Inside the Royal Harems of the Ottoman Empire

You can't move for people talking about the Roman Empire or the British Empire, but what about the Ottoman Empire? It spanned a huge period of time and at the heart of it was the Royal harem: enslaved women who lived in closed-off servitude to the Sultan. Peaking in the 17th century, who were these women? What were their lives like inside the palace? And why have westerners been particularly fascinated by this part of history? Joining Kate today is Dr Michael Talbot, Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at University of Greenwich, to help us find out. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Hello, welcome back. It's lovely to see you again. But before we can continue together, I do have to give you the fair do's warning. Kate, what's a fair do's warning? Well, it's the warning that we have to give you to let you know that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way of arranging adult subjects, which being adult too. And once you've heard that little lot and you keep listening, if you get upset, well, fair do's, that one's on you. We did tell you. Right, on with the show.

• 1:54Kate Lister?

  Well hello again, Betwixters! You join me in 16th century Istanbul, deep in Topkapi Palace, at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And we've got everything here! This is a self-contained city with its own kitchens, baths, schools, gardens and... its own harem. Of course it does. Within this hidden world are hundreds and hundreds of women, most of whom are enslaved, and they are here to service one man: the Sultan. But who are these women? Where did they come from? What goes on inside these walls when they're not seeing the Sultan? Well, let's do some sneaking around to find out more.

• 3:00Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Many of you have asked, and we are only too happy to respond. In today's episode, we are finally taking you inside the royal harem's of the Ottoman Empire. And wow! The Ottoman Empire really is something of a blind spot in Western understanding. And it was around for a hell of a long time, you know, from the 13th century until the 20th century, and yet it barely gets a look in when we're talking about historical fiction or dramas, at least in the West. Why would that be, I wonder? Hmm. Well, today we are bringing it front and centre with the fantastic Dr Michael Talbot,

• 3:44Kate Lister?

  Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich. This was a fantastic episode, if I do say so myself, and so rest assured, we will be coming back to the Ottomans in the future. But without further ado, let's crack on.

• 4:05Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Michael Talbot. How are you doing?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I'm fine, thank you. How are you doing, Kate? You alright?

• 4:13Kate Lister?

  I'm really excited to talk to you because Ottoman Empire, you're special to, that's not a history I know a whole lot about. Obviously, I've heard of it, Ottoman Empire, but I've not researched it. I don't know very much about it at all. Can I ask you as a starter question before we get going on Harems and empires? How did you come to study this?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I think I've been interested in the Middle East for as long as I can remember. But I really started getting interested in the Ottomans when I first visited Turkey. So I travelled there when I was much younger. And I also was intrigued by this fact that I didn't know that much about them. And I'm a proper history geek, right? I mean, I've loved this stuff since I could read. But I just didn't know anything about them. And then I started to learn, you know, they controlled parts of Europe and Africa as well as parts of Asia for 600 years. And why is it we don't know anything about them? Why aren't we taught about them? It's a strange thing. So I just became obsessed with them and I've been obsessed with them ever since.

• 5:11Kate Lister?

  It's a good question because there are many empires. We know, obviously, Roman Empire, everyone knows about that one. The Greeks had a crack at it as well, British Empire, Mongols, people know about that one. Ottoman, that doesn't seem to register with a lot of people. I don't recall any like historical drama reenactments of Ottoman empires or documentaries.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  You need to watch some more Turkish dramas. They've got loads of them, loads of them. Turkish costume dramas, they're brilliant. But the empires that you all mentioned, right, they all interact with the Ottomans in one way or another. So the Ottomans are in a way a product of the Mongol invasions. They are a successor to the Roman Empire. They call themselves the successors of the Roman Empire and they last until the British Empire. So they're this sort of really important node in this global history of empires and we should know more about them. And that's my job, I guess.

• 6:00Kate Lister?

  That's why you're here and we're so glad that you are. But for anyone listening, that's knowledge of Ottoman empires is largely based to furniture. I'm thinking I've got like an Ottoman, that's probably not the same thing. What period? What period of time are we talking about? You said it's modern day Turkey. What chunk of time are we looking at?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  So the empire's generally agreed to have started around 1299 and lasts until 1922. So if we're talking about British history, we're saying basically the reign of Edward the first up until George the fifth. It's this huge span, one family ruling over. The empire itself changes. So it starts off as this very small principality almost in what's now northwest Turkey on the edge of the Byzantine Empire. So this successor state to the Roman Empire and on the edge of the Islamic world on the other side. And within a century of its foundation in 1299, it expands at the expense of the Byzantine Empire into southeastern Europe, into the Balkans. A century after that, its conquests take it to the Middle

• 7:02Speaker 02

  East, to North Africa, to the Red Sea. At its height, it has territory that covers around a third of Europe.

• 7:11Kate Lister?

  No.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  It covers the whole of the Middle East, from Iran to Algeria, North Africa. It contains parts of East Africa. At one point, they even have a crack at Indonesia. Like, and this is in the 16th century, its height. And then as the empire sort of changes and as the world changes, their military power isn't as strong as it had been, is unable to conquer as much as it had. And then the Europeans start to get their weapons sorted out. And so really, from the 18th century onwards, the empire starts to lose territory in Europe first, then in the Middle East. And by the end in the 1920s, it's left with basically the same territory it started as in this tiny corner of northwest Turkey. So its story is long and complicated, and we won't try and do it, I don't think, in

• 7:54Speaker 02

  a podcast like this. But it basically, because of its nature, its length and its geographic span, it covers so much of the human experience and it covers so much of global historical importance, which is why I'm so passionate about speaking about it.

