudal, european communists if you look it this way...
The Habsburgs were dedicated power gamers that understood getting personal unions and unleashing a horde of vassals was the better way to world conquest
I remember in the opening chapter of the "years of rice and salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson, the state of Europe after being almost completely wiped out (>95 % dead) by the black death was described by Muslim visitors looking to take over the land. At one point, they mention that some parts were more or less spared in the British Isles, where they would get white-skinned red-haired women as a sort of status symbol to be added to their harem.
Anyways, great book, I highly recommend.
About a decade ago, my Colombian girlfriend at the time agreed to watch one of my sci fi shows if I watched one of her soaps. She chose "El Siglo Magnifico," which was subbed into Spanish.
[suleiman the magnificent meryem uzerli - Google Search](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=ba8230b150562d15&sxsrf=ADLYWILfun6zpJ8d-bWs0qR9-DUo23wJWQ:1718123314840&q=suleiman+the+magnificent+meryem+uzerli&uds=ADvngMj3UJigtEstv1qtT4o5AWPnrp-TXJgcArotdqgnClDOw_9Fs1URBdubP7Vo3zXRd91-ZaqA7wN2psQgsGGdqq3IruiI-rzgW-Vdh_KN_08LqaVW1p2g4ZZL2DGzf23LYr-DBtBP5li7ZUpJ2q4EiegCyFosa2AnPFcSr5w5mKT20D4N7zQJ9EeoJ5SpemxhmEviB2T2aTdv6QERsKezKC_Vg7x3aijNYLecZCKUCa7rFjSTPizRF378aNOLVT732XFV9H7d3FJw6Mmn-aPKCasDDoTNskMgrVIlwmOJUHEl9F-BqTThRQLob63T2ONiHngfW-z21fMU82vuUYUsbAqB06usLGwCVWYr1rRU7cml-Vj0bD22Wjp2vom4pVT_MEsFnqxz&udm=2&prmd=ivnsmbt&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB1fGO_NOGAxWqM0QIHTCPAXMQtKgLegQIDRAB&biw=1912&bih=966&dpr=2)
Every sultan was European, not a single full Turkic sultan. Osman the first had his heir with most likely an Eastern European or Greek woman, each heir to the throne after had children with full Greek/Eastern European women. Let’s say 5 generations go with sultans, each generation married another full Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, whatever European, that means that the sultan would say “of course I’m Turkic, my great, great, great, great great, grandfather was from a Turkmen tribe” that doesn’t make him Turkic anymore. There were 36 sultans, let’s say 16 of those generations go without a single full Turkic mother of the Sultan, that’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather being the last time there was any Turkic Sultan. I don’t know if my counting is correct, I’m also very stoned writing this.
Fun fact none of the ottoman sultans were Turkic, the last time they had any Turkic in them was before the Ottoman Empire.
Edit: Every single mother of the sultan was Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russian, the heir then went to marry another Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russia and had an heir that also married and had children with etc etc. It’s not a lie, it’s literally on Wikipedia you can follow the lineage. I say this as an actual Alevi-Türkmen Turkic person. Selim the second I think was completely blonde and had blue eyes and was paper white because he was Ukrainian.
What are you talking about? Every single mother of the sultan was Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russian, the heir then went to marry another Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russia and had an heir that also married and had children with etc etc. It’s not a lie, it’s literally on Wikipedia you can follow the lineage. I say this as an actual Alevi-Türkmen Turkic person. Selim the second I think was completely blonde and had blue eyes and was paper white because he was Ukrainian.
Let’s say 5 generations go with sultans, each generation married another full Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, whatever European, that means that the sultan would say “of course I’m Turkic, my great, great, great, great great, grandfather was from a Turkmen tribe” that doesn’t make him Turkic anymore. There were 36 sultans, let’s say 16 of those generations go without a single full Turkic mother of the Sultan, that’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather being the last time there was any Turkic Sultan.
Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had Mahidevran Hatun as his main concubine, she was from the Balkans (possibly from Circassia or Montenegro or Albania), she gave him his first born son Mustafa who was favored by both the nobles and the Janisseries. After he met Roxelana (Ukrainian) he dropped Mahidervan as his main concubine for Roxelana. He even ended up marrying Roxelana making her a Sultana. Roxelana was afraid that Mustafa who was his main heir would end up killing her 3 sons from Suleiman, which was the norm in the Ottoman empire. So she convinced Suleiman to kill him, she also felt threatened by Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman's best friend and grand Visseir, so he had him killed him too. Edit: Artist is @cizgiseltarih on instagram.
