Over the centuries, the sultan became something like a queen bee, sequestered at the center of a massive hive, protected and pampered and not really in charge of anything. The individual personality of any particular sultan was superseded by the idea and the institution. The sultan could always be replaced. “With the exception of such forceful men as Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim I or Murad IV, the Ottoman sultans were little more than cogs in a machine.”
