How The Ottoman Harem Picked It's Concubines?

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]In 1520, a teenage girl from a village near Rohatyn, in what is now western Ukraine, was dragged from her home by Crimean Tatar raiders.

[00:00:10]She was the daughter of an Orthodox priest.

[00:00:13]She had no title, no wealth, no political connections of any kind.

[00:00:19]Within 15 years, that girl would become the legal wife of the most powerful man on Earth, the mother of a future sultan, and the woman who redrew the political map of an empire spanning three continents from inside the walls of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

[00:00:38]Her name was Hurrem.

[00:00:40]The Europeans called her Roxelana.

[00:00:43]And her story began inside the one place western historians have been getting wrong for 500 years, the Ottoman Imperial Harem.

[00:00:52]So, how did the Ottoman Harem actually choose its concubines?

[00:00:56]Because the version you have heard, with sultans tossing silk handkerchiefs at trembling beauties lined up in the palace corridors, isn't what happened.

[00:01:07]The real system was stranger, more calculated, and far more consequential [music] than any fantasy the West ever invented.

[00:01:16]If you search for images of the Ottoman Harem right now, what you will find comes almost entirely from one tradition, European oil paintings by artists who never [music] set foot inside any Harem, working from the accounts of European men who also never entered the Imperial Palace's private [music] quarters.

[00:01:37]In 1668, an English diplomat named Paul Ricaut published one of the most influential accounts of the Ottoman court ever written.

[00:01:47]In it, he described the sultan choosing concubines by dropping a silk handkerchief at the feet of the woman who caught his eye.

[00:01:55]She would then creep to the foot of the Imperial bed and wait.

[00:01:59]There is a problem with this account.

[00:02:02]Ricaut himself admitted he had almost no direct knowledge of the harem's inner workings.

[00:02:08]He was describing chambers inside the Topkapi Palace he had never entered, rituals he had never witnessed, >> [music] >> and women of the Ottoman court he had never spoken to.

[00:02:20]50 years later, a woman actually did enter the private quarters of the Ottoman elite.

[00:02:26]Her name was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

[00:02:34]Between 1717 and 1718, she visited the homes and bath houses of Ottoman women in Istanbul and Adrianople in person.

[00:02:44]When she asked Hafsa Kadin, a former consort of Sultan Mustafa [music] II, about the handkerchief ceremony, Hafsa told her flatly that no such custom existed in the Ottoman Palace.

[00:02:57]What Montagu actually found inside those marble-floored [music] chambers was not an erotic playground.

[00:03:03]It was, in her own words, the women's coffee house, where all the news of the town is told.

[00:03:10]Gossip, political intelligence, social maneuvering, a world managed by women inside the palace walls of Istanbul for purposes the European male imagination could not conceive of.

[00:03:24]This is where the real story of the Ottoman harem begins.

[00:03:29]Not with fantasy, but with the institution itself.

[00:03:33]And that institution had rules as rigid as any military command structure.

[00:03:39]The Ottoman harem did not recruit its women.

[00:03:42]It acquired them.

[00:03:44]And it acquired them through three channels that operated like a state-supervised supply chain stretching from the Black Sea coast [music] to the markets of Constantinople.

[00:03:56]The first and largest channel was the Crimean slave trade.

[00:04:00]For roughly 200 years, from the early [music] 1500s to the late 1700s, Crimean Tatar raiding parties >> [music] >> swept across the steppes into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the territories of Muscovy, carrying captives south to the Black Sea port of Caffa, modern-day Feodosia in Crimea.

[00:04:20][music] Ottoman historians Halil İnalcık and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk have estimated that approximately 2 million enslaved [music] people from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine entered the Ottoman Empire through Crimean ports between 1500 and 1700.

[00:04:39]Hürrem Sultan arrived in Istanbul through this exact pipeline around 1520.

[00:04:45]The second channel was Istanbul's dedicated women's slave market, called the Avret Pazari.

[00:04:52]Located in the Aksaray district near the ancient column of Arcadius, this marketplace held open auctions every Wednesday from the mid-15th century until Sultan Abdülmecid I shut it down by imperial decree on December 28th, 1846.

[00:05:09]>> [music] >> Ottaviano Bon, a Venetian diplomat stationed in Istanbul from 1604 to 1607, described the scene in his written account of the Ottoman court. Girls were displayed for prospective buyers [music] in an enclosed courtyard, their bodies examined to confirm the buyer would not feel cheated.

[00:05:29]A French traveler named Nicolas de Nicolay, writing in 1567, recorded that slaves, especially children and young women, were displayed without clothing so that buyers could inspect them physically before purchase.

