August 1422 – February 1423
Küçük Mustafa, 1422–1423
Murad’s younger brother Mustafa, about thirteen years old, is known as Küçük Mustafa, Mustafa the Younger. He has been governor of the Hamid lands around Isparta, and after their father’s death he flees to Karaman because he fears for his life. His tutor Şarabdar İlyas urges him to claim the throne. The bey of Karaman, Yakub II of Germiyan at Kütahya and the Turgudlu Turkmens back him, and by Doukas’s account Byzantium sends him money.
In late August 1422 Küçük Mustafa lays siege to Bursa. The Ahi brotherhoods of the city send word to İlyas that Bursa has the men and the supplies to defend itself, and the prince turns to İznik. He takes İznik after a siege of forty days and is proclaimed sultan there. Murad lifts the siege of Constantinople on 6 September and crosses to Anatolia.
Murad wins over Şarabdar İlyas with the promise of a beylerbey’s post. In February 1423 Mihaloğlu Mehmed Bey’s sipahis fall on İznik while the prince is in the bath. The prince’s men fight to get him away and Mihaloğlu is wounded, but İlyas puts the prince on his own horse and hands him over to Murad. Küçük Mustafa is strangled, and his body is hung from a fig tree outside İznik and then buried in his father’s Green Tomb at Bursa.
The Green Tomb of Mehmed I at BursaWikimedia Commons, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Yeşil Türbe 01.jpg)
Sources
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (late 15th century).
- Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ (late 15th century).
- Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (1990).
- Halil İnalcık, “Murād II”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 7 (1993), 594–595.
- Mustafa Çetin Varlık, Germiyan-oğulları Tarihi (1300–1429) (1974).
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