• 8:08Kate Lister?

  I suppose for a historian like you, or any historian that's working with non-European sources, you've got to try and push past that overly romanticized image, what the theorist Edward Said called Orientalism, that largely the Victorians, again, are favourites, did a real number on it. It becomes this, like, you know, Arabian night, eroticised, smoke and incense and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Is that difficult for you to work with?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  It is difficult. It's amazing how powerful those narratives are, even for people who Don't really have a direct exposure to them. Like, I still have, when I go to speak in schools, I have, you know, teenagers speaking about the sick man of Europe. And like, where have they got that from in twenty twenty five? I just don't understand that. So, I mean, yeah, you mentioned orientalism. It's a really powerful trope. And it's a way that not just the Victorians, but people, including in our own times, have used to explain why the West, as in the Christian white European West, has risen to supremacy and why the formerly powerful Ottomans and other Asian empires lost their power and lost their dominance. And as you mentioned, sexuality is a huge part of it, either

• 9:24Speaker 02

  hypersexuality or repressed sexuality, but it's also linked to power. So as we'll hopefully touch on, imperial women, many of whom, well, all of whom, in many parts of the empire are enslaved women. Their experience is linked to this alleged decline in Ottoman power. So the decline of power is a problem of having powerful women. And that's a really powerful idea still, unfortunately. So, yeah, we find that all the time.

• 9:49Kate Lister?

  That's a really interesting point that you raised, because you do, when it comes to how Western people think of sex and sexuality in the Ottoman Empire. And unfortunately, we are quite lazy when we do this. It's very easy to lump Ottoman India just over there somewhere and kind of like, it's very easy for us to fall into still quite lazy tropes about how either it's hyper eroticised and it's all belly dancers and, you know, harems, or it's completely sexually repressive and nobody is allowed to even leave the house.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And various points for various people, both of those things can be true. But yeah, to generalize an entire civilization, as I said, that spans six hundred years and three continents on that basis. I'm not sure, I mean, lazy perhaps, some people are lazy about it, but I think it's just a lack of of education. I mean, scholarship on Ottoman history isn't always widely available to the public. Books can be expensive. I mean, there's, there are some great books I'm happy to recommend as we go along, some great books on this topic. But yeah, I mean, it's also in popular culture. Like, my go-to reference for a long time, and this might be betraying my age a bit, was Disney's Aladdin.

• 10:54Kate Lister?

  I was just thinking of Aladdin. You were saying all of that. I was like, don't embarrass yourself. Don't do it.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Well, it's the perfect example, as you say, of sort of mashing together Middle Eastern and South Asian Islamic culture all into this really fantastical world. And part of that is a long legacy of these tropes that have been reproduced over centuries and centuries and centuries and are now so deeply ingrained in our culture, like other forms of racism, that sometimes we don't even notice them until someone points them out.

• 11:26Kate Lister?

  Because Disney did get some pushback for that, even at the time where they-

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Well, there was the song, right? And at the beginning-

• 11:32Kate Lister?

  Yes, the song, Arabian Nights.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll cut off your head or something, if they don't like your face.

• 11:38Kate Lister?

  It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. When you actually stop and you think about it, that is really bad.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  And that was like, what, one year after the first Gulf War, right? So it was part of this general milieu of, in the early 90s, of a changing relationship with the Middle East and the Islamic world. So, yeah, all of this stuff is tied in.

• 11:56Kate Lister?

  Still with us.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:57Kate Lister?

  And one of the things that's inescapable, when you think about sex in the Ottoman Empire or anywhere that, again, it's not European, not you, because you're a historian and you know the nuance, but if you were to just pop vox people on the street, someone might say harem, they might go for that, because that has been a feature of Ottoman history that the West has been fascinated with for a very, very long time.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And it was a thing, right? We can't escape the fact-

• 12:26Kate Lister?

  It was a thing. It's not a myth, that it was a definite thing. Okay.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  No, so the harem is a crucial institution to the state. It's also a feature of elite households across the empire from its beginning until pretty much its end. So the harem did exist. It did not exist in the way that it was fantasized about by Western writers and artists.

• 12:50Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I mean, the art, I mean, you know, it's-

• 12:52Kate Lister?

  It's bordering porny, isn't it?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Well, it is very porny. But I mean, this is the whole point of the harem is that it's a closed off institution. It's from a word that kind of means forbidden or restricted or bounded.

• 13:05Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  It's out of reach to everyone who isn't the responsible male of that household. So in the palace's case, the Sultan. And that means that because it's, there's no access to it. We, the observers relied on hearsay as well as fantasy to then create these images that could sell back home.

• 13:23Kate Lister?

  God, yeah. Were any of the Victorian art, because if anyone, for anyone listening, you can Google Victorian art harem and see what we're talking about.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Who's good like Angra, the French painting.

• 13:33Kate Lister?

  Yes. Were they allowed into the harem then? No, no.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Never, never, never.

• 13:38Kate Lister?

  This is just all the fevered imagination of 19th century explorers.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I mean, sometimes on rare occasions, a Western woman might gain access. So the most famous example is Mary Wharton Montague in the early 18th century.