[00:05:45]The third channel was political gifting.

[00:05:49]Provincial governors, grand viziers, and especially the Crimean Khan routinely sent young women to the Sultan in [music] Istanbul as tribute.

[00:05:58]When Sultan Ahmed III took the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1703, >> [music] >> the Crimean Khan sent him 100 Circassian virgins as an accession [music] present.

[00:06:11]Safiye Sultan, one of the most influential women in Ottoman history, entered the Topkapi Palace in 1563 [music] as a gift from Suleiman the Magnificent's own granddaughter to the young prince Murad.

[00:06:27]Islamic law governed who could be enslaved under the Ottoman system.

[00:06:32]Muslims could not be taken.

[00:06:35]The supply flowing into the palace was therefore almost entirely non-Muslim.

[00:06:41]Circassian women from the Caucasus Mountains, Georgian women from the kingdom of Kartli, Ruthenian and Ukrainian women from the borderlands of Poland-Lithuania, Russian women from Muscovy, Greek women from the Aegean Islands, Albanian women from the Balkans, and East African women purchased through the slave markets of Cairo.

[00:07:01]Once a girl reached the imperial capital, she did not simply walk through the gates of Topkapi Palace.

[00:07:08]She entered a screening process inside the harem that would determine her entire future within the Ottoman court.

[00:07:16]Palace midwives in the harem quarters examined each new arrival for virginity and infectious disease.

[00:07:23]The girls were placed in a 30-day quarantine inside the palace.

[00:07:28]Ottoman sources describe a practice called sleep watching, where attendants observed the new arrivals at night for snoring or talking in their sleep, which palace authorities considered signs of mental instability unfit for court service.

[00:07:44]The buyers, often agents acting on behalf of the Valide Sultan or the chief black eunuch inside Topkapi, assessed each girl's geographic origin, hair color, skin condition, teeth, voice quality, and bearing.

[00:08:00]Blond hair paired with blue eyes commanded the highest prices in the Istanbul slave markets.

[00:08:07]According to the historian Hayri Göksin Özkoray, a luxury slave cost approximately 5,000 akçes in the 16th to 17th centuries.

[00:08:17]A menial domestic slave cost around 200.

[00:08:21]Once selected, a girl was taken to the Eski Saray, the old palace built by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in the 1450s on the site of what is now Istanbul University in the Beyazıt district.

[00:08:35]This was the training ground.

[00:08:37]Each girl received a new Turkish name, usually drawn from Persian words for beauty or flowers.

[00:08:45]Hürrem means the joyful one.

[00:08:48]Nurbanu means princess of light.

[00:08:51]Mahidevran means everlasting [music] moon.

[00:08:55]A paper badge was pinned to her chest until the other women in the palace learned her new name.

[00:09:01]The training curriculum inside the harem lasted years.

[00:09:04]It included Turkish language instruction, Quranic study, Islamic ritual, court etiquette, embroidery, dance, and music.

[00:09:15]Archival research by the Ottoman historian Betül İpşirli Argit on the reign of Sultan Mehmed the Fourth from 1648 to 1687 identifies specific girls in the palace who were paid stipends to study violin, kanun, tanbur, santur, ney, and other instruments.

[00:09:36]Some were even sent outside [music] the Topkapi Palace walls to the homes of famous male composers in Istanbul for private lessons.

[00:09:44]The 16th-century French observer, Guillaume Postel, noted that girls trained specifically in needlework inside the harem were those who lacked the beauty and grace to rise higher in the palace hierarchy.

[00:09:58]This is an explicit confirmation from the period itself that the training stream inside the Ottoman harem was tiered by physical appraisal from the very beginning.

[00:10:09]Speaking native languages inside the palace [music] was forbidden.

[00:10:13]After a few years behind the walls of Topkapi, most girls had forgotten where they came from.

[00:10:19]The Ottoman state had erased their past and built a new identity centered entirely on service to the dynasty.

[00:10:27]And within that system inside the harem, there was a hierarchy as rigid and codified as any rank structure in the Ottoman military.

[00:10:37]A girl entered the Topkapi harem >> [music] >> as an acemi, a novice.

[00:10:42]She advanced to sakird, or apprentice, then to cariye, a full slave attendant working inside the palace.

[00:10:50]The vast majority of women in the Ottoman harem spent their entire careers at this level. [music] They cleaned the tiled corridors, cooked in the palace kitchens, [music] laundered silk garments, served food in the imperial dining halls, and never [music] once laid eyes on the sultan.

[00:11:08]A cariye could rise to become a kalfa, a paid stewardess [music] overseeing daily operations, or an usta, a mistress of a specific department like the table service or the imperial laundry.

