by Tom Phillips
He might have got away with all this if he hadn’t been busy alienating people in other ways. The British had grudgingly recognized Egyptian independence in 1922, but still maintained a large, unpopular military presence in the country, and many of Farouk’s subjects increasingly saw the monarchy as a puppet of the West. For their part, the British were growing increasingly narked at Farouk for not being enough of a puppet. (For more on this sort of thing, see the later chapter on colonialism.)
Farouk I of Egypt (1920–1965)
When World War II came along, it wasn’t just stuff like nicking Churchill’s watch that turned everybody against Farouk. It was other little things, like refusing to turn off the lights in his Alexandria palace while the city was on blackout due to German bombing. Or sending Adolf Hitler a note saying that he would welcome a Nazi invasion, on the grounds that it might get rid of the British.
Farouk just about made it through the hostilities, belatedly declaring war on the Axis powers at roughly the point that the fighting was over, but didn’t last long after that. He was deposed in a military coup in 1952 (his six-month-old son technically became king for just under a year before the monarchy was abolished) and lived out his remaining years in Monaco and Italy, where, as Time magazine wrote, he “grew ever more gross and more persistent in the pursuit of women.” He eventually died in the time-honored manner of exiled leaders—of a heart attack, at the age of 45, during the cigar course after a massive dinner in a restaurant in Rome.
(For the record, Churchill did not find the watch thing funny, and angrily asked for it back.)
You’d hope that the quality of rulers we get might have improved a little over time, but there are plenty of leaders from the modern era who can rival their historical counterparts for baffling awfulness. For example, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan for over 20 years, from when it was still part of the Soviet Union, through independence, until his death in 2006, stands as a prime example of the fact that you can always build a cult of personality around a dictator, even if that dictator’s personality is extremely stupid.
For two decades, president-for-life Niyazov ruled the country according to his personal whims, almost all of which were deeply weird. He insisted on being referred to as “Türkmenbaşy,” meaning “leader of the Turkmen.” He banned dogs from the capital city of Ashgabat because he didn’t like the way they smelled. He outlawed beards, long hair on men and gold teeth. He was keen on passing judgment on television personalities, and prohibited TV newsreaders from wearing makeup because he said it made it hard to tell the men and women apart. He banned opera and ballet and circuses, lip-synching at gigs, playing recorded music at events like weddings and even listening to the radio in the car.
He built a giant gold statue of himself in Ashgabat that rotated so that it always faced the sun. He absolutely loved putting his name on things. In 2002, he renamed the month of January “Türkmenbaşy,” while April became “Gurbansoltan” after his mother. A major city was rechristened “Türkmenbaşy.” Bread was renamed after his mum. The airport in Ashgabat was named “Saparmurat Türkmenbaşy International Airport.” He instituted a public holiday in honor of melons, specifically a new variety of muskmelon that was named, in a shocking twist, “Türkmenbaşy.”
Gold statue of Saparmurat Niyazov (also known as “Türkmenbaşy”) in Ashgabat
He wrote a book called the Ruhnama, which was part poetry collection, part autobiography, part dodgy history lesson and part self-help tract. Not liking the book was punishable by torture. Knowledge of the book was a required part of the state driving test. He closed down all libraries outside the capital city, on the grounds that the Quran and the Ruhnama were the only books anybody needed to read. He built a giant statue of his own book in the capital city, which rotated and played audio passages at regular intervals. Reading the book was declared to be a prerequisite for entry to heaven. (It was possibly ghostwritten.)
He spent vast sums on ridiculous buildings, like an ice palace in the desert, a giant pyramid and a $100 million mosque that he named “Spirit of Türkmenbaşy.” He built a giant concrete staircase on a desolate mountain and forced every public servant to go on a 23-mile walk along it every year. In 2004, he sacked 15,000 medical staff from the country’s health service and replaced them with soldiers; he closed all hospitals outside the capital, on the grounds that if people were sick, they could travel in; he swapped out the Hippocratic oath for an oath sworn to Türkmenbaşy. He reportedly used to seize smuggled shipments of drugs and keep them for himself, shooting pistols at imaginary enemies in his darkened residence. There was no free press, dissidents were suppressed and all public groups, political parties and religions had to register with the “Ministry of Fairness.” Outside the Ministry of Fairness stood a giant statue of the figure of Justice—who, people couldn’t help but notice, looked surprisingly like Türkmenbaşy’s mother.
