Fiona’s Reviews > The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs > Status Update

After Suleiman I’s passing in 1566, the Ottomans entered a new phase in the politics of reproduction. A sedentary as opposed to warrior sultanate arose, alongside the rise to influence of the women of the harem. Seniority became the new law of succession rather than military victory and fratricide. It made succession an automatic procedure. Facilitated by the fact that the successor also resided in the palace

beginning in the 1530s during the reign of Suleiman I as they battled the Habsburgs for control of the Western Mediterranean and the North African coast, the Ottomans also attempted to expel the Portuguese from the region stretching from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. This led to repeated unsuccessful attempts to capture the strategic Strait of Hormuz which controls the entrance to the Persian Gulf

the Ottoman maritime empire emerged in the same century as that of the Portuguese. Beginning with the reign of Mehmed II, sultans referred to themselves as ‘Lord of the two seas and two continents’. The sultans were the rulers of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Europe and Asia. From Egypt to Indonesia, the Ottomans rivalled the Portuguese in the battle for the seas and played a major role in international trade

the sultan turned against the Mamluks in the south. Again, the Ottomans used gunpowder weapons (canons and muskets) to defeat a Muslim rival armed with swords, bows, and arrows—the weapons of aristocrats and men of leisure who looked down on the musket, which any untrained soldier could use.

Murad I established the pitiless sultanic practice of murdering all one’s brothers and uncles—and often all one’s male relatives, no matter their age—upon coming to power. Fratricide was meant to ensure that the ruler had no familial rivals. The practice was codified in the mid-fifteenth century in the Ottoman law code attributed to Mehmed II.

As can be seen in the coins minted in his name, Murad I was the first head of the Ottoman dynasty to style himself as sultan, the secular civil and military leader. His predecessors Osman and Orhan had claimed only to be chiefs (bey). The name ‘sultan ‘ symbolises the Ottoman transition from tents to towns, from nomad archers to infantry, from Osman’s introduction of the first market tax