Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities (2013) s01e03 Episode Script
Capital Of A New Empire
These are the gardens of the Topkapi Palace of Istanbul, the imperial residence of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire.
Just as Henry VIII was dazzling England, two boys might have been seen walking here amongst the pavilions and the courtyards.
The two boys were Prince Suleiman, the son and heir of the reigning Sultan, and Ibrahim, his favourite companion, his slave, a Christian boy bought in the slave markets of Europe converted to Islam and brought here to be trained in the palace school.
Ibrahim had been given to Suleiman, and they became best friends, inseparable allies.
It was a friendship that would ultimately end in betrayal and murder.
Ibrahim was the bumptious and confident one.
His master more enigmatic and reticent.
These two boys would one day rule a global empire from this, their imperial capital, but whatever the name of this city, and it had variously been Byzantium, Constantinople and now Istanbul, this place was always the essence of its power.
Once, it had been the site of the palace of the Roman Caesars, and now, it was the seat of the Ottoman emperors and from here, they ruled the greatest empire on Earth.
I come here as historian and traveller, to tell the story of how this city rose to become the cosmopolitan world capital of a vast empire that stretched from Iraq to the Balkans, and also a sacred epicentre of Islam.
It's always been a city built and made to rule the world.
I'm fascinated by its secrets, the world under its streets, the hidden councils of power, the dark recesses of the imperial palaces, the intrigues behind the grilles of the Harem.
In this last film, we will travel from the fearsome brilliance of Sultan Selim the Grim and the rule of the female Sultanas, all the way up to the First World War and finally, the rise of a new Turkey under the command of a visionary secular leader, the extraordinary Ataturk.
When the Ottoman conquerors poured through the walls of this city in 1453, the first thing they did was convert the ancient church of St Sophia into a mosque.
Constantinople, in ancient times Byzantium, was then rebuilt and repopulated and they called it Istanbul.
The Ottomans had a vision of the city as world capital, with all other faiths, Christians and Jews tolerated, providing they recognised the supremacy of Islam and the Ottoman Sultan.
Strangely, the Ottomans had conquered south-eastern Europe before they conquered Asia.
At the start of the 16th century, the Ottoman sultans ruled most of the Balkans.
Alongside their own Turkish horsemen, their armies and their administrators, the viziers, were mainly made up of Christian converts, forcibly taken as a tax from families in today's Serbia, Greece, and Bosnia.
It was very much a European empire.
But all that was to change because of just one man.
This is the tomb of Selim the Grim.
He was probably the greatest warrior emperor of the Ottoman dynasty.
As those boys walked in the Topkapi gardens, the Prince's father was conquering a new empire.
Selim was a terrifying and ferocious warrior Sultan.
He was also talented, highly educated, an accomplished poet, trained and raised in the vicious snake pit of the Ottoman court.
Selim didn't spend much time in Istanbul, he was always at war.
He spent most of his eight-and-a-half-year reign in the saddle.
First he defeated the Shiite Shahs of Iran and then he destroyed the entire Mamluk Empire, conquering all of the Middle East, including the holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem and henceforward, he proudly called himself Guardian of the Holy Places.
But there was more.
Selim was now the proud possessor of the most important holy relics of Islam, the swords of the Prophet Mohammed.
And these cases, containing his mantle and his sacred banner.
These were the treasures he brought back to the Topkapi Palace.
The palace of the Ottoman emperors was situated on a high peninsula guarding the Bosphorus, the narrow straits dividing Europe from Asia.
This city commanded the strategic crossroads between east and west, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and now it was the capital of the Muslim world.
When Selim the Grim died, it was here that his son Prince Suleiman came to take the reins of power.
Topkapi was like no other palace on Earth.
Its many pavilions are arranged more like the campaign tents of a monarch on the march.
It was a place of intrigue and shadows, where business was conducted in almost complete silence.
I was just looking at a portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Looking at the face of this exceptional man.
He was very thin-faced.
He was just 25 years old, haughty, majestic, enigmatic.
Always totally mysterious.
He was capable of running wars, of commanding complex architectural projects, of thinking about ideology of religion, but he also was deeply paranoid and suspicious.
This was a man of great friendship and loyalty, but he was also capable of the darkest vengeance on family and friends.
This is the Divan, the Cabinet chamber of the empire.
Suleiman soon made his friend Ibrahim his Grand Vizier or Prime Minister.
But while Ibrahim sat with his ministers, Suleiman listened to their plans unseen from behind a grille he'd had installed halfway up the wall.
The sultans often executed their grand viziers and even Ibrahim had begged his master not to raise him too high.
Suleiman didn't see himself just as a Sultan.
He was Caesar and Khan, Lord of the Horizon, Emperor of the Two Seas, but now he had the holy cities and the holy relics, he added another title - that of Caliph.
The Successor and Viceroy of Mohammed on Earth.
Suleiman now set about building a city worthy of that title.
Up here, on the rooftops, among all these famous minarets, and these great domes, I'm at the centre of one of the holiest cities in the world, and I'm about to hear any minute the call to prayer, from the muezzins in these minarets.
It's starting over there.
The sound of a holy city.
Suleiman the Magnificent built many mosques here in the capital, but there's one that's bigger and more stately than all the rest, one that even rivals the church turned-mosque of Hagia Sophia.
And it bears his name, the Suleimaniye.
This is the masterpiece of Suleiman the Magnificent's architect, Sinan.
Together, theirs was probably the most successful partnership of monarch and architect in all of history.
He was the Christopher Wren of Istanbul and much, much more.
They changed the skyline of the city more than anyone since Justinian had built Hagia Sophia.
The foundations alone of this great mosque took three whole years to build.
Inside, no expense was spared.
Sinan even fitted its vast dome with special resonators to help improve the acoustics.
I'm with art historian Nina Ergin to explore what Suleiman had in mind.
Suleiman had a very long reign, 46 years, and he was a very successful military leader as well, and with the money from his conquests, he was able to build a mosque of this size.
Suleiman the Magnificent, he picked for himself the Padishah of Islam, the Emperor of Islam, so really, the Caliph, the ruler of the entire Islamic world.
Part of his mission was to bring the law of the Ottoman countries more in line with the Sharia and put more emphasis on the Orthodox practice of religion, and this is very much emphasised in this building.
For example, the inscriptions that you can see all over the mosque, they are almost exclusively drawn from the Koran and they are almost exclusively verses that emphasise how you should pray, how often you should go to pray, the timing of the prayer and so on.
But it's outside, at his mausoleum, that I discover how Suleiman really saw himself.
He was emulating the greatest king of the Bible.
Suleiman, the name itself actually means Solomon, and he styled himself as the Solomon of his age.
So for example, he had a very special connection to Jerusalem, where the temple built by Solomon is also located and on top of that is the Dome of the Rock.
Suleiman the Magnificent actually renovated the Dome of the Rock and following that, he built his own mausoleum to reflect the shape of the Dome of the Rock.
Suleiman, law-giver and conqueror, was answerable to no man.
And yet, within the cold haughtiness, there was a surprising warmth, and it came from the most secret part of the Imperial Palace.
This gate led to the harem, and a special purpose of the harem was only indirectly concerned with sex.
It was really all about power and the imperial bloodline, and forget the cliche of black-eyed B-list belly dancers, these rooms behind me contained the most beautiful women in the world.
This was a breeding machine for the sultans.
The idea was that no wife or her family would ever become powerful.
They were just there to provide multiple heirs for the Ottoman Empire.
That was all.
At least, that was how it was MEANT to work.
These girls, the concubines of the harem, were Christians, often captured by pirates, bought by slave traders for the markets of the city.
Slavic blondes and redheads were particularly prized.
They were converted to Islam and educated in the Sultan's harem.
One Russian girl attracted Suleiman's special attention.
Ottoman emperors didn't traditionally marry their concubines, but Suleiman obviously absolutely loved Roxelana.
He renamed her Hurrem Sultan, the joy the delight of the Sultan.
They had children together, they had sons and daughters and she became increasingly part of his life and of the politics of the Ottoman court.
Their love letters, which they exchanged and also the poems they wrote to each other, are some of the most romantic exchanges in all of Turkish literature and I think in world literature.
He called her, "The queen of my heart's realm.
"Oh, my black-haired love "with bow-like eyebrows, "with languorous, perfidious eyes.
"If I die, you are my killer.
"Merciless infidel woman.
" Her letters are passionate too Her letters are passionate too "If the seas become ink and the trees become pens "when could they write of our parting?" And sometimes she writes of "The pity and lonely separation from the "Lord of the Worlds.
" But behind the sweet words was a grimmer reality.
