10 "dark" secrets of the Ottoman Empire, which do not like to remember in Turkey

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

For nearly 400 years, the Ottoman Empire ruled over what is now Turkey, southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Today, interest in the history of this empire is greater than ever, but at the same time, few people know that the Osta had many "dark" secrets that were hidden from prying eyes.

1. Fratricide

The early Ottoman sultans did not practice the birthright, in which the eldest son inherits everything. As a result, a number of brothers often claimed the throne. In the first decades, there were frequent situations in which some of the potential heirs took refuge in enemy states and caused a lot of problems for many years.

When Mehmed the Conqueror was besieging Constantinople, his own uncle fought against him from the walls of the city. Mehmed handled the problem with his usual ruthlessness. When he ascended the throne, he executed most of his male relatives, including even ordered to strangle his baby brother right in the cradle. Later, he issued his infamous law, which read: "". From that moment on, each new sultan had to take the throne, killing all of his male relatives.

Mehmed III tore out his beard in grief when his younger brother asked him for mercy. But at the same time he "did not answer him a word," and the boy was executed along with 18 other brothers. And Suleiman the Magnificent silently watched from behind a screen as his own son was strangled with a bowstring when he became too popular in the army and became a danger to his power.

2. Cages for shehzade

The policy of fratricide was never popular with the people and the clergy, and when Ahmed I died suddenly in 1617, it was abandoned. Instead of killing all potential heirs to the throne, they began to be imprisoned in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in special rooms known as Kafes ("cells"). A prince of the Ottoman Empire could spend his entire life imprisoned in Kafes, under constant guards. And although the heirs were kept, as a rule, in luxury, many shehzade (sons of the sultans) went mad with boredom or became libertine drunkards. And this is understandable, because they understood that at any moment they could be executed.

3. The palace is like a quiet hell

Even for the Sultan, life in Topkapi Palace could be extremely bleak. At that time, it was believed that it was indecent for the sultan to speak too much, so a special form of sign language was introduced, and the ruler spent most of his time in complete silence.

Mustafa I considered that it was simply impossible to endure and tried to abolish such a rule, but his viziers refused to approve this prohibition. As a result, Mustafa soon went mad. He often came to the seashore and threw coins into the water, so that "at least the fish would spend them somewhere."

The atmosphere in the palace was literally saturated with intrigue - everyone fought for power: viziers, courtiers and eunuchs. The women of the harem gained great influence and eventually this period of the empire became known as the "sultanate of women." Akhmet III once wrote to his grand vizier: "".

4. A gardener with the duties of an executioner

The rulers of the Ottomans had complete control over the life and death of their subjects, and they used it without hesitation. The Topkapi Palace, which received petitioners and guests, was a terrifying place. It had two columns on which the severed heads were placed, as well as a special fountain exclusively for executioners so that they could wash their hands. During the periodical purges of the palace from the unwanted or guilty in the courtyard, whole mounds of the languages of the victims were piled up.

Curiously, the Ottomans did not bother to create a corps of executioners. These duties, oddly enough, were entrusted to the palace gardeners, who divided their time between killing and cultivating delicious flowers. Most of the victims were simply beheaded. But it was forbidden to shed the blood of the Sultan's family and high-ranking officials, so they were strangled. It is for this reason that the head gardener has always been a huge, muscular man, capable of quickly strangling anyone.

5. Death Race

For the guilty officials, there was only one way to avoid the Sultan's wrath. Beginning in the late 18th century, it was customary for a condemned grand vizier to escape his fate by defeating the chief gardener in a race through the palace gardens. The vizier was summoned to a meeting with the head gardener and, after exchanging greetings, he was handed a cup of frozen sorbet. If the sherbet was white, then the sultan provided the vizier with a reprieve, and if he was red, he should have executed the vizier. As soon as a person condemned to death saw a red sorbet, he immediately had to run through the palace gardens between shady cypresses and rows of tulips. The goal was to get to the gate on the other side of the garden that led to the fish market.

The problem was one thing: the vizier was being chased by the head gardener (who was always younger and stronger) with a silk cord. However, several viziers managed to do so, including Hachi Salih Pasha, the last vizier to last in such a deadly race. As a result, he became a sanjak-bey (governor) of one of the provinces.

6. Scapegoats

Despite the fact that in power the grand viziers were theoretically second only to the sultan in power, they were usually executed or thrown into the crowd to be torn apart as a "scapegoat" whenever something went wrong. During the time of Selim the Terrible, so many great viziers were replaced that they began to always carry their wills with them. One vizier once asked Selim to let him know in advance if he would be executed soon, to which the Sultan replied that a whole line of people had already lined up to replace him. The viziers were also supposed to reassure the people of Istanbul, who always, when he did not like something, came in droves to the palace and demanded execution.

