THE HAREM INSTITUTION may have distinguished Ottoman society from Christian Europe, albeit not as it was imagined as a playground for a lustful sultan. Although the Byzantines had also employed eunuchs in the palace, the fact that the harem was guarded by castrated males from Africa caused the European imagination to run wild. Yet in important ways, sexuality in the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Renaissance Europe was comparable. A shared culture of man-boy love, which drew on ancient Greek and Roman precedent, encompassed Europe in London, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Istanbul. Homosexual desire was seen as the domain not of a numerical minority but of all men, a building block of culture, especially in the military and schools.1 And it went all the way to the top of society. Mehmed II described in a poem the young male Christian object of his sexual desire:
I saw an angel, a sun face
or this world’s moon.
Black hyacinth curls,
smoky sighs of lovers.
An alluring cypress,
clad in black, like the moon
in night, or the Franks [Western Europeans]
whom his beauty rules.
If your heart is not bound
in the knot of his heathen belt,
you’re no true believer,
but a lost soul among lovers.
His lips give life anew
to those whom his glances kill
just so, for that giver of life
follows the way of Jesus.
Avnî [Mehmed II’s pen name], have no doubt,
that beauty will one day be tame
for you are ruler of Constantinople.2
Mehmed II was not alone in his affections. His writing reflects that of the Sufi Rûmi, recorded two centuries earlier. Rûmi was spiritually transformed by his passionate relationship with his elder Şams al-Tabrizi, another Sufi from the east. Rûmi called Şams ‘heart-stealer’ and ‘soul’s beloved’ for whom his heart burst with ecstasy.3 He praised his ‘beauteous face’, ‘bewitching narcissi [eyes]’, ‘brow of hyacinth’, and his lips, which were as ‘rubies sweet to taste’. After Şams left him, an anguished Rûmi referred to him as a ‘gorgeous heartbreaker’, a ‘heartthrob’, and ‘luscious bough of rosebuds’. He lamented how bitter it was to be separated ‘from such sugary lips’.
A chaste reading interprets such verses as symbolising humans held captive by worldly illusions. The lover is spellbound, contemplating the beauty of God. Rûmi’s love for and devotion to Şams is seen as a model of his love of God.4 The Sufi practice of gazing at young boys is interpreted as a window onto human contemplation of God’s beauty. Rûmi’s biographers go out of their way to deny that the writers of homoerotic verse engaged in physical love. Perhaps. Just as verses written about earthly profane love may be seen as metaphors for the human love for God, so, too, may poems articulating human love for God be seen as metaphors for earthly profane love. In a world before sexual preferences constituted an identity, where men who desired other males were not considered members of a biologically determined, distinctive subculture with a fixed nature, the verses written by Rûmi dedicated to Şams al-Tabrizi were erotic love poetry, the ecstatic expression of one younger man’s love for an older one.
The socially acceptable practice of men drinking wine and adoring and having sexual relations with beardless youths, who were the inspiration for lyric love poetry, was common practice in England, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as in contemporary Iran. A character in Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) declares, ‘If it be sin to love a sweet-faced boy, / Whose amber locks trust up in golden trammels / Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy, / When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels; / If it be sin to love a lovely lad, / Oh then sin I, for whom my soul is sad’.5 In the Ottoman Empire, Sufis and the male urban elite saw beautiful boys as objects of desire.
Regarding sexuality in Renaissance Europe and the contemporary Muslim-majority world, what mattered was age and stage of life, not gender. What was important was one’s place in the social order, not one’s social identity. Distinctions were drawn between adult men who loved boys (which was acceptable), the boys themselves (who once they matured could love only boys, not other men), and adult men (between whom sexual relations were not socially acceptable). Once one’s beard grew, one could no longer be an object of anyone’s same-sex affection.
