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I found no references to Mehmed's having "twenty seven brothers executed", so I replace it with a reference of nineteen brothers executed. --Kansas Bear (talk) 18:15, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Lack of context
Mehmed's reign was during one of the most interesting periods in Mediterranean history. It was the height of the Christian "Wars of Religion," as the Catholic Duke of Guise and (then) Protestant Henry of Navarre were fighting over southern France, Protestant England and Catholic Spain were warring in the aftermath to the Armada, Europeans were beginning to seek independent relations with Ottoman Shiite enemy Safavid Persia as a direct route to India, and the power of Venice was on the wane due to piracy and constant warfare and shifting patterns of trade and consumption. At every turn, Jewish and Muslim exiles from Europe were aligning with one or another ruler under the many different identities that their language skills and cultural experience allowed them to assume. Within the Ottoman empire there were battles between those who advocated a strict application of Islamic precepts even to trade and diplomatic relations and those (including the sultan and his court) who advocated the traditionally Mediterranean pragmatic approach to the problem of overlapping legal systems. The end of the Islamic millennium in 1591 had inspired a burst of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that the Ottoman rulers had to manage along with extreme volatility in currency sources and values, mass migrations, and scheming by resident Europeans that grew up naturally around the conditions just described. Mehmed was actually invited at one point by Henry's emissary to bombard Marseilles in the effort to get its submission.
Whatever Mehmed's personal faults may have been, to describe his reign in such bland and uncompromising terms is bad history. The ruler was a symbolic representation of his era. We have very few sources on his personal character and do not really know how he was involved in these events. It would be reasonable if he leaned on his mother for diplomatic advice. I think the description here borders on caricature. It would be better to say frankly that there is much we do not know, but we do know that he was navigating treacherous waters.
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