[00:11:22]The most trusted attendants who served the sultan [music] personally inside his private chambers were called gedikli, those who stand at the threshold.

[00:11:32]Above them, inside the [music] dynastic family proper of the Ottoman court, came the ranks that changed the course of history.

[00:11:41]A gözde, the noticed one, was a woman the sultan had selected for his bed inside the private apartments of the Topkapi harem.

[00:11:50]An ikbal, the fortunate one, was a woman who had been called back.

[00:11:56]A kadin was a formal consort, capped at four in imitation of the Islamic legal wife tradition.

[00:12:03]A haseki sultan was the chief favorite of the reigning sultan.

[00:12:07]And at the very [music] top of the Ottoman imperial hierarchy sat the valide sultan, the sultan's own mother, who controlled the entire institution from her ornate apartments [music] in the center of the Topkapi harem.

[00:12:21]Two figures ran this system inside the palace walls with absolute authority.

[00:12:27]The first was the valide sultan herself.

[00:12:31]She decided which women entered the harem of the Topkapi Palace, which ones advanced through the ranks, which ones were presented to the sultan in his private chambers, and which ones were married off to Ottoman officials and sent away from the capital.

[00:12:47]No woman entered or left the imperial harem without her consent.

[00:12:52]The second was the kizlar agasi, the chief black eunuch of the Ottoman court.

[00:12:57]Almost always a castrated East African boy, purchased through the slave markets of Cairo, and raised inside the palace.

[00:13:06]After 1574, when Sultan Murad III created the position, this man became the fourth highest-ranking official [music] in the entire Ottoman Empire.

[00:13:17]He controlled the harem treasury inside Topkapi, administered the holy endowments of Mecca and Medina, and served as the physical gatekeeper [music] between the women's world behind the palace walls and the outer court where the grand vizier and the imperial council conducted state business.

[00:13:36]The physical space of the Topkapi Harem matched this hierarchy floor by floor.

[00:13:42]The complex, mostly designed by the architect Mimar Sinan and expanded after fires in 1541 and 1665, contained more than 400 rooms across six floors inside the palace.

[00:13:56]The carriers slept in small, dark, tightly packed dormitories stacked above the concubines courtyard.

[00:14:03]The apartments of the Valide Sultan, by contrast, were the largest section of the entire Harem decorated with blue and white Iznik tiles, stained glass windows, and marble water fountains.

[00:14:16][music] The privy chamber of Sultan Murad III, built by Sinan in the 1570s, still retains its original blue and coral Iznik tile work and a two-tiered marble fountain [music] whose constant running water was designed to defeat eavesdroppers listening through the walls of the Topkapi Palace.

[00:14:36]The actual process by which a woman reached the Sultan's private chambers was nothing like the European [music] fantasy.

[00:14:44]The Valide Sultan and the chief black eunuch surrounded the Sultan with the most promising women from inside the Harem.

[00:14:52]When the Sultan made a selection, the chief black eunuch quietly informed the chosen gözde.

[00:14:59]She was bathed, perfumed, and conducted along an internal corridor inside the palace known as the Altın Yol, the golden road, to the Sultan's apartments.

[00:15:10]There was no audience. There was no ceremony.

[00:15:13]There was a bureaucratic process managed by eunuchs inside the walls of Topkapi.

[00:15:19]And then there was the rule that defined everything about a woman's fate >> [music] >> inside the Ottoman harem.

[00:15:26]The nine-year rule, a cariye who served nine years inside the Topkapi Palace without being selected by the Sultan or promoted to kalfa, received a document called an itikname, a certificate of manumission.

[00:15:40]She carried this small certificate in a round amulet pinned over her chest for the rest of her life.

[00:15:46]And she was buried with it when she died.

[00:15:49]The Ottoman [music] state then arranged her marriage, usually to a palace officer or a provincial governor elsewhere in the empire, and provided a dowry.

[00:15:59]This was not generosity, it was imperial strategy.

[00:16:04]By seeding the entire Ottoman ruling class with women who had been raised for years inside the dynasty's own household at Topkapi, the system created a network of personal loyalty that extended from [music] the palace corridors in Istanbul to the farthest provincial capitals of the empire.

[00:16:23]>> [music] >> The actual population of the harem tells a different story than the European fantasies.

[00:16:29]Wage registers studied by Betül İpşirli Argit at Cambridge University show 49 women in the Topkapi harem in 1574.

[00:16:39]By 1633, there were 433.

[00:16:43]Under Sultan Mahmud I, the first, around 446.

[00:16:48]Under Selim III, the third, roughly 720.