It’s not entirely clear what broader lessons we can draw from Niyazov’s long, extremely awful reign, other than if you ever catch yourself acting even a little bit like him, please, please stop.
But as bad as Türkmenbaşy was, and as unlucky as Turkmenistan was to suffer under the two decades of his reign, he still doesn’t quite make it to the top of the “extremely regrettable autocrats” list. There have been leaders more evil, and possibly even leaders more incompetent. But if you want a good example of just how fucked-up autocracy can get, then it’s hard to beat the period of the Ottoman Empire that proved bad things sometimes really do come in threes.
The Gilded Cage
Very few places have had a run of really terrible leaders quite like the one the Ottoman Empire suffered in the first half of the seventeenth century. Two of them usually have the words “the Mad” retrospectively added to their names, which is never a good sign. Worse, the one who doesn’t even get called “the Mad” might have deserved it the most.
Given that two of them were brothers and the other was their uncle, it’s hard not to suspect that something hereditary might have been going on there. But equally, there’s also an overwhelming sense of “well, what did you expect?” If you were actually trying to set up a system designed to produce somewhat unstable rulers, it’s hard to see how you could have done better than this.
The Topkapı Palace in Istanbul was not an especially safe place to be during this period, particularly if you were the son of the current sultan. The problem was your brothers—or at least, they were the problem as soon as the current sultan died and all of you tried to claim the throne at the same time.
As tended to happen with monarchies at the time, extremely bloody fights over the succession had effectively become a tradition in the previous centuries—a tradition that had an inconvenient habit of spilling over into prolonged civil war. This wasn’t terribly convenient for anybody, especially when you had an empire to expand, so sons of the sultan usually decided it was more efficient to forestall any sibling rivalry by...well, by having all their brothers murdered.
The downside of this institutional fratricide was that the Ottoman dynasty was permanently vulnerable to coming to an abrupt end, if a sultan were to die without having any sons to take over and with no brothers left unmurdered. There was also the slight issue of Sultan Mehmed III, who had no fewer than 19 younger brothers murdered when he acceded to the throne in 1595, which everybody seems to have agreed was a bit much. So, starting with Mehmed III’s successor, Ahmed I, a compromise was put in place: Kafes, which literally means “the Cage” and was a place to keep your spare brothers.
The Cage was not, in fact, a cage—it was a relatively luxurious, tastefully decorated tower just next to the harem—but it certainly had a few features in common with a cage. Like, for example, not being able to leave it.
When Ahmed I became sultan in 1603, he unexpectedly broke with the brother-murdering tradition and allowed his younger brother Mustafa to live. The fact that Ahmed was just 13 y
ears old and Mustafa was 12 at the time might have played a part in this decision—Ahmed wouldn’t even father a son until the following year. And partly it might have been due to him feeling sympathy with Mustafa, who seems to have already been quite fragile. Basically, there seems to be a possibility that Ahmed might have been...almost nice?
So anyway, rather than being killed, Mustafa was sent off to live in the Cage, while Ahmed I got on with being sultan. This all went swimmingly until 1617, when Ahmed died of typhus.
By this point, he had fathered a bunch of sons, who technically should have inherited the throne. But due to a combination of the fact that they were also pretty young, and various bits of palace intrigue (largely down to Ahmed’s favorite consort, Kösem, not wanting her sons to be murdered when their older half brother came to power), the powers behind the throne decided to change the line of succession. Rather than going to Ahmed’s eldest son, Osman, it would pass brother-to-brother. And so it was that Mustafa became Mustafa I.
It’s fair to say that this did not go well.
