Shadow of God (3 page)

As the light washed over the fallen man’s face, all three knights froze. The man in black slumped back to the ground in total surrender. The knight with the lantern let out his breath and gasped, “Dear God!”

Edirne, northern Turkey, near the Greek border
September 21, 1520

Selim,
Yavuz.
Selim, the Grim.

Selim, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, slept fitfully in his tent. He lay under a pile of silk brocade coverlets. As he rolled onto his side, a piece of parchment fell to the carpeted floor. Piri Pasha, his Grand Vizier, knelt to tuck in the sides of his master’s covers. He reached down and picked up the parchment. Leaning nearer the light of the brazier, he unrolled the document. He immediately recognized the distinctive calligraphy of his master. He smiled as he realized that even in what could certainly be the last hours of the Sultan Selim’s life, there had been time for yet one more poem. Piri had made sure to leave the gilded box of writing materials always close to Selim’s bedside, for the master liked to write late into the night when the pain woke him.

Piri unrolled the parchment. The words were written in Persian, the language of the poets. The Sultan’s hand had shaken badly. Though spatterings of ink had stained the parchment, the writing was fully legible. Piri held it closer to the warm yellow light, and read:

The hunter who stalks his prey in the night,
      
Does he wonder whose prey he may be?

As the Sultan’s Grand Vizier, Piri Pasha was the highest-ranking official in the entire Ottoman Empire. As such, he was arguably the second most powerful man on Earth. He sat on a low
divan
in the darkened tent, watching the Sultan sleep. The coal brazier gave off a red glow that carried its heat deep into the body of his master. But, Piri himself could not get warm. The Sultan made low noises as he breathed fitfully. Now and again, Selim’s eyes would tighten as a grimace of pain crossed his face.

Outside the tent, the Janissaries stood guard; two of them flanked the door, while seven more surrounded the tent. Another ring of twenty Janissaries stood at attention in an outer circle, creating a formidable wall of warriors. The young men were dressed in dark-blue jackets and baggy, white pants. Their caps were tapered white cylinders, each holding a tall, white heron’s feather in its band. They wore high boots of soft, brown leather, and were armed with jeweled dirks in their belts; in the left hand some carried sharp pikes on six-foot wooden poles. All wore long, curved scimitars, inscribed in Arabic with the words “I place my faith in God.”

Piri dragged the heavy brazier closer to Selim’s body. The tent was warm, but still Selim shivered in his broken sleep. His body had been racked with pain for the last several months, and the Sultan now spent most of his time asleep. His doctor had given him ever-increasing doses of opium so that now his sleep was disturbed less and less by the lightning jabs of pain. Still, he would awaken suddenly and cry out in the night, as the cancer ate him from within.

Piri knew that the end was near, and had made all the appropriate arrangements. Many lives would hang upon Piri Pasha’s judgment. An empire could fall with a single mistake.

Piri Pasha was the Grand Vizier of the House of Osman, rulers of the Ottoman Empire since 1300 A.D. For eight years, he had been the ear and the right hand of the Emperor. He was both friend and confidant to Selim
Yavuz.
He had, from the very first day of his duties, kept absolute faith with the trust Selim had placed in him.

Selim had named Piri Pasha the “Bearer of the Burden,” for so great was his load that a lesser man would have faltered long before.
In the eight years of service, Piri had no thought but for the welfare of his master, the Emperor; and of the Empire. Now that Selim’s death was near, Piri had much to do.

The story of Selim’s short life had been written in blood. It was the blood of his times and the blood of his people. It was written, too, in the blood of his father and the strangled breath of his brothers. These deaths were the result of the law of Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet,
Fatih;
Mehmet, the Conqueror.

An early unwritten Ottoman law had directed the newly crowned emperor to slay all his siblings, their children, and all but his own ablest son. The eldest did not necessarily succeed to the throne. It was hoped that in this way the new Sultan, by leaving only one heir alive, could prevent wars of succession that might endanger the Empire. Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet, had codified this tradition in the Law of Fratricide. Under the Law of Fratricide, all the possible heirs to the throne must be strangled with the silken cord from an archer’s bow. A knife or sword could not be used, for it was a sacrilege to shed royal blood. Mehmet, himself, had strangled his infant brother to death upon his own succession to the throne.

When Selim’s father, Bayazid II, ascended to the throne, he, too, fell under this law of the Ottomans; but not as he had expected.

Bayazid was a more reticent and gentle man than his father, Mehmet. He was loath to carry on, as his father had, the continuous wars to expand the Empire. Mehmet had challenged the great powers of the Shiite Muslims of Persia, going to war with Shah Ismail, their ruler. The Shiite religious doctrines seemed to Mehmet a dagger at the backs of the orthodox Sunni Muslims of Turkey.

But, Bayazid had no taste for war. When he succeeded Mehmet as Sultan, he retired to the safety of Istanbul, and the Palace.

Selim was the youngest of Bayazid’s five sons, and his favorite. Two of his other sons had died in childhood, and only Selim seemed suited for the succession to Sultan. But, Selim was impatient with his father, and longed to resume the wars his grandfather had started. So, at age forty, after a failed rebellion against Bayazid, Selim and his family went into self-imposed exile in the Crimea, north of the Black Sea. His wife, Hafiza, was the daughter of a
Tartar Khan. After some time, Selim was able, with the help of his father-in-law, to raise a substantial army.

