OTTOMAN HISTORY WAS not made by men alone. The politics of reproduction played a crucial role in Ottoman history. To understand this, however, we must reassess our notions of what politics and the political are. Normally one speaks of politics as being played out in public. The private realm is excluded from consideration. But the distinction between public and private is not helpful here. If harem means “home” and that home is the home of the sultan and his family, then the private is most assuredly political, for decisions made in his home had repercussions for the entire empire.1 The women in the harem were educated and politically ambitious. Far from being a purely domestic space, the harem was a political centre filled with powerful women, reflecting the Ottomans’ Turco-Mongol heritage. Pre-Islamic Turcoman society, as depicted in folk epics—many of which are devoted to manly warriors—contains many stories of women who were also fearsome combatants, swift horse riders, and political players. The Ottoman harem was anything but the lascivious fantasyland depicted in the West. The majority of its inhabitants had no sexual relations with the sultan. It was more akin to a convent, with rigid rules of behaviour based on notions of sexual propriety, all with the aim of ensuring the continuity of the dynasty.
The politics of reproduction in the Ottoman Empire passed through different stages.2 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottoman sultans usually married Christian (especially Greek and Serbian) and Muslim (Central Asian and Turcoman) princesses. This was a means of forging political alliances or dissolving conquered dynasties. But rather than allowing the sultan to produce offspring with his wives, the dynasty preferred him to have an unlimited number of Christian and Muslim concubines for childbearing purposes. The aim was to prevent entangling alliances with formerly or potentially powerful families. By the mid-fifteenth century, sultans no longer even entered into childless marriages. For whereas married, free Muslim women had the right to children and sexual satisfaction from their husband, concubines, who were legally slaves, had no such rights. As in the Seljuk harem, the dynasty adopted a ‘one mother, one son’ policy. A concubine who had given birth to a male heir was no longer allowed to be a sexual partner of the sultan. Or, at least, if she was still intimate with the sultan, she was required to use birth control—usually intravaginal suppositories made of herbs, spices, and plant essences—and abortion to ensure no more children. Roles of royal consort and mother were distinguished. The mother of a sultan’s son and other post-sexual women, including the valide sultan (mother of the sultan), had the highest status in the harem.
From the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century, the mother and son, when he reached the age of eighteen, were sent to a princely apprenticeship in Amasya, Konya, Kütahya, or Manisa, former capitals of vanquished rival Muslim principalities and dynasties, where the prince served as governor and commander, learning the arts of war and governance under his mother’s tutelage. It was a reflection of the Mongol legacy, in which senior women commanded soldiers in war, although the prince was also assigned an administrator as tutor. The role of the Ottoman mother was not as impressive as that of her Safavid counterparts, who went to war, although not without tragedy—one of Shah Ismail I’s wives was captured by Selim I in 1514 and given as booty to one of his officers. Upon the news of the death of his father, the sultan, the prince and his mother raced to Istanbul to proclaim him as the next ruler. The son who defeated his other brothers in combat or outmanoeuvred them to be the first proclaimed as sultan rose to the top. His mother was determined to ensure this happened. Until the end of the sixteenth century, succession was accompanied by fratricide. Upon being enthroned, the new sultan killed all potential rival male claimants—brothers, nephews, cousins, and uncles—wiping out all branches of the dynasty that were not his own. Sultans were not above having unfavoured sons murdered to allow an easier succession for their favourite. The Ottomans maintained the Mongol tradition of giving all sons equal claim to sovereignty, while utilising fratricide to ensure that the ruler, once enthroned, went unchallenged. A new phase began, however, with the life of Suleiman I’s love, Hürrem Sultan.
Europeans were fascinated by the woman they knew as Roxelana, ‘the maiden from Ruthenia’ in western Ukraine, then part of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.3 A bronze statue of her stands in Rohatyn, Ukraine, allegedly her birthplace, where everyone in her family, including her priest father, was supposedly killed by Muslim slave raiders. The teenager was seized by Crimean Tatar slavers, who were given the monopoly in slave trading after Mehmed II conquered Constantinople. Their raids into Poland, Ukraine, and Russia netted millions of slaves, a huge source of tax revenue for the Ottomans. Roxelana, like the others, was subject to physical abuse, marched on foot in chains from her homeland to the Crimean peninsula, and was sent by boat to Istanbul, centre of the east Mediterranean slave trade. Many of these captives converted to Islam during the journey to Istanbul, hoping it might improve their plight.4
Arriving in Istanbul, Roxelana faced a gender-segregated world. Passing a virginity check, she was purchased at the slave market for the harem, perhaps a ‘gift’ given to Suleiman I at his enthronement in 1520. After converting her to Islam, the Ottomans knew her by her Muslim name, Hürrem. Just as the Ottomans entrusted their administration and military elite to deracinated slave boys, so, too, did they entrust their royal family to slave girls. They only trusted those they could raise themselves to be absolutely loyal to serving the dynasty and its interests.
At that time, the harem—the home of royal women, concubines, and children—was located in the Old Palace in the centre of Istanbul, which was also the school for female slaves being instructed to become Ottomans. The sultan, his administration, and male recruits educated for the bureaucracy and military lived in the New Palace, Topkapı Palace, at the tip of the peninsula. Eunuchs, considered neither male nor female, served in both palaces. Princesses were married to men of state. These were unions of elite women and men, all of whom began as humble slaves. Hürrem was sent to the Old Palace. As the slave of the sultan, she would be freed after he died if she bore him a child.
