Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2011, vol. 6
Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations
of Elite Ottoman Women
Heather Madar
T
he much-mythologized harem of the Ottoman sultans occupied a
central place in European Orientalist thought for centuries.1 The
harem, presented as an exotic world of forbidden sexuality inhabited by
compliant yet sexually voracious women, appears in literature, art, and
travel writing. While the most famous expressions of this harem fixation date from later centuries,2 a focus on the harem as libidinous zone is
demonstrably present in written sources from the sixteenth century. Yet an
exploration of sixteenth-century European images turns up a surprising
dearth of imagery in this vein. While Renaissance art lacks the languid
odalisques or detailed views of the physical environment of the sultan’s
harem familiar from later works, a series of largely overlooked representations of elite Ottoman women do exist. Dating from the mid-sixteenth
century, these images feature imagined portraits of sultanas — elite women
such as Ottoman princesses, the sultan’s mother (valide sultan), or the sultan’s preferred concubine (haseki).3 Hurrem, the wife of sultan Süleyman,
and his daughter Mihrimah appear most frequently in this genre. Yet striking differences are immediately evident between their depiction and later,
more familiar, views of the harem and harem women. The women shown
in the Renaissance tradition were members of the sultan’s harem, yet they
are not shown within a harem setting, nor do the images make reference to
it. Although they are visually marked as Other, largely through the attention given to their exotic dress, they are also presented as women who are
of interest as individuals, possessing status and political significance.
1
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Beginning with the earliest encounters of the West with the Islamic
world during the Middle Ages, European writers characterized Islam as
licentious and Muslim women as potential sexual temptresses of hapless
Christian men.4 The Ottoman Empire was similarly sexualized in Western
discourse. Early Modern European travelers made frequent mention of the
beautiful yet lascivious women of the sultan’s harem and wrote of lesbian
activity at the bathhouse and sodomy among the Ottoman male elite.5 The
sexualized image of Islam and Muslim women is reflected in the European
fixation on the harem, particularly the sultan’s harem at the Topkapi Palace
in Istanbul, commonly referred to as the seraglio by European writers.6
The imperial harem was seen as the ultimate site of sexual permissiveness
and decadence.7
Western fictions of the harem are widely recognized as emerging in
the late seventeenth century and becoming a dominant Orientalist trope
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8 According to Mohja Kahf, the
harem became “the definitive topos of the Muslim woman and indeed the
entire world of Islam” by the eighteenth century.9 Because harems remained
off limits to European men, discussions of the harem were largely exercises
in fantasy. Yet this very unknowability heightened their aura of titillating
mystery.10
“Descriptions of the seraglio,” according to Alain Grosrichard, “are
alike to the point of repetition.”11 They typically focus on a narrow set of
themes: the lassitude and indolence of the women, opulence and luxury,
the sexually charged atmosphere of the harem, the lustful yet cruel sultan,
and sexual perversion. From the eighteenth century on, harem discussions
also see the harem as a prison, and the women therein as oppressed.12 The
notion of the harem was also inextricably linked in the Western mind with
despotism. Peirce writes: “Europe elaborated a myth of oriental tyranny
and located its essence in the sultan’s harem. Orgiastic sex became a metaphor for power corrupted.”13 The harem thus became a locus of complementary and overlapping Orientalist tropes.
Although harem discourse is primarily associated with a later period,
its seeds are clearly present in sixteenth-century materials, particularly
narratives of travel to Istanbul. Authors of such narratives were men from
a range of European countries who had traveled to Istanbul for numer-
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Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women
3
ous reasons. Some were former captives, while others were ambassadors
or attached to diplomatic envoys sent to the sultan’s court by various
European powers. Their texts were often published in multiple languages
and disseminated widely, creating a shared basis of seemingly authentic
information about the Ottomans across Western Europe.14 The material
covered in these texts often overlapped with repetition of motifs and frequent plagiarism.15 The discussions of Ottoman women in these narratives
focus on a narrow set of themes, which largely echo the themes of later
harem discourse: the beauty of Turkish women and of the women in the
sultan’s harem in particular, grooming habits, Muslim marriage practices
(including a requisite discussion of polygamy), the sexually charged nature
of the harem, and unchecked female sexuality at the bath.