Mustafa was really not cut out to be sultan. He doesn’t seem to have been terribly keen on the idea, and the whole situation hadn’t been helped by having spent the first 12 years of his life convinced that his brother was going to murder him, and then the next 14 years imprisoned with nothing to do but take opium and hang out with concubines. The powerful court eunuchs had hoped that being reintroduced into society might focus his mind a bit. Nope.
Mustafa’s main approach to governing seems to have involved giggling an awful lot, pulling the beards of his viziers and knocking their turbans off while they tried to tell him important government things. He had a tendency to appoint random people—like a farmer he met while out hunting—to powerful official positions. He was also noted for being accompanied around the palace by two virtually naked slave women, and for his habit of trying to feed gold and silver coins to fish.
The whole thing lasted about three months before everybody had absolutely had enough, and Mustafa I was overthrown by the 14-year-old Osman. Somehow, for a second time, he managed to avoid being murdered, and instead got sent back to the Cage.
That would have been that, except for the fact that the precocious Osman II was an ambitious, unorthodox sultan with a zeal for reform, who refused to be bound by tradition. (Well, mostly. He did manage to squeeze in murdering at least one of his brothers during his reign, for old times’ sake.) Osman made the crucial mistake of really annoying the elite units of the Ottoman army, the Janissaries—blaming them for a failure to win a battle he’d led, punishing them by closing their coffee shops and banning them from smoking or drinking, before finally planning to disband them altogether and raise an alternative army in Syria.
While Osman might have genuinely had a point about their military effectiveness, the Janissaries were, unsurprisingly, not entirely on board with this plan. So Osman II was given the distinction of becoming the first example of regicide in Ottoman history, killed by his own army through the inventive combination of strangulation and “compression of the testicles.”
And then, in the absence of anybody else to take over, once again Mustafa was coming out of his Cage. And he was doing...not fine.
It’s not clear if everybody thought that four more years’ confinement might somehow have improved his mental state, but if so, they were quickly disappointed, as straight away Mustafa was extremely back on his bullshit. For starters, when they came to get him out of the Cage and told him he was sultan again, he barricaded himself inside and refused to come out, explaining (not unreasonably), “I do not want to be the sultan.” After they managed to winch him out through a hole in the roof, he spent large amounts of his time running through the palace desperately looking for Osman II, who he believed was still alive and might be hiding in a cupboard. If he could find Osman, his reasoning went, he could take over being sultan again and Mustafa wouldn’t have to do it anymore.
This all went on for another 17 months (during which period Mustafa did at least find time to put a donkey driver he’d met in charge of a major mosque) before everybody decided that enough was enough. Even Mustafa’s mother signed up to the idea of deposing him for a second time, with the proviso that she would prefer it if they could see their way to not murdering him. Remarkably, everybody agreed, and Mustafa was sent off to live out his days in the Cage, having somehow managed to be sultan two times and murdered zero times.
The new sultan, Murad IV, had two major benefits for the power players in the Ottoman court: (a) he was not obviously mad, and (b) he was an 11-year-old child. His mother, Kösem, who was a remarkably skilled power player herself, got a good few years of ruling on behalf of a puppet sultan out of this arrangement. That was before Murad IV grew old enough to reveal that, if not actually mentally unsound, he was at least an utter, utter bastard.
Inheriting an empire that was in something of a state, he made up his mind to assert his authority. Hard. Deciding that his half brother Osman hadn’t gone far enough with banning stuff just for the army, Murad banned smoking, drinking and especially coffee for everybody in the Ottoman Empire.
In a list of “moves designed to piss lots of people off,” banning coffee in Turkey probably ranks somewhere alongside banning cheese in France, banning guns in America and...well, banning national stereotyping in Britain. But Murad was determined. He hated coffee drinkers so much that he would patrol the streets at night dressed in civilian clothes, looking for people drinking coffee and then executing them on the spot.
When not enforcing his strict anticoffee laws, he liked to wind down by executing people for literally any other reason he could think of: for playing the wrong kind of music, for talking too loudly, for walking or sailing too close to his palace or just for being women. Especially for being women. He really hated women.
