For 130 years, the most powerful government on Earth did not sit in a council chamber. It sat behind a curtain. The Ottoman Empire, whose armies had hammered at the walls of Vienna and whose word carried from the Persian Gulf to the shores of North Africa, was ruled not by its sultans but by a succession of women. Most had been born as captives, seized from distant lands by slave raiders, sold into the imperial harem, and raised to serve one man.
They were, in law, the sultan’s property. And yet, for more than a century, they governed. They appointed grand viziers and destroyed them. They wrote as equals to the queens of Europe.
They held fortunes larger than any minister’s, built networks of informers, and, when a rival blocked their path, that rival could be gone by morning. Later historians called this era the Sultanate of Women and treated it as a sickness in the natural order. The official chroniclers, paid by the state and answerable to it, tried to bury it. But the men who really watched the empire—the ambassadors of Venice, who had no reason to flatter and every reason to know the truth—recorded precisely where power sat.
The women’s rise began with one who broke every rule the system was built on. Hurrem Sultan was a captive from Ruthenia, swept into the harem during the slave raids that fed the markets of the Black Sea coast. She became the favorite of Suleiman the Magnificent, the lawgiver who ruled at the height of Ottoman power. The harem operated on an iron rule forged in the memory of civil war: one mother, one son.
Once a concubine bore the sultan a male child, her role as his companion ended; her life belonged to her son. Hurrem shattered that law. She bore Suleiman six children, refused to fade into the nursery, and persuaded him to do what no sultan had done in living memory—to marry her, freeing her from bondage and making a former slave his lawful wife. When she asked to move closer to him, the entire harem was relocated from the old palace into Topkapi itself, into apartments that looked onto the same courtyard as the imperial council.
The women were placed at the physical heart of the state, and the chroniclers recorded it as a change of address to please a beloved wife. Through her, this was all still personal. Hurrem was cast as the trusted counselor, the voice at the sultan’s shoulder, never a ruler herself. But her letters, written to Suleiman while he campaigned in Persia and Hungary, show a mind that missed nothing.
She gave opinions on who should be promoted and who watched. She warned him of men she distrusted. Her public works—mosques, hospitals, public kitchens in Istanbul, a pilgrim hostel in Jerusalem that fed the poor for centuries—gave her a standing that reached beyond the palace walls. Yet when she died in 1558, the story insisted her age died with her.
It did not. The pattern she had set was picked up by her daughter-in-law, Nurbanu Sultan, married to Suleiman’s son Selim II. Selim was no soldier; he left the running of the empire to others and earned the nickname “the Drunkard. ” The real channel to the throne passed through Nurbanu.
When Selim died in 1574, she hid his body in the palace ice house for twelve days until her son Murad III could ride from his provincial governorship and reach the capital before any rival could move. Only then was the sultan announced dead. His five brothers were executed the day he took power, the throne cleared by the old law of fratricide. And Nurbanu, as Valide Sultan—mother of the reigning ruler—became the true power in the empire.
The Venetian ambassador wrote home that the sultan grounded all his decisions on the council of his mother. His successor said flatly that any treaty, any negotiation with the empire had to be routed through her hands first. Under Nurbanu, the harem stopped being a household. It became a second government, with its own ranks, its own treasury, and its own foreign policy, run through Jewish women known as kiras who moved freely between the sealed harem and the markets and embassies of the city.
The rivalry between Nurbanu and her daughter-in-law Safiye Sultan was not, as the chronicles claimed, a jealous mother-in-law and an ambitious wife fighting over a man. The Venetian dispatches describe a cold war between the two highest political offices in the palace, fought over every appointment, every tax contract, every promotion in the Janissary corps. It was about who held the budget and who could point the army. When Safiye’s son came to the throne in 1595, her accession was the bloodiest the law had ever produced.
Nineteen of her son’s brothers, some of them small children, were strangled in a single day. Their coffins were carried out through the palace gate before the mourning crowds. The city was shaken, and the memory of that day began at last to turn opinion against the old law. But it cleared the throne, and Safiye’s power became measurable.
As Valide, she drew a daily stipend of 3,000 aspers. The grand vizier, chief executive of the entire state, drew 1,200. The governor of Egypt, master of one of the empire’s richest provinces, made 800. Her allowance was a national budget flowing into one woman’s hands, enough to keep a private corps of loyalists, to bribe on a scale no minister could match.
Her correspondence with Queen Elizabeth I of England reads as what it was: correspondence between two sovereigns. Elizabeth, set against Catholic Spain, found in the Ottoman Empire a natural ally. She sent Safiye jewels, a portrait of herself, and a great mechanical organ that played on its own, carried across the sea and reassembled inside the palace by an English craftsman. Safiye answered with advice on naval strategy, writing of Philip II as the king who is an unbeliever and proposing coordinated action against him.
