Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Inside the Royal Harems of the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

You can't move for people talking about the Roman Empire or the British Empire, but what about the Ottoman Empire?It spanned a huge period of time and at the heart of it was the Royal harem: enslaved women who lived in closed-off servitude to the Sultan.Peaking in the 17th century, who were these women? What were their lives like inside the palace? And why have westerners been particularly fascinated by this part of history?Joining Kate today is Dr Michael Talbot, Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at University of Greenwich, to help us find out.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Bertwix the Sheeds. Hello, welcome back. It's lovely to see you again. But before we can continue together, I do have to give you the fair do's warning. Kate, what's a fair do's warning? Well, it's the warning that we have to give you to let you know that. This is an adult podcast book and by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way you're coming arranged. Adults subjects used to be an adult too. And once you've heard that little lot,

you keep listening. If you get upset, well, fair do's, that one's on you. We did tell you. Right, on with the show. Nba Twixters, you join me in 16th century Istanbul, deep in Topkapi Palace, at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And we've got everything here. This is a self-contained city with its own kitchens, bath, schools, gardens, and its own Harim. Of course it does. Within this hidden world are hundreds and hundreds of women. Most of her. Most of her. whom are enslaved and they are here to service one man, the sultan. But who are these women?

Where did they come from? What goes on inside these walls when they're not seeing the sultan? Well, let's do some sneaking around to find out more. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. Many of you have asked and we are only too happy to respond. In today's episode, we are finally taking. you inside the Royal Harims of the Ottoman Empire.

And wow, the Ottoman Empire really is something of a blind spot in Western understanding. And it was around for a hell of a long time, you know, from the 13th century until the 20th century. And yet, it barely gets a looking when we're talking about historical fiction or dramas, at least in the West. Why would that be, I wonder? Hmm. Well, today we are bringing it front and centre with a fantastic doctor. Dr Michael Talbot, Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich. This was a fantastic episode, if I do say so myself, and so rest assured, we will be coming back to the Ottomans in the future.

But without further ado, let's crack on. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Michael Talbot. How are you doing? I'm fine. Thank you. How are you doing, Kate? You're right. I'm really excited to talk to you, because Ottoman Empire, your special to, that's not a history. I know a whole lot about, obviously I've heard of it, Ottoman Empire, but I've not researched it. I don't know very much about it at all. Can I ask you as a starter question before we get going on Harim's and Empires? How did you come to study this? I think I've been interested in the Middle East for as long as I can remember, but I've really started getting interested in the Ottomans

when I first visited Turkey. So I traveled there when I was much younger. And I also was intrigued by this fact that I didn't know that much about them. And I'm a proper history geek, right? I mean, I've loved this dust as I could read. But I just didn't know anything about them. And then I started to learn, you know, they controlled parts of Europe and Africa as well as parts of Asia for 600 years. And why is it we don't know anything about them? Why aren't we taught about them? It's a strange thing. So I just became obsessed with them and I've been obsessed with them ever since. It's a good question because there are many empires. We know, obviously, Roman Empire. Everyone knows by that one. The Greeks are the

bracket as well, British Empire. Mongols, people know about that one. Ottoman, that doesn't seem to register with a lot of people. I don't recall any like historical drama reenactments of Ottoman empires or documentaries. You watch some more Turkish dramas. They've got loads of them. Lose them. Turkish costume dramas, they're brilliant. But the empires that you were mentioned, right, they all interact with the Ottomans in one way or another. So the Ottomans are in a way, a product of the Mongol invasions. They are a successor to the Roman Empire. They call themselves the successor to the Roman Empire.

And they last until the British Empire. So they're this sort of really important node in this global history of empires. And we should know more about them. And that's my job, I guess. That's why you're here. And we're so glad that you are. But for anyone listening, that knowledge of Ottoman empires is largely based to furniture, I'm thinking I've got like an Ottoman.

That's probably not the same thing. What period of time are we talking about? You said it's modern day Turkey. What chunk of time are we looking at? So the empire generally agreed to have started around 1299 and lasts until 1922. So if we're talking about British history, we're saying basically the reign of Edward I, up until George V.

It's this huge span, one family ruling over. The empire itself changes. So it starts off as this very small principality almost in what's now northwest Turkey, on the edge of the Byzantine Empire, so this success estate to the Roman Empire, and on the edge of the Islamic world on the other side. And within a century of its foundation, in 1299, it expands at the expense of the Byzantine Empire into southeastern Europe, into the Balkans.

A century after that, its conquest take it to the Middle East, to North Africa, to the Red Sea. At its height, it has territory that covers around a third of Europe. It covers the whole of the Middle East from Iran to Algeria and North Africa. It contains parts of East Africa. At one point they even have a crack at Indonesia. This is in the 16th century, it's height. And then as the empire sort of changes and as the world changes, their military power isn't as strong as it had been, is unable to conquer as much as it had.