By the end of his reign, Murad wasn’t even really executing people anymore, as that implies he at least had some sort of vague pretext. He was pretty much just running around with a sword, pissed out of his skull, killing any poor bastard he came across. Some estimates suggest that he might have personally executed around 25,000 people during just 5 years of his 17-year reign—which on average would be more than 13 every single day. Again, it’s really worth emphasizing that this is the guy who doesn’t get “the Mad” attached to his name.
Oh, and obviously he also murdered most of the rest of those brothers that Osman had left not-murdered.
When Murad IV died in 1640 (of cirrhosis of the liver, which must have come as a bit of a surprise to his subjects, who he’d banned from drinking alcohol), there was in fact just one nonmurdered brother remaining: Ibrahim. By this point Ibrahim had spent virtually all of his 25 years of life confined to the Cage, living in perpetual fear of his seemingly inevitable murder. He wasn’t entirely wrong about that: Murad did in fact order Ibrahim’s murder from his deathbed, preferring to see the Ottoman dynasty die out entirely than Ibrahim come to the throne. The only reason the murder didn’t happen was that, as is often the case with bickering brothers, their mother, Kösem, stepped in and stopped it.
But if everybody was tempted to breathe a sigh of relief now that Murad was out of the picture, Ibrahim soon cured them of that mistake. Because if he hadn’t been insane when he went into the Cage, he certainly was when he came out.
Much like Mustafa before him, he was initially reluctant to come out of the Cage at all, as he was convinced it was a huge trick on the part of Murad, all the better to murder him with. The only thing that would reassure him was when they actually brought him Murad’s dead body.
Once they’d coaxed him out, Kösem—perhaps realizing that he wasn’t terribly well suited to ruling—suggested that he might like to busy himself with some concubines instead. Unfortunately, Ibrahim took her suggestion to extremes.
In addition to his other proclivities (like being obsessed with fur, wearing fur coats all the time and demanding that eve
ry room in his palace was decked out with huge quantities of fur), Ibrahim was sexually obsessed and virtually insatiable. This suited Kösem, who was busy ruling in his place—she had Ibrahim supplied with a vast number of slave girls and kept him hopped up on aphrodisiacs so that exhaustion and impotence wouldn’t leave him sexually incapable for long enough that he might accidentally do some ruling of his own.
Ibrahim’s sexual habits included—I’m going to be honest here—some extremely grim shit. As a prince of Moldavia, Dimitrie Cantemir, wrote some years later: “In the palace gardens he frequently assembled all the virgins, made them strip themselves naked and, neighing like a stallion, ran among them and, as it were, ravished one or the other, kicking or struggling by his order.”
It gets worse. According to Cantemir, one day Ibrahim saw a wild cow when he was on a trip, and became obsessed by its genitals. So much so that he had a cast made of them, and then copies of the cast crafted in gold and sent all around the empire, with an order that his servants find a woman whose genitals could match the cow’s.
Yeah.
(One caveat: it’s worth noting that Cantemir might not be a wholly unbiased source. On the one hand, he had lived and studied in Constantinople and spoke Turkish, and was writing only a few decades after the events. On the other hand, his book was called The History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, and he wrote it shortly after switching Moldavia’s allegiance from the Ottomans to Russia, losing catastrophically in battle, then being deposed and exiled, so he might have had a slight grudge. The supposedly “decaying” Ottoman Empire lasted in some form for another two centuries.)
Ibrahim’s search for his ideal woman, whether or not prompted by a bovine encounter, ended with her being found in Armenia. She was named Sugar Cube, and she quickly became Ibrahim’s favorite. Things start spiraling out of control: Sugar Cube told Ibrahim that one of his other concubines had been unfaithful, which sent Ibrahim into such a rage that he slashed his own son’s face with a knife for joking about it, and then—being unable to tell which woman was the supposedly guilty one—had all but two of his 280-strong harem tied up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. Only one survived. Sometime after this, fearing Sugar Cube’s growing influence, Kösem invited her over for dinner and a little girl chat, during which she quickly murdered her. (She told Ibrahim that Sugar Cube had died of a sudden illness.)