On the Shores of the Mediterranean (26 page)

To stand in the semi-darkness of these rooms, all of them now in an advanced state of decay, even for a few minutes, hearing the mice scratching away in the wainscoting and the sirens of the ships, was to have the sensation of being buried alive. Yet here, and in what remains of an earlier Kafes, a building with barred windows that still stands in what is called the Boxwood Court, which lies below the Court of the Gözdeler, beyond the now grass-grown remains of what was once a large pool, the crown prince, the
sehzade
, was imprisoned, in what was a form of living death, by whoever was the ruling sultan, probably his brother, until he in his turn became sultan, that is if he had not already been strangled with the bowstring.

Murad III, who reigned from 1574 to 1595, had 103 children by his harem women, of whom there were 1200. Of these, twenty sons and twenty-seven daughters survived him. His eldest son, who succeeded him as Mehmed III, had all his nineteen brothers put to death and seven of his father’s pregnant concubines drowned.

A far greater slaughter of harem women took place in the reign of the mad Sultan Ibrahim, who reigned from 1640 to 1649. In order to clear the way for a fresh collection of women, he had 280 of his odalisques, who would normally have remained in the harem until pensioned off and sent to the Old Palace, what was
said at that time to be his entire stock, put in weighted sacks and drowned off Seraglio Point. It was to prevent such consumption of the life blood of the sultanate that the Kafes was invented.

Of Ibrahim, Demetrius Cantemir wrote, in his
History of the Growth and Decay of the Othoman Empire
, published in 1734:

As Murat [Ibrahim’s brother, Murad IV] was wholly addicted to wine so was Ibrahim to lust. They say he spent all his time in sensual pleasure and when nature was exhausted with the frequent repetition of venereal delights he endeavoured to restore it with potions or commanded a beautiful virgin richly habited to be brought to him by his mother [Kosem, the Sultan Validé, who was eventually murdered in the harem], the Grand Vezir, or some other great man. He covered the walls of his chamber with looking-glass so that his love battles might be seen to be enacted at several places at once. He ordered his pillows to be stuffed with rich furs, so that the bed designed for the Imperial pleasure might be the more precious. Nay, he put whole sable skins under him in a notion that his lust would be inflamed if his love toil were rendered more difficult by the glowing of his knees. In the palace gardens, he frequently assembled all the virgins, made them strip themselves naked, and neighing like a stallion ran among them and … ravished one or the other, kicking or struggling by his order.

Ibrahim was kept prisoner in the Kafes from the age of two until he became sultan at the age of twenty-four. No wonder he was as mad as a hatter. At the end of his reign he was returned to it to be murdered by the deaf-mutes with slit tongues and punctured eardrums which enabled them to resist any cries for mercy.

If a prince had the strength of mind to ask for them, he might be given teachers to fortify his mind in addition to the customary
supply of some two dozen barren
ikbals
he was normally allowed. Suleiman II spent his thirty-nine years in the Kafes, before succeeding to the throne in 1687, practising calligraphy and reading the Koran. Osman III was fifty years in the Kafes and when he succeeded as sultan in 1754 – he only lived for two years after his release – he had the wall lowered which hid it from view in the Boxwood Courtyard.

The last to die in the Kafes was Sultan Selim III, strangled with the bowstring in 1807 but only after a desperate resistance which belied his gentle reputation.

There are said to be four hundred rooms in the harem. Perhaps the number depends on what one means by rooms. There are stone cupboards and secret cupboards and mouldering corridors that might qualify as rooms if one was setting out to count them. Altogether, we saw about a hundred and fifty of which a couple of dozen are normally shown to the public.

Although the Chief White Eunuch, the
Kapi Agha
, was Head of the Inner Service of the Selāmlik, the outer palace, and of the Palace School, the Infirmary, and was also Head Gate-Keeper and Master of Ceremonies (one of his subordinates, the
Hasinedarbashi
, was also in charge of the Treasury), his power was as nothing compared with that of the Chief Black Eunuch, the
Kislar Agha
, who administered the harem in consultation with the Sultan Validé, the Queen-Mother.

