Why It Sucks to Be a Losing Concubine (in Ottoman Empire)

On the night Mehmed III took the Ottoman throne in January 1595, nineteen of his brothers were taken from their mothers and killed under the family's law. The next day the city celebrated with cannon fire and fireworks. Then the mothers were sent away to the Old Palace. You're one of those mothers. Carried off from a village in Poland by Tatar raiders at twelve, sold in Kaffa, trained in the harem of Sultan Murad III, chosen at eighteen, and given a son in a palace where only one son can win. This is your life from the day your grandmother says you'll be beautiful to the morning more than two hundred women leave the New Palace. Told in second person and based on the sources. The harem's ranks, the rivalry between Nurbanu and Safiye, the night of the nineteen princes, the cypress coffins and the move to the Old Palace are in the Ottoman chronicles. The mothers of the nineteen were never named, so "you" are a composite of them, and where the later stories go past the record (the drowned concubines) we say so. Based on the mothers of the nineteen sons of Murad III (reigned 1574-1595) killed at the accession of Mehmed III. SOURCES Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, Tarih-i Selaniki Ibrahim Pecevi, Tarih-i Pecevi Feridun Emecen, "Mehmed III", TDV Islam Ansiklopedisi Tugba Demirci, on the nineteen princes in Ottoman histories, SKAD 5/9 (2019) Betul Ipsirli Argit, Life after the Harem (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem (Oxford University Press, 1993) Maria Pia Pedani, "Safiye's Household and Venetian Diplomacy", Turcica 32 (2000) Mikhail Kizilov, "Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea", Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007) Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapi Palace (MIT Press, 1991) #history #ottoman #whyitsucks