Roxelana was not the only woman to bear the Sultan's children and she was up against a brutal convention set up by Suleiman's great-grandfather.
The breeding machine of the harem worked far too well.
Now, there were so many heirs and they all wanted power, but Suleiman's great-grandfather Sultan Mehmed II had instituted a ruthless solution to this problem.
They would kill all their brothers, and some of their sons even, on their accession.
And this is how they did it.
With the bowstring.
The Turks believed it was forbidden to shed royal blood, so they had to find a way to kill their brothers without shedding any.
And this is how they did it They sent deaf-mutes, their special bodyguards, to strangle them like this.
Roxelana would have to fight for her own children's survival in a merciless contest.
She would have to wield power herself.
But how? The only way was to gain the Sultan's exclusive ear.
To do that, she would have to get rid of his great friend and minister Ibrahim.
This is the palace of Ibrahim Pasha, built for him by Suleiman the Magnificent himself.
By this time, Ibrahim was the richest and most powerful man in the empire after the Sultan himself.
When Suleiman was away at the war, Roxelana wrote him letters warning him of plotting and intrigue by Ibrahim.
When Suleiman got back, he invited his old friend over to the Topkapi Palace to spend an evening together like they always used to.
Ibrahim went over there for dinner.
It was to be their last evening together.
It was to be Ibrahim's last evening, full stop.
In the morning, his strangled and bloodied body was found outside the palace gates.
With Ibrahim gone, Roxelana was able to take total control.
She married her and Suleiman's daughter to a Grand Vizier of her choice, Rustem, and together they plotted against Suleiman's eldest son, Mustafa.
This is Rustem's Mosque, also built by Sinan.
It's one of the most beautiful in Istanbul with the most stunning Iznik tile work, but behind the beauty is the story of how Roxelana put her own son in line for the throne.
She played on Suleiman's suspicions of his elder son, which were perhaps justified.
Either way, Suleiman invited his son Mustafa to his tent where he was strangled in front of him.
Roxelana had won.
She's buried in a glorious tomb next to her master at the Suleimaniye Mosque.
It was her son Selim II who succeeded his father.
He was fat, he was indolent and he was cheerful and he was so fond of wine that westerners called him Selim the Drunk.
The Ottoman conquests hadn't been just on land.
Their admirals, like the famous Barbarossa, had ensured that this city dominated the entire Mediterranean, and by Suleiman's time, Istanbul had entered a golden age as trading entrepot.
There were spices and perfumes from Egypt, meat from Anatolia and the Balkans, butter and salt from the Crimea.
Silks from the Far East.
Fish from the Black Sea.
Istanbul was an orderly and peaceful place, due as one visitor noted, to the salutary vigour of frequent acts of execution.
But one minority of traders had a special reason to feel grateful.
I've come to the old Jewish quarter of Haskoy.
These days, there's only a few Jews left in Istanbul, but they once were a powerful community.
Hola! Straightaway, you hear something.
A language that gives you a clue about how they got here.
Gracias.
I didn't realise they were still speaking this special Jewish dialect of Spanish.
It's amazing to find out that they still are.
(speaking Ladino) Gracias.
Wow, what a lovely synagogue, and I'm very happy to be here.
This synagogue, founded in 1525, is one of the oldest in Istanbul.
A beautiful place, as you can see, and it tells a story here.
In 1492, the repressive and intolerant Christian rulers of Spain, and then followed by the whole of western Europe, expelled their Jews and the Ottoman emperors gave them refuge, invited them to settle and they did so in large numbers.
They made themselves so at home here that they spoke a special language, Ladino, a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew, with a little bit of Turkish thrown in.
And even today, the Jews who look after this Synagogue, speak that special Ottoman Jewish language.
But I'm really here to tell the story of one remarkable man.
Joseph Nasi came here with his aunt, a regal retinue and an international banking fortune that he leant to his new sovereign.
Joseph Nasi became companion, advisor and best friend almost of the heir to the throne, Prince Selim, and when he succeeded as Selim II, he became his chief consularie almost and he prospered enormously.
Joseph was enriched by monopolies granted to him, especially in wine, which he enjoyed drinking with the Sultan.
He was so powerful, that Europeans who called the Sultan "The Great Turk", dubbed Joseph "The Great Jew".
He built a palace overlooking the Bosphorus where he lived like a king, patronising artists and protecting his fellow Jews.
This is really the most important part of any synagogue.
It's the ark and it's where the scrolls of the law, the Tora are kept and it's always a very exciting moment and a rather lovely moment for a Jewish person to look at these, so I'm going to open it.
I've got the golden key here.
So let's see.
Open the doors .
.
and .
.
draw aside the curtain and there they are.
Very beautiful, aren't they? Selim made Joseph the Duke of Naxos, an island in the Aegean, where ironically, this Jewish prince found himself ruling over Christians.
It just tells you something about this extraordinary time in Ottoman history and the history of Istanbul, when this great Jewish figure could actually be best friends and confidant with the Caliph of Islam and the Islamic Emperor of the greatest Muslim empire in the world.
It wasn't just the Jews that prospered.
The Christian Greeks that had been here since before the Ottoman conquest thrived.
The Sultan appointed Greek princes to rule his Christian provinces in today's Romania.
But the Armenians were the Christians who really blossomed in Istanbul.
They too had their own quarter of the city.
All of them swore loyalty to the Emperor.
They were the Sultan's Christian subjects.
Any threats that came to the city came not from them, but from the instability of its Ottoman rulers.
As their empire got bigger, the sultans spent less time in the saddle and more time enjoying the pleasures of the palace.
Selim II died after falling over drunk in the harem.
If his vice was alcohol, that of his successor was lust.
Murad III fathered 102 children, which required a massive culling of princes when his son Mehmed III succeeded him in 1597.
The day after his accession, the policy of fratricide reached its brutal and heart-rending climax.
This place bears witness to the tragedy of that day where 19 brothers were killed, some as young as five.
Their tombs are here alongside their father's at Hagia Sophia.
One of the little ones asked if he could finish his roasted chestnuts before he was strangled.
Even the hardened courtiers of the Topkapi wept as they saw the procession of 19 tiny coffins wend its way from the palace to rest right here.
This was fratricide gone mad, and even public opinion was outraged, so the brothers of future sultans were kept in luxurious rooms in Topkapi, known ironically as the cage, where they spent the rest of their lives in isolated splendour.
In 1616, a new showpiece of Ottoman power arose in the city, a landmark that still defines the skyline of Istanbul.
The Blue Mosque had an unprecedented six minarets, but its building tells us much about the state of the empire outside and the positions of the sultans here.
There's something a little gaudy, perhaps a little kitsch, certainly very Baroque about this place.
It's got these vast, elephant-leg columns and above, a cascade of multiple domes.
It wasn't built like the other mosques on the trophies of victory over the Christians.
This one is really a statement of vanity of the Sultan Ahmed I, but I like it.
I like it a lot.
Ahmed I was a pious Sultan, but he didn't live long enough to enjoy the delights of his foundation.
He died aged 27, having half bankrupted the empire to build it.
Sultan Ahmed built the Blue Mosque, but the most interesting thing about him is the intelligent and beautiful Greek woman who became the love of his life - Kosem.
She and Ahmed are both buried over there.
She became the most powerful woman in all of Istanbul's history.
She was the wife and mother, the ruler and the killer of sultans.
Ahmed's immediate successors weren't Kosem's sons, but she watched and waited as Ahmed's brother Mustafa went insane and was dethroned by the palace eunuchs.
His son Osman suffered an even worse fate when he dared to cross his elite troops, the Janissaries.
The Janissaries had been mainly Slavic boys, given to the Sultan as a tax on his Christian subjects.
They were converted to Islam, and trained into the best troops in Europe.
But now, they had become a bloated Praetorian Guard, hereditary and over-mighty with the power to dominate the sultans themselves.
The boy Sultan Osman was imprisoned in the Castle of the Seven Towers.
When they came to kill him, he resisted violently until he was stopped by Pahlavan the Oil Wrestler, who killed him by constriction of his testicles.
Imagine the agony.
Whether Kosem was directly involved or not, we don't know.
But it was now that Kosem helped raise her own young son to the throne.
Murad IV was an Ottoman cross between Julius Caesar and Caligula, one of the most victorious sultans, but also the most blood-spattered.
He was an enormous giant of a man who could lift up two of his courtiers in each arm above his head.
He led victorious campaigns that retook Armenia and Baghdad, and when he returned to Topkapi, he did so in a Roman-style triumph wearing a lion skin.
He celebrated his victories by building the majestic Baghdad Pavilion at Topkapi Palace, but this victorious and meteoric showman had a dark side.