• 13:52Kate Lister?

  Allowed in.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Well, she was, yeah, she was the wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul. And she was in the, one of the grand viziers harem's. And so she was invited in because she's a woman, she's, she's allowed in and she gets entertained. Yeah, and her account isn't, you know, it's kind of sensationalized and that helps to then confirm some of these myths that people were building of sort of like women lounging around, doing nothing.

• 14:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, half nude.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and entertainments. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, that no men get access, very occasionally women do get access.

• 14:25Kate Lister?

  What's some of the earliest records that we have of, see, I'm saying harem and you're kind of saying harem, which one?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Either's fine.

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  Oh, either's fine, okay.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  I mean, the Tur- in Turkish, they would say harem.

• 14:36Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay, I'm gonna say harem then from now on.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  You say how you wanna say it.

• 14:40Kate Lister?

  I wanna sound like I know what I'm talking about, even though I don't. What's some of the, what's some of the earliest evidence that we have of the harem?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  So the Ottomans aren't the first to have this institution. It's common to a whole bunch of states that precede them, both Islamic and non-Islamic. We don't have very good records for the Ottoman state for anything really before around 1480. But we know by the time the records do emerge that the harem is there as an institution. It starts off a little bit different to the main period that we're going to focus on. So in the early centuries, so the sort of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, although the Ottoman soldans did have enslaved women within their harem, they also engaged in diplomatic alliances through marriage with neighboring powers, with the Byzantines and with neighboring Turkish states.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  So it was more common for their consorts to be from foreign royalty. That changes by the end of the fifteenth century. So really, after the raid of Mehmed the Conqueror, who dies in fourteen eighty one, after his reign, it's changed quite dramatically to being almost exclusively populated by enslaved women. And we start to get decent records about that institution from that sort of period, the beginning of the sixteenth century.

• 15:58Kate Lister?

  Could anyone have a harem? Or is it just rich? I suppose it's money, isn't it? Can you afford it? Right, okay.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  In a way, it's also kind of racialised. So enslavement in the Ottoman Empire had degrees of desirability, for want of a better word, with black people from central Africa at the bottom of the hierarchy, East Africans, sort of like Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan in the middle, and then white people at the top as being the most desirable. And almost all of the enslaved women who serve as concubines within these households are white. So you have to be rich to be able to afford them.

• 16:43Kate Lister?

  Where were they from then?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  They are from all over the shop. So the most common routes for white women in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century is around the Black Sea, so what's now Ukraine and Russia, but also the Caucasus. So Georgia, Armenia, that sort of area. So that's the main source. In earlier periods, they were also taken as spoils of war from Ottoman conquests in Europe. So from places like Hungary and Serbia, Austria. There was another route that came from North Africa and they had maritime enslavement. Where corsairs would go and raid places, including Ireland and England, and take captives away and they would be sold in slave markets in Algiers and Tunis.

• 17:28Kate Lister?

  There could have been a Yorkshire lass in a harem in the Ottoman Empire.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I don't know if they made it as far as Yorkshire. There are all these tales of English women and we know that, you know, in North Africa especially, they do appear in slave markets.

• 17:43Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Michael after this short break.

• 17:54Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 18:36Kate Lister?

  It sounds extraordinary again, but that's unpicking our understanding of what slavery actually was and how it functioned. Last year I did a documentary about Pompeii and the thing that I never got my head around, no matter how much I tried, was the Roman system of slavery. The fact that like so many people and that people who are enslaved are doing jobs like doctors and scribes and like, because our comprehension is very difficult to get our head around how that system functioned. And what was it like in the Ottoman Empire?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  It's more along the lines of that Roman system than it is of the plantation slavery that we're more familiar with. And in fact, the most important people in the Ottoman Empire, apart from the Sultan, are enslaved people. So all of the imperial women, the military commanders from the 14th century in some sources.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  The army is recruited as part of the system called the Devshirme, which is the gathering of Christian children from the Balkans who are taken from their families. They are taken to the imperial centre, they are converted to Islam and the sort of the weedy ones get trained in administration. The bulky ones get sent to the army and once in the army, they can rise up to be generals, to be pashas, to be vizirs. But they started off their lives as enslaved children. So huge amounts of Ottoman elite society can trace their roots to the practice of slavery and it is everywhere. It's in elite households, it's in galleys, it's in industrial centres.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  It is a huge, huge part and still comparatively understudied part of Ottoman society.

• 20:17Kate Lister?

  Isn't there a sort of an estimate that like one in ten people in the Ottoman Empire at its height were enslaved? Is that wildly?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to, we don't, we don't really have senses. In that period, unfortunately, we can get some idea from people's wills that we find in the archives as to how many enslaved people, for example, they leave in their legacy or how many they free upon their death. It's a huge percentage, whatever it is, we're never going to know the numbers. I mean, millions of people across the period of the empire are trafficked into enslavement.

• 20:47Kate Lister?