Haseki sultan (favourite concubines) like herself were given only one sexual-political role. No matter how many daughters she bore, once a concubine bore a male child to a prince or sultan she was no longer allowed sexual relations with the father. One concubine, one son. Her duty was to train the son to rule and to do everything in her power to place him on the throne. For if he did not become sultan, he would be killed and she would be retired from sexual and political life. The way to become sultan was to defeat all the other princes in battle upon the demise of their father. Once victorious, the new sultan would have all his remaining male relatives put to death.
But Suleiman I kept calling Hürrem to his bed. She kept bearing sons. Mehmed in 1521. Selim in 1524. Bayezid in 1525.5 In 1525, the Janissaries rebelled and trashed the Jewish Quarter as well as Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha’s residence, signs of their anger towards the sultan, as Suleiman I had gone against two centuries of customary practice. In their view, he spent too much time hunting and with Hürrem, rather than waging war and acquiring human and material booty.
Already in 1515 before he became sultan, Suleiman I’s previous favourite concubine, Mahidevran, had given birth to his son and presumed successor, the popular Mustafa, who was supported by the Janissaries. But Hürrem Sultan overcame that disadvantage by breaking precedent and marrying the sultan in 1534. Their union was celebrated publicly two years later in a lavish spectacle complete with marching giraffes.6 It was the first sultanic marriage in nearly a century. This meant that Suleiman I had freed her. To free her and then have sex without marrying her would have been considered adultery. In another break with precedent, Hürrem Sultan then moved from the Old Palace, residence and school for royal women slaves and their children, to the all-male Topkapı Palace, royal residence, seat of Ottoman power and government, and training ground for male slaves.
Other than the concubines who had temporarily stayed in a suite of rooms known as the Hall of Maidens to sleep with the sultan, she was the first woman to reside in Topkapı Palace. The women’s harem thereafter became a key Ottoman institution within the palace. The harem was located alongside the second and third courts, with access, to those so privileged, from either court. As it developed over the centuries, it would contain mosques, baths, pools, courtyards, gardens, a throne room, the privy chamber (private bedroom) of the sultan, and the apartments of his wives and concubines. What was new in Hürrem’s time was that royal women went from being segregated in another palace across town to residing at the literal and symbolic innermost core of Ottoman political power and exalted authority, formerly a privilege for men alone, with its own male harem of palace pages. The imperial harem, with its separate male and female halves, became the centre of the dynasty and empire. This had been the practice in the palace of the Byzantine emperor, where the gynaeceum served as the female apartments, as well as in the palace of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, a Mongol vassal.
Hürrem Sultan became one of Suleiman I’s most trusted advisors. Many, such as the Janissaries, opposed her rise. They referred to her as an evil sorceress who had bewitched the sultan. Otherwise, why would he agree to these changes that upended the social hierarchy? Why would he forsake his favoured son Mustafa and his mother, Mahidevran, governing in Manisa, when Hürrem did not accompany her sons to the provinces when they turned eighteen?
Observers were also concerned about Suleiman I’s other love, Ibrahim Pasha, whose trajectory in many ways paralleled Hürrem Sultan’s rise to power. Just as her life story puts a face to the idea of the harem, so, too, does Ibrahim Pasha’s biography allow us to see the individual journey of a male slave from obscurity to towering influence.
The pages of the school in Topkapı Palace were the beloved boys of the sultan’s court. Sultans preferred garden parties with pleasant, witty, refined conversation with their gentlemen-in-waiting—and beautiful boys—accompanied by wine, music, and recitations of poetry. Love defined the relationship between the sultan and his patronage-dependent courtiers as well; these less powerful men tried to win his favour in the way a lover tries to gain the attention of his beloved. They submitted to a capricious tyrant and gained their desires through flattery as supplicants to the dominant master. The sultan was the ultimate beloved whom everyone was trying to woo.7 At the same time, the sultan’s male servants were his slaves, recruited from his Christian subjects, captured as prisoners of war, or purchased abroad. The women of his harem were likewise his Christian-born slaves. Suleiman I is remembered for his passion for two of his slaves: for his beloved Ibrahim when the sultan was a hot-blooded youth, and for his beloved Hürrem when he was mature. He was a man dominated by his passions and his loves.
Handsome Ibrahim was the Greek slave who entered palace service and became young Prince Suleiman’s intimate friend and companion. Ibrahim Pasha is referred to as ‘the favourite’ for good reason.8 He was born a Venetian subject in Parga, opposite Corfu, on the coast of Epirus in northwest Greece. Captured as a young boy and sold into slavery to the household of a wealthy military official, Ibrahim was presented as a gift to Prince Suleiman, who was the same age. Like Hoja and his slave in The White Castle, Suleiman and Ibrahim became inseparable; they were like one person.9 When Suleiman acceded to the throne in 1520, he appointed Ibrahim chief of the sultan’s privy chamber, guaranteeing him the most intimate access to the most powerful man in the realm. It was reported that they slept together in the same bed.10
The following year, appropriating the Roman imperial past by revitalising Istanbul’s ceremonial core, the sultan built Ibrahim Pasha a sumptuous palace on the ancient Hippodrome, Istanbul’s main forum just outside the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace. The large public space became the new site of dynastic celebrations, including Ibrahim Pasha’s two-week-long marriage festival in 1524, replete with the captured tents of the foreign rulers the Ottomans had defeated in combat. He wedded a bride name Muhsine from one of the wealthiest families in the city. Her grandfather was a convert to Islam who had established the first lodge of Rûmi’s Mevlevi order of Sufis in the capital.11 Yet despite being married and residing in his own palace, Ibrahim sometimes spent the night with Suleiman I at Topkapı Palace. The sultan could sleep at Ibrahim Pasha’s lodgings as well.
