memories never fade

Today is Valide Kösem Sultan's death anniversary, R.I.P this charitable and strong woman.

"Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day,

Nothing gold can stay."

“As you wish” was all he ever said to her. That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying “as you wish”, what he meant was “I love you”.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE — 1987, dir. Rob Reiner

+ BONUS:

The rose she had offered was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his 21st year. If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.

We have loved these people since the day we arrived. When you love something, you protect it.

Catherine, for all her ‘broken English’, made the speech of her life. But its effect was not so much rhetorical as forensic. By appearing to take her husband’s protestations of continuing love at face value, she had twisted his words to devastating effect. If Henry was so keen for the marriage to be found valid, she had said, how could he possibly object to her appeal to Rome? Surely it was the most natural thing in the world?

    Still worse from Henry’s point of view was his own response. The heat of the moment, his instinctive gallantry, the overwhelming sympathy of the audience for his wife – all drove him to give some sort of agreement to Catherine’s request.

    It is unclear just how far he went. Campeggio understood the exchange to mean that Henry had actually ‘granted [Catherine] full liberty to write and send messengers to Rome and to his Holiness [with her appeal]’. Catherine understood the same. But Henry, appalled at what he had done under pressure, later tried to introduce qualifications. It proved impossible. He had given his wife the word of a King, spoken in public, that she could appeal to Rome. He could never retract. She could act with a clear conscience.

    It was Catherine’s final and most effective coup against the Great Matter. She had knelt. But she had fought and won.

    There was nothing more for her to do in the court. 'She rose up, making a low courtesy to the King, and departed from thence.’ It was supposed that she would have returned to her former seat; instead 'she took her direct way out of the house, leaning, as she was wont always to do, upon the arm of her General Receiver called Mr Griffith [Richards]’. Seeing his prey escape, Henry ordered the crier to call her back. 'Catherine, Queen of England, come into the court!’ he cried. Richards said to her: 'Madam, ye be called again.’ 'On, on,’ she replied. 'It makes no matter, for this is no indifferent court for me; therefore I will not tarry. Go on your ways.’ Twice more the crier repeated his summons. But Catherine ignored him. She never returned.

UNDERRATED RELATIONSHIP/PARTNERSHIP/FRIENDSHIP MEME 4/?: @mihrunnisasultans​‘ pick: Süleyman the Magnificent & İbrahim Pasha

Among all the colorful public personalities gracing the Süleymanic era (1520–1566), Ibrahim Pasha, known as “∞makbul [favorite] and maktul [executed],∞” stands out as a particularly intriguing figure. In 1523 this childhood friend, favorite, and slave of Sultan Süleyman was most irregularly promoted to the highest office in the empire, the grand vizierate, directly from the sultan’s personal service, without having had any experience in government. For the following thirteen years, with the enormous power and authority that he assumed, Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha ruled the empire like a second sultan. As the sultan’s chief advisor and commander, Ibrahim Pasha not only was single-handedly in charge of the political and military administration of the empire but also acted as the sultan’s alter ego and absolute representative in public. In this way Ibrahim Pasha played a pivotal role in the promotion of the Ottoman sultan’s image as the world ruler and in the consolidation of Ottoman claims to universal sovereignty both within and beyond the empire’s borders — two crucial developments that defined the Ottoman Empire for centuries to come. Ibrahim Pasha’s career abruptly ended one night in March 1536, when he was mysteriously executed in the imperial palace on the orders of his beloved sultan.

- Ebru Turan, The Marriage of İbrahim Pasha

İbrahim Pasha had been born a Venetian subject at Parga, on the Ionian coast opposite Corfu, and after his capture by the Ottomans had served in Süleyman’s household in Manisa when he was prince-governor of Saruhan. Almost as soon as he became sultan, Süleyman publicly demonstrated the favour in which he held İbrahim by building him a magnificent palace on the Hippodrome in Istanbul. Having inherited his first grand vezir, Piri Mehmed Pasha, from his father, Süleyman appointed İbrahim to succeed him. Such promotion, of someone who was not a vezir but a senior officer of the Sultan’s household, was extraordinary.

- Caroline Finkiel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire

The Sultan and Grand Vezir, well-informed about matters in the West, quickly received details of Charles V’s splendid coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in 1530, and as quickly interpreted it as tending to reinforce the claim that the Holy Roman Emperor saw himself as the recreated caesar of the Roman Empire. Sultan Mehmed II had aspired to be a universal sovereign and had been seen as a rival by Matthias Corvinus, in his day the most powerful figure in central Europe, who fancied himself the new Hercules or (like Mehmed himself and, according to the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth century, both Selim I and Süleyman) Alexander the Great. Süleyman could not leave this perceived challenge unanswered. From Venice İbrahim Pasha commissioned a gold helmet of four superimposed crowns surmounted with a plumed aigrette. It reached Edirne in May 1532, by way of the Ottoman tributary port-city of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic, as the Sultan was leading his army towards Hungary. The helmet-crown was prominently displayed at the audiences Süleyman gave and played its part in the carefullychoreographed triumphal parades that took place along the route to war, for the benefit of the foreign ambassadors and other observers the Sultan wanted to impress with his power. The Habsburg envoys Süleyman received at Niš seemed unaware that the turban was the headgear of sultans, and thought this gaudy regalia was the Ottoman imperial crown. Neither the timing of İbrahim Pasha’s commission nor its form was accidental. The helmet-crown bore stylistic similarities to the Emperor’s and also to the papal tiara – but with more tiers it symbolized a challenge to their power. İbrahim was like a brother to the Sultan, his intimate adviser and highest officer of state, and this very closeness made him enemies. In 1525 his palace on the Hippodrome was sacked in a janissary uprising in Istanbul that may have been incited by his rivals.

- (x)

In ‘The Story of Suleyman’s attachment to his Vezir Ibrahim’, Stanley Lane-Poole wrote: ‘Suleyman, great as he was, shared his greatness with a second mind, to which his reign owed much of its brilliance. The Grand Vezir Ibrahim was the counterpart of the Grand Monarch Suleyman. He was the son of a sailor at Parga, and had been captured by corsairs, by whom he was sold to be the slave of a widow at Magnesia. Here he passed into the hands of the young prince Suleyman, then Governor of Magnesia, and soon his extraordinary talents and address brought him promotion… From being Grand Falconer on the accession of Suleyman, he rose to be first minister and almost co-Sultan in 1523. He was the object of the Sultan’s tender regard: an emperor knows better than most men how solitary is life without friendship and love, and Suleyman loved this man more than a brother. Ibrahim was not only a friend, he was an entertaining and instructive companion. He read Persian, Greek and Italian; he knew how to open unknown worlds to the Sultan’s mind, and Sulevman drank in his Vezir’s wisdom with assiduity. They lived together: their meals were shared in common; even their beds were in the same room. The Sultan gave his sister in marriage to the sailor’s son, and Ibrahim was at the summit of power.’