Indeed, running a big American firm or a Silicon Valley start-up is now riskier than being grand vizier in the court of the Ottoman sultan.

ECONOMIST: Firing the boss

One reason must have been the attractiveness of his promise to reverse the condition into which history had placed the Jews, a dispersed nation subordinate to both Ottoman sultan and Christian king.

ECONOMIST: Jewish mysticism

On that day the musketry and artillery of Selim the Grim, the Ottoman sultan, blasted to shreds the sword-wielding cavalry of Egypt's 250-year-old Mamluk sultanate, opening the way to 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule over all but the peripheries of the Arab world.

ECONOMIST: The history of the Arabic-speaking peoples

Erdogan Toprak, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People's Party, has said the prime minister "would like to bring the sultan back" - a reference to the old days of the Ottoman Empire before Turkey become a republic.

BBC: Is Turkey's secular system in danger?

Well, one of his ancestors was instructed by the then Sultan Abdul Hamid I in the late 18th century to fix the already ailing Ottoman empire's finances.

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne