Sex, Power, and Politics: The Real Story Behind the Ottoman Imperial Harem
A Review of Leslie Peirce’s The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
The concept of the “harem” has occupied the minds of European observers for a very long time. I’ve written before about how the Europeans came to see the harem, starting with the Sultan’s own “debauched” household, as a representation of everything that was wrong with Muslim societies. At the same time, they instrumentalized their conception of the harem as a tool to construct the Orient as Europe’s inferior other to justify their colonization efforts from the mid-19th century onward. Ottoman intellectuals like Fatma Aliye, on the other hand, challenged this view and responded to this discourse by trying to present the harem to their European audiences more as a domestic space.
While Western observers imagined it to be a place of pleasure from where the Sultan reigned over his subjects, some Ottoman thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries also attributed the “decline” of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of the influence of women in the Imperial Harem, as I’ve also briefly mentioned in my post on the idea of Ottoman decline. This narrative, which came to be known as the “sultanate of women” (with derogatory undertones) and assumed that the influential roles that women played at the time were the root cause of all types of problems in the Empire, was also very popular among Turkish historians until the 1980s.
This is where the Ottoman historian Leslie Peirce made a crucial intervention. Her The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, published in 1993, did a great job of separating fact from fiction and portrayed the imperial harem as a complex institution that had its own hierarchical structure and that played a key role in Ottoman politics. This was a far cry from what the European Orientalists imagined the harem to be. Moreover, she argued that while the women in the harem did indeed begin to wield considerable influence in Ottoman political life from the mid-16th century onwards, this was because of some very specific changes that the Ottoman Empire was going through at the time. These shifts transformed the Imperial Harem into a vital institution that started to occupy a central place in the politics of the Empire.
Peirce begins the book by challenging the idea that women in the harem were powerless outside of their domestic environment because they were secluded in the Palace. This view was voiced by European observers in the 16th and 17th centuries and was also later picked up and reproduced by modern historians. The reasoning behind it stemmed from the Europeans’ adherence to the dichotomy between “public/commonwealth/male” and “private/domestic/female.” Since the women were confined to the domestic environment, the Europeans argued, they could not exercise any real power in the public sphere.
Peirce, however, turns this idea on its head, arguing instead that for the Ottomans, the dichotomy was not between public and private or between genders. Instead, it was between the “interior” and “exterior,” where the interior had the superior importance. What this meant was that being close to the “inner” circle of the Sultan’s household was what determined a person’s degree of power. The closer you were to the Sultan, the more power you had. And since the women in the imperial harem were integral parts of the Sultan’s inner circle, they could exercise considerable influence in the outer world, especially from the mid-16th century onwards.
For Peirce, the pivotal point of transformation in the structure of the Imperial Harem came during the reign of Suleyman I (known as Suleyman the Magnificent). To fully appreciate why this shift was important, however, we need to know a little bit about the Ottoman politics of reproduction during the 14th and 15th centuries.
One key thing that Peirce drew attention to was the increasing reliance of the sultans on the concubines for reproduction. Although the first Ottoman sultans did take legal wives, especially royal Byzantium princesses, as well as concubines, by the end of the 14th century, reproduction through concubinage became the norm for the Ottoman rulers. The reasoning behind this shift in practice was to protect the integrity of the dynasty and prevent any future challenges to the patrimony. Since the slave concubines were seen as having no “lineage,” the Sultans born of them would be the descendants of the Ottoman dynasty only.
The other important feature of the Ottoman politics of reproduction before Suleyman I’s reign was the “one woman/one son” policy. The sultans maintained their sexual relationship with a concubine until the woman gave birth to a male heir. After the birth of a son, the Sultan either did not have sex with the concubine anymore or used some form of birth control. And once the son reached an appropriate age, he was sent to a province as governor, while his mother accompanied him there.
Peirce argues that this one woman/one son policy was the result of the open succession model the Ottomans implemented, where every prince had a right to the throne. Once a Sultan died, the princes had to compete with their brothers to become the next ruler, and in this struggle, which usually cost the loser his life, the mother was a prince’s main ally. It was understandable, therefore, that the Ottomans did not want brothers to compete for the support of their mother, too, in this already difficult (!) process. Hence, the one woman/one son policy.
Suleyman I went ahead and broke with pretty much all of these traditional policies of reproduction during his reign. Instead of reproducing through multiple concubines, for instance, Suleyman limited his sexual activities to a single concubine, Hurrem (known as Roxelana in the West), and elevated her to the position of haseki, or favorite.
Not only that, but Suleyman did not follow the one woman/one son policy, either. On the contrary, he had multiple sons with Hurrem. What this led to was that instead of following her sons to the provinces they were assigned to, as she was supposed to, Hurrem stayed back in Istanbul, essentially becoming an integral part of the Sultan’s household, which concentrated more and more in Istanbul. Through this newly established proximity to the Sultan’s inner circle, the women in the Imperial Harem started to wield a considerable amount of political influence, and it all started with Hurrem Sultan in the mid-16th century.
The breaks with the traditional politics of reproduction introduced during the reign of Suleyman I progressed further in the post-Suleymanic period. According to Peirce, two of the most important changes that followed the reign of Suleyman I were the termination of the princely governorate (during the reign of Mehmed III) and the introduction of the principle of seniority in place of open succession (Selim II and Murad III).
