For two days the Ottoman court had been waiting for the sultan to die, and Ibrahim had been waiting for all of his adult life to see his brother’s corpse. Now, in the summer of 1640, Murad IV lay in his final agony, and the empire’s most powerful woman was making a choice that would doom millions. Kosem Sultan had spent decades protecting her sons, burying them one by one as Murad’s paranoia demanded their heads. Only Ibrahim remained, a trembling, broken man who had spent sixteen years locked in a cage.

And now her dying son had ordered that Ibrahim be executed too, refusing to leave the throne to a lunatic. Kosem refused to let that happen. When Murad finally gave his last breath, the empire had a new sultan, but getting him to accept the crown proved nearly impossible. Ibrahim had watched every one of his brothers walk out of the imperial cage and never return.

So when the crowd came to free him and proclaim him sultan, the terrified man blocked the door and would not let anyone inside. He was mad, but he was not stupid. The courtiers pleaded with him, but Ibrahim would not budge. So his mother ordered Murad’s remains brought to the cage, a grotesque proof that his brother was truly dead and the throne was truly his.

Ibrahim looked at the body and still refused to come out. The cage had been his prison for sixteen years, but it was the only world he had ever known. The thought of becoming sultan terrified him more than the bars around him. Kosem had not saved his life so he could rot in that cage forever.

She reminded him of the alternative: refuse the throne, and he would likely face execution anyway. Between his brother’s corpse and that grim threat, Ibrahim finally opened the door and stepped out into the world for the first time in sixteen years. His doubts evaporated the instant he was free. He began dancing through the harem, shrieking that the butcher of the empire was dead.

He did not realize that the butcher had simply been replaced. Ibrahim’s reign actually began well. The grand vizier who had served his brother was a capable administrator, and he kept the empire running smoothly through the transition. The new sultan seemed, at first, reasonably well adjusted for a man who had grown up in a cage.

He communicated regularly with his grand vizier and showed genuine concern for governing the empire. He even disguised himself and walked through the city to inspect the local markets for himself. Things were going about as well as anyone could have hoped. But there were signs that something was seriously wrong.

Ibrahim suffered from excruciating headaches and attacks of physical weakness. Modern scholars largely agree that the trauma of his upbringing caused these symptoms. As the months and years passed, the good sultan began to grow more and more unstable. Kosem saw where he was heading, and she made a calculated decision to manage the damage.

She encouraged him to distract himself with his harem. After all, a sultan needed heirs. Before long, Ibrahim had fathered three sons by three different concubines. But he did not stop there.

Ibrahim had an insatiable appetite for women. Kosem personally went to the markets to ensure a constant stream of slave girls for her son. She knew exactly what kind of women he liked and handpicked those she thought would hold his attention. But she soon learned that his appetites were far more disturbing than they had first seemed.

Ibrahim was a predator in every sense. He kept his harem filled with hundreds of concubines, slaves with no choice in the matter. And twistedly, he preferred women he could not have. Women who were not in a position to refuse him interested him far less than those he had to coerce.

The boy who grew up in captivity became a horribly damaged monster, and he did not take kindly to the word no. According to one story, Ibrahim became infatuated with the Grand Mufti’s beautiful daughter. He asked the religious leader for her hand in marriage. But the Grand Mufti had heard the stories of what went on behind the walls of the harem, and he refused the proposal to protect his daughter.

Ibrahim did not take rejection well. In his rage, he ordered his guards to follow the Grand Mufti’s daughter. They captured her and dragged her back to the harem, where Ibrahim had his way with her for days before sending her back to her father. As long as Ibrahim was distracted with his harem, Kosem could essentially rule the empire in his stead, so she was willing to do anything to keep him occupied.

She knew that her son was frequently impotent, so she scoured the city for the best aphrodisiacs money could buy and supplied them to him so he could continue his twisted fantasies. Those fantasies were every bit as deranged as one might imagine. According to one report, Ibrahim frequently assembled all the virgins in his harem, ordered them to strip, then ran among them neighing like a horse and ravishing one after another. He even ordered them to kick and struggle against him.

The harem was a nightmare for every woman unlucky enough to find herself there. The heaviest women had it worst of all: Ibrahim sent men out to find the fattest women in the empire and bring them back to the capital to join his harem. His obsession consumed nearly his entire life. He collected a vast library of books describing bedroom positions and allegedly invented several new ones himself.

But it was not all about sex. He found other questionable ways to occupy himself, chiefly by spending the empire into ruin. During his reign, the imperial harem reached unprecedented heights of luxury. Ibrahim brought in the finest perfumes and jewelry for his concubines.

Above all else, he loved furs. His obsession earned him the nickname the Fool of Furs. He only wanted to sleep with women on extravagant furs, and he had an entire room lined with lynx and sable simply because he could. He wore the finest clothes money could buy.

At one point he gifted two of his favorite concubines the entire treasury of Egypt. For the hundreds of other women in his harem, life was miserable beyond description. They had at least one person looking out for them. When Ibrahim tried to force himself on one concubine, Kosem pulled a dagger and threatened to stab him, telling off her deranged son and allowing the woman to escape the harem.