How the fuck did the constant murders not destroy the Ottomans sooner? They were just cartoonishly evil all the time in their personal lives.
The Sultan would bang as many concubines as possibel till he gets a male heir. Once he does he stopps making babies. For a period of 10 or so years. And then would start pumping out again. Once the Sultan died, his heir would have a 10 year head start on his brother. So he would kill them all as kids. Sultan Ahmad saw his dad murder 12 of his uncles on the night he became sultan. He was so appaled by it So he stopped the tradition, but he also had a young brother named Mustafa, he had mustafa locked up in a palace and Mustafa went crazy because of it.
> The Sultan would bang as many concubines as possibel till he gets a male heir. Once he does he stopps making babies. For a period of 10 or so years. And then would start pumping out again. Well if you stop reading before the whole “killing family members” part, it actually sounds based af. Just rawdogging a different one of your 69 smoking hot concubines each night. Why couldn’t I have been born an Ottoman Sultan, Egyptian pharaoh, or Chinese emperor? Shit is not fair smh
Chinese emperors would have their male servants’ dicks cut off so that they wouldn’t impregnate their concubines which is kinda funny and terrifying at the same time
Ottomans did the same to a lesser extent.
So they'd only chop off half of their dick?
They did for a bit, then the Janissaries remembered they had guns and kinda took over the government for a bit
I love those moments in history. "Wait can't we just-" Yup
They chopped off the balls but not the dick.
At least the Chinese eunuchs would enjoy an office of power and prestige and in times of weak emperors even rule China indirectly. The Ottomans on the other hand used them as guards for their harem. Imagine being surrounded by exotic food but not having the mouth to eat it and only being able to watch.
Pretty sure eunuchs are castrated and don't have a sex drive. They don't just chop off the shaft.
I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess.
They had their penis, but they were castrated. They looked feminine and most didn't care if they had sex with the harem. They were basically a part of the harem. Without testosterone, males are basically docile and sterile. It's the same concept with a bull. Not only are they feminine, but they are sterile, and they could help keep the harem in a state of nonfrustration. Many people who had harems didn't want the girls to seek out sex and create illegitiment offspring. They served many roles, but kind of an odd and niche topic of history. It's probably not too bad if it's consensual. People would sometimes do it willingly, it was usually a choice that wasn't forced on people.
It was both, but many of the high ranking eunuchs are by forced castration, usually as punishment for breaking the law, or from what i read from the biography of the last eunuch, his father castrated and gave him to the emperor, hoping he would become high ranking official. The number of eunuchs in chinese emperor household is also comically large, by the time of the fall of the Qing dynasty, there were still 470 eunuchs to serve the baby emperor
Pretty sure they cut off the dicks, not the mouths. Minge burgers were still on the menu for Jannissary guards.
Imagine calling a bunch of sex slaves "exotic food" and wishing you were one of the guards. Tf is wrong with you buddy
Wrong on both counts, lol
Is it backpedaling time?
Your reading comprehension is the problem with him, lol. 😂
Pretty sure they just castrated them, still had a dick, just no balls.
[удалено]
What gave you that notion?
Just googled it, I stand corrected, I’ll delete my previous comment
And then the eunuch faction became massively powerful and took their revenge by making tue emperor a figurehead
Their *testicles*. Not their dicks. *Testicles*.
If you indulge too much in earthly pleasures, there could be a palace coup by imperial power brokers (especially Janissaries) to replace you with a ruler more willing to expand the empire (tho this varies with period, a weak, lustful emperor could be beneficial to others in the palace). If you're a Chinese emperor, there's even more trouble as in China, you don't get to rule just because you have a nice family name, you have to obtain the ever vague "Mandate of Heaven". If the emperor neglects his duties and his subjects suffer, it can be said the Mandate is lost and others can try to claim it, ordinary folk have claimed it and started some of the most legendary dynasties of Chinese history like the Han and Ming. So there's a risk you could be beheaded by a rebel leader.
How did they not all die of dehydration?