Obsessed with re-imposing political authority and religious conformity, he presided over the executions of as many as 20,000 people.
Now, he would leave the palace at night and prowl the streets.
He was both a sadist and increasingly an alcoholic.
When he heard some women partying down by the river, he had them all drowned in the water.
When his singer at court sang a Persian song, he chopped off his head.
At night, incognito and drinking heavily, he would patrol the town with a group of friends wearing a huge broadsword.
He would burst into cafes and private houses and shops and any rules that were broken, he would draw his sword and personally chop the heads off anyone who crossed him.
He was becoming a monster.
While Murad killed, Kosem would patrol the same streets tending to the orphaned and the dispossessed.
The terror only ended in 1640 when Murad IV died at the age of 29, the last of the conquering sultans.
Kosem would rule in place of her last son, Ibrahim, who was insane.
But, mercifully for the city, he was confined to an existence within the palace walls.
Ibrahim the Mad built this little pavilion to take his breakfast, but actually his mind was very rarely on food.
He was a demented, fetishistic, erotomaniac priapist, who was obsessed with three fetishes, amber scent, furs and gigantic women.
He scoured the entire empire for larger and larger women.
Such a woman was found, and this Armenian courtesan was brought to Istanbul where he named her Sugar Cube and made her his absolute favourite.
But he was becoming more and more demented.
He would find women walking here in the gardens at Topkapi and ravish them in front of all his courtiers.
Soon, this was too much even for the eunuchs of the harem and his courtiers and they, along with the mufti, the religious leader of Istanbul, decided that Ibrahim the Mad had to go.
His mother agreed.
While Ibrahim was being led away for strangulation, Kosem was already presenting her seven-year-old grandson to the viziers.
Here he is, she said.
See what you can do with him.
Kosem was the real ruler, giving orders to ministers from behind the gilded grille in the Divan.
Like the sultans before her, Kosem also built charitable works on a grand scale.
Right in the heart of the city, there's a huge galleried courtyard, complete with its own mosque.
One of the delights about researching the history of a place like Istanbul is finding this sort of neglected jewel.
This was once a caravanserai to receive goods and camel trains from the east, from the silk route, from Persia, and you can imagine it in the 17th century thriving, bustling with camels and horses.
There were hotels here and stables and workshops, markets.
This huge place is all the work of one woman - the Queen Mother, the Valide Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
But inevitably, Kosem's turn came too in yet another palace coup.
Kosem was the Mrs Thatcher of the Ottoman Empire, which she dominated for 50 years, but when the intrigues of the harem turned against her, they found her hiding in a cupboard.
She fought so hard that the blood poured out of her ears and eyes.
And it was said she was strangled with her own hair.
Over the next two centuries, the fortunes of the city began to stagnate just as the empire outside fell into torpor.
But a recent discovery beneath this building challenges our presumption that the Ottomans were obsolete.
I've come to see an extraordinary structure underneath the 18th-century Nuruosmaniye Mosque.
These pools are part of an elaborate system to limit the damage from earthquakes, because the mosque above was built on soft ground.
In the rainy season, the pools would overflow and the floodwater would disappear down a steep channel into the Bosphorus.
That way, these fantastic vaulted foundations were kept dry, so that when earthquakes struck, as they frequently do here, the mosque would stay up.
So even in the 18th century, the middle of the 18th century, in the time when the Ottoman Empire was actually in eclipse and its power was in serious decline, it's interesting that they were still capable of this very, very sophisticated and multipurpose piece of engineering.
But away from the capital, the foundations of this great empire were now beginning to fracture.
The problem was with the Sultan's Christian subjects.
This is the Phanar District of Old Istanbul, the Greek Orthodox neighbourhood.
And it's a vanished world now.
You can see the mansions ruined of old Phanariot Greek merchant families.
They were the fixers, the middlemen, they were wealthy and their princes were potentates of Ottoman society, descended from Byzantine emperors.
But in 1821, something happened that broke for ever 400 years of tolerance and co-existence.
The Greeks of mainland Greece rebelled against the Sultan.
The consequences for the Greek population of Istanbul were dire.
Their patriarch, Gregory V, the head of the Orthodox Church, somehow became implicated in the rebellion.
The Sultan decided to make an example of him.
On Easter Sunday 1821, the holiest day of the Greek Orthodox calendar, the Sultanic guards burst into this church.
They rushed down the centre, grabbed the patriarch in front of his packed congregation, dragged him out and hanged him from a gibbet right on the gate of his own church.
It took him hours to die.
Elsewhere in the city, three archbishops were hanged and any Greeks found on the streets were killed on the spot.
Peace was soon restored in the capital, but the centuries-old tradition of tolerance in the city had been broken.
The Sultan who'd given the order was this man.
Mahmud II.
He believed that if he was to maintain power abroad, he would first have to assert himself in his capital.
And that meant getting rid of his bodyguard, the Janissaries.
They were out of control and becoming a plague on Istanbul.
The Janissaries had once been the Sultan's crack troops, but now they were incompetent, corrupt and technically obsolete.
They were much more interested in trading in their little shops and making and unmaking sultans.
And intriguingly, in a city of wooden buildings, they were the fire brigade.
When fire broke out, as it frequently did in Istanbul, the Janissaries would pull down the houses in the path of the fire to stop it spreading.
But more often than not, the contents would be looted by them and the owners left destitute.
The Janissaries were hated by everyone.
They were a law unto themselves.
Mahmud too had good reason to hate his own troops.
The Janissaries had deposed and murdered his own cousin Selim III in 1808 and he'd only escaped by running across the rooftops of the Topkapi Palace.
Now as Sultan, Mahmud was determined to destroy the Janissaries and to do that, he would deploy one of the holiest relics in all Islam.
On the 11th June 1826, the Sultan began to drill some of his soldiers in European fashion .
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wearing modern uniforms, knowing the Janissaries would resent this new challenge to their age-old power.
The Janissaries took the bait, they rebelled and ran amok in the streets, hoping to bully the Sultan as they always had before.
But this time, the Sultan was ready.
He fetched the Holy Banner of the Prophet from its box in the Topkapi Treasury and gave it to his Grand Vizier to take to the Blue Mosque, saying either the Janissaries will all be murdered or cats will walk over the ruins of Constantinople.
The Holy Banner of the Prophet Mohammed was unfurled from this pulpit and the message went out to all true Muslims in the city, come here and support your Caliph.
But would the people come? And would the Sultan's other soldiers stay loyal? But come they did.
Thousands of people converged on this mosque, bearing swords and pitchforks and guns, to support their Sultan against the hated Janissaries.
This became military headquarters for this holy enterprise and at last, the Blue Mosque covered itself in holy glory.
Outnumbered by the people of the city, the Janissaries retreated to their barracks.
It was a fatal mistake, because the Grand Vizier had the loyalty of the Sultan's artillery regiment.
He brought up cannon and started to bombard the place.
It caught fire and, in a sort of sweet infernal irony, the Janissaries, the firefighters of Istanbul, were consumed in their thousands in this vast and terrible conflagration.
The Janissaries who escaped were butchered by the people of Istanbul.
When they hid in the bathhouses of the city, they were dragged out for a month afterwards and torn to pieces, their bodies left for the dogs.
There ended, after hundreds of years, the power of the Janissaries.
The massacre was styled the Auspicious Event.
Now, the sultans could turn their backs on the past and start to modernise.
And it was clear what their model would be.
Their inspiration would be the imperial dynasties of the West.
France, Austria, Britain.
And here it is, the new face of Empire.
This is the brand-new Dolmebache Palace, built in the mid-19th century.
It's grand, it's gaudy, it's kitsch and it's bling.
It's built to impress and it's really declaring that the Ottoman sultans are modern European monarchs in the grand age of Victorian empires.
Everything in here is the very best that Europe can offer.
The chandeliers are from Britain, the gilded furniture is French.
The ceramics are Italian.
The Sultan who built this is really saying, "I am still the master of a thriving international empire.
" That's what it looks like, but in fact, the reality is very different.
The bear skins on the floor are from Russia, and they tell us the other side of the story.
This is the Sultan's reception room, and this is where, in his customary magnificence, he received the ambassadors of the great powers.
But only two of these ambassadors really mattered - the Russians and the British.
And it was they who were encouraging him to reform his army and to give his minorities the sort of rights they received in the West.
But actually, something very different was going on here, both the Russians and the British took turns to bully the Sultan into doing what they wanted him to do.
Tsar Nickolas I called the Ottoman Empire "The sick man of Europe".
And actually, both powers were really only interested in carving up the empire when it finally died.
But it was the Russians who had the greatest and most ancient ambitions.