The Chief Black Eunuch was also Director of the Princes’ School, in which, up to the age of ten or eleven, before possibly being consigned to the Kafes or suffering a worse fate, they were educated in the exquisite tiled and panelled schoolroom above his own gloomy quarters, which overlook the Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs. He was also a pasha with his own extensive entourage and when the sultan ceased to attend meetings in the divan became the link between the sultan and the grand vizier.

The Queen-Mother was the Ruler of the Harem, the Chief Black Eunuch the link between her and the women of the harem, and between the sultan and the rest of the outside world.

The administrators of the harem were women, all of them slaves. The name by which all the harem women were known, from the Sultan Validé to the Head Housekeeper, the Head Treasurer to the Lower Lesser Laundresses, was
Cariye
, those who serve.

The financial administration was extraordinarily complex and costly. It included the payment of pocket money to the various girls on a carefully graduated scale, according to the degree of favour they basked in, and pensions to those who had retired to the Eski Saray. There were Keepers of the Baths, of the Jewels, of the Readers of the Koran, of the Scribes, of the Store Rooms, of the Table Service, all women who had exchanged the remote possibility of becoming
kadinefendis
for other positions of eminence and power.

This took no account of the women of the Sultan Validé: her Treasurer, First Secretary, First Seal-Bearer, Water Pourer, Coffee-Maker, Confectioner, Mistress of the Robes, of the Sherbets and so on. There were twelve of them, each of whom had – they were called
kalfa
(mistress) – an
oda
, or company of women working for them, consisting of six
hayaliks
, Lesser Women, drawn from the most junior in terms of age and position in the harem. So that there were hordes of Lesser Treasurers, Lesser Confectioners, Lesser Sherbet Mistresses, etc. And there were yet other entourages, those of the
kadinefendis
, of the
sehzade
, the crown prince, and of the Chief Black Eunuch, half a dozen or more households, worlds within worlds, each with perhaps a hundred members, all spinning away like tops, independent of one another much of the time. And there was the Head Nurse, the
Dada Usta
, and her entourage, and the Midwives.

It is unfortunate that there are now no inhabitants of the harem
of the Grand Seraglio still in the land of the living to tell us anything about what it was really like to live in it.

The best written accounts we have are of life in the Summer Harem; but only two men make any real pretence of having actually seen any of the girls at all. The most convincing witness – the other one writes from hearsay – is Master Thomas Dallam, a Cockney organ-maker, sent to Constantinople in 1599 to erect in the Selāmlik, not the harem, an hydraulic organ he had built, which was a gift from Queen Elizabeth I to Sultan Mohammed III, who reigned from 1595 to 1603. He wrote:

When he [a black eunuch] had showed me many other thinges which I wondered at, then crossinge throughe a litle squar courte paved with marble, he poynted me to goo to a graite in a wale, but made me a sine that he myghte not goo thether him selfe. When I came to the grait the wale was verrie thicke, and graited on bothe the sides with iron verrie strongly; but through that graite I did se thirtie of the Grand Sinyor’s Concobines that weare playinge with a bale in another courte. At the firste sighte of them I thoughte they had bene yonge men, but when I saw the hare of their heades hange doone on their backes, platted together with a tasle of smale pearle hanginge in the lower end of it, and by other plaine tokens, I did know them to be women, and verrie prettie ones in deede … I stood so longe loukinge upon them that he which had showed me all this kindnes began to be verrie angrie with me. He made a wrye mouthe, and stamped with his foute to make me give over looking; the which I was verrie lothe to dow, for that sighte did please me wondrous well.

So rare in fact is a report of a genuine sighting of female members of the harem that it may be excusable to print an account of the other, although rather more second-hand one.

The man who witnessed it was the secretary and chaplain to the Swedish Embassy in Constantinople and he described it to the English traveller and scientist Edward Clarke who was in Constantinople in March 1801. What the chaplain saw were the four principal Sultanas and the Queen-Mother, Mihrisāh Sultan. This was perhaps the Créole girl, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a cousin, neighbour and childhood friend in Martinique of Joséphine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, who later became wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress of France. She was captured by Barbary corsairs while travelling from her convent school in Nantes to Martinique, and is said to have been presented by the Dey of Algiers to Sultan Abd ul-Hamid I later becoming, as
Naksh
, the Beautiful One, his favourite, and presenting him with a son, Mahmud II, the Reformer, on whom she is said to have had a great and liberalizing influence.