The sultan’s harem, the women who lived there, and their reported
beauty received considerable attention in Renaissance texts. Thomas
Dallam, an English organ-maker who traveled to Istanbul in 1599 at the
behest of Elizabeth I, commented that they were “verrie prettie.”16 Another
common theme is the diversity of harem women and their reputed
Christian origins. Nicolas de Nicolay, who accompanied the French
ambassador to Istanbul in 1549, describes how “the wives and concubines
of the great Turk, which in number are about 200. being the most part
daughters of Christians, some being taken by courses on the seas or by
land, aswel from Grecians, Hongarians, Wallachers, Mingreles, Italians as
other Christian nations.”17 As Schick comments: “This no doubt served the
important function of creating a fantasy of exogamy that was ‘safe’ because
its women were not really other.”18 The function of harem women as sexual
objects for the sultans is also noted. Goughe notes that the sultans do not
typically marry and describes how in order “to satisfye their pleasure, and
libidinous lustes (wherunto in moste vile and filthy maner, they are subiect,
above all other nations)” they instead take “virgins frome all partes of the
worlde.”19
An extended passage from the 1587 Faustbuch also makes clear that
the primary conception of harem women was as sexual objects. Faust, after
conjuring up a thick fog around and inside the sultan’s palace, enters the
harem. His sexual encounters with the most attractive of the women follow:
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Faustus tooke the fairest by the hand, and led her into a chamber,
where after his maner hee fell to dalliance, and thus he continued a
whole day and night: and when hee had delighted himselfe sufficiently
with her, hee put her away, and made his spirite bring him another. . .
and so hee passed away sixe daies, hauing each day his pleasure of a
sundry Lady, and that of the fairest.20
The subsequent report of the event by one of the harem women to the
sultan also stresses her sexual appetite: “hee lay with vs starke naked, kissed
and colled us, and so delighted me that for my part, I would he came two
or three times a week to serue me in such sort againe.”21
Sixteenth-century texts also highlight the sexuality of Ottoman
women generally. Theodore Spandounes, who wrote a treatise on the history of the Ottomans from the perspective of a Byzantine exile who had
spent time in Istanbul, commented on the lascivious nature of Ottoman
women, explaining that it was for this reason that they were secluded and
guarded by eunuchs.22 Several authors also give vivid accounts of sexual
activity among women at the bath, a key signifier of transgressive Muslim
female sexuality from the Renaissance. In his book from 1545, Luigi
Bassano, who was in Istanbul in the 1530s and likely served as a page in the
sultan’s court, describes how “[T]hey intimately wash one another, and one
neighbor the other, or one sister the other: for which reason there is great
love between women, due to the familiarity that develops from washing
and rubbing each other.”23 Nicolay, whose discussion of the bath is dependent on Bassano’s, adds that “perceiving some maide or woman of excellet
beauty they wil not ceaste until they have found means to bath with them,
and to handle and grope theme everywhere at their pleasures so ful they
are of luxuriousness and feminine wantonness.”24
The charged nature of the harem is also underlined in these texts by
a stress on the forbidden and furtive glimpse. Dallam details how he was
able to gaze, unsuspected, at “thirtie of the Grand Sinyor’s Concobines”
through a grate in the wall. He describes his scopophilic pleasure as he
“stood so longe looking upon them. . . .that sighte did please me wondrous
well,” and notes how he “could desarne the skin of their thies” through their
clothing.25 The illicit nature of his gaze is underlined by the resulting anger
of his guide, and by writers such as Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassa-
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Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women
5
dor of Ferdinand I to Istanbul, who stress the inaccessibility of Ottoman
women.26
There are some significant differences between sixteenth-century
discussions of the harem and later harem discourse. In particular,
sixteenth-century texts often show an awareness of the education and
activity that occurred in the harem, which diverges from the later trope
of the passive, indolent, and even ignorant harem woman. Nevertheless,
these written sources clearly contain the germ of later harem discourse
and repeatedly explore themes that parallel its major tropes. Yet the frequency of harem descriptions and the sexualized portrayal of Ottoman
women in Renaissance travel literature is not matched in literary or visual
sources. Indeed, the harem is nearly absent from the visual record. There
is no equivalent genre to eighteenth-century Rococo harem imagery with
pink-cheeked sultanas holding court amid subservient odalisques or to
nineteenth-century nude odalisques and sexualized bath imagery.
