Among the Ottoman princes who were sent out to govern sanjaks, Mahmud is one of the least often mentioned. He was the youngest of Bayezid II's eight sons. His brother Selim took the throne, Ahmed and Korkud became both actors in and victims of the struggle for it, and Mahmud died at Manisa at the age of thirty-two, before the quarrel had fully begun. His life can be read as the life of a sanjak governor: his estate villages in the survey registers, a madrasa's lands in an endowment document, the poets around him in the biographical anthologies, a bear hunt told by a chronicler, and a tomb in Bursa.

He was born in Amasya, spent his childhood in his father's sanjak palace, was sent to Kastamonu at about the age of ten and stayed there for nearly twenty years. After the death of his brother Alemşah he moved to Manisa, and three or four years later he died. Amasya's share in this life is limited to his birth and his mother; even so, separating what is known from what is not helps us see a small but real link in the city's history as a seat of princes.

An Amasya Birth

Prince Mahmud was born in this city while his father Bayezid was sanjak governor of Amasya. The article by Cevdet Yakupoğlu, which counts as the principal scholarly study of Mahmud, relies on Hoca Sadeddin and Solakzâde to give his birth date as 880 in the Hijri calendar, that is, 1475-1476. Some sources place the birth in 1476 and others in 1475. The day and month are unknown. Mahmud was the youngest son born in the years when Bayezid was still a prince, before his accession.

Bayezid's eight sons are listed as Abdullah, Şehinşah, Ahmed, Korkud, Selim, Mehmed, Alemşah and Mahmud. Of these, only Ahmed, Korkud and Selim outlived their father; the others died during Bayezid's lifetime. The same study also notes that Uzunçarşılı's works contain mutually inconsistent entries for the princes' birth, death and posting dates. In one place, for example, Mehmed appears as governor of Kastamonu instead of Mahmud. Such contradictions explain why the dates reported here are so often given with the words "approximately" and "probably".

His mother appears in the sources under the name Bülbül Hatun. Prince Ahmed, Gevhermelik Sultan, Hundî Sultan, Hatice Sultan and Şah Sultan were also born to the same consort. Mahmud was thus the full brother of Ahmed, one of Amasya's best-known princes. According to a study of endowment documents, Bülbül Hatun stayed with her son Ahmed while he was sanjak governor of Amasya. The only general information the sources give about Mahmud's childhood in Amasya is that these years were spent in his father's governor's palace. In the fifteenth century Amasya ranked first among Ottoman sanjak centers, and the administrative, scholarly and literary accumulation of the city played a primary role in giving princes born in a palace environment a good education. Nothing is known about the names of Mahmud's own teachers or about his daily life in Amasya. It is known that during Bayezid's own princeship in Amasya his lala was Ali Pasha; who Mahmud's childhood lala was has not been documented.

For the Amasya years there is no building, endowment or event that bears the prince's name. What we have is a place of birth and a mother.

His Mother's Charitable Foundations in Amasya and Ladik

Mahmud's tie to Amasya does not consist of his birth alone. His mother Bülbül Hatun founded a mosque and public kitchen (imaret) bearing her name in Ladik, together with their endowments, and established a mosque-masjid and a primary school (sıbyan mektebi) with their endowments in Amasya. A study published in Vakıflar Dergisi reports that she dedicated all her property to sustaining the charitable institutions she had built in Amasya and Ladik, and that in 1511 and 1513 she had two endowment deeds drawn up to regulate their operation. The deeds list in detail the endowed properties, the staff, the duties of the staff, their salaries and the people who would benefit from the imaret. The income and expenses of the foundation can also be followed through its accounting registers alongside these documents.

Bülbül Hatun died in 1515, after her husband Bayezid II and her son Mahmud, and was buried in the tomb she herself had built at Muradiye in Bursa. Her charitable works had two sides: Amasya and Ladik on one, Bursa on the other. Of these settlements, her son's name is linked to a building only in Bursa.