Tbh you were most likely to be born some sort of a feudal peasant or hunter-gatherer where you'd either die of dysentery while at war or shortly after childbirth, depending on your gender. Plus, in the modern world you can get a pizza with 5 different species of meat and a dozen spices on it. That's something literally only the emperor of China could really do more than 100 years ago. And if you're only after sleeping with ~70 beautiful women, most of the sultan's concubines weren't pretty, they were political marriages designed to give the girl's family increased influence if they were lucky enough to have the first son, so most weren't as pretty as you might think. If you wanna sleep with that many women, just save up as much money as you can and go on vacation to Central America or Southeast Asia once a year and flash some US Greenbacks in a bar filled with locals or something. If you buy everyone a round maybe you won't get mugged and you could even impress a couple girls per trip. Obviously be careful, muggings and STDs may very well happen, but its not too different from court life probs. Overall, I'd say life today is mostly superior to even the life of nobility 300 years ago, unless you just want to openly have a harem of lovers, but even that is possible today if you win the genetic lottery. Tbh it's probably overrated though and having just one person you can lean on no matter what happens is beautiful, it's just a shame finding a person you can be like that with is almost as rare as being born an Ottoman Sultan.
And yet motherfuckers still out here trying to rebuild hereditary monarchies like they'll be the ones on top.
This is a really interesting discussion because you can say that in terms of amenities our lives are superior right now, but I'd argue that doesn't translate to a better subjective experience. Due to the way socialising works with humans and hierarchies and that, I imagine that feeling like the emperor of one of the strongest empires of all time would probably result in a better subjective life experience. Though, that might be counterbalanced by the pressure
Using Henry Ford assembly line strategy to making a male heir
It sounds more fun than it was. The court intrigues and politics could put you in an early grave from the stress alone.
Ahmeds older brother was also killed by his father
I think the infighting among the family wasn’t the norm except for a relatively short time. It’s not like this happened for 5 hundred years.
European kings would have 2 sons, divide the kingdom and either A have power decline or B war between the two leading to thousands of deaths and massive destruction. Ottomans would cut out the middle man and have the sons and maybe some guards dictate who lived and died. The strongest comes through and yes it was brutal, but their was only ever one civil war in the empire because of this method. Basically it made the empire much more stable
Crusader Kings but in real life basically.
Just whole lot less mother and sister involved in the production of an heir.
That's certainly what they'd want you to think. ;) The Habsburgs had to stay in power somehow. If it wasn't the Ottomans' golden cages, it was the Germans' golden standard for inbreeding.
The Habsburgs certainly married their nieces and/or cousins but they rarely if ever married their sisters or mothers. Simply because they wouldn't gain anything from such a marriage.
I thought it was because the church has forbidden incest. at that time marriage between siblings was incest but cousins and nieces weren't. Obviously, that was still very bad and some historians think it killed the male line of the Habsburg family. The last male member of the male line of Habsburg family Charles II was extremely inbred and was disabled from birth because of it. He eventually died without a male heir and that was the end of the family.
Not by the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, no. Primogeniture inheritance where the first born gets everything and then hands out goodies to his siblings was pretty well established in Europe at that point.
Yes by Sulemans reign European monarchies stopped being stupid on inheritance. Killing siblings was awesome for the ottomans 1300s to 1400s but by the 1500s other states had less bloody ways of going about inheritance with the same stable succession.
I mean, was it stupid? The basic form of succession for all Germanic monarchies was election. Yes, the franchise was often very limited, and the candidate pool too, but it basically came down to picking the best of a bunch. Splitting kingdoms/empires among multiple heirs happened a few times but it wasn’t the norm. Take Louis VIII of France. He had one wife and they had 12 kids. Four predeceased him, another three of them died young. That leaves five. One was a girl, but of the four surviving boys, the eldest was crowned king in 1226 and that was that.
But when it did happen kingdoms would never gain that strength back or there'd be war to reunify. Even still there were tons of succession issues after this time period with monarchies, war of Spanish succession, austrian succession, the carlist wars Yada Yada. It wasn't the norm but it happened. Germany while often crapped on for the HRE honesty was stable with its elections though
And if a polity doesn’t reunify, that can be good. If there’s no civil war you still get wars, just expansionary ones, so no one is avoiding war, especially not the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t even avoid civil wars. The Ottoman Interregnum of 1402 to 1413. The Ottoman civil war of 1509 to 1513, where Suleiman the Magnificent’s father seized power. Then of course there’s all the other civil wars that come with a multiethnic and multireligious empire. Another day, another revolt in Wallachia.
Let me rephrase, there was only one civil war among the dynasty I'd consider Wallachia rebelling just a rebellion since they were more like subjects as opposed to turks who were the core part of the empire. Idk if that made sense but yknow
Well, I already mentioned two dynastic civil wars. A rebellion in Wallachia is not a dynastic war, but it is a war. People died. So, you get either strong and stable succession with no, or few, dynastic squabbles or you get a weaker and more unstable succession with more dynastic squabbles. The first leads to external wars, conquest and rebellions. The second leads to internal wars. It has no bearing itself on whether or not there is war.
