The Women Who Built the Ottoman World

Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gulnus Sultan

Muzaffer Özgüles

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784539269
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire remained the grandest and most powerful of Middle Eastern empires. One hitherto overlooked aspect of the Empire's remarkable cultural legacy was the role of powerful women - often the head of the harem, or wives or mothers of sultans. These educated and discerning patrons left a great array of buildings across the Ottoman lands: opulent, lavish and powerful palaces and mausoleums, but also essential works for ordinary citizens, such as bridges and waterworks. Muzaffer OEzgule? here uses new primary scholarship and archaeological evidence to reveal the stories of these Imperial builders. Gulnu? Sultan for example, the favourite of the imperial harem under Mehmed IV and mother to his sons, was exceptionally pictured on horseback, travelled widely across the Middle East and Balkans, and commissioned architectural projects around the Empire. Her buildings were personal projects designed to showcase Ottoman power and they were built from Constantinople to Mecca, from modern-day Ukraine to Algeria. OEzgule? seeks to re-establish the importance of some of these buildings, since lost, and traces the history of those that remain. The Women Who Built the Ottoman World is a valuable contribution to the architectural history of the Ottoman Empire, and to the growing history of the women within it.

PART I

OTTOMAN SULTANA:
WIFE, MOTHER AND PATRON

INTRODUCTION

THE FORGOTTEN STAR OF THE SULTANATE OF WOMEN

This book focuses on the building activities of an overlooked Ottoman royal woman, Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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. Gülnuş 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).

Figure I.1 In an engraving by Theodoor van Merlen dated to the second half of the seventeenth century, Gülnuş Sultan was depicted on horseback and named as ‘Evemenia Sultana, the principal wife of Mahomet IV, Turkish emperor’ (© Bibliothèque nationale de France).

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, Gülnuş Sultan's legacy is eclipsed in the historical and popular imaginary by figures such as Hürrem (d. 1558), Nurbanu (d. 1583), Kösem (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 Gülnuş 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 Hürrem 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 Gülnuş 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 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 Hürrem and encompassing the reign of several influential favourites and queen mothers, ending in the mid-seventeenth century.¹ This book argues that the ‘Sultanate of Women’ thesis ought to be extended to include Gülnuş, 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 eighteenth-century. For this reason, it is important to reflect on the possible influence Gülnuş Sultan's intellect and her agency might have had on setting the stylistic parameters of the new era of Ottoman architecture.

While some of Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş'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.

Gülnuş 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 Köprülü 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 Süleyman 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 Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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 Gülnuş 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 heretofore-overlooked 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-Şenocak'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-Şenocak, 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-Şenocak'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, Gülnuş 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 ever-increasing partic...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Ottoman Sultana: Wife, Mother and Patron
• PART II: The Building Activities of Gülnuş Sultan
• PART III: Architectural Legacy of Ottoman Royal Women
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates Section