Ottoman Women Builders

The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan

Lucienne Thys-Senocak

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913157
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Examined here is the historical figure and architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the young mother of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, who for most of the latter half of the seventeenth century shaped the political and cultural agenda of the Ottoman court. Captured in Russia at the age of twelve, she first served the reigning sultan's mother in Istanbul. She gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to Sultan Ibrahim, and came to power as a valide sultan, or queen mother, in 1648. It was through her generous patronage of architectural works-including a large mosque, a tomb, a market complex in the city of Istanbul and two fortresses at the entrance to the Dardanelles-that she legitimated her new political authority as a valide and then attempted to support that of her son. Central to this narrative is the question of how architecture was used by an imperial woman of the Ottoman court who, because of customary and religious restrictions, was unable to present her physical self before her subjects' gaze. In lieu of displaying an iconic image of herself, as Queen Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici were able to do, Turhan Sultan expressed her political authority and religious piety through the works of architecture she commissioned. Traditionally historians have portrayed the role of seventeenth-century royal Ottoman women in the politics of the empire as negative and de-stabilizing. But Thys-Senocak, through her examination of these architectural works as concrete expressions of legitimate power and piety, shows the traditional framework to be both sexist and based on an outdated paradigm of decline. Thys-Senocak's research on Hadice Turhan Sultan's two Ottoman fortresses of Seddülbahir and Kumkale improves in a significant way our understanding of early modern fortifications in the eastern Mediterranean region and will spark further research on many of the Ottoman fortifications built in the area. Plans and elevations of the fortresses are published and analysed here for the first time. Based on archival research, including letters written by the queen mother, many of which are published here for the first time, and archaeological fieldwork, her work is also informed by recent theoretical debates in the fields of art history, cultural history and gender studies.

1
Introduction: Royal Ottoman Women as Architectural Patrons

This book examines the person and architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the mother of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). Like many women of the Ottoman harem, Turhan Sultan entered the Topkapı palace court as a concubine. She had been captured in Russia at the age of twelve and brought to İstanbul to serve Kösem Sultan, the mother of the reigning Ottoman sultan. Turhan gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to the sultan and, upon the death of her husband Sultan İbrahim, became a valide sultan (or queen mother) in 1648. As the mother of the new sultan (a six-year-old child), Turhan became the de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire for over three decades, until her death on 4 August 1683. During this time she shaped many of the political and cultural agendas of the Ottoman court and assumed much of the power, wealth, and traditional privileges of the sultanate. Among these privileges was the patronage of large-scale architectural works in both the Ottoman capital and its provinces. By her early thirties Turhan Sultan had become an active patron of architecture. In 1658 she initiated the construction of two large fortresses at the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles. In 1661 she began to build a large mosque complex (or külliye), which included a tomb, primary school, royal pavilion, and market complex, in Eminönü, the center of İstanbul’s busy harbor on the Golden Horn. Later in her life, she endowed several other structures in Ottoman Thrace, the Balkans, and Crete; she also provided for charitable foundations along the pilgrimage route to Mecca. It was through her ambitious patronage of architectural works that Turhan Sultan legitimated her new political authority as a valide and became a visible force in the early modern era of Ottoman history.¹

Figure 1.1

Hadice Turhan Sultan, an imagined portrait. Attr. Sir Paul Rycault, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 1668

Contrary to the popular notion that women in Islamic empires were powerless because of cultural practices which restricted their physical access to the public sphere and forbade display of their persons, recent scholarship has shown that many royal female members of Islamic courts undertook quite ambitious building projects and actively engaged in ceremonial as a way to represent themselves and to insure visibility among their subjects.² Ottoman women were no exception to this phenomenon. Turhan Sultan had a long line of female patrons of architecture to emulate, from imperial women of early Islamic courts such as Zubayda, the wife of the Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, to Ottoman women who were her near predecessors such as Hürrem Sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent’s wife. The latter, known in Western sources as Roxelana, had built extensively in İstanbul, Jerusalem and other regions of the empire only a century before Turhan became a queen mother.