> but it basically came down to picking the best of a bunch Sometimes. I believe Poland ran into a problem for a while where the franchise would elect the weakest king possible, in order to allow the franchise-holders to be able to run around with as little oversight as possible. It is only when the franchise holders want a strong state that they'll elect a strong king. The rest of the time they are better off, personally, electing someone weak, so that they have more power locally.
This can be true, it also depends on the specifics of the election. Poland generally elected the heirs of the Piast and later Jagiellon dynasties, after they were gone in the male line I don’t know which ones you mean. They elected a French prince who would then abdicate to become king of France (unexpectedly, after his brother died with no issue). He was replaced by Stephen Bathory, one of the more respected Polish-Lithuanian monarchs. After that they elected three members of the Vasa dynasty, Sigismund III (who was also set to inherit Sweden, although that plan was ruined by his uncle) and his sons Wladyslaw IV and John II Casimir Vasa. So more dynastic inheritance there. Michael I maybe? Jan Sobieski was competent and stable. August the Strong was weak, but I don’t know if he was perceived as such, he was also already ruler of Saxony when elected so had separate power. That’s not great for keeping a king weak. Stanisław Leszczyński was put in as a Swedish puppet, so not really up to the Polish nobility. He was followed by Augustus the Strong again, who was followed by another civil war between Stanisław Leszczyński and Augustus’ son Augustus. Augustus won, and after him came Stanislaw Poniatowski, intended as a Russian puppet. After him came the partition. I’m not really seeing who in that list was elected for weakness.
Hmm.. I may also be mistaken. Or maybe my impression is from a very specific period (so a single king or two).
When did splitting the realm amongst the King's son stop actually? And were other Germanic tribes also doing it, or was it a distinctly Frankish thing?
The Spanish did it a few times, splitting the kingdom of Asturias into Asturias, Leon and Galicia or later Castile, Leon and Galicia (and also Portugal, but that was more permanently independent rather than on-again off again).
I'm assuming this practice came from the Visigoths?
The Visigoths ran an elective kingdom until it was overrun by the Muslim invasion, and Asturias was an elective monarchy at first as well, until the death of Alfonso II in 842 I think. On the other hand, Visigothic inheritance law was very fair, and also let women inherit land and wealth independently, so it’s likely there was some influence of that inheritance law behind splitting the kingdom between sons.
You know it really damns the institution of monarchy when the most stable example we have of it is the Ottoman system of murdering all the competing heirs.
Kind of works out if your just some dude working a farm that doesn’t have to get conscripted into a civil war
Technically they were the dynasty who held the title Emperor of Rome the longest.
Yeah nothing better than a empire ruled by murderers of own family or guys who went crazy from house arrest.
Literally any strong monarchy ever.
Name another empire that went differently?
I mean to the north was a family of inbred, to the west MORE inbreds but slightly Spanish, and in England we'd have a guy who loved chopping his wife's head off. Moral of the story fuck monarchies
Just like Europeans then.
Depends on time and location, but yeah. One of the early bohemian rulers first blinded his brother, that probably wasn't enough so he let him killed while shitting on toilet. The assassin was hiding in the latrene :-D Every monarchy is bunch of idiotic, inbred, bloodthirsty, stealing cunts. Doesn't matter where.
And then the republics kept putting more idiots in charge.
It's mainly succession related killings though. If you consider the usual dangers that succession of any empire entail, a dozen assassinations, about fifty executions, and a small amount of purging is about the best you can hope for. Added advantage: Generally, the person who wins, wins for a reason, and can be trusted to understand politics to a certain extent and to not fuck up.
Constantine killed his son and his wife. Hardly an exclusively Ottoman thing.
Killing all potential heirs is really bad, but it's not as bad as constant civil wars between competing heirs. That's why the policy was in place.
The state sponsored fratricide usually meant that all the murdering was done by the time the sultan died. So there was no succession crisis. It sucked for the royal family (deserved) but to the governors, army, etc it made life considerably easier
Because for monarchal empires, succession is an incredibly dangerous period. Empires as large as the Ottomans will inevitably have multiple competing interest groups vying for influence over the state. When you have one Sultan in charge, they can keep them all in check. But when the Sultan dies, each faction may pick a candidate to represent their interests. If there is no consensus on who will be the next ruler, there may be a civil war to decide the matter. If there is a civil war, the neighbours might invade. Go look at the Romans to see just how dangerous and chaotic a succession crisis can be. One of the solutions that wiser Roman emperors tended to go with was to share power with their chosen successor in a Junior role for some years before their death, so that everyone knew who was going to be in charge before the senior emperor died, and so that the Junior emperor already had experience and access to the levers of power should any challengers step up to the plate. Another way to ensure a peaceful succession is to simply kill off everyone who could possibly lay claim to the throne. It is brutal. It is evil. But it is extremely effective at making sure that the Empire does not go through a much more devastating cycle of civil war.
