17 Facts About Cem Sultan

Only six days later, Cem Sultan captured the city of Inegol with an army of 4,000.

Cem Sultan Bayezid sent his army under the command of vizier Ayas Pasha to kill his brother.

Cem Sultan proposed to divide the empire between him and his brother, leaving Bayezid the European side.

Cem Sultan lost and fled with his family to the Mamluk Cairo.

In Cairo, Cem Sultan received a letter from his brother, offering Cem Sultan one million akces to stop competing for the throne.

Cem Sultan intended to give it all up and return to Cairo but all of the roads to Egypt were under Bayezid's control.

In return for the overthrow of the new sultan Bayezid, Prince Cem offered perpetual peace between the Ottoman Empire and Christendom if he regained the Ottoman throne.

Cem Sultan spent the next five years there, mostly at Bourganeuf.

Cem Sultan was well treated, but essentially a captive.

Bayezid II negotiated both with D'Aubusson, to have Cem Sultan returned to Rhodes, and with representatives of the new French monarch, Charles VIII, to have him kept in France.

Apparently, Cem Sultan found life in Rome more pleasant than in France, and he had lost hope of seizing the Ottoman throne, but he wanted to die in a Muslim land.

Pope Innocent VIII unsuccessfully attempted to use Cem Sultan to begin a new crusade against the Ottomans.

In exchange for maintaining the custody of Cem Sultan, Bayezid paid Innocent VIII 120,000 crowns, a relic of the Holy Lance, one hundred Moorish slaves, and an annual fee of 45,000 ducats.

Cem Sultan requested to have Cem's body for an Islamic funeral, but it was not until four years after Cem's death that his body was finally brought to the Ottoman lands because of attempts to receive more gold for Cem's corpse.

Cem Sultan had two diwans in Turkish and Persian, and he spoke Arabic.

Cem Sultan's life served as inspiration for a character in the book The Damned Yard by the Yugoslav Nobelist writer Ivo Andric.

Cem Sultan appears as one of the main characters in a multiple-layered narration and serves as a metaphor for the human condition.