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By Root 922 0

guard of the Arab caliphs at Baghdad was composed of Turkish mercenaries. From being the caliph’s servants, they became his masters. By the ninth century the Seljuk Turks—tribesmen whose chieftains claimed descent from an ancestral hero named Seljuk—had made the caliph into a figurehead. In 1055 they took over most of the great Arab empire for themselves; a few years later, in 1071, they defeated the emperor of Byzantium at Manzikert in Asia Minor and began settling in that country. Shortly before the year 1300 a few hundred families of another Turkish tribe left their central Asiatic pastures near the river Oxus to settle in the domain of their Seljuk kin. Under their leader, Osman, they soon moved into western Asia Minor, and as the Seljuk empire broke into fragments, they extended their sway to gain control eventually over the entire region. Osman’s descendants, the Osmanli or Ottoman sultans, continued to rule Asia Minor until the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1922.

One of the most famous of them, Mohammed II, captured Constantinople in 1453 and put an end to the diminished Byzantine empire. Once his capital was established there, he sent his armies off in all four directions. The swiftly moving Turkish horsemen returned victorious—and rich—and the sultans soon ruled an empire on three continents. Osman’s descendants led glorious but dangerous lives. Whenever a new sultan ascended the bejeweled imperial throne, he had his brothers strangled to rid himself of rivals. Later, when the Turks became more civilized, the sultan’s brothers—and often his sons—were merely imprisoned in cages, next to the royal harem, to keep them from mischief. But whenever one of them was lucky enough to reach the throne, he could style himself: “Sultan of the Sultans of East and West, fortunate lord of the domains of the Romans, Persians, and Arabs, Hero of creation … Sultan of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, of the extolled Ka’aba and Medina the illustrious and Jerusalem the noble, of the throne of Egypt and the province of Yemen, Aden and San’a, of Baghdad and Basra and Lahsa and Ctesiphon, of the lands of Algiers and Azerbaijan, of the region of the Kipchaks and the lands of the Tartars, of Kurdistan and Luristan and all Rumelia, Anatolia and Karaman, of Wallachia and Moldavia and Hungary and many kingdoms and lands besides …” Turkish royal politics being what they were, it was a fortunate sultan who stayed on the throne long enough to memorize, or even recite, this formula.

The court artists who were called upon to depict so august and all-powerful a personage had a difficult task. They showed the sultan bigger than the people around him, his rich robes billowing out to fill an inordinately large share of the picture space. The painters, like almost everyone else who lived and worked in the Grand Seraglio, the enormous royal palace at Constantinople, were his slaves, about on a level with the servant who carried in the clock when the sultan wanted to know what time it was, or the man who bore an extra royal turban in public processions and bobbed it up and down to save the sultan the trouble of acknowledging the applause of the populace.

A number of the painters came from Persia, for the Turks then thought of that country as the home of art, much as Americans not long ago considered France. Persian miniatures, which earlier had been influenced by the art of Turkish central Asia, now influenced Ottoman art. Yet there were differences, many of them traceable to old Turkish traditions, inherited from the art of tribal days. The costumes depicted, the shape of mountains in landscape paintings, the postures of the sitters—who were usually shown seated with legs crossed, almost in the pose of Buddha—recalled the art of central Asia rather than that of Persia. The Persians used a wide range of delicate colors. The Turks employed fewer colors, but they were generally bolder. The Persians painted amorous scenes and gardens, or depicted the legendary exploits of ancient heroes. The Turks, more realistic, painted cities and soldiers,