And then the Europeans start to get their weapons sorted out. And so really from the 18th century onwards, the empire starts to lose territory in Europe first. then in the Middle East, and by the end in the 1920s, it's left with basically the same territory it started as in this tiny corner of northwest Turkey. So its story is long and complicated, and we won't try and do it, I don't think, in a podcast like this, but basically because of its nature, its length and its geographic span, it covers so much of the human experience and it covers so much of global historical importance, which is why I'm so passionate about speaking about it.

I suppose for a historian like you or any historian that's working with non-European sources, you've got to try and push past that overly romanticised image, what the theorist Edward Said called Orientalism, that largely the Victorians, again, our favourites, did a real number on it. It becomes this like, you know, Arabian night eroticised, smoke and incense and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Is that difficult for you to us? work with. It is difficult. It's amazing how powerful those narratives are, even for people who

don't really have a direct exposure to them. Like, I still have, when I go to speak in schools, I have, you know, teenagers speaking about the sick man of Europe. And like, where have they got that from in 2025? I just don't understand that. So, I mean, yeah, you mentioned orientism. It's a really powerful trope. And it's a way that, not just the Victorians, but people, including in our own times, have used to explain why the West, as in the Christian white European West has risen to supremacy and why the formerly powerful Ottomans and other Asian empires lost their power and lost their dominance. And as you mentioned, sexuality is a huge part of it, either hypersexuality or repressed sexuality, but it's also linked to power. So as we'll

hopefully touch on imperial women, many of whom, or all of whom in many parts of the empire are enslaved women, their experience is linked to this alleged decline in Ottoman power. So that the decline of power is a problem of having powerful women. And that's a really powerful idea still, unfortunately. So yeah, we find that all the time. That's a really interesting point that you raised. When it comes to how Western people think of sex and sexuality in the Ottoman Empire, and unfortunately, we are quite lazy when we do this. It's very easy to lump Ottoman, India, just over there somewhere and kind of like it's very easy for us to fall into still quite lazy tropes about how either it's hyper eroticised and it's all belly dancers and you know harrims

or it's completely sexually repressive and nobody is allowed to even leave the house. And at various points are for various people, both of those things can be true. But yeah, to generalise an entire civilisation, as I said, that spans 600 years and three continents on that basis. I'm not sure. I mean, lazy perhaps. are lazy about it, but I think it's just a lack of education. I mean, scholarship on Ottoman history isn't always widely available to the public. Books can be expensive. I mean, there's,

there are some great books. I'm happy to recommend as we go along some great books on this topic. But yeah, I mean, it's also in popular culture. Like, my go-to reference for a long time, and this might be betraying my age of it, was Disney's Aladdin. I was just thinking of Aladdin. You were saying all of that. And you say that now. Don't embarrass yourself. Don't do it. But it's the perfect example, as you say, of sort of mashing together, Middle Eastern and South Asian, Islamic culture, all into this really fantastical world. And part of that is a long legacy of these tropes that have been reproduced over centuries and centuries and centuries. And are now so deeply ingrained in our culture, like other forms of racism, that sometimes we don't even notice them until someone points them out. Because Disney did get some pushback for that even at the time where they...

Well, there was the song, right? And at the beginning. Yes, the song. And it says something like, yeah, they'll cut off your head or something. Yeah. And then it's, it's barbaric, but hey, it's home. When you actually stop and you think about it, that is really bad. And that was like, what, one year after the first Gulf War, right?

So it was part of this general milieu of in the early 90s of a changing relationship with the Middle East and the Islamic world. So yeah, all of this stuff is tied in. Still with us. Yeah. And one of the things that's inescapable when you think about, sex in the Ottoman Empire or anywhere that, again, it's not European. Not you, because you're a historian and you know the nuance. But if you were to just pop Vox people on the street, someone might say Harim. They might go for that because that has been a feature of Ottoman history

that the West has been fascinated with for a very, very long time. Yeah, absolutely. And it was a thing, right? It was a thing. It's not a myth. That was a definite thing. Okay. No. So the is a crucial institution to the state. It's also a feature of elite households across the empire from its beginning until pretty much its end. So the harim did exist. It did not exist in the way that it was fantasised about by Western writers and artists. I mean, the art, I mean, you know, it's... It's bordering porny, isn't it?

Well, it's very porny. But, I mean, this is the whole point of the harem is that it's a closed-off institution. it's from a word that kind of means forbidden or restricted or bounded. And it's out of reach to everyone who isn't the responsible male of that household. So in the Pannis's case, the Sultan. And that means that because there's no access to it, the observers relied on hearsay as well as fantasy to then create these images that could sell back home. Yeah.

Were any of the Victorian art, because if anyone, for anyone listening, You can Google Victorian art, Harim and see what we're talking about. Who's good like Angra, the French painting? Yes. Were they allowed in to the Harim? No. No. No. No. Never, never, never.

