looking for info on Ottoman Prince Yahya

This guy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Yahya. Yahya, born 1585, was the son of Ottoman Sultan Murad III and was baptized by his mother into Orthodox Christianity at an early age. He spent most of his life trying and failing to get support to claim the Ottoman throne before dying in 1649. This is basically the summery of the Wikipedia article, which leaves much to be desired. That's why I'm posting this here: I'm hoping that someone has more information on this Prince.

His mother was supposedly Princess Elena of the Komnenos dynasty, which is itself baffling, as that dynasty was supposed to be extinct by the time of his birth. So is there any evidence of a Komnenos branch alive in the Ottoman Empire at the time? And what about his children? He supposedly married an Albanian-Italian Princess and had three children. Is there any proof to this and if so did his children leave descendants? Do we know what happened to them or not? Finally, if Yahya was an imposter, why was he never denounced by the Sultan in Istanbul and how did he gain support from successive Popes, the Cossacks and a Tatar Khan? Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
The Ukrainian wiki states that he was an imposter period. Though his mother really was a Greek noble, Komnenos name was just a BS claim.
As for gaining support, the Ottoman Empire was on decline back then, and the pretender was a really popular one.
 
It's unlikely that his mother was descended from the Komnenoi of Trebizond, but not completely impossible. When Mehmed II exterminated this dynasty in 1463, one son is believed to have survived, and eventually escaped to Georgia, where he married the daughter of a Georgian lord and had children. The lordship in question - Guria - later fell into the Ottoman sphere.

There's this work on Jachia, which is a fair bit longer and more detailed than the Wikipedia article; but it's still not easy to separate fact from fiction.

Apparently, Jachia really did marry an Albanian woman (whether she was actually from Skanderbeg's family or not - hard to say. The whole "Duke of Drisht" business sounds strange). And he really did have children - two children, anyway, Maurice and Elena. The third one is a mystery or a mistake, not mentioned in Jachia's testament or surviving letters.

If Jachia was an imposter, he was a reasonably convincing one - for example, he could make a reasonable imitation of an Ottoman imperial monogram. So it's not surprising that he managed to establish links with pious Western rulers, and Serbian and Albanian rebels in the Ottoman realm. No idea why a Crimean Khan would support him, though.

I assume the Sultan did not officially denounce him because, from the point of view of Ottoman state ideology and power structures - the idea of a Christian Sultan was already so bizarre and alien that it didn't require any special denouncement.
 
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It's unlikely that his mother was descended from the Komnenoi of Trebizond, but not completely impossible. When Mehmed II exterminated this dynasty in 1463, one son is believed to have survived, and eventually escaped to Georgia, where he married the daughter of a Georgian lord and had children. The lordship in question - Guria - later fell into the Ottoman sphere.

There's this work on Jachia, which is a fair bit longer and more detailed than the Wikipedia article; but it's still not easy to separate fact from fiction.

Apparently, Jachia really did marry an Albanian woman (whether she was actually from Skanderbeg's family or not - hard to say. The whole "Duke of Drisht" business sounds strange). And he really did have children - two children, anyway, Maurice and Elena. The third one is a mystery or a mistake, not mentioned in Jachia's testament or surviving letters.

If Jachia was an imposter, he was a reasonably convincing one - for example, he could make a reasonable imitation of an Ottoman imperial monogram. So it's not surprising that he managed to establish links with pious Western rulers, and Serbian and Albanian rebels in the Ottoman realm. No idea why a Crimean Khan would support him, though.

I assume the Sultan did not officially denounce him because, from the point of view of Ottoman state ideology and power structures - the idea of a Christian Sultan was already so bizarre and alien that it didn't require any special denouncement.

Weren't the house of Giray next in line for the Ottoman throne if the actual house of Osman went extinct? That could explain why the Crimeans were interested in him - I think...
 
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