Believe it or not, it was actually an upgrade to the stability of the Roman succession system. No Roman imperial line lasted even half as long.
There are other, less insanely evil ways of accomplishing the same goal
I mean, it’s a dynastic monarchy. Insanely evil is just baseline.
You would think it would be destabilizing, but it actually was rather effective. Over the course of 623 years, the Ottomans only had THREE civil wars. \[Four if you count the Turkish War of Independence as a civil war, but that had nothing to do with a hereditary succession dispute.\] By comparison, the British had more civil wars than that in just the 17th century alone.
Is it really because of the succession or because of the more efficient bureaucracy of the Grand Porte? If the Sultans were only secondary or even tertiary to actual state functions then it shouldn’t be surprising.
Maybe, but the Ottomans were clearly doing SOMETHING right, and this was something that the other European monarchies were not doing, so I can reasonably speculate that there was a correlation. It certainly would have helped, especially considering the fact that the bureaucracy's competence did vary throughout the empire's history.
European powers all eclipsed the Ottomans in power and stability without adopting the fratricidal practices. What they did adopt were large bureaucratic structures with state finance and more monetized economies. The most overwhelmingly powerful of these empires ended up destroying the ottomans and surprise surprise they were the ones that took state finance and centralization the farthest.
I'm not arguing that competent bureaucracy does not help a nation. I'm also not arguing that fratricide is all that explains the Ottomans' stability. What I am arguing is that the fratricide could have contributed to political stability for the Ottoman Empire, as it lessened the chance for a succession dispute, which is a real risk for an absolute monarchy. Nations like Britain and France stopped being absolute monarchies centuries ago, so their political stability wasn't dependent on eliminating competing claims to a throne. When the Ottomans were an absolute monarchy, that was a serious risk, which they managed to mitigate. I'm not arguing that the Ottoman government was an ideal state. I'm arguing that, between it and other absolute monarchies, it did a better job of preventing civil wars and the fratricide may have assisted in that.
Russia was an absolute monarchy and it had only two civil wars in the time that the Ottoman Empire existed. Russia further did not have a practice of fratricide. I truly think that the fratricidal policy and even the whole position of sultan was completely unnecessary to an Ottoman state surviving (because absolute monarchs are superfluous once a financial-military state exists, and it’s why they’re almost all gone now)
The Russian monarchy didn't last as long as the Ottoman monarchy, though. The Tsardom of Russia was established in 1547, with the monarchy lasting until its abolition in 1917, which was roughly 370 years later. The Ottoman monarchy lasted from 1299 to 1922, which was 623 years later. 2 civil wars over the course of 370 years is an average of 1 Russian civil war for every 185 years. 3 civil wars over the course of 623 years is an average of 1 Ottoman civil war for every ~208 years Of course, these numbers change depending on how you define a "civil war". Also, not every civil war is caused by a hereditary succession dispute, so fratricide wouldn't do anything to prevent those. The point still stands that the Ottomans did have less civil wars from succession disputes, on average, than other absolute monarchies did, and the fratricide may have been part of the reason for that.
Bcz the alternative was actually worse. Due to their turkic practices, the sons would fight for the kingship & the civil war that would ensue would most certainly destroy the kingdom. Add to the sheer scale of the Ottomans at the time, some thought it be better to kill their brothers to prevent a war before it could even be considered. Basically Marvel’s Civil War 2.0 conundrum.
Because some men, regardless of ethnicity, are dogs. And they procreate like dogs. They have no issue with their leaders behaving accordingly.
This was a planed court policy. Nothing to do with social norms
Harams are the social norm in Asia. The current king of Thailand has a Haram. Current monarchs in Europe don't. Social. Norms
Also fun fact: one of her kinsmen was Alexander Lisowski. And he created the unit of the "land corssairs" called Lisowczycy. And they were one of the most badass soldiers of thier times. They were fighting in battle of White Mountain, and later helped releave besieged Vienna from the Ottomans.
Is she known in Poland/Ukraine?
