In Muslim culture harem means a sacred place or a sanctuary, which is forbidden to profane outsiders. The term was applied to the part of the household occupied by women and children and forbidden to men outside the family. The most famous member of the Ottoman sultan’s harem was Hurrem, wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Hurrem (1505?-1558) came to the harem as a slave-concubine. Like many of the sultan’s concubines, Hurrem was of foreign birth. Tradition holds that she was born Aleksandra Lisowska in what was then the kingdom of Poland and today is Ukraine. She was captured during a Tartar raid and enslaved. Between 1517 and 1520, when she was about fifteen years old, she entered the imperial harem. Venetian ambassadors’ reports insist that she was not outstandingly beautiful but was possessed of wonderful grace, charm, and good humor. These qualities gained her the Turkish nickname Hurrem, or “joyful one.” After her arrival in the harem, Hur-rem quickly became the imperial favorite.
Suleiman’s love for Hurrem led him to break all precedents for the role of a concubine, including the rule that concubines must cease having children once they gave birth to a male heir. By 1531 Hurrem had given birth to one daughter and five sons. In 1533 or 1534 Suleiman entered formal marriage with his consort—an unprecedented honor for a concubine. He reportedly gave his exclusive attention to his wife and also defied convention by allowing Hurrem to remain in the palace throughout her life instead of accompanying her son to a provincial governorship as other concubines had done.
Contemporaries were shocked by Hurrem’s influence over the sultan and resentful of the apparent role she played in politics and diplomacy. The Venetian ambassador Bassano wrote that “the Janissaries and the entire court hate her and her children likewise, but because the Sultan loves her, no one dares to speak.”6 She was suspected of using witchcraft to control the sultan and accused of ordering the death of the sultan’s first-born son (with another mother) in 1553. These stories were based on court gossip and rumor. The correspondence between Suleiman and Hurrem, unavailable until the nineteenth century, along with Suleiman’s own diaries, confirms her status as the sultan’s most trusted confidant and adviser. During his frequent absences, the pair exchanged passionate love letters. Hur-rem included information about the political situation and warnings about any potential uprisings.
She also intervened in affairs between the empire and her former home.
She wrote to Polish king Sigismund Augustus and seems to have helped Poland attain its privileged diplomatic status.
She brought a particularly feminine touch to diplomatic relations, sending the Persian shah and the Polish king personally embroidered articles.
Hurrem used her enormous pension to contribute a mosque, two schools, a hospital, a fountain, and two public baths to Istanbul. In Jer u salem, Mecca, and Istanbul, she provided soup kitchens and hospices for pilgrims and the poor. She died in 1558. When her husband died in 1566, their son Selim II (r. 1566-1574) inherited the throne.
Drawing from reports of contemporary Western observers, historians depicted Hurrem as a manipulative and power-hungry social climber. They saw her career as the beginning of a “sultanate of women” in which strong imperial leadership gave way to court intrigue and dissipation. More recent historians have emphasized the intelligence and courage Hurrem demonstrated in navigating the ruthlessly competitive world of the harem.
Hurrem’s journey from Ukrainian maiden to harem slave girl to sultan’s wife captured enormous
Public attention. She is the subject of numerous paintings, plays, and novels as well as an opera, a ballet, and a symphony by the composer Haydn. Interest in and suspicion of Hurrem continues. In 2003 a Turkish miniseries once more depicted her as a scheming intriguer.
Questions for Analysis
1. Compare Hurrem to other powerful early modern women such as Isabella of Castile,
Elizabeth I of England, and Catherine de’ Medici of France.
2. What can an exceptional woman like Hurrem reveal about the broader political and social world in which she lived?
Source: Leslie P. Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Other fronts, the Habsburgs conquered almost all of Hungary and Transylvania by 1699 (see Map 17.4). The Habsburgs completed their victory in 1718, with the Treaty of Passarowitz. From this point on, a weakened Ottoman empire ceased to pose a threat to Western Europe.
What social and economic changes affected central and eastern Europe from 1400 to 1650? (page 433)
From about 1400 to 1650 social and economic developments in eastern Europe diverged from those in western Europe. In the East, after enjoying relative freedom in the Middle Ages, peasants and townspeople lost freedom and fell under the economic, social, and legal authority of the nobles, who increased their power and prestige.
How did the rulers of Austria and Prussia manage to build powerful absolute monarchies? (page 438)
Within this framework of resurgent serfdom and entrenched nobility, Austrian and Prussian monarchs fashioned absolutist states in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These monarchs won absolutist control over standing armies, taxation, and representative bodies, but they did not question underlying social and economic relationships. Indeed, they enhanced the privileges of the nobles, who filled enlarged armies and growing state bureaucracies. In exchange for entrenched privileges over their peasants, nobles thus cooperated with the growth of state power.
Triumphant absolutism interacted spectacularly with the arts. Central and eastern European rulers built grandiose palaces, and even whole cities, like Saint Petersburg, to glorify their power and majesty.
What were the distinctive features of Russian and Ottoman absolutism in this period? (page 444)
In Russia the social and economic trends were similar, but the timing of political absolutism was different. Mongol conquest and rule were a crucial experience, and a harsh indigenous tsarist autocracy was firmly in place by the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. More than a century later Peter the Great succeeded in modernizing Russia’s traditional absolutism by reforming the army and the bureaucracy. Farther to the east, the Ottoman sultans developed a distinctive political and economic system in which all land theoretically belonged to the sultan, who was served by a slave corps of administrators and soldiers. The Ottoman Empire was relatively tolerant on religious matters and served as a haven for Jews and other marginalized religious groups.
1. H. Kamen, "The Economic and Social Consequences of the Thirty Years’ War,” Past and Present 39 (April 1968): 44-61.
2. H. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 43.
3. Quoted in Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy, p. 40.
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Serfdom (p. 433) hereditary subjugation (p. 434) Peace of Westphalia (p. 436) Bohemian Estates (p. 438) elector of Brandenburg (p. 439) Junkers (p. 442)
Mongol Yoke (p. 444) boyars (p. 446) tsar (p. 446) service nobility (p. 446) Cossacks (p. 446) sultan (p. 450) millet system (p. 451) janissary corps (p. 453)
World History