So this is just all the fevered imagination of 19th century explorers. I mean, sometimes on rare occasions, a Western woman might gain access. So the most famous example is Mary Wortley Montague in the early 18th century. Oh, she was allowed in? Well, she was, yeah, she was the wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul. And she was in one of the grand viziers, high rims. And so she was invited in because she's a woman. She's allowed in and she gets entertained.

Yeah. And her account isn't, you know, it's kind of sensationalized. And that helps to then confirm some of these myths that people were building and sort of like women lounging around, doing nothing. Yeah, half nude. Yeah. Entertainment. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, that no men get access. Very occasionally women do get access. What's some of the earliest records that we have of... See, I'm saying Harim and you're kind of saying Harim. Either is fine. Either is fine. I mean, in Turkish they would say Harim. Okay.

I'm going to say Harim then from now on. You say how you want to say it's all. I want to sound like I know what I'm talking about, even though I don't. What's some of the earliest evidence that we have of the Harim? So the Ottomans aren't the first to have this institution. It's common to a whole bunch of states that precede them, both Islamic and, you do. and non-Islamic. We don't have very good records for the Ottoman state for anything really before around 1480, but we know by the time the records do emerge that the harem is there

as an institution. It starts off a little bit different to the main period that we're going to focus on. So in the early centuries, so the sort of the 14th and the 15th century, although the Ottoman sultans did have enslaved women within their harem, they also engaged in diplomatic alliances through marriage with neighbouring powers, with the Byzantines and with neighbouring Turkish states. So it was more common for their consorts to be from foreign royalty. That changes by the end of the 15th century. So really after the raid of Mehmed the Conqueror, who dies in 1481, after his reign, it's changed quite dramatically to being almost exclusively populated by enslaved women. And we start to get decent record.

about that institution from that sort of period the beginning of the 16th century. Could anyone have a harim? Or is it just rich? I suppose it's money, isn't it? Can you afford it? Right. And in a way, it's also kind of racialized. So enslavement in the Ottoman Empire had degrees of desirability, for want of a better word, with black people from central Africa at the bottom of the hierarchy, East Africans sort of like Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan, in the middle, and then white people at the top as being the most desirable. And almost all of the enslaved women who serve as concubines within these households are white. So you have to be rich to be able to afford them. Where were they from then? They are from all over the shop. So the most common

routes for white women in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century is around the Black Sea. So what's now Ukraine and Russia, but also the Caucasus. So Georgia, Armenia, that sort of area. So that's the main source. In earlier periods, they were also taken as spoils of war from Ottoman conquests in Europe, so from places like Hungary and Serbia, Austria. There was another route that came from North Africa and they had maritime enslavement where Corsairs would go and raid places including Ireland and England and take captives away and they would be sold in slave markets in Algiers and Tunis. There could have been a Yorkshire lass in a Haram in the Ottoman Empire.

I don't know if they made it as far as Yorkshire. There are all these tales of English women and we know that in North Africa, especially they do appear in slave markets. I'll be back with Michael after this short break. It sounds extraordinary again, but that's... That's unpicking our understanding of what slavery actually was and how it functioned. Last year I did a documentary about Pompeii. And the thing that I never got my head around,

about how much I tried was the Roman system of slavery, the fact that so many people and that people who are enslaved are doing jobs like doctors and scribes and lies, because our comprehension is very difficult to get ahead around how that system functioned. And what was it like in the Ottoman Empire? It's more along the lines of that Roman system that it is of the plantation slavery that we're more familiar with. And in fact, the most important people in the Ottoman Empire, apart from the Sultan, are enslaved people. That's so. All of the imperial women, the military commanders from the 14th century in some sources,

the army is recruited as part of the system called the Dev Shirmer, which is the gathering of Christian children from the Balkans who are taken from their families. They are taken to the imperial centre, they are converted to Islam, and the sort of the weedy ones get trained in administration, the bulky ones get sent to the army. And once in the army, they can rise up to be generals, to be pashers, to be viziers, but they start off their lives as enslaved children. So huge amounts of Ottoman elite society can trace their roots to the practice of slavery. And it is everywhere. It's in elite households. It's in galleys. It's in industrial centres.

