Istanbul: A City on Two Continents - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 210

are fake and that the real ones were sold off during the last days of the sultanate (or perhaps
sooner!).
The harem: Islamic law permits a man to have four wives and as many concubines as
he can provide for. The harem's 300 rooms were home to as many as 800 concubines (and
their children!) Some concubines were kept for reasons of statecraft and alliance. Most
were kept for what eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeans coyly called “the sultan's
pleasure.” A bookshelf of harem literature served as a voyeur's delight. So did drawings
and paintings of the harem. To keep out unwanted visitors and to assure the purity of the
sultan's bloodline, the harem was guarded by a corps of several hundred Nubian eunuchs.
The Chief Eunuch and the sultan's mother (the Valide Sultan) looked after the affairs of the
harem. It was the Valide Sultan who often chose the women who would become her son's
favorites.
The residences of the sultan's siblings: The Ottomans did not follow a system of rule
that favored the ruler's first born (primogeniture). The sultan's sons, and they were many,
were often given army command or administrative posts in the empire to test their capa-
city for leadership. Harem politics aside, the best and most promising son might be chosen
by the sultan to be his successor. To avoid civil war, the new sultan's surviving siblings
were strangled by a silken cord; Ottoman house law forbade the shedding of royal blood.
Death by the silken cord ended sometime around 1607; thereafter, the princelings were se-
questered in luxury and closely guarded.
The Janissaries: The Ottoman Turks were born of a long tradition of bravery in battle.
But bravery alone could not take the place of a large army. All across the empire, the army
corps was recruited by persuasion and levy. A levy (a quota: Devsirme , a gathering) of
healthy, first-born sons was laid on each province or district. These would become slaves
of the sultan and members of his army. Families were promised that their sons would be
well cared for, trained in the skills of warfare, given an opportunity for promotion and lead-
ership, and assured of honorable careers. These were the Janissaries, the gathered, whose
vocation was so respected and envied that fathers would often volunteer their sons for en-
listment outside the quota. Intelligence, good physical condition, a willingness to endure
hardship, obey orders, and submit to circumcision were the conditions of entry into the Jan-
nisary corps. Each Jannisary unit had its own distinctive dress; each was organized around
its soup kitchen (its mess), and in times of stress or rebellion, the great soup caldron would
be defiantly overturned.
Ottoman Turkey began its slow decline in the eighteenth century, with Russia as its
major opponent. As Christian champions of eastern Europe, especially Orthodox Commu-
nion, the Tsars fought a series of wars to push the Turks out of southern Europe. Cather-
ine the Great's foreign policy was aimed at that push. The Crimean War (1853-56) ranged
British, French, and Ottoman armies against Russia. Casualties, mostly from disease, were