Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

by Amila Buturovic

of the dragoman (interpreter) of the Porte and the title of hospodar (prince, or

  more appropriately, governor) of the Danubian Principalities, which meant that

  only rich and influential dragoman s could hope to gain, whether by licit or illicit

  means, the Moldo-Wallachian thrones. In practice, the title was often sold to the

  highest bidder who subsequently attempted to recover his losses by raising taxes

  and dues and by selling, in his turn, government and administrative offices to

  boyar s (i.e. native nobles) increasingly dependent on state service.

  Throughout their history, the native boyar s have built their wealth, power, and

  sense of identity within the complex network of relationships that evolved among

  the Ottoman suzerain, the Prince, his Greek-Phanariot and native Romanian

  clients, and the rest of society: the clergy, peasants, Gypsy slaves, and a steadily

  growing merchant and professional class which often sought—and gained—entry

  into boyar dom. Contesting the Ottoman-appointed ruler and appealing to one

  great power or another (France, Russia, Austria, Turkey) for the preservation

  of the principalities’ autonomy and of their own rights as a class became the

  boyar s’ main foreign political objective and dominated Romanian political life

  up to at least the 1840s and 1850s, when a new social and national awareness led

  to political energies being increasingly channelled towards reforming society and

  building the nation.

  Historians’ views on “Phanariotism” have been predominantly negative, but

  revisionist readings of the period started to emerge more consistently in the 1970s.

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  My own analysis of the channels of Europeanization in the Principalities is based

  on this re-adjusted view, according to which—irrespective of the overall negative

  impact of foreign domination and its political legacy—the Phanariot régimes

  contributed in a positive way to the refashioning of the capital cities Bucharest

  and Iaşi in the early nineteenth century as “centres of Hellenic culture, a crucial

  intersection of Ottoman, Russian, Italian and central European influences.”7 Many

  of the Ottoman-appointed princes who arrived in the Principalities with retinues

  comprising French- and Greek-speaking doctors, secretaries, and scholars, had

  major roles in building schools, printing presses, hospitals, and orphanages, as

  well as in commissioning the codes of law that served as the foundations of

  modern Romanian jurisprudence.

  Negative readings of Phanariotism owe much to the rivalry of “natives” and

  “foreigners” in the pursuit of power and wealth in ancien-régime Romania. Late

  eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ethnic Romanians must have resented

  the Phanariots’ presence, the ensuing competition for resources, as well as the

  superiority of the Greek language and culture that dominated at the courts and the

  academic centres of Bucharest and Iaşi, forgetful that this culture was “European”

  in a foundational sense of the word. In a study which remains little-quoted in the

  relevant literature, the late historian Vlad Georgescu made what so far apparently

  remains the only attempt at a quantitative study of the corpus of political texts

  produced in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia between

  1369 and 1878.8 His sample comprised 2,049 texts (princes’ decrees, memoranda,

  theoretical works, reforms projects) produced by 302 authors on 172 general

  themes subdivided into topics as varied as the “meanings” of history and the

  “historical destiny” of the Romanians, the international status, sovereignty, and

  autonomy of the Principalities, representations of the Ottomans and the Greeks,

  the merits of industrialization, pleas for civil and human rights, and many others,

  minutely categorized and quantified by Georgescu. In terms of the Romanians’

  broad political-cultural choices as set out by their intellectual élite in the Phanariot

  period, most texts advocate a rapprochement with western Europe, a distancing

  from the “East” (the Ottoman suzerain power and the Russian protecting power),

  and a clearly expressed inclination to distinguish themselves from the “southeast”

  of Europe (a trend that continues today in the form of a reluctance to be seen as

  part of the “Balkans”). Anti-European views were rarely expressed before 1821,

  and when they were, they originated, in Georgescu’s view, in dogmatic disputes

  largely fuelled by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.9 On the contrary, most

  Romanian authors viewed education in West-European schools and travel abroad

  in a very positive light. Attacks on the “corrupting” influence of the West belong

  almost exclusively to the post-1848 period.

  The contemporaries’ negative views of the Phanariot period (1711–1821) as

  disruptive of this pro-European path are reflected in the comparative stagnation

  in the production of political texts between 1720 and 1770, and in the prevalence

  of ideas of decline and backwardness in the available texts. Most of the causes of

  decline as perceived between 1760 and 1830 are connected to foreign domination

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  Women in the ottoman Balkans

  or protectorate (Ottoman-Greek between the sixteenth and early nineteenth

  centuries, Russian after 1821), hence the prevalence of foreign political rather than

  domestic-social issues in the texts covered by the survey. Very few authors in the

  period prior to 1821 attributed the country’s economic and cultural backwardness

  to the corruption, venality and/or inefficient administration of the native (ethnic

  Romanian) élites. Instead they primarily pursued increased autonomy and

  ultimately independence from the Porte, Austria, and Russia.

