The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem

Conclusion

Conclusion When considering the portrait of life in the imperial Ottoman harem that emerges from these memoirs, intriguingly enough we can conclude that the authors both corroborate and dispel the picture of harem life that flourished in the popular imagination then as now. For while in some aspects life in the harem differed wildly from that experienced by anyone not living in an Ottoman palace, in most ways the existence portrayed here varied little from that led by aristocratic European women of the day. We have seen that the imperial harem did indeed keep its female residents in seclusion from the public at large, and from inclusion in male social life, in line with the cultural standards that governed the participation of upper-strata women in public life throughout the Muslim world. Foreign as these strictures may seem from our vantage point, apart from the custom of veiling they differed little from the practice of contemporaneous European nobility, which similarly restricted the manner and locations in which respectable ladies of rank might appear in public and function in public life. In our authors’ descriptions of the concubines and royal children, we have met with lives devoted to useful activity and the development of talents (in the Ottoman palace, frequently musical), as well as lives marked by indolence and scant education—traits that the Ottoman imperial family also shared with contemporaneous European aristocracy. We have encountered the riches bestowed on a prince’s children, concubines, and high-level staff, in line with their rank, and the opulence of their surroundings—riches that every royal court employs to underscore its claim to stand at the pinnacle of society. And in contrast to popular depictions of the Ottoman harem as a place of cruelty and fear, we have seen portrayals of warm and nurturing love between parents and children. While our knowledge of relations between parents and children in the Ottoman palace over the centuries is scant, quite  | conclusion likely this warming of relations between parents and children there evolved at the same time it did among European aristocracy: primarily only over the course of the nineteenth century.¹ Our authors have depicted slavery, both female and male, surviving into the third decade of the twentieth century, yet slavery that from all three accounts ostensibly avoided cruelty (at least once the slaves entered palace service), provided a means of manumission, and included paths for the talented to rise to positions of eminent authority and honor. The slavery depicted here furnished the recruits, who were then schooled at considerable length, once they entered palace service, in the operation and management of a large public institution whose essential purpose lay in housing the head of state and in producing and nurturing successors to him. In addition to these purposes, as Princess Ayşe corroborates, under Sultan Abdülhamid the palace also became the effective seat of government, with its male slaves employed toward political ends in addition to household domestic service. For this political involvement some of Abdülhamid’s eunuchs later paid with their lives, wrongly so in the Princess’s estimation. The memoirs certainly lay to rest two popular fantasies of harem life. One is the widespread supposition in contemporaneous Europe and America, where miscegenation aroused titillation, fear, and condemnation, that the Ottoman sultan took to bed women of any race.² All three memoirs make clear that imperial concubines uniformly originated in the Caucasus. The second popular fantasy is that of unbridled sexuality on the part of the Ottoman prince. Indeed only the concubine raises the subject of sex at all, and that because, as she says, she knows her audience is wondering. Far from dissolute abandon, we have seen that dictates of practical considerations decidedly limited the tally of concubines a prince might take, despite the fact that Ottoman court custom allowed the monarch (and after the 1850s, all princes) such freedom in theory. As a result in part of the practical limitations on the prince in choosing concubines, the number of children in the Ottoman imperial family remained within manageable limits. And so we see the harem system at work: ensuring the future of the dynasty, in the face of high infant mortality, through the use of multiple mothers to produce royal offspring, yet structured to avoid an excessive proliferation of these offspring, as too many rival claimants could undermine the unity of the empire. In producing heirs, the harem system sought a balance between extremes. 1...