u/UrulmisHan

The 3rd and 4th images are rotated 180° for better understanding.

Concerning the continental mass at the north(or the south, depending on how the map is positioned)I initially thought that it might have been a representation of Mount Qaf instead of the famous Terra Australis. However, after doing some research, I found that Mount Qaf was deliberately left out of the map (according to Baki Tezcan), so it is very likely that this represents Terra Australis.

Haritalar daha kolay anlaşılmaları için 3. ve 4. görseller 180 derece döndürülmüştür.

The seal of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb

The central circle reads:

ابو الظفر محی الدین محمد عالمگیر پادشاه غازی — ۱۲ — ۱۰۷۹

Abū al-Ẓafar Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad ʿĀlamgīr Pādshāh Ghāzī — 12th regnal year — 1079 AH

The surrounding inscriptions are read clockwise, beginning with the upper-right medallion, they are read like that :

ابن شاه جهان پادشاه

ibn Shāh Jahān Pādshāh

ابن جهانگیر پادشاه

ibn Jahāngīr Pādshāh

ابن اکبر پادشاه

ibn Akbar Pādshāh

ابن همایون پادشاه

ibn Humāyūn Pādshāh

ابن بابر پادشاه

ibn Bābur Pādshāh

ابن عمر شیخ شاه

ibn ʿUmar Shaykh Shāh

ابن سلطان ابو سعید شاه

ibn Sulṭān Abū Saʿīd Shāh

ابن سلطان محمد شاه

ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad Shāh

ابن میران شاه

ibn Mīrān Shāh

ابن امیر تیمور صاحب قران

ibn Amīr Tīmūr Ṣāḥib-Qirān

Yavuz Sultan Selim, known in the West as Selim the Grim, was probably the most eastern focused Ottoman Padishah. Following Chaldiran, according to Şükri-i Bitlisi, he intended to winter in Karabagh, then, in spring, reassert authority in Tabriz, then defeat Shah Ismail completely, and go to conquer Khorassan. He spoke to Beddiuzzaman Mirza (a Timurid prince, one of the last rulers of Herat, who was taken with the Ottoman army following Ismail's defeat), to restore him in Herat (probably as a client ruler), and even wanted to conquer Hind and Sindh. It is likely that the final blow against the Safavids was to be through coordinated Ottoman-Uzbek pressure, due to Selim sending letters to the Shaybanid Khan. Due to several soldiers and animals drowning while crossing the Aras River, and due to the instigations of some of the Viziers desiring to return home, the army revolted, requesting to winter in Amasya instead and return to Tabriz in spring. The Janissaries encircled the tent of Sultan Selim, raised their torn clothes on the tip of their spears, and requested a return to Anatolia. Following these events, Selim had no choice but to winter in Amasya, despite Ismail being in a very precarious position and no longer having the same reputation of "invincibility" he had prior to the battle among the Qizilbash emirs.

Despite that, Selim didn't abandon his projects of conquering Persia, eliminating the Shii threat and freeing the Sunni majority of Iran. After wintering in Amasya, Selim still intended to return against the Safavids in spring. However, another Janissary revolt occurred in Amasya in February 1515, with the soldiers demanding a return toward Istanbul and plundering the houses of Piri Mehmed Paşa and Halîmî Çelebi. Selim blamed some of the leading officials for instigating the revolt, notably Grand Vizier Dukakinzade Ahmed Paşa, who was executed.

Despite this, Selim again marched east from Amasya in April 1515. He first secured the corridors needed for the campaign, Kemah, eastern Anatolia was also reorganized, and several Kurdish emirs joined the Ottoman Empire.

Hasan-i Rumlu states that in 1515, intending to fight the Shah of Persia, Sultan Selim Khan accumulated large stores in the lands of the Dulkadir Bey Alaüddevle, which were then plundered by the Dulkadir forces. This led Selim to leave aside temporarily, his plans concerning Azerbaijan and first focus on the Dulkadir in order to secure the campaign. He sent Hadım Sinan Paşa against Alaüddevle, who was defeated and killed in June 1515, removing another obstacle on the route toward the east.

Meanwhile, Ottoman consolidation continued in the region of Diyarbekir. Bıyıklı Mehmed Pasha continued eliminating Safavid-Qizilbash positions, while Idris-i Bitlisi worked to bring several Kurdish emirs into the Empire.