She sent Elizabeth a gown of cloth of gold, a jeweled girdle, and a crown, carried to London by the wife of the English ambassador, the only Christian woman ever received at her court. A woman the official story called a prisoner in a gilded cage was conducting foreign policy in her own name. As the Valides’ power grew, the very shape of government bent around them. The council, the Divan, still met at dawn beneath its gilded dome, but for the gravest questions the Valide Sultan took her place in a chamber alongside it, hidden behind a heavy curtain of silk.
The viziers would argue their case, lay out their reports, and then fall silent and wait. The final ruling arrived as a voice with no face, spoken from behind the cloth, sometimes carried the last steps by the chief black eunuch, who had become a great officer of state in his own right, outranking nearly every pasha in the empire. To the grand vizier—a man who had marched armies, signed treaties, held power of life and death over millions—the curtain was the new throne. Unseen, beyond challenge, offering no appeal.
The system reached its height, and its breaking point, with Kösem Sultan. Captured as a girl from the Greek islands, she rose to become the most powerful woman the empire had produced. When her husband died, she broke the law of fratricide in practice, saving his brothers and her own younger sons from the executioner’s cord, and replacing it with the Kafes—the cage—guarded rooms where spare heirs were locked away for years, tended by deaf-mute servants. She became twice the official regent of the empire, first for her son Murad IV, who took the throne at eleven, then for her grandson.
None of it was hidden. It was law. Her title, regent of the Sultanate, was written onto state documents. Her seal was pressed into imperial decrees beside the sultan’s own.
For close to a decade, she governed the empire alone, holding the eastern frontier while Baghdad changed hands, crushing provincial rebellions, and dragging a debased currency back from collapse. The system that had lifted her had a fatal flaw. A Valide’s authority was total only while her own son or grandson wore the crown. The moment a new sultan took the throne, his mother became the new Valide, and the old one was expected to vanish.
Every succession was a civil war waiting to happen inside the palace walls. When Kösem’s son Ibrahim was deposed in 1648 and strangled, a child of six took the throne: Mehmed IV. His mother, Turhan Hatice, was a young woman seized as a girl from beyond the Danube and sold into the harem. Two women now shared the regency in name.
Only one could survive it. Kösem, past sixty, watched the courtiers drift toward Turhan’s rooms and resolved on one last stroke. She would remove her own grandson, the boy sultan, and replace him with another grandson whose mother was weak and no threat—so that no rival Valide could ever rise against her again. The plot was carried to Turhan in a whisper by a servant of Kösem’s own household who feared the crossing of a line even the harem would not forgive.
On the night of September 2, 1651, Turhan struck first. The coup was fought not in the streets but in the marble corridors of the imperial harem, in rooms lit by oil lamps, doors forced one by one down the length of a passage. Kösem heard the doors giving way and hid—in a store room, some accounts say, or a cramped closet set into a wall. A searcher noticed a cupboard door not quite closed, a corner of cloth caught in the gap, and wrenched it open.
The woman who had governed the Ottoman Empire for a quarter of a century was pulled out onto the floor of her own rooms. They stripped the great pearls from her body as they dragged her. A heavy curtain torn from a doorway—the screen behind which she had judged viziers and directed the affairs of three continents—was the thing they used to end her. She was buried without ceremony.
The city, whose poor had known her as their benefactor, went into mourning for three days. Turhan Hatice was now undisputed regent, the most powerful woman in the empire, and not yet thirty. But the empire that fell into her hands was hemorrhaging. A grinding sea war with Venice had cut off the capital’s grain.
Soldiers went unpaid and the Janissaries had hanged thirty court officials from a great plane tree in the hippodrome. Grand viziers came and went so fast that one held the office for only hours. Turhan understood that another decade of rule from behind a curtain would not save the empire. What it needed was a single hard public authority, a man who could act in the open and be feared.
She settled on Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, an Albanian taken by the child levy, a man of iron temper and a reputation for getting things done without mercy. She offered him the office of Grand Vizier in 1656. He accepted, but set his terms first: his orders could not be reversed, his appointments could not be challenged, no report against him could be read before he had answered it, and no rival whisper behind a screen could reach the sultan without passing through him. Turhan agreed to every condition and kept her word when it was tested.
Köprülü broke the factions and the mutineers, drove the Venetian fleet back from the straits, and gave the empire fresh strength. His family held the running of the state for nearly a century. The Sultanate of Women did not end in weakness or failure. It ended in a deliberate act of statecraft.
To save the empire, Turhan Hatice gave up by choice the direct executive power her predecessors had schemed and killed to hold. She did not vanish. She finished the great mosque at Eminonu that Safiye had left half-built, domes that still stand over the ferry landings. She built the twin fortresses that guarded the straits, endowed a library and a school, and was buried in a tomb beside her mosque among her descendants.
The empire they had steered through war, rebellion, and ruin survived. Its own chroniclers spent centuries pretending the women who ran it were never there at all. But the proof of their reign is written in the letters of frightened ambassadors, in the ledgers of the treasury, and across the skyline of Istanbul, where the domes their names still carry rise over the water.