Download PDF | John Freely - Inside the Seraglio_ Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul-I.B. Tauris (2016).
290 Pages
John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn. In 1944, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the US Navy and served for two years, including combat service in the Pacific and China–Burma–India theatres. In 1960 John and his family moved to Istanbul, where he taught physics and the history of science at Boğazic¸i University. Aside from his travels across the world, he has lived there ever since. He is the author of over 60 acclaimed travel and history books, including Strolling through Istanbul, The Western Shores of Turkey, Strolling through Venice, Inside the Seraglio, Children of Achilles, Light from the East, Celestial Revolutionary and The Grand Turk.
Introduction to the New Edition
Sultan Selim initiated the following opinion: That the true felicity of a king or emperor did not consist of military toils and in operations of bravery or glory, but in idleness and tranquillity of the senses, in the enjoyment of all comforts and pleasures in palaces filled with women and buffoons, and in the fulfilment of all desires for jewels, palaces, loggias, and stately constructions. Lorenzo Bernardo, Report to the Venetian Senate, 1570 The world changed forever on Tuesday, 29 May 1453, when the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, who was just twenty-one, made his triumphal entry into Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, successor to the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces, which had fallen to him after a seven-week siege.
Thenceforth the city came to be known as Istanbul, capital of the rapidly growing Ottoman Empire, which would soon encompass all of the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire in both Europe and Asia, leaving all of Christendom in mortal fear of falling to the Terrible Turk. Thereafter Mehmet was known to the Turks as Fatih, the Conqueror, the seventh sultan of the House of Osman, taking its name from Osman Gazi, Warrior for the Islamic faith, first of an imperial line that would rule the Ottoman Empire for more than seven centuries. Fatih began reconstruction of his new capital in the summer of 1453, when he issued orders for the repair of the ancient Byzantine walls and other structures that had been damaged in the siege. Since the Great Palace of Byzantium on the first hill was in ruins, Fatih began construction of a new imperial residence on the third of the city’s seven hills, on a site described by his contemporary Greek biographer Kritoboulos as ‘the finest and best location in the centre of the City.’
This residence came to be known as Eski Saray, the Old Palace, because a few years later Mehmet decided to build a new palace on the first hill, the famous Topkapı Sarayı, which for nearly four centuries was the principal residence of the Ottoman sultans. Fatih constructed his palace on the summit of the first hill above Saray Burnu, the promontory where the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn meet and flow together into the Sea of Marmara, while on the slopes of the hill and along the seashore he laid out extensive parks and gardens with pavilions. The palace was described by the seventeenth-century Turkish chronicler Evliya Çelebi as ‘the most delightful residence ever built by the hand of man.’ Topkapı Sarayı was much more than just the private residence of the sultan and his court. It was the seat of the supreme executive and judicial council of the empire, the Divan, and it housed the largest and most select of the training schools for the imperial civil service, the Palace School.
The Saray was laid out to accommodate these various institutions, each in its own buildings around the four main courtyards. The residential section of the palace extended along the west side of the three inner courts, with the Harem, the women’s quarters, to the south, and the Selamlık, the residence of the sultan and the royal princes, to the north. During the great days of the Ottoman Empire the population of the palace is estimated to have been between three and four thousand. The complex of buildings commonly referred to as the Harem includes also the Selamlık, the private rooms for the sultan himself and the semipublic ones where he occasionally entertained the high officials of the government and the high officials of the court and government; there is no very clear dividing line between the two. It is a labyrinth of several hundred rooms, few of them very large, on half a dozen levels, of passages, stairways, courtyards and gardens, without any apparent overall plan. Bab-üs Saadet, the Gate of Felicity, is the entryway to the Third Court.
Here one entered the strictly private and residential areas of the Inner Palace, the sequestered Dar-üs Saadet, the House of Felicity. The Harem was not an original part of the palace as laid out by Mehmet II. Fatih seems to have designed Topkapı Sarayı primarily as the administrative centre of his empire, reserving Eski Saray, the old palace on the Third Hill, for his court and his harem. This arrangement was maintained by his three immediate successors: Beyazit II (r. 1481–1512), Selim I (r. 1512–20), and Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66), at least during the early years of his reign. According to tradition, Süleyman allowed his wife Roxelana to install herself in Topkapı Sarayı, but probably only in wooden pavilions; his son and successor Selim II (r. 1566–74) seems to have done the same.
The first permanent structures in the Harem seem to have been built by Selim’s son and successor Murat III (1574–95). The women in the harem were guarded by the black eunuchs, while the royal princes, the palace pages and the students in the Palace School were looked after by the white eunuchs. The eunuchs were taken into the palace as youths, having been castrated after they were bought in slave markets, the blacks generally coming from Nubia and the whites from Circassia. The chief black eunuch had the title kızlarağası, or ağa of the girls, while the chief white eunuch was called kapıağası, or ağa of the gate. Originally the chief white eunuch was the dominant figure in the Inner Palace, but after the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, when the number of women in the Harem greatly increased, the chief black eunuch became the most powerful personage.
Topkapı Sarayı continued to be the principal imperial residence until the mid nineteenth century, when the sultans abandoned it in favour of more modern palaces along the shores of the Bosphorus. Then, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, Topkapı Sarayı became the property of the new Turkish Republic, which began converting the old palace into a museum. The descendents of the last sultans were forced into exile, utterly without resources, living on charity while it lasted and then reduced to penury and despair. Ayşe Osmanoğlu, a daughter of Abdül Hamit II, wrote in her memoirs: ‘We are a group of human beings without fatherland, without a home, without shelter. The history of our family in exile was just a sequence of tragic deaths.’ The law forbidding the return of males of the imperial Osmanlı line was eventually rescinded, and in 1992 President Turgut Ozal invited Mehmet Orhan (1909–94), a grandson of Abdül Hamit II, to return to Turkey. Since then many other royal exiles have returned to Turkey, some of them taking Turkish citizenship and beginning new lives in their homeland.
Inside the Seraglio tells the fascinating story of this pleasure dome and the people who lived out their sequestered lives in what was known in its time as the Abode of Felicity. Then, after the fall of the House of Osman, it follows the lives of the royal exiles and the eventual return of some of them to a land that their ancestors had ruled for more than six centuries. It also describes Topkapı Sarayı itself, from its golden age through its abandonment and decay up until its restoration as a museum. When I first came to Istanbul in 1960, there were hardly any tourists in Topkapı Sarayı, and the Harem was not open to the public.
But I visited the palace so frequently that I befriended the few guards and members of the museum staff, and they let me go where I pleased, without any restriction. I had read the only book then available on Topkapı Sarayı: Barnette Miller’s Beyond the Sublime Porte: The Grand Seraglio of Istanbul (1932), and so I was able to identify virtually every room in the Harem, including the barracks of the black eunuchs who guarded the women’s quarters, and the Hall of the Favourites, whose rooms were shuttered and in almost total darkness, their canopied bedsteads shrouded in cobwebs, the dressing table of an odalisque reflecting the dark image of a deserted room. Such was the House of Felicity
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