On this date in 1622, the deposed Ottoman Sultan Osman II was strangled in Yedikule Fortress.
A boy-emperor still in his 18th year at death, Osman had been the subject of a strange succession dispute: his father died in 1617, but with multiple underaged princes available to succeed him, the throne had been placed in the hands of a mentally disturbed uncle instead.
Osman was able to depose this man, but at his age — and without the steadying maternal hand* so necessary in the “Sultanate of Women” era — he was always an underdog to the Porte’s political snakepit.
Osman would be an early casualty of an intractable administrative problem for the Ottomans: curbing the Praetorian-like power of that clique of European-born warrior elites, the Janissaries.
Irritated by a battlefield reversal in Europe, Osman showed his young backside to the Janissaries by having their officers discipline them and exploring the feasibility a replacement force of Muslim-born Anatolians.
Thus while Osman prepared for an expedition to the southern reaches of his realm, the disaffected infantrymen answered their sultan’s ire with a rising of its own, one which Osman imperiously refused to pay in the customary coin of executed courtiers and policy concessions. He was accordingly deposed for that same disturbed uncle he had supplanted, and the unhappy Osman
was thrust into a cart by the wrestler Bunyan and strangled within the walls of the Seven Towers. The Jebbehji-bashi cut off one of his ears and carried it with the news of his murder to [new regime Grand Vizier] Davud Pasha. His body was buried in the At-maidân in the mausoleum of Sultan Ahmed Khan [Osman’s father]. He was cut off by fate before he could leave any monument of his reign. (Source)
Allegedly (via this detailed pdf breakdown of his fall), Osman cried to the mob as the cart hauled him to his dungeon, “Yesterday morning I was a sultan, now I am naked. Pity me, learn a lesson from my misfortune! This world shall not stay yours forever!”
* His European mother was either dead or in exile; she does not factor in Osman’s story; it was most typical during this period for a harem mother to sustain a prince in power by mastering Topkapi Palace’s labyrinthine internal politics.
On this day..
- 1527: Hans Hergot, immovable type
- 1952: Jan Bula, Czechoslovakian priest
- Feast Day of St. Baudilus
- 1691: Mark Baggot, Jacobite spy
- 1799: Simon Taylor, for indulging in drunkenness
- 1795: Ignac Martinovics and the Magyar Jacobins
- 2001: An adult actress stoned to death in Evin prison
- 1881: Po'olua, "darkened in my mind"
- 1943: Wilhelm H., pensioner and vandal
- 1987: Edward Earl Johnson, "I guess nobody is going to call"
- 2001: Zhang Jun and his gang
- 1820: Karl Ludwig Sand, a curious strand of German history
The Ottoman Empire or Caliphate was one of those historical constructs which offered mainly wars and civil wars to history. They too were very culpable for the decline of muslim Arab culture, not only the Mongols and their descendant Tamerlane.While the Arabs had learned from the Greek/Byzantine, former Persian and Indian civilizations the Turks hardly learned anything and stayed barbarian..And i can not imagine anyone idealizing the Ottomans..