Like the sultan, Ibrahim Pasha was devoted to beloved boys. A poet poked fun of his devotion with the couplet, ‘It’s not clear who is ruled and who rules these days / It’s a wedding feast, so who is dancing and who plays?’12 Although ostensibly concerning a boyfriend of Ibrahim Pasha’s, the poem implies that Suleiman I was under Ibrahim Pasha’s spell. Perhaps this was because Ibrahim Pasha even had a private room in the harem, contrary to normal practice.13 His presence muddied the architectural and hierarchical distinctions between the inner and outer sections of the palace and among the inhabitants. Ibrahim Pasha, who had had poets executed for accusing him of not being a true Muslim, eventually seemed to overshadow the sultan.
In 1523, following Suleiman I’s successful campaigns against Belgrade and Rhodes, Ibrahim Pasha was appointed grand vizier and governor general of Southeastern Europe, despite being only about thirty years old and lacking in actual military experience. Tongues wagged at this unprecedented promotion straight from palace service to the two highest offices of the state. It offended the more experienced Ahmed Pasha—who had expected the promotions but was appointed governor of Egypt instead—and made other courtiers wonder what was going on. In spring 1524, Ibrahim’s marriage was celebrated in a lavish ceremony sponsored and attended by the sultan on the Hippodrome. That autumn, Ibrahim Pasha set out for Egypt to repress the revolt of Ahmed Pasha, the one whose rightful position as grand vizier he had usurped. The campaign was successful.
Celalzade Mustafa’s law code for Egypt the next year promoted Suleiman I as military commander, lawgiver, and the shadow of God on earth. Suleiman I was depicted as the divinely appointed, saintly, prophetic ruler spreading God’s justice through conquest and promulgation of a harmonised secular canon and Islamic law with the assistance of Ibrahim Pasha, his deputy.14 In the preamble, which describes the grand vizier as the absolutist sultan’s alter ego, Ibrahim Pasha speaks in first person, referring to himself as ‘Asaf [King Solomon’s legendary vizier] in purity, Plato in wisdom, Aristotle in expertise, Galen in faithfulness’.15 Thus the grand vizier’s arrogance knew no bounds.16 Putting his trust in his cocky yet beloved boyhood friend, Suleiman I appointed Ibrahim Pasha field marshal of the 1526 Hungary campaign, the 1529 campaign to Vienna, and, three years later, the war against the Safavids. After wintering at Aleppo, Ibrahim Pasha occupied Tabriz in August 1534, where the sultan joined him. Together they took Baghdad in December. The sultan and the grand vizier arrived back at Istanbul in 1536, and during the next month Ibrahim led negotiations with the French ambassador about the capitulations, granting French merchants trading privileges.
Despite, or perhaps because of, all his successes on military and diplomatic fronts, Ibrahim Pasha was suddenly executed on Suleiman I’s orders during the Ides of March in 1536. After no hint that he was no longer the sultan’s favourite, Ibrahim was strangled in his sleep in his bedroom in the harem of Topkapı Palace after having earlier broken the Ramadan fast with Suleiman I. The man who had been the sultan’s ‘breath and heart’ was buried in an obscure grave.17
The sultan could promote his inexperienced converted male favourite whom he passionately loved to the highest office in government, bestow upon him an extraordinary income and a magnificent palace to go with it, and even pay for his wedding. He could also murder this slave arbitrarily and without trial to show who was master. Ibrahim Pasha’s ruin coincided with the rise of Suleiman I’s other love, Hürrem, during his mature years.
But rather than castigating the sultan’s Rasputin-like advisor, Haydar, a geomancer whose yearly predictions the sultan kept close in his private bedroom, or Suleiman I himself, most blamed Hürrem Sultan for Ibrahim Pasha’s astonishing fall.18 It is possible that she had a role in it, jealous of Suleiman I’s affections for his childhood friend and former chief falconer about whom much gossip was spread. Why, they asked, was Ibrahim Pasha allowed to sleep in Topkapı Palace, despite being a grown man? The sultan was supposed to be the only adult male resident aside from the palace pages. Their relations were considered too intimate for two grown men. Before Ibrahim’s murder, Ferhad Pasha—Suleiman I’s sister Beyhan’s husband—had called him Suleiman I’s ‘whore’.19 They seem to have violated the convention that powerful men could desire only beardless youths, not other powerful men. Hürrem was worried that Suleiman I loved Ibrahim Pasha more than her. He appeared to have not one, but two favourites.
Suleiman I was devastated when his eldest son by Hürrem, Mehmed, died of plague aged twenty-two in 1543. He cried for hours, refusing to part from the coffin, not allowing it to be buried. This grave loss was part of the reason he turned pious. Suleiman I’s decision to execute his eldest son by Mahidevran, Mustafa, a decade later is therefore surprising. Had he forgotten how painful it was to bury his own children? Ottoman historians blamed Hürrem for being so influential in the sultan’s life that she convinced him that thirty-eight-year-old Mustafa was plotting with the Janissaries to murder Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha (Hürrem’s son-in-law through his marriage to her daughter, Mihrimah) and depose Suleiman I in favour of the popular and capable Mustafa. Suleiman I called Mustafa to his tent outside Konya and had him strangled in 1553; his corpse was then thrown outside. Mustafa’s only son was also strangled. Suleiman I feared a repeat of what had happened to his grandfather: Selim I had forced Bayezid II to abdicate in Istanbul, was enthroned in his place, and was suspected of having his father poisoned as he journeyed to his retirement. Suleiman I never recovered from his decision to have Mustafa killed. He became religious, reserved, and melancholy.