Of consequence was life stage. A young man would be considered desirable, a passive object of affection and sexual penetration indistinguishable from a woman, and expected to attract male admirers. When he matured and married, he would in turn become the lover of young male beaus. Over the course of their lives, men would be both the lover and beloved of another man. Sexuality was conceived as a power relation, not an identity. The penetrator was considered strong and dominant. Anyone who could be dominated and penetrated, be it a girl, boy, or woman, could be the object of sexual desire and was accordingly considered weak and inferior.6
Mature men desired beardless youths or women, both of whom they described in verse, although most poetry concerned boys. Poets who were attracted to women rather than boys were described as peculiar. Androgyny was a feature of Ottoman literature. As the sixteenth-century poet Azizi writes in a couplet, ‘Those who concentrate on pleasure / Grant male and female equal measure’.7 Yet poems were mostly addressed by men to youths. According to a Qajar Iranian, the beloved is inevitably described as ‘rose-faced, silver-bodied, cypress-statured, narcissus-eyed, coquettish, with sugar lips, wine bearers with tulip cheeks, moon-faced, Venus-shaped, with crescent eyebrows, magic eyes, black-scented hair, and crystalline chin folds, and full of games and coquettishness’.8 Female and male beloveds had the same characteristics. The ideal beautiful woman’s ‘body is a swaying cypress, her hair a hyacinth, her moles are like peppercorns, her cheek a rose, her lip like wine’ and her face ‘a shining moon’.9 At the same time, a beautiful boy ‘has a cypress body, a tulip cheek, a rosebud lip, an apple chin, a moon face and a crescent brow’, and his moles ‘are like peppercorns, his hair like the hyacinth’.
From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ottoman poets authored collections of poetry dedicated to beloved shop boys. These ‘city thrillers’ were works dedicated to the beautiful boys of a particular city, including Belgrade, Bursa, Edirne, Istanbul, and Rize in the eastern Black Sea region. A book dedicated to the beautiful boys of Edirne was composed in honour of the visit of Bayezid II. Along with the apprentices working in the bazaar, the boys included theology students, sons of callers to prayer, sons of Qur’an reciters, and young Janissaries. Of the nearly fifty extant collections devoted to the beauties of a city, only one describes women. Sixteenth-century Ottoman writers found that work to be the anomaly and considered it strange because it did not describe beloved boys.10 Of the poet, an author wrote disparagingly, ‘He was a lover of women, but then only God is without fault’.
Galata, the former Genoese colony across the Golden Horn from Istanbul—a district known for its Christian, Jewish, and Italian inhabitants and taverns—was described as a place of pleasure, where Muslim men went to enjoy wine and Christian boy beloveds: ‘For wine and beloved [boys] it is without peer’. But ‘Adviser, don’t bar the reveller from wine saying it’s forbidden / The fatwa [legal opinion] in hand says the law of Jesus makes it licit’.11 Fatwas were posed in the sixteenth century asking whether it was permissible for a beautiful boy to pray in the front row of a mosque, or whether he should be forbidden, for his prostrations would excite the men standing behind him. A poet urged libertines to ‘take your glass in the direction of Galata / He who wishes to see Europe in Ottoman lands / Let him ever cross to see that city of two beauties / Pious one, should you see those Frankish [Western European] boys but once / You would never cast an eye on the houris [the maidens promised to believers] in paradise’.12 Ottoman taverns were similar to English molly houses. In both places, elite men drank and cavorted with lower-class boy lovers.
Before the nineteenth century, the view of the medical sciences in the Ottoman Empire and in Safavid and Qajar Iran (founded in 1785) was not based on the two-sex model, but instead viewed women as biologically imperfect men.13 Because men and women were not understood as opposites, same-sex relations were not considered to go against nature. Moreover, it was believed that both men and women produced semen, although women’s was assumed to be inferior. Both thus possessed analogous powers of procreation and needed to discharge it, causing men and women to desire sexual intercourse equally. Moreover, female orgasm was understood to be critical to conception.14 Physicians wrote manuals instructing men how to pleasure women sexually, on efficacious aphrodisiacs, and on the various types of contraception. Men believed women had an insatiable sexual appetite that they were unable to control. Based on a saying of Muhammad, men envisioned every part of a woman as being a private sexual part. They used this view to legitimise men’s control over women, keeping them covered, veiled, and away from unrelated men. According to this view, if men did not segregate women, they would want to have sex with any man they ran across, whether the man was willing or not.
