This lively account of the comings and goings of the Ottoman sultans is packed with memorable details, but in the wake of the recent tragedy in northern Turkey, two sentences are particularly striking. "In 1509", Freely writes, "Istanbul was shaken by a severe earthquake, popularly called 'The Little Doomsday', which damaged the outer walls of Topkapi Sarayi as well as some of the palace buildings". Later in the book he notes that "a terrible earthquake in 1766 destroyed or damaged many important buildings in Istanbul, most notably Fatih Camii, the Mosque of the Conqueror, which was totally ruined." In those days, of course, it was not the collapse of buildings which endangered the lives of ordinary folk, but their construction. The same Fatih, aka Mehmet II, who seized the city of Constantinople from the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Dragases, rallied his troops from an awesome fortress called Rumeli Hisari, on the shores of the Bosphorus, which was built in four months in 1452 and is still one of the most imposing sights in a city of architectural miracles. History, needless to say, does not record how many slaves lost their lives in the rush to get it completed on time.
The present study, however, concentrates not on the buildings of Ottoman Istanbul but on what went on inside them - specifically, inside the high walls of the harem. The very word conjures up visions of soft lights, sweet music and perfumed beauties swathed in jewelled silks; the reality, so far as we can ascertain it from occasional sidelong references and speculative asides, seems to have resembled nothing so much as life in a particularly brutal boarding school. In the early years of the empire, conditions in Topkapi Palace were spartan, to say the least - those miles and miles of unheated tiles must have been cruel to slippered feet in winter - and rates of infant mortality were shockingly high. As late as the 1840s, some 25 of the children of Sultan Abdul Mecit I (he fathered 18 sons and 25 daughters altogether, not bad for a man suffering from tuberculosis, though he was pipped at the post by Murat III, who is credited in the harem archives with the production of 24 sons and 32 daughters) died in infancy.
IF you were a royal prince of the Ottoman dynasty, on the other hand, death from natural causes was the least of your worries. At the end of January 1595 it was the turn of another Mehmet, Mehmet III, to take the reins of empire. The day after he was crowned, he summoned his 19 half-brothers - the eldest of whom was 11 - to his quarters in the palace. According to a report prepared by a Jewish rabbi for the English ambassador, he "told them not to fear, as he did not wish to do them any harm, but only to have them circumcised, according to custom . . . and directly they had taken his hand they were circumcised, taken aside, and dexterously strangled with handkerchiefs . . . " The practice of fratricide eventually died out, with the young princes being incarcerated, instead, in a gilded prison known as the Cage. For the women of the harem, life imprisonment rather than butchery had always been the order of the day. It was still a tough existence, with palace intrigues and rivalries occasionally reaching (literally) poisonous levels, but many slave girls of humble - and, often, foreign - origin worked the system to their advantage, rising to positions of considerable power not just in domestic matters but sometimes, in the case of the valide sultan, or mother of a reigning sultan, in the domain of national, even international, politics. In the course of his jaunt through six centuries of Ottoman history Freely provides a detailed picture of the increasingly complex organisation of the harem - which eventually, like the empire itself, spun out of control as successive sultans, having spent most of their lives locked up in Topkapi or one of the other imperial palaces, emerged as idiots, alcoholics and psychopaths. Indeed, it could be argued that the harem, which had ensured the propagation of the Ottoman dynasty for so long, was, indirectly at least, responsible for its dissolution. In the autumn of 1919, with the empire on the point of collapse as the Allied Powers merrily carved up its territory among themselves at the Treaty of Sevres, the last sultan, 60-year-old Mehmet VI Vahidettin, went AWOL for a month, ignoring panicky messages from foreign ambassadors and other officials. It later transpired he had been amusing himself in the harem with his newest wife - the 19-year-old daughter of a palace gardener.
The story of the harem, though, is more than simply a catalogue of political ineptitude and domestic brutality; it is the story of a way of life whose secrecy and sensuality are almost unimaginable to us, and Freely has, in his rather dogged way, assembled a fascinating collection of insights, glimpses and snatches of gossip which, in the best tradition of the seraglio, cover up at least as much as they reveal. The sultan who wore hobnailed boots so that his concubines could scatter discreetly at his approach (perhaps, like a number of his royal relatives, he preferred boys?); Mahmut II on his hands and knees in the palace nursery, playing the part of a horse in a game with his little sons; the rule which specified that radishes, cucumbers, gourds and similar vegetables should be sliced before being brought into the harem, lest they should provoke wanton thoughts among the ladies, "for they are all young, lusty and lascivious wenches, and wanting the society of men . . . " Ibiza Uncovered, eat your heart out.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