  That's one of the things that Mary Beard, remember her saying was that slaves could paradoxically be incredibly powerful people because they have they, or at least they had close proximity to real power.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's one of the difficult things, I think, about the way that both the harem and its institutions have been approached by historians in the past is that we focus on the success stories, the ones who became the consort of the Sultan. We don't focus on the thousands who didn't and who lived a relatively miserable and unknown life in enslavement. And also there's a sort of barbarity to other kinds of Ottoman enslavement. So for example, the way in which the harem in the palace is run is by eunuchs. And that practice. Goes on really until almost the end of the empire in the 20th century. And these are huge numbers of boys, mostly from East Africa, East and Central Africa sometimes,

• 21:42Speaker 02

  who are castrated and then trafficked to slave markets and sold to become the overseers of the harem. But paradoxically, by being a eunuch and being able to move between the world of women and the world of men, in the 16th and 17th centuries, some of the most powerful people in the Ottoman Empire are the chief black eunuchs. And that's a difficult story to tell because they become hugely powerful and hugely rich. But it's not a life that I'm sure any of them would have chosen for themselves.

• 22:12Kate Lister?

  It's also a very, very, there are say, male idea to think that just by cutting the genitals off someone, there will be no adultery or no love affairs.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Well, yes, indeed. Well, quite.

• 22:24Kate Lister?

  It's now impossible because the penis doesn't work. Oh, come on. The lesbians are howling with laughter.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  I'm sure they are. I mean, there's a whole range of sexual practices in the harem that we'll never know for sure about because obviously they're never recorded. But we can get a sense from being human, the kind of things that probably went on that weren't recorded.

• 22:43Kate Lister?

  So let's talk about the harem then and about these poor young boys that are castrated and trafficked there. But I'm like curious as to how this even functioned on an administrative level. Because like the idea is that you've been enslaved presumably. You're supposed to be like sexually exclusive to the person who owns the harem. Is that the idea?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're their property and you come in, the term that's often used is jarier. And that is often translated as concubine because essentially any enslaved female within the household, unless they're owned by the lady of the house, if they're owned by the master of the house, he can do whatever he wants with them sexually. So they might not be formally a sex slave, but they could just be a sort of a domestic worker. But the master of the house would still have the same rights.

• 23:32Kate Lister?

  It's grim, isn't it?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  It is really, really grim. It is really grim. And that is replicated in elite households across the empire. The harem in the palace. Is different because it's the Imperial Harem and it's huge. It's home to many hundreds of enslaved women who.

• 23:48Kate Lister?

  Hundreds.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Hundreds, yeah, hundreds. I mean, in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, we could be talking four, five hundred women in the Harem at a time. We might talk about the palace in a bit, but if you ever go to Istanbul and you go to the Imperial Palace, Topkapi Palace, a lot of the Harem still isn't open to the public. But it's a huge maze, like it's this maze of like loads, hundreds of rooms, just it's unbelievable, the scale of of this institution. And it is an institution in that sort of sense.

• 24:15Kate Lister?

  My first thought of that is appalling. My first thought is that I couldn't be bothered. Like, could you like, if, could you be bothered with with a Harem like of hundreds of people that you had to try and deal with?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Well, thankfully, if you're the Sultan, you've got people to deal with them for you, like in Eunice.

• 24:29Kate Lister?

  I suppose you do, don't you?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Have the fun bit of it in in that sense. I mean, that that's the thing. I mean, you can have these hundreds of women, some of whom may never really even see the Sultan or or have anything to do with him. A lot of it is is luck that you're at the entertainment in his private chambers and he likes the look of you.

• 24:46Kate Lister?

  So he can just summon people, just like, I'll have number two along today, please.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And that will go on until or unless you bear a child. Once you bear a child for him, you're kind of removed from that part of the Harem. And you go into a different area where it's much more tame and domesticized, I suppose. But until that point, you're sort of waiting for your moment. You might never get that moment. You might end up in other roles. So, you know, lots of women in the Harem take on different duties. They might become dancers, like one of the most important composers of Ottoman eighteenth century classical music, Dil Hayat. She was an enslaved woman in the Harem and she became a court musician and a music teacher instead. So there's different paths that these women might take within the Harem, aside from necessarily being a sexual partner of the Sultan.

• 25:34Kate Lister?

  Okay, so it's not just like they would just be hanging around waiting to be summoned. They'd be doing other stuff?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  That, yeah, I mean, I think. It's difficult to get into the mindset, isn't it? But I suppose if you're there, your chance to get into the Sultan's bedroom and potentially to bear him a child, that's your way out of that kind of enslavement and into power, into wealth, into prestige. I mean, you're still stuck in the harem. But at least you have your own quarters, at least you have your own respectability, the potential that your child, if it's a male child, could become the next ruler.

• 26:10Kate Lister?

  Oh, so the children are legitimate then?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really, it's a complicated legal framework. But yeah, under Islamic law, the children between the master of the house and the enslaved women are legitimate.

• 26:24Kate Lister?

  I see. Okay, that's interesting. What about the wife then? How does, how does this work? Is there, is there a wife that the Sultan or whoever has, and then he's got his, his little harem as an enormous side piece, but it's there? Like, what's this dynamic?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the term sometimes used is wife. I, I tend not to use that because I think it gives the wrong impression. The term in Ottoman Turkish is that becomes used in the 16th century is hasaki, which is kind of like favorite, we might translate it as. And the Sultan might have a, a series of two, one, two, three, four favorite concubines because they've borne him a son or because they just get on or he's attracted to them. And they occupy a position of, of supreme prestige within the harem. The most prestigious that you can get, however, is if your son becomes the Sultan, you then become the queen mum, the valeda Sultan.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  And in the 16th and 17th century, that is at many points, the most powerful position in the empire, more powerful than anyone else. Marriage isn't in the sense that we are used to in European royal marriages. It's more about being favorited and getting extra rights and privileges as a result of being that favorite. And that starts in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, and it's his.

