Merryn Allingham

The capital city of Turkey has been the centre of one of the most powerful empires in history: first as Byzantium, then Constantinople and finally Istanbul. Most of the many palaces in Istanbul are from the Ottoman period and in A Tale of Two Sisters I mention three of them:

Yıldız Palace, meaning ‘star’ was built at the end of the eighteenth century and was the residence of Abdul Hamid II (the reigning sultan in A Tale of Two Sisters) from 1889 until 1909.

Dolmabahçe Palace was built in the mid-nineteenth century and was home to six Ottoman sultans and the last Ottoman khalifate. The name Dolmabahçe comes from the Turkish dolma meaning ‘filled’ and from the Persian bahçe meaning ‘garden’. It was a move towards a more Western style of architecture and after the Republic of Turkey was established, the palace was used as the presidential residence.

Finally Topkapı Palace, the setting for A Tale of Two Sisters. Built in the fifteenth century, it served as the main residence and administration headquarters of the Ottoman sultans until they built Dolmabahçe Palace by the waterside. Topkapı is the largest and oldest palace in the world still surviving.

At one time, the palace housed some five thousand residents, a city within a city. The surrounding walls were about three miles long. During the four hundred years of occupation, each sultan added a different section or hall to the palace, depending on his taste or on the needs of the time. The palace became a maze of buildings centred around a series of courtyards protected by different gates. It is so vast, there’s space to mention only a few places – those that play an important role in my novel.

The palace is onion-layered, with a succession of gateways leading  from one courtyard to another, progressing from public space to private. Anyone could pass through the initial gate, the Imperial Gate, though on foot –  only the sultan would ride. This led to the first courtyard, called the Court of the Janissaries (soldiers). The second gate has two guard towers and is called the Gate of Salutation, because everybody had to salute the sultan before going through it. Only the sultan and people working in the palace could pass. I made this the main gate that first Lydia, then Alice, pass through into the Court of the Divan in A Tale of Two Sisters.

The third gate is the Gate of Felicity – this is where the sultan and his court celebrated important events. The first building in this courtyard is the Audience Hall where the sultan received his viziers or foreign ambassadors. The magnificent audience chamber was barred to everyone else but Lydia nevertheless managed to infiltrate!

And behind this hall is the old library – and in A Tale of Two Sisters, a completely imaginary new library as well!

But to pass on to details of the harem, since this is where the majority of the novel’s action takes place.

There were four hundred rooms in the harem, a vast and bewildering complex of labyrinthine passageways, cloistered rooms, grand salons and intimate courtyards, the outside world seen only through screened windows. At one time, it supposedly housed 150 concubines.

The eunuchs’ quarters, a mere fifty rooms, led on to those inhabited by the Valide Sultan, the sultan’s mother. She was very much the power behind the throne and her rooms testify to her importance. Below is an image of some of the beautiful Iznik tile work that decorates almost every part of the palace, but is particularly rich in the Valide Sultan’s quarters. There were bronze fireplaces to warm the rooms in winter and fountains to cool them in summer.

The so-called Golden Way was the passage that joined the Valide Sultan’s quarters to her son’s. Proximity and ease of communication was crucially important for a woman who had her hands on power and was the arbiter of everything that went on in the harem.

With so many women housed together and without access to the external world, it was important they provided each other with stimulating company, as well as learning together the arts and skills that would stand them in good stead in their later lives. Below is a picture of the communal space where they would gather and talk.

A place of great sociability as both my heroines discover. As was the hammam or marbled bathhouse below – a significant centre of female social life in Ottoman times.

The sultan and his sons lived in the harem, too, and the oldest and finest surviving room in Topkapı is the Privy Chamber of Murat III. It still retains its original interior from the fifteenth century.

Topkapı is vast and fascinating, beautiful and haunting, and a brief article can’t begin to do it justice. But the images I’ve posted above were very much in my mind when I wrote A Tale of Two Sisters. Here’s a farewell look at an amazing piece of architecture.

The slave system in the Ottoman Empire was very different from that of plantation life in the US and the Caribbean. Males could be either military or domestic slaves and females almost always domestic. Within the gender segregation, there was a racial hierarchy at work, too. African women were cooks and given menial work, while white female slaves performed more specialised tasks like making and serving coffee or attending dinner trays or acting as nursemaids. Nineteenth century European women visitors reported that slave women had an astonishingly large amount of leisure time and freedom of speech and action inside the harem. They saw the slaves’ lives as preferable to those of domestic servants in the West.