Russia had wanted the city ever since 1780, when Catherine the Great had initiated her Greek Project, the partition of the Ottoman Empire with the intention of creating a new Christian Byzantium.
She called Istanbul "Tsargrad", City of the Caesars, and she even named her grandson Constantine, designated future emperor of a new Byzantine Empire.
Looking out here, you can really see why this little bit of water mattered so much to the Russians.
Look at these cargo ships queuing up to get through the straits to export their grain from Odessa, on the north coast of the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean.
And that's why the Russian Tsars wanted to conquer Istanbul.
In April 1877, Russia declared war and invaded the empire's Balkan provinces.
Seven months later, they'd fought their way to the very gates of Istanbul.
But on the 13th February 1878, six battleships anchored right off the coast here to take on the Russians.
And this big gun tells the story of what happened next.
Those battleships were British battleships, and they were there with one purpose - to stop the advancing victorious Russians and to save Istanbul.
And they succeeded.
The Russians stopped in their tracks.
Look at this nameplate here.
It says "Vickers-Armstrong, Newcastle, 1869.
" This was a gun given by the British to the Ottomans to help defend Istanbul.
The guiding principle of British foreign policy throughout the 19th Century was to keep the Russians out of Istanbul and to maintain the Ottoman Empire until they decided otherwise.
While the Russians and the British schemed, the new Sultan was enlisting help from other quarters.
Help that would ultimately prove disastrous for the city.
This is the Yildiz Palace.
It's not really a palace at all, it's actually a complex of different pavilions.
And it's as weird, as eccentric, as eclectic and as sinister as the Sultan who built it, Abdul Hamid II.
For 30 years, he ruled the Ottoman Empire from here.
As I'm sitting on the steps of his favourite house in his secret park, I've just been looking at the face of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
He has to be one of the strangest leaders of modern times.
A bizarre mixture of the archaic and the modern.
Over there, he had his harem with 900 girls in it, his odalisques.
In this house, he would go to the top floor and watch the Bosphorus through a telescope to monitor the comings and goings, and he was absolutely paranoid.
He looked every day under his bed to see if there was an assassin.
He was happiest sitting here in his park, on his island, watching his private zoo.
And yet, despite all these eccentricities, he was a ruthless politician with a singular idea of how to save the Ottoman Empire.
As it lost more and more Balkan provinces, Abdul Hamid promoted himself as an Islamicist leader, as the Caliph of international Islam, by which he hoped to provide the glue to keep the empire together.
He also was a fanatical moderniser.
He built railways, and telegraphs and a modern army, and to do this, he had one backer and partner.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, of Germany, who visited him here at Yildiz twice and, as you can see, he built German buildings.
The Kaiser would have felt right at home here.
But Abdul Hamid, ageing and isolated, was overthrown in 1909 by the Young Turks, idealistic army officers who set up a parliamentary government.
But in 1913, power was seized by one of them, Enver Pasha, a reckless and flamboyant young general, who believed only harsh nationalism and victorious war could save the empire.
On the 9th November 1914, backed by Germany, Enver declared war against Britain, France and Russia.
His murderous repression and deportation of minorities destroyed the old cosmopolitanism of the capital, and his defeats brought catastrophe.
Sean McMeekin studies the pivotal role played by Istanbul in the First World War.
Well, it put it right at the heart of the conflict.
It was the great prize, if not the greatest prize to be won in the war.
In a certain sense, it gave the war a purpose, it gave it a point.
Not least for Russia, the Tsar with his sovereign claim here on the city.
Suddenly, the war had a point for the Russians, and it had an objective now for Russia's allies, Britain and France, wanting to open up the city so that they could help supply Russia by way of the Black Sea.
So, the city really became the great prize that was fought over, with this claim actually negotiated between the powers during the Gallipoli campaign.
In fact, the city was literally to be divided in three between these allies, with the Russians getting most of the ancient city of Byzantium.
How did Enver and the Ottomans do in World War One in fact? Well, not that badly.
In some ways, the Ottomans actually surprised Europe with their performance in the war.
In the end though, it wasn't enough.
It's a largely forgotten episode in the West that the powers occupied the capital of the Ottoman Empire for four years from 1918 to 1922, although it's not forgotten here.
In 1918, Britain and France, the victorious allies, occupied Istanbul.
The great capital that had resisted all comers for 400 years had finally fallen, and a resentful population awaited its fate.
While plans for partition were being drawn up, it was here, at the Pera Palace Hotel, that the British officers and diplomats stayed.
They flirted in the bar with gorgeous Russian countesses turned courtesans, refugees from the Bolshevik revolution.
Russia was now out of the running, and it was the British Prime Minister who had the big idea.
But it was an idea from an old world.
In the excitement of victory, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George was dazzled by dreams of classical empires.
He encouraged the Greeks to go to war, to restore the Byzantine Empire, and recreate a Christian Constantinople.
The Greeks began to dream of Orthodox services at the great church of St Sophia.
But one man would change all that.
In November 1918, an elegant and much-decorated Turkish General arrived here in the Pera Palace Hotel and booked into a suite on the second floor.
One night, some British officers invited him for a drink at their table.
He famously replied, "We are the hosts here, "you are the guests, you take drinks at my table.
" The occupation was unacceptable to most Turks, and his voice was the voice of history.
His name was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, but he's known to posterity as Ataturk.
This is where Ataturk stayed.
He was altogether an exceptional character.
He was one of the few Ottoman generals who'd actually defeated the British.
He'd expelled the Anglo-French expedition at Gallipoli in 1915.
He had the looks of a matinee idol, he was a man of veracious sensual appetites.
He loved drinking, he loved womanising, but above all, he had a vision for himself as leader and for Turkey as a nation.
When the Greek armies invaded Turkey at Lloyd George's instigation, Ataturk left Istanbul to lead the resistance from mainland Anatolia.
He planned to mobilise what was left of the Ottoman army.
The next time he'd return to Istanbul, it would be as conqueror.
Ataturk made his base in Ankara to the east, and in a ferocious campaign, pushed the Greeks all the way back to the Aegean.
The British plans collapsed and by September 1922, Ataturk's forces encircled the city.
The British, now war-weary, wisely did not engage.
In a year-long stalemate, the Turks took over the city from the inside, and in Britain, Lloyd George resigned.
On 6th October 1923, the first infantry division of the new Turkish Army entered Istanbul.
And the Turkish Republic was born.
The victorious Ataturk had great plans for his country.
He abolished the Sultanate, but the Ottomans remained as Caliphs, commanders of the faithful.
But not for long.
400 years after Selim the Grim had brought back the holy relics to Istanbul, the caliphate's days were numbered.
On the 3rd March 1924, the Assembly in Ankara formerly abolished the caliphate.
The next morning, at dawn, troops surrounded the Dolmabache Palace, and the Caliph, a small group of servants and family, gathered together their things and left the palace.
In the evening, the last Caliph boarded the Orient Express into exile.
It was the end of 500 years of the Ottoman Dynasty's connection with Istanbul.
Ataturk suppressed the city's religious establishments.
Some became museums.
Many shrines, religious schools and dervish lodges were closed.
"No civilised nation could follow in the path of sheikhs, "dervishes and fortune-tellers," he said.
Religion was a private matter.
But it wasn't just that.
He shunned the capital itself.
This is Ataturk's yacht.
It's moored here in Istanbul, a city he turned his back on, despising its perfidious history.
He said, "Perhaps the Black Sea will flood the Bosphorus, "the Republic will make a man of Byzantium, "which by becoming habituated to filth, "lies and immorality, has lost its immeasurable value.
" He moved the capital away from Istanbul and the Turkish Republic is still governed from Ankara.
90 years on, Ataturk's secular vision remains the only way for many Turks and Istanbul is now Europe's biggest megacity, of 15 million, comfortable in its role as Turkey's modern, cultural, economic capital.
But today's Turkish democracy is following a mildly Islamic path, accompanied by a revival of Ottoman prestige and ambition.
There are head scarves in the streets and pilgrims pray at the tombs of conquering sultans.
Cosmopolitan Istanbul now seems divided as the pendulum swings towards stricter Muslim piety.
I'm ending my story in one of the most wondrous buildings on Earth, Hagia Sophia.
It's still the monument, the symbol, the centre of this crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity.
For one and a half millennia, it has presided over Caesars and sultans, magnificence, massacre and mayhem.
The tides of history, power and faith.
More than any other, this building defines the sacred and imperial city with the three magical names.
For 900 years, it was a church.
For 500 years, it was a mosque.
For the past 80, it's been a neutral, secular museum.
And now, there's a campaign for it to be a mosque again.
