Private World of Ottoman Women

Godfrey Goodwin

• Verlag: Saqi Books
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780863567766
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'Asie

Recovering the oft-neglected role of women in Ottoman high society and power politi, this book brings to life the women who made their mark in a male domain. Though historical records tend to favour the glitter of palaces over the trials of daily life, Goodwin also reconstructs ordinary women's domestic toil. As the Ottoman Empire first expanded and then shrank, women travelled its width and breadth whether out of necessity or merely for pleasure. Some women owned slaves while others suffered the misfortune of being enslaved. Goodwin examines the laws which governed women's lives from the harem to the humblest tasks. This perceptive study of Ottoman life culminates with the nineteenth century and explores the advent of modernity and its impact on women at a time of imperial decline. 'The best book on the subject and likely to remain so for some time.' Times Literary Supplement 'A fascinating account by the foremost authority on the Ottoman period.' The Middle East 'Goodwin is an exceptional scholar with an insight that reveals itself in every sentence.' Asian Affairs 'Offers excellent scholarship into a history that has been much neglected by the West.' Judaism Today

CHAPTER 1

The Coming of the Nomads

In the Beginning

Anatolia is as big as Germany and France put together. Even today, distances are great although roads have transformed the country during the last forty years and vehicles travel speedily. It is still wise to think of a night’s break when travelling by car from Istanbul to Dıyarbekir let alone by bus, however luxurious this means of transport has become. A hundred years ago, only the Tatar (Tartar) mounted post could ride 300 kilometres in one day in a crisis. A dispatch from the governor of Dıyarbekir could rarely reach Istanbul in less than ten days. The army might take almost as many weeks. All this was after a military route was established, with depots for revictualling, in the tracks of the Seljuks (Selcuks), Byzantines and Romans before them.

Anatolia is a harsh plateau girdled by a kind coastline and the population needed, and still needs, to be tough to survive the hot summers and bitter winters. The Hittites, Hurrites and Uratu, among the many people who came after the hunter-gatherers and the earliest settlers of the plains of Greater Syria, were indeed tough. They produced leaders, and therefore rivals, who added war to the catastrophes of the climate. The gods had to be placated or enlisted, if possible, and the remains of divine symbols cover large areas of the plateau. They have nothing to do with love but are the entreaties of humanity. There are no statistics to draw on and one may only guess at the numbers of these settlers, the fertility of their wives and how many children survived into adolescence (seen as maturity then because life was short). We do know that they stayed in a harsh terrain for so long because there were no cities to escape to: Constantinople had no name and not even Byzans had been imagined.

Later it was to be different. Other people invaded the pastures and benefited from past husbandry. Eventually, these predators were to include the Romans. Many of the administrators of the Eastern Roman empire had never seen Italy but were educated in the Balkans and Thrace. It was even less likely that many of their troops were Italian-born. Where did the Hittites come from, for that matter?

It is a strange army which leads a celibate life and rare troops who travel with their wives and families. Thus the stock of the plateau embraced some alien blood and some of the children survived. What the Romans did bring with them was their legal code, the father of both Byzantine and Ottoman land laws,¹ which were just benevolent enough to reduce the impulse to escape even when the land was poor. It was an agricultural system based on the family holding. Small farms were held by free peasants whose main crops were the wheat and barley which were vital to subsistence. Since land varies in fertility, the measure was linked to the amount of land that could be ploughed by one yoke of oxen. This was the most efficient economic and political system because the family as a whole supplied the labour and good husbandry increased loyalty to imperial rule. Direct rule from Rome ended when lines of communication became too stretched and the empire was divided into two. The Byzantines in the east were more often of Greek or Balkan origin than Italian and it was rational to be rid of Latin as the twin language by the sixth century when Greek became paramount. The Byzantines accepted the principles of the Roman agrarian system but this did not prevent the growth of large estates when imperial authority dwindled or showed no interest. Many smallholders came to be no better than serfs. The peasants struggled on. They lived in such poverty and remoteness that their mores and ways of living changed little over the centuries, especially where generations were rooted in the same area.

