PK, Caution: gory historical stuff. When the Ottomans fought the Byzantine empire, they ceremonially drank wine out of the loser's skull. And when Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans, he put the Sultan in a cage and hauled him around his former empire. To be fair, one reason he did it was because the Sultan Beyazet (sp) said he was going to put Tamerlane in a cage after he won the big battle. And the Sultana was forced to serve all of Tamerlane's guests at the table while she was totally nude. Not even a hairnet. Oh, the hygeine. <G> And that is the reason why, from that time forward, there was never a Sultana. The Sultan just had concubines who provided children.
Earlier, when the same Sultan defeated a combined Hungarian and French army, he chopped off the heads of 5000 French knights, but did not consider Western Europeans worthy of the wine from the skull bit. The Hungarians ran away, so we'll never know what he would have done to them.
We have actually improved in our attitudes about such things since those days. |