As ever, reflecting the drama of its times, this world city remains ever-changing.
Just as Henry VIII was dazzling England, two boys might have been seen walking here amongst the pavilions and the courtyards.
The two boys were Prince Suleiman, the son and heir of the reigning Sultan, and Ibrahim, his favourite companion, his slave, a Christian boy bought in the slave markets of Europe converted to Islam and brought here to be trained in the palace school.
Ibrahim had been given to Suleiman, and they became best friends, inseparable allies.
It was a friendship that would ultimately end in betrayal and murder.
Ibrahim was the bumptious and confident one.
His master more enigmatic and reticent.
These two boys would one day rule a global empire from this, their imperial capital, but whatever the name of this city, and it had variously been Byzantium, Constantinople and now Istanbul, this place was always the essence of its power.
Once, it had been the site of the palace of the Roman Caesars, and now, it was the seat of the Ottoman emperors and from here, they ruled the greatest empire on Earth.
I come here as historian and traveller, to tell the story of how this city rose to become the cosmopolitan world capital of a vast empire that stretched from Iraq to the Balkans, and also a sacred epicentre of Islam.
It's always been a city built and made to rule the world.
I'm fascinated by its secrets, the world under its streets, the hidden councils of power, the dark recesses of the imperial palaces, the intrigues behind the grilles of the Harem.
In this last film, we will travel from the fearsome brilliance of Sultan Selim the Grim and the rule of the female Sultanas, all the way up to the First World War and finally, the rise of a new Turkey under the command of a visionary secular leader, the extraordinary Ataturk.
When the Ottoman conquerors poured through the walls of this city in 1453, the first thing they did was convert the ancient church of St Sophia into a mosque.
Constantinople, in ancient times Byzantium, was then rebuilt and repopulated and they called it Istanbul.
The Ottomans had a vision of the city as world capital, with all other faiths, Christians and Jews tolerated, providing they recognised the supremacy of Islam and the Ottoman Sultan.
Strangely, the Ottomans had conquered south-eastern Europe before they conquered Asia.
At the start of the 16th century, the Ottoman sultans ruled most of the Balkans.
Alongside their own Turkish horsemen, their armies and their administrators, the viziers, were mainly made up of Christian converts, forcibly taken as a tax from families in today's Serbia, Greece, and Bosnia.
It was very much a European empire.
But all that was to change because of just one man.
This is the tomb of Selim the Grim.
He was probably the greatest warrior emperor of the Ottoman dynasty.
As those boys walked in the Topkapi gardens, the Prince's father was conquering a new empire.
Selim was a terrifying and ferocious warrior Sultan.
He was also talented, highly educated, an accomplished poet, trained and raised in the vicious snake pit of the Ottoman court.
Selim didn't spend much time in Istanbul, he was always at war.
He spent most of his eight-and-a-half-year reign in the saddle.
First he defeated the Shiite Shahs of Iran and then he destroyed the entire Mamluk Empire, conquering all of the Middle East, including the holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem and henceforward, he proudly called himself Guardian of the Holy Places.
But there was more.
Selim was now the proud possessor of the most important holy relics of Islam, the swords of the Prophet Mohammed.
And these cases, containing his mantle and his sacred banner.
These were the treasures he brought back to the Topkapi Palace.
The palace of the Ottoman emperors was situated on a high peninsula guarding the Bosphorus, the narrow straits dividing Europe from Asia.
This city commanded the strategic crossroads between east and west, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and now it was the capital of the Muslim world.
When Selim the Grim died, it was here that his son Prince Suleiman came to take the reins of power.
Topkapi was like no other palace on Earth.
Its many pavilions are arranged more like the campaign tents of a monarch on the march.
It was a place of intrigue and shadows, where business was conducted in almost complete silence.
I was just looking at a portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Looking at the face of this exceptional man.
He was very thin-faced.
He was just 25 years old, haughty, majestic, enigmatic.
Always totally mysterious.
He was capable of running wars, of commanding complex architectural projects, of thinking about ideology of religion, but he also was deeply paranoid and suspicious.
This was a man of great friendship and loyalty, but he was also capable of the darkest vengeance on family and friends.
This is the Divan, the Cabinet chamber of the empire.
Suleiman soon made his friend Ibrahim his Grand Vizier or Prime Minister.
But while Ibrahim sat with his ministers, Suleiman listened to their plans unseen from behind a grille he'd had installed halfway up the wall.
The sultans often executed their grand viziers and even Ibrahim had begged his master not to raise him too high.
Suleiman didn't see himself just as a Sultan.
He was Caesar and Khan, Lord of the Horizon, Emperor of the Two Seas, but now he had the holy cities and the holy relics, he added another title - that of Caliph.
The Successor and Viceroy of Mohammed on Earth.
Suleiman now set about building a city worthy of that title.
Up here, on the rooftops, among all these famous minarets, and these great domes, I'm at the centre of one of the holiest cities in the world, and I'm about to hear any minute the call to prayer, from the muezzins in these minarets.
It's starting over there.
The sound of a holy city.
Suleiman the Magnificent built many mosques here in the capital, but there's one that's bigger and more stately than all the rest, one that even rivals the church turned-mosque of Hagia Sophia.
And it bears his name, the Suleimaniye.
This is the masterpiece of Suleiman the Magnificent's architect, Sinan.
Together, theirs was probably the most successful partnership of monarch and architect in all of history.
He was the Christopher Wren of Istanbul and much, much more.
They changed the skyline of the city more than anyone since Justinian had built Hagia Sophia.
The foundations alone of this great mosque took three whole years to build.
Inside, no expense was spared.
Sinan even fitted its vast dome with special resonators to help improve the acoustics.
I'm with art historian Nina Ergin to explore what Suleiman had in mind.
Suleiman had a very long reign, 46 years, and he was a very successful military leader as well, and with the money from his conquests, he was able to build a mosque of this size.
Suleiman the Magnificent, he picked for himself the Padishah of Islam, the Emperor of Islam, so really, the Caliph, the ruler of the entire Islamic world.
Part of his mission was to bring the law of the Ottoman countries more in line with the Sharia and put more emphasis on the Orthodox practice of religion, and this is very much emphasised in this building.
For example, the inscriptions that you can see all over the mosque, they are almost exclusively drawn from the Koran and they are almost exclusively verses that emphasise how you should pray, how often you should go to pray, the timing of the prayer and so on.
But it's outside, at his mausoleum, that I discover how Suleiman really saw himself.
He was emulating the greatest king of the Bible.
Suleiman, the name itself actually means Solomon, and he styled himself as the Solomon of his age.
So for example, he had a very special connection to Jerusalem, where the temple built by Solomon is also located and on top of that is the Dome of the Rock.
Suleiman the Magnificent actually renovated the Dome of the Rock and following that, he built his own mausoleum to reflect the shape of the Dome of the Rock.
Suleiman, law-giver and conqueror, was answerable to no man.
And yet, within the cold haughtiness, there was a surprising warmth, and it came from the most secret part of the Imperial Palace.
This gate led to the harem, and a special purpose of the harem was only indirectly concerned with sex.
It was really all about power and the imperial bloodline, and forget the cliche of black-eyed B-list belly dancers, these rooms behind me contained the most beautiful women in the world.
This was a breeding machine for the sultans.
The idea was that no wife or her family would ever become powerful.
They were just there to provide multiple heirs for the Ottoman Empire.
That was all.
At least, that was how it was MEANT to work.
These girls, the concubines of the harem, were Christians, often captured by pirates, bought by slave traders for the markets of the city.
Slavic blondes and redheads were particularly prized.
They were converted to Islam and educated in the Sultan's harem.
One Russian girl attracted Suleiman's special attention.
Ottoman emperors didn't traditionally marry their concubines, but Suleiman obviously absolutely loved Roxelana.
He renamed her Hurrem Sultan, the joy the delight of the Sultan.
They had children together, they had sons and daughters and she became increasingly part of his life and of the politics of the Ottoman court.
Their love letters, which they exchanged and also the poems they wrote to each other, are some of the most romantic exchanges in all of Turkish literature and I think in world literature.
He called her, "The queen of my heart's realm.
"Oh, my black-haired love "with bow-like eyebrows, "with languorous, perfidious eyes.
"If I die, you are my killer.
"Merciless infidel woman.
" Her letters are passionate too Her letters are passionate too "If the seas become ink and the trees become pens "when could they write of our parting?" And sometimes she writes of "The pity and lonely separation from the "Lord of the Worlds.
" But behind the sweet words was a grimmer reality.
Roxelana was not the only woman to bear the Sultan's children and she was up against a brutal convention set up by Suleiman's great-grandfather.