• 27:43Kate Lister?

  What a name, wow.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, listen, if you're going to be Suleiman, you might as well be magnificent.

• 27:47Kate Lister?

  Be the magnificent, absolutely.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  That's right. So he, so he's Sultan from fifteen twenty to fifteen sixty six, and he's the one who kind of changes things because he, he falls in love with one of his concubines, a woman named Harems Sultan, who in the West they know as Roxana. You might have encountered her perhaps in some early modern plays and paintings and things. But she becomes the first Haseki, the first favorite. And it's her kind of power that transforms the role of women within the Harem to being a really powerful political one within the empire.

• 28:20Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay. So it's not that there's a wife and the, and the Harem is, is like adultery. It's that they're all kind of his wives, but not, but like he can choose a favorite from amongst them.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:35Kate Lister?

  Or several favorites.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  That's right, several favorites. And one of the reasons, I mean, marriage within Islam grants certain rights to women. For example, the right to divorce her husband. So you can't really have a woman coming and divorcing the Sultan. So it'd be a bit awkward if, if, if it was more formalized that way. Later on, there is a kind of marriage system that's more akin to, to normal domestic marriage in that sense. But yeah, in this period, it is mostly about favorites.

• 29:01Kate Lister?

  Okay. So how did Roxana, how did she overhaul the role of the, the Harem? I'm interested in what she did.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  So she is an incredible character and there's a really amazing biography of her by Leslie Pearce, one of the greatest Ottoman historians. She's enslaved as a child or a young teenager, probably from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, somewhere in sort of the steppes of, of central Eastern Europe.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  She comes to the palace and by all accounts, she manages to gain the Sultan's, this is Suliman's, eye by her beauty, but also something that's highly prized within the Harem by her intelligence and her wit. There's training that women have to undergo within the palace to make sure that they're of a suitable level to converse with or to be in the presence of the Sultan's. They get a sort of rudimentary form of education, the same that sort of the palace page boys would get.

• 29:53Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Some of them learn to sing, some of them learn to dance. Whatever she does, she does it really well. And Suliman appears to fall in love with her. Now, when she becomes his favorite, the Harem isn't in the same palace as the Sultan. So there's two palaces in Istanbul in the middle of the 16th century. There's Top Kuppa Palace, which is the famous one where all the tourists go in Istanbul today. That was separate. At that time, it was believed that women shouldn't be near the seat of power, that sort of the Sultan's private life should be kept somewhere else. So they were put on the other side of the city in an older palace. It's Harems who arranges for the Harem to be moved over to this new Top Kuppa Palace, where the new Harem is established. And

• 30:39Speaker 02

  that gives her direct access at all times to the Sultan, but also through her agents and through the eunuchs to the Imperial Council that's also based in the palace. So this then allows her to start building up a patronage network of men outside the Harem, because she has the Sultan's ear. If someone wants a promotion or wants to push a new policy, they can contact her via her agents and she can push for it. So it's a huge power play on her part.

• 31:10Kate Lister?

  That is, isn't it? And you mentioned training there. So I'm trying to like get my head around like what, again, what the admin of this is. So what age would? Young girls be enslaved and sent to the Harem and then like go through some kind of concubine training programme?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, essentially.

• 31:27Kate Lister?

  What would that look like?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're talking, I mean, the ages vary. It can be sort of young, eight, nine, 10, up until sort of early teens, maybe sort of mid teens at a push. They wouldn't be expected to have sexual relations generally at that point, although it's not unheard of, of course, unfortunately. They would then be trained sometimes by the eunuchs, sometimes by other Harem women, by imperial princesses who are also sort of living around in the Harem. In the manners of being at the Ottoman court, you know, the Ottoman court in the 16th century is the most powerful court probably on the planet, right? It makes the Tudors look like some provincial wasteland.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And if you think about how formal the Tudor court was, or how formal the court of Louis XIV was later, the Ottoman court puts all that in the shadow. It's a very ritualised, formal court, high culture, and so the women are expected, at least in the best of their abilities, to engage in that. So basic literacy is taught, various forms of art and performance are taught. And this then allows them to enter the Sultan's presence and to converse with him and to entertain him.

• 32:32Kate Lister?

  Wow, I want to be careful how I phrase this because I'm aware that it's all about enslavement and sexual enslavement and it's all terrible. But it sounds reasonably okay if you have to be a slave, that sounds awful, but I know.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  No, but this is the thing, I know what you're getting at too. And it, it, this is why it's such a hard thing to discuss. I mean, I guess if we're talking about somewhere like England, right, in the 16th century, your chances of social mobility as a peasant from Yorkshire are zero, right?

• 33:01Kate Lister?

  That's what I'm getting at, yes.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Whereas in the Ottoman Empire, you could be the son of an Albanian pig farmer and you could command the armies within 30 years. Or you could be the daughter of a priest from some remote village in Poland and then you could be the favourite of the Sultan within 30 years. It's an awful process. And again, this is not the life these people would have chosen, but they make the best of that life, I suppose, and can become very powerful from it.

