Post by Admin on Aug 19, 2021 18:39:19 GMT
A Visionary Psychopath
Christopher de Bellaigue
The Ottoman sultan Selim I is a near-perfect illustration of Machiavelli’s premise that the powerful individual is the driver of history.
August 19, 2021 issue
www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/08/19/selim-i-visionary-psychopath/
Sultan Selim I, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520, deposed his father and murdered two of his brothers. He executed so many of his officials that he inspired a curse still heard in Turkey today: “I wish for you a vizierate under Selim.” On the rare occasions when he was in his capital, Istanbul—he spent much of his sultanate either campaigning or hunting—he would emerge after dark in disguise, sit with his subjects and gamble (a sin under Islam), and have them hanged the following day. A zealous Sunni, he wrote poems full of images of Shia heretics drowning in seas of blood. Not for nothing was he named Selim the Grim.
For decades the modern Republic of Turkey neglected Selim in favor of his more obviously heroic relatives. His grandfather Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire. His court was a place of debonair cosmopolitanism where Italian Renaissance artists found work. In 1520 Selim’s only son came to the throne as Suleyman I and for the next forty-six years ruled the Ottoman Empire with such splendor and authority that later Europeans dubbed him “the Magnificent.” In the freewheeling early years of Suleyman’s reign, Ibrahim Pasha, a Greek convert of dubious sincerity, effectively ran the empire as grand vizier while Alvise Gritti, the illegitimate son of the Venetian doge, made a huge fortune and dominated trade and diplomacy.
In 1988 an enormous suspension bridge across the Bosporus was opened, bearing the name of Mehmet the Conqueror. More recently, beginning in 2011, Suleyman was the subject of a TV melodrama called Magnificent Century, whose 139 episodes were possibly Turkey’s most far-reaching cultural export since the tulip.
And yet for all the renown of Mehmet and Suleyman, it is Selim who may have the strongest claim to preeminence in what the Turkish historian Halil Inalcik named the empire’s “classical age”: the period, lasting a little more than two centuries, when it went from being one of several Anatolian principalities to attaining something close to administrative and military perfection under Suleyman. This is Alan Mikhail’s view in God’s Shadow, his new biography of Selim, in which he argues that Mehmet’s great conquest was of mainly symbolic importance, the Byzantine Empire having by then been reduced to its impoverished capital and a few overseas territories, while Suleyman has been unduly lauded simply for administering the empire his father created.
Christopher de Bellaigue
The Ottoman sultan Selim I is a near-perfect illustration of Machiavelli’s premise that the powerful individual is the driver of history.
August 19, 2021 issue
www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/08/19/selim-i-visionary-psychopath/
Sultan Selim I, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520, deposed his father and murdered two of his brothers. He executed so many of his officials that he inspired a curse still heard in Turkey today: “I wish for you a vizierate under Selim.” On the rare occasions when he was in his capital, Istanbul—he spent much of his sultanate either campaigning or hunting—he would emerge after dark in disguise, sit with his subjects and gamble (a sin under Islam), and have them hanged the following day. A zealous Sunni, he wrote poems full of images of Shia heretics drowning in seas of blood. Not for nothing was he named Selim the Grim.
For decades the modern Republic of Turkey neglected Selim in favor of his more obviously heroic relatives. His grandfather Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire. His court was a place of debonair cosmopolitanism where Italian Renaissance artists found work. In 1520 Selim’s only son came to the throne as Suleyman I and for the next forty-six years ruled the Ottoman Empire with such splendor and authority that later Europeans dubbed him “the Magnificent.” In the freewheeling early years of Suleyman’s reign, Ibrahim Pasha, a Greek convert of dubious sincerity, effectively ran the empire as grand vizier while Alvise Gritti, the illegitimate son of the Venetian doge, made a huge fortune and dominated trade and diplomacy.
In 1988 an enormous suspension bridge across the Bosporus was opened, bearing the name of Mehmet the Conqueror. More recently, beginning in 2011, Suleyman was the subject of a TV melodrama called Magnificent Century, whose 139 episodes were possibly Turkey’s most far-reaching cultural export since the tulip.
And yet for all the renown of Mehmet and Suleyman, it is Selim who may have the strongest claim to preeminence in what the Turkish historian Halil Inalcik named the empire’s “classical age”: the period, lasting a little more than two centuries, when it went from being one of several Anatolian principalities to attaining something close to administrative and military perfection under Suleyman. This is Alan Mikhail’s view in God’s Shadow, his new biography of Selim, in which he argues that Mehmet’s great conquest was of mainly symbolic importance, the Byzantine Empire having by then been reduced to its impoverished capital and a few overseas territories, while Suleyman has been unduly lauded simply for administering the empire his father created.