7. Harem

Perhaps the most important attraction of the Topkapi Palace was the Sultan's harem. It consisted of up to 2,000 women, most of whom were bought or kidnapped slaves. These wives and concubines of the Sultan were kept locked up, and any stranger who saw them was executed on the spot.

The harem itself was guarded and controlled by the chief eunuch, who, because of it, had tremendous power. There is little information about the living conditions in the harem today. It is known that there were so many concubines that some of them almost never caught sight of the sultan. Others managed to get such a huge influence on him that they took part in solving political issues.

So, Suleiman the Magnificent fell madly in love with the Ukrainian beauty Roksolana (1505-1558), married her and made her his chief adviser. Roxolana's influence on the politics of the empire was such that the grand vizier sent the pirate Barbarossa on a desperate mission to kidnap the Italian beauty Julia Gonzaga (Countess of Fondi and Duchess of Traetto) in the hope that Suleiman would pay attention to her when she was brought to the harem. The plan ultimately failed, and they could not kidnap Julia.

Another lady - Kesem Sultan (1590-1651) - achieved even greater influence than Roksolana. She ruled the empire as regent in place of her son and later grandson.

8. Blood tribute

One of the most famous features of early Ottoman rule was devshirme (blood tribute), a tax imposed on the non-Muslim population of the empire. This tax consisted in the compulsory recruitment of young boys from Christian families. Most of the boys were enlisted in the Janissary corps - the army of slave soldiers that was always used in the first line during the Ottoman conquests. This tribute was collected irregularly, usually resorting to devshirma when the sultan and viziers decided that the empire might need additional labor and warriors. As a rule, boys aged 12-14 were recruited from Greece and the Balkans, and the strongest were recruited (on average, 1 boy per 40 families).

The recruited boys were collected by Ottoman officials and taken to Istanbul, where they were entered on a register (with a detailed description in case someone escaped), circumcised and forcibly converted to Islam. The most beautiful or cleverest were sent to the palace, where they were trained. These guys could achieve very high ranks and many of them eventually became pashas or viziers. The rest of the boys were initially sent to work on farms for eight years, where the children simultaneously learned Turkish and developed physically.

By the age of twenty, they were officially janissaries, elite soldiers of the empire who were renowned for iron discipline and loyalty. The blood tribute system became obsolete in the early 18th century, when the children of the Janissaries were allowed to join the corps, which thus became self-sustaining.

9. Slavery as a tradition

Although devshirme (slavery) was gradually abandoned during the 17th century, this phenomenon continued to be a key feature of the Ottoman system until the late 19th century. Most of the slaves were imported from Africa or the Caucasus (the Adyghes were especially valued), while the Crimean Tatar raids ensured a constant influx of Russians, Ukrainians and Poles.

Initially it was forbidden to enslave Muslims, but this rule was quietly forgotten when the influx of non-Muslims began to dry out. Islamic slavery has largely developed independently of Western slavery and, therefore, had a number of significant differences. For example, it was somewhat easier for Ottoman slaves to gain freedom or achieve some kind of influence in society. But there is no doubt that Ottoman slavery was incredibly brutal.

Millions of people died in slave raids or grueling labor. And that's not even mentioning the castration process that was used to join the ranks of eunuchs. The fact that the Ottomans imported millions of slaves from Africa, while very few people of African descent remained in modern Turkey, testify to what the mortality rate among slaves was.

10. Massacres

With all of the above, we can say that the Ottomans were a fairly loyal empire. Apart from the devshirme, they made no real attempt to convert non-Muslim subjects to their faith. They accepted Jews after they were expelled from Spain. They never discriminated against their subjects, and the empire was often ruled (we are talking about officials) by Albanians and Greeks. But when the Turks felt threatened, they acted very cruelly.

Selim the Terrible, for example, was deeply alarmed by the Shiites, who denied his authority as a protector of Islam and could be "double agents" of Persia. As a result, he slaughtered almost the entire east of the empire (at least 40,000 Shiites died and their villages were razed to the ground). When the Greeks first began to seek independence, the Ottomans resorted to the help of the Albanian partisans, who carried out a series of terrible pogroms.

As the empire waned, it lost much of its former tolerance for minorities. By the 19th century, mass murder had become much more common. This reached its climax in 1915, when in the empire, just two years before its collapse, 75 percent of the entire Armenian population (about 1.5 million people) was massacred.

Continuing the Turkish theme, for our readers incendiary video of oriental dances performed by men.