It is a huge, huge part and still comparatively understudied part of Ottoman society. Isn't there sort of an estimate that like one in ten people in the Ottoman Empire at its height were enslaved? It could be. It could be. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard to, we don't really have censuses in that period, unfortunately. We can get some idea from people's wills that we find in the archives. as to how many enslaved people, for example, they leave in their legacy or how many they free

upon their debt. It's a huge percentage, whatever it is. We're never going to know the numbers. I mean, millions of people across the period of the empire are trafficked into enslavement. That's one of the things that Mary Beard, remember her saying, was that slaves could paradoxically be incredibly powerful people because they have, or at least they had close proximity to real power. Yeah. And that's one of the difficult things, I think, about the way that both the Hiram and its institutions have been approached by historians in the past is that we focus on the success stories, the ones who became the consort of the Sultan. We don't focus on the thousands who didn't and

who lived a relatively miserable and unknown life in enslavement. And also there's a sort of barbarity to other kinds of Ottoman enslavement. So for example, the way in which the Hiram in the palace is run is by eunuchs. And that practice goes on really until almost the end of the empire in the 20th century. And these are huge numbers of boys, mostly from East Africa, Eastern Central Africa sometimes, who are castrated and then trafficked to slave markets and sold to become the overseers of the Hiram. But paradoxically, by being a eunuch and being able to move between the world of women and the world of men, in the 16th and 17th century, some of the most powerful people in the Ottoman Empire are the chief black eunuchs. And

That's a difficult story to tell because they become hugely powerful and hugely rich, but it's not a life that I'm sure any of them would have chosen for themselves. It's also a very, very, there I say, male idea to think that just by cutting the genitals off someone, there will be no adultery or no love affairs. Well, yes, indeed. It's now impossible because the penis doesn't work. Oh, come on. The lesbians are howling with laughter.

I'm sure they are. I mean, there's a whole range of sexual practices in the harem. that we'll never know for sure about because obviously they never are recorded. But we can get a sense from being human. The kind of things that probably went on that weren't recorded. So let's talk about the harem then and about these poor young boys that are castrated and trafficked there. But I'm curious as to how this even functioned on an administrative level.

Because the idea is that you've been enslaved, presumably. He's supposed to be sexually exclusive to the person who owned the harem. Is that the idea? Yeah, you're their property. And you come in the term that's often used as Jariya, and that is often translated as concubine, because essentially any enslaved female within the household, unless they're owned by the lady of the house,

if they're owned by the master of the house, he can do whatever he wants with them sexually. So they might not be formally a sex slave, but they could just be a sort of a domestic worker, but the master of the house would still have the same rights. It's grim, isn't it? It is really, really grim. It is really grim.

And that is replicated in elite households across the empire. The harem in the palace is different because it's the imperial harem and it's huge. It's home to many hundreds of enslaved women who are born and hundreds. Hundreds, yeah. Hundreds. I mean, in the 60th, 17th century, we could be talking for 500 women in the harem at a time. We might talk about the palace in a bit. But if you ever go to Istanbul and you go to the imperial palace, Top Kappa Palace,

A lot of the Hiram still isn't open to the public, but it's a huge maze. Like it's this maze of loads, hundreds of rooms. It's unbelievable the scale of this institution. And there is an institution in that sort of sense. My first thought of that is appalling. My first thought is that I couldn't be bothered. Like, could you be bothered with a harim like of hundreds of people that you have to try and deal with? Well, thankfully, if you're the sultan, you've got people to deal with them for you, like a unit.

I suppose you do, don't you? or have the fun bit of it in that sense. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, you can have these hundreds of women, some of whom may never really even see the Sultan or have anything to do with him. A lot of it is luck that you're at the entertainment in his private chambers and he likes the look of you.

So he can just summon people just like, I'll have number two along today, please. Yeah, absolutely. And that will go on until or unless you bear a child. Once you bear a child for him, you're kind of removed from that part of the Hiram, and you go into a different area where it's much more tame and domesticized, I suppose. But until that point, you're sort of waiting for your moment.

You might never get that moment. You might end up in other roles. So, you know, lots of women in the harem take on different duties. They might become dancers. Like, one of the most important composers of Ottoman 18th century classical music, Dilhaiat. She was an enslaved woman in the harem, and she became a court musician and a music teacher instead. So there's different paths that these women might take within the harem, aside from necessarily being the sexual partner of the Sultan.

Okay, so it's not just like they would just be hanging around waiting to be summoned. They'd be doing other stuff? Yeah, I mean, I think it's difficult to get into the mindset, isn't it? But I suppose if you're there, your chance to get into the Sultan's bedroom and potentially to bear him a child, that's your way out of that kind of enslavement and into power. into wealth, into prestige. I mean, you're still stuck in the harem, but at least you have your own quarters, at least you have your own respectability,

the potential that your child, if it's a male child, could become the next ruler. Oh, so the children are legitimate then? Yeah, it's a really, it's a complicated legal framework. But yeah, under Islamic law, the children between the master of the house and the enslaved women are legitimate. I see. Okay, that's interesting.