Several images do suggest a nascent, yet ultimately unrealized
Renaissance harem imagery. Gentile Bellini famously was reported to have
created cose di lussuria [things of lechery/lasciviousness] as decorations for
Mehmed II’s palace. While the content of these images is unknown, they
are often assumed to have been erotic, perhaps even pornographic.27 If so,
this suggests a tantalizing possibility of erotica, potentially with harem
themes, emerging from this key intersection of a European artist with an
Ottoman patron in the fifteenth century. Yet Bellini’s surviving work from
his Istanbul stay and afterward rarely depicts Ottoman women — and
then only as costume studies — and does not contribute substantially to
later imagery of Ottoman women.28
Harem imagery does make an appearance in the Historia Imperatorum
Regni Turcici or Historia Turcorum (ca. 1500–1503), an illustrated manuscript belonging to Vladislav II, king of Bohemia and Hungary, which
provides a history and genealogy of the Turkish sultans. The identity of
the artist is debated, but the consensus is that he is Italian, likely from
Lombardy.29 The images from this manuscript, showing the succession of
the Ottoman sultans in medallion portraits and also in larger, full-page
narrative scenes, have passed largely unnoticed in the scholarly literature.30
While most of the sultans are shown as warlike military commanders, sul-
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tans Bayezid II and Murad II are instead shown relaxing with the women
of their harems. Murad, for example, is shown seated, surrounded by a
throng of women. One woman presents him with food, while the twisting
postures of the others suggest dancing. Their sheer, diaphanous clothing
clearly reveals their bodies underneath (see fig. 1).
The interpolation of harem imagery into this manuscript is unusual.
Raby suggests that it might be related to a perception of both Bayezid II
and Murad II as less warlike, while Bauer-Eberhard notes that Bayezid was
known for a taste for pleasure.31 Yet the content of these images reflects
the already well-developed European notion of the harem. As in written
texts, the harem is figured as a location of pleasure, sexuality, and even
excess, arranged according to the person of the sultan. The manuscript’s
pairing of harem scenes with war imagery also presents a familiar duality
in Western perceptions of the sultans as both unbridled military aggressors and lascivious despots.32 What is surprising about these scenes is
their uniqueness. They are unprecedented in Renaissance art and have no
immediate successors.
Imagery suggestive of later depictions of the harem and echoing
tropes of Renaissance harem descriptions also makes an appearance in
work of the Danish artist Melchior Lorich (or Lorck). Lorich traveled to
Istanbul in 1555 as part of the entourage of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq,
an ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, and remained in Istanbul
until 1559.33 On his return, he completed numerous Turkish-themed
images, including a series of 128 woodcuts of Turkish subjects published
posthumously in 1626 as the Wolgerissene und Geschnittene Figuren [Well
Drawn and Cut Figures]. Lorich’s work also included a series of eleven
drawings showing Turkish women’s daily life. The images feature events
such as praying, the return from Mecca, and women’s activity surrounding
a wedding and a burial. Presumably intended as preliminary drawings for
a printed series, the images were never executed in printed form.
While Lorich’s work does not explicitly treat the harem, several of
his drawings suggest a harem setting or at least have strong parallels to
both sixteenth-century and later harem discourse.34 In a scene of women
eating, their indoor setting, number, youth (with the exception of a single
older woman), and the intimate gesture of a girl being fed invokes harem
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Fig. 1. Francesco da Castello (att.), Sultan Murad II, in Historia Turcorum
ca. 1500–1503, Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. Solg. 31, 2, fol. 12v.
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tropes. An erotic charge is also apparent in a scene of three women dancing in an indoor setting. A woman facing frontally towards the viewer
poses completely nude apart from a shawl draped seductively behind her
body. The second woman’s body curvature suggests motion, and she is
seemingly in the process of disrobing. A third clothed woman appears to
be commencing her dance. Although the written notation indicates that
the women are prostitutes (bulerin), the depicted location is unlikely to
be a brothel. While prostitution was common in the Ottoman Empire,
brothels or formal establishments for prostitution were not common
before the nineteenth century.35 While ambiguous, the sketched setting,
with its high walls, ornate decoration and a pointed arch entryway evokes
magnificence and wealth, perhaps suggesting the sultan’s palace. Dancing
girls are often mentioned within discussions of the harem and depicted
in later Orientalist art.36 Professional female dancers, known as çengi, also
existed in the Ottoman Empire, and performed at the sultan’s palace, elite
mansions, and imperial festivals.37 While female dancers are depicted in
Ottoman miniature sources, they are always shown fully clothed. In the
figures depicted by Lorich, their disrobing clearly underlines the eroticism
of their dance.
