Sultan Yahya

Who is Sultan Yahya?

Yahya was the third son of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet III. His mother was a princess from the Byzantine Komnenós dynasty of Trebizond, a surviving branch of the Byzantine imperial family of the same name from Constantinople. When his father, Mehmet, became Sultan, he followed the Ottoman custom of executing all of his brothers. Yahya's mother was concerned that this could also eventually happen to him after the death of his father, so he was smuggled out of the empire, first to Greece, and then to present-day Bulgaria. He was then supposedly baptized at an Orthodox Christian monastery, where he lived for the next eight years of his life.