Three of the four were
Georgians
, having dark complexions, and very long dark hair; but the fourth was remarkably fair and her hair, also of singular length and thickness, was of a flaxen colour: neither were their teeth dyed black, as those of
Turkish
females generally are. The Swedish gentleman said, he was almost sure that these women suspected they were seen from the address they manifested in displaying their charms, and in loitering at the gate. This gave him and his friend no small degree of terror; as they would have paid for their curiosity with their lives, if any such suspicion had entered into the minds of the black eunuchs …

Their dresses [the chaplain said, who seems to have as good an eye for detail as any fashion editress] were long spangled robes, open in front, with pantaloons embroidered in gold and silver, and covered with a profusion of pearls and precious stones which displayed their persons to great advantage; … their hair hung in loose and very thick tresses on each side of their cheeks, falling
down to the waist, and entirely covering their shoulders. Those tresses were quite powdered with diamonds, not displayed according to any studied arrangement, but as if carelessly scattered, by handfuls, among their flowing locks. On top of their heads, and rather leaning to one side, they wore, each of them, a small circular patch or diadem. Their faces, necks, and even breasts, were quite exposed; not one of them having a veil.

Clarke, together with a young Englishman to whom he was acting as a tutor on what had already proved to be a very adventurous and unconventional Grand Tour, and a M. Preaux, a French landscape artist, succeeded in entering the Summer Harem at Seraglio Point at a time of year when the occupants were still in the Winter Harem up on the hill, with the connivance of Herr Ensle, an Austrian gardener who had been responsible for laying out a garden for the sultan in the manner of that at Schönbrunn. The ‘Charem’, as Clarke called it, from the outside reminded him of one of the smaller Cambridge colleges – he was at that time both a fellow and Bursar of Jesus College – enclosing the same sort of cloistered court.

They were then taken to the New Kiosk, built by Selim III at his summer residence. ‘There’, he wrote,

… We were pleased with observing a few things they [the women of the Seraglio] had carelessly left upon their sofas, and which characterised their mode of life. Among these was an
English
writing box, of black varnished wood, with a sliding cover, and drawers; the drawers containing coloured writing paper, reed pens, perfumed wax, and little bags made of embroidered satin, in which their billets-doux are sent, by negro slaves … That liqueurs are drunk in these secluded chambers is evident; for we found labels for bottles, neatly cut out with scissars, bearing
Turkish
inscriptions,
with the words ‘Rosoglio’, ‘Golden Water’, and ‘Water of Life’. These we carried off as trophies of our visit to the place.

With a wealth of material to record in the Kiosk and in the Summer Harem building in which harem women slept in tiers, one above the other, in a long corridor, it was unfortunate that M. Preaux, the French artist, whose extraordinary dexterity with pen or pencil enabled him to make lightning sketches of anything he saw, was so weighed down by feelings of guilt and apprehension that he either lost the few drawings that he had dared to make, or else threw them away, which was a great loss to posterity as no accurate representations of the interior of the Summer Harem are known to exist. Just as the Summer Harem itself, what was an enchanting collection of wooden buildings, no longer exists. It was burned down in 1863, in the reign of Sultan Abd ul-Aziz. It was never rebuilt, and when the railway finally wormed its way into the city, following the line of the sea walls round Seraglio Point in 1870, all communication between the Palace on the Hill and the Point was cut off. Today much of what was the site of the Summer Harem has been buried by the coastal highway.

To return to the Winter Harem at Topkapi, the last sultan to maintain a harem there was Abd ul-Medjid I who became sultan in 1839 at the age of sixteen. Enfeebled early in his reign, which lasted until 1861, by excessive indulgence in the pleasures which its occupants offered, he became extremely depressed by living in it – in spite of having built himself the Kiosk with an entrancing view of the approaches to the Bosphorus, now a restaurant which bears his name.