Imperial Ottoman

Society & Culture · In depth

The Ottoman Family and the Imperial Harem

Family structure, marriage, divorce, the imperial harem, concubines, the valide sultan, and the place of slavery in the Ottoman household from the medieval to the modern period.

The Ottoman Family and the Imperial Harem

The family was the basic unit of Ottoman society. From the imperial household of the sultan to the household of a peasant, from the urban household of a merchant to the semi-nomadic encampment of a Yörük herder, Ottoman life was organized around marriage, children, and the management of an extended domestic unit. This article surveys the structure of the Ottoman family, the institution of marriage, the place of the harem in the elite household, the workings of the imperial harem at Topkapı, and the role of slavery in the system. It complements the broader overview of Ottoman society and culture, and the daily routines of the harem are described in the article on life in the imperial harem.

The extended household

The typical Ottoman household was a large, multi-generational unit. The patriarch — the senior male — lived in the same house, or in a nearby house in the same courtyard, as his married sons, his unmarried daughters, his widowed mother, his unmarried sisters, and sometimes his married daughters and their husbands. The household was a single economic unit: it produced, it consumed, it sold in the bazaar, and it paid its taxes to the state as a single fiscal entity.

The size of the household was a measure of the family’s prosperity. A wealthy household of the seventeenth or eighteenth century might contain dozens of people: the patriarch, his wife, his mother, his sons and their wives, his unmarried daughters and sisters, his young children, his elderly relatives, his servants, his slaves, and the guests and lodgers who passed through. The konak, the great house of a pasha or a wealthy merchant, was an entire compound, with its own courtyard, its own kitchen, its own hamam, and its own stables.

The household was governed by a strict internal hierarchy. The patriarch had authority over the men; the hanım, the senior woman, had authority over the women, the children, and the servants. The senior woman generally controlled the kitchen, the household accounts, the education of the children, and the marriage of the daughters, and she had a kind of moral authority that the patriarch could not easily override.

Marriage

Marriage in Ottoman society was a contract between two families, mediated by a process of negotiation. The first step was the söz, the verbal agreement, generally reached by the fathers of the bride and groom with the help of a senior relative or a friend. The second step was the nişan, the engagement, marked by the exchange of rings, the giving of a small gift to the bride, and a celebration in which sweets were distributed to the neighbors. The third step was the düğün, the wedding itself, which could last for several days and which was a major social event in the neighborhood.

The marriage contract was a serious legal document. It was drawn up by a kadı (judge) and registered in the court records, and it specified the marriage portion, the obligations of the husband, the conditions of any divorce, and the rights of the bride. The bride’s mehr, the dower that the husband had to pay her in case of divorce or his death, was a fixed sum that the bride herself controlled.

Polygamy was permitted under Islamic law, and a Muslim man could have up to four wives simultaneously. In practice, the great majority of Ottoman men — including, with the exception of certain sultans, most of the imperial household — had only one wife at a time, and the conditions of polygamy were difficult. A man marrying a second, third, or fourth wife had to have the means to support each wife in a separate household, to treat them with strict equity, and to obtain the consent of the first wife. The cost of multiple households, the difficulty of living with multiple mothers-in-law, and the social pressure against it meant that polygamy was most common among the very rich, the very old, and the very infertile. The devshirme system, by contrast, supplied a steady flow of unrelated women and men into the imperial household; it is treated in the devshirme system article in the military silo.

Divorce and widowhood

Divorce was a legal option for both men and women, although in practice it was far more common for a man to divorce a woman than the reverse. A man could divorce his wife by a simple declaration, and the procedure was not subject to the consent of the judge; a woman seeking divorce had to apply to the court and had to show specific grounds, such as the husband’s failure to provide, his cruelty, his long absence, or his inability to support her.

The most common form of divorce was the talak, the husband’s unilateral repudiation. Once pronounced, it could be revoked within a period of three months, but after that point it was final. The wife retained the custody of the children (with the specific ages at which the children moved to the father’s custody depending on whether they were boys or girls), she kept her mehr, and she retained a right to a share of the household property.

Widowhood was a common and respected state. Ottoman society made extensive provision for widows, and the evkaf — the pious foundations — supported a number of institutions for the support of widows, the education of orphans, and the care of the elderly. A widow who could support herself was generally expected to remain unmarried; a widow who could not was often married to a brother of the deceased husband, in the custom of levirate marriage.

The harem in the elite household

The harem — literally, “forbidden” or “sacred” — was the women’s quarter of the household. In the konak of a wealthy pasha or merchant, the harem occupied the back of the house, the upper floor, or a separate wing, and it was entered only by the patriarch, the female relatives, the male children before the age of circumcision, and the eunuchs who guarded the household. Male guests were entertained in the selamlık, the men’s reception hall at the front of the house.

The harem was not, as it is sometimes misunderstood in the West, a place of sexual slavery. It was the private domestic space of the family, and it was governed by a complex set of customs, rules of etiquette, and an internal hierarchy. The senior woman of the harem — generally the mother of the patriarch — was at the top of the hierarchy; the patriarch’s wife and the wives of his sons occupied the middle ranks; the unmarried daughters, the sisters, and the daughters-in-law were at the bottom.

The harem was also the principal site of the household’s domestic production. The women of the harem organized the kitchen, the laundry, the cleaning, the education of the children, the management of the slaves, the production of the textiles, and the maintenance of the wardrobe. In a wealthy household, the harem also produced a substantial portion of the household’s income: the women sold embroidery, lace, and textiles in the bazaar, managed the household’s urban property, and sometimes administered the household’s rural estates through agents.