People were outraged and blamed Hürrem (and Rüstem Pasha, who had forged a treasonous correspondence between Mustafa and the Safavid shah Tahmasp). Rüstem Pasha was dismissed from his post as grand vizier after nearly a decade in office. Some brave voices, however, blamed the sultan. The poet Nisayi of the imperial harem—a woman in the retinue of Mustafa’s mother, Mahidevran—wrote a scathing poem castigating the sultan for being tyrannical, unjust, and lacking compassion: ‘You allowed the words of a Russian witch into your ears / Deluded by tricks and deceit, you did the bidding of that spiteful hag / You slaughtered that swaying cypress, fruit of life’s orchard / What has the merciless Monarch of the World done to Sultan Mustafa?’20 Her poem averred that the people held the sultan in contempt and cursed the sheikhulislam who approved the execution. But despite his execution of his favourite vizier (Ibrahim Pasha), his execution of his favourite son (Mustafa), the killing of another son (the thirty-six-year-old Bayezid was assassinated in Safavid Iran, where he had fled after defeat on the battlefield against his brother Selim in 1559), and the execution of a number of grandsons (the sons of Mustafa and Bayezid) and three brothers-in-law, Suleiman I continued to enjoy a glowing reputation among his people and still today among modern historians. His faults were placed at the foot of Hürrem. Hürrem was helped again when Rüstem Pasha’s replacement in 1553, Kara Ahmed Pasha, husband of Suleiman I’s sister Fatma, was executed in 1555 on trumped-up charges, and Rüstem Pasha called back to the grand vizierate.
Suleiman I died of unknown causes aged sixty-five while waging a campaign in Hungary on the night of 6–7 September 1566. In order not to allow a break in dynastic continuity as manifested in the physical presence of the sultan, the Ottomans did not hold public funerary prayers for a deceased sultan until a new one had been enthroned. The problem was that Suleiman I’s only surviving son, Selim, was far away in Kütahya, in northwest Anatolia. Urgent dispatches were secretly conveyed to him to rush to Istanbul. In the meantime, the Ottoman leaders had to do something to preserve the corpse. Suleiman I’s body was ritually washed according to Muslim custom. The corpse was heavily perfumed with musk and ambergris, wrapped in waxed bandages, and temporarily buried beneath his tent before the walls of Szigetvár.21 The fortress soon surrendered to the Ottomans. Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who had succeeded Rüstem Pasha after his death in 1561, had to pretend the sultan was still alive so that false claimants to the throne would not arise and the Janissaries would not rebel in Hungary or in Istanbul. To continue the subterfuge, he administered the empire on behalf of the deceased sultan, whose death he kept secret. He pretended to consult him orally and in writing, composing responses in the sultan’s handwriting.22
Three weeks later, forty-two-year-old Selim mounted the throne at the Gate of Felicity in Topkapı Palace and became Sultan Selim II (reigned 1566–1574). His reign began on a sublime, religious note. At his accession, the viziers and leaders of the Muslim religious class gave their oath of allegiance to him as caliph, the leader of all Sunni Muslims. As his father, Suleiman I, had adopted the caliphal title midway through his reign, Selim II was the first sultan to receive such a loyalty pledge at his enthronement.23 From that moment, Ottoman sultans were sultan-caliphs. He was also the first to take a pilgrimage to the tomb of Muhammad’s companion Ayyub al-Ansari in Eyüp on the Golden Horn as part of his accession rituals.24 The waterborne procession to the holy tomb and great military procession afterward displayed the new dynastic leader to the public. Selim II then continued his journey towards Hungary—as his father’s corpse travelled towards Istanbul.
Six weeks after his death, Suleiman I’s corpse was disinterred for the journey to Istanbul. According to an Ottoman chronicler, one of the palace pages who had accompanied the sultan to Hungary, the secret of the sultan’s passing was still kept from his troops. A stand-in ‘white-faced, hawk-nosed’ Bosnian palace page ‘with a sparse beard and a bandaged neck, and an appearance of ill-health’ sat in the sultan’s carriage and waved to the soldiers on their return march.25 It was only in Belgrade, forty-eight days after Suleiman I’s death, that public funeral prayers for the sultan were recited and Selim II received the oath of allegiance from the army commanders as the new head of the dynasty.
At last, the procession of Suleiman I’s coffin, topped by a giant turban and followed by the deceased’s riderless horses, reached the cemetery behind his mosque in Istanbul. As a tent was erected above, he was buried in the earth. Once he was interred, the tent was replaced by a domed, octagonal mausoleum illuminated by stained-glass windows framed in arches of red and white stone resting on pillars. Its walls are lined in exquisite panels of emerald-green and turquoise İznik tile and alternating bands of red and green marble. Although it is a palatial monument for an earthly king, the tomb’s Qur’anic verses remind humans to be humble, for it is God’s throne that encompasses the heavens and earth. Eight years had passed since Suleiman I’s wife Hürrem had been laid to rest in her adjacent, smaller tomb.
