The sultan's favorite: Ibrahim Pasha and the making of the Ottoman universal sovereignty in the reign of Sultan Suleyman (1516--1526)

This dissertation presents a new historical narrative of the main political events in Ottoman and Mediterranean history from 1516 to 1526 through the prism of Ibrahim Pasha, the famous grand vizier of Sultan Suleyman. Ibrahim Pasha was more than a mere servant or adviser to the sultan. He was Suleyman's favorite, alter ego, and inseparable companion. From his appointment to the grand vizierate in 1523 until his execution in 1536 on the order of Suleyman, Ibrahim Pasha ruled the empire with a power equal to the sultan's own.;This dissertation situates the extraordinary term of Ibrahim Pasha in the broader political and cultural context of the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean world in the first half of the sixteenth century, a period imbued with eschatological expectations of the rise of a universal emperor who was to unite the entire world under a single rule and single religion. In so doing I challenge the traditional historiography in Ottoman scholarship, which claims Mehmed II founded the Ottoman Empire upon his conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Instead, I suggest that the Ottoman sultans first began to claim universal rule with the conquest of Constantinople, the sole embodiment of world rule that the Mediterranean world recognized in the Renaissance. However, from the late fifteenth through the first decades of the sixteenth century, Ottoman universal sovereignty remained a contested issue.;The Ottoman dynasty was able to consolidate its claims to world rule only in the late 1520s, during the grand vizierate of Ibrahim Pasha. Two factors played a key role in this process. After the conquest of Syria (1516) and Egypt (1517), the Ottoman sultan not only vastly expanded his financial and military resources but also began to refashion himself as the long-awaited world ruler. Second, and more important, was the rise of a new Turkish-speaking Muslim milieu in the city of Istanbul that embraced and took pride in the imperial idea that Constantinople represented. In time, this milieu became the chief supporter of the Ottoman sultan, whom they identified with the emperor of their city and thus the whole world.