Five Sons, One Throne, No Rules

At Ankara in 1402, Timur destroyed the Ottoman army and took Sultan Bayezid the Thunderbolt prisoner. What followed the Turks call the Fetret Devri, from the Arabic fatra, a pause or interval. English renders it “Interregnum”, but the Turkish is the more honest word: not an absence of government so much as an interval, after which the performance resumes with the same scenery.

There are five principals, all of them çelebi—a courtesy title for a gentleman of good family, somewhere between “esquire” and “highness”. They are called Süleyman, İsa, Musa, Mehmed and Mustafa. Which is to say Solomon, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and one of the Prophet’s epithets, “the chosen”. Five sons named after prophets then spent eleven years killing one another.

Who ran where

Courtiers got Süleyman, the eldest, off the field at Ankara; he went to Bursa for the treasury and thence to Gallipoli. From there, in January 1403, he concluded what one might generously call a collective security agreement with the Byzantines, Venice, Genoa, the Hospitallers of Rhodes and the Duchy of Naxos. (The same Hospitallers from whom Timur had taken Smyrna two months earlier. It was a small world.) To the Byzantines he returned Thessalonica, the Chalcidice and the entire Aegean coast from the Strymon to Olympus, and handed over his sister Fatma and his brother Kasım as hostages. Gallipoli he did not hand over. It was his crossing into Europe, and a man who has just fled across something does not give it away. The signature, incidentally, was not the emperor’s: Manuel II Palaiologos was at that moment touring Western Europe asking for help, and the regent John VII signed in his stead.

Timur, meanwhile, disposed of the Thunderbolt’s estate on his own terms. He confirmed the fourth brother, Mehmed, as sultan—Mehmed being then at Amasya. To the second, İsa, he gave the governorship of Karesi, as a vassal, for six weeks, from the middle of December 1402. İsa found the post beneath him and by January had installed himself at Bursa as an independent sovereign.

The third brother, Musa, had been captured alongside their father. Timur handed him to Yakub of Germiyan for safekeeping, and he was released at Mehmed’s request. Note that: Mehmed personally got out of captivity the man who would, eight years later, become the most dangerous enemy he had.

Bursa, there and back

Mehmed and İsa came to blows almost at once. İsa proposed dividing Anatolia between them like brothers; Mehmed, for reasons of his own, declined to divide anything, and after the battles of Ermeni-beli and Ulubad (March–May 1403) İsa fled to Constantinople and Mehmed took Bursa.

From Constantinople, İsa applied to Süleyman for support, and got it: an army, and instructions to go back. Mehmed thrashed his elder brother a second time, at Karesi. İsa, undeterred, went looking for beys who might help, and this availed him nothing. In September 1403 he was seized at Eskişehir and strangled with a bowstring in a bathhouse—by Mehmed’s agents, according to the Spanish ambassador Clavijo, who was in the country at the time.

The one who waited

Süleyman watched the whole performance from his capital at Edirne with the air of a man who has secured a good seat and sent out for refreshments. When İsa was finished, he crossed into Anatolia and took Ankara and Bursa, but did not pursue Mehmed, who had gone to ground at Ayasoluk—modern Selçuk, next door to ancient Ephesus.

The name is Greek: Ἅγιος Θεολόγος, “the Holy Theologian”, meaning John the Evangelist, whose basilica stands there. Nothing was mangled in the passage: by the fifteenth century the gamma had softened to something near a y, the theta had nowhere to go in Turkish and became an s, the eo collapsed in rapid speech, and the Greek ending fell away as Greek endings do. Ayasoluk is simply what Ἅγιος Θεολόγος sounds like when a Turk repeats what he has heard.

Süleyman then spent some time calmly recovering the territories the Ottomans had lost, arrived at Ayasoluk with an enormous army, waited for Mehmed to come and submit of his own accord—and forgave him. This last was, by the standards of the family, eccentric.

The Wallachian marriage

Having thrown himself on his elder brother’s mercy, Mehmed continued to plot against him, now using Musa. Manuel II, back from his travels, shipped Musa to Wallachia, where he married a daughter of the voivode Mircea the Elder—grandfather of Vlad III the Impaler, the Dracula one.

While Süleyman was consolidating his position in Anatolia, Musa took Edirne and Gallipoli without difficulty, obliging his elder brother to come back and administer two defeats to him. Two were as far as it went: Süleyman’s horsemen, aggrieved at his standing prohibition on plundering the locals as they rode, simply went over to Musa, and in February 1411 Musa returned to Edirne in triumph. Süleyman fled, was caught halfway, and killed; his head was sent on to Edirne. Where exactly this happened is disputed, and local tradition puts it where the Thracian industrial town of Çerkezköy stands today—although that “Circassian village” would not exist until the nineteenth century, when the muhacirs arrived. History keeps its own arrangements and does not require the permission of historians.

Everyone against one

Having proclaimed himself sultan, Musa found the position uncomfortable. Everybody came for him at once. The Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević—a relation, as it happens: his sister Olivera had been the late Bayezid’s wife—began helping himself to Musa’s lands. The Byzantines destroyed his fleet and released Orhan, Süleyman’s son, against him (though the dates of Orhan’s birth sit awkwardly with this, and the sources disagree about who exactly was let out). Supporters grew steadily fewer.

At the right moment Mehmed surfaced and began making his brother’s life difficult as well. In the field Musa beat him twice; in politics he was outclassed entirely, and when he went into his own supporters’ pockets to refill an empty treasury, the last of his support went with it. Mehmed’s third attempt succeeded: on 5 July 1413, at Çamurlu near Sofia, he and the Serbian despot finished Musa off—this on a day that had begun with Musa winning. He was taken and strangled.

So Mehmed I became the sole Ottoman sultan and brought the period of fratricide to an end. It had taken him a mere eleven years.

Nearly to an end, at any rate. There remained the fifth brother, Mustafa, captured at Ankara, who rose in revolt in 1416 and again under the following sultan. Ottoman historiography solved this elegantly by declaring him an impostor—Düzmece Mustafa, “the counterfeit Mustafa”. Modern scholarship holds that Bayezid’s son was perfectly genuine. By the time this was established there was no one left to argue with.