What about the wife then? How does this work? Is there a wife that the Sultan or whoever has and then he's got his little Harim as an enormous sidepiece but it's there? Like, what's this dynamic? Yeah, I mean, the term sometimes used is wife. I tend not to use that because I think it gives the wrong impression. The term in Ottoman Turkish that becomes used in the 16th century is Haseki, which is kind of like favorites we might translate it as. And the Sultan might have a series of two, one, two, three, four favourite concubines because they've borne him a son or because they just get on or he's attracted to them and they occupy a position of supreme prestige within the harem. The most prestigious that you can get, however, is if your son becomes the Sultan, you then become the Queen Mum, a Validei Sultan. And in the 16th and 17th century, that is, at many points, the most powerful position in the empire, more powerful than anyone else. Marriage isn't in the sense that we are used to in European

royal marriages. It's more about being favoured and getting extra rights and privileges as a result of being that favourite. And that starts in the reign of Suleiman, the magnificent. And it's his What a name. Wow. Listen, if you're going to be Suleiman, you might as well be magnificent. Be the magnificent. Absolutely. So he's sold him from 1520 to 1566. And he's the one who kind of changes thinks because he falls in love with one of his concubines, a woman named Hurem Sultan, who in the west they know as Roxalana. You might have encountered her perhaps in some early modern plays and paintings and things. But she becomes the first Haseki, the first favourite.

And it's her kind of power that transforms the role of women within the harem to being a really powerful political one within the empire. Okay. Okay. So it's not that there's a wife and the harem is like a term. adultery, it's that they're all kind of his wives, but not, but like he can choose a favorite from amongst them. Yeah. I mean, that's right, several favorites. And one of the reasons, I mean, marriage within Islam grants certain rights to women, for example, the right to divorce her

husband. So you can't really have a woman coming and divorcing the Sultan. So it'd be a bit awkward if it was more formalized that way. Later on, there is a kind of marriage system that's more akin to normal domestic marriage in that sense. But yet in this period it is mostly about favourites. Okay. So how did Roxana, how did she overhaul the role of the Harim? I'm interested in what she did. So she is an incredible character and there's a really amazing biography of her by Leslie Pearce,

one of the greatest Ottoman historians. She's enslaved as a child or young teenager, probably from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, somewhere in sort of the steps of central. Eastern Europe. She comes to the palace and by all account she manages to gain the sultan's. This is Salimann's eye. By her beauty but also something that's highly prized within the hiring by her intelligence and her wit. There's training that women have to undergo within the palace to make sure that they're of a suitable level to converse with or to be in the presence of the sultans. They get a sort of rudimentary form of education the same that sort of the palace

page boys would get. Some of them learn to sing. Some of them. and learn to dance. Whatever she does, she does it really well. And Suleiman appears to fall in love with her. Now, when she becomes his favourite, the harem isn't in the same palace as the Sultan. So there's two palaces in Istanbul in the middle of the 16th century. There's Top Kappa Palace, which is the famous one where all the tourists go in Istanbul today. That was separate. At that time, it was believed that women shouldn't be near the seat of power, that sort of the Sultan's private life should be kept somewhere else. So they were put on the other side of the city in an older palace. It's Hurem who arranges for the Harem to be moved over to this new

top kappa palace where the new Harem is established and that gives her direct access at all times to the Sultan, but also through her agents and through the eunuchs to the Imperial Council that's also based in the palace. So this then allows her to start building up a patronage network of men outside the harem because she has the sultan's ear. If someone wants a promotion or wants to push a new policy, they can contact her via her agents and she can push for it. So it's a huge power play on her part. That is, isn't it? You mentioned training there. So I'm trying to get my head around like what, again, what the admin of this is. So at what age would young girls be enslaved and sent to the harem and then like go through some kind of concubine

training program? Yeah, essentially. What would that look like? Yeah, so we're talking, I mean, the ages vary. It can be sort of young, eight, nine, ten, up until sort of early teens, maybe sort of mid-teens at a push. They wouldn't be expected to have sexual relations generally at that point, although it's not unheard of, of course, unfortunately.

They would then be trained sometimes by the eunuchs, sometimes by other hiring women, by imperial princesses who are also sort of living around. around in the Hiram in the manners of being at the Ottoman court. You know, the Ottoman court in the 16th century is the most powerful court probably on the planet, right? It makes the Tudors look like some provincial wasteland. And if you think about how formal the Tudor court was or how formal the court of Louis XIV was later, the Ottoman court puts all that in the shadow. It's a very ritualized formal court, high culture, and so the women are expected at least in the best of their abilities to engage in that. So basic literacy is taught various forms of art.

and performance are taught. And this then allows them to enter the Sultan's presence and to converse with him and to entertain him. Wow. I want to be careful how I phrase this because I'm aware that it's all about enslavement and sexual enslavement and it's all terrible. But it sounds reasonably okay

if you have to be a slave. That sounds awful. But this is the thing. I know what you're getting at too. And this is why it's such a hard thing to discuss. I mean, I guess if we're talking about somewhere like England, right, in the 16th century, your chances of social mobility as a peasant from Yorkshire are zero, right?