Hürrem’s son, Selim II, was generally disinterested in ruling and empowered his grand vizier, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, to make most decisions. Selim II is credited with the conquest of Cyprus in 1571 and of Tunis in 1574. But he was a corpulent glutton who could barely saddle a horse, an important sign of a sultan’s power and majesty. Foreigners and Ottomans observed that he was devoted to wine, women, and boys and neglected to attend mosque in favour of poetry gatherings.26 That the polyamorous and beautiful widowed poet Hubbi Hatun was a royal confidant attracted additional opprobrium.27 Selim II tried to improve his image by having the master architect Sinan construct the finest of all Ottoman mosques, the Selimiye in Edirne (1575). He vowed to give up drinking and partying.28 But at age fifty, he died after a fall in the bath. Ottoman writers lamented that had the capable Mustafa been allowed to rule, the empire would have continued its grand adventure in capable hands.
Ottoman royal women played important roles in the political life of their empire, but they were less significant than Byzantine empresses, Mongol khatuns, and Christian European queens. Much of Ottoman court ceremony and life reflected earlier practices. Byzantine women had been influential and even exercised power at court for over a thousand years, sometimes ruling as empress. The empress was not necessarily the wife of the emperor, but could be his sister, mother, or daughter. Because of the Christian emphasis on monogamy, imperial widows often refused to remarry and retained their position at court. The structure of the Byzantine court—like that at the future Topkapı Palace—was one reason for their influence.29 The empress had her own quarters, staffed by her own eunuchs, who held posts parallel to the emperor’s staff. She and her courtiers arranged royal marriages, burials, and enthronements, organising the female part of court ceremony. She gave birth to the heirs of the empire in the purple chamber in her quarters. Being ‘born in the purple’ was used for seven centuries to guarantee and legitimate imperial authority.30 Another reason for the empress’s influence was that Byzantine royal women were financially independent. Unlike in Islam, Byzantine law ensured that daughters inherited equally as sons. They had an income and owned and managed properties.31 They became great patrons of the arts and of monumental buildings, such as churches and monasteries.
Both Ottoman and Byzantine princesses were wed for the purpose of political alliance. In the early centuries, the Ottomans married foreign princesses who almost never bore children, because that role was for slave concubines whose loyalty to the dynasty would not be doubted. In contrast, the Byzantines sent their princesses to marry foreign rulers. The aim was to build alliances and serve as ambassadors for the dynasty.32 Such women maintained their own retinue, including priests, and spread Orthodox Christianity in other lands. Byzantine emperor Michael VIII’s (reigned 1261–1282) daughter Maria was sent to Persia to marry the Mongol Ilkhanid ruler. In Persia she promoted Christianity, including the building of a church.33 When her husband died, she returned to Constantinople, where an ancient church was renamed Saint Mary of the Mongols in her honour. Today it is the only still-functioning Byzantine church in Istanbul, where she became patron of the Chora Monastery. Ottoman princesses, however, did not marry Christian rulers as part of marriage alliances meant to serve diplomacy and improve or maintain foreign relations. They were wed for the purpose of alliance in the early centuries to Muslim rivals.34 In later centuries, Ottoman women from the palace, themselves slaves from foreign lands, wed administrators who came from the Collection, the viziers.
Ottoman women never ruled the empire as empresses as Byzantine women had. Nor were they khatuns equal to khans, as in the Mongol Empire. They never served on the battlefield as their Turco-Mongol predecessors had. Genghis Khan was successful thanks to his mother’s role as a warrior in battle. Sorkoktani Beki—the mother of the fourth Mongol khan Möngke, the fifth khan Kubilai, and Khan Hülegü, founder of the Ilkhanids—also trained her children.35 An Arab traveller in Central Asia noted how ‘remarkable was the respect shown to women by the Turks, for they hold a more dignified position than the men’.36 When the Mongol Golden Horde khan issued a decree, he reported, it said, ‘By command of the Sultan and the Khatuns’. In Ottoman İznik, the traveller was welcomed not by the sultan but by Orhan’s wife, a woman who also commanded the soldiers in the newly conquered yet deserted city.37
Compared with these predecessors, Ottoman women had less power after the conquest of Constantinople. Although they had an important role, it should nevertheless not be exaggerated to counter Western images of the harem as orgy rooms for lascivious Oriental tyrants. Women played an important part in reproducing the dynasty, in politics in the palace, and in spreading the good and pious name of the Ottoman dynasty. Beginning with Hürrem Sultan in the sixteenth century, royal women sponsored mosques in Istanbul. Although the chief harem eunuch served as overseer of royal foundations, some royal women provided funds for monumental public works across the empire. Hürrem Sultan endowed mosques, madrasas, public baths, soup kitchens, hospitals, primary schools, bakeries, public toilets, inns, and pilgrim hostels in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem (just as Helena, mother of Byzantine emperor Constantine, had sponsored public works in that city), as well as Edirne and Istanbul. The neighbourhood in Istanbul where Hürrem Sultan’s mosque foundation was located is still named Haseki—the favourite—after her.
Suleiman I’s only surviving daughter and close confidant, Mihrimah, who was never considered eligible to rule because she was a woman, sponsored two mosques in Istanbul. The first appeared in the 1540s in the east, on the Asian side, in the heart of Üsküdar. The second was built in the 1560s in the far west at Edirne Gate, where the conquering Mehmed II had entered the city in 1453. From the latter’s minaret, one can get the best views over the red-tiled roofs of the old city surrounded by seas of aquamarine, as the Renaissance tower sways disturbingly in the breeze.