The breeding machine of the harem worked far too well.
Now, there were so many heirs and they all wanted power, but Suleiman's great-grandfather Sultan Mehmed II had instituted a ruthless solution to this problem.
They would kill all their brothers, and some of their sons even, on their accession.
And this is how they did it.
With the bowstring.
The Turks believed it was forbidden to shed royal blood, so they had to find a way to kill their brothers without shedding any.
And this is how they did it They sent deaf-mutes, their special bodyguards, to strangle them like this.
Roxelana would have to fight for her own children's survival in a merciless contest.
She would have to wield power herself.
But how? The only way was to gain the Sultan's exclusive ear.
To do that, she would have to get rid of his great friend and minister Ibrahim.
This is the palace of Ibrahim Pasha, built for him by Suleiman the Magnificent himself.
By this time, Ibrahim was the richest and most powerful man in the empire after the Sultan himself.
When Suleiman was away at the war, Roxelana wrote him letters warning him of plotting and intrigue by Ibrahim.
When Suleiman got back, he invited his old friend over to the Topkapi Palace to spend an evening together like they always used to.
Ibrahim went over there for dinner.
It was to be their last evening together.
It was to be Ibrahim's last evening, full stop.
In the morning, his strangled and bloodied body was found outside the palace gates.
With Ibrahim gone, Roxelana was able to take total control.
She married her and Suleiman's daughter to a Grand Vizier of her choice, Rustem, and together they plotted against Suleiman's eldest son, Mustafa.
This is Rustem's Mosque, also built by Sinan.
It's one of the most beautiful in Istanbul with the most stunning Iznik tile work, but behind the beauty is the story of how Roxelana put her own son in line for the throne.
She played on Suleiman's suspicions of his elder son, which were perhaps justified.
Either way, Suleiman invited his son Mustafa to his tent where he was strangled in front of him.
Roxelana had won.
She's buried in a glorious tomb next to her master at the Suleimaniye Mosque.
It was her son Selim II who succeeded his father.
He was fat, he was indolent and he was cheerful and he was so fond of wine that westerners called him Selim the Drunk.
The Ottoman conquests hadn't been just on land.
Their admirals, like the famous Barbarossa, had ensured that this city dominated the entire Mediterranean, and by Suleiman's time, Istanbul had entered a golden age as trading entrepot.
There were spices and perfumes from Egypt, meat from Anatolia and the Balkans, butter and salt from the Crimea.
Silks from the Far East.
Fish from the Black Sea.
Istanbul was an orderly and peaceful place, due as one visitor noted, to the salutary vigour of frequent acts of execution.
But one minority of traders had a special reason to feel grateful.
I've come to the old Jewish quarter of Haskoy.
These days, there's only a few Jews left in Istanbul, but they once were a powerful community.
Hola! Straightaway, you hear something.
A language that gives you a clue about how they got here.
Gracias.
I didn't realise they were still speaking this special Jewish dialect of Spanish.
It's amazing to find out that they still are.
(speaking Ladino) Gracias.
Wow, what a lovely synagogue, and I'm very happy to be here.
This synagogue, founded in 1525, is one of the oldest in Istanbul.
A beautiful place, as you can see, and it tells a story here.
In 1492, the repressive and intolerant Christian rulers of Spain, and then followed by the whole of western Europe, expelled their Jews and the Ottoman emperors gave them refuge, invited them to settle and they did so in large numbers.
They made themselves so at home here that they spoke a special language, Ladino, a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew, with a little bit of Turkish thrown in.
And even today, the Jews who look after this Synagogue, speak that special Ottoman Jewish language.
But I'm really here to tell the story of one remarkable man.
Joseph Nasi came here with his aunt, a regal retinue and an international banking fortune that he leant to his new sovereign.
Joseph Nasi became companion, advisor and best friend almost of the heir to the throne, Prince Selim, and when he succeeded as Selim II, he became his chief consularie almost and he prospered enormously.
Joseph was enriched by monopolies granted to him, especially in wine, which he enjoyed drinking with the Sultan.
He was so powerful, that Europeans who called the Sultan "The Great Turk", dubbed Joseph "The Great Jew".
He built a palace overlooking the Bosphorus where he lived like a king, patronising artists and protecting his fellow Jews.
This is really the most important part of any synagogue.
It's the ark and it's where the scrolls of the law, the Tora are kept and it's always a very exciting moment and a rather lovely moment for a Jewish person to look at these, so I'm going to open it.
I've got the golden key here.
So let's see.
Open the doors .
.
and .
.
draw aside the curtain and there they are.
Very beautiful, aren't they? Selim made Joseph the Duke of Naxos, an island in the Aegean, where ironically, this Jewish prince found himself ruling over Christians.
It just tells you something about this extraordinary time in Ottoman history and the history of Istanbul, when this great Jewish figure could actually be best friends and confidant with the Caliph of Islam and the Islamic Emperor of the greatest Muslim empire in the world.
It wasn't just the Jews that prospered.
The Christian Greeks that had been here since before the Ottoman conquest thrived.
The Sultan appointed Greek princes to rule his Christian provinces in today's Romania.
But the Armenians were the Christians who really blossomed in Istanbul.
They too had their own quarter of the city.
All of them swore loyalty to the Emperor.
They were the Sultan's Christian subjects.
Any threats that came to the city came not from them, but from the instability of its Ottoman rulers.
As their empire got bigger, the sultans spent less time in the saddle and more time enjoying the pleasures of the palace.
Selim II died after falling over drunk in the harem.
If his vice was alcohol, that of his successor was lust.
Murad III fathered 102 children, which required a massive culling of princes when his son Mehmed III succeeded him in 1597.
The day after his accession, the policy of fratricide reached its brutal and heart-rending climax.
This place bears witness to the tragedy of that day where 19 brothers were killed, some as young as five.
Their tombs are here alongside their father's at Hagia Sophia.
One of the little ones asked if he could finish his roasted chestnuts before he was strangled.
Even the hardened courtiers of the Topkapi wept as they saw the procession of 19 tiny coffins wend its way from the palace to rest right here.
This was fratricide gone mad, and even public opinion was outraged, so the brothers of future sultans were kept in luxurious rooms in Topkapi, known ironically as the cage, where they spent the rest of their lives in isolated splendour.
In 1616, a new showpiece of Ottoman power arose in the city, a landmark that still defines the skyline of Istanbul.
The Blue Mosque had an unprecedented six minarets, but its building tells us much about the state of the empire outside and the positions of the sultans here.
There's something a little gaudy, perhaps a little kitsch, certainly very Baroque about this place.
It's got these vast, elephant-leg columns and above, a cascade of multiple domes.
It wasn't built like the other mosques on the trophies of victory over the Christians.
This one is really a statement of vanity of the Sultan Ahmed I, but I like it.
I like it a lot.
Ahmed I was a pious Sultan, but he didn't live long enough to enjoy the delights of his foundation.
He died aged 27, having half bankrupted the empire to build it.
Sultan Ahmed built the Blue Mosque, but the most interesting thing about him is the intelligent and beautiful Greek woman who became the love of his life - Kosem.
She and Ahmed are both buried over there.
She became the most powerful woman in all of Istanbul's history.
She was the wife and mother, the ruler and the killer of sultans.
Ahmed's immediate successors weren't Kosem's sons, but she watched and waited as Ahmed's brother Mustafa went insane and was dethroned by the palace eunuchs.
His son Osman suffered an even worse fate when he dared to cross his elite troops, the Janissaries.
The Janissaries had been mainly Slavic boys, given to the Sultan as a tax on his Christian subjects.
They were converted to Islam, and trained into the best troops in Europe.
But now, they had become a bloated Praetorian Guard, hereditary and over-mighty with the power to dominate the sultans themselves.
The boy Sultan Osman was imprisoned in the Castle of the Seven Towers.
When they came to kill him, he resisted violently until he was stopped by Pahlavan the Oil Wrestler, who killed him by constriction of his testicles.
Imagine the agony.
Whether Kosem was directly involved or not, we don't know.
But it was now that Kosem helped raise her own young son to the throne.
Murad IV was an Ottoman cross between Julius Caesar and Caligula, one of the most victorious sultans, but also the most blood-spattered.
He was an enormous giant of a man who could lift up two of his courtiers in each arm above his head.
He led victorious campaigns that retook Armenia and Baghdad, and when he returned to Topkapi, he did so in a Roman-style triumph wearing a lion skin.
He celebrated his victories by building the majestic Baghdad Pavilion at Topkapi Palace, but this victorious and meteoric showman had a dark side.
Obsessed with re-imposing political authority and religious conformity, he presided over the executions of as many as 20,000 people.
