In June 1631, the emperor and Mumtaz, aged thirty-eight, pregnant for the fourteenth time, travelled southwards to campaign in Deccan. At Burhanpur, she endured a thirty-hour labour before giving birth to a daughter, Gohara, and then haemorrhaging. Her eldest daughter Jahanara ran out to pray and distribute alms to the crowds, while a ‘paralysed’ Shahjahan sobbed desperately. But the bleeding would not stop.
TAJ MAHAL: MUMTAZ’S DAUGHTER AND KöSEM’S MAD SON
When Mumtaz died, Shahjahan howled for a week, his hair turning white. Jahanara thought he might die. After a year of recovery, he re-emerged, backed by Jahanara, who acted as his empress in the place of Mumtaz. Shahjahan conceived a white marble tomb for Mumtaz and himself that would express his love for her, the Crown of the Palace (Taj Mahal) – the statement of the ruler of the greatest state in the world at that time who recognized few limits.* Nonetheless Shahjahan did not neglect the first job of House Tamerlane: conquest.
It is not cheap maintaining an empire: the greater the power, the greater the aspirations, the higher the costs. It is a rule of imperial power and human nature that every state will expand its ambitions beyond its resources, by at least one degree. The second Lord of the Conjunction aspired to rule the rest of India, expelling impertinent Portuguese from Port Hooghly in Bengal, advancing southwards into Deccan and westwards into Afghanistan. The decline of his aggressive Persian neighbour, Abbas the Great, offered western opportunities: Abbas destroyed his own achievements by liquidating or mutilating all three of his sons. In 1629, he died, leaving the throne to a vicious, illiterate, opium-addicted grandson, Safi, spawn of his murdered crown prince, who killed most of the family. Shahjahan later seized Kandahar, while further west the Ottomans – led by a predatory but talented young padishah – joined the carve-up.
Kösem’s irrepressible son, Murad IV, was a muscular taurine giant who lived for hunting, drinking and wrestling. As he grew up, the Magnificent Mother ran the empire as regent –
The Magnificent Mother was loved because of her authority and beauty, not to speak of her charity: during the month of good works, Rajab, she dressed incognito to pay the debts of jailed debtors. But Murad resented her. ‘What can I do? My words are bitter to him,’ she wrote, sounding like any mother coping with a defiant teenager. ‘Just let him stay alive,’ she wrote to Halil, ‘he’s vital to us all.’
In 1628, when he was sixteen, Murad took power, launching a wave of terror, executing corrupt viziers with his own sword, banning drinking and coffee-housing, while patrolling Istanbul in disguise, executing any fraudsters. But he particularly watched Shah Safi’s declining Persia – and coveted Iraq. He took personal command of the armies. After defeating the Poles, in 1634, he stormed into the Caucasus to retake Yerevan, a feat celebrated in a Romanesque triumph in Istanbul (and the strangling of two half-brothers).
While he was away, Kösem was his ears and eyes. When she heard that the mufti (Islamic jurist) was conspiring, she had him strangled.
At home, Murad held court, showing off his wrestling skills, often challenging his courtiers to bouts that ended with him holding them above his head, as recounted by his friend the Sufi poet, adventurer and outrageous raconteur Evliya Çelebi, who was writing the world’s greatest travel book. Murad enjoyed the satirical verses of the poet Nefi but warned the wit against mocking the grand vizier and ordered a black eunuch to draft his apology. When a drop of black ink spattered the eunuch’s letter, Nefi could not resist a racist joke: ‘Your blessed sweat dripped.’ Hearing this, Murad ordered him strangled. The padishah was becoming a Neronian sadist: he would sit in a kiosk on the Bosphoros boozing and firing his crossbow at boatmen who came too close. In 1638, he invaded Iraq and routed the Iranians. Shah Safi died after a drinking contest and Murad secured Baghdad. Iraq remained Ottoman until 1918.
Murad held another Roman triumph in Constantinople, his mother Kösem parading in a golden carriage. He was only twenty-nine but, falling sick with cirrhosis, he lashed out, killing first his grand vizier and then his younger brother – and would have executed his last brother, the lunatic Ibrahim, had Kösem not begged for his life. When he died in 1640, the only Ottoman prince left alive was Mad Ibrahim, a murderous erotomaniac whose outrages forced Kösem to make an unbearable decision for a mother.