The imperial harem at Topkapı

The imperial harem at Topkapı Palace was the most elaborate version of the elite Ottoman harem. It was a separate walled quarter in the heart of the palace, with its own courtyards, its own apartments, its own school, its own hamam, its own mosque, and its own staff of hundreds of eunuchs, attendants, and servants. It housed the valide sultan (the mother of the reigning sultan), the sultan’s haseki (the principal consort), the ikbal (the secondary consorts), the gözde (the favored ladies), the kalfa (the senior attendants), the cariye (the enslaved women), the children of the dynasty, and the female relatives of the sultan.

The harem was governed by a strict internal hierarchy. The valide sultan was at the top; the haseki was second; the ikbal and the gözde were below. The harem also had a large staff of enslaved women, who rose by merit and seniority. The most powerful women in the empire — the valide sultans Hürrem, Nurbanu, Safiye, Kösem, and Turhan — were largely women who had been brought into the dynasty as concubines and who had climbed the ranks of the harem over decades of service.

The harem had its own schooling system. The children of the dynasty, both boys and girls, were taught the Qur’an, Arabic and Persian, Ottoman history, calligraphy, music, embroidery, and the etiquette of the court. The boys were removed from the harem at the age of circumcision and sent to the Enderun, the palace school, and from there to provincial governorships. The girls remained in the harem until their marriage, and the most prestigious marriage of all was the marriage of a princess to a senior statesman of the empire. The palace of the dynasty is described in the article on Ottoman architecture, and the principal architect of its great monuments was Mimar Sinan.

The valide sultan

The valide sultan — the mother of the reigning sultan — was the most powerful woman in the empire. She had her own apartments, her own revenue, her own staff, and her own political household, and she often exercised considerable political influence, especially when her son was a minor. The valide sultan of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — Kösem Sultan, Turhan Hatice, Hatice Muazzez, Bezm-i Âlem — were the effective rulers of the empire during long periods of minority and seclusion of the sultans. The principal consort Hürrem Sultan, the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, was one of the first women of the harem to exercise a comparable influence, and her mosque, designed by Mimar Sinan, is one of the monuments of the age.

The political importance of the valide sultan reached its peak in the so-called Sultanate of Women (Kadınlar Saltanatı) of the seventeenth century, when a succession of powerful valide sultans and senior consorts effectively governed the empire. The period is sometimes called the Sultanate of Women because the names of the reigns of Ahmed I, Mustafa I, Osman II, Murad IV, Ibrahim, and Mehmed IV are all associated with the influence of one or another powerful woman of the harem.

Concubines and the place of slavery

Slavery was a legal institution in the Ottoman Empire from beginning to end. The household of every wealthy Ottoman contained enslaved men and women, and the status of an enslaved person was a recognized legal category. The children of enslaved mothers, however, were generally born free, and many of the most important figures in Ottoman political life — including several of the grand viziers, the great majority of the chief white eunuchs, and a number of the valide sultans — were the children of enslaved women.

The principal source of the concubines of the harem was the system of cariye selection, in which young women were recruited from the Christian populations of the empire — the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia — and brought to Istanbul. The most beautiful, the most intelligent, and the best educated were selected for the imperial harem; the others were sold into the households of the elite, the merchants, and the religious foundations.

The system was abolished in the course of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century the harem of the sultan had been dissolved and the slave trade of the empire had been brought to an end. The legacy of the system, however, lived on in the cultural memory of the empire, and the harem continued to be a powerful symbol in Western representations of the Ottoman world long after the institution itself had disappeared.

Children and education

Children were welcomed as gifts of God. A naming ceremony on the seventh day after birth gave the child a name, often of the Prophet, his family, or a local saint, and the child was sprinkled with salt to protect it from evil. Boys were circumcised in an elaborate public ceremony, often timed to coincide with the circumcision of a prince — an event known as a sünnet düğünü that could last for days.

For the sons of the ruling class, education began at home and continued at a medrese, where the curriculum centered on the Qur’an, the hadith, Islamic law, Arabic and Persian grammar, logic, mathematics, and astronomy. The most promising students went on to specialized military-administrative schools, and a small number were selected for the palace school, the Enderun, where the brightest of the devshirme recruits were trained for the highest offices of the state.

Girls of the elite learned domestic skills — cooking, sewing, embroidery, household management, and the recitation of the Qur’an — at home. Among the dervish orders and in some Sufi lodges, women played important teaching roles, and a number of women poets and mystics, such as the sixteenth-century figure Mihri Hatun, were celebrated in their own lifetimes. The devshirme system is treated in more detail in a separate article on the devshirme system in the military silo.

The end of the old order

The nineteenth century brought the most thoroughgoing social transformation of the family in Ottoman history. The Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and 1856 began a process of modernizing the legal status of women, the regulation of marriage, and the abolition of slavery. The Mecelle, the civil code promulgated between 1869 and 1876, codified the rules of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The harem of the sultan was dissolved in 1909, and the slave trade of the empire was progressively brought to an end. The Constitution of 1876 and the rise of the women’s press, the women’s schools, and the women’s rights organizations of the late Ottoman period laid the foundation for the much more radical transformations of the early Republic.

The legacy of the Ottoman family, however, lives on. The pattern of the extended family, the elaborate wedding ceremony, the respect for the senior woman of the household, the careful negotiation of the marriage contract, the strong identification with the maternal line, and the continuing importance of the household as an economic unit are all features of Turkish, Balkan, and Middle Eastern family life that the Ottomans helped to establish.