Bayazid and Selim, father and son, fought each other for the throne in a great battle at Edirne, in northern Turkey near the Greek border. Only the speed of Selim’s legendary stallion, Black Cloud, had allowed his escape from his father’s sword. Though he lost the battle, his heroism had impressed his father’s army of Janissaries. A legend began to grow around Selim’s name.

As Bayazid aged, pressure began to build from the nobles of the court to send for Selim, so that Selim’s succession could be assured. The Janissaries wanted nothing of the two eldest sons, whom they knew to be as gentle and peace-loving as their father. They wanted Selim. Selim
Yavuz.
They, too, longed for the return to war; to ride once more against the Infidel and drink in the heady scent of blood and smoke.

Bayazid wanted peace within his empire at any cost. So, a few months after Selim’s defeat and escape, Bayazid sent for his son, asking that he return to his home in Istanbul. Selim received the letter in the depths of a terrible winter. Still, with the help of his father-in-law, he amassed an army of three thousand horsemen, and left immediately for the capital. He drove his men eighteen hours a day, in blinding blizzards and killing cold. Hundreds of men and horses died along the way, left unburied at the side of the frozen road. To save time, Selim avoided the longer detour to the bridge over the wide Dniester River. Instead, he forced his army to ford the icy waters. There, too, many frozen bodies floated away in the black current. Finally, with his army in tatters, he reached Istanbul in early April.

Selim approached the gates of the city fearing a trap. But, when the ten thousand Janissaries of Bayazid’s Household Guard saw him mounted upon his famous Black Cloud, they rushed to his side, cheering and proclaiming
him
the Sultan. The soldiers surrounded his horse and fought to touch Selim’s stirrups. They threw their hats in the air, and celebrated his arrival. Within a few days, Bayazid surrendered to his youngest son the symbol of power of the Ottoman Empire. He handed over the emblem of the Ottomans,
the jeweled Sword of the House of Osman. Selim was now truly the Emperor of the Ottomans.

The following day, Selim walked alongside his father’s litter as the old man was carried out through the gates of the city. He held his father’s hand, and there were tears in both men’s eyes.

The crowds followed the two men silently behind the human wall of armed Janissaries and mounted Sipahis, the Sultan’s elite cavalry. After handing over his power to Selim, Bayazid wanted to return to his birthplace at Demotika, near Edirne, to spend his last days there away from the turmoil of Istanbul and the political intrigues in the Palace. As his father was carried away by the small retinue of servants and carts of personal effects, Selim and the Janissaries turned in silence and walked back to the imperial city.

Bayazid was never to have his final wish fulfilled. Three days after his departure, he died suddenly in a small village along the wayside. Some said that he died of a broken heart after being so cruelly deposed by his favorite child. But, rumors also spread that he had been poisoned on Selim’s orders. Few doubted that this might be so, for Selim was capable of great cruelty, and was totally insulated from remorse when it came to protecting his succession as Sultan.

No sooner was Bayazid laid to rest in his grave than Selim set about insuring the security of his reign. Bayazid had never carried out his own father’s Law of Fratricide. Selim still had older brothers with claims to the throne.

As soon as he was settled in Istanbul, Selim gathered his band of assassins—six deaf mutes, who had worked for him many times in the past. The mutes were summoned to the Palace. They gathered before the new Sultan and pressed their heads to the floor. A servant took each man by the arm and led him backwards toward the wall of the room. This way, they could not turn their backs upon the Sultan. When the six men sat kneeling against the walls and looking towards their master, Selim rose and moved toward the opposite side of the room. He took an archer’s bow from its rack on the wall, bringing it in front of the mutes. He stood before them, and with his powerful hands bent the stout wooden bow tighter in its recurved arc to loosen the silk string. That this act required
immense physical strength was not lost on the mutes. He removed the string from the bow and walked toward the kneeling men. Slowly he moved before them, looking into each one’s eyes. From them, he saw nothing. No emotion. No fear. No love. Nothing.

He came to the end of the line. With feline speed and precision, he stepped behind the first mute, quickly wrapping the silk bowstring around his neck. He crossed his powerful hands and tightened the garrote. The big mute clawed at the rope around his throat. His legs shot out in front of him as he tried to gain his feet to find a platform from which to resist. Selim barely moved. His hands continued to tighten the snare of silk.

The mute’s fingers clawed at his own neck, trying to find purchase under the cord, anything to loosen the cord and escape the strangulation. His fingers tore at his skin. But the cord was buried deep into his own flesh, and his fingers could not find their way. As he struggled, his face grew scarlet, then crimson. The veins began to stand out upon his neck. His eyes were wide with fear, and his color slowly changed to a pale blue. Small dots of hemorrhage began to break out in the whites of his eyes. Then, as if it were the changes of color that controlled his body, the strength and the intensity of his resistance began to diminish. In less than three minutes, he stopped struggling altogether. His hands came away from his neck and he buckled limply to the floor. His knees sagged, and he appeared as a puppet held aloft by the strength of Selim, the puppeteer. His skin turned gray, and the luster left his protruding eyes.