Royal women sponsored lavish public ceremonies. The fifty-day circumcision festival of Prince Mehmed (the future Mehmed III) in summer 1582 on the Hippodrome was perhaps the largest public spectacle the dynasty ever produced. The people of Istanbul were feted with dancing boys—‘of lovely countenance and smelling of musk; a tall cypress and moon face, sweet tongued and slender waisted’—bears, fireworks, and feasts.38 Each parading group of bearded tradesmen masters included a troupe of their boy beloveds, their apprentices. The eroticism of the youth and the bonds between men and boys were openly displayed. Unlike their Byzantine or Mongol predecessors, Ottoman royal women remained invisible. They watched the spectacles from behind screens or latticed windows. Crowds were instructed to look away when their royal carriages passed, although their doors and windows were screened.
Leading Ottoman ladies were diplomats, exchanging letters and gifts with foreign rulers and their representatives in Istanbul. By the sixteenth century, they never did so in person. This was a far cry from Turco-Mongol practice, where a khan sent his mother as emissary to foreign courts. Mehmed II received White Sheep sultan Hasan the Tall’s mother, Sara Khatun, to negotiate peace on her son’s behalf. Cem, son of Mehmed II, sent an aunt to his brother Bayezid to negotiate the division of the empire between them. In the sixteenth century, Ottoman royal women corresponded by pen. When foreign queens and regents sought to curry favour with the Ottomans, they did so through the sultanas. Hürrem Sultan corresponded with Sultanim, sister of Shah Tahmasp—who gave Persian carpets to cover the floor of Suleiman I’s mosque—as well as with male and female members of the Polish royal family. Nurbanu Sultan, who was valide sultan (mother of the sultan) from 1574 to 1583, was the daughter of a Venetian family. She corresponded with the Venetians and with Catherine de’ Medici (mother of three successive kings in France) and appears to have hindered an Ottoman invasion of Venetian Crete. Safiye Sultan (valide sultan 1595–1603) exchanged letters and gifts with England’s Elizabeth I, who sent her a jewelled portrait of herself. These women promoted good international relations.
As the significance of palace women grew in the sixteenth century, so, too, did that of their ladies-in-waiting. Both caused resentment. By the end of the sixteenth century, contemporaries mistook the rise in importance of palace women for corruption of power. Tensions over the increased power of royal women—especially that of the valide sultan—led to the creation of scapegoats. The ‘Jewish dame’—Jewish ladies-in-waiting in service to various sultanas—became the sign of a world turned upside down. It mattered that the lady-in-waiting was both a woman and Jewish.
Jewish women served as ladies-in-waiting to the harem throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the early sixteenth century, Strongilah, a Karaite Jew—a member of the Jewish sect that accepts only the Torah, but not the Talmud (the corpus of Jewish law), as binding—served Hafsa Sultan, Suleiman I’s mother. Strongilah converted to Islam at the end of her life, during Suleiman I’s reign, becoming Fatma. Around the time of her death, the Spanish Jewish lady-in-waiting Esther Handali began to serve the harem. She served Nurbanu Sultan, the favourite of Selim II and later the valide sultan of Murad III, from 1566 to 1595. Esther was followed by several others, including an Italian Jew, Esperanza Malki, who served Safiye Sultan, the favourite of Murad III and mother of Mehmed III (reigned 1595–1603).
Having gained the confidence of the various sultanas, these Jewish women functioned as mediators between the harem and the outside world. They exchanged gems, jewellery, and other valuables with foreign leaders and their representatives as part of diplomatic relations, becoming very wealthy and influential. They passed information about the dynasty to foreign ambassadors in exchange for valuable silks for the sultana. A letter sent from Safiye Sultan to the English queen Elizabeth I in 1599 mentioned how she had entrusted the lady-in-waiting to give the British ambassador a crown of rubies and diamonds for the queen. The lady-in-waiting also relayed important political messages from the valide sultan.39
Later that same year the lady-in-waiting Esperanza Malki wrote a personal letter in Italian to Queen Elizabeth I. Malki declared that Elizabeth’s ‘power and greatness’ attracted even those who were not English to wish to serve her, including the Jewish lady-in-waiting.40 After mentioning the gifts the valide sultan had sent the queen, including the crown of gems, she confided that beautiful and flattering silk and wool cloths were more dear to the valide sultan than jewels.41 Noting that the ruler of England was a woman like her, she was not embarrassed to request that the queen send a gift of rare distilled waters for the face and perfumed oils for the hands, which she would personally deliver to the valide sultan. Being articles for ladies, she did not wish them to pass through men’s hands.
Elizabeth I must have been surprised to be addressed by a Jew with such confidence and intimacy. Her kingdom had banished the People of the Book in 1290. That the Ottomans not only tolerated their existence in their kingdom but employed them in the palace and as go-betweens with foreign ambassadors and rulers must have been a surprising discovery. The English had established relations with the Ottomans only a decade earlier. Elizabeth I’s private physician was a Portuguese converso, Roderigo Lopez, but he was legally a Christian. Old prejudices remained: he was drawn and quartered for allegedly plotting to poison Elizabeth I on behalf of the Spanish in 1594.42 Like Lopez, Malki would suffer a grim fate.
On a Friday at the end of March 1600, when Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha returned from campaign, thousands of outraged cavalry troops stormed his palace in Istanbul demanding lucrative tax allocations. They claimed they were owed them in place of the less profitable ones they regularly received.43 They asked whether they had been distributed to the women and eunuchs in the palace, complaining that the coins with which they had been paid were worthless.44 They rushed to Sheikhulislam Sunullah Efendi, demanding to know whether the food they had purchased with the worthless silver coins given to them as their salary was halal, ritually approved. He responded that it was not. ‘The Jewish hag lady-in-waiting farms the customs revenue’, they replied. ‘She is the one who gives us these counterfeit coins—they belong to her! We will kill her’, the cavalrymen declared, requesting a fatwa approving her execution. The sheikhulislam responded that Islamic law did not permit her killing. At worst she could be expelled from the city.45 He told them to record their wishes in a petition that he would pass on to the sultan, who would then issue an imperial decree. This response only emboldened the cavalry troops in their rebelliousness.