Now, he would leave the palace at night and prowl the streets.
He was both a sadist and increasingly an alcoholic.
When he heard some women partying down by the river, he had them all drowned in the water.
When his singer at court sang a Persian song, he chopped off his head.
At night, incognito and drinking heavily, he would patrol the town with a group of friends wearing a huge broadsword.
He would burst into cafes and private houses and shops and any rules that were broken, he would draw his sword and personally chop the heads off anyone who crossed him.
He was becoming a monster.
While Murad killed, Kosem would patrol the same streets tending to the orphaned and the dispossessed.
The terror only ended in 1640 when Murad IV died at the age of 29, the last of the conquering sultans.
Kosem would rule in place of her last son, Ibrahim, who was insane.
But, mercifully for the city, he was confined to an existence within the palace walls.
Ibrahim the Mad built this little pavilion to take his breakfast, but actually his mind was very rarely on food.
He was a demented, fetishistic, erotomaniac priapist, who was obsessed with three fetishes, amber scent, furs and gigantic women.
He scoured the entire empire for larger and larger women.
Such a woman was found, and this Armenian courtesan was brought to Istanbul where he named her Sugar Cube and made her his absolute favourite.
But he was becoming more and more demented.
He would find women walking here in the gardens at Topkapi and ravish them in front of all his courtiers.
Soon, this was too much even for the eunuchs of the harem and his courtiers and they, along with the mufti, the religious leader of Istanbul, decided that Ibrahim the Mad had to go.
His mother agreed.
While Ibrahim was being led away for strangulation, Kosem was already presenting her seven-year-old grandson to the viziers.
Here he is, she said.
See what you can do with him.
Kosem was the real ruler, giving orders to ministers from behind the gilded grille in the Divan.
Like the sultans before her, Kosem also built charitable works on a grand scale.
Right in the heart of the city, there's a huge galleried courtyard, complete with its own mosque.
One of the delights about researching the history of a place like Istanbul is finding this sort of neglected jewel.
This was once a caravanserai to receive goods and camel trains from the east, from the silk route, from Persia, and you can imagine it in the 17th century thriving, bustling with camels and horses.
There were hotels here and stables and workshops, markets.
This huge place is all the work of one woman - the Queen Mother, the Valide Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
But inevitably, Kosem's turn came too in yet another palace coup.
Kosem was the Mrs Thatcher of the Ottoman Empire, which she dominated for 50 years, but when the intrigues of the harem turned against her, they found her hiding in a cupboard.
She fought so hard that the blood poured out of her ears and eyes.
And it was said she was strangled with her own hair.
Over the next two centuries, the fortunes of the city began to stagnate just as the empire outside fell into torpor.
But a recent discovery beneath this building challenges our presumption that the Ottomans were obsolete.
I've come to see an extraordinary structure underneath the 18th-century Nuruosmaniye Mosque.
These pools are part of an elaborate system to limit the damage from earthquakes, because the mosque above was built on soft ground.
In the rainy season, the pools would overflow and the floodwater would disappear down a steep channel into the Bosphorus.
That way, these fantastic vaulted foundations were kept dry, so that when earthquakes struck, as they frequently do here, the mosque would stay up.
So even in the 18th century, the middle of the 18th century, in the time when the Ottoman Empire was actually in eclipse and its power was in serious decline, it's interesting that they were still capable of this very, very sophisticated and multipurpose piece of engineering.
But away from the capital, the foundations of this great empire were now beginning to fracture.
The problem was with the Sultan's Christian subjects.
This is the Phanar District of Old Istanbul, the Greek Orthodox neighbourhood.
And it's a vanished world now.
You can see the mansions ruined of old Phanariot Greek merchant families.
They were the fixers, the middlemen, they were wealthy and their princes were potentates of Ottoman society, descended from Byzantine emperors.
But in 1821, something happened that broke for ever 400 years of tolerance and co-existence.
The Greeks of mainland Greece rebelled against the Sultan.
The consequences for the Greek population of Istanbul were dire.
Their patriarch, Gregory V, the head of the Orthodox Church, somehow became implicated in the rebellion.
The Sultan decided to make an example of him.
On Easter Sunday 1821, the holiest day of the Greek Orthodox calendar, the Sultanic guards burst into this church.
They rushed down the centre, grabbed the patriarch in front of his packed congregation, dragged him out and hanged him from a gibbet right on the gate of his own church.
It took him hours to die.
Elsewhere in the city, three archbishops were hanged and any Greeks found on the streets were killed on the spot.
Peace was soon restored in the capital, but the centuries-old tradition of tolerance in the city had been broken.
The Sultan who'd given the order was this man.
Mahmud II.
He believed that if he was to maintain power abroad, he would first have to assert himself in his capital.
And that meant getting rid of his bodyguard, the Janissaries.
They were out of control and becoming a plague on Istanbul.
The Janissaries had once been the Sultan's crack troops, but now they were incompetent, corrupt and technically obsolete.
They were much more interested in trading in their little shops and making and unmaking sultans.
And intriguingly, in a city of wooden buildings, they were the fire brigade.
When fire broke out, as it frequently did in Istanbul, the Janissaries would pull down the houses in the path of the fire to stop it spreading.
But more often than not, the contents would be looted by them and the owners left destitute.
The Janissaries were hated by everyone.
They were a law unto themselves.
Mahmud too had good reason to hate his own troops.
The Janissaries had deposed and murdered his own cousin Selim III in 1808 and he'd only escaped by running across the rooftops of the Topkapi Palace.
Now as Sultan, Mahmud was determined to destroy the Janissaries and to do that, he would deploy one of the holiest relics in all Islam.
On the 11th June 1826, the Sultan began to drill some of his soldiers in European fashion .
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wearing modern uniforms, knowing the Janissaries would resent this new challenge to their age-old power.
The Janissaries took the bait, they rebelled and ran amok in the streets, hoping to bully the Sultan as they always had before.
But this time, the Sultan was ready.
He fetched the Holy Banner of the Prophet from its box in the Topkapi Treasury and gave it to his Grand Vizier to take to the Blue Mosque, saying either the Janissaries will all be murdered or cats will walk over the ruins of Constantinople.
The Holy Banner of the Prophet Mohammed was unfurled from this pulpit and the message went out to all true Muslims in the city, come here and support your Caliph.
But would the people come? And would the Sultan's other soldiers stay loyal? But come they did.
Thousands of people converged on this mosque, bearing swords and pitchforks and guns, to support their Sultan against the hated Janissaries.
This became military headquarters for this holy enterprise and at last, the Blue Mosque covered itself in holy glory.
Outnumbered by the people of the city, the Janissaries retreated to their barracks.
It was a fatal mistake, because the Grand Vizier had the loyalty of the Sultan's artillery regiment.
He brought up cannon and started to bombard the place.
It caught fire and, in a sort of sweet infernal irony, the Janissaries, the firefighters of Istanbul, were consumed in their thousands in this vast and terrible conflagration.
The Janissaries who escaped were butchered by the people of Istanbul.
When they hid in the bathhouses of the city, they were dragged out for a month afterwards and torn to pieces, their bodies left for the dogs.
There ended, after hundreds of years, the power of the Janissaries.
The massacre was styled the Auspicious Event.
Now, the sultans could turn their backs on the past and start to modernise.
And it was clear what their model would be.
Their inspiration would be the imperial dynasties of the West.
France, Austria, Britain.
And here it is, the new face of Empire.
This is the brand-new Dolmebache Palace, built in the mid-19th century.
It's grand, it's gaudy, it's kitsch and it's bling.
It's built to impress and it's really declaring that the Ottoman sultans are modern European monarchs in the grand age of Victorian empires.
Everything in here is the very best that Europe can offer.
The chandeliers are from Britain, the gilded furniture is French.
The ceramics are Italian.
The Sultan who built this is really saying, "I am still the master of a thriving international empire.
" That's what it looks like, but in fact, the reality is very different.
The bear skins on the floor are from Russia, and they tell us the other side of the story.
This is the Sultan's reception room, and this is where, in his customary magnificence, he received the ambassadors of the great powers.
But only two of these ambassadors really mattered - the Russians and the British.
And it was they who were encouraging him to reform his army and to give his minorities the sort of rights they received in the West.
But actually, something very different was going on here, both the Russians and the British took turns to bully the Sultan into doing what they wanted him to do.
Tsar Nickolas I called the Ottoman Empire "The sick man of Europe".
And actually, both powers were really only interested in carving up the empire when it finally died.
But it was the Russians who had the greatest and most ancient ambitions.
