The problem of succession has troubled many societies, from Rome and Greece to China and Cuba. When one leader dies, is there a clearly understood procedure for determining who should be the next leader?
Each civilization must confront this question. Some have answered it successfully. Other have failed.
For several generations, these succession disputes were solved by a policy imposed by Mehmed II in the mid-1400s. Michael Farquhar describes the Muslim’s solution to the riddle of “who should be the next ruler?”
Sultan Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” devised a simple solution in the mid-15th century for the fierce sibling quarrels that had long plagued the succession to the Ottoman throne: fratricide. “And to whomsoever of my sons the Sultanate shall pass, it is fitting that for the order of the world he shall kill his brothers,” Mehmed II decreed (after having his own infant brother strangled). Nearly a century and a half later, the murderous policy had a particularly devastating effect on Mehmed III’s brothers — all 19 of them! — when he came to the throne on January 27, 1595. The young men, some of them still babies, were ritually strangled with a bowstring and then buried with all due solemnity in the same tomb as their recently deceased father.
This solution to the succession problem was, after more than a century, so thoroughly ingrained in Islamic lands that the British poet Alexander Pope, in giving advice to would-be ruler, wrote, “Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.”