Older Gods

These people clung to their superstitions and pagan beliefs related to the demons of nature, since a terrain so harsh and a climate so unattractive bred very few kindly spirits. Natural phenomena took on their old importance. A great mountain like Erciyas (Mount Argeus) which ennobles Kayseri clearly had to be one of divine importance. It stands overlooking the plain, in an atmosphere which has the gift of transforming this beautiful extinct volcano into a mystery. The only dispute was which deity was enthroned on the summit. Any beautiful stream with its life-giving water would achieve the same importance. Trees in particular were regarded with awe, and in the villages elders met under the finest to discuss local problems in the shade of its invisible wisdom. If it were so old that it showed signs of falling, everything would be done to prop it up. Plane trees were the most revered and the Rev. Walsh, who was chaplain to the British embassy in Istanbul in the 1820s, reported that they were sometimes planted on the birth of a child. In the early 1960s, when the coast lane from Istanbul to Rumeli Hısar was widened, the new road was split to run either side of such a tree rather than that it should be cut down. It is either because of educational progress or municipal power that it has since been felled.

Trees, rocks and springs were so important that new religions, when they reached Anatolia, could not – or were wise enough not to – interfere with primitive beliefs. There are many sites which are equally sacred to Christians and Moslems just as there are the tombs of shared saints. The sacred tree on the Milas to Bodrum road still flaunts its coloured rags above the whitewashed adobe tomb of a holy man, in order to attract his attention in heaven; their number and that of the stones stacked against his monument attest to his sanctity although his name is unknown. He continues to intercede on behalf of the innocent for the cure of diseases, the relief of suffering and to awaken life in a barren womb. It was the women who had the greatest sense of their ancestry, as well they might since they, and they alone, ensured the continuation of a family with the help of benevolent spirits. So tombs were especially precious for women and to worship there was particularly comforting. The worst tyrant among husbands had no right to prevent his wife seeking solace in such places any more than he could forbid her going to the hamam, or bath.² Ancestor worship was just as important as in Cairo, where the families of the deceased still picnic on the graves of their forebears and even sleep there. This practice was pursued on a more modest scale in Ottoman cemeteries.

For the intellectuals of the Greek Orthodox Church, Anatolia was a place of exile. The great bishops, Fathers of the Church though they may have been, dreaded such sees as Caesaria (Kayseri) with its icy winters and mud-sodden springs, despite Roman engineering. The local clergy were as superstitious as their flocks and often as illiterate.³ It was barely possible to find any priest who was prepared to live in a village of mean crofts far from a town and there perform the duties of Christ’s Vicar. The humbler monks offered far more to a peasantry from whom many had sprung, but although there were many monasteries, the country was too large for them to have much influence outside their immediate neighbourhood. Moreover, some monks resorted to centres like Cappadocia to adorn self-dug caves with unsophisticated frescoes of remarkable brilliance just as a few continue to seek refuge on Mount Athos, the holy mountain of Thrace. In Ottoman times, the same problem of finding scholarly imams, or prayer leaders, who would work in outlying places continued and again the situation was sometimes ameliorated by dervish tekkes, or Sufi monasteries. The tomb of the founder became a place of supplication. The dervish movement was mystical and offered an entanglement of spiritual paths. It followed that the many sects held different tenets, but they were brotherhoods akin in their belief that from God we come and to God we shall return.

Such brotherhoods could be widespread and some had tekkes in Central Asia which then branched out and spread all over the Ottoman dominions. In Central Asia, they were influenced by shamanism and it was there that the Turkish babas, or holy men, emerged as leaders. They brought with them antlers and other symbols of the past. While the beliefs of some orders remained simple, others were highly sophisticated, such as those of the Mevlevi order whose vision of the universe was as vivid as it was intellectually rewarding. Its founder, Celalettin Rumi (d. 1273), who was the greatest poet of his age, taught the unity of all reality in God and called on his followers to recognize the place of sin in this unity. The concept is expressed in the choreography of the famous dance of the Mevlevi, where one hand is raised heavenwards and the other points down to the earth.

It was not long before the convents of the brotherhoods attracted the women of the villages because of their humanity.⁴ The Bektaşi even admitted women into their order: women şeyhs, or masters, have been reported. The historians Hasluck and (a century later) Kafadar are open-minded on this claim. More certainly, there were groups of women mystics who met in each other’s houses and were affiliated to a Bektaşi tekke where they might observe the ceremonies.

The Iconoclastic movement of the seventh century grew up among the educated Byzantine clergy because it was obvious that the humble prayed to the image instead of God and were therefore idolatrous. Hence the attempt to suppress icons – but the monks, who had far more sympathy for and friendship with the simple villagers, prevailed. The icons even included those of the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who was of foremost solace to all women. She was the supreme intercessor because she was the Matriarch. When the Iconoclasts were defeated, hers was the first mosaic to be set up in the apse of the basilica of Hagia Sophia. Cybele was reborn.