In 1516 started the campaign that is famous for having ended the Mamluk Sultanate. Haydar Çelebi, in his Ruznâme, records Selim giving the order to march on the Qizilbash. In the meantime, Bıyıklı Mehmed Pasha was eliminating the Safavid Qizilbash remnants from the region of Diyarbekir, while Ottoman agents were gathering information about the military situation beyond the frontier. In 1516, orders were given to Ottoman commanders to build a bridge on the Euphrates, which would directly threaten not only the Safavids but also the Mamluks. They felt threatened following the annexation of their vassal state, the Dulkadir Emirate, but also due to the conquests of the Kurdish principalities.

The presence of Qansuh al-Ghawri in Syria, the hostile attitude of the Mamluks, and the rumours of a Mamluk-Safavid alliance led the two armies confronting each other at Marj al-Dabiq on 24 August and subsequently to the campaign being redirected toward Egypt.

Returning to Syria from Cairo in 1517, the Ottomans received a Safavid embassy led by Sarı Şeyh in 1518, which attempted peace, yet was dismissed by Selim, who still wanted to remove the ghulat Shia threat that the Qizilbash posed. Reports from Diyarbekir and the Shirvanshah informed that Ismail had moved toward Karabagh. Upon this, Sinan Ağa was ordered to go with men to obtain or prepare boats for a bridge across the Euphrates, known as the second Euphrates bridge. But the expedition suddenly ceased, Selim detaching himself from the main army, leaving the Grand Vizier Piri Mehmed Paşa there, while the Padishah returned to the capital, Konstantiniyye, via Bursa. Despite not knowing the reasons, the theory of resistance from the army is plausible, especially when considering that they had already been on campaign for two years. But other explanations, such as the need to consolidate the newly acquired Mamluk lands, local rebellions, the need to reorganize the finances and administration, and concerns in the Mediterranean with Rhodes and in the Balkans with the Hungarians, are possible too.

Selim still continued to put an embargo on Safavid products, especially on the silk trade, with the goal of weakening the Qizilbash state.

In 1520, Yavuz Sultan Selim Han again set out for a new campaign, but died just before its start. Concerning this campaign, there is the traditional story of a campaign on Rhodes. Despite heavy preparations toward Rhodes, Haydar Çelebi says that the campaign had "fallen upon another country". He then explains that Sultan Selim, after consulting Scholars and state officers, came to the conclusion that finishing the matter of Shah Ismail was more important than the conquest of Rhodes, leading to the abandonment of the campaign against the Hospitaller Knights. The fact that the government continued to receive reports about the situation in Iran reinforces the theory of the last campaign being directed toward Persia, despite a weaker theory of a western campaign due to movements toward Edirne just before his death.

Sources :

-Şükrî-i Bitlisî, Selim-nâme

-Haydar Çelebi Ruznâmesi

-Hasan Beg Rumlu, Aḥsan al-Tawārīkh

-İdris-i Bidlisî's letters to Bayezid II and Selim I

-Feridun Ahmed Bey, Münşeâtü's-Selâtîn

-Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi

-Feridun M. Emecen, Zamanın İskenderi, Şarkın Fatihi: Yavuz Sultan Selim

The claim that Mehmed II was bisexual is nowadays repeated online almost as a basic biographical fact. Yet when looking at where this claim actually comes from, the evidence is surprisingly weak. There is no Ottoman source identifying Mehmed as having had a sexual relationship with men, and most of the argument is built on a few Greek anecdotes and modern literal readings of Ottoman poetry.

The most famous example is Radu.

Chalkokondyles, a Greek historian, alleges in Histories 9.82 a sexual encounter between Mehmed and Radu and later calls Radu Mehmed’s lover. But Chalkokondyles gives no named eyewitness or informant for this extremely private story.

This is important because Anthony Kaldellis’ detailed study of Chalkokondyles’ sources concludes that he relied mostly on oral information, and several of these informations are clearly false.

The clearest example is Süleyman Paşa. Süleyman died in 1356/57, before his father, Orhan Gazi. Chalkokondyles nevertheless has Süleyman alive when Orhan dies, makes him Orhan’s successor before Murad I, and even connects him to the Battle of Maritsa in 1371, which is considered by Kaldellis’ as pure fiction. He explains that Chalkokondyles sometimes could not correctly coordinate the information he had received, and even misplaced events by decades.

These points alone demonstrate serious problems with the reliability of this anti-Ottoman historian, bur we also possess Ottoman material concerning exactly the same Wallachian affair.

Tursun Beg, for example, served in the Ottoman administration, entered Mahmud Paşa’s service, and personally participated in Mehmed’s Wallachian campaign. His work covers the Wallachian expedition, and the Ottoman historical tradition in general discusses Vlad, Radu, and the struggle over Wallachia in considerable detail. Yet no independent Ottoman corroboration of Chalkokondyles’ sexual story is found in these works.