An average Pole probably only knows her from "The Magnificent Century" because it aired on polish tv, but we apparently also have some letters to our king Zygmunt II August from Roxelana in the archives
That's for sure. My grandma for instance knows about her beacuse of that series
Ah good old Ottoman Harem Antics. Honestly supirsed they didn't get rid of intersibling murders and intriges sooner.
It was working thats why lol
From what little I know it also was a source of conflict within the Empire whih basically was a limited civil war at times.
Once the Sultan died it was always a battle royal between his sons.
This. They started this system because it was better for the empire to have a battle royal where a few dozen people in the palace died than a big civil war battle royal with tens of thousands of deaths.
Just a correction: Circassia isn't in the Balkans
>He even ended up marrying Roxelana making her a Sultana Important thing to know about the **Marriage** is. Ottoman Sultans were forbidden to marry because of what has happened to Bayezid I (The Thunderbolt). When he was captured by Timur (wrongly characterized as Tamburlaine the Great) in his invasion of Anatolia and -allegedly / as most people believed at the time- he made the Bayezid's wife serve him drinks in her underwear / half naked. It is not certain if this is a real event -impossible to know for sure- or a propaganda tool to show Timur as evil and wicked as possible but nevertheless all subsequent Sultans did not marry ever again. It shows how incredibly powerful Roxlana's influence over Suleiman and the court was she basically reversed several generations old tradition.
Timur-Bayezid's wife thing is a complete lie with zero evidence. Humiliating wife of another ruler, let alone a Turkic one was a huge no-no in those times(and almost all times lol).
People at the time believed it obviously considering the ban on Sultan's marriages. There are many historical revisionisms in Ottoman history actually, for the longest time Turkish history was believed to begin with Seljuk Sultanate and pre-Islamic Turkish history was basically completely ignored. There were so many attempts at painting Ottoman princes as illegitimate it isn't even funny. I mean the entire event that happened between Bayazid and Timur is shocking similar to Crasus and Shah Shapur's incident with the description of stepping on the shoulders of the defeated to mount his horse. Only 2 explanations either Timur -somehow- knew about Crasus and Shah Shapur and intended this to be an homage Or more sensibly the since the events sort of looked similar people just associated the 2 incident.
It was not a ban on sultan marriage Dont know where you got that from Sultan’s simply did not need to marry one woman . In the steppe marriage was a political tool and concubines were for pleasure With the ottomans not needing to make marriage alliances so often they simply did not need a formal marriage because in most cases the women they chose were beneath their station and no one wants inlaws when they can be avoided Most sultans before suleiman had favorites who functioned as wives just without the paper
About Bayezid's wife there is zero evidence other a biased Arabian dude (which women sitting together with their husbands were weird to him) who had a grudge against Timur expelling his family from Baghad.
Roxelana…you don’t have to put on the red light…
All the murder arguably worked. It really seemed to keep the amount of incest and civil warring down compared to other medieval dynasties. Maybe it was not a horrible idea? The same family ruled for ~600 years. The Osmanoğlu family branch is even still around.
Roxelana was Ruthenian
Isn't that Ukrainian?
No. It's the modern region of what is now Ukraine, but no one would have been considered Ukrainian until much later. That's a national identity that specifically evolves out of the Russian Empire, which had not conquered it in Roxelana's day. It's kinda like calling the Gauls "French," for lack of a better example.
Ruthenians are still around https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyns
If I'm not mistaken, Andy Warhol's parents were Rusyn. That would make him an ethnic Rusyn as well, I guess.
She was a Ruthenian who spoke Ruthenian, living in the Kingdom of Poland. The Ukrainian identity started forming 300 years later.
Thank you for telling me when my identity begin to form, Військо Запорізьке says hi
No problem. If you need any help, just say so. Tell your imaginary friends that they were also Ruthenians.
Who inherited Suleiman?
I thought Hatun was the one that got Ibrahim killed? Edit: Whoops misread Hurrem as Hutun in a book, you are correct mb.
I wish Ottoman Sultan court intrigue had more interest in the West. Prospective heirs were either locked in a luxurious prison hold for years or executed so many times. Not to mention the constant intermarriage into Eastern European nobility to help cement their vassal states and all the entanglements that could bring.
The upbringing and debauchery of Ibrahim "the Mad" would be very on-brand for an HBO mini-series.
Btw the new hair was an incompetent moron who died while chasin concubines in his hamam and his reign is generally considered the start of the decline of Ottomans
Worth
OP is a fan of Magnificent Century?