That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Whereas in the Ottoman Empire, you could be the son of an Albanian pig farmer and you could command the armies within 30 years. Or you could be the daughter of a priest from some remote village in Poland and then you could be the favourite of the Sultan within 30 years. It's an awful process. And again, this is not the life these people would have chosen.

but they make the best of that life, I suppose, and can become very powerful from it. Wow. Are there any other examples of women in the Harim that go on to become incredibly powerful and influential? Well, after Hurim, there's this period that became known in Ottoman historiography as the sultanate of women.

And that lasts really from the time of Herrick session, which is 1534, until the beginning of the 18th century. So most of the 16th, all of the 17th in the beginning of the 18th century, the Sultanate of women. And this is where power is exercised sometimes via the Hasehi, via the favourite, but more often than not by the Queen Mum, by the Validae Sultan. And some of these women not only act as senior advisors, but at various points regents to their sons. So, for example, Hatija Turhan Sultan, she is the mother of Sultan Mehmed VIII, who kind of comes to the throne as a boy, essentially. And so for his entire minority, she's running the show.

And she's dictating reformist policy. One of her predecessors, Kersem Sultan, she engages in warfare. She demands the Ottoman army go and invade Crete. And it's a whole... Wow, you weren't kidding. These are very powerful women. They are super, super, super powerful. And this is done in their own right.

And one of the ways that they're able to build this power and they're able to exercise political power is because living in the harem is just a part of their experience. They also have this life outside the harem that they can't participate in directly, but they live in the outside world by proxy. What I mean by that is, by becoming the favourite or the Queen Mum,

you become fabulously wealthy, right? This is an empire that controls the gold mines of Egypt and the whole of the Middle East, you know, it's hugely wealthy. So being an imperial woman means that you, can get a huge amount of wealth. Rather than hoarding that wealth, Imperial women, Hurem, Kersem, Hatichetoolha and others engage in patronage projects for kind of social welfare institutions. So they'll build mosques and soup kitchens and bath houses that cater to the capital but also to

the provinces. And then this helps to build up their political and cultural capital, which further helps them to then exercise power over things like the bureaucracies. and the army. So it's a really interesting way that women who are essentially confined to one space are able to make themselves felt throughout this vast empire. I suppose the ultimate goal then in this environment has got to be being the Sultan's mum because favourites, although they can wield enormous power and there's multiple examples of that happening and still happening to this very day. But favouritism can turn on a dime. Like, it's so, like, all right, he fancies you now.

But when we think back about our own dating past of all the people that once upon a time, we were like, but I love him. And now you're like, oh, God, what was I thinking? Like, it turns that quick. So being his mum, now that's harder to get rid of. It is. And, I mean, Hurtem is probably one of the greatest examples of this. So she becomes the favorite or the chief favorite of Siddermann. But he's already had his kind of first love, I suppose.

And his first love gave him a son, Mustafa. And Mustafa was like his old man. He was a talented administrator. He was an excellent soldier. He was popular with the court and with the people. But he wasn't Hurem's son. And she had her own son, Salim, who, you know, by all accounts, was perhaps less talented in those areas than Mustafa. I mean, there's a whole sorts of intrigue and we'll never know the truth.

But what we do know is that Mustafa is killed. He's murdered. Oh, look at that. Yes, and that then opens up for her son, Salim, to become Salimun's successor and not Mustafa. There's no, in the 16th century in particular, there's no kind of logic as to who becomes the next Sultan. Any son of the Sultan could have a cracker tit. It's not until much later that they have a system where it passes from brother to brother, then the next generation. So, yeah, your chance of becoming the Queen Mum, you're quite right, is that's your real shot at power.

And so women, in Huram's case, will do anything to make sure that it's their son that becomes. becomes the next Sultan and they can become the next validae. It must have been bitchy as hell. I can't imagine it, honestly. I like to think, you know, the sisterhood and would all be supporting each other and cheering each other on. But that's just not what would happen to human nature being what it is. It would be bitchy as hell.

Yeah. The harem is big in the palace by its limited real estate. So you might want to get some more apartments, but that has to come at the expense of arrival. So how are you going to? So there's a lot, you know, the intrigue is, it's also something that we, We'll never know in a huge amount of detail, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. We have some written records of these women by these women, but not of that kind of intrigue.

I'll be back with Michael after this short break. So there are examples of women going on from the Harim, but they go on to wield enormous power. What about those that didn't do that? What about the ones that didn't give the Sultan a son and the ones, like, is there a retirement program for the Harim? Is there like where do you go when you edge out of this? What's the, like, what happens to them? Sometimes we'll never know because their lives aren't recorded in the same detail. Yeah.

If nothing's going to happen, sometimes what can happen is they can be married off to some of the enslaved men within the court. So the pages and sort of those sort of court officials on the other side of the wall. Sometimes they might be freed, particularly in a case of a Sultan who's just passed away. it's a very high charitable act in Islamic law to free slaves, particularly if they have converted or are going to convert to Islam. So some of them might be freed, but a lot of them sort of just disappear into this huge palace complex and will end up with lives of domestic servitude of various forms.

