The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates

by Des Ekin

  Anna’s carriage would rumble through the white marble portals of the Imperial Gate into the first of four courtyards. The first was a busy public square with all the utilities of imperial power – administrative offices, a mint, a gun store. There was the smell of baking bread from a huge bakery. From here a loftier gate, the Gate Of Peace, led inwards to a second courtyard of gardens and cypress trees. The Square Of The Processions was heavily guarded by Janissaries and restricted to those on legal or government business.

  They were moving steadily away from the busy hum of everyday life. The next gate they would enter would mark the boundary between the outside world and the silent, protected world of the inner palace. Once they passed through The Gate Of Felicity, few would ever return. They would spend the rest of their lives in the harem.

  The word ‘harem’ holds a wealth of exotic and decadent associations for westerners. But this would have baffled a typical Muslim husband of the seventeenth-century whose sole wife and daughters resided in a very staid ‘harem’.

  In any home, the women’s quarters was haram – an adjective meaning ‘forbidden’, but in a positive sense, like a protective den or a sanctuary.

  Even the smallest living spaces can have their harems or forbidden zones, created simply by drawing a curtain across a room.

  The Topkapi harem took this idea to its extreme. Here up to a thousand women were retained for the pleasure of a single male, the Sultan. They ranged from black maidservants from the sub-Sahara all the way up to slave ‘queens’ with opulent chambers and dozens of staff.

  This palace of excess had nothing to do with Islamic teachings. It arose for a quite different reason – national security. Sultans were constantly vulnerable to assassination. If they took wives from prominent families, they created palace power blocs and angered rivals. It was much more convenient – and safer – to father children with slave women.

  Think of the implications for a moment. This meant that every new emperor was the result of a union with a slave. It also meant that any slave who bore the firstborn male was rocketed from poverty to the pinnacle of power the moment the infant gave his first cry. If she and her son survived until his accession – a very big if – the formerly humble slave girl would become the Queen Mother, the most powerful person in the palace.

  The hundreds of women in the harem were divided into clearly-defined classes. At the apex was the current emperor’s mother, the Queen Mother or Sultan Valide. Counted in her household were the royal sisters and daughters, the Sultanas.

  Next in line were the four ‘special favourites’ (kadin), the slave women who were first to bear boy children. They were quasi-wives, hence the number, and they ranked in order of their sons’ birth.

  After these four came the ‘favourites’ (ikbals), regular consorts of the Sultan. Below them came the chamber women (odalisks) who were themselves divided into several ranks. There were hundreds of them, and although they were all available to the Sultan, the vast majority were never expected to sleep with him.

  When Anna passed through the Felicity Gate, she would have found herself in a grand courtyard surrounded by a multi-arched arcade. At the far end was what the English traveller Aaron Hill described as a ‘wonderful river’, an artificial concourse that flowed both ways and marked the dividing line between the Grand Seraglio and the forbidden grounds – the harem.

  Passing across a drawbridge guarded by black eunuchs, Anna would have climbed a marble staircase whose walls tumbled with scented jasmine and honeysuckle. Black maidservants, loaded down with towels and clothes, scurried down passages towards the baths and laundries.

  The newcomers would have been led past the superintendent’s office, and into one of the long, narrow dormitories. Their sleeping arrangements were basic, as Aaron Hill testified:

  ‘Their beds are only quilts or carpets five times doubled, over which is laid a satin coverlet and which, being turned aside, they enter in their shifts and muslin drawers and contentedly repose themselves until the break of day, beyond which hour they seldom are permitted to indulge themselvers in slumber.’

  New arrivals to the harem were usually women in their teens, but girls as young as eight could also be inducted for training. Each new batch of entrants always caused a stir among the long-term residents. There were scores of other harem women of all nationalities – Georgians and Carcassians, blond Scandinavians and olive-skinned Latins – and the only thing they had in common was their exceptional beauty. Already the most attractive women in the empire, they now had access to the most skilful beauticians and hairstylists.

  As Anna would discover from conversation, not all of them were reluctant captives. Impoverished families would volunteer their daughters for the harem simply to ensure their survival. Even in Christian cities like Venice, powerful families would contrive to have their shrewdest daughters taken in to the harem, arming them with covert connections and a secret bribe-purse to help them rise to key positions of influence.

  Anna was in the harem, but she was not yet a member of it. First she had to be medically examined for any illnesses or flaws. After that, she had to meet with the approval of the Sultan Valide.

  In the 1630s, the Queen Mother was an ambitious and utterly ruthless Greek named Kiosem. For the reign of two Sultans – Murad IV, the current emperor, and later his younger brother Ibrahim – she would rule the palace and much of the empire with an iron hand. Kiosem was a former slave who, at the age of fifteen, had become a favourite of the teenage Sultan Ahmed with whom she had three sons. When Ahmed died, rivals ordered all three sons to be strangled but Kiosem helped to defeat the plot and ensure that Murad became Sultan.

  One of the traditional roles of Queen Mother was to act as a procuress for her son, seeking out and training the most beautiful virgin girls for his pleasure. This was a delicate task: the women had to be so devastatingly seductive that they would excite the Sultan’s jaded appetite, and yet not so irresistible that they might pose a threat to her own power. To this end, she would inspect each newcomer closely.