Although inconceivable to most Ottoman men, there were women who loved women and pleasured them. Poet Crazy Brother (Deli Birader) Gazali was an Islamic scholar, law professor, Sufi, bathhouse owner, and pornographer. He aimed to entertain his readers when he wrote about the ‘famous dildo women’ in large Ottoman cities who dressed as men, rode horses like cavalrymen, and ‘strap[ped] dildos about their hips, oil[ed] them with almond oil, and set about the business in the usual manner, working away dildoing the cunt’ of elite women.15
Sex manuals were written or translated for Ottoman princes and sultans. On the orders of Selim I in 1519, Restoration of the Old Man to Youth Through the Power of Libido/Intercourse, for example, was translated from the Arabic and expanded. The same work was translated by the disaffected Ottoman bureaucrat Mustafa Ali as The Carnal Souls’ Comfort (1569) for Prince Mehmed, two years old at the time, who became Mehmed III a quarter of a century later.16
Sexuality was openly visible in the sexually charged plays of the Ottoman shadow theatre.17 The shadow theatre was most likely an export from Egypt brought back to Istanbul by Selim I after his defeat of the Mamluks in the sixteenth century. Commonly called Karagöz, after the main character, the shadow plays were performed in the palace, in coffeehouses, and to large crowds during festivities such as circumcision feasts, marriages, and the nightly fast breaking during the month of Ramadan. Cartoonish puppets made out of coloured, translucent camel leather were held by long sticks by a puppeteer, who projected their images onto a screen by means of lit candles or lanterns and played the roles of all characters, male and female. These comic and carnivalesque shows mocked, parodied, and critiqued society and its morals, showing a world full of lusty lawlessness and freedom. Men and women were sexually libidinous and promiscuous, always looking to ensnare others for pleasure. Men chased after boy dancers dressed as women. Women also chased after women. No one attempted to maintain their virtue, save their soul, or fight off Satan’s temptations, and women were not inferior to men. The main female character in all plays was an unabashed flirt on the lookout for sex, literally turning tricks. Women were bare breasted. The main character, Karagöz, was depicted with an enormous, moveable phallus.
Collections of sexually explicit poems, jokes, and stories were common in the sixteenth century. Crazy Brother (Deli Birader) Gazali composed The Expeller of Sorrows and Remover of Worries (ca. 1483–1511). It contains a hilarious imagined debate fought between virile ‘pederasts’ and weak ‘fornicators’. The work includes odes to the anus and to the vagina.18 The ‘boy lovers’ win and convert the ‘women lovers’ to their view: ‘When he was done, the boy stood up and farted several times on the sheikh’s exhausted head. He said, “Oh what pleasure you gave me!” and left. Then the leader of the pederasts came forward. Putting his arm around the former sheikh of fornicators’ neck, he said, “Now you are one of us and on our team”’.
This text, copied in manuscript and circulated until the nineteenth century, was written for a potential heir to the throne, Prince Korkud (died 1513), son of Bayezid II, when the prince was governor of Manisa. Gazali, professor at an Islamic college in Bursa, wrote the text at the request of one of Korkud’s courtiers. It was meant to be both morally instructive and humorous. The chapters concern the sexual objects of mature men: ‘The Benefits of Marriage and Sexual Intercourse’ (mostly revealing the drawbacks to marriage); ‘War Between the Pederasts and the Fornicators’; ‘How to Enjoy the Company of Boys’; ‘How to Enjoy the Company of Girls’; ‘Masturbation, Nocturnal Emissions, and Bestiality’; ‘The Passive Homosexuals’; ‘The Pimps’.19 The chapter ‘How to Enjoy the Company of Boys’, which is the only chapter to contain a discussion of sexual positions, is longer than ‘How to Enjoy the Company of Girls’ or the chapter concerning sexual intercourse with one’s wife. In fact, the chapter on loving boys is by far the longest of the text.
The author depicted women as having more passion than men, and thus their insatiable sexual yearning posed a threat. Young boys and young girls, on the other hand, posed no danger. They were easily taken for a small gift, easily satisfied because they had the lowest expectations—having sex for a few coins, with money for a bath after—and gave the most pleasure. They were ‘fresh’, and their orifices were ‘tight’.20 Married women with children were the worst possible sexual partners for obvious reasons according to this type of classification.