Wow. Yeah. Was it the same with the eunuchs? Did any of them make it and conversely what happened if they didn't? Well, I mean, lots of them do make it. As with other political positions within the Ottoman Empire, making it can be a deadly business. So Kersem Sultan, who I mentioned earlier, the one who started this war with Crete, she gets killed by an angry mob of soldiers because they're angry with her power. Some chief back eunuchs are also killed, assassinated, murdered in political rivalries.

But the risks come with reward, right? If you were the chief black unit, particularly sort of in the 17th and the 18th century, again, you were one of the most powerful people in the 18th century. Again, you were one of the most powerful people in the empire. You were able to build mosques. You were able to build soup kitchens. Wow. You were able to build your own network of patronage. The ones that didn't make it, they're stuck in the palace teaching elocution lessons

to these slave girls from Poland and Russia. It's a more anonymous life. It's perhaps because there are fewer of them, there is a better sort of chance of a decent outcome for the eunuchs. You know, they have a purpose. They always have a purpose. There's always going to be women there. Whereas for the women, if they don't.

meet the Salta Zai and they don't fulfill the sexual function, then another life awaits them. That's that out on your ear. Sorry, love. Oh, God. So when do we start to see the decline of this institution then? So the power of women really starts to change at the beginning of the 18th century. So the last really powerful one is Gnush Sultan. She's sort of the Validé Sultan of Sultan Mustafa II and Ahmed III. So she dies in 1715. So that's the sort of the Valenus Sultan of Sultan. that's the end of really the powerful women. After that, the Ottoman Empire starts to change in its nature. So there's this big war with the Europeans that starts with the siege of Vienna in 1883. That ends in 1699 with an Ottoman catastrophic defeat and it really causes some

soul searching and some changes in how the state is run. So in part, the change in the role of women is reflective of that. The state administration becomes more professionalized and moving, moves away from the palace a little bit, that's for the women. I mean, the Valadei Sultan remains a powerful woman. There is still the system of Hasek is a favourite. So that continues all the way until the 1920s with the last Sultan who leaves in 1922. But for enslavement, that starts to change, as with other places in the world, sort of the middle of the 19th century, the 1830s onwards, is when slavery as an institution starts to be increasingly changed.

challenged within the Ottoman realms. It doesn't end though, and I think it's important to note that, you know, slavery in different forms, as in different parts of the world that engage in abolitionist initiatives, often just changed in nature. So there's shade in women from the Black Sea and from the Caucasus, for example. That goes under a profound change. So first of all, the main supplier for the Ottomans was their sort of subject state. in the Crimea, the Crimean Khanate. That's conquered by Russia in 1783, so that cuts off that supply. So the Ottomans then look towards the Caucasus, an area called Circassia, sort of where Georgia is, above where Georgia is now. That area undergoes invasion by Russia across the middle of the 19th century

and ethnic cleansing and genocide, meaning that hundreds of thousands of Circassian refugees flood into the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s and the 1870s. It's from these populations that this trade in enslaved concubines continues and will continue at least into the 1890s. It's not formally, officially said to have stopped until 909. I mean, there's lots of laws, right? So, I mean, the slave market in Istanbul is shut down in 1847. There's a whole bunch of laws banning the Mediterranean slave trade, the Circassian slave trade, the African slave trade between 1847 and 1857. There's another law in 1889. They sign up to the anti-slavery initiative in 1890. But all this does really is it pushes things under the radar. Abolishing slavery does not mean

that all enslaved people are freed on abolition. And so many of the women who were still enslaved at the time of informal abolition in the 1840s and the 1850s, remain enslaved in some cases until they're freed under the New Republic in 1924. It's still there as an institution and it's not just women who are enslaved. There's all different kinds of enslavement that continues into the 19th and in some cases the early 20th century. So the Ottoman Empire is around doing its thing for 600 years. Yeah, 600 years. And in all of that, I think I know what you're going to say to this one.

And in all of that time, was there ever a Harim for women? Did that ever happen? Was there ever a sultana somewhere? I went, I'll have one of them. Thank you very much. No, I mean, there are enslaved men who perform a kind of role like that, but as dancers. So they're called Kurchex. And they're not really for the imperial women.

They're for the benefit of the Sultan. So Ottoman sexuality is a whole different podcast, I think. But it's complicated. and Ottoman sultans can like men and boys as much as they can like girls and women. So there are sort of these sort of newball boys who are able, as long as they are clean-shaven and youthful looking. It's always the boys, isn't it? I know, I know.