Circumcision and Childhood in Istanbul

It is related that Cem, one of Mehmed the Conqueror's sons, was circumcised in early 1472 together with Bayezid's two eldest sons, Abdullah and Şehinşah. Mahmud had not yet been born. Bayezid's other sons are said to have been circumcised in Istanbul around 1480, together with Cem's son Oğuz Han. Yakupoğlu suggests that Mahmud may have been circumcised at that ceremony at about the age of five; this is an inference and does not rest on a definite record. Hoca Sadeddin writes that in 1490 lavish wedding celebrations were held for the princes who had not been circumcised in the Conqueror's time, but there he mentions only Ahmed's son and the sons of viziers. The conclusion is therefore that Mahmud had been circumcised earlier.

When Mehmed the Conqueror died on 3 May 1481, Mahmud was at the Istanbul palace with his brothers Alemşah and Korkud. Their father Bayezid was still in Amasya and had not yet reached the capital; in this gap, Korkud, one of the sons at the palace, was briefly placed on the throne. Mahmud is thought to have been five or six years old at the time. After Bayezid won the struggle against Cem and took the throne, he began sending his sons to Anatolia's important sanjaks as he reorganized the affairs of state. This practice, required by the old Turkic dynastic tradition, was a way of accustoming the children to administration at an early age and also of placing members of the dynasty in different parts of the country.

The Sanjak of Kastamonu

From the second half of the fifteenth century, Kastamonu was an Ottoman sanjak center. In 1460 the Conqueror first took Amasra on the Black Sea coast, and then received Kastamonu and Sinop, held by the Candaroğulları, from İsmail Bey without a fight. Although the administration of Kastamonu was briefly given to İsmail Bey's brother Kızıl Ahmed Bey, this bey was removed from the region, and in 1461 the city was made a sanjak center under a new administrative arrangement. The first Ottoman prince to serve there was the Conqueror's son Cem (1469-1474). Cem received a good education in Kastamonu; scholars and men of letters such as Tirmizli Aynî and İsfahanlı Hamidî were around him, and he learned Arabic and Persian through them. When his brother Mustafa died at Karaman in August 1474, Cem was appointed governor of Karaman and left Kastamonu in December. After him, in the Conqueror's last years, Süleyman Pasha was sent to the city as governor; Süleyman Pasha fell as a martyr during the siege of Rhodes in 1480.

The exact date of Mahmud's appointment to Kastamonu is not known. Yakupoğlu considers it highly probable that he was sent to his sanjak at about the age of ten, that is, in 1484-1485. Because the Kastamonu-Sinop survey completed at the end of Jumada al-awwal 892 records the prince's estate villages, it is clear that he had become sanjak governor no later than 24 May 1487. In the survey his name appears in forms such as "Hasha-i Hazret-i Şehzâde" and "Hasha-i Şehzâde-i Civan-baht Sultan Mahmud"; the title "Sultan" was used for other princes as well in that period. The study gives his term of service in general as 1484-1504.

Estates and Retinue

Specific estates (has) had been assigned to all of Bayezid's sons; according to records of 1503, each one's annual revenue reached one million two hundred thousand akçe. The villages of Mahmud's estates were spread across the central district of Kastamonu and the districts of Kuzyaka, Devrekâni, İnebolu, Göl, Daday, Taşköprü, Boyabat and Sinop. The villages of the Boyabat plain stood out for rice cultivation; some villages had two or three rice-grower households, others thirty or forty, and the revenue varied with production. A community of five falconers ("bazdârân") around Sinop was also part of the prince's estates. Judging by the village names, the population was mostly Muslim, and a good part of the villages had been founded by Oghuz tribes who had come to the region in the Seljuk and beylik periods.

