ABSTRACT
With the continuing negligence manifested by her son towards his duties as a sovereign, the roles that Turhan Sultan played within the Ottoman court increased. While she did spend time with Mehmed in the palace of Edirne, and moved back and forth between the two cities, the valide served, in her son’s absence, as the symbol of the Ottoman state in its capital city during most of Mehmed IV’s reign. From royal progresses within and outside of İstanbul, the architectural projects she commissioned in its commercial center, and the correspondence between the valide and members of the Ottoman administration, it appears that Turhan Sultan herself, not the sultan, exercised a great degree of control over the way in which she was represented. The degree of agency the valide could exercise as a patron in the planning and design of her architectural project is an important point to address here as it has been the assumption throughout this book that female patrons such as Turhan Sultan participated actively in decisions concerning self-representation. Agency, here defined more narrowly, is the ability of the patron to make decisions about the type, location, layout, material, epigraphic and decorative program used in an architectural project. It is concerned with the ways the patron chose to represent herself through the medium of architecture, its accompanying rhetoric and ceremonial, and how these actions were received and interpreted by the audience.