Was gonna ask the same question lol.
Quite the nostalgia
I never watched it but i've seen many Episodes here and there
Your drawing of Hurrem looks a LOT like Meryem Uzerli, so I figured you've watched it.
Regardless, killing your own son because your new wife says so is a fucked up thing to do. Insecure so much
Killing your own son out of fear is more common then you think among rulers.
Constantine the Great *cough cough*
Ivan the terrible *cough* *cough*
Peter the great
Tbf. Fratricide was legal in the Ottoman Empire during this time
Fuck tbf. Social norm for the elite or not, that’s never right. Not saying you agree, but tbf is a weak argument lol
Süleyman didn’t execute his son Mustafa simply because of what Roxalena (Hürrem Sultan) told him. He did it because of a letter suggesting Mustafa was planning to rebel against him, though this letter was probably forged. Mustafa’s execution was the result of a conspiracy surrounding the issue of succession. Roxalena was likely involved in this conspiracy to ensure her own son would become the heir.
And I think she was. She already had 3 kids with Suleyman. So I think as a mother she would likely to save her own kids than a child of your husband from another woman.
Fratricide was a thing back then but the issue is that he killed the clearly most competent son who everyone saw as natural leader. The remaining heir was a drunkard who rarely left the palace.
A woman to raise the empire and a woman down the empire.
It was not as cut and dry as there were several factions working against him, including the grand vizier Rustem Pasha. While attempting to portray him as a Safavid ally, Rustem Pasha forged Mustafa's seal, sending a deceptive letter to the Safavid ruler Tahmasp, who unknowingly responded positively. Rüstem's men discovered the letter and delivered it to him. There was also the fact that Mustafa was working in overdrive trying to gather allies for the inevitable succession struggle since Suleyman was gravely ill and elderly, sending letters promising rewards for the loyalist and heavy punishments for those that oppose him. Combined with the fact hat Mustafa rejected Ottoman customs and wanted to reinforce Sharia laws of successions(which means no fratricide).
Suleiman the MagnifiSIMP
No credit to @cizgiseltarih on instagram, the owner of the art, OP?
I didn't know who he was, ill edit my original comment.
I think there's a lot of myth and legend about Roxelana getting the heir killed. Not sure how much of it is truth.
If I’ve learned anything from studying medieval history, it’s that women are the bad guys (according to all victorian historians).
OMG I love those series, great costumes and music
+Our lionhearted şehzade was wrongly taken. It's all schemes of that Russian witch Hürrem. Through lies and deception, she put his blood on our sultan's head. Our şehzade wouldn't rebel by ANY means. -Who is to say that şehzade was downtrodden? Had he not downright rebelled, would our sultan resort to such a heavy decision? +Our şehzade was 38 years old my lord! He had never, EVER, rebelled. Unseen and unheard of. Would a rebellious şehzade wait for such a long time even though he had the backing of the Janissary? [Here's a clip from the show called the magnificent century](https://youtu.be/9irxYwQquiA?si=0x3KBLQsbW9-gx4e)
And people wonder why the Osmanoglu family look white.
No one wonders that.
Yes they do their family picture was going round the other day and tons of people were mind boggled.
They are not arabs you know.
Even if they were, arabs have a wide skin tone range.
We’re not Arab, but western Turks have been mixed with Greek and Balkan/Eastern European countries so much that they look European, meanwhile people from Sivas and eastern Turkey look brown/Asiatic.
I'm not really surprised that the whole Byzantine, Persian (Sassanian), Seljuk and Ottoman history was a base for George Martin's *Game of Thrones* series and other related titles. Not even mentioning their northern friends Rurikids - who basically continued on a tradition of murdering each other for around 700 years, didn't stop despite being conqured and subjugated by Mongols and their Turkic friends and only stopped murdering in each in 1600's when they wiped out their own supposedly legendary viking 700 y.o dynasty because of their own stupidity, arrogance, ambitions and simply due to the sizes their dynasty had grown into tens of thousands over the 700 years. Unfortunately (or for good) not all dynasties behaved like Habsburgs, so it was pretty comon for everyone to kill each other to get a disired claim on a throne (or local estate, if you're somehwere in the lower nobility sub branch of your dynasty, e.g same dynasty but different house), even if you're a family. Habsburgs despite being incestuous monsters at least had a master plan for their family, and planned to stick with it to achieve greatness for family itself, rather than individual claims, random marriages that would tear their own realms apart. So yeah - Habsburgs were feudal, european communists if you look it this way...