• 33:28Kate Lister?

  Wow, are there any other examples of women in the Harem that go on to become incredibly powerful and influential?

• 33:35Speaker 02

  After Harems, there's this period that became known in Ottoman historiography as the Sultanate of Women.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And that lasts really from the time of her accession, which is fifteen thirty four, until the beginning of the eighteenth century. So most of the sixteenth, all of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, this Sultanate of women. And this is where power is exercised, sometimes via the Haseki, via the favorite, but more often than not by the queen mum, by the Valide Sultan. And some of these women not only act as senior advisors, but at various points, regents to their sons. So for example, Hatijeh Turhan Sultan, um, she is the mother of Sultan Mehmed the fourth, who comes to the throne as a boy, essentially.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  And so for his entire minority, she's running the show and she's dictating reformist policy. One of her predecessors, Kersem Sultan, she engages in warfare. She demands the Ottoman army go and invade Crete and it's a whole.

• 34:39Kate Lister?

  Wow, you weren't kidding. These are very powerful women.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  No, seriously. They are super, super, super powerful. And this is done in their own right. And one of the ways that they're able to build this power and they're able to exercise political power is because living in the Harem is just a part of their experience. They also have this life outside the Harem that they can't participate in directly, but they live in the outside world by proxy. What I mean by that is by becoming the favorite or the queen mum, you become fabulously wealthy, right? This is an empire that controls the gold mines of Egypt and the whole of the Middle East, you know, it's hugely wealthy. So being an imperial woman means that you can get a huge amount of wealth.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Rather than hoarding that wealth, imperial women, Harems, Kersem, Hatijeh Tulhat and others, engage in patronage projects for kind of social welfare institutions. So they'll build mosques and soup kitchens and bath houses that cater to the capital, but also to the provinces. And then this helps to build up their political and cultural capital, which further helps them to then exercise power over things like the bureaucracy and the army. So it's a really interesting way that women who are essentially confined to one space are able to make themselves felt throughout this vast empire.

• 36:00Kate Lister?

  I suppose the ultimate goal then in this environment has got to be being the Sultan's mum. Because favourites, although they can wield enormous power and there's multiple examples of that happening and still happening to this very day.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 36:13Kate Lister?

  But favouritism can turn on a dime. Like, it's so, like, all right, he fancies you now. But when we think back about our own dating past of all the people that once upon a time we were like, but I love him. And now you're like, oh, God, what was I thinking? Like, it turns that quick. So being his mum, now that's harder to get rid of.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  It is. And, I mean, Harems is probably one of the greatest examples of this. So she becomes the favourite, or the chief favourite of Suleiman. But he's already had his kind of first love, I suppose. And his first love gave him a son, Mustafa. And Mustafa was like his, his old man. He was a talented administrator. He was an excellent soldier. He was popular with the court and with the people. But he wasn't Harems's son. And she had her own son, Saleem, who, you know, by all accounts was perhaps less talented in those areas than Mustafa. I mean, there's a whole sorts of intrigue and we'll never know the truth. But what we do know is that Mustafa is killed. He's murdered.

• 37:15Kate Lister?

  Oh, look at that.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yes. And that then opens up for her son, Saleem, to become Suleiman's successor and not Mustafa. There's no, in the 16th century in particular, there's no kind of logic as to who becomes the next Sultan. Any son of the Sultan could have a crack at it. It's not until much later that they have a system where it passes from brother to brother, then the next generation. So, yeah, your chance of becoming the Queen Mum, you're quite right, is, is that's your real shot at power. And so women, in Harems's case, will do anything to make sure that it's their son that becomes the next Sultan and they can become the next Valide.

• 37:50Kate Lister?

  It must have been bitchy as hell.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I can't imagine it, honestly.

• 37:54Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I like to think, you know, the sisterhood and we'd all be supporting each other and cheering each other on. But that's, that's just not what would happen, human nature being what it is. It would be bitchy as hell.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. The harem is big in the palace, but it's limited real estate. So you might want to get some more apartments, but that has to come at the expense of arrival. So how are you going to? So there's a lot, you know, the intrigue is, it's also something that we will never know in a huge amount of detail, particularly in the, in the 16th and 17th centuries. We have some written records of these women, by these women, but not of that kind of

• 38:25Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that level.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  intrigue, yeah.

• 38:32Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Michael after this short break.

• 38:43Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 39:25Kate Lister?

  So there are examples of women going on from the Harem, but they go on to wield enormous power. What about those that didn't do that? What about the ones that didn't give the Sultan the son? And the ones, like, is there a retirement programme for the Harem? Is there, like, where do you go when you edge out of this? What's the, like, what happens to them?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Sometimes we'll never know because their lives aren't recorded in the same detail.

• 39:52Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  If nothing's going to happen, sometimes what can happen is they can be married off to some of the enslaved men within the court. So the pages and sort of those sort of court officials on the other side of the wall. Sometimes they might be freed, particularly in a case of a Sultan who's just passed away. It's a very high charitable act in Islamic law to free slaves, particularly if they have converted or are going to convert to Islam. So some of them might be freed, but a lot of them sort of just disappear into this huge palace complex and will end up with lives of domestic servitude of various forms. Yeah.

• 40:29Kate Lister?

  Was it the same with the eunuchs? Did any of them, like, make it? And conversely, what happened if they, if they didn't?