  Even though such comprehensive statements must be treated with due caution,

  they do provide signposts for an understanding of the period in Romanian history

  up to 1850 largely as a culturally pro-European and politically reformist period.

  This was the crucial period in which a small but influential group of reformist

  nobles and intellectuals addressed concepts such as the nation, the ethnic unity and

  shared traditions of the Romanians in the various provinces they inhabited, the pro-

  European option, and the rejection of Ottoman, Russian, and southeast European

  developmental models. Their largely theoretical efforts prepared the ground for

  landmarks such as the abolition of the Ottoman commercial monopoly in 1829,

  the unification of the Principalities in 1859, the establishment of a constitutional

  monarchy in 1866, and, eventually, national independence in 1877.

  Travellers, Exoticism and Turquerie

  Travellers’ accounts are a major source of information for the largely source-

  impoverished social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

  Romania, as suggested by a major research project at the “Nicolae Iorga” Historical

  Research Institute in Bucharest involving the publication of a still growing

  collection of such accounts in Romanian translation.10 There is in addition much

  documentary travel literature not yet published in Romanian, published a long

  time ago in obscure periodicals, or insufficiently exploited so far. Icono
graphy—

  chiefly lithographs by itinerant artists, votive church murals, and the earliest

  formal portraiture in early nineteenth-century Romania—is a source that has been

  investigated to some extent by art historians and historians of fashion such as Al.

  Alexianu, Andrei Cornea, and Adrian Silvan Ionescu,11 although even here much

  remains to be done.

  To a lesser extent, internal primary sources such as the period’s dowry papers,

  testaments, and wealth inventories are also suggestive sources, but they, of course,

  never offer a “living” image of how clothes were actually worn, nor a sense of what

  material possessions meant for their owners, donors, and observers. What these

  sources have preserved, however, is the extensive and, until the 1850s, almost

  exclusively Turkish, lexicon of wardrobes, as well as occasional information on

  prices and consumption, and on the “social circuits” of clothes—that is, on the

  ways in which clothes were purchased, offered, transmitted, and recycled in the

  period from roughly the 1780s to the 1850s.12 The language of a late-eighteenth-

  century dowry record from Wallachia or Moldavia is almost incomprehensible

  to a present-day Romanian, due mainly to the Turkish names of now largely

  obsolete items of clothing and domestic appliances. Such names entered the

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  language mainly via Greek, the official language of administration, law, and trade,

  which explains the hesitant spelling of, for instance, cübbe (overcoat), rendered

  variously as giubeo, ğiubeoa, or giubea, or of entari, normally listed as anteri in most documents. Thus, for instance, the items given by a Moldavian boyar

  lady to her daughter in a dowry list of 1775 include “a cübbe lined with samur

  (sable),” a “cübbe of kakum (ermine) with gold thread,” a “cübbe lined with sincab

  (squirrel),” as well as a “night entari of germesud (satin).”13 Until the 1830s at

  least, dowries were replete with items such as biniş, alaca, ferace, kontoş, and

  many other similar items. At this stage, Romanian historiography is still lacking

  in detailed studies of prices, trade, and inheritance patterns of boyar family estates

  for the period under consideration here. In addition, the wide range of Central

  European and Ottoman coins used in transactions and the rapid fluctuations in

  exchange rates and monetary values makes it extremely difficult to assess, for

  instance, levels of consumption within a family or across several families, or

  to make comparative analyses of budgets and expenditures among families, or

  social, ethnic, and professional groups. I am, therefore, giving a few examples

  that have a purely suggestive value for price/income ratios in late eighteenth-

  century Moldavia, around the time when the above-mentioned dowry list was

  issued. Thus, in 1763, when the residing Ottoman Divan Effendi (judge) received

  a monthly salary of 250 lei,14 his secretary 140 lei, and the Phanariot prince’s cook

  30 lei, a squirrel pelisse and piece of atlas cost 65 lei, a ferace was also 65 lei, while a horse, a very valuable item at the time, was worth 246 lei, and a carriage

  was 125 lei.15 The Moldavian state budget for 1764 lists salaries of dignitaries,

  officials and court servants ranging between 60 lei per month to the Uşierul cel

  mare (grand court usher) and a mere 2 lei per month to the gardener. The Greek

  doctor Fotaki, with 20 lei as official monthly income, and the fur-maker with 10

  lei, could hardly have engaged in conspicuous consumption, although one should

  not forget the gifts (Slav. mile) made to civil servants and court professionals by

  the Prince.16

  During this time, an accelerated pace of change dramatically transformed

  upper-class female fashions, the patterns of consumption, imports and leisure,

  domestic amenities and interiors, as well as, one can speculate, the élites’—

  especially élite women’s—sense of their own identity. Members of the urban

  élites, on which this discussion is focused, included higher and lesser nobility (the

  native boyar s), a few wealthy merchants, and some members of other upwardly

  mobile urban socio-professional groups, such as doctors and civil servants who

  could gain relatively easy access into the boyar class, usually via purchases of

  titles. The term “Phanariot” or “Greek-Phanariot” designates, as noted above,

  members of the Ottoman-imposed governing élites of Wallachia and Moldavia

  between 1711 and 1822, but the upper class groups I have in view also included

  the ethnic Romanian boyar s, who, as landowners and state officials, administered

  the Principalities and exploited their resources in conjunction, if not always in

  harmony, with the Phanariots.