Princes acted as half-sovereigns in the places where they governed, but they could not have coins struck in their names or have the Friday sermon read in their names. The central government assigned officials to them, such as the lala, armor-bearer, chief gatekeeper, standard-bearer, master of the stables, treasurer and chancellor, and village revenues were set aside for these men as estates. Mahmud's retinue also had this staff. His lala appears in the records as "Lala Pasha", and his real name is thought probably to have been Hüsrev Bey; the village of Alpağut and many villages and summer pastures belonging to Daday were assigned to him as estates. Defterdar Muhyiddin Çelebi, a member of the divan, also had villages in the districts of Evlani and Araç. The surveys further mention the names of the sanjak's military officers, such as Kemal, the commander of Kuzyaka, Hocendî, the standard-bearer of Kastamonu, and Ali Çelebi, the zaim of Taşköprü. Yakupoğlu describes this arrangement, begun with Cem, as a small state mechanism, a copy of the government, established in Kastamonu.

Poets were also part of this circle. According to Latîfî's biographical anthology, Necati, one of the best-known poets of the age, had come to Kastamonu with Mahmud and served for a time as the prince's chancellor. Tâlî served as treasurer and Sun'î-i Kadîm as divan secretary, and the poet Andelîbî, from the Devrekâni area, was the prince's boon companion and poet. How long Necati stayed in Kastamonu is unknown, but traces of the city's folk culture and dialect can be seen in some of his poems; Yakupoğlu attributes one of the most important points joining Necati and Mahmud to the fact that both lived in this city and were influenced by it. Sehî Bey, Sun'î, Şevkî, Fedayî and Zatî were also in the prince's service in either Kastamonu or Manisa. Arslanoğlu Hamza Bâlî (d. 1493-1494) wrote a work in Mahmud's name.

Works and Activities

Yakupoğlu notes that none of Mahmud's works in Kastamonu stands today and that the historical documents contain little information. It is known that he had a mosque and a fountain built in his own name. The mosque was built in the 1490s in the village of Gökçeağaç in the district of Taşköprü, near present-day Hanönü. An endowment document dated 1928 shows that the building was still standing and in use for worship at that date; it must have been demolished later. The fountain is in the village of Çayırcık in Devrekâni. For the upkeep of this fountain the prince removed from the timar system a bathhouse in the village built by Candaroğlu İbrahim Bey II and made it an endowment, added a garden in the center of Kastamonu to the foundation, and set aside part of the revenue for the servants of Medina. The annual yield of the bathhouse is recorded as 500 and that of the garden as 1315 akçe.

The return of the bathhouse from timar to endowment was not an exception. In the Conqueror's time some endowed lands in Kastamonu had been converted into timars, and some madrasa endowments had been absorbed into the müsellem farms; Bayezid II's general policy was to restore these to endowment, and Mahmud took part in this work. A decree dated to mid-Muharram 899, that is, 26 October 1493, reports that two parcels of land named Buçama and Karınca, belonging to the Muzaffereddin Madrasa in Taşköprü, were reattached to the madrasa endowment after an inspection by the qadi of Kastamonu on the center's orders and the prince's investigation. As the highest administrative and civil authority of the region, the prince had had the endowment records examined, had identified the abuse and had reported it to the center. The document also confirms that Mahmud was still in office in Kastamonu in 1493. His name also appears often in the Kastamonu-Çankırı Müsellemân Register of 1502; the same register records that the müsellem community of Sinop had been assigned, before that date and by imperial decree, to the prince's service.

Around Kastamonu, raising birds of prey had been important since the Candaroğulları; the gyrfalcons and falcons raised there were taken as far as Syria, Egypt, Iran and Turkestan, from Anatolia. Mahmud continued this tradition. He had the specialists called bazdar and sayyad identified, exempted them from müsellem service with his father's approval and appointed them to the work of raising birds. These officials looked after the nests, and when the season came they took the young birds and delivered them to the relevant units. The survey of early 1487 lists five bazdar in this service.

Hunting and marksmanship also held an important place in Mahmud's circle. The Kastamonu poet Ferâhî, in an ode written for him, praises the prince's hunting dogs and his skill at hunting partridge and quail. This interest is regarded as an indication that the hunting tradition of Turkic rulers and begs was kept up in Kastamonu.

