Heady times in the Ottoman Palace… warring for love and power behind the Imperial Gate.
Our story begins in the autumn of 1654, some two years after the death of the Elder Queen. It was a time when Cromwell governed England as Lord Protector, Cardinal Mazarin held sway over the fortunes of France in the name of King Louis XIII and in India, Prince Aurangzeb plotted the overthrow of his father Shah Jahan, whilst the silvery land of China was unhappily settling into the long dusk of Manchurian rule.
At the Imperial Ottoman Palace, Turhan Sultan ruled supreme as undisputed Queen Mother and her son Mehmet IV, the emperor, was nearly fourteen years of age. But did mother and son choose the wrong man for the office of Grand Vezier?..
R. Kandiyoti, was born in İstanbul in 1942. He has successively served on the academic staffs of the Middle East Technical University, Boğaziçi University and Imperial College London, where he is presently a Professor of Chemical Engineering. His publications include Solid Fuels and Heavy Hydrocarbon Liquids: Thermal Characterization and Analysis [Elsevier, 2006] and Pipelines: Oil Flows and Crude Politics [I.B. Tauris, forthcoming]. The Imperial Gate is a product of his long
standing interest in Ottoman history.
