Mehmed III
Mehmed III killed nineteen brothers on his accession, won one battle in person, and spent the rest of his reign losing Anatolia to its own soldiers. The fratricide of 1595 was the largest in the dynasty's history and the one that ended the practice: nineteen coffins left the palace, several of the boys still children, and the public revulsion was sufficient that his successors confined their brothers in the palace instead of executing them - which solved the moral problem and created a new one, since it produced sultans who arrived on the throne after decades of isolation with no experience of anything. He inherited a war with the Habsburgs in Hungary that had been going badly, and in 1596, under pressure from the clerics and his own household, he did what no sultan had done for a generation and led the army himself. At Mezokeresztes his line broke and he tried to leave the field; he was persuaded to stay, the Habsburg army fell to looting the Ottoman camp, and a counterattack turned a defeat into the largest Ottoman victory of the war. He went home and never campaigned again. The real crisis was behind him rather than in front. The Celali risings that began in earnest during his reign were not peasant revolts but mutinies of the irregular musketeers the state had raised for the Habsburg war and then discharged without pay. They took to banditry in bands of thousands, seized provincial towns, and in places set themselves up as rulers collecting their own taxes. Anatolia was effectively outside government control for the best part of thirty years. Hundreds of thousands of peasants abandoned their land, and the tax base of the core provinces never fully recovered. He died at thirty-seven, having also had his own eldest son executed on a rumour of conspiracy.
- Lived: 1566 CE – 1603 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