The Bear Story

The historian İbn Kemal relates an incident to show the prince's courage. According to the account, a huge and powerful bear appeared in the lands under Mahmud's rule, threatened the people for days, blocked the roads, attacked a Turk, wounded him and killed his horse. A reward of a thousand akçe was announced for whoever killed the bear, but the beast could not be removed. In the end the prince sent word to the wounded man to wait on a certain day at the place where the bear would pass, and on that day, early in the morning, disguised and armed, he secretly went to him. When the bear rose on its hind legs and advanced on the prince with its paws raised, Mahmud cut it in two with his sword.

Yakupoğlu does not read this as a document; he takes it as a sign that the prince was spoken of among the people like a hero of an epic. He draws attention to the implicit comparison with Oghuz Khagan, who killed a monster in the forest, and recalls that a similar story was told about Cem Sultan in the Balkans. In the same passage İbn Kemal writes that Kastamonu found peace thanks to Mahmud's governorship, that through the maintenance of justice both natives and foreigners found security, and that the notables of the region came under the prince's patronage. These praises have to be read in light of the historiographical conventions of the period.

The Sanjak of Saruhan and Manisa

While Mahmud was serving in Kastamonu, his brother Alemşah was sanjak governor of Manisa. When Alemşah died in Manisa in 908 AH (1503), Mahmud was sent to the sanjak of Saruhan in his place. Hoca Sadeddin gives the appointment as 910 AH / 1504. İbn Kemal writes that the prince governed the sanjaks of Kastamonu and Saruhan for about twenty years in total. Manisa was an extremely important city for the dynasty at that time; both the Conqueror and Süleyman the Magnificent had spent their princeships there. Bayezid's sons Abdullah, Şehinşah, Korkud and Alemşah had also served in Manisa. Princes lived with their whole retinues in the Saray-ı Âmire built by Murad II, and Mahmud is thought to have settled there as well.

According to Yakupoğlu, Alemşah, a prince who gave himself over to pleasure and entertainment and neglected the affairs of the province, had damaged the state's standing in the eyes of the people; Mahmud must have tried to erase that bad impression and appears to have succeeded. This is an inference and does not rest directly on a source. He continued in Manisa the habit he had begun in Kastamonu and gathered scholars, men of letters and poets around him. Necati served here too as chancellor and companion. Necati's path had earlier passed through the retinue of Prince Abdullah, governor of Karaman; after Abdullah's death he had remained for a long time in Istanbul under the patronage of Bayezid II, and then entered Mahmud's service. The prince showed him great warmth and did not let him leave his assemblies. A qadi from Kastamonu named Şemsî had set some of Necati's ghazals to music. Sehî Bey, in his anthology, includes poems that express the close relationship between Mahmud and Necati. His lala in the Manisa period was Kasım Bey.

As for administrative activity, the Manisa years are quiet. Hoca Sadeddin, İbn Kemal and Lütfi Pasha content themselves with saying that the prince governed there for a short time; the reason may be that no major event took place in the city during his short term. It has also not been established whether Mahmud had a mosque or fountain built in Manisa. What is known is that a wide circle of learning formed around him.

His Death

Mahmud fell ill and died at a young age during his governorship of Manisa, a period full of scholarly and literary activity but one that left him little opportunity to accomplish much in administration. Relying on Yakupoğlu, İbn Kemal, Lütfi Pasha and Emecen, the date of death is given as 913 AH / 1507-1508; in common usage the year is 1507. The name of the illness is not stated in the sources. His age at death is written as thirty-two, but because the birth date is uncertain, this age too should be taken as approximate.

His death deeply grieved the poets around him. Hoca Sadeddin mentions an elegy and a chronogram poem written for him. In the final lines of the elegy the prince is called "Mahmud Khan, lord of the province of Saruhan"; the chronogram poem begins "Let the stars weep blood, let the heavens go on groaning" and ends with a prayer by Lâmi'î. That the prince is called "Khan" is considered in keeping with the style of the time. İbn Kemal mentions him fifth among Bayezid's sons and praises him with epithets that picture the moon and a brilliant pearl; on his death he relates the couplet "The bastion of felicity was brought low / the jewel of the casket of honor was shattered". The deep grief felt by his father Bayezid is conveyed by another couplet that İbn Kemal also reports: if the moon is gone, may the sun live on, and may it endure as long as the world stands. Here Mahmud is likened to the full moon and Bayezid to the sun.

