Where exactly is the throne? Locating sovereignty in sixteenth-century Ottoman succession rituals

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As a ritual ceremony is by default a formal event, a pre-modern enthronement ceremony would naturally be defined as one which incorporates certain actions “performed by authorized people with respect to eligible persons or entities under proper circumstances in accordance with proper procedures,” to benefit from the words of Roy Rappaport from “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual”. The formal nature and political significance of the ceremony, serving among other things the initial legitimating ground for political authority, usually brings along a monolithic impression of a systemized and fixed series of actions. A comparative examination of the Ottoman sultans in the course of the sixteenth century, however, reveals a rather circumstance-based picture as far as the various aspects of enthronement ceremonies are concerned. This paper is an attempt to scrutinize the issue through the case of Selim II whose enthronement seems to have created major problems when those around him could not agree on the manner or moment of actual succession. The confusion surrounding the accession of Selim II not only gives considerable insight into the various pre-requisites for the ritual attainment of sovereign power, but provides the opportunity to discuss the extent to which different aspects of a given ritual could or could not be standardized and the effects of immediate circumstances on the formal features on the said ceremony as well as its gradual evolution through time.