ABSTRACT
By examining the ways in which women from diverse cultural contexts constructed and legitimized their identities as sovereigns, we gain insight into the connections between gender, patronage and representation in the early modern world both within and beyond Europe. The conditions which faced “other” women of imperial rank as they strove for political legitimacy through diplomatic negotiations, ceremonial activities, and architectural patronage illuminate the specific challenges facing Ottoman royal women like the valide Hadice Turhan Sultan. Along with many of her Ottoman predecessors in the early modern period, Turhan Sultan’s social and cultural norms restricted the display of her person in royal ceremonial, statuary or portraiture. Hence, the patronage of architecture by imperial Ottoman women became the main route to becoming visible and to advertising royal status and piety to subjects. Contrary to the patterns of patronage observed by Kelly-Gadol and Wiesner-Hanks, who see this era of the early modern period in Europe as “a step backward for women” and a time when “males began to replace females as the primary arbiters of culture, with the patronage activities of the latter significantly diminished or modified”, Ottoman women were the most active during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries particularly in İstanbul, the center of the Ottoman Empire. Statistical analysis of evkaf, or endowed property, in the Ottoman capital during the sixteenth century has shown that 36.8 percent of the foundations – over one-third – were established by women.3 When compared to European counterparts, Ottoman women, both elites and non-elites, had greater control over inherited property, and could enter into legal contracts to purchase and dispose of their property independent of their menfolk. But the severed relationship that the Ottoman woman patron had with her natal family, particularly if she was building as a valide sultan, created a very different pattern of patronage
J. Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance ?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard and Merry Wiesner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 137-64.
