Court ceremonial compliance decided whether Ottoman Sultans received foreign princes

Evidence

The Mughal prince seems to have made a bad impression at the Turkish court. Naima describes him as boastful, arrogant, and discourteous. Full of pride at his own royal descent he failed to comply with the ceremonial of the Ottoman court and was even so tactless as to brag of his ancestor Timur—not very wise on the part of a Timurid guest of an Ottoman Sultan. When he was given a sum of money for his expenses he distributed it, as soon as he came out of the audience, among the porters and guards. As a result of these acts of discourtesy the Sultan ceased to rise from his seat when the prince called on him, and eventually stopped receiving him altogether. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 604

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the Islam-West representation cluster: the Mughal prince’s failure to read Ottoman court protocol is an early instance of intra-Islamic ceremonial misunderstanding that parallels how outsiders misread Islamicate courts.