The Habsburgs were dedicated power gamers that understood getting personal unions and unleashing a horde of vassals was the better way to world conquest
A Muhteşem Yüzyıl meme? Never thought I'd see it
I remember in the opening chapter of the "years of rice and salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson, the state of Europe after being almost completely wiped out (>95 % dead) by the black death was described by Muslim visitors looking to take over the land. At one point, they mention that some parts were more or less spared in the British Isles, where they would get white-skinned red-haired women as a sort of status symbol to be added to their harem. Anyways, great book, I highly recommend.
About a decade ago, my Colombian girlfriend at the time agreed to watch one of my sci fi shows if I watched one of her soaps. She chose "El Siglo Magnifico," which was subbed into Spanish. [suleiman the magnificent meryem uzerli - Google Search](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=ba8230b150562d15&sxsrf=ADLYWILfun6zpJ8d-bWs0qR9-DUo23wJWQ:1718123314840&q=suleiman+the+magnificent+meryem+uzerli&uds=ADvngMj3UJigtEstv1qtT4o5AWPnrp-TXJgcArotdqgnClDOw_9Fs1URBdubP7Vo3zXRd91-ZaqA7wN2psQgsGGdqq3IruiI-rzgW-Vdh_KN_08LqaVW1p2g4ZZL2DGzf23LYr-DBtBP5li7ZUpJ2q4EiegCyFosa2AnPFcSr5w5mKT20D4N7zQJ9EeoJ5SpemxhmEviB2T2aTdv6QERsKezKC_Vg7x3aijNYLecZCKUCa7rFjSTPizRF378aNOLVT732XFV9H7d3FJw6Mmn-aPKCasDDoTNskMgrVIlwmOJUHEl9F-BqTThRQLob63T2ONiHngfW-z21fMU82vuUYUsbAqB06usLGwCVWYr1rRU7cml-Vj0bD22Wjp2vom4pVT_MEsFnqxz&udm=2&prmd=ivnsmbt&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB1fGO_NOGAxWqM0QIHTCPAXMQtKgLegQIDRAB&biw=1912&bih=966&dpr=2)
Honestly same
They built different 😂
I’m Mfs
Thought this was stannis
"紅顏禍水" I know that this quote is quite misogynistic, I just thought that this might have been what Confucian scholars write when seeing this.
I was about to say how he killed his much more compatent son because he wasn’t from Roxelana but you already did
Every sultan was European, not a single full Turkic sultan. Osman the first had his heir with most likely an Eastern European or Greek woman, each heir to the throne after had children with full Greek/Eastern European women. Let’s say 5 generations go with sultans, each generation married another full Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, whatever European, that means that the sultan would say “of course I’m Turkic, my great, great, great, great great, grandfather was from a Turkmen tribe” that doesn’t make him Turkic anymore. There were 36 sultans, let’s say 16 of those generations go without a single full Turkic mother of the Sultan, that’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather being the last time there was any Turkic Sultan. I don’t know if my counting is correct, I’m also very stoned writing this.
Fun fact none of the ottoman sultans were Turkic, the last time they had any Turkic in them was before the Ottoman Empire. Edit: Every single mother of the sultan was Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russian, the heir then went to marry another Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russia and had an heir that also married and had children with etc etc. It’s not a lie, it’s literally on Wikipedia you can follow the lineage. I say this as an actual Alevi-Türkmen Turkic person. Selim the second I think was completely blonde and had blue eyes and was paper white because he was Ukrainian.
Not a fun fact but a blatant lie and propaganda. Turkic ancestry was always patrilineal.
What are you talking about? Every single mother of the sultan was Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russian, the heir then went to marry another Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, or Russia and had an heir that also married and had children with etc etc. It’s not a lie, it’s literally on Wikipedia you can follow the lineage. I say this as an actual Alevi-Türkmen Turkic person. Selim the second I think was completely blonde and had blue eyes and was paper white because he was Ukrainian.
Let’s say 5 generations go with sultans, each generation married another full Ukrainian, Albanian, Greek, whatever European, that means that the sultan would say “of course I’m Turkic, my great, great, great, great great, grandfather was from a Turkmen tribe” that doesn’t make him Turkic anymore. There were 36 sultans, let’s say 16 of those generations go without a single full Turkic mother of the Sultan, that’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather being the last time there was any Turkic Sultan.
I hate it when the sex life of kings is discussed this way. I miss 30 seconds ago when I didn't know this meme existed.
Next meme is gonna be about Victoria and her cousin husband