Also slavery was temporary. White women were obliged to serve as slaves for nine years but black women from Africa only seven, as they were thought less well-suited to a colder climate. When a woman was freed from slavery, she received a legally valid certificate of emancipation. She could ask to stay with her former master’s family for life and would be looked after, or she could request to be married. If she chose to marry, she was given a trousseau, jewellery, home furnishings and often a house of her own. The freed slave received a pension of life from his or her former master and would keep strong ties with their former family. Many former slave women, particularly those trained in the harems of the elite, married men of high position.

As a result, it was possible to see slavery as a vehicle of upper mobility, a social ladder, rather than a badge of disdain. (This is something that Lydia Verinder in A Tale of Two Sisters finds almost impossible to understand.) Many young girls from poor families volunteered therefore to become slaves. Or their families sold them into slavery, believing they would have a better future. Others might be captured during tribal raids and sold to slave dealers for profit. Whether voluntary or forced, slavery was seen by both children and parents as a transitory phase leading to social advancement.

Another attraction was the benign treatment slaves received in Ottoman harems. Young slave girls were raised as part of the family, often bought at ages six or seven or even as infants when they were provided with wet nurses. The child would be given a new name and assigned to an experienced slave woman. The young slave ate the same food as the family and her clothing was of similar quality. She was trained in elaborate Ottoman etiquette and practiced by waiting on older slave women before directly serving the family. She would be taught to speak and read Turkish and also taught the basic beliefs and practices of Islam. She learned to sew and embroider and, if she had musical talent, taught to play an instrument or to sing or dance. Both Alice and Lydia in A Tale of Two Sisters are, at different times, entranced by the skills of the women they live with.

Sometimes young female slaves were bought as companions for the young girls of the family and given the same education. They learned to read Persian and Arabic, and in later centuries, English and French. Some trained as nursemaids for the children of the family. Once they had completed their term of servitude, they were married to Ottoman men, or they might be released before their term was completed, as the emancipation of slaves was considered an act of great moral value in Islam. Because of their beauty, charm and cultivation, these girls were highly sought as brides and quite often married into the family they’d grown up in. A cultivated female slave might often be preferred by a man as being far less expensive to marry than a free Ottoman woman of the ruling class. The duty of finding a husband for slave girls fell to the mistress of the house and it was a point of honour to marry her slaves well.

If the girl opted not to marry, she was taken care of for the rest of her life. Slavery was strictly regulated by Islamic law. A slave girl’s rights and the master’s or mistress’s responsibilities towards her were clearly defined. Once purchased, no slave girl could be turned out on the streets. The owner had either to sell her, free her, give her to someone else or provide for her himself. If she had a child by the master, she gained the legal status of ‘mother of a child’ and could not be sold or given away and became free when her master died, if not freed beforehand. The child was acknowledged as legitimate and free and could inherit the same as a child from a legal marriage. The mother was then often married to her master or to an outsider and given a dowry.

If slaves were unhappy, they could ask to be resold and had the legal support of the law. If owners refused, they could run away but could not obtain freedom in this way before their term of servitude was complete. If they ran away, they had to apply to a slave dealer who would sell them to a new owner and inform the former master.

In the imperial harem, the female slaves were primarily servants, though some were used as concubines. By the end of the fourteenth century, concubinage played a major role in royal reproduction. There were a number of benefits to the Ottoman dynasty:

• It was preferable to have female consorts whose allegiance was exclusive to the sultan rather than having wives from a pool of hereditary nobility, who might challenge the sultan’s power.
• A royal consort usually had only one son because as the prince’s mentor as well as his mother, she needed to devote herself completely to his training and protection. It would not have been legally possible to force a free Muslim wife to restrict herself to one son.
• With the high infant mortality rate from disease, it was more logical not to rely on one woman’s ability to produce sons for the continuation of the dynasty.

Most slave girls were not concubines, however – only those at the top of the palace training system, who excelled in intelligence, character and accomplishments as well as beauty, were eligible as concubine candidates. In addition to being a residence for the royal family, the imperial harem was a training institution – a kind of royal finishing school. The women destined to be concubines were often trained by the sultan’s mother herself. The Valide Sultan in A Tale of Two Sisters has complete control over every woman and every slave in the imperial harem. She is second only in power to the sultan himself. For the vast majority of slave women who were not concubines, there was the opportunity to rise through the administrative ranks and enjoy a permanent career within the imperial harem or be married to a husband in the Ottoman military or administrative elite.