Figure 1.2

Mehmed IV on Horseback , c . 1663, Austrian National Library, Vienna

Changes in various aspects of Ottoman policies concerning succession during the mid-sixteenth century brought imperial women, and particularly the mothers of Ottoman princes, closer into the folds of the sultanate in İstanbul. In a process which Peirce has referred to as the “sedentarization of the Sultanate”, the “royal family was gradually gathered in from the provinces and installed in the imperial palace in the capital of İstanbul”.³ This shift in the locale of members of the royal family impacted, in turn, the stage upon which imperial women set their patronage. Prior to the mid-sixteenth century, the major architectural foundations built by imperial Ottoman women had been realized outside the capital of İstanbul. The mothers of potential heirs to the sultanate, serving as guardians and advisors to their sons, directed much of the business of the princes’ provincial courts in various regions of the empire. In the royal households of the provinces it was often the mother of the prince, as the eldest member of the court, who stepped into the role of the patron of architecture. However, as the loci of princely residences shifted increasingly to İstanbul, imperial women responded by focusing their building efforts in the capital and less in the provinces. With the exception of the Sultan Ahmed mosque, founded in the first half of the seventeenth century, most of the large külliye built in the capital city of İstanbul from the mid-sixteenth through the late seventeenth century were built by women of the Ottoman court: the wives, daughters, and mothers of the Ottoman sultans.⁴

A central question asked in Ottoman Women Builders is how architecture was used as a vehicle for self-representation and expression by imperial woman of the Ottoman court. Because of the customary views and religious laws of the time which restricted the degree to which royal women could be seen in public, Turhan Sultan and many royal women who lived in the Ottoman court before her were neither expected nor allowed to present their physical selves, unveiled, before the gaze of their subjects. In this respect the imperial experience of Turhan Sultan differed significantly from that lived by many of her contemporaries in Europe who often used the physical display of their persons to create an aura of power, piety and legitimacy. However, Ottoman women’s greater access and ability to exercise control of their wealth made a significant difference in the patronage agendas of European and Ottoman imperial women. Chapter Three, “Ottoman Women/Other Women”, explores the different ways in which imperial women in the Ottoman world and in early modern Europe represented themselves through acts of patronage and ceremonial during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the patronage agendas of the imperial European women – Elizabeth I, Catherine and Maria de’ Medici – selected here for comparative purposes, are as unique as the patrons themselves, my intention in “Ottoman Women/Other Women” is not to make generalizations about imperial female patrons in this era. Rather, I hope to enrich the data that has been collected for the early modern period with case studies of their Ottoman “consoeurs”, like Turhan Sultan, who are not as well known as their European contemporaries, but who were indeed very active patrons of architecture.⁵ By comparing the conditions surrounding these women’s individual acts of building, I hope to work towards a better understanding of how gender intersects with patronage, architecture, and self-representation.⁶

Turhan Sultan and her architectural patronage are of particular interest because among the buildings she commissioned were two fortresses. These building types rarely appear in the architectural repertoire of imperial women in any region of Europe or the Mediterranean world during the early modern era. Yet Turhan Sultan’s first major act of patronage, and the focus of Chapter Four, “Defending the Dardanelles”, was the construction of Seddülbahir and Kumkale, on either side of the Dardanelles. With these two military structures the Ottoman queen mother could assume and advertise her position as the protector of the empire, a role previously reserved for the sultan. The presentation here of the first plans and detailed historical and architectural documentation of Turhan Sultan’s two works of military architecture on the Dardanelles forms an important part of this book.