[00:16:53]Under Mahmud II, the second, 473.

[00:16:57]The sensational European claims of 1,500 women inside the palace were inflated by men writing about an institution they could never access. [music] The genius of the Ottoman harem and its danger was that it could produce women capable of running an entire empire.

[00:17:16]Four of them did exactly that.

[00:17:19]And historians now call their era the Kadınlar Saltanatı, the Sultanate [music] of Women.

[00:17:26]It lasted from roughly 1533 to 1656, >> [music] >> a span of 123 years.

[00:17:34]Hürrem Sultan shattered every rule governing women inside the Ottoman court.

[00:17:40]She bore Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent six children, [music] breaking the one mother one son rule that had governed Ottoman dynastic reproduction for generations.

[00:17:51]Before Hürrem, once a concubine inside the harem produced a male heir, her intimate relationship with the Sultan typically ended.

[00:18:00]She devoted herself entirely to raising her son inside the palace.

[00:18:04]And when he reached adolescence, she accompanied him to a provincial governorship far from the capital in Istanbul.

[00:18:12]The system produced multiple equally trained heirs [music] scattered across the Ottoman provinces, ensuring the strongest would win the inevitable succession war after the Sultan's death.

[00:18:24]Hürrem refused to follow that pattern inside [music] the Topkapi Palace.

[00:18:29]She stayed at the Sultan's side.

[00:18:32]She was emancipated [music] and legally married to Suleiman around 1533 or 1534, the first slave concubine in Ottoman history to be freed and wed by a reigning Sultan.

[00:18:45]She moved the Imperial Harem from the Old Palace across Istanbul into Topkapi itself.

[00:18:51]She corresponded directly with the King of Poland, the wife of the Shah of Persia, >> [music] >> and the Venetian Doge from inside the palace walls.

[00:19:00]She commissioned the great Ottoman architect Sinan to build a mosque, a hospital, a madrasah, and a soup [music] kitchen in Istanbul.

[00:19:10]And she built them at the Avret Pazari itself, the very slave market where women like her were bought and sold.

[00:19:17]Nurbanu Sultan came after Hurrem.

[00:19:20]Most likely born Cecilia Venier Baffo, the illegitimate daughter of a Venetian nobleman, she was captured around age 12 during the Ottoman Admiral Barbarossa's naval raids in the Aegean Sea around 1537.

[00:19:36]Hurrem personally selected her inside the Topkapi Harem for her son, [music] Prince Selim.

[00:19:42]When Sultan Selim II died inside the palace in 1574, [music] Nurbanu hid his corpse packed in ice [music] inside the Topkapi Palace for days, keeping the death secret from the Imperial Court until [music] her son Murad could travel from the Ottoman provinces and claim the throne before any rival could act.

[00:20:04]She was the first concubine in Ottoman history ever buried [music] beside her Sultan in a tomb at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

[00:20:15]Safiye Sultan, probably Albanian from the Dukagjin Highlands, was presented to the young Prince Murad inside the Topkapi Harem in 1563 and remained his only intimate companion for close to 20 years.

[00:20:31]She exchanged letters with Queen Elizabeth I of England who sent her a European-style gilded coach [music] as a diplomatic gift to the Ottoman Court.

[00:20:41]After her son [music] Mehmed III took the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1595 on a night preceded by the strangling of his 19 brothers inside the Topkapi Palace by deaf-mute executioners using [music] silken bowstrings because Ottoman custom forbade the spilling of royal blood, Safiye effectively co-ruled the empire from behind the harem walls until 1603.

[00:21:06]The Venetian Ambassador Marco Venier, sent a diplomatic [music] dispatch from Istanbul about that night in January of 1595.

[00:21:15]He reported that the eldest brother, described as a beautiful boy, beloved by everyone in the Ottoman court, kissed the new Sultan's hand and said, "My lord and brother, now to me as my father, let not my days be ended thus in this [music] my tender age."

[00:21:33]The Sultan tore at his beard with every sign of grief, [music] but answered nothing.

[00:21:38]The boy was led away to the executioners inside the [music] palace.

[00:21:43]The horror of that mass killing inside Topkapi helped end the Ottoman practice of royal fratricide.

[00:21:50]From then on, the princes of the Ottoman dynasty were confined to the [music] kafes, the cage, a suite of small, dark rooms inside [music] the Topkapi Palace overlooking the courtyard of the favorites.

[00:22:03]They were given barren concubines to prevent rival heirs, received no military training from the Janissary Corps, and gained no political experience governing the Ottoman provinces.

[00:22:15]When Sultan Suleiman II finally emerged from the kafes in 1687, after 36 years [music] of solitary confinement inside those rooms, he reportedly said, "If my death has been commanded, say so.

