Word: sultanic
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...wrote over a hundred volumes and tablets setting forth his spiritual and social teachings. These included tablets sent to the principle political and ecclesiastical rulers of the time: Queen Victoria, Napoleon III, Kaiser Wilhelm I, Czar Alexander II, Kaiser Francis Joseph of Austria, President Grant, Pope Pius IX, Sultan 'Abdu'l-Aziz of Turkey, and Nasir'd-Din Shah of Iran. In these letters, he proclaimed the coming of a new Manifestation of God and exhorted them to lay down their arms and take hold of that which would be conducive to the unity of mankind. Some were warned...
...Ottoman sultans ruled an empire from Baghdad to Vienna for most of four centuries, but their personal lives back home in Constantinople's Great Harem of Topkapi were mainly a matter of bed and bored. One 17th-century sultan, aptly called Ibrahim the Mad, became so bored that he spent much of his time tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosporus alongside the Topkapi Palace. One day, harem-scare-em Ibrahim ordered his 1,001 concubines trussed, weighted and tossed into the sea-and, of course, replaced. But between fits of madness, Ibrahim and the 24 other...
...palace houses the famed Topkapi jewels, long a must for tourists in present-day Istanbul, but the principal sight will be the intricate maze of grandly decorated apartments. They include the gilded, rococo Hall of the Sultan, where reigning monarchs reclined on a brocaded couch to watch dancing girls perform. Near by are the royal baths, which featured marble floors, golden faucets and slave girls to assist the sultan in his bath. Then there are the gilded and inlaid bedchambers...
...seraglio, however, sex was sometimes secondary to intrigue, and the queen mothers and chief eunuchs often ruled the roost as much as the rooster. Too much ikbal resulted in too many male heirs eligible to succeed as sultan. Aggressive siblings-or their mothers-cut down the rival candidates neatly. As soon as he was named sultan in 1595, for example, Mohammed III murdered 19 half brothers and, to be certain of obliterating all possible competition, also killed seven of his father's concubines who happened to be pregnant at the moment. This was extreme even by Topkapi ground rules...
...Great Harem was abandoned in 1909 when one of the last of the Ottoman sultans, Abdul Hamid, was exiled to Salonika with a few of his favorites; 370 concubines, old or second-rate by the Sultan's standards, and 127 eunuchs were set free. Now the Turkish Ministry of Culture is planning to make Topkapi Palace the focus of a "cultural revolution" featuring concerts, poetry recitals, ballet and re-enactments by the National Theater of the tragedy of Ibrahim...