After his patron's death Necati returned to Istanbul, worked as a clerk in the Imperial Divan and died there in 914 AH (1508-1509). The poets around Mahmud left, from this short governorship, a trace distinct enough to enter the anthologies and the chronicles.

His Tomb in Bursa

Mahmud's grave is in the tomb within the Muradiye Complex in Bursa. According to a description based on the Bursa provincial culture and tourism records, the building was commissioned in 1506 by the prince's mother Bülbül Hatun from the architect Mimar Yakup. The octagonal tomb is built of cut stone and brick together and is covered with a lead-sheathed dome with two rows of hedgehog-fringe eaves. The entrance section on the northwest has a Bursa-type arch carried on four marble piers. The interior walls up to above the windows are covered with navy and turquoise hexagonal tiles with gilded stamped motifs, and the dome and the upper parts of the walls are decorated with polychrome painted work. The mihrab has four rows of stalactites, and the door and window leaves are original.

Inside are the marble sarcophagi of Mahmud, of his sons Musa, Orhan and Emir, and of his mother Bülbül Hatun. Yakupoğlu places the building's construction around 1507, after Mahmud's death, and notes that, according to one claim, the architect was Ali b. Abdullah. The difference between 1506 and 1507 and the two different architects' names remain unresolved.

According to endowment records from the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the revenues of the villages of Eriklü, Ziyaret and Hortaniye in the Aydıncık district of the Hüdavendigâr province, and of the hamlet of Çürüden-İlyas attached to Ziyaret, had been endowed to the tomb. In the same period the yield of 4015 akçe from the village of Mîzân in the province of Biga was also set aside for the grave under the name "Endowment of Sultan Mahmud the Prince".

His Family and Sons

It is understood that Mahmud married during his governorship of Kastamonu, but whose daughter his wife was or which family she came from has not been established. It is possible that he married a woman of the Candaroğulları dynasty; this is a possibility, and there is no definite information. It has also been claimed that he made other marriages, and it is said that his son Musa's mother was a different woman. It was customary for rulers to send gifts to princes who had gone out to their sanjaks; Bayezid also sent six boys and five concubines in 1485 to Mahmud, the sanjak governor of Kastamonu, so a marriage to one of these concubines is also possible.

According to the sources, Mahmud had three sons named Musa, Orhan and Emir Han (in some records simply Emîr; in one rendering Süleyman). All three were born in Kastamonu in the 1490s. After their father's death in Manisa, Orhan was appointed sanjak governor of Kastamonu and Musa of Sinop; Emir Han was still a child. Whether Sinop was a separate sanjak from Kastamonu at that date needs clarification, since even in the 1530s the city was a district of the sanjak of Kastamonu.

In 1512, when Selim I took the throne and eliminated Ahmed and Korkud, he also had these nephews, who were in Bursa, put to death. Hoca Sadeddin relates that, together with Mahmud's three sons, Mehmed, son of Şehinşah, and Osman, son of Alemşah, were also removed in Bursa by their uncle, on the grounds of the survival of the state. İdris-i Bitlisî tells the event in more detail: while the struggle for the throne between Ahmed and Selim was going on, these princes came to Bursa and submitted to the orders of their uncle, the new sultan, and Selim showed them favor. Soon afterward, the gossip that they were coming forward as claimants to the throne reached the sultan. Words from some janissaries whom Selim had reprimanded, to the effect that besides him there were eleven more princes ready for the sultanate, also moved the sultan to act, and the princes were executed in Bursa by imperial order. The sources sometimes confuse the princes' names; in one work by Âlî, Mahmud's sons appear in one place as Musa, Emin and Orhan, and in another as Mustafa, Süleyman and Orhan. It appears that Mahmud's children were mixed up in this confusion with the children of his brothers. The three princes were buried at Muradiye, in the tomb where their father lies, within the Tomb of Murad II.

