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This ferocious Sultan was completely under the thumb of his mother, a bloody old lady named Kiusem. Kiusem persuaded Murad not to liquidate his younger brother İbrahim but to keep him instead in the Cage; so that when Murad died in 1640 İbrahim succeeded him, and Kiusem continued as Queen Mother and the power behind the throne.

İbrahim was a homicidal maniac. He had been in the Cage since babyhood and, ever since he had been old enough to realize that he was a younger brother, had lived in daily expectation of the mutes with bowstrings. Therefore, when the viziers came to proclaim him Sultan, the first thing he did was to pile all the furniture in front of the door. Once convinced, however, that he was not to be killed but enthroned, he indulged himself in all of his criminal and crazy whims. He built a kiosk and lined it with sable; he threw gold sequins to the goldfish in the palace lake; he festooned his beard with precious jewels. One day in a fit of pique with his harem, he had each of his three hundred concubines put into a sack with a stone at her feet and drowned in the Sea of Marmara. (The story goes that some years later a diver, looking for a submerged wreck, descended into the Marmara and came up almost at once babbling incoherently about three hundred sacks, held upright by weights at one end, nodding and bowing in the current.) İbrahim made a bath attendant the General of the Janissaries and an itinerant Arab singer Lord Chamberlain. Even Evliya Effendi, Murad’s Boon Companion and a staunch admirer of Sultans, was obliged to write that “he was … not very intelligent.” After eight years of İbrahim, a janissary revolution overthrew him and put him back in the Cage where the mutes with bowstrings paid him an overdue visit. A son of İbrahim succeeded to the throne, and the new Queen Mother very sensibly had the old one strangled and turned over her power to a capable vizier.

In earlier days the royal heirs had gained some knowledge of their empire by fighting at the front or governing distant provinces. But after the middle of the seventeenth century they never left the Cage. One Sultan, who succeeded to the throne after fifty years there, was unable to speak; another, who had employed his thirty-nine years there in copying and illuminating Korans, begged to be allowed to get on with it. The princes received very little education and what they did receive was apt to come from doctored textbooks. Prince Abdül Aziz, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, studied textbooks in which the Turks had never suffered a military defeat and the French Revolution had never happened. The princes’ company was limited to that of eunuchs and women chosen for their barrenness.

Modern Turks, who are extremely proud of their history since 1920, prefer to ignore the seamy history of the Sultans. Because of this, and also because they are new to the idea of tourism and really can’t see why a foreigner would be interested in browsing around any damp old Turkish buildings, the Museum of the Grand Seraglio is not only provocative but provoking. Enough treasure is there—emerald-encrusted coffee cups, plumed fans with diamonds hanging like dew among the plumes, a pure gold throne—to give a hint of the old, vast splendor. There are the Sultans’ portraits—grim Sultans, foxy Sultans, obese and mad-eyed Sultans; there are marble balustrades and tattered brocade draperies, and one or two of the fountains that once made the whole palace murmurous with playing water. But the buildings are badly lit, the gardens raggle-taggle, and the few signs and labels maddeningly uninformative. It is as though the old palace still resented intruders and would like to keep them cooling their heels, as visiting ambassadors were kept at the Gate of the Executioner.

In the old days, when the Sultan was ready to grant an audience to a waiting ambassador, a herald cried out cordially, “Let the dogs be fed!” The audience always took place on a day when the Divan (the imperial council) was meeting and the janissaries were to be paid, so that