‘Nurjahan Begum, whose skill and experience are greater than those of the physicians, tried to diminish the number of my cups and carry out remedies,’ recalled Jahangir. ‘Gradually she reduced my wine.’ Nurjahan’s power depended on the life of one Tamerlanian junkie, but her contemporary in Constantinople was an even more remarkable woman who would dominate the Ottoman empire for forty years.
When the Ottoman sultan, Ahmed, first saw her, she was Anastasia, a newly enslaved Greek odalisque in the harem. Both of them were thirteen and he renamed her Mahpeyker – Beautiful Moon. But when he fell in love with her, he renamed her Kösem – Leader. ‘Beautiful and shrewd,’ noted the Venetian envoy, ‘with many talents, she sings beautifully, is extremely well loved by the king,’ who even ‘listened to her in some matters’. Together they had nine children, of whom five were sons, one of brilliant gifts, one of homicidal insanity. Kösem faced competition: Ahmed’s eldest son, Osman, was by another odalisque, yet she became close to him, though her priority would always be her own children.
Sultan Ahmed, prompted supposedly by Kösem, ended the tradition of strangling royal brothers: he preserved his own brother in the ‘golden cage’ of the harem. The padishahs now spent less time commanding armies, which empowered their palace staff: their African eunuchs now ranked equal to grand viziers.*
Playful, cultured and athletic, a poet and fencer, Ahmed, who always wanted Kösem beside him, worked hard on his Blue Mosque, designed with Mehmed Agha, who had been trained by the great Sinan. With its breathtaking five domes, eight smaller domes and six minarets, and its aquamarine tiles, a cascade of Byzantine–Ottoman styles, it remains one of the joys of Istanbul. The Ottomans had recently won victories in Hungary and had seized the Caucasus from Persia which led Ahmed to take his eyes off his main duty: war. Suddenly in 1605, he was attacked by a terrifying new shah.
Great-grandson of the messianic boy-king Ismail, Abbas had been formed by the murderous purges of the Safavi shahs and the overmighty swagger of their Turkman generals, who had blinded his father and sliced up his mother. When he was seventeen, one of the generals deposed his father and crowned him.
Stocky, agile and swarthy with green eyes and droopy moustaches, Abbas was pleasure-loving but with a will to power, focused and unpredictable, always wearing a sword, frequently beheading prisoners in front of the court. In battle he was strong enough to wrestle an Ottoman assassin to death. Once in a towering rage at the clumsy blunder of troops in a mock battle, he ran among them slicing four men in half. Yet he was informal, cooking his own food and exercising his horse in the square at Isfahan, chatting to passers-by. He checked food prices by wearing disguise in the bazaar: when tradesmen tricked him, he had a baker baked in his oven, a butcher roasted alive.
Abbas was an enthusiast for girls and boys, both usually enslaved Georgians. In the harem, the girls sometimes ‘swept him off his feet, whirled around the rooms, threw him down on the carpet as he called out, “You strumpets, ah you crazy things!”’ As in Constantinople it was run by African and Georgian eunuchs. Abbas sometimes performed the orchiectomies himself with such precision that fewer died than usual. His new army was mainly manned by
After his initial successes against the Ottomans, Rudolf sent an envoy to Abbas, who welcomed him cheerfully while examining two swords before choosing one and beheading an Ottoman prisoner, with the advice that the emperor should treat the Turks the same way. But the real world was now catching up with the emperor of fantasy.
HIGHFALL: PRINCE OF DARKNESS AND THE COPROPHAGIAN JULIUS CAESAR
‘They say you’re an alchemist, astrologer and given to necromancy,’ Rudolf’s brother Albrecht wrote to him. ‘If this be true and Your Majesty has fallen into the habits of using the services of the dead, pity the House of Austria.’ The pope, Clement VIII, was now leading a militant Catholic revival, a reaction to the passion of Protestantism, and planned regime change in Prague, spying on Rudolf and encouraging his brothers, led by Archduke Matthias, to depose him. ‘It is generally agreed among Catholics in Prague,’ reported Clement’s envoy, ‘that the emperor has been bewitched and is in league with the devil. I’ve been shown the chair in which His Majesty sits holding conversations with the Prince of Darkness … and the little bell HM uses to summon spirits of the departed.’
