Mahmud II

Mahmud II, proclaimed sultan, iii.

He went to India, where he took service under the Bahmani king of the Deccan, and ultimately became a person of great importance at the court of Mahmud II.

Additions include a rare double-sided Byzantine Christian icon lent from the Heybeliada monastery by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, a grouping of second-century marble statues that once formed part of a Greco-Roman fountain at the tip of the Golden Horn, and a sumptuously embroidered portable hunting tent of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II.

Mehemet Ali was fully conscious that the empire which he had so laboriously built up might at any time have to be defended by force of arms against his master Sultan Mahmud II., whose whole policy had been directed to curbing the power of his too ambitious valis, and who was under the influence of the personal enemies of the pasha of Egypt, notably of Khosrev, the grand vizier, who had never forgiven his humiliation in Egypt in 1803.

The mother of the noted reforming sultan, Mahmud II., who began to reign in 1808 when a mere child, was a French woman.