[00:22:30]Since my childhood, I have suffered 40 years of imprisonment.

[00:22:35]It is better to die once than to die every day."

[00:22:39]This is the context in which Kösem [music] Sultan rose to power inside the Ottoman court.

[00:22:45]Probably Greek, captured around [music] age 14 in 1604, she was spotted by the chief black eunuch [music] inside the Topkapi harem and presented to Sultan Ahmed I.

[00:22:57]She became the first woman in Ottoman history to be formally invested with the regency of the empire, governing on behalf of her 11-year-old son, Murad IV, when he took the throne in 1623.

[00:23:11]She attended the Imperial Council of the Ottoman government from behind a latticed screen inside the palace.

[00:23:17][music] In 1648, she supported the deposition and execution of her own son, [music] Sultan Ibrahim, inside the walls of Topkapi.

[00:23:28]Her end came on the night of September 2nd, [music] 1651.

[00:23:34]The Ottoman chronicler, Mustafa Naima, records that the chief black [music] eunuch and over 120 armed eunuchs descended on the Topkapi Palace and fought through more than 300 loyal Janissaries and palace [music] guards to reach Kösem's private quarters inside the harem.

[00:23:52]A man named Küçük Mehmed [music] cut a curtain from the wall of her chamber and used it as a rope to strangle her.

[00:23:59]The city of Istanbul observed 3 days of public mourning for the woman who had governed the Ottoman Empire from inside [music] its harem walls for nearly 30 years.

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[00:24:14]We cover the forgotten fates of royal [music] families every week.

[00:24:19]The historian Leslie Pierce, whose 1993 book The Imperial Harem remains the definitive scholarly account of these women, made an argument that overturned a century of [music] Western historiography about the Ottoman court.

[00:24:33]The political influence of these women was not, as 19th [music] century European historians had claimed, a symptom of Ottoman decline.

[00:24:42]It was a logical, even intended, consequence of the system's own structure inside the Topkapi Palace.

[00:24:50]Consider the architecture of power inside the late Ottoman court.

[00:24:54]With the princes of the dynasty locked in the cafes instead of governing Ottoman provinces, the Valide Sultan became the only person in the empire who could legitimately train the next ruler from childhood [music] inside the palace walls.

[00:25:09]During the chronic minorities of 17th [music] century Ottoman Sultans, with Ahmed I taking the throne at 13, Murad IV at 11, Mehmed IV at 6, the Valide Sultan ran the government of the empire from inside the Topkapi Harem.

[00:25:27]Under Islamic law, a concubine who bore her master an acknowledged [music] child became what the legal tradition called Umm al-Walad.

[00:25:37]She could never be sold.

[00:25:39]She was automatically freed upon her master's death.

[00:25:43]And her children were free, legitimate, and equal in inheritance rights to those born to legal wives.

[00:25:51]This is why every Ottoman Sultan from the late 15th century onward, with the exceptions of Suleiman and Selim II, was the son of a slave concubine inside the Imperial Harem.

[00:26:04]And it is why those concubine mothers became, >> [music] >> on their son's accession to the throne of the Ottoman Empire, the most consequential women in the Islamic world.

[00:26:15]When an Ottoman Sultan died inside the Topkapi Palace, his surviving concubines, who had not born a successor to the throne, were transferred across Istanbul to the Eski [music] Saray, the old palace in the Beyazit district.

[00:26:30]It served as the Imperial Dowager House for women whose role inside the court had [music] ended.

[00:26:36]Disgraced Valide Sultans were sent there, too.

[00:26:40]Safiye Sultan was exiled to the Old Palace in 1603. [music] The Eski Saray burned to the ground in 1687, killing Muazzez Sultan, the mother of Ahmed II, inside its walls.

[00:26:54]The Ottoman government never rebuilt it.

[00:26:57]For 500 years, the Ottoman Imperial Harem inside the Topkapi Palace selected, trained, ranked, and deployed women through a system more structured and more consequential than most European royal courts of the same era.

[00:27:12]And for 123 of those years, the women it produced governed one of the largest empires on Earth from inside its walls.

[00:27:21]The oil paintings, the silk handkerchief stories, the breathless fantasies [music] of a thousand European travelers writing about the Sultan's palace in Istanbul.

[00:27:32]All of it was invented by men who were never allowed through the door of the Topkapi Harem.

[00:27:37]The women behind that door did not need anyone's fantasy.

[00:27:42]They had the [music] empire.

[00:27:44]If you want to know what happened to these women after the Ottoman dynasty finally fell in 1924, that story is waiting for you on screen now.