Political tutors
It is not that royal women were not powerful in the Ottoman empire before or after the 'sultanate of women'. The famous Muslim world-traveller, Ibn Battuta, who visited the nascent Ottoman state in 1336, remarked that 'among the Turks and the Tatars their wives enjoy a very high position.'
From the time of the Ottoman dynasty's emergence in the 14th century, mothers of princes played a recognised role as political tutors and guardians of their sons – roles they would maintain throughout the dynasty's 600-year lifespan. In the 15th century, elder females – aunts, mothers and sisters of sultans
Grudging admiration
Women of the Ottoman royal harem were prominent in what was an age of royal women – Mary Queen of Scots, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, Catherine de Médicis, as well as their counterparts in Safavid Persia and Mughal India. These women were not always loved for their power, and even admiration was often grudgingly given.
Among the Ottomans, there were numerous counterparts to John Knox, the Scottish clergyman who decried the 'monstrous regiment of women' in 1558. A 17th-century grand vizier, himself a slave of the sultan, complained about the 'passle of mentally deficient slave girls, daughters of Russian, Polish, Hungarian and Frankish infidels' whose influence caused him such political grief. The resistance these women provoked serves, of course, as in index to their political power.
Leslie Peirce is professor of history and Near Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Imperial Harem: Women and sovereignty in the Ottoman empire and Morality Tales: Law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab. She is currently working on a popular book about the pre-modern Ottoman empire.