Download PDF | Muzaffer Özgüleş - The Women Who Built the Ottoman World_ Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gulnus Sultan-I.B. Tauris (2017).
368 Pages
Muzaffer O¨ zgu¨les¸ is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at Gaziantep University, Turkey, and was the Barakat Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford from 2014 to 2015. He gained his PhD in Architectural History at Istanbul Technical University in 2013.
INTRODUCTION
THE FORGOTTEN STAR OF THE SULTANATE OF WOMEN
This book focuses on the building activities of an overlooked Ottoman royal woman, Gu¨lnus¸ Emetullah Sultan, and situates her patronage alongside that of her royal predecessors and successors in an architectural lineage that produced some of the most extraordinary buildings in the history of the Ottoman world. The output of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan is chosen in order to reveal how the scope of Ottoman women builders’ patronage was shaped by various determining parameters, be they structural, historical or ideological. Moreover, the subject has been chosen in order to illuminate the life and work of one of the most notable figures of the Ottoman Harem, and correct the historical record, which heretofore has somewhat neglected her.
In fact, we will argue that Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan should be considered one of the most notable figures of the historic Ottoman Harem, as she enjoyed a very long reign of influence at the heart of the Empire, which spanned moments of great turbulence during the mid-seventeenth century and periods of relative prosperity, including the early years of the eighteenth century. She began exercising her influence between 1664 and 1687 as the favourite of Mehmed IV (r. 1648–87), who, once she had given birth to a son, never left her behind at court and insisted on her company, even military campaigns.
She was the only haseki (royal favourite) ever to accompany her husband on such missions, and away from the battlefields, she was famed across Europe for joining him on his hunting parties, held during the prolonged glory years of the dynasty. This was the period when the Turks were still a source of fear for their European neighbours, and this Greek-born, Harem-raised woman at the heart of the sultanate fascinated the world outside the Empire. Gu¨lnus¸ even became the subject of contemporary European engravings, which, in extraordinary depictions of an Ottoman consort, showed her on horseback, a prominent and active member of the royal inner circle (Figure I.1). Later, she became queen mother to two Ottoman sultans, Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703) and Ahmed III (r. 1703–30), affording her an unusual longevity at the top of the Harem and, from 1695 and until her death in 1715, she played an active role both in politics and patronage as the Valide Sultan (Queen Mother).
The buildings that she endowed throughout the domains of the Empire helped her successfully legitimize her own power in the capital while simultaneously representing the glory and might of the Ottoman dynasty and state at its outmost reaches. Nevertheless, Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s legacy is eclipsed in the historical and popular imaginary by figures such as Hu¨ rrem (d. 1558), Nurbanu (d. 1583), Ko¨sem (d. 1651) or Turhan (d. 1683) Sultans. Likewise, her building activities are less well known than those of other Ottoman royal women. This could be due to either the ‘unappealing’ seventeenth century of the Ottoman history, which is notorious as a period of crisis, rebellions and military defeats, or the Ottoman court’s move from Istanbul to Edirne in the second half of the seventeenth century, as these historical realities have tended to reduce the attention paid to this period and its building activities. However, this oversight is a mistake, and obscures from us the dedication in which Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan was held by the sovereign, Sultan Mehmed IV.
Indeed, Mehmed endowed her with many extraordinary favours, gifts and privileges: she was the only Haseki (favourite) in the history of the Empire in whose name a church was converted into a mosque as part of the spoils of a successful military campaign; moreover, she was only the second privileged Haseki after the reputed Hu¨ rrem Sultan to have an extensive religious foundation in Mecca, the holiest city of Islam; finally, she was the only queen mother to build two imperial mosques in Istanbul, the jewels in the crown of her buildings, which mushroomed throughout the empire as imprints of her power. Yet, it is not only the quantity, exceptionality or spread of her buildings that makes Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s patronage important. This book will argue that she was indeed one of the most influential of Ottoman royal women, and that she actively took part in the state politics and used Figure I.1
In an engraving by Theodoor van Merlen dated to the second half of the seventeenth century, Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan was depicted on horseback and named as ‘Evemenia Sultana, the principal wife of Mahomet IV, Turkish emperor’ (q Bibliothe`que nationale de France). architecture as a means of propaganda. Her building enterprises were highly influenced by the political realities and contingencies of the moment, to which she paid strict attention in her ongoing attempts to shore up her sons’ power. Until now, she has been excluded from the scholarly record’s thesis about the so-called ‘Sultanate of Women’, the period starting with the tenure of Hu¨ rrem and encompassing the reign of several influential favourites and queen mothers, ending in the midseventeenth century.1 This book argues that the ‘Sultanate of Women’ thesis ought to be extended to include Gu¨lnus¸, that she was indeed a member of it and that her patronage was the expression of her immense power. Moreover, her last buildings carried the seeds of an imminent and dramatic change in Ottoman architectural taste, which would determine the building styles and decorations throughout the rest of the eighteenthcentury.