She was playing a dangerous game, and she knew she could not control Ibrahim forever. The breaking point came when Ibrahim turned on his own family. He utterly humiliated his sisters by making his concubines more powerful than them. He gave away his sisters’ lands and jewels to his favorites.

The princesses of the Ottoman Empire were left with nothing. Kosem was furious. She had given Ibrahim everything, only for him to betray his own family. A feud was brewing.

Ibrahim invented new ways to be utterly mad. When the grand vizier refused his demand to reclaim gifts left at a shrine in Medina by previous sultans, Ibrahim made one of the craziest threats in history: he threatened to stuff the vizier with straw. And the dark voices whispering in his ear did not help matters. Anyone who could give Ibrahim what he wanted stood to gain immense wealth and power, which attracted all kinds of shady characters.

Before Rasputin, there was Cinci Hoca, a charlatan who claimed he could cure any illness. He cured Ibrahim’s ailments, and the sultan rewarded him with untold riches. The viceroy who tried to check Hoca’s influence was executed, and the foxes were officially running the henhouse. The empire suffered greatly.

Once stable and powerful, its foundations grew shakier with each passing year. It would only take a shove for everything to fall apart, and that shove came in the form of a war. In 1644, Maltese corsairs captured a ship carrying several high-ranking Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Ibrahim’s advisers convinced him to invade the island of Malta.

So began a disastrous war with Venice. Venice blockaded the Dardanelles, cutting off Istanbul’s only connection to the Mediterranean and causing massive shortages of food and supplies. While his people starved, Ibrahim continued levying brutal taxes to pay for the extravagances of his harem. In 1647, after three miserable years of conflict, a plot against Ibrahim began brewing.

The latest grand vizier teamed up with Kosem to depose the sultan. But the plot fell apart before it got off the ground. Ibrahim had the vizier executed and exiled his own mother from the harem. Free to devote himself to his concubines as the war continued, he appointed a new, corrupt grand vizier who would let him do whatever he wanted.

But if Ibrahim thought no one else would come for him, he was sorely mistaken. A year later, his number finally came up. The Janissaries, the empire’s elite infantry, revolted. The first to go was regent Ibrahim’s new grand vizier.

On August 8, 1648, an angry mob got their hands on him, and it was not pretty. They tore him to shreds, earning him the gruesome moniker Thousand Pieces. Next, they were coming for Ibrahim. With the walls closing in, Ibrahim ran straight into his mother’s arms.

He had exiled her before, but she was the only person who had ever truly looked out for him. He begged her to protect him. Kosem gave him an ultimatum: abdicate or face the mob. That same day, guards seized Ibrahim and imprisoned him.

Once again, he found himself in a cage. This time, he would not leave alive. His one consolation was that his mother was out there working to protect him. If only he knew the truth.

Kosem had sheltered her son his entire life, even when he betrayed her. That time was over. She saw what her son had become, and she knew he had to go. She wrote: “In the end, he will leave neither you nor me alive.

We will lose control of the government. The whole society is in ruins. Have him removed from the throne immediately. ”

And that is exactly what happened.

A coalition deposed Ibrahim and made his six-year-old son the new sultan. But no one felt safe with Ibrahim still alive, even locked in a cage. The new grand vizier sought a fatwa from religious leaders to sanction Ibrahim’s execution. The only person left who could save Ibrahim’s life was Kosem, and she would not do it.

Ibrahim had beaten all of the motherly love out of her. She consented to the execution. The grand vizier quickly sent for two executioners. In a morbid twist, one was the same executioner Ibrahim himself had commanded for years.

But the end of Ibrahim the Mad was far slower than a beheading or hanging. As officials watched from an overlooking window, the executioners trudged into Ibrahim’s cell and strangled him to death. Before their hands wrapped around his neck, Ibrahim managed to croak out one final plea. According to contemporary reports, his last words were: “Is there no one among those who have eaten my bread who will take pity on me and protect me?

These cruel men have come to kill me. Mercy, mercy. ”

No one had a shred of pity left for the mad sultan. Not even his favorite concubines.

Perhaps the most infamous story about Ibrahim began with a woman named Civelek Sultan, who allegedly told him that one of his concubines had been compromised by an outsider, though she claimed to know no further detail. A paranoid lunatic like Ibrahim raged for days, demanding information about this mysterious traitor. No amount of interrogation uncovered a name. So Ibrahim ordered one of the most disturbing acts in history.

When no traitor came forward, he allegedly ordered his entire harem tied up in weighted sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus. Two hundred and eighty women drowned like cats, all over an unsubstantiated claim of treachery. Strangulation was too good an end for a man like that. But at least the ruthless Civelek got what was coming to her as well.

Ibrahim could deny her nothing, and she quickly became too powerful for her own good. When she threatened Kosem’s place in the harem, it cost her her life. Kosem invited her to dinner, only to have her poisoned or perhaps strangled, then told Ibrahim she had suddenly fallen victim to a mysterious sickness that no one could save her from. Ibrahim the Mad’s reign became a cautionary tale of unchecked power and the consequences of a ruler’s mental instability.

Despite his initial promise, his descent into madness and tyranny nearly destroyed the Ottoman Empire. His deposition and execution marked the end of a dark chapter in Ottoman history, and the story of what happened when a broken man was handed absolute power would haunt the empire for generations to come.