As Seddülbahir was under Turkish military jurisdiction until 1997, and Kumkale continues to operate as a naval base making it inaccessible to the public, neither of the valide’s fortresses had been accurately surveyed when I began my research of Turhan Sultan’s patronage. The results of a five-year survey project, initiated in 1997, which documented the existing remains of these sites along with the related archival material, increased in a significant way the data that exists for the study of military architecture in the Ottoman Empire. As more of this type of data accumulates, the traditional assumption that the Ottomans were either opposed to or unable to innovate or integrate the technologies of artillery and military architecture after the sixteenth century will need to be reassessed.⁷ There have been relatively few Ottoman military structures which have been accurately surveyed and whose architectural history has been investigated in any detail. These types of structures have been overshadowed by the larger urban complexes of the “Ottoman Classical Age” and have yet to capture the interest of the majority of Ottoman architectural historians. The imperial mosque complexes built by Sinan, the famed court architect of the sixteenth century, and more recently the Ottoman domestic and palace architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are the focus of most architectural historians’ research on Ottoman buildings. Compared to the numerous studies and architectural surveys conducted of fortresses throughout Europe, interest in Ottoman military architecture is in its infancy. Comparative stylistic analyses of Ottoman fortresses in the early modern era are, therefore, still quite difficult to make, particularly for the seventeenth-century structures where there is even less documentation.⁸

Recent scholarship on the level of development in European versus Ottoman military technology has demonstrated that the Ottomans, at least until the mid-eighteenth century, were considered by Europeans to be formidable adversaries whose knowledge and ability to engage in siege warfare and defense tactics were comparable to other powers throughout the Mediterranean and the European frontiers of Hungary.⁹ In the seventeenth century the Ottoman attempts to destroy Venetian seapower in the Aegean were largely successful, particularly after the former were able to capture Crete, the major towns of which, except for Candia, modern-day Heraklion, gradually succumbed to the sultan’s navy by 1646.¹⁰ Venice’s subsequent tactic of blockading the Dardanelles did debilitate the Ottoman naval forces temporarily, but eventually the former were repelled and the straits made more secure through the construction of Seddülbahir and Kumkale during the early days of Turhan Sultan’s tenure as valide.¹¹

Turhan Sultan’s second building project, and the subject of the fifth chapter, is the Yeni Valide mosque complex of Eminönü, İstanbul. The New Mother’s mosque complex was a large socio-religious building project located in a central market quarter of İstanbul which required a massive expropriation of property from the Jewish community that had existed there since the late Byzantine era. Fueled by the conservative Islamic Kadızadeli movement of the mid-seventeenth century, which railed against non-Muslim minorities and orthodox sufis, Turhan was able to harness the political rhetoric of the time and amass sufficient wealth and legitimacy to transform this quarter of the city, through her architectural patronage, into a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. With the Egyptian Bazaar, an immense han or market building she erected adjacent to her mosque, Turhan Sultan not only arranged for additional funds to be allocated for the upkeep of her complex, but helped to shift the locus of wealth that was generated by the customs offices in this district from non-Muslim to Muslim merchants. “Building in the Capital: The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex of Eminönü” (Chapter Five) explores Turhan Sultan’s motivations for and the processes through which she created this large Ottoman architectural foundation.

Ottoman Women Builders draws upon the resources and methodologies of three fields of history: Ottoman history, architectural history, and the history of gender in early modern Europe. While there are questions and concerns shared by scholars engaged in all of these areas, there are discourses that are, of course, unique to each. Part of the challenge and the excitement of bringing these three disciplines together in a monograph about an Ottoman woman like Turhan Sultan has been to see how the concerns and the queries of one field can elucidate those in others. The varied ways in which gender shapes the periodization of historical events, representation, and patronage have been a central concern to historians and art historians of early modern Europe for at least two decades. Numerous case studies of European women’s patronage in the early modern era exist and the theoretical approaches used by these scholars are useful when examining similar phenomena in the Ottoman context. While it would be inappropriate to extract and impose the same methodological framework upon a culture as different as that of the Ottomans, it is important to see where and why there may be convergence and divergence in the types of patronage activities undertaken by imperial women in the early modern era of Europe, and during the same time period in the Ottoman Empire.

As an example, the problem inherent in gendering private and public spheres of life has been a topic of ...