How to Kill an Ottoman Sultan: Regicide and the Kuleli Incident (1859)

This paper will examine the first known political regicide attempt of the post-janissary era in the Ottoman Empire in 1859. It will be based on my archival research on interrogation registers of forty-one accused suspects and concentrate on their plot to kill the Sultan. It will analyze them from a diachronic perspective, first, to discuss the evolution of the political utility of violence against the Ottoman Sultan (since Osman II), and second, to highlight the modifications that the idea of Sultan’s inviolability has gone through in the Tanzimat era.

        Although the previous regicides in the Ottoman history had always taken place behind the walls of the imperial palace (or in dungeons), the plotters of the Kuleli incident insisted on, for the first time in Ottoman history, the necessity of the public’s witnessing regicide. In stark contrast, the commission charged for the interrogations did not even dare to write down the name/title of the Sultan in the same sentence with the words that suggested violence against him. When an accused person pronounces the Sultan’s name/title in such context, the scribe left blank the place in which the Sultan’s name/title was expected to be. Given the fact that Ottoman official chronicles have not hesitated to narrate all humiliating regicide scenes (especially that of Osman II and of Selim III), one can argue that, the sensibility shown to preserve the Sultan’s textual inviolability is as alien as the idea of public’s need to witness his demise in the history of regicide in the Empire. Consequently, this paper will demonstrate the relationship between the Ottoman governmentality (especially in its reconstruction process during the Tanzimat era) and the political imaginary related to use of violence against the sultan.