For this reason, it is important to reflect on the possible influence Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s intellect and her agency might have had on setting the stylistic parameters of the new era of Ottoman architecture. While some of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings displayed the ambitions of a self-confident Ottoman Empire that was still able to wield considerable might in the world, some were more expressive of grudging defeats taken from European rivals. While some of them reflected the health and prosperity of the dynasty, some carried signs of internal pressure as Ottoman sultans were often faced with challenges as they imposed their power on their subjects, their soldiers or the ulema (religious leaders).
This is particularly true when Gu¨lnus¸’s buildings involved the Islamization of previously Christian spaces. Thus, while it was possible to come across church conversions in her name on the frontiers, which acted as symbols of military victories, it was also possible to find some in the imperial capital which were built to Islamize previously Catholic land in order to compensation for other military losses. Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s tenure stretched through a half-century period of great transition, which included conquests, such as that of Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1672, and catastrophes, like the Siege of Vienna of 1683, victories, like the one in Prut in 1711, and defeats, like the one in the Zenta War of 1697.
When she started her career as the favourite of Mehmed IV, the Ottoman Empire was enjoying a relatively stable period under the grand viziership of the Ko¨pru¨lu¨ dynasty.2 Subsequently, her husband Mehmed IV took on the holy conquest mission of his ancestors and marched into Europe with his beloved wife.3 After successful campaigns in Poland, however, his ambition to conquer Vienna – the red apple of the Ottomans’ eye since the time of Su¨leyman the Magnificent (r.1620–66) – turned out to be his doom. Humiliating defeats followed for the rest of the century under the reigns of three more sultans. The century ended with the catastrophic Treaty of Karlowitz, signed in 1699 during the reign of Mustafa II, a substantial humiliation for the Empire.4 The Edirne Revolt of 1703 signalled a shift in the Empire’s fortunes. It not only ended the long influence of the Kadizadelis and their dominant creed of conservative orthodox Islam, but also the reign of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s elder son, Mustafa II.5 Her younger son Ahmed III, however, enjoyed a more successful tenure: the Ottomans were able to recover some of the previous territorial loses and, by the death of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan, the ‘Tulip Era’ – a period of peace and stability – was at the door.6 This long transition period from the second half of the seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century carried the Ottoman Empire towards the so-called, although now much-contested, idea of the ‘decline’ era.
This context of change and upheaval, with its tempestuous political and economic fluctuations, also shaped the patronage of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan and is registered in the endowment decisions she made and the stylistic expressions present in her buildings. It is, in fact, possible to read this historical transition through the lens of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s building activities, by taking architecture as a mirror of the transformation of the politics of state. However, for this reading, the locations of her buildings, their implicit and symbolic meanings and correlations with the socio-political events should be treated as boldly as their stylistic evolution. After this brief historical background, one might be convinced of the exceptionality of the period or singularity of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan, but still raise the following question: ‘Why does Ottoman women’s patronage matter?’ In fact, the answers to that question have been given considerable attention in the recent literature emerging in the wake of Gender Studies, and revisionist projects have begun to populate the male-dominated boundaries of architectural history with heretoforeoverlooked women patrons. So far, the focus has been on shedding light on Western or European women and their patronage of the arts and architecture.7 In terms of the Islamic world, it has been widely thought that men’s patronage far exceeded women’s in terms of scale and scope. Parallel to Islam’s restrictions for women in public spaces, the trend has been to neglect evidence of women’s architectural patronage on the assumption that any such building activities were necessarily subordinate to those of their male counterparts.