Russia had wanted the city ever since 1780, when Catherine the Great had initiated her Greek Project, the partition of the Ottoman Empire with the intention of creating a new Christian Byzantium.
She called Istanbul "Tsargrad", City of the Caesars, and she even named her grandson Constantine, designated future emperor of a new Byzantine Empire.
Looking out here, you can really see why this little bit of water mattered so much to the Russians.
Look at these cargo ships queuing up to get through the straits to export their grain from Odessa, on the north coast of the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean.
And that's why the Russian Tsars wanted to conquer Istanbul.
In April 1877, Russia declared war and invaded the empire's Balkan provinces.
Seven months later, they'd fought their way to the very gates of Istanbul.
But on the 13th February 1878, six battleships anchored right off the coast here to take on the Russians.
And this big gun tells the story of what happened next.
Those battleships were British battleships, and they were there with one purpose - to stop the advancing victorious Russians and to save Istanbul.
And they succeeded.
The Russians stopped in their tracks.
Look at this nameplate here.
It says "Vickers-Armstrong, Newcastle, 1869.
" This was a gun given by the British to the Ottomans to help defend Istanbul.
The guiding principle of British foreign policy throughout the 19th Century was to keep the Russians out of Istanbul and to maintain the Ottoman Empire until they decided otherwise.
While the Russians and the British schemed, the new Sultan was enlisting help from other quarters.
Help that would ultimately prove disastrous for the city.
This is the Yildiz Palace.
It's not really a palace at all, it's actually a complex of different pavilions.
And it's as weird, as eccentric, as eclectic and as sinister as the Sultan who built it, Abdul Hamid II.
For 30 years, he ruled the Ottoman Empire from here.
As I'm sitting on the steps of his favourite house in his secret park, I've just been looking at the face of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
He has to be one of the strangest leaders of modern times.
A bizarre mixture of the archaic and the modern.
Over there, he had his harem with 900 girls in it, his odalisques.
In this house, he would go to the top floor and watch the Bosphorus through a telescope to monitor the comings and goings, and he was absolutely paranoid.
He looked every day under his bed to see if there was an assassin.
He was happiest sitting here in his park, on his island, watching his private zoo.
And yet, despite all these eccentricities, he was a ruthless politician with a singular idea of how to save the Ottoman Empire.
As it lost more and more Balkan provinces, Abdul Hamid promoted himself as an Islamicist leader, as the Caliph of international Islam, by which he hoped to provide the glue to keep the empire together.
He also was a fanatical moderniser.
He built railways, and telegraphs and a modern army, and to do this, he had one backer and partner.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, of Germany, who visited him here at Yildiz twice and, as you can see, he built German buildings.
The Kaiser would have felt right at home here.
But Abdul Hamid, ageing and isolated, was overthrown in 1909 by the Young Turks, idealistic army officers who set up a parliamentary government.
But in 1913, power was seized by one of them, Enver Pasha, a reckless and flamboyant young general, who believed only harsh nationalism and victorious war could save the empire.
On the 9th November 1914, backed by Germany, Enver declared war against Britain, France and Russia.
His murderous repression and deportation of minorities destroyed the old cosmopolitanism of the capital, and his defeats brought catastrophe.
Sean McMeekin studies the pivotal role played by Istanbul in the First World War.
Well, it put it right at the heart of the conflict.
It was the great prize, if not the greatest prize to be won in the war.
In a certain sense, it gave the war a purpose, it gave it a point.
Not least for Russia, the Tsar with his sovereign claim here on the city.
Suddenly, the war had a point for the Russians, and it had an objective now for Russia's allies, Britain and France, wanting to open up the city so that they could help supply Russia by way of the Black Sea.
So, the city really became the great prize that was fought over, with this claim actually negotiated between the powers during the Gallipoli campaign.
In fact, the city was literally to be divided in three between these allies, with the Russians getting most of the ancient city of Byzantium.
How did Enver and the Ottomans do in World War One in fact? Well, not that badly.
In some ways, the Ottomans actually surprised Europe with their performance in the war.
In the end though, it wasn't enough.
It's a largely forgotten episode in the West that the powers occupied the capital of the Ottoman Empire for four years from 1918 to 1922, although it's not forgotten here.
In 1918, Britain and France, the victorious allies, occupied Istanbul.
The great capital that had resisted all comers for 400 years had finally fallen, and a resentful population awaited its fate.
While plans for partition were being drawn up, it was here, at the Pera Palace Hotel, that the British officers and diplomats stayed.
They flirted in the bar with gorgeous Russian countesses turned courtesans, refugees from the Bolshevik revolution.
Russia was now out of the running, and it was the British Prime Minister who had the big idea.
But it was an idea from an old world.
In the excitement of victory, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George was dazzled by dreams of classical empires.
He encouraged the Greeks to go to war, to restore the Byzantine Empire, and recreate a Christian Constantinople.
The Greeks began to dream of Orthodox services at the great church of St Sophia.
But one man would change all that.
In November 1918, an elegant and much-decorated Turkish General arrived here in the Pera Palace Hotel and booked into a suite on the second floor.
One night, some British officers invited him for a drink at their table.
He famously replied, "We are the hosts here, "you are the guests, you take drinks at my table.
" The occupation was unacceptable to most Turks, and his voice was the voice of history.
His name was Mustafa Kemal Pasha, but he's known to posterity as Ataturk.
This is where Ataturk stayed.
He was altogether an exceptional character.
He was one of the few Ottoman generals who'd actually defeated the British.
He'd expelled the Anglo-French expedition at Gallipoli in 1915.
He had the looks of a matinee idol, he was a man of veracious sensual appetites.
He loved drinking, he loved womanising, but above all, he had a vision for himself as leader and for Turkey as a nation.
When the Greek armies invaded Turkey at Lloyd George's instigation, Ataturk left Istanbul to lead the resistance from mainland Anatolia.
He planned to mobilise what was left of the Ottoman army.
The next time he'd return to Istanbul, it would be as conqueror.
Ataturk made his base in Ankara to the east, and in a ferocious campaign, pushed the Greeks all the way back to the Aegean.
The British plans collapsed and by September 1922, Ataturk's forces encircled the city.
The British, now war-weary, wisely did not engage.
In a year-long stalemate, the Turks took over the city from the inside, and in Britain, Lloyd George resigned.
On 6th October 1923, the first infantry division of the new Turkish Army entered Istanbul.
And the Turkish Republic was born.
The victorious Ataturk had great plans for his country.
He abolished the Sultanate, but the Ottomans remained as Caliphs, commanders of the faithful.
But not for long.
400 years after Selim the Grim had brought back the holy relics to Istanbul, the caliphate's days were numbered.
On the 3rd March 1924, the Assembly in Ankara formerly abolished the caliphate.
The next morning, at dawn, troops surrounded the Dolmabache Palace, and the Caliph, a small group of servants and family, gathered together their things and left the palace.
In the evening, the last Caliph boarded the Orient Express into exile.
It was the end of 500 years of the Ottoman Dynasty's connection with Istanbul.
Ataturk suppressed the city's religious establishments.
Some became museums.
Many shrines, religious schools and dervish lodges were closed.
"No civilised nation could follow in the path of sheikhs, "dervishes and fortune-tellers," he said.
Religion was a private matter.
But it wasn't just that.
He shunned the capital itself.
This is Ataturk's yacht.
It's moored here in Istanbul, a city he turned his back on, despising its perfidious history.
He said, "Perhaps the Black Sea will flood the Bosphorus, "the Republic will make a man of Byzantium, "which by becoming habituated to filth, "lies and immorality, has lost its immeasurable value.
" He moved the capital away from Istanbul and the Turkish Republic is still governed from Ankara.
90 years on, Ataturk's secular vision remains the only way for many Turks and Istanbul is now Europe's biggest megacity, of 15 million, comfortable in its role as Turkey's modern, cultural, economic capital.
But today's Turkish democracy is following a mildly Islamic path, accompanied by a revival of Ottoman prestige and ambition.
There are head scarves in the streets and pilgrims pray at the tombs of conquering sultans.
Cosmopolitan Istanbul now seems divided as the pendulum swings towards stricter Muslim piety.
I'm ending my story in one of the most wondrous buildings on Earth, Hagia Sophia.
It's still the monument, the symbol, the centre of this crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity.
For one and a half millennia, it has presided over Caesars and sultans, magnificence, massacre and mayhem.
The tides of history, power and faith.
More than any other, this building defines the sacred and imperial city with the three magical names.
For 900 years, it was a church.
For 500 years, it was a mosque.
For the past 80, it's been a neutral, secular museum.
And now, there's a campaign for it to be a mosque again.
As ever, reflecting the drama of its times, this world city remains ever-changing.