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  Women in the ottoman Balkans

  The writings of travellers to the “Orient” often include tactile little dramas of

  foreigners and natives curiously gazing at or touching each other’s clothes, the

  Turkish bath scene in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters (written 1716–1718,

  published 1763) being only the most famous scene of this kind.

  One such traveller’s tale provides a convenient introductory insight into what

  a lady of the Phanariot élite in Wallachia must have looked like in the 1790s.

  Travelling to Constantinople via the Romanian Principalities in 1794—on

  a more adventurous route than was customary for young English men on the

  Grand Tour—the young and wealthy John B. Sawrey Morritt (1772–1843) of

  Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire, and his two companions, crossed the Carpathians from

  Transylvania into Wallachia in carriages perilously drawn by oxen. Afterwards,

  having been shaken for days on the terrible Wallachian roads of the time, they

  were only too ready to be enchanted by the effortless hospitality of a Wallachian

  lady who received them, surrounded by her children and her maidservants, in the

  absence of her husband, an aga (i.e. police prefect) who was away on business.17

  This tableau of exotic domesticity and colourful costume was complemented

  the following morning by the minimal and—to westerners—unusual Turkish

  breakfast of coffee and rose sherbet.

  She was seated on a low board sofa which filled the whole of one side of the

  room, surrounded by five or six Greek slaves in great state, [Morritt wrote

  to his sister on 25 July 1794.] … Her gown was long-sleeved, coming up

  before no higher than her cestus, which was tied à la Campbell.18 It was

  gathered round her ankles and legs like trousers, and was made of a spotted

  light muslin. On her head she wore a flat-topped high cap with a gold tassel

  on the top, and a shawl handkerchief round her forehead, her hair hanging

  loose about her shoulders. Over her gown she wore a long light blue silk

  pelisse edged with fur, with half-sleeves; on her feet she had thin yellow-

  leather boots, with slippers, which she left at the side of the sofa to put up

  her feet, for they all sit cross-legged, à la Turque. Over her bosom she wore

  a thin fold of muslin which fastened under her cestus; and I assure you,

  though not of the première jeunesse, it is difficult to imagine a more elegant

  figure.19

  The drawings of the Viennese painter who accompanied Morr
itt on his travels

  are presumed lost.20 However, the works of the French-born Swiss “peintre

  Turc” Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89) offer a plausible suggestion of the general

  appearance of a Greek-Romanian Phanariot lady in the period under consideration.

  Liotard spent a few years in Constantinople (1738–42), where, incidentally, he

  must have obtained special dispensation to wear Turkish dress,21 and a much less

  documented period in Moldavia (1742–43), where he gained first-hand knowledge

  of the lines, colours, and fabrics, as well as of the social and political conventions

  of the Turkish costume in a Balkan context. The only known Moldavian female

  figure by Liotard is a sketch for the official portrait of Ecaterina Mavrocordat

  (Greek: Mavrokordatos), wife of the ruling Prince Constantin Mavrocordat, but

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  Figure 7.1. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of the Moldavian Princess

  Ecaterina Mavrocordat. Red and black chalk, 1742–43.

  Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.

  her dress and pose suggest late “Byzantine” court pomp rather than the more

  relaxed and “bourgeois” attitudes of the Phanariot and native boyar s in daily life

  (Figure 7.1). For purposes of illustration, Liotard’s presumed portrait of Mary

  Gunning, Countess of Coventry, is probably a fairly accurate representation of the

  late eighteenth-century Moldo-Wallachian every-day code of dress for women of

  the urban élites (Figure 7.2).22

  The basic elements of the “Phanariot look”—an essentially layered look—

  were, for the women, a light gauze chemise ending in shalvars (Turkish: şalvar),

  covered by a frock, usually of taffeta or velvet, and one or even two superimposed

  long or short gowns or coats called anteri. In the summer, the anteri could be

  covered in its turn by a ferace or a biniş, or, on grand occasions, by the maloté,

  a very expensive coat lined with ermine fur. The entari, ferace, and biniş were

  common to both female and male wardrobes, so that—details excepted—female

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  Women in the ottoman Balkans

  Figure 7.2. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait d’une jeune femme en costume turc assise

  sur un divan (presumed portrait of Mary Gunning, Countess of Coventry).