And Radu is not the only piece of evidence normally used. Another story comes from Doukas, who claims that after the conquest Sultan Mehmed, supposedly drunk, demanded the young son of Loukas Notaras for sexual purposes and had Notaras executed after he refused, and this story has an even more serious problem, Mehmet Kalpaklı and Walter Andrews point out that Doukas’ account is not found in the contemporary accounts of the other Greeks who witnessed the conquest firsthand. They also note that the story closely resembles the much older Christian legend of "Saint" Pelagius: a "beautiful" Christian youth supposedly killed by the Muslim ruler ʿAbd Al-Rahman III after refusing his sexual advances. They argue that Doukas’ tale likely owes more to the "Saint" Pelagius story and to a long tradition of portraying Muslims as morally inferior than to what actually occurred during the conquest. They refer to it themselves as “Doukas’s fiction.”

Even more strikingly, Mehmed II is the Sultan who introduced the practice of eating separately from his officials, and no Ottoman primary source mentions Mehmed II as an alcoholic.

There is another quotation that circulates online and is repeatedly presented as if Kritovoulos himself wrote that Mehmed was “sensual rather than acquisitive” and that George Sphrantzes’ fifteen-year-old son was killed after rejecting Mehmed’s advances,there's a problem here as well, the frequently copied English wording comes from René Guerdan’s 1956 secondary work, "Byzantium: Its Triumphs and Tragedy". It is not itself a quotation from Kritovoulos’ History of Mehmed the Conqueror, Guerdan later invokes Kritovoulos in the surrounding discussion, which appears to have contributed to the quotation being repeatedly attributed to Kritovoulos online.

So already three of the supposed pillars look rather different when examined closely.

Then there is Avnî’s poetry, probably the most common attempt to give the accusation an “Ottoman source.” Mehmed wrote poetry under the mahlas Avnî. Some verses speak about beautiful beloveds, Christians, Galata, wine, and similar imagery, and these are sometimes lifted out of divan poetry and presented almost like pages from Mehmed’s private diary, but one of the famous Persian verses used in these discussions is demonstrably a nazire, a poetic response to Hafez.

Selim Sırrı Kuru shows that Mehmed takes Hafez’s famous verse about giving Samarqand and Bukhara for the beauty of the “Shirazi Turk” and changes only a handful of words: the cities become Istanbul and Galata, and the beloved becomes a Frankish “infidel.” Kuru specifically explains that the ghazal is not a realistic description, Mehmed is entering into poetic competition with Hafez through the established conventions of the genre.

Ekrem Buğra Ekinci debunk even more the claims, discussing specifically the attempts to use Avnî’s poetry as evidence of homosexuality, he argues that the poem cannot be understood without the language of Tasawwuf and says that, in this reading, the beloved is neither male nor non-Muslim. Words involving wine, unbelief, and captivity are part of the symbolic language of classical Sufi poetry that musn't be read literally.

There is finally the religious context, which is also strangely absent from many of these discussions.

Mehmed was educated by major ulema, among them Molla Gürânî, who was specifically his teacher while he was a prince. Molla Hüsrev became one of the central jurists of Mehmed’s reign and helped prepare the curriculum of the Sahn-ı Semân medreses with the Sultan and other leading scholars. Ottoman sources even transmit Mehmed’s description of Hüsrev as “the Abu Hanifa of his age.”

Hüsrev’s Gurer and Dürerü’l-hükkâm became extraordinarily important works of Ottoman Hanafi jurisprudence.

And Ottoman Hanafi law did not consider livâta (sodomy) permissible. Mustafa Avcı’s study of Ottoman Law shows that it was treated as prohibited and punishable; the Hanafi disagreement concerned its precise juridical classification and punishment, not whether sodomy was halal.

The anti-Ottoman label “bisexual Mehmed the Conqueror ” tells us about how western writers have combined and interpreted these stories to suit the meaning they want.

Sources :

-Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories, IX.82, trans. Anthony Kaldellis.

-Anthony Kaldellis, “The Greek Sources of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Histories,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 52 (2012).

-Tursun Beg, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth.

-Halil İnalcık & Rhoads Murphey, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror by Tursun Beg.

-Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, trans. Harry J. Magoulias.

-Walter G. Andrews & Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds.

Selim Sırrı Kuru, “İki Şehrin Şiiri: Gazelde İstanbul ve Galata İkilisi,” YILLIK 2 (2020).

-Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, “Unnatural Love Affairs or Homosexuality in Ottoman Society.”Mustafa Avcı, “Osmanlı Hukukunda Livatanın Cezası.”TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: “Mehmed II,” “Molla Gürânî,” “Molla Hüsrev.”