This has resulted in a significant underestimation of women’s role in this area and the extent of their patronage has often been underestimated, or indeed misattributed to their husbands or sons. Nevertheless, in the last few decades, prioritizing male patrons over female ones in Islamic empires has begun to be questioned, and it has come to be seen that far from being inactive or passive in this field, women of privilege frequently patronized architecture and used it as an effective tool for self-representation and visibility; not only did they build, but their buildings were often their public face, particularly as their physical appearance was often restricted under Islamic social norms, especially during more conservative phases.8 As a consequence, it was realized that women of a privileged status within the Ottoman Empire were as important patrons of architecture as men of privileged status, and their patronage started to become a subject of scholarly studies.9 The increasing attention towards Ottoman royal women, who used to be thought as passive subjects beyond Harem walls, brought with it new insights about their participation in politics and their patronage parallel to their power.10 It was shown that Ottoman royal women, that is, mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of sultans, took the advantage of their positions and their high levels of income to build extensively in order to promote an image of themselves as a pious and charitable sultana while at the same time assuring their visibility through these physical structures, which played a bolder, more overt role than their seldom appearance in public ceremonies.11 In parallel with the evolution of the policies of inheritance in the Ottoman dynasty, or due to political and economic constraints, queen mothers or favourites even took over the role of building on behalf of their sons.12 In fact, this practice was in keeping with that of their predecessors in the Byzantine, Ayyubid and Seljuk empires.13 Within the last few decades, further academic studies have appeared which have brought certain buildings of certain woman builders into focus in order to reveal the patronage mechanisms of the Ottoman elites and how implicit messages were conveyed through those buildings.14
A groundbreaking volume published in the last decade must be highlighted, as it sets out to examine the patronage of a single Ottoman women builder and places her output in comparison with that of contemporary European women patrons. It was Lucienne Thys-S¸enocak’s ‘Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan’, which intensively examines the building activities of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the mother of Mehmed IV.15 Thys-S¸enocak, by challenging the traditional misogynistic framework that obscured and discounted Ottoman women’s involvement in politics, successfully showed how Turhan Sultan represented her power and piety, and made herself visible to Ottoman subjects and others through architectural patronage. And it was Thys-S¸enocak’s words below that marked the present book’s starting point, inspiring both its subject and its approach: Ultimately, this case study of Turhan Sultan and her agenda for architectural patronage should be expanded to compare with patronage efforts conducted both by other royal Ottoman and ‘other women’ patrons who were her contemporaries, predecessors and successors. We can then work towards a more comprehensive understanding of imperial women’s patronage in the Ottoman Empire and the complex relationships that existed between the built environment and the gendered identity of the architectural patron in the early modern world.16 With these words in mind, this current project focuses on Turhan Sultan’s successor and daughter-in-law, Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan.
As we have seen, both her person and her building activities have heretofore been obscured in the historical record, but, after a preliminary survey, it was easy to see that the combination of the involvement of Ottoman royal women in state politics since the early sixteenth century, and their everincreasing participation in architectural patronage since Hu¨ rrem Sultan had bequested a critical legacy to Gu¨lnus¸. She naturally took her predecessors as role models in many ways; she knew how to transform her political power into buildings in order to portray an image of pious and beneficent sultana and how to use her income effectively to represent herself. Unfortunately, only some of the buildings that bore the name of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan have survived; many others have long since disappeared and been forgotten, ironically sharing a similar fortune with their patron. Thus presenting the architectural repertoire of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan is an exciting challenge as it attempts to fill an important gap within the Ottoman architectural history.
This book also takes this goal a step further by investigating Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s motivations for undertaking her various building activities and comparing her patronage with that of other Ottoman royal women. In so doing, the study aims to reach a comprehensive understanding of royal women’s patronage in the Ottoman Empire and safely assess Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s place within this bigger picture. In other words, this book aims to bring another dimension to the emerging discourse on Ottoman women builders, and does so by performing a vertical comparison rather than a lateral one. Thus, rather than comparing Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s output with that of her contemporaries in the West or in the East, it ambitiously investigates the building activities of her predecessors and successors in the Ottoman Empire, that is, her role models and inheritors. Furthermore, while it continues in the vein of attempting to offer answers for previously unanswered questions, such as the agency of Ottoman women patrons in building projects, at the same time, by presenting new primary material, it refrains from repeating the assessments of the previous literature. In order to realize these aims, this book first portrays the life of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan in Chapter 1, starting with her capture, in 1646 from Rethymno, her home town in Crete, and her subsequent presentation as a concubine to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. We will then chart the three major phases of her life, her early years in the Harem as the favourite of Mehmed