Conquering Sheep

By the eleventh century, climatic changes had deprived the Mongol hordes of their grazing lands in Central Asia which supported their horses and their flocks. This deracinating revolution resulted in a planned and devastating cataract of invasions. First, the settled peoples of the region fled before their advance and then the Mongols went on to sack and burn Baghdad and their Seljuk successors to take Isfahan. Conquest usually begins with looting and ends with settling, and restoring, a devastated city and the farmland which feeds it; but the advance from Asia was different. The Mongols had no affinity with settled lands and cities and therefore no use for them. What they, and the Seljuk Turks after them, wanted was grazing land.

A flock of sheep was not a matter of a few hundred head but of tens of thousands. In Spain, the migration of the Berbers from the Atlas mountains and Morocco threatened the farms and set routes had to be enforced when they moved their flocks from summer to winter pastures else crops would have been obliterated. But the Mongol rulers had no use for gardens because they had lived, in so far as their memories could stretch, like cowboys in the saddle and had no need of crops.

Memory is of two natures. There is that which does or does not recall a grandparent and that which feeds on legends of astonishing times when heroes were magical. One such hero ran away from a giant who was hurling mountains at him (could this be a way of describing an earthquake or volcano?) and mounted a convenient horse. What else would a tribesman do? The horse sped off as only a Mongol pony could speed but the giant soon caught up with the hero, who dismounted, stuck the horse in his pouch and was happily ignored as a worthless peasant.⁵

Mongol women were just as used to horses as they were to babies.⁶ They were treated with respect and as near equals by men – except in councils of war since they were not Amazons. In this is a rooted inequality. Think how Florence Nightingale’s intervention in the Crimean war was seen as an affront to the generals: she would have had less difficulty with Chingis Khan. By the nineteenth century, women went completely covered in the streets of Turkistan and divorce by the man was common.⁷ The Russians claimed to have freed 25,000 slaves when they captured Khiva in 1873. These girls were regularly culled by the Turcoman (Türkmen) in raids on Persian villages.⁸ In the past, no Mongol would ever marry a slave, unlike the Ottomans, but they could be brutally punished and mutilated. Moser, exploring Central Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, contrasted this with the customs of the Khirgiz Turks, among whom the beautiful 20-year-old wife of a chieftain went unveiled in the guest tent. Shamanism had no use for veils.⁹

Out of Arabia

Immediately after the death of the Prophet, the forces of the new religion of Islam achieved spectacular conquests. Syria and Egypt were taken and Persia absorbed its conquerors. Anatolia followed. The province was in distress, under Byzantine rule, due to over-taxation and unpoliced disorder. Whatever may have been the causes – corruption at all levels of government and a greed for property which the authorities made little effort to restrain – the Byzantine empire was in decline. The frontiers were poorly guarded so that Turkish nomads, in search of grazing when they were driven out of their old pastures by the approaching Mongols, infiltrated Byzantine territories. These were ideal for them because they had plains by the sea for winter grazing and the slopes of foothills up narrow valleys in summer time. When the emperor Romanus was defeated at Manzikirt in the north-east of the province in 1067, the Turkish tribes flowed into the country and they had no inclination to live a sedentary life for which they had no training. The women had the most to lose because they enjoyed a way of life which, like the Mongols’, was freer than that of any villager under Byzantium.

The life of the Turcoman nomads is the first to be considered in this book because, although they pre-dated the Ottomans, they remained under their bureaucracy since they had nowhere to flee but the sea. Other tribes entered Iran and were of military importance once the Persians had wooed the Mongols and the Seljuk Turks with luxury and the comforts of the city. These tribes were valiant and, as the Kızılbaş (Red Heads, so named because of their turbans), some were dangerous to the future Ottoman government because they were religious fanatics following the Shia heresy. The Ottomans were followers of the strictly orthodox Sunni schools against whom these rebellious nomads were pitted, heart and soul.

The Seljuk Turks who defeated the emperor Romanus were the foremost of a brotherhood of tribes fr...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Pronunciation
• Genealogy of the House of Osman
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Coming of the Nomads
• 2. The Wanderers
• 3. Home and the Peasant
• 4. Trade and Wealth
• 5. Bedfellows
• 6. The Chrysalis Cracks
• 7. The Final Decades
• 8. The Seeding of Western Culture
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright