apartments, servants, jewels, dresses and an allowance. As all the women in the harem were totally dependent on how well the sultan was pleased, all were eager for opportunities to reach his bed and, once in it, desperate to please. So much so that several sultans, surfeited with endless days and nights of passion supplied by platoons of eager, adoring women, went, quite simply, insane.*
Into this private world of women, no male except the sultan was allowed to penetrate. So exclusive was the harem that, according to a Turkish saying, if the sun had not been female, even she would never have been allowed to enter. To ensure this exclusivity was the duty of the harem eunuchs. Originally, the eunuchs had been white, mostly brought, like the harem women, from the Caucasus. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the 200 eunuchs who guarded the harem were black. Most were bought as children in the annual slave caravans from the upper Nile and were castrated near Aswan as they came down the river. Ironically, as the Moslem religion forbade castration, the deed was performed by Copts, a Christian sect living in the region. These mutilated children were then presented as gifts to the sultan from his governors and viceroys in lower Egypt.
In theory, the eunuchs were slaves, and servants of the slaves who were the harem women. But the eunuchs often gained great power because of their proximity to the sultan. In the ceaseless round of court intrigue, the alliance of women and eunuchs could heavily influence the flow of favors and public positions. Eventually, the Chief of the Black Eunuchs, known as the Aga of the Women or the Aga of the House of Felicity, often played a great role in affairs of state, becoming tyrant of the whole Seraglio and sometimes ranking third in power in the empire, after the sultan and the grand vizier. The Aga of the Black Eunuchs always
*Some of the Ottoman sultans kept boys as well as women in their harems. But while it is true that certain Turkish sultans had homosexual tastes, as did some Christian kings, most Ottoman sultans preferred women. The harem was overwhelmingly a reservoir of females.
lived grandly, having many privileges and a large staff which included a number of his own slave girls, whose duties, it must be said, are difficult to imagine.
Within the harem, as everywhere in his empire, the sultan was treated as a demi-god. No woman was allowed to meet him unsummoned. At his approach, those in his path had to hide quickly; one sultan, in order to give warning of his approach, wore slippers with silver soles to make a clater on the stone passageways. When he wanted to bathe, the sultan went first to his undressing room, where his clothes were removed by young female slaves; next to a massage room, where his body was oiled and rubbed; then to a bath chamber with a marble tub, fountains of hot and cold running water and gold faucets, where, if he desired, his body was washed, an assignment usually given to rather elderly women; finally, he would be dressed and perfumed, again by younger females. When the sultan wished festivity, he repaired to his audience hall, a large, blue-tiled chamber spread with crimson carpets. There, he sat on his throne while his mother and his sisters and daughters sat on sofas, and the ikbal and godze sat on cushions on the floor in front of him. If there were dancing girls and music, the court musicians might be required to attend, but on these occasions they were carefully blindfolded to protect the harem women from their eyes. Later, a balcony for the musicians was built above the audience hall, with walls so high that only the music could pass over.
It was in this audience hall that the sultan occasionally received a foreign ambassador. At these moments, he sat on his marble throne, wearing a long robe of golden cloth trimmed with sable and a white turban with a black- and-white aigrette and a giant emerald. Always, he sat with his face in profile, so that no infidel might gaze on the full countenance of the Shadow of God on Earth.
Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire remained a warrior state. All power lay in the hands of the sultan. When the sultan was strong and gifted, the empire prospered. When he was weak, the empire decayed. Not surprisingly, life in the harem, surrounded by adoring women and conniving eunuchs, took much of the fiber out of a race which had begun with warrior conquerors. A second circumstance tended, as the history of the empire unfolded, to degrade the quality of ruling sultans. Ironically, it had begun with an act of mercy. Until the sixteenth century, it had been an Ottoman tradition that, of the sultan's many sons, the one who succeeded to the throne would immediately have all his brothers strangled, to remove any threat to his position. Sultan Murad III, who ruled from 1574 to 1595, sired more than a hundred children and was survived by twenty sons. The eldest, succeeding to the throne as Mehmet III, strangled his nineteen brothers and also, to be certain of liquidating any possible competition, murdered seven of his father's concubines who happened to be pregnant. In 1603, however, the new sultan, Ahmed I, ended this terrible rite by refusing to strangle his brothers. Instead, to keep them innocuous, he walled them up in a special pavilion called 'The Cage,' where they lived cut off from all communication with the outside world. Henceforth, all Ottoman princes idled away their lives in this place, in the company of eunuchs and of concubines, who, to prevent the birth of children, were required to be beyond the age of childbearing. If, by mistake, a child was born, the infant was not allowed to complicate the royal genealogical tree by remaining alive. Thus, when a sultan died or was disposed without a son, a brother would be summoned from seclusion and proclaimed the new Shadow of God on Earth. Amidst this collecton of ignorant, unaggressive royal males, neither the Janissaries nor the grand viziers could often find a man with the intellectual development or political knowledge to rule an empire.
