Noble Blood - The Cage of the Ottoman King

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

When Mehmed III, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, died, his young son Ahmed took the throne. Tradition dicrated that Ahmed should have killed any rivals to the throne, specifically his half-brother, Mustafa. He didn't. Historians still don't know why, and Mustafa's strange life—as pawn, prisoner, and sultan—continues to raise questions about the nature of power and royalty itself. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel, 'Immortality: A Love Story'  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On the 22nd of December 1603, the Ottoman Imperial Council assembled for an ordinary administrative meeting in the capital of Istanbul. The Sultan's Grand Vizier, a man named Kasim Pasha, oversaw these regular meetings, directing the official business and foreign policy of an empire which reigned as far as Mecca and Algiers, 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 and Persia were kept in check for now, 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 Topkapi 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. Kassim Pasha 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, Kasim Pasha. 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. Kassim Pasha had only ever been a loyal advisor and administrator to Sultan Mehmed.

Why would Sultan Mehmed test him when? this, sending him such a strange message, Kessimpasha 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 13-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. Kasim Pasha ordered a hasty enthronement ceremony to be conducted within the palace. The new Sultan's throne was erected before a lavish gate. The royal clerics and advisors assembled for an oath-swearing. But the entire time, everyone can't. kept glancing at the young sultan's only other brother, his half-brother, really, and only a child himself,

a boy named Mustafa. Qasim 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, and 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-brothers' enthronement ceremony. If that was to be a day of glory for the Ottoman Empire, it was a glory that Mustafa would never truly be able to bask in, dead or alive. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. According to a long-standing tradition, officially codified in 1451,

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 Mustafa's grandfather took the Ottoman throne in 1574, he had his five brothers strangled.

When their father, Sultan Mehmed, took the throne in 1595, he had his 19 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 shableness.

casting a pall over the city as 19 coffins streamed into the Hia Sophia in descending size. The trauma from that massacre may have contributed to the new Sultan, Ahmed's decision to keep his half-brother Mustafa alive after he took the throne in 1603. In all likelihood, the Imperial Council decided to keep the younger prince 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 300-year line of Ottoman succession, but the disease luckily passed without severely harming the boy. It was commonly understood

that Mustafa 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. Amid was the first Ottoman ruler to be circumcised, and he was 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 1604, Ahmed's 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 Mustafa's father Mehmet was sent to the nearby city of Manisa for over 10 years,

before he was invited to Istanbul to attempt to claim the Sultanate. In that time, he established an administration of trusted viziers and advisors, 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 1604, 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 fratricide was, up till this point, a normal expectation that Mustafa 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 1605, which the 15-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 Ottoman architecture and the second most famous building in Istanbul only after the Hyas Sophia. For that project, Ahmed recruited the help of a new court favorite, the powerful chief eunuch Mustafa Agha. In the Ottoman imperial court, the chief eunuch served a particularly powerful role. Unix traditionally attended to the women of the imperial harem, but over the years, their role expanded into advising the sultan as well. The chief eunuch of Ahmed's reign was named Mustafa Agha.

I know his name is also Mustafa, but he's different from the Mustafa Our Story is about, the sultan's half-brother away in his cage. Anyway, Mustafa Agha, 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 Hyasofia for his own ambitious mosque project, it was Mustafa Agha who found funding, who negotiated with the power brokers of the city and who oversaw the construction. To this day, a verse of 16 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 Agha as though he were the Sultan's equal. Most importantly for our story, Mustafa Agha 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 1617, Amid had at least 15 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 19, Mustafa lived a severely secluded life and remained all but a mystery to the people of Istanbul. Historians don't agree on why Mustafa 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, Kossam Sultan, the most of the most of the births of 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 Kossam Sultan influenced Ahmed to keep Mustafa 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 check. These jurists were already wary of familial executions during the reign of Ahmed and Mustafa's father. And, and And for the grand Mufti Assad, 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 survival, Mustafa outlived his older brother. In 1617, 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 Assad had already accounted for. Asad was the first. was the first to hear of the sultan's death on the night of November 21st, 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 Agha certainly advocated for that position. After all, he had essentially raised the boys himself. But according to Assad's contrived interpretation of ancient law, Osman and Mehmed, the two sons, then aged 14 and 13, were too young for the sultanate. Never mind that Ahmed himself had been only 13 when he was enthroned. No, the Grand Mufti proclaimed in the secret council, only the 19-year-old Mustafa had the mandate to rule. The next morning, the forlorn brother of Ahmed,

