Selimus: General Introduction

Introduction

The First Part of the Tragical Reign of Selimus is a historical drama likely first staged by the Queen’s Men in the early 1590s that was first published in 1594 by the London printer-bookseller Thomas Creede (Gants). Heavily influenced by the pamphlet material and theatrical culture of its day, the play follows in thirty scenes the events leading to the deposition and murder of the Ottoman Emperor Bajazeth by his youngest son Selimus as well as Selimus’s subsequent executions of his siblings and family members in order to secure his power. It ends by promising a follow-up that will show Selimus with triumphant sword / Dividing kingdoms into equal shares, / Giving them to his warlike followers (). As far as we know, this sequel was never written.

Selimus recounts an Ottoman dynastic struggle that took place in and around what is now Turkey from 1511 until 1513. Bayezid II, the historical analogue of the play’s Bajazeth, had ruled as Ottoman Emperor since the death of his father Mehmud II in 1481. Unlike in early modern England, succession in the Ottoman Empire was dictated by a version of what is now called unigeniture wherein only the sole surviving son or male family member of a sultan enjoyed an undisputable right to rule. Under Mehmud II, what had been a pragmatic political practice of fratricide became systemized when the Ottoman Emperor declared, it is appropriate for whichever of my sons attains the sultanate with divine assistance to kill his brothers for the sake of the world’s order (qtd. in Çipa 30). Authority in this system was firmly linked to Istanbul with the son best positioned quickly to secure control over the imperial capital after the death of his father having the best chance to consolidate power. Proximity then was of paramount importance (Çipa 33), and the sons of sultans aggressively competed for governorships close to Istanbul. In the latter months of 1510, Selim, the youngest surviving son of Bayezid II and historical analogue of the play’s Selimus, had organized an army and begun a north then westward march to Istanbul in order to lobby for a more politically advantageous governorship than the one he had been given in the remote region of Trabzon along the southern coast of the Black Sea. He was especially frustrated that Bayezid II had favored his elder brother Ahmed (the historical analogue of the play’s Acomat) by giving him governorship of the coveted province of Amaysa when he became sultan in 1481. By the following summer, Selim and his army had arrived in Edirne, the city temporarily hosting the Ottoman court after Istanbul had been devastated by an earthquake in 1509. Word of Bayezid II’s intended abdication in favor of Ahmed had been no small motivation forward. It is at this point in the historic struggle between Bayezid II and Selim that the play begins.

Eager to avoid a military confrontation with his youngest son, Bayezid II removed abdication from the table and offered one of three possible provincial governorships. Selim chose Semendire (Samandria in the play) in what is now Serbia. Taking advantage of a strong Shia uprising against Bayezid II in the southwest of present-day Turkey, though, Selim continued to build his army, and he then engaged in a battle with his father’s forces as they were returning to the capital. Near the city of Çorlu, Bayezid II’s youngest son suffered a historic defeat that ended with him barely escaping with his life to what is now Bulgaria. Back in Istanbul, Bayezid II sent for Ahmed in order to begin the process of abdication. As in the play, however, the janissaries resisted, greatly preferring thebellicose and anti-Shia Selim. In the early months of 1512, they refused to give Ahmed entrance into the city and successfully insisted that Selim be made commander-in-chief of the imperial army. In mid-April, Selim arrived in Istanbul to take on his new responsibilities. Within a week, Bayezid II had abdicated, strong-armed into his decision by the janissaries’ vehement support of Selim. Four weeks later, Bayezid II was dead, succumbing on the way to Dimeticum, his childhood home. Whether Selim I was responsible is unclear, but if so, his murder of a deposed Ottoman emperor was unprecedented. Selim I then turned his attention to his enemies. In December 1512, he executed the sons of three of his dead brothers as well as Bayezid II’s minister Mustafa Pasha who he suspected of supporting Ahmed. In March, 1513, he captured his brother Korkud (Corcut in the play) and quickly had him executed. A month later, he had Ahmed strangled after defeating him in a battle near the town of Bursa in what is now northwest Turkey. Selim I’s elimination of his last political rival is where the play ends.

Selimus was by no means the only professional play staging Turks and Ottoman history in the last decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. Over a dozen of these plays appeared between 1585 and 1595. Some of these are extant like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon, Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, and Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, while others like Peele’s The Turkish Muhammad and Irene the Fair Greek are now lost. While Selimus is the only Elizabethan professional play to recount events during the reigns of Bayezid II and Selim I, George Salterne’s Latin closet drama Tomumbeius (possibly written a few years before Selimus) stages the defeat of the Mamaluke Sultan Tuman Bey II of Egypt by Selim I in 1517. This is the Tonombey whom Selimus defeats with Acomat in the second-to-last scene of Selimus and who exits with the lament, For never yet since I could manage arms / Could any match with mighty Tonombey, / Just heroic emperor Selimus (). In his Argument, Salterne calls Selim a harsh, savage, impious Turk, but during his two appearances in the play in the fourth Act, he is both reluctant to go to war—seeking instead an honest peace—and devout, calling upon Mohammed, Highest of the High (Barker) when learning of the Mamalukes’s treachery. This is a very different Selim than we encounter in Selimus.

That plays about the recent history of the Ottoman empire were being written and staged in England in the late Elizabethan period is not surprising. As a result of the significant expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Africa, Asia, and especially Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, general accounts of the Turks and their history began to appear regularly in London’s bookshops in the 1540s. Though trade and diplomatic dealings were sporadic in these years and the decades after, formal Anglo- Ottoman trade negotiations began in earnest in the late 1570s. These led to the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations in 1580 giving Elizabeth license to establish English consulates in Turkey and English merchants the right to trade in Ottoman regions. A year later, the Levant Company was formally established in London, and its first trading vessel arrived in Istanbul in 1583.

Gerald M. MacLean and Nabil I. Matar have maintained that early modern England was greatly affected by its encounters with the Islamic world, perspectives varying depending on time and place. According to them, captivity narratives having to do with the Turks drawn from English accounts of the Barbary coast had a powerful impact on the English imagination—Turks painted as violent, heartless, and capricious. At the same time, though, reports from merchants, diplomats, and consuls painted a mostly positive picture, the Ottomans described as tolerant and as important potential allies against the Catholic Church and the Spanish. Daniel Vitkus too has identified a diversity of perspectives on the Turks in early modern England. Pointing to what were England’s fledgling colonialist projects in the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, he argues that the English were not yet in a position to conduct their encounters with the Ottomans in terms of self and other. At the same time, England’s Reformation sectarian struggles greatly muddied English perspectives on non-Christians. While an invasive demonic threat of the Turks could be variously invoked in hand-wringing debates about the dissolution of Christendom in the late 1520s, a mutuality of purpose and perspective with the Turks was sometimes imagined in the 1580s in response to expanding Catholic Spanish dominions (Dimmock).