The Cage of the Ottoman King

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 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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

maybe a stroke. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood 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,

and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.