Mara’s Message From History
Small entities might once again need to relearn how to hedge between great powers. One forgotten highborn woman from history provides some ancient realist lessons.
Tuba Büyüküstün might not be a known name in Hollywood, or America. Although the 42-year-old Turkish beauty is famous in her part of the world, in the West she is known only among obscure Netflix historical documentary–enjoyers as the person who played Mara Brankovic, the Serbian princess and widow of the Ottoman Sultan Murad II and the stepmother of Mehmed II the Conqueror, in the the critically acclaimed and mostly historically accurate (albeit a trifle hagiographic) Rise of Empires: Ottoman.
Neo-Ottomanism is not just on the TV, but in academic debates—and for good reason. After having defeated the Russians by proxy in Armenia and Syria, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken his country to its highest level of strategic power and influence in (arguably) over a century.
“The fate of Damascus and Yerevan, and the people in between, is tied through Istanbul once more. A century on from the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, which rang the death knell on the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, is trying to recast a Sultan-like influence across the region,” Hannah Lucinda Smith, recently wrote. “The government in Ankara still displays the relics of Ottoman cosmopolitanism like trinkets, sending congratulations to its minorities on their religious holidays. In 2023 the first new church in a hundred years opened on Turkish soil, yet in recent years Erdoğan has also converted ancient churches including the Hagia Sophia, once the seat of eastern Christianity, into mosques.”
With the return of multipolarity and decline of American hegemonic stability, the grand old continent is once again beset by territorial, demographic, and material forces beyond its control. In an emergent age of conquest and imperialism, this period of history, when the interests of the western part of Eurasia diverged from those of the borderlands and their rising powers, is of more than mere academic interest. (As I write, Armenia is trying to finesse a rapprochement with both Azerbaijan and Turkey; there are talks in Europe about a partition of Ukraine to satiate Russian conquest.) Yet, bafflingly, there is not much discussion of how small states hedged and survived during an earlier such epochal shift in their neighbourhood.
There are not many Western sources about Mara Brankovic, one of the most fascinating realists of her age. Mara’s life is a standing rebuke to some of the deeply held beliefs of our own times about religion, loyalty, credibility, realism, political expediency, and gendered competence. Although she was one of the most interesting female diplomats of her age, modern feminists won’t touch her with a bargepole, presumably because she was pious and traditionally moral. The Greek historian Sphrantzes records that Mara categorically refused a remarriage during her widowhood, arguing that it went against her Christian principles and that she wanted to devote her life to the pursuit of knowledge, peace and religion.
Older records of her are either mostly calculatedly indifferent if not at times hostile: a Christian princess who chose diplomatic expediency and irreligious realism over crusading faith; an intelligent, fierce and competent woman who played the game of men better than most men in her lifetime and beyond; a woman who led (according to some Byzantinists) in a life no better than a captive among infidels, yet earned respect through her actions and not just a gifted title; a Western woman who married an Easterner and never wavered from going against her own blood, who even compelled her own father to submit to her stepson’s empire in a show of immigrant loyalty to the land beneath her feet. She is venerated in Ottoman historiography as Mara Despina or Mara Hatun; she was quite possibly the most influential person in the life of the man who eventually conquered Constantinople and altered the course of European history permanently.
Mara Brankovic was born the eldest daughter of Serbian despot Durad. Serbia was sandwiched between arch-rivals: the expansionist Ottoman Sultanate and Hungary, the first line of formal defense for Central and Western Europe. Western Europe was, by turns, indifferent, powerless, and theologically divided. Serbia, Transylvania, Wallachia, and other such smaller feudatories once supported by the Byzantine imperial peace were left to fend for themselves without Western support as Constantinople’s power retracted.
Brankovic descended from four noble dynasties, the Brankovići, Nemanjići, Kantakuzēnoi, and Palaiologoi. As Sir Edward Creasy noted in his magisterial study, the Ottomans under Murad were already considered a stable (albeit non-Christian) power. European kingdoms also had a long tradition of trading with bigger and more powerful empires in the east—Persia, India and China. The laws of balance of power are timeless and universal, and unless a specific power was nomadic, predatory, or threatening to an entire way of life (as were, say, the Mongol hordes), a casual and negative balance usually was achieved quickly by trade and elite marriages.
