ABSTRACT
This book examines the person and architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the mother of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). Like many women of the Ottoman harem, Turhan Sultan entered the Topkapı palace court as a concubine. She had been captured in Russia at the age of twelve and brought to İstanbul to serve Kösem Sultan, the mother of the reigning Ottoman sultan. Turhan gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to the sultan and, upon the death of her husband Sultan İbrahim, became a valide sultan (or queen mother) in 1648. As the mother of the new sultan (a sixyear-old child), Turhan became the de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire for over three decades, until her death on 4 August 1683. During this time she shaped many of the political and cultural agendas of the Ottoman court and assumed much of the power, wealth, and traditional privileges of the sultanate. Among these privileges was the patronage of large-scale architectural works in both the Ottoman capital and its provinces. By her early thirties Turhan Sultan had become an active patron of architecture. In 1658 she initiated the construction of two large fortresses at the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles. In 1661 she began to build a large mosque complex (or külliye), which included a tomb, primary school, royal pavilion, and market complex, in Eminönü, the center of İstanbul’s busy harbor on the Golden Horn. Later in her life, she endowed several other structures in Ottoman Thrace, the Balkans, and Crete; she also provided for charitable foundations along the pilgrimage route to Mecca. It was through her ambitious patronage of architectural works that Turhan Sultan legitimated her new political authority as a valide and became a visible force in the early modern era of Ottoman history.1