The disgruntled sixteenth-century Ottoman historian and bureaucrat Mustafa Ali, who expressed his love for wine and beautiful boys in his youth and old age, wrote in a similar vein in his work Etiquette of Salons.21 A chapter is entitled, ‘Describing the Smooth-Cheeked Boys Ready for Pleasure’. He wrote that in his era, ‘the popularity of beardless youth, smooth-cheeked boys, and well-behaved lads, whose sweet beauty is apparent’, exceeded the popularity of beautiful women.22 The reason was that while a female beloved had to be concealed for fear of malicious gossip, keeping company with a young man was connected to acceptable sociability. A relationship between males could be enjoyed either secretly or openly. Beardless youths were available to their middle-aged masters as friends and lovers, whether on military campaign or at home. Their relation could be enjoyed in public, unlike that between a man and a woman, who could not be companions.23 Inherent to this patriarchal vision was a disparaging view of women, seen neither as friends nor companions, but as intellectual inferiors. Women could offer only physical satisfaction, which was denigrated as worldly but necessary for procreation. Same-sex relations, by contrast, with an intellectually equal but socially inferior male friend and beloved, were supposedly heavenly, satisfying metaphysical and spiritual needs.
Mustafa Ali also provided a sexual ethnography of boys from different nations. Looking down on easterners (Arabs and Turks), the Bosnian-origin writer praised the ‘large, thick-lipped slave boys of Bosnia [who] are always amenable to service’. Beardless Kurds were ‘faultless and constrained to be amiable and abundantly obedient in whatever is proposed to them’ and they dyed themselves ‘below the waist with henna’. Those who desired ‘the famously fair of face and wish fervently to be serviced by silver-bodied cypresses, tall of stature and elegantly moving’ turned to the boy dancers of Southeastern Europe, or the Circassians, or the ‘musky, delectable Croats from among the Janissaries’. Albanians stole the heart of their lovers, but they were ‘impertinent and obstinate’. Georgians and Russians were also available ‘for erotic pleasures’. Mustafa Ali quoted a poem from The Expeller of Sorrows and Remover of Worries, which he commented upon favourably: ‘The following is famous for its originality, so much so that reading it compares with orgasm: “It opens like a smiling rose, O anus, / And closes a rosebud-lip in wonder, O anus! / The vagina is a house built in a narrow place like the crotch, / But, it is in a plaza to play boccia ball, O anus!”’24
The sexual encounters between men and youths—whether bathhouse attendants, waiters in taverns and coffeeshops, apprentices to tradesmen, Sufi novices, or servants to soldiers on campaign—were always meant to be based on an unequal power and status relationship. The relationship was predicated on dominance and submission. It was entered into in exchange for money, wine, and favours. The boys were not supposed to take any sexual pleasure in the encounter. Violence and force were also often used—described in Ottoman legal discussions of rape of boys and women and literary accounts of older men taking advantage of boys when they passed out from drinking too much wine. In one story in Gazali’s pornographic work meant to entertain, a beautiful boy drinks too much wine, passes out, and is raped by numerous men while unconscious. When he awakes, he states, ‘The wine would be just dandy—if only it weren’t such a pain in the butt’.25 His gang rape was supposed to be funny.
Mustafa Ali saw sexual danger lurking at the heart of empire, like worms devouring an apple from within. In the first chapter in his book Etiquette of Salons, entitled ‘About the Situation in the Palaces of the Sultans and About the Boy Servants in the Harem’, Mustafa Ali imagined that in the past only boys with good morals, as observable from their physiognomy, were recruited to serve in the palace. Yet in his day, those who served the sultan were allegedly ‘impudent converts who rush about madly in the service of shameless lowlife types’, people who had ‘mingled with hooligans of the city-boy class’, and ‘those notorious for going to taverns and being sold [for sex]’.26 Such sexual adventurers, he argued, were a danger to the royal family and should not be servants of the sultan. He perceived the rewarding of positions to such people as a main cause of what he thought was Ottoman decline.
The topic of decline occupied many of the best Ottoman minds of this era, minds fearful that the Ottoman Way that had made the empire great was being abandoned. Mustafa Ali was one of the keenest observers of the transformations that rocked the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century empire. To understand them, we must turn to Ali’s life and analysis of the source of Ottoman greatness and how he saw that greatness threatened.
It is at this point that we can return to a chronological account of the dynasty and its empire from the late sixteenth century. The next four chapters examine transformations in the succession to the sultanate and the role of the sultan; the rise of royal women in politics; changes to military, administrative, and palace recruitment; the breakdown of class distinctions; the Ottoman military losing its edge over other imperial armies; and the impact of these developments on Ottoman ideology. Intellectuals were compelled to critique the changes they saw occurring. Sultans mounted tragic attempts to take back power.