These changes, Peirce argues, reflected a key structural shift for the Ottomans. According to her, from the mid-16th century onwards, the Ottoman Empire gradually transitioned from being an expansionist state, led by a warrior Sultan, to a more sedentary and bureaucratic one, governed by a collective political elite. As a result, the imperial household started to be consolidated in Istanbul, where the Sultan spent more and more of his time. In turn, the harem became a vital institution that was charged with ensuring the continuity of the Ottoman dynasty, while the women in the harem, especially the Sultan’s mother, called the valide sultan, acquired new roles and came to wield a considerable amount of influence in state affairs.
The valide sultan was an interesting and intriguing figure. Peirce points out that as the sultans became more secluded in the Harem during the post-Suleymanic period, the loyalty of the Ottoman subjects gradually took on a more abstract form and was transferred from the individual Sultan to the Ottoman dynasty itself. In this new setup, the valide sultans became a matriarchal symbol, who were responsible for ensuring that the dynasty continued to live on, especially in times of crisis. When the Sultan was not of age to govern or was mentally incompetent, for instance, they took on the role of regent and played major roles in the governance of the Empire. In fact, some of these women became so influential that they went into power struggles with other members of the Ottoman ruling elite, including the grand viziers, which sometimes led to their deaths.
Besides having a major influence in the Ottoman imperial household, the women of the imperial harem also put this newly acquired power to use in the outside world as well. It may have been true that these women were mostly secluded in the harem, but this did not mean they could not exert any influence in the public sphere.
One way they did this was to establish contacts through a variety of means, including using former household slaves as representatives or marrying their daughters to important statesmen of the Empire. Moreover, the women of the Imperial Harem displayed their power and the power of the dynasty by commissioning the construction of various pious foundations. The costs of these buildings were covered by the women themselves, through the various sources of income assigned to them personally. According to Peirce, the reason why the women of the harem could increasingly take part in these types of representations of the dynasty was that, during the post-Suleymanic period, the sovereignty and legitimacy of the sultan came to rely on “demonstrations of piety and the support of the holy law” in which the women could also take part.
Finally, Peirce also tells the story of the role the imperial women played in the diplomatic relations of the Ottoman Empire. She demonstrates how women such as Hurrem, Nurbanu, Safiye, and Kosem Sultans (all of them important figures in the 16th and 17th century Ottoman history) played their part in Ottoman diplomacy by exchanging gifts and letters with various diplomatic actors or foreign sovereigns, especially queens. Meanwhile, the sultans also used the imperial women to promote peace, as was the case with Hurrem during the reign of Suleyman I. In that sense, not only did they play crucial roles domestically, but these women also made their presence and power felt in the international affairs of the Empire as well.
Although it was published more than 30 years ago, Peirce’s work on the Imperial Harem continues to be a must-read for anyone interested in early modern Ottoman history. Her work was one of the first attempts to bring gender as a unit of historical analysis to Ottoman historiography. She demonstrated that women did indeed play important roles in Ottoman politics in the 16th and 17th centuries, not because the Sultans were weak and deranged, however, as some Orientalists and popular authors (Turkish) claimed, but because of very specific structural changes that the Ottoman Empire went through at the time. Her book demystifies the Imperial Harem and presents it as an institution that had its own hierarchy and rules and that came to take a vital place within the Ottoman state apparatus from the mid-16th century onwards.
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Read very quickly. Would need sometime to dive in, read the book, reflect on the content and what it means for us, former ottomans, contrast in the light of our contemporary societies.... One thing strikes me from the get go, observed from our mothers, grand mothers, great grand mothers...It is not the power games, the internal politics, the intimate physical and emotional contact (to use a more whole comcept in this humble writer's view) which there definitely was a lot of that.
It is, I was saying, culture. Yes, culture. The women in a Harem, and the model they carried out (one man, several wives and children growing with several parental figures), were highly cultured, refined ( in more than one aspect good or bad, granted). Not defending or praising anything here. Just sharing. That state of things trickled down to family, clan, tribe relationships in that type society. Women, from the most powerful to tge humblest, were cultured in all kinds of arts, speech, culinary, abode, bath and body care. music and imstrument playing, poetry, storytelling and history ( popular and otherwise), textiles and clothings, home keeping ( yes there is culture in that too...), quranic precepts and related...and of course, but it is just one of many aspects. how to hold with an absolute grip a House without seeming overpowering, just passing by...
In other words, to extend this Harem core question to the rest of the Ottoman society and what is contemporarily called ( reductively in this writer's view) empire, culture was at the core of the feminine centred household, power supported it, not the other way round.
Just my two cents, regretting already this comment for how long it became. Sorry for that. And...thank you again for opening up this fascinating subject. Salam
This morning I read a piece in LinkedIn on how "Wives in family businesses hold powerful, often unseen influence over succession outcomes. Their attitudes and roles—whether active or behind the scenes—can shape leadership transitions in unexpected ways. Including them in planning is critical for success. this is from the work of Barbara Cosson (she/her) and Michael Gilding
Clearly even as many things have changed some things haven't! And that's a good thing IMO!
https://familybusiness.org/content/over-my-dead-body-the-unseen-influence-of-wives-on-succession