Among his daughters, Hançerli Fatma Sultan was born in Kastamonu in the mid-1490s and married Mehmed Bey, son of Mustafa Bey, one of Bayezid II's men. It is said that she had a bathhouse (1524) and palaces built in her own name in Istanbul and Bursa and that she died in 1532-1533; her grave is in Eyüp. Two sons, Mustafa and Kasım, were born of her marriage. His other daughter, Ayşe Hundî Sultan, was also born in Kastamonu, and her date of death is unknown.

Legacy and Place in Amasya's Memory

The concluding section of Yakupoğlu's study ends with a bitter observation: no living memory of Mahmud and his sons is found in either Kastamonu or Manisa. The family's memory lives on in Bursa, around the Tomb of Sultan Murad II. Although Mahmud governed for a long time, his life was too short for him to take the throne; nor did he see the struggle among Selim, Ahmed and Korkud. His sons, for their part, did not live even as long as their father and were killed in the midst of the throne wars. Described as a small branch of one of the Ottoman dynasty's great lines, this family represents a branch left in the shadows in the history of the princes.

For Amasya the situation is similar. The city is where Mahmud was born; these studies identify no documented building in the city that bears the prince's name. His tie to Amasya can be traced through his mother Bülbül Hatun's charitable works in the city and in Ladik and through his full brother Prince Ahmed's governorship of Amasya. The city of his birth, the two sanjaks where he served and the place where he lies are four separate settlements: Amasya, Kastamonu, Manisa and Bursa.

Chronology

1475-1476 (880 AH): Birth in Amasya; his father Bayezid is at that time sanjak governor of Amasya.

Around 1480: Bayezid's sons are said to have been circumcised in Istanbul; Mahmud is also suggested to have been circumcised then (inference).

3 May 1481: Death of the Conqueror; Mahmud is at the Istanbul palace.

1484-1485 (probable): Appointment as sanjak governor of Kastamonu.

1485: Bayezid II sends six boys and five concubines to Mahmud, sanjak governor of Kastamonu.

1487 (24 May at the latest): His estates are recorded in the Kastamonu-Sinop survey.

1490s: His sons Musa, Orhan, Emir Han and his daughter Fatma Sultan are born in Kastamonu; the Şehzade Sultan Mahmud Mosque is built in Taşköprü.

26 October 1493: Decree on the return of the Muzaffereddin Madrasa's lands to its endowment.

1502: His name appears in the Kastamonu-Çankırı Müsellemân Register.

1503 (908 AH): Death of Alemşah, sanjak governor of Manisa.

1504 (910 AH): Transfer to the sanjak of Saruhan (Manisa), according to Hoca Sadeddin.

1506: Construction date of the Prince Mahmud Tomb at Muradiye, according to the Bursa provincial culture and tourism records.

1507-1508 (913 AH): Death in Manisa (commonly given as 1507).

1511 and 1513: The two endowment deeds Bülbül Hatun drew up for her Amasya and Ladik foundations.

1512: His sons Musa, Orhan and Emir Han are killed in Bursa.

1515: Death of his mother Bülbül Hatun.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Primary sources relied on in Yakupoğlu's article: İbn Kemal, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, VIII. Defter; Hoca Sadeddin, Tâcü't-Tevârîh; Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-Şu'arâ; İdris-i Bitlisî, Selimşahnâme; Lütfi Paşa, Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman; Solakzâde Tarihi; BOA, Tapu-Tahrir Defteri, Nr. 23M.

Academic studies

  • Cevdet Yakupoğlu, "II. Bayezid'in Oğlu Şehzade Mahmud'un Hayatı ve Faaliyetleri", ZKÜ Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, C. 6, S. 12, 2010, pp. 319-339.
  • Ahmet Gündüz, "Vakfiyeleri Işığında II. Bayezid'in Eşi Bülbül Hatun Vakıfları", Vakıflar Dergisi, S. 55, 2021, pp. 25-53. dergipark.org.tr

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı, "Şehzade Mahmut Türbesi" (Bursa). kulturportali.gov.tr

Other sources

Online sources