emerged from his cage after 15 years in captivity. In a twist of fate, Mustafa 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. Mustafa's sovereignty would come with a heavy price. As in all succession crises, the coronation had winners and losers. On the winning side was the Grand Mufti Assad 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 Topkapi Palace just like her son, but who now emerged into a position of conspicuous power. On the losing side was the chief eunuch Mustafa Agha, 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 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. Mustafa Agha began organizing a coup against Solton. Mustafaaga began organizing a coup against Mustafa almost immediately. He called upon an ally in the Navy named Ali Pasha who could leverage his connections with Ottoman merchants to so discontent in Mustafa and support for young 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 Agha 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 Yongement? Munich 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 correspondence was handled by a male counselor, Mustafa's letters were strangely drafted by a female slave from the harem who doubled as Mustafa's tutor. Then again, Ahmed didn't allow Mustafa 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 Mustafa was an active participant in his administration.

He's reported to have taken great interest in inspecting Istanbul's arsenal and docs. The French ambassador wrote that Mustafa even contemplated leading a campaign against the Saphavids. It's also worth noting that Mustafa had been imprisoned in the palace for 15 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 13th century mystic St. Francis of Assisi honored those that lived as fools in the eyes of men, but sages in the eyes of God. The 16th century, Teresa of Avila, gained enormous renown for her visions of Christ and bouts of religious ecstasy. Some of Istanbul's populace saw elements of Mustafa's madness as proof of his divinity. They referred to to him as Veli 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 Mustafa Agha's favor. For the first couple months of Sultan Mustafa's reign, the only major statesman pushing for Osman 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 Osman in return for a generous shipment of Bouillon. Assad, once devoted to Mustafa's cause, resigned himself to accepting Osmond's inevitable

ascension. On the morning of Monday, February 26, 1618, 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. Mustafa Agha politely asked the Sultan to wait inside before he exited the room and had a servant lock the door, from the outside. With Mustafa locked away, all of the court swore allegiance to the 14-year-old

Osman, and not a peep of outcry was heard in the city. Mustafa'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 of about Mustafa in the first place. One, Cordier referred to the reign of Mustafa as the false dawn, before Osman's real dawn. Sultan Osman was much like his father, Ahmed. He was extraordinarily pious,

so much so that he opted for simple, ascetic attire over the lavish ropes 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 Osman was purifying the soul of his empire. Osman 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 Mustafa alive, as though his uncle no longer posed a threat after being so severely discredited and dethroned. When Osman returned from war, dissatisfied with the conduct of his troops, he made covert planned 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 Osman planning on sidelining the beating heart of the Empire's military, he was going to staff his new army with former traitors.

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 1622. except no Sultan before Osman ever issued plans to take Hajj. Even the Muftis, 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 outside the Highas 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 advisors. 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 Mustafa 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 Janissaries' 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 Mustafa'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? Osmond'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 12, the Imperial Council finally dethroned him. Four months after being pushed, upon the throne a second time, Mustafa returned to his cage, this time for good. He passed the hours, days, seasons, another 16 years within his ornate prison until he died in 1639, around the age of 40. Historians regularly describe 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 their 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.

Readers Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand this guy's... 2 a.m. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm

like... Wild bat you were with. It was like a first like closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like but... Listen to Laskol Dristas on the IHart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on demand. This guy's bobo-u-a-m. 2-Mu-A-Muars. Whatever time it is, Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, a wild bat you were with. It was like a first, like, a closet moment from you where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a

different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Coleristas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. 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 Momit, whom Mustafa never actually got the chance to meet. In 1596, when the author, Austrians invaded the part of modern-day Hungary then ruled by the Ottomans, Mustafa'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 55,000 men strong, the king wished to disband his forces and scamper back to Istanbul. His advisors 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. Disracted, 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 Hungary. 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 15 years old, implored his father to send him on a similar expedition,

this time against the Sepavid 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 see past 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 jurist 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 Mahmoud 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 19 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 Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcasts, presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo.

Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast Guaranteed human