The Turks had mellowed since the heady days of the First Crusade; under the Ottomans, they considered themselves a relatively stable Eurasian power, interested in expansion, like all empires, but often supported by much smaller Christian states in return for imperial protection. Serbia was particularly important, as both Creasy and German Ottomanist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall wrote, and a stalwart ally of Ottoman power. Serbians fought alongside the Ottomans when the Turks were threatened by the Mongols from central Asia. Then, just as now, alliances were formed on the basis of shared threats, and not religion or ethnicity.
Into this scenario enters our heroine protagonist, who became more prominent diplomatically after her engagement with Murad. The marriage to the aging Sultan was a practical gift from Durad, who managed, unlike his counterparts in Wallachia, to stabilize his eastern front with familial ties. The records of the marriage’s early years are fairly uneventful. Murad, by all accounts, wasn’t interested originally in the nuptials; while he clearly was fond of his European wife, it was arguably in a fatherly way. The marriage reportedly wasn’t consummated. German orientalist historians such as Franz Babinger note how much the relationship between Mara and Murad was based not just on mutual respect but an appreciation of the geopolitical advantage the relationship brought to both sides. First-person accounts of the period are shaky at best, but both Greek and Turkish historians confirm that this is the time she got to know her stepson, the young prince Mehmed, Murad’s oldest son and the future conqueror of Constantinople. Mehmed was alone at the imperial court without allies, worried about palace coups and intrigues, and bereft of his own birth mother, who died in 1449. Around this time, he started to regard Mara as his mother.
Mara was an intelligent woman, who quickly became fluent in both customs and language. She served as an intermediary between her father’s Europe and her husband’s Turkey, being widely regarded as an impartial interlocutor. She also realised that her celibacy was an advantage: Her own biological son wouldn’t have survived a power struggle. She never crossed the empress, and treated Murad’s firstborn with motherly kindness, laying the foundations for their future relationship.
Mara was, however, no pushover. In one instance, her brother’s family wanted to secede from Ottoman yoke. When Mara’s husband found that out, he blinded them both to deter other rebels. Mara was furious. She threw such an enormous tantrum that Murad was reportedly in fear of the wrath of her new wife and went out of his way to pacify her. The importance of Mara was thus established in the court. She was allowed to continue practicing and propagating her religion, becoming a patroness for Christians in Ottoman territory.
Murad’s death swiftly brought significant developments. The death of a moderate emperor resulted in hedging from Christian powers such as Serbia, Hungary, and Wallachia who rightly sensed potential Ottoman weakness and an oncoming imperial power struggle. Mehmed returned to Edirne, the capital, and ascended the throne, quickly neutralizing any challenges to his authority by medieval means which are easily imaginable and unnecessary to write. The Eastern Roman emperor, Constantine Palaiologos, severely miscalculated the young Turk and his providential appetite for greatness, and denied Mehmed tribute.
Mara’s life also took a strange turn. After her husband’s death, she was quickly sent back to her father’s home with enormous Ottoman gifts. But a power struggle with her younger brother in Serbia, who, sensing a new ruler in Ottoman throne, wanted to hedge and balance, became a risk to her life; she fled back to her stepson, where as a dowager empress she was quickly admitted to the inner circle of the Ottoman court Mara thus became both the teacher and counsellor of the emperor, especially during his decisive campaign against Constantinople. In return, she also deftly guaranteed the lives and livelihood of Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, in the region by then under the Ottoman flag.
Mara’s diplomacy changed the region. There isn’t much modern scholarship available on her, particularly in English. Mihailo Popovic’s German monograph is as close to a modern study that one might get. But medieval sources provide a glimpse of how she changed the diplomatic landscape. Consider that Mara compelled Mehmed to donate her lands to charity, breaking a mold where the property of the deceased nobility was absorbed by the imperial main. Mara even got her personal priest, Dionysius, made patriarch. Popovic describes Mara’s various roles, in his words, as a “diplomat, protector, and donator.”
She was also influential as a diplomat between the warring Venetian Republic and Ottomans, after the collapse of the Eastern Roman empire altered the balance of power in the region and made the Ottomans a European power with a foothold on the thither side of the Bosporus. It was Mara who as chief diplomat arranged meetings between two sides in the neutral ground of the holy mountain of Athos. It was Mara who persuaded Mehmed to seek a rapprochement with Venice, according to the Venetian senator Domineco Malipiero. St. Ivan Rilski’s bones were transferred to Bulgaria under her guidance, and Mehmed was persuaded never to conquer Mount Athos.
