Grand Vizier

The Grand Vizier (sadrazam) was the second most powerful figure in the Ottoman Empire after the sultan. After the Mehmed II’s institution of the kanunname, the Ottoman sultans retreated into royal isolation, rarely holding public court. The grand vizier became the chief administrator of official ceremonies and the sultan’s primary representative in them. Most grand viziers were married into the imperial family to consolidate power and lived outside Topkapi Palace. For example, the notable sixteenth-century Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha had a palace on the ancient Hippodrome, which today serves as the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. In this oil painting, we see the early eighteenth-century grand vizier hosting a lively banquet in the domed Imperial Council Hall of Topkapi. Vanmour’s careful incorporation of the curtained lattice window just above the grand vizier sitting at the center, behind which the sultan observes the event, testifies to the painter’s understanding of the invisible yet highly structured hierarchy of power in the Ottoman court.