Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan (review)

In Ottoman Women Builders, Lucienne Thys-Şenocak elucidates the architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, mother of Sultan Mehmed IV, in an effective and very useful history of Ottoman architecture and courtly culture. In her examination of royal Ottoman female patronage, Thys-Şenocak employs an impressive range of crossdisciplinary tools and methodologies that highlights architectural patronage as the performance of gender. The author carefully untangles the web of sociohistorical circumstances and personal motivations that made the large-scale transformation of the built environment not just possible but advantageous for a high-ranking Ottoman woman.

Ottoman Women Builders was written with a broad audience of early modern scholars and students in mind. Its clear prose and helpful translations, together with a cleverly organized text, makes an otherwise specialized topic accessible to various disciplines. Chapter 1 offers a short introduction to the central themes of architecture, gender, patronage, and self-representation in the early modern Ottoman world. Specifically, it places these concerns within the historiography of Ottoman and early modern studies.

Chapters 2 and 3 constitute a comprehensive introduction to the life and historical context of Turhan Sultan and successfully ground a text that is insightful in its broad methodological scope. While chapter 2 focuses on Turhan Sultan's trajectory from a captured concubine to Queen Mother, chapter 3 contextualizes her experience in relation to that of Ottoman and European counterparts such as Nurbanu, Kösem, Safiye Sultan, Queen Elizabeth I, and Catherine and Maria de'Medici. What emerges from this comparative effort is a close reading of the particularities of Ottoman female patronage. While the visibility and legitimacy afforded by commissioning important works of art and architecture was sought by all imperial female patrons, Ottoman women did so with the primary purpose of advancing the political cause of their male heir: promoting the cause of the sons' rule and legitimizing their claim to empire. In the process, of course, they placed themselves knowingly, firmly, and visibly in the midst —physically and emblematically —of imperial greatness. Of particular interest is Thys-Şenocak's insight into the relationship between imperial women's life stages and Ottoman female agency and power.

Chapter 4 explores Turhan Sultan's patronage of a work of military architecture, the Seddü lbahir and Kumkale fortresses guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles. In her examination of Turhan Sultan's first architectural project, the author makes use of historical, art historical, documentary, archaeological, literary, and ethnographic evidence. Thys-S¸enocak successfully unravels a complex web of visual and textual information to argue convincingly that "Turhan Sultan's first architectural project is a complex agenda which included the valide's need to legitimize her own power and authority through these acts of patronage, but also a recognition that she had the responsibility, and was expected, to prepare her son . . . to become the same kind of famed sultan that his famed ancestors had been" (135).

Chapter 5 focuses on Turhan Sultan's most enduring and influential foundation, the Yeni Valide Mosque complex in Istanbul, located at the center of the city's commercial district. This section is perhaps the most deeply rooted in Islamic architectural history, although it employs a similarly impressive range of crossdisciplinary tools to analyze an expansive and complex building program. Thys-Şenocak's careful attention to the epigraphic information that adorns the walls of the mosque binds the multiple layers of her persuasive argument: as in the military forts at the Dardanelles, Turhan Sultan was driven by a desire to assert herself politically and to project her commitment to the formation of her son as a powerful ruler. In the face of her son's absence from the imperial center in favor of the city of Edirne and the increasing Ottoman "sultanic seclusion" of the seventeenth century, her complex also reaffirmed Istanbul's preeminence as the administrative and...