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 treats the structure of the 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. It complements the broader overview of Ottoman society and culture; the daily routines of the harem are in life in the imperial harem.

Key dates

c. 1453 — Mehmed II consolidates the imperial household at Topkapı; the harem becomes a fixed institution of the palace.
c. 1502/06–1558 — Hürrem Sultan, haseki of Süleyman I, the first legally wed wife of an Ottoman sultan since the 14th century.
1522–1578 — Mihrimah Sultan, daughter of Süleyman and Hürrem, the wealthiest woman of the 16th century.
c. 1589–1651 — Kösem Sultan, haseki of Ahmed I and valide sultan of Murad IV and Ibrahim; effective regent of the empire, assassinated in 1651.
1627–1683 — Turhan Sultan, valide sultan of Mehmed IV, regent 1651–1656.
1839, 1856 — The Tanzimat reform edicts begin to regulate the legal status of women, marriage, and slavery.
1924 — Exile of the Ottoman dynasty; the imperial harem at Topkapı ceases to exist.

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, consumed, sold in the bazaar, and paid its taxes to the state as a single fiscal entity.

A wealthy household of the 17th or 18th 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, kitchen, hamam, and 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 was a contract between two families. 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 was the nişan, the engagement, marked by the exchange of rings, the giving of a small gift to the bride, and a celebration. The third was the düğün, the wedding, which could last for several days and was a major social event in the neighborhood.

The marriage contract was a serious legal document, drawn up by a kadı (judge) and registered in the court records. 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. Halil İnalcık, in The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (1973), makes the point that the Ottoman marriage contract was substantially more protective of the wife’s property rights than its early modern European counterparts — the mehr functioned as a kind of compulsory insurance.

Polygamy was permitted under Islamic law, but the great majority of Ottoman men had only one wife at a time. The conditions of polygamy were difficult: a man marrying a second wife had to maintain each wife in a separate household, treat them with strict equity, and 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.

Divorce and widowhood

Divorce was a legal option for both men and women, although men divorced women far more often than the reverse. A man could divorce by simple declaration; a woman seeking divorce had to apply to the court and had to show specific grounds — failure to provide, cruelty, long absence, or inability to support.

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 custody of the children (with the ages at which they moved to the father’s custody depending on their sex), she kept her mehr, and she retained a right to a share of the household property.

Widowhood was a common and respected state. 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 sometimes 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. Leslie Peirce’s argument in The Imperial Harem (1993), that the harem was a household of status and lineage rather than a seraglio of sex, has, in my view, the best of the recent revisionist cases. The harem was the private domestic space of the family, governed by a complex set of customs, rules of etiquette, and an internal hierarchy. The senior woman of the harem was at the top; 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 textiles, and the maintenance of the wardrobe. In a wealthy household, the harem produced a substantial portion of the household’s income: the women sold embroidery, lace, and textiles in the bazaar, managed urban property, and sometimes administered rural estates through agents.

The imperial harem at Topkapı

The imperial harem at Topkapı was the most elaborate version of the elite Ottoman harem. A separate walled quarter in the heart of the palace, with its own courtyards, apartments, school, hamam, mosque, and 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 (secondary consorts), the gözde (favored ladies), the kalfa (senior attendants), the cariye (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 below. The most powerful women of the 17th and 18th centuries — the valide sultans Nurbanu (c. 1525–1583, of probable Venetian or Jewish origin, haseki of Selim II and valide sultan of Murad III), Safiye (c. 1550–1618, of probable Albanian origin, haseki of Murad III and valide sultan of Mehmed III, described by the Venetian bailo Agostino Nani as the de facto ruler of the empire in the 1590s), Kösem (c. 1589–1651, haseki of Ahmed I, valide sultan of Murad IV and Ibrahim, effective regent and the wealthiest woman of her century before her assassination in 1651), and Turhan (1627–1683, haseki of Ibrahim I, valide sultan of Mehmed IV, regent 1651–1656) — were largely women who had been brought into the dynasty as cariye and had climbed the ranks of the harem over decades of service. The same was true of the earlier Hürrem Sultan (c. 1502/06–1558), the haseki of Süleyman I and the first legally wed wife of an Ottoman sultan since the 14th century; she died in 1558, eight years before Süleyman, and never held the title of valide sultan, because her son Selim II did not reign in her lifetime. Hürrem is sometimes mistakenly listed among the valide sultans; she is not, properly, one of them.

The valide sultan and the Sultanate of Women

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 influence over appointments, marriages, and the disposition of princes. The political importance of the valide sultan reached its peak in the so-called Sultanate of Women (Kadınlar Saltanatı) of the 17th century, when a succession of powerful valide sultans — Kösem above all, then Turhan, then Hatice Muazzez — effectively governed the empire during long minorities and seclusions of the sultans. The harem’s chief black eunuch, the Kızlar Ağası (also called the darüssaade ağası), was a parallel grand officer of state: he sat in the divan alongside the grand vizier, conducted diplomacy with foreign envoys in his own audience hall, and transmitted the sultan’s commands into the harem.

Concubines and the place of slavery

Slavery was a legal institution in the Ottoman Empire from beginning to end. Madeline Zilfi’s Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire (2010) is the indispensable account; her central point is that the slavery of the Ottoman household was, in its legal structure, very different from the chattel slavery of the Atlantic plantation, and that the children of enslaved mothers were generally born free and inherited as free persons. The household of every wealthy Ottoman contained enslaved men and women, and the status of an enslaved person was a recognized legal category. 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 progressively abolished over the course of the 19th century. The 1856 Hatt-ı Hümayun, the 1858 land code, the 1882 abolition of the slave trade, and a series of further measures over the next twenty years brought the institution to an end in law and in everyday use. The dynastic harem at Topkapı continued to function through the First World War and was finally dissolved only with the exile of the Ottoman dynasty in March 1924, when the caliphate itself was abolished.

Princes, succession, and the kafes

Until the late 16th century, Ottoman princes competed openly for the throne. On the death of a sultan, the eldest prince who could reach the capital first and secure the support of the Janissaries and the divan would succeed; fratricide, although not formal law, was repeatedly practiced to remove rival brothers. The sünnet — the circumcision of a prince — was the public ritual that announced a prince’s coming of age, and provincial governorships (the sancak) in Manisa, Amasya, Trabzon, Kefe, Konya, and Bursa were the training grounds of the dynasty.

The kafes — literally, “cage” — changed this. The system, generally associated with the early 17th century and codified under Murad IV and the Köprülü grand viziers, required that on the accession of a new sultan all his brothers be confined in a suite of apartments in the inner harem and remain there for the rest of their lives. The eldest male of the dynasty succeeded not by merit or by competition but by seniority (ekber-i erşed). The kafes was intended to prevent civil war, but it produced a long line of sequestered, often disturbed sultans — Ibrahim, Mustafa II, Ahmed III, Selim III, Mustafa IV — and the system shaped Ottoman politics until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922.

“The princes of the Ottoman house live in the cage, neither permitted to marry in their own right nor to ride abroad in the city. They are waited on by their mothers, and they learn the Qur’an and the Persian poets. But they learn nothing of the world, and when at last one of them comes to the throne, he is a stranger to the very empire he is to govern.” — Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Turkish Letters (1589), the embassy of the Habsburg envoy to Süleyman’s court

The 19th century and the end of the old order

The 19th century brought the most thoroughgoing 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 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 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.