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, lots of them do make it. As with other political positions within the Ottoman Empire, making it can be a deadly business. So Kursen Sultan, who I mentioned earlier, the one who started this war with Crete, she gets killed by an angry mob of soldiers because they're angry with her power. Some chief back eunuchs are also killed, assassinated, murdered in political rivalries. But the risks come with reward, right? If you were the chief back unit, particularly sort of in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Again, you were one of the most powerful people in the empire. You were able to build mosques. You were able to build soup kitchens.

• 41:13Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  You were able to build your own network of patronage. The ones that didn't make it, they're stuck in the palace, teaching elocution lessons to these slave girls from Poland and Russia and um it's a more anonymous life. It's perhaps because there are fewer of them, there is a better sort of chance of a decent outcome for the eunuchs. You know, they have a purpose. They always have a purpose. There's always going to be women there. Whereas for the women, if they don't meet the soul desire and they don't fulfill the sexual function, then another life awaits them.

• 41:42Kate Lister?

  That's that out on your ear. Sorry, love. Oh, God. So when do we start to see the decline of this institution then?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  So the power of women really starts to change at the beginning of the eighteenth century. So the last really powerful one um is Gunush Sultan. She's sort of the Valide Sultan of Sultan Mustafa the Second and Ahmed the Third. So she dies in seventeen fifteen. So that's the end of really the powerful women. After that, the Ottoman Empire starts to change in its nature. So there's this big war with the Europeans that starts with the siege of Vienna in sixteen eighty-three. That ends in sixteen ninety-nine with an Ottoman catastrophic defeat. And it really causes some soul searching and some changes in how the state is run. So in part, the change in the role of women is reflective of that. The state administration becomes more

• 42:35Speaker 02

  professionalized and and moves away from the palace a little bit. That's for the women. I mean, the the Valide Sultan remains a powerful woman. There is still the system of Haseki's a favorite. So that continues all the way until the nineteen twenties with the the last Sultan who leaves in nineteen twenty-two. But for enslavement, that starts to change as with other places in the world. Sort of the middle of the nineteenth century, the eighteen thirties onwards is when slavery as an institution starts to be increasingly challenged within the Ottoman realms.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  It doesn't end though, and I think it's important to note that, you know, slavery in different forms, as in in different parts of the world that engage in abolitionist initiatives, it often just changed in nature. So this trade in in women from the Black Sea and from the Caucasus, for example, that goes under a profound change. So first of all, the main supplier for the Ottomans was their sort of subject state in the Crimea, the Crimean Khanate. That's conquered by Russia in seventeen eighty-three, so that cuts off that supply. So the Ottomans then looked towards the Caucasus, an area called Circassia, sort of where Georgia is, above where Georgia is now. That area

• 43:53Speaker 02

  undergoes invasion by Russia across the middle of the nineteenth century and ethnic cleansing and genocide, meaning that hundreds of thousands of Circassian refugees flood into the Ottoman Empire in the eighteen sixties and the eighteen seventies. It's from these populations that this trade in enslaved concubines continues and will continue at least into the eighteen nineties. It's not formally officially said to have stopped until nineteen oh nine. I mean, there's lots of laws, right? So, I mean, the slave market in Istanbul is shut down in eighteen forty-seven. There's a whole bunch of laws banning the Mediterranean slave trade, the Circassian slave trade, the

• 44:35Speaker 02

  African slave trade between eighteen forty-seven and eighteen fifty-seven. There's another law in eighteen eighty-nine, they sign up to the anti-slavery initiative in eighteen ninety, but all this does really is it pushes things under the radar. Abolishing slavery does not mean that all enslaved people are freed on abolition. And so many of the women who were still enslaved at the time of informal abolition in the eighteen forties and the eighteen fifties remain enslaved in some cases until they're freed under the New Republic in nineteen twenty-four. It's still there as an institution, and it's not just women who are enslaved. There's there's all different kinds of enslavement that continues into the nineteenth and in some cases, the early twentieth century.

• 45:20Kate Lister?

  An empire is around doing its thing for about six hundred years.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, six hundred years.

• 45:26Kate Lister?

  Six hundred. And in all of that, I think I know what you're gonna say to this one. And in all of that time, was there ever a harem for women? Did that ever happen? Was there ever a sultana somewhere where I'll have one of them? Thank you very much.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  No, I mean, there are enslaved men who perform a kind of role like that, but as dancers. So they're called kurchaks and they're not really for the imperial women, they're for the benefit of the sultan. So Ottoman sexuality is a whole different podcast, I think, but it's complicated. And Ottoman sultans can like men and boys as much as they can like girls and women. So there are sort of these, these sort of nubile boys who are able, as long as they are clean shaven and youthful looking. I know, I know.

• 46:11Kate Lister?

  No, but it's, it's just interesting, like it's horrendous. I'll preface everything by saying it's horrendous, but just, just looking at it. Is you see that all over the place. It's this, uh, sex with men is fine as long as the, um, the one who's bottoming. Quote unquote is basically a proxy woman, that they have to be young, they have to be clean shaven, they have to look feminine. And it's the youth that's a part of that. You don't tend to get, or at least I'm sure it'll be somewhere, but I can't think where it is. Like this idea that it's all right, just have sex with, with another bloke, that you're both of the same age and that you've both got beards and that you go to the pub for a pint afterwards. It's not that.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  I mean, we do have some instances of that. I mean, one of the most famous ones is, is Mehmed the Conqueror, Mehmed the Second, who fell in love with Vlad the Impaler's younger brother. Razu. And we don't know if they actually sort of engaged in sexual activity, but some of the poetry that Mehmed wrote for him is filthy.