IV until his deposition in 1687, her first reign as queen mother to her elder son Mustafa II, 1695–1703, and finally her second tenure as queen mother to her younger son Ahmed III, 1703–15. The most notable events of her life, including her political activities and her travels into Eastern Europe, which were highly unusual for an Ottoman sultana, are interwoven with the historical background of the Empire in order to form a picture of the milieu within which her building activities took place; as we shall see, the events of her time were closely related with the emergence and the expression of her building activities. To supply a base for the legacy that Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan inherited and was in dialogue with in the construction of her own patronage portfolio, Chapter 2 focuses on the patronage of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s predecessors in the Ottoman Empire. It is divided into two sections, taking one of the most influential sultanas, namely Roxelana or Hu¨ rrem Sultan, as a milestone. This is because Hu¨ rrem’s unparalleled impact and privileged position in the eye of her husband Su¨leyman the Magnificent notably reshaped the patronage of all Ottoman women builders who came after her and 10 WOMEN WHO BUILT THE OTTOMAN WORLD brought about what Leslie P. Peirce has called the ‘sedentarization of the sultanate.’17 This change overturned the established practice of ceding out provincial governance to young heirs to the throne; rather, Hu¨ rrem opted to stay in the imperial capital and raise her sons in Topkapı Palace. The move proved lasting: not one of Hu¨ rrem’s successors permitted their sons to be separated from them in the name of governance. The decision also had a profound effect on the future of Ottoman patronage, as it significantly affected the locations of the royal women’s buildings. Hu¨ rrem’s unusual patronage18 had very close correlations with her political agenda, and her reign became a model for her successors, yielding the period called the ‘Sultanate of Women’. Therefore, the first section starts with the roots of women’s patronage in the early Ottoman State and continues up until the reign of Hafsa Sultan, the mother-in-law of Hu¨ rrem Sultan, while the second section presents the subsequent royal women up to and until Turhan Sultan. With each sultana, the conditions governing the evolution of their building activities will be discussed. What follows are the five core chapters of the book, ‘The Building Activities of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’, which thoroughly investigate how Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan exercised her patronage, examining the historical and architectural aspects of her buildings and grouping them in five separate sections, each of which corresponds to a certain type or stage of patronage. In Chapter 3, three churche-mosque conversions are explored: all in her name, in three different phases of her career and in three unique frontier cities, namely Kamianets-Podilskyi, Chios and Oran. These conversions clearly show how a royal woman could represent the Ottoman state by claiming the superiority of Islam over Catholic Christendom, and as such this section provides a previously undiscussed insight about women’s symbolic role in religious patronage. Chapter 4 takes on another dimension of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s patronage, focusing instead on buildings attesting to her piety and her religiosity, since they were constructed either in Mecca, the holiest city of Islam or on the route of the Hajj, the pilgrimage. The hospital and the soup kitchen, designed for the use of the pilgrims and the poor of Mecca, and the bridges near I˙znik easing the passage of a troublesome section of this long journey confirmed Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s reputation as a pious and generous sultana. By contrast, Chapter 5 examines a single building, Galata New Mosque, which had replaced the major Catholic Church, which had fallen into disrepair after an earthquake hit Istanbul and had subsequently been demolished, leaving few traces behind. This longforgotten, uniquely modest imperial mosque, which was built in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood of the city, is here brought into daylight, as is a discussion of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s Islamization of Christian space. In Chapter 6, Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s large-scale network of water structures, fountains and their waterways in Galata, Edirne and elsewhere, are discussed.
These are hugely important aspects of her patronage because, despite their hidden nature, they probably constitute the most philanthropic of her endowments. Moreover, examination of the documents attached to these endowments provides perhaps the clearest window into the construction processes Gu¨lnus¸, her chamberlain and the labour-chain followed and illuminate the agency of the Valide Sultan herself. Finally, Chapter 7 illustrates the magnum opus of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan, U¨ sku¨dar Yeni Valide Complex in Istanbul, and its novel articulation which signalled the approaching stylistic changes of eighteenth-century Ottoman architecture. Chapter 8 discusses the building activities of Ottoman royal women after Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan and takes her legacy into account while tracing the patronage of queen mothers and favourites from Saliha Sultan (d. 1739) to Rahime Perestu¨ Sultan (d. 1904). While the changing paradigms in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture brought about new styles and new building types, the patronage of royal women also adapted to this change and their patronage never lagged behind their male counterparts. Therefore this chapter reconsiders outdated ‘decline of the Ottoman Empire’ phenomenon by examining Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s successors’ evolving patronage and charts the shifting dynamics of the expanding architectural repertory of Ottoman sultanas. In order to find the answer to the question ‘Where do the buildings of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan stand within Ottoman architecture?’, a comparative study is conducted in Chapter 9. Firstly, the building activities of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan investigated from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7 are compared and contrasted with each other with respect to their changing styles and scales over the long duree of her successive reigns.