The next morning at the crack of dawn, a great mob went to the gate of Deputy Grand Vizier Halil Pasha’s palace, demanding the ‘lady-in-waiting hag’. When she was found in her home in the Jewish Quarter and brought out, they mounted her on a packhorse and brought her to the gate of the pasha’s palace. No sooner had she dismounted than the impatient cavalrymen drew their daggers and ‘cut her to pieces’ according to an Ottoman chronicler. They tied a rope to one of her feet and dragged the ‘carcass’ to the Hippodrome. They ‘cut off the accursed one’s hand, which was the appendage of bribery, and cut out her vulva, nailing them to the doors of those conceited ones who obtained their posts by means of that accursed woman’.46
The English traveller John Sanderson confirmed the grisly details. He added that dogs devoured all save her ‘bones, sinews of her legs, and soles of her feet’. Sultan Mehmed III watched the lynching. The cavalrymen paraded her head on a pike through the city. They also carried ‘her shameful part; also many small pieces of her flesh, which the Turks, Janissaries, and others carried about tied in little packets, showing to the Jews and others, and in derision said: “Behold the whore’s flesh”’. He saw a slice of her passing by his home in Galata.47
The next day, the mob again went to the gate of the pasha’s palace, demanding that her children and other relatives be brought forth immediately, lest they start a bigger riot.48 When her older son was brought out, they hacked him limb from limb with their daggers, ‘showing no mercy’. They dragged the ‘carcass’ to the Hippodrome, placing it next to what remained of his mother’s ‘carcass’.49 There, they accepted her younger son’s conversion to Islam, sparing his life, on condition that he promised to pay the treasury the revenues held by his mother as tax farms. What remained of the lady-in-waiting and her son’s bodies was cremated because ‘the disgusting carcasses of the accursed ones were prey to the dogs for many days on the Hippodrome, creating an abominable stench, which annoyed Muslims’.50 Islam and Judaism generally view cremation as an abomination.
The treatment of the lady-in-waiting and her son was shocking to Muslims and Jews alike. Recoiling from the ‘shameful’ way the lady-in-waiting had been killed, a horrified Safiye Sultan declared to her son, Mehmed III, ‘If her execution was necessary, did it have to be carried out like this? She could have been [sewn into a sack and] thrown into the sea. The execution in such a way of a woman so closely connected to the harem is damaging to the integrity’ of the empire.51
The mob had mutilated her corpse and that of her son to make a point: those who violated the gendered religious hierarchy of society would be publicly humiliated. Confirming that the rise to power and influence of a Jewish woman had upset the social order, immediately following these events the sultan issued a decree imposing clothing and employment restrictions on Jews.52 Jews were no longer allowed to wear fine garments and had to wear a red cap. They were no longer permitted to be tax farmers. Such measures were a way of ensuring that Jews were barred from becoming rich and lording it over Muslims. Dressed in a coloured cap and clothes befitting their lower station, they would ever be identifiable as Jews. The tensions created by the development of the harem institution, which had inverted both gender and religious hierarchies, had ended in a rebellion against the lady-in-waiting, resolvable only by the hierarchies’ restoration and her demise.
Jews served as ladies-in-waiting, physicians, advisors, bankers, spies, and diplomats during the Ottoman Jewish ‘golden age’ from the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 to a generation beyond the death of Sultan Suleiman I in 1566. Both Jewish men and women were entrusted with intimate advisory roles and sensitive diplomatic missions. This demonstrated the level of trust sultans, the various sultanas, and members of the elite placed in them. But this is not what the Ottoman chroniclers remembered. Jewish usefulness and loyalty went unmentioned in their chronicles. Their preferred figure was that of the untrustworthy Jew, and they expressed relief when Jews in prominent positions were replaced by Muslims. Moses Hamon’s rise to prominence as privy physician to Suleiman I was criticised. Upon Hamon’s death an author celebrated how ‘the Sultan’s court was purified of the filth of his existence’.53 He was depicted as a source of danger because he transgressed the social order.
Rather than focusing on the positive roles of the Jewish physician Moses Hamon or the philanthropist Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, Ottoman history writers’ attention was drawn to figures who betrayed the dynasty’s trust. Ottoman descriptions of the rise and fall of the ‘Jewish dame’—Malki, the Jewish figure most often mentioned in Ottoman histories from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries—reflected their displeasure and discomfort that Jews and women were ever given such distinguished roles in the first place. They preferred men to women and Muslims to Jews in positions of power.
Along with women, including ladies-in-waiting, another important group that rose to influence in the palace and in Ottoman politics by the end of the sixteenth century were the castrated male eunuchs. Especially significant were the harem eunuchs, members of the sultan’s household responsible for guarding the women and children of the royal family. Like their Byzantine and Seljuk predecessors, Ottoman rulers had utilised slaves and eunuchs in their entourage from the beginning. Establishing a dervish lodge in 1324, Orhan awarded stewardship of the endowment to a freed slave and eunuch. In Topkapı Palace, the chief harem eunuch was responsible for the education of young Ottoman princes and the women of the harem, and played a role in making and unmaking grand viziers, a role usually filled by the sultan’s son-in-law.
