The Prophet's mantle and relics passed from dynasty to dynasty as proof of title, and the Ottomans shipped them from Cairo to Istanbul in 1517

Possession of the Prophet's belongings became a sign of the right to rule. TDV records that the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya paid 20,000 dirhams for the Prophet's mantle. When the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, was killed in 750, a servant bought his own life by showing the Abbasid commander where the relics were hidden, and they went to the first Abbasid caliph. Abbasid survivors of the Mongol sack of Baghdad took them to Cairo, where a line of Abbasid caliphs lived under the Mamluks. Evliya Çelebi says that before the 1517 battle the Mamluks kept them at Alexandria, packed to be shipped west if the Ottomans won: a banner, a tooth, hairs of the beard, mantles, a sword, wrapped in bundles marked "these are the bequest of the Messenger of God". Selim I sealed them himself and sent them by ship to Istanbul. The Sharif of Mecca sent Selim the keys of the Kaaba. The last Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, was taken to Constantinople. The story that he handed the caliphate to Selim does not appear in writing until the 1780s, when the Ottomans began to stress their caliphal claim. When Ottoman troops withdrew from the Hijaz after the First World War, Fahreddin Pasha, defender of Medina, sent its relics to Istanbul so they would not fall to the British. Topkapı's Sacred Relics department holds 605 objects.