Then a comparison of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s patronage with that of previous and successive Ottoman women is conducted, in order to see ‘the big picture’, by making use of the data presented in chapters 2 and 8. For these comparisons, different parameters, such as types, sizes, locations, architectural styles and symbolic meanings of buildings are taken into account. Finally in the epilogue of the book, the determining factors of Ottoman royal women’s patronages, such as length or political stability of their tenures, are analyzed. After safely designating the place of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings in the long tradition of Ottoman architecture, and having witnessed an extraordinary example of women’s architectural patronage throughout a transitional and, at times, turbulent period of the Empire, an even more ambitious question is raised: How would a typical Ottoman royal woman, a favourite or a queen mother, carry out her architectural patronage? The answer to this question deciphers the common denominators which link patronages among Ottoman royal women across the centuries. It ends by offering a hypothetical illustration of an anonymous Ottoman sultana and her potential building activity. Many other questions are answered in the following pages and still more are raised. It is to be hoped that this book also supplies necessary secondary material for future research projects by offering tables, chronologies and maps within its appendix, which can be used as references for further investigations. Besides giving an overall view, the chronology of queen mothers and favourites of the Ottoman dynasty, the tabulated data regarding the buildings’ expenses, the number of attendants and their wages, as well as the table of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s endowment deeds and their postscripts, should contribute a rich resource to be exploited not only by architectural historians, but also by scholars of economic and social history. Likewise, map showing the locations of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings and her routes during her travels provide clarity about the extent of her patronage and her unique mobility as a Harem member. Finally, lyrics of a folk song, which used to be sung in Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s hometown Crete and narrate her story, were added as a ‘bonus track’.
The research for this book basically relied on mostly hitherto-unused material gathered from three major Ottoman archives in Turkey.19 Invaluable documents shedding light on both Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s life and building activities were supplemented by her own and other Ottoman royal women’s endowment deeds. Those materials were extremely helpful in revealing various parameters of buildings and patronage, such as the start and completion dates of construction, material types and unit prices, the wages of workers or attendants of the buildings, the income generating sources and amounts of the pious foundations, and so on. Certain processes, from the reconnaissance survey to the inauguration ceremonies, have become clear, even for some nonextant buildings, and the agency of the patron has been proven with the letters showing the correspondence between Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan and her chamberlain – we can read her own sentences, written in her own hand. Furthermore, these archival materials were consolidated with the accounts of Ottoman chroniclers,20 who were most of the time eye-witnesses to those building activities. Moreover, travelogues,21 which also gave first-hand insights about buildings and their perception by their contemporaries, were valuable, as were many other secondary sources. Besides the aforementioned written documents, visual sources and fieldwork were extremely important for unearthing the hidden history of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings. Certain engravings, maps and rare photographs22 gave invaluable insights for the nonextant buildings and helped substantially in their architectural reconstructions. For those buildings still standing, I pursued the trail of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings in Istanbul, Edirne, Yalova, Kocaeli and Menemen in Turkey and in Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine. I also performed fieldwork for a building which no longer stands in Chios, Greece. The fieldwork was excessively helpful and brought about new discoveries, as spending long hours in and around Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s buildings inspired new perspectives and a deeper understanding about their architecture.
The buildings of many other Ottoman royal women were visited, photographed and investigated, with a particular interest in their certain features that would yield correlations with those of Gu¨lnus¸ Sultan’s. However, the long-disappeared buildings in Mecca and Oran were not visited, since those cities and their street patterns have lost their historical appearance. Time in the field and in the archives prompted many more research questions than cannot be covered in the scope of this book. Questions abound regarding the sources of a specific architectural element in women’s building projects, whether the gender of a patron impacted the overall expression of a building, what were the building activities of countless other royal women, what material traces as to a patron’s identity remain imprinted upon the buildings and what evidence is there of contact between Ottoman patronesses and their female contemporaries in other Islamic or European countries... Yet, those questions and many others are to be answered by future researchers. It is my hope that this book goes some way towards prompting such studies. Yet, for our purposes, it is now time to home in on the extraordinary life and exceptional patronage of a previously neglected Ottoman royal woman, Gu¨lnus¸ Emetullah Sultan. As we shall see, what emerges can provide us with an invaluable blue-print for royal women builders of the Ottoman world.
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