• 47:05Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, really, really filthy stuff. So.

• 47:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, I like that. Okay.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Although the, the nubile boy thing was a really important part of Ottoman sexuality, there is definitely other kinds of male male relationships.

• 47:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Um, and in terms of women. We do, you know, we don't have that many examples for unfortunately obvious reasons about lesbians, partly because Ottoman culture just didn't recognise them as a thing. But we have some, for example, there's a poet from the beginning of the 19th century, Leila Hanam, who seems to be, from her poetry, in love with women and has sexual relationships with women. She refuses her marriage. So what she represents is a really important, interesting period in sort of late 18th, early 19th century Ottoman history, is this sort of really interesting changing of role for women outside the palace. She's an elite woman, she's not in the palace, but she sort of defines herself by casting off the expectations

• 48:03Speaker 02

  of male society and going off and doing her thing. And she expresses that in her poetry by taking new poetic forms and rhythms and meters. And so these women are there, they didn't have harams, unfortunately for the story here, or fortunately, I suppose. But, you know, these sorts of relationships do exist. And of course, in a place like the harem, where hundreds of women are enclosed with each other for years.

• 48:27Kate Lister?

  It's gonna happen, innit?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  It's gonna happen.

• 48:29Kate Lister?

  It's gonna happen. It's interesting that lesbianism rarely gets a look in in the writers, although there was, there was a book I was reading recently about the history of lesbianism in the Islamic world. And there just seemed to have been some acknowledgement of this behaviour, even even though they don't really understand it. There's lots of reference to grinding and to.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ottoman people use the word rubbers.

• 48:51Kate Lister?

  Yeah, rubbers, that's the one. Rubbers, grinding, all this kind of stuff. And there was one writer, his name completely escapes me. He describes it as they're clashing shields instead of a shield and a sword. And it's this kind of, again, back to that anathema effect, but they don't have a penis. What on earth are they doing?

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely. No, there there definitely are mentions of them. I mean, but the the idea that that would constitute sex for an Ottoman male is just beyond.

• 49:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter. Whatever they're doing is it's just jolly japes and it's not, it's not proper, proper sex. Did did we have any gay harams then? Is, I know that that's a huge question. Was it always women?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always women within the harem. And that's because the harem is defined by. Genitalia essentially. So

• 49:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Any, any man who's not an immediate relative, like a boy of the Sultan or the Sultan himself, they can't come anywhere near it. So this doesn't mean to say that the Sultan wouldn't take sexual advantage of his enslaved.

• 49:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Men as, as he would with his enslaved women. And that same thing would go for other elite households too. But no, there's no formal harem, partly also because there's a legal justification to some extent.

• 50:01Kate Lister?

  Making babies, isn't it?

• 50:03Speaker 02

  It's making babies, but also, you know, when the Quran was written, just like when the Bible was written, slavery was normal and it's included as part of the legal system, you know, with rights and obligations for, for slave owners and, and for enslaved people. But yeah, so enslaving women and using them sexually isn't such a big deal. Whereas having relations with a man, regardless of their age, is technically breaking the law. It's technically adultery and sex outside marriage. So you, you would never have something formal for that. So it's all kind of hush, hush.

• 50:36Kate Lister?

  It is, isn't it? I think the, even the concept of a harem is, is it's very, very male centered. I think if you said to any woman, you can have four hundred virgins to do some, that's just a nightmare situation. That's just, what on earth would you do with that?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the paranoia of the Ottoman Empire is always the end of the dynasty. I mean, there's several periods where, you know, particularly in the eighteenth century, where we have some aging Sultans who aren't as virile perhaps as they might have been in previous generations. And so it's important to have lots of options because

• 51:12Kate Lister?

  I suppose it is. I suppose it is.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  If there's no, because the idea, you know, this empire is so tied to that one family, to that one dynasty. There's no idea of what happens next. There's no alternative.

• 51:23Kate Lister?

  Yeah. I just, I'm just thinking of just like, if you said like four hundred male virgins, all squeaky voiced and spotty faced and just.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Some people would enjoy that. I don't know.

• 51:33Kate Lister?

  Hello, come on, oh god, this is awful, it's just a fleet of sexual incompetence. What on earth am I supposed to do with this? Michael, you have been so fascinating to talk to, thank you so much. If people want to know more about you, and they should, and your work, where can they find you?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm online in various places, University of Greenwich in London, so you're welcome to have a look at my website and have a look there. And I'm also happy to send in a little, a reading list to share.

• 51:59Kate Lister?

  Oh, please do, yes, people always want book recommendations. And will you come back and tell us more about this fascinating history?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Listen, whenever you want me back, I will be here.

• 52:07Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much, you've been marvellous.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 52:12Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Michael for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please do give us a review, a like and follow along, wherever it is you get your podcasts, it does actually really help us. And coming up, we have got an episode on the sex life of Freud. Oh, how very Freudian. And another which revisits a favourite episode from earlier this year, and we will be asking, who was the Virgin Mary? Essential information just in time for Christmas. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.