  The chosen ones were trained as concubines, a process involving personality skills, storytelling, poetry and musicianship as well as the finer arts of seduction. It was by no means inevitable that a concubine would share the Sultan’s bed; she might never even meet him.

  Once trained, these concubines enjoyed a special prestige. Far from being viewed as second-hand or damaged, they were highly sought after as wives by other men. If a sultan wished to present a special gift to someone, he would donate one of his most prized virgin concubines as a wife.

  A newcomer like Anna would probably have started harem life as an ordinary odalisk or chamber woman. (An ‘oda’ literally means a room.) This did not involve cleaning or routine cooking, but training in specialist skills. Apprenticed to an oda or training centre, she would have learned skills ranging from coffee brewing and sherbet making to Koran reading. There were specialist jewel-keepers, bathgivers and wardrobe mistresses. All of these activities were vitally important in the ritual of the harem, and most trainees would aim eventually to become head of her own oda.

  Twelve of the most talented and personable odalisks would be given the exceptional honour of becoming the Sultan’s personal maidservants (gedikli).

  There were several ways in which an odalisk or concubine could be selected for the royal bedchamber. The first was the traditional ceremony in which the Queen Mother presented her most beautiful virgins to her son after Ramadan. Another came when the Sultan wandered around the harem and made his own choice.

  With so much at stake, it is not surprising that there was fierce competition to win the emperor’s attention. Prohibited from making eye contact or talking to him, the concubines had to rely on gesture instead: it was said that a simple ripple of a bare arm and wrist could imply such a wealth of erotic meaning that gloves were made compulsory for the sake of decency.

  The Sultan enjoyed watching his concubines as they exercised in the garden. Sometimes he’d
disrupt their activities with horseplay, chasing them or throwing them into the fountains. On occasions he would ask them to dance:

  ‘[They] practise the most lascivious dances, postures and performances to raise the lustful fire and excite the passion of the amorous Sultan,’ wrote Hill. ‘He beckons [one woman] from the rest, and leads her to some bower to talk a while in private and prepare her expectation for the honour he allots her to.’

  Ottaviano Bon, a top Venetian diplomat, describes another common selection process:

  ‘[W]hen he is prepared for a fresh mate, he gives notice to the Kahiya Cadun [harem stewardess] of his purpose; who immediately bestirs herself like a crafty bawd, and chooseth out such as she judgeth to be the most amiable, and fairest of all; and having placed them in good order in a room, in two ranks, like so many pictures, half on the one side, and half on the other; she forthwith brings in the King, who walking four or five times in the midst of them, and having viewed them well, taketh good notice within himself of her that he best liketh, but says nothing; only as he goeth out again, he throweth a handkerchief into that virgin’s hand; by which token she knoweth that she is to lie with him that night.’

  When he disappeared, there would be a fever of excitement throughout the harem. The woman he had chosen would be immediately elevated in status to a geuzdé – literally, one given the eye. She would be given her own room, maidservants and beauticians.

  The chosen woman would, according to Bon, be ‘exceedingly joyful’. Yet the geuzdé must also have experienced shivers of apprehension. Sultan Murad may have been only twenty-one in the year 1633 – he had taken the throne at the tender age of eleven – but his innocent, boyish face belied a sadistic and cruel nature. One witness talked of his rosy face and ‘black and lively eye’, but added ominously: ‘His exterior appearance did not correspond with the internal cruelty of his violent spirit.’

  Murad was an active ruler: the last Sultan to lead his troops in battle. He had established his authority by ruthlessly crushing a Janissary mutiny and beheading the fifty ringleaders.

  The entire nation lived in terror of his unpredictable rages, but it was his palace staff who bore the brunt. He executed a cook on the spot for preparing a bad dinner. Courtiers who showed the slightest signs of pride had the tips of their ears and nostrils cut off ‘to clip the wings of their ambition’. When one slave offered to translate for a French diplomat during a heated dispute, Murad instantly ordered the man to be impaled – a dreadful punishment in which a spike was inserted in the fundament and pushed through the entire body until it emerged at the top. Murad stayed to watch, relishing the grisly spectacle.

  Soon cruelty became an end in itself: a vicious royal entertainment involving innocent passers-by. Murad’s favourite pastime was to sit by the seaside randomly shooting his subjects as they rowed past in boats. On one occasion he spotted a boat full of women and sent orders for it to be sunk. ‘Among his pastimes,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘nothing was more pleasing than some divertissement connected with blood.’

  Plagued with painful gout, he sought refuge in strong Malvoisia wine, which served only to fuel his violent rages. Even Murad seemed terrified by the changes in his own personality. When sober, he would command his terrified staff to ignore any orders he issued after dinner.

  He slapped a nationwide ban on alcohol and tobacco. His soldiers roamed the country, demolishing taverns and spilling wine into the gutters. Anyone ignoring his order had his legs sawn off. A man and woman caught in the act of selling tobacco were ‘impaled alive … with a roll of tobacco about their necks’.