Eunuchs became especially noticeable in Ottoman politics after the conquest of Constantinople. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans employed one thousand eunuchs in Topkapı Palace, divided into two groups.54 Men who originated in Central Europe, especially Hungary, or the Caucasus, especially Georgia and Circassia, guarded the threshold in front of the sultan’s audience chamber, located between the second and third courts of the palace. This group resided with the palace pages in the palace school in the third court. They were responsible for guarding the men of the palace, including the sultan. Men of East African, especially Ethiopian and Sudanese, origin guarded the women of the palace and the harem, and resided within it. Nowhere else was there such a concentration of Afro-Ottomans, and their presence attracted the horror and fascination of European Christian observers.
Despite the lack of such terms in Ottoman Turkish, the head eunuchs of both groups are referred to by Westerners as the ‘chief black eunuch’ and ‘chief white eunuch’. Their official titles were agha (lord) of the Abode of Felicity (the harem) and agha of the Gate of Felicity (the third palace gate), respectively. We have no explanation for why the dynasty chose men of African origin to guard the royal family while deploying men of Caucasian origin to guard the palace recruits and sultan. The Ottoman conquest of Egypt gave the dynasty further access to the African slave trade and to Mamluk Egyptian precedent. Mamluk Egypt, a dynasty ruled entirely by Turkic or Circassian slaves, assigned eunuchs to guard Muhammad’s tomb and mosque in Medina and gave them control of administering endowments in Mecca and Medina. The Ottomans continued these traditions.
Other aspects of the eunuchs of the palace drew the attention of Ottomans and foreigners alike. Like the youth recruited for the Collection, the eunuchs were acquired as slaves of Christian origin, whether from East Africa, Central Europe, or the Caucasus. Their enslavement again raises the question of the legality of the act. They were often recruited from regions ruled by the Ottomans, which should have exempted these Orthodox Ethiopian, Coptic, Catholic, Apostolic Armenian, or Orthodox Christians from enslavement.
Castration also violated Islamic law as understood and practised in that period. To circumvent this, the Ottomans usually had Christian physicians carry out the operation, whether Armenians in the Caucasus or Copts in Sudan. But castrations were also carried out in Topkapı Palace, where in that period there were no Christian physicians.55 African eunuchs typically lost both their testicles and penis, whereas Caucasian or Central European eunuchs had only the testicles removed. We do not know the reasons for these different procedures. It appears that the Ottomans followed Mamluk precedent for the castration of African eunuchs and Byzantine practice for European eunuchs. Removal of the penis would prevent the African eunuchs from having sexual relations with the women and children they were entrusted to guard. Enemies of the African-origin eunuchs at the Ottoman court criticised their alleged practice of saving their private parts to be buried with them when they died.56
The castration process had profound physical repercussions for these men. The smell of urine accompanied them, which may be the reason why they had their own mosque at Topkapı Palace.57 They carried quills in their turbans to be used as catheters, which, along with incontinence, may have been the source of their smell and unhygienic reputation. Castrated prior to puberty, their bones did not develop properly. They often suffered from osteoporosis, causing them to stoop and have skeletal deformities, including very long arms and legs. Hormonal imbalance conspired to make them unusually thin or very fat. With fingers reaching nearly to their knees, skin that wrinkled beginning at a young age, unusually large faces that remained beardless, very high-pitched voices, and lives that stretched into their eighties and nineties, eunuchs were an unmistakable feature of the palace.
No matter his strange appearance and other defining characteristics, the chief harem eunuch became an indispensable power holder in the palace and beyond. He served like a Western European lady-in-waiting, as the mediator between the royal women—the concubines and valide sultan—and the rest of the administration. The chief harem eunuch became the sultan’s main companion beginning with the reign of Murad III, the first sultan to leave the privy chamber (his private bedroom) and the young men in the third court to live in the harem, where he built a lavish bedchamber. His royal bed was guarded by elderly women, rather than young palace pages. Murad III also transferred the supervision of all lucrative foundations of Mecca and Medina from the agha of the Gate of Felicity, who supervised the palace pages, to the chief harem eunuch.58 As chief treasurer of the harem and then administrator of the endowments in Arabia, as well as his own investments in Yemeni coffee, Murad III’s chief harem eunuch controlled great wealth. As patron of libraries, mosques, and colleges, he was an empire-wide benefactor of Sunni Islam. As chief tomb eunuch at the Prophet’s tomb in Medina, he sealed his reputation as a wealthy, powerful, Sunni Muslim Ottoman dignitary controlling the revenues from the two holy shrines and serving as the palace’s trusted set of eyes and ears.
Despite bearing names such as Hyacinth and Sweet Basil, these dignified men—permitted to ride white horses during their lives and buried in the cemetery at Eyüp, the holiest Muslim shrine in Istanbul—were referred to on their tombstones as virtuous, noble, pious, generous, and learned men whose destiny was paradise. Their lives illustrate how far a person of humble African or Christian origins could rise in the Ottoman order of things.59
Their names also provide another insight into Ottoman culture. Significantly, the name Hyacinth was a moniker for the hair of the beloved. For along with eunuchs, another unmistakable presence in Ottoman society from the beginning was that of the boy beloved. The fact that mature men had boy lovers means that the Ottomans were quintessentially European. Exploring this theme as it relates to boy beloveds remains integral to showing that the Ottomans participated in European history, which requires us to rewrite and broaden our understanding of what being European means—expanding it to include being both Roman and Muslim.