20 Ottoman Sultans and the Shocking Ways They Died

In most empires, the throne was the safest place a man could sit. In the Ottoman Empire, it was the most dangerous job on earth. A sultan ruled three continents. He also had the highest chance of being murdered of almost any ruler in history.

And the men most likely to kill him weren't his enemies. They were his soldiers. His sons. His own court. Sometimes the very people sworn to protect him.

Thirty-six sultans ruled the Ottoman Empire across six hundred years. Many died peacefully. But a startling number did not.

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They were strangled, deposed, driven mad, and quietly removed. Some deaths were dramatic. Some were suspiciously convenient. And some are still argued over by historians today.

Today, twenty of them, and the strange, bloody, and bizarre ways their reigns came to an end. If you like the strange corners of history, subscribe. New episode every week. Let's go.

Number one. Murad the First won one of the most important battles in Ottoman history, and was assassinated on the field right after it. According to tradition, a wounded enemy soldier, pretending to be dying, was allowed close enough to stab him. The empire won the day and lost its ruler in the same hour. It set a grim tone for what the throne would cost.

Number two. Bayezid the First, called the Thunderbolt for the speed of his armies, was captured alive by the conqueror Tamerlane. Stories say he was kept as a prisoner and died in captivity within a year, some say of despair, some say worse. The fastest sultan in Ottoman history ended his life unable to move at all.

Number three. Several early sultans died in the saddle, far from any palace. Hunting and campaigning were constant, and a fall, a fever, or a wound in the field could end a reign without warning. For the first Ottoman rulers, the throne was something you held between battles, not something you retired from.

But once the empire settled into its palace, the danger didn't go away. It just moved indoors.

Number four. For more than a century, the law of fratricide meant a new sultan's first act could be the death of his own brothers. Mehmed the Second made it official policy: a sultan could kill his siblings for the good of the state. Some princes died as grown rivals. Some died as infants. The throne was secured by ending everyone who might also have a claim to it.

Number five. Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire's greatest ruler, had two of his own sons executed. Convinced by court intrigue that they were plotting against him, he ordered the deaths of the very heirs he had raised. The most powerful sultan in history spent his final years haunted by the children he had killed to protect his throne.

Number six. Later sultans replaced execution with the cage, the kafes, but it had its own quiet death toll. Princes were locked away for years, sometimes decades, in luxurious isolation. Many emerged broken, paranoid, or unfit to rule. The cage stopped killing princes with cords. It started killing them slowly, with solitude.

Number seven. More than one sultan was effectively ruled, and ruled out, by his own mother. During the era historians call the Sultanate of Women, queen mothers held enormous power over who sat on the throne and how long they kept it. A sultan who displeased the wrong relative could find his support, and then his reign, quietly withdrawn.

Number eight. The janissaries, the elite soldiers meant to defend the sultan, became the single greatest threat to his life. When they overturned their sacred kettle, it was a declaration of revolt. Over the centuries they deposed sultan after sultan, and the men they removed rarely lived long afterward. The empire's bodyguards became its most reliable assassins.

Number nine. Osman the Second tried to reform, and the janissaries killed him for it. Young, ambitious, and aware that his elite soldiers had grown lazy and dangerous, he planned to replace them. They found out. In 1622 they seized him, imprisoned him, and murdered him, making him the first Ottoman sultan to be killed by his own troops. The lesson was clear: do not threaten the men with the swords.

Number ten. Ibrahim the First was declared unfit, deposed by his own officials and clergy, and then strangled. After a chaotic reign, the very institutions of the empire turned against him, removed him from power, and had him killed days later. A sultan could be the absolute ruler of millions one week and a problem to be solved the next.

Number eleven. To save themselves, sultans regularly sacrificed their closest advisors. When the army or the mob demanded blood, a sultan would often hand over his own grand vizier or favorites to be killed, buying his survival with theirs. The men closest to the throne were also the most expendable, traded away to delay the day the crowd came for the sultan himself.

Some deaths were loud. Others were designed so no one would ever be sure what happened.

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BLOCK 4 - THE QUIET AND THE STRANGE

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Number twelve. When Suleiman the Magnificent died during a siege deep in enemy territory, his death was hidden for weeks. His advisors kept it secret to stop the army from panicking, carrying his embalmed body with the troops and issuing orders in his name. A sultan can rule, in a sense, even after he has died, as long as no one is allowed to know.

Number thirteen. The empire's signature method of royal execution left no blood and no proof: strangulation by a silk cord. A sultan, prince, or official could be removed without a public execution, without a weapon, and without a clear story for the outside world. Many royal deaths recorded as "natural" were almost certainly anything but.

Number fourteen. Some sultans were destroyed not by a cord but by their own minds. Years of isolation, paranoia, and the constant fear of assassination drove more than one ruler into mental collapse. A few were declared insane and deposed, their breakdowns as politically fatal as any poison. The throne could kill you without anyone laying a hand on you.

Number fifteen. Selim the Third tried to modernize the army and was deposed in a revolt, then murdered to stop him returning to power. His attempt to build a new European-style military enraged the janissaries, who removed him. When his supporters tried to restore him, his enemies had him killed first. Reform, again and again, turned out to be one of the deadliest things a sultan could attempt.

Number sixteen. Abdulaziz was deposed in 1876 and found dead days later, his wrists cut. The official ruling was suicide. Almost no one believed it then, and historians still argue about it now. Whether he took his own life in despair or was killed to make sure he never reclaimed the throne, his death showed how blurry the line between "stepped down" and "removed" really was.

Number seventeen. Abdul Hamid the Second ruled with absolute power for over thirty years, then was deposed and spent his final years under guard. Once one of the most feared men in the world, controlling a vast secret police and a sprawling empire, he ended his life as a closely watched prisoner of the state he had once commanded. Survival, for a late Ottoman sultan, could be its own kind of sentence.

Number eighteen. By the empire's final decades, several sultans were rulers in name only. Real power sat with political movements, officers, and parliaments, while the sultan signed what he was told to sign. They didn't need to be killed anymore. They had simply been emptied of everything that made the throne worth murdering for.

Number nineteen. The last sultan to rule, Mehmed the Sixth, didn't die on the throne. He fled it. In 1922, with the empire abolished around him, he escaped Istanbul aboard a British warship and sailed into exile, never to return. After six centuries of strangled, stabbed, and deposed sultans, the dynasty's reign ended not with a murder, but with a quiet departure at dawn.

Number twenty. The very last man to hold the imperial title died in exile, far from the empire, as an ordinary citizen of other countries. The family that had ruled three continents was banished, scattered, and forbidden to return for decades. The dynasty that had killed its own brothers to keep the throne ended with its heirs living anonymous lives in cities that had never been theirs.

For six hundred years, the Ottoman throne was the most powerful seat on earth, and one of the most lethal. Sultans were killed by enemies, by soldiers, by sons, by mothers, and by the slow weight of the throne itself.

The empire that ended castles and humbled kings could never quite solve its own succession. In the end, the greatest danger to an Ottoman sultan was almost always the people standing closest to him.

If you want more, more empires the history books skip past, subscribe. Next week, we step out of the palace and into the street. Twenty Ottoman superstitions and beliefs that controlled everyday life, and some of them are stranger than anything a sultan ever did.