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Distinctive Facts About The Mighty Ottoman Empire

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2020 35 min

Battle of Ankara - Timurid Empire — Tamerlane gloating over the captured Bayezid I. Wikimedia

8. The Sultanate of Women

For the most part, the Ottoman sultan’s Harem was not a Hugh Heffneresque playground of sensual pleasures. Instead, it was more of a dumping ground in which hundreds of royal female relatives, concubines, and wives were kept, most of them bored out of their minds with little to do. However, some powerful Harem women managed to wield great influence over a stretch of 130 years, circa 1533 to 1656. That period came to be known as “The Sultanate of Women”.

During the Sultanate of Women, imperial wives known as Haseki Sultans, and mothers of sultans known as Valide Sultans, often wielded significant political and social power. That enabled them to influence the daily running of the Ottoman Empire, the appointment, dismissal, and sometimes execution of its foremost officials.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.