  Maddened by constant pain, Murad began stalking the streets in disguise looking for late-night drunks. He met two women wandering in the dark and ordered them to be cut into pieces. A deaf man who couldn’t hear his shouted challenge was strangled on the spot and his body left on the road as an example.

  As the death-toll mounted, his soldiers would sneak out ahead of the Sultan, driving revellers away with stones in a bid to save their lives. Yet Murad’s bloody promenades continued … until it was said that there was a victim almost every day and a festering corpse strung up at every junction.

  And this was the man with whom the geuzdé would have to spend the night.

  The summons to the royal bedchamber might come that same evening, or the following evening, or not at all. If the call did not come, the chosen one was demoted back to the basic level of odalisk – presumably a humiliating and embittering experience.

  If the big moment arrived, the geuzdé was ‘washed from head to floor [and] scented with perfumes’ before being escorted to the Sultan’s bedroom, where she would knock and enter on her knees. Directed by a row of white candles, she approached deferentially until she reached the end of the royal bed.

  ‘A slave to your commands, great monarch, awaits your beckon,’ she would ask ritually. ‘May or may not she now be admitted?’

  Aaron Hill, the contemporary English traveller, explained what the concubines must do next: ‘Dropping off their nightgowns, they must gently raise the bedclothes at the foot, and so creep gradually up to those embraces.’

  Ottaviano Bon wrote that two elderly maidservants silently remained in the room all night: ‘[O]ne of them sits by the light at the bed’s feet, and the other by the door.’

  Next morning the couple would be awakened by eunuch choristers singing a benediction:

  Endless pleasures bless your bed

  Angels’ wings around you spread

  Godlike offspring grace your joys

  Heavenly daughters, lovely boys.

  The Sultan always rose first, dressing in brand-new silk robes. It was tradition for his bedmate to accept the discarded clothes, including a jewel he’d leave in the pocket.

  If she had pleased him, the concubine would be readmitted to the harem as a favourite with her own permanent apartment and staff. More valuable gifts would follow from the Sultan: ‘… jewels, money and vests of great value,’ says Bon, ‘agreeable to the satisfaction and content which he received from her that night.’

  For the ordinary odalisk like Anna, however, life in the harem was as disciplined and humdrum as it might have been in a convent. In fact, Bon makes the direct comparison:

  ‘Now in the women’s lodgings, they live just as nuns do in great nunneries, for these virgins have very large rooms to live in, and their bedchambers will hold almost a hundred of them apiece. They sleep upon sofas, which are built longways on both sides of the room, and a large space left in the midst to go to and from about their business.

  ‘Their beds are very coarse and hard … and by every ten virgins there lies an old woman … [to] … keep the young wenches from wantonness.’

  According to Hill these matrons were former concubines who took a ‘malicious care to hinder [such] wantonness as they are past the task of.’

  He said lights burned all night so that the matrons ‘may be able to discover all immodest or indecent pastimes’. This caution went to extremes, with orders that any phallic-shaped vegetables must be finely chopped before entering the bedrooms.

  Orientalist painters like Ingres and Delacroix imagined voluptuous women lying naked on sofas. In reality, the typical odalisk was warmly wrapped up: there are descriptions of them huddled around the charcoal burners, which provided the only heat in the draughty palace.

  For exercise, they would play ball or indulge in childlike games of tag. We have a unique description of one of these sessions from an English craftsman named Thomas Dallam who worked near the harem. At one stage he sneaked a look through a grille:

  ‘[T]hrough the grate I did see thirty of the Grand Signor’s concubines that were playing with a ball in another court …. They wore upon their heads nothing but a little cap of cloth of gold, which did not cover the crown of her head; no bands about their necks, nor anything but fair chains of pearl and that a jewel hanging on their breast, and jewels in their ears; their coats were like a soldier’s mandilion [cloak] … they
wore breeches of scamatie, a fine cloth made of cotton and wool, as white as snow and as fine as lane [muslin]; for I could discern the skin of their thighs through it.’

  He confessed he was reluctant to leave the grille, ‘for that sight did please me wondrous well.’

  Had Dallam been caught, he would have lost his eyes and possibly his life. Sultan Murad once wreaked a terrible revenge on a Venetian merchant who’d built a viewing room with spyglass above his seaside mansion. Murad decided his true motive was to spy into the harem and ordered the merchant to be ‘hanged in his shirt’.

  Security in the harem was strictly enforced by the black eunuchs. The chief black eunuch was entitled the Master Of The Maids, an immensely powerful figure. Far from being weak and effeminate, eunuchs were tough security specialists who’d been subjected to savage beatings to test their endurance. They often had wives and concubines: and, although neutered, with a little ingenuity they could still enjoy giving and receiving sexual pleasure.

  It goes without saying that the harem could be a hotbed of sexual frustration. For most, the sole opportunity for any form of sexual encounter lay in the hammams or baths.

  ‘It’s common knowledge,’ wrote diplomat Bassano da Zara, ‘that as a result of this familiarity in washing and massaging, women fall very much in love with each other. And one often sees a woman in love with another one, just like a man and woman … on seeing a lovely young girl, [they] seek an excuse to wash with her just to see her naked and handle her.’