There are few explicit timeless and universal natural laws in history. Almost all of them apply in the case of Mara Brankovic. Mara was fiercely loyal to the power she represented and served, and the land where she chose to reside—a lesson to the current crop of elite migrants heading to any imperial core. Mara was ahead of her time in differentiating and compartmentalizing her faith and identity from those of her sovereign and from the acts of state. Mara proved, more than anything, that equilibrium is the highest virtue in international relations. Her life is a testament to individual agency towards the pursuit of knowledge and charity and protection of faith.
She died around the age of 70, 36 of those years a widow and dowager sultana—or emerissa as she was known in the refugee Orthodox communities in Rome and Venice—and in that time, she created a legacy of realpolitik that survives to this day. She never remarried or moved to the prosperous West, an easy option for a highborn woman; nor did she become a detached nun. Instead, she chose to be the woman in the arena, and wield her influence towards the highest good of her times, arguably at a considerable risk to her life.
There is no question that the Ottoman empire moved in an increasingly moderate and liberal direction with time, not unlike the Mughals or the British, developing a broad tolerance for ethnic and religious minorities and eventually institutionalizing it in the millet system. How much of that was a direct influence of Mara Brankovic? It is also a recorded historical truth that the republic that followed the empire’s collapse was far more ethno-centric, discriminatory, and brutal towards minorities than the multiethnic entity that preceded Atatürk by nearly 600 years. “Ottoman policies were more nuanced and strategic, or opportunistic, than their Christian opponents could perceive,” as a new book by Marcus Bull suggests. History is a difficult ethical judge, but comparing the number of deaths resulting from Vlad Tepes’s rebellion and crusade against the Ottomans with the number of Christian lives and institutions saved by Mara’s diplomacy and persuasion from within should pull even the most strident of disbelievers towards her moral cause and diplomatic style: an important lesson, perhaps crucial to Armenians and Ukrainians (and Taiwanese and Arabs) today.
“It says much for Mara’s maturity and strength of character that she obstinately refused to obey her father’s wishes in this matter,” Donald MacGillivray Nicol, one of the last great historians of Byzantium, wrote about pressures on Mara to remarry during her widowhood. “Like many Byzantine widows before her, she might have insured herself against further inroads on her privacy by becoming a nun. She preferred to stay in the secular world.”
It is difficult to explain in words to modern minds how tricky a balancing act that could have been even in the best of times, not just for a Christian, but for a woman. She could have easily been categorised as an infidel agent and put to a brutal death, a fate that her contemporary, Razia Sultana, faced in India. But through her genuine and proven neutrality, impartiality, and loyalty to the land that she chose for her own, she won over an expansionist imperial court both ideologically and theologically opposed to her existence as a free agent.
Mara remained overtly christian in life, while simultaneously remaining loyal to her Sultan and liege lord. After the collapse of Byzantine power, Greek speaking subjects of Mehmed considered Mara as their protectress. Mara in turn, dedicated her life and purse not just to achieving peace between various christian powers and the Ottoman Empire, but also towards sustaining knowledge in various monasteries which would have otherwise been converted. Mara could have been relegated to history as a random Ottoman widow, as a twice-married second queen, or as a nun in some obscure monastery, or perhaps a martyr buried in records of history. Instead she chose to wield power, in the most prudent way possible, and thereby shaped the forces around her.
An emerging multipolarity and great power dominance is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to once again study Mara’s forgotten record half a millennium after her death and to relearn some realist lessons from history. She carried in her veins, as Donald Nicol poetically wrote, the bloodlines of Byzantine Cantacuzene: “Her own talents were more practical. It was in the promotion and furtherance of tolerance and good relations between Christians and Turks that Mara excelled. She put to the best possible use the favours and privileges granted to her by the enemies of her Orthodox faith.”
She is survived by several monasteries she patronized. In the town of Jezevo, a ruined tower is called the Tower of Lady Mara. A strip of Greek coastline, Kalamarija, “Mara the Good,” is apparently named in her honor.
There are worse ways for a diplomat to be remembered by posterity.
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