No, but it's just interesting. Like, it's horrendous. I'll preface everything by saying it's horrendous. But just looking at it is you see that all over the place. It's this sex with men is fine as long as the one who's bottoming, quote, unquote. is basically a proxy woman that they have to be young, they have to be clean shaven,

they have to look feminine, and it's the youth that's a part of that. You don't tend to get, or at least, I'm sure it'll be somewhere, but I can't think where it is, like this idea that it's all right, just have sex with another bloke, that you're both at the same age

and that you've both got beards and that you go to the pub for a pint afterwards. It's not that. I mean, we do have some instances of that. I mean, one of the most famous ones is Mehmed the Conquer, Mehmed II,

who fed in love with Vlad the Impalers younger brother, Radu. And we don't know if they actually sort of engaged in sexual activity, but some of the poetry that Mehmed wrote for him is filthy. Really? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, really, really filthy stuff.

Oh, I like that. Yeah, so although the Nubal Boy thing was a really important part of Ottoman sexuality, there is definitely other kinds of male-male relationships. Yeah. And in terms of women, we do, you know, we don't have that many examples for unfortunately obvious reasons about lesbian.

is partly because Ottoman culture just didn't recognize them as a thing. But we have some, for example, there's a poet from the beginning of the 19th century, Laila Hanam, who seems to be from her poetry in love with women and has sexual relationships with women. She refuses her marriage. So what she represents is a really important, interesting period in sort of late 18th, 30, 19th century, Ottoman history is this sort of really interesting changing of role for women outside the palace. She's an elite woman. She's not in the palace, but she sort of defines herself

by casting off the expectations of male society and going off and doing her thing. And she expresses that in her poetry by taking new poetic forms and rhythms and meters. So these women are there. They didn't have harems, unfortunately, unfortunately, I suppose. But, you know, these sorts of relationships do exist. And of course, in a place like the harem where hundreds of women are enclosed with each other for years. It's going to happen, isn't it? It's going to happen. It's going to happen.

It's interesting that lesbianism rarely gets a look in in the writers, although there was a book I was reading recently about the history of lesbianism in the Islamic world. And there just seem to have been some acknowledgement of this behaviour, even though they don't really understand it. There's lots of reference to grinding and to... Yeah. Ottomers would use the word rubbers. Yeah, rubbers, that's the one.

Rubbers, grinding, all this kind of stuff. And there was one writer whose name completely escapes me. He describes it as their clashing shields instead of a shield and a sword. And it's this kind of, again, back to that anathema effect, but they don't have a penis. What an earth are they doing? Absolutely. No, there definitely are mentions of them. I mean, but the idea that that would constitute sex for an Ottoman male is just beyond his imagination.

Whatever they're doing is it's just jolly japes and it's not proper, proper sex. Did we have any gay harrims then? I know that that's a huge question. Or was it always women? Yeah, it's always women within the harem. And that's because the harem is defined by Jedatalia essentially. So any man who's not an immediate relative,

like a boy of the Sultan or the Sultan himself, they can't come anywhere near it. So this doesn't mean to say that the Sultan wouldn't take a sexual advantage of his enslaved men, as he would with his enslaved women. And that same thing would go for other elite household. too, but no, there's no formal Hiram, partly also

because there's a legal justification to some extent. But making babies, isn't it? It's making babies, but also, you know, when the Quran was written, just like when the Bible was written, slavery was normal and it's included as part of the legal system,

you know, with rights and obligations for slave owners and for enslaved people. But yeah, so enslaving women and using them sexually isn't such a big deal. Whereas having relations with a man, regardless of their age, is technically breaking the law. It's technically adultery and sex outside marriage. So you would never have something formal for that.

So it's all kind of hush-hush. It is, isn't it? I think even the concept of a harem is, it's very, very male-scented. I think if you said to any woman, you can have 400 virgins to do something. That's just a nightmare situation. That's just, what on earth would you do with that? Well, I mean, the paranoia of the Ottoman Empire is always the end of the dynasty. I mean, there's several periods where, you know, particularly in the 18th century,

where we have some aging sultans who aren't as virile perhaps as they might have been in previous generations. And so it's important to have lots of options because if there's no, because the idea, you know, this empire is so tied to that one family, to that one dynasty, there's no idea. idea of what happens next. There's no alternative. Yeah. I'm just thinking of just like if you said like 400 male virgins all squeaky voiced and spotty-faced and just like, some people would enjoy that. I don't know. It's just, hello. Oh God, this is awful. It's just a fleet of sexual incompetence on earth I'm supposed to do with this. Oh, my God, you have been so fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and they should and your work, where can they find you? Oh, I'm online.

various places. University of Greenwich in London. So you're welcome to have a look at my website and have a look there. And I'm also happy to send in a little reading list to share. Oh, please do. Yes, people always want book recommendations. And will you come back and tell us more about this fascinating history? Listen, whenever you want me back, I will be here.

Thank you so much. You've been marvellous. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Michael for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please do give us a review a like and follow along. Wherever it is, you get your podcasts. It does actually really help us.

And coming up, we've got an episode on the sex life of Freud. Oh, how very Freudian. And another which revisits a favourite episode from earlier this year, and we will be asking, who was the Virgin Mary? Essential information just in time for Christmas. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello,

then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.