At all times, but especially when the sultan was weak, the Ottoman Empire was actually administered by the grand vizier. From a vast building erected in 1654 near the Seraglio and known to Europeans as the Sublime Porte, the grand vizier controlled the administration and armed forces of the empire—everything, in fact, except the Seraglio. In theory, the grand vizier was the servant of the sultan. His appointment was symbolized by his acceptance from the sultan's hands of a signet ring; his dismissal was signaled by the recall of this imperial seal. In practice, however, the grand vizier ruled the empire. In peacetime, he was the chief executive and chief magistrate. In war, he commanded the Ottoman army in the field, assisted by the Janissary Aga and the Captain Pasha of the Navy. He presided over his council, the Divan, in a large, domed audience chamber whose walls were adorned with mosaics, arabesques and blue-and-gold hangings. Here, on a bench circling the perimeter, sat the great officers of the Porte, the colors of their fur-trimmed, wide-sleeved robes—green, violet, silver, blue, yellow—denoting their rank. In the center sat the grand vizier, wearing a robe of white satin and a turban bound with gold.
The office of grand vizier carried enormous power—on occasion, grand viziers could arrange the fall of sultans—but it also entailed enormous risks and offered little prospect of a peaceful death. Defeat in war was blamed on the grand vizier and was followed inevitably by dismissal, exile and, not infrequenty, strangulation. Only a master of intrigue could attain the office. Between 1683 and 1702, twelve grand viziers came and went from the Divan and the Sublime Porte.
Nevertheless, earlier in the seventeenth century, it had been the grand viziers who saved the empire while the sultans sat in their harems indulging their tastes and fantasies.* Outside, Ottoman power had declined so greatly that Venetian ships cruised off the Dardanelles while Cossack 'seagull' corsairs from the Dnieper raided the western entrance of the Bosphorus. The empire, bubbling with corruption and dissolving into anarchy, was rescued by the skill of what amounted to a dynasty of grand viziers: father, son and brother-in-law.
In 1656, with the empire near collapse, the harem hierarchy reluctantly named as grand vizier a stern, seventy-one-year-old Albanian, Memmed Korpulu, who solved problems ruthlessly: Between 50,000 and 60,000 executions purged the Ottoman administration of graft and corruption. By the time he died, five years later, the decline in the empire's fortunes had been halted. Under his son Ahmed Korpulu and later his brother-in-law, Kara Mustapha, a brief revival of Ottoman power occurred. The fleets and armies of the Christian powers, Austria, Venice and Poland, were driven back. In 1683, responding to a Hungarian appeal for aid against the Emperor Leopold, Kara Mustapha decided to capture Vienna. An army of over 200,000 men under a banner with horsehair plumes, commanded by Kara Mustapha himself, marched up the Danube, conquered all of Hungary and, for the second time in Ottoman history, stood before the walls of Vienna. Through the summer of 1683, Europe watched anxiously. Regiments of soldiers from the German states enlisted under the Hapsburg Emperor's banner to fight the Turks. Even Louis XIV, normally the enemy of the Hapsburgs and secret ally of the Turks, could not afford not to help save the great Christian city. On September 12, 1683, an allied relieving army fell on the Turkish siege lines from the rear and drove the Turks in flight down the Danube. By order of the Sultan, Kara Mustapha was strangled.
*One sultan, Ibrahim the Mad, encased his beard in a network of diamonds and passed his days tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosphorus. He wanted to see and feel nothing but fur, and levied a special tax for the import of sables from Russia so that he might cover the walls of his apartments with these precious furs. Deciding that the bigger a woman was, the more enjoyable she would be, he had his agents search the empire for the fattest woman they could find. They brought him an enormous Armenian woman, who so fascinated the Sultan that he heaped riches and honors upon her and finally made her Governor General of Damascus.