A final image shows three Turkish women playing instruments while
a single woman dances.38 The harp player on the left also appeared in the
Wolgerissene und Geschnittene Figuren as a single figure (see fig. 2). Text
accompanying the 1646 printing, which Fischer believes to be derived
from Lorich, describes the figure as a harp player and as one of the sultan’s
captured Christians.39 The drawing also contains a strange detail, with a
smaller, framed image set into the upper left of the drawing. According to
Fischer, this should be read as a window.40 The sketchily executed scene
beyond shows a standing nude, a turbaned male figure, and several other
figures. The deliberate intimation of forbidden viewing, whether through
the glimpse into the private realm of Ottoman women, the usurping of
the place of the (male) viewer to whom the dancer displays her nudity, or
the suggestion of looking through a frame, also invokes the harem. This
charged viewing connects with themes of illicit sight and scopophilia common in harem discourse.
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Fig. 2. Melchior Lorich, Harp Player, 1583, © Trustees of the British
Museum.
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The Lorich images and the illustrations from the Historia Turcorum
as a group constitute a singular moment in Renaissance imagery of the
Ottoman Empire and presage later image types. Denny, speaking of the
Lorich drawing of the dancing scene, which he interprets as a harem scene,
suggests that the image “show[s] the germs of exoticism.”41 Exoticism is
here defined as a type of Orientalist imagery that “uses the Orient as an
excuse to portray subjects and to elicit emotions that cannot be conveyed
with European imagery,” chiefly through the theme of the “sexuality of the
harem.”42 These images, taken together, suggest the erotic charge and the
homosocial nature of the harem and convey an overall sense of pleasure
and indulgence. These were all familiar themes in contemporary written
sources but remained largely absent in visual imagery.
Images of specific women within the Ottoman harem did emerge in
the 1530s and continued as a recognizable type through the end of the
century, yet they differ strikingly from the images discussed above and
from the more familiar representations of the harem from later centuries.43
These depictions are fantasy portraits of sultanas: Ottoman princesses,
harem favorites or haseki, the sultan’s mother (the valide sultan), and the
sultan’s wife. Süleyman’s wife Hurrem, known to the West as Roxelana
or Rossa, and Mihrimah, their daughter and Süleyman’s only daughter to
live past infancy, are represented most frequently. Mihrimah is generally
referred to as Cameria or Camilla in these images.44 Their portraits constitute a distinct, albeit largely unrecognized visual phenomenon, and to my
knowledge have never been considered as a group.45 Yet they show clear
visual and conceptual similarities and, taken as a group, shed new light on
Renaissance conceptions of elite Ottoman women. While these images
feature women from the harem, their focus is not on the harem either as a
site of Western desire or as an exotic setting. This is not because of a lack
of awareness. The activities of these women within the harem are known
and discussed in European sources, and, in some cases, visual depictions of
these women immediately precede written discussions of the harem.46 The
images nevertheless focus solely on the women themselves, showing them
as political figures of individual importance and interest. While they are
women of the harem, they are not figured as harem women.
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Images corresponding to this type appear in both printed and painted
forms and were created by both Italian and Northern European artists. The
images range from printed portraits of the 1530s and 1540s, to a Venetian
portraiture tradition originating in the mid-1550s, to a series of sultanas
by Lorich from 1570–1583, to images of “the favorite of the sultan” that
appeared in mid- to late sixteenth-century costume books. The images,
nevertheless, cohere visually as a group. Key features include a depiction of
the women as single figures lacking a setting or location, as youthful and
beautiful conforming to contemporary Renaissance standards of female
beauty, and as clad in exotic costume and ornamented textiles. The images
are executed according to recognizable conventions of Renaissance art,
specifically portraiture and costume book illustration. Given the lack of
images of these women within the sixteenth-century Ottoman context,
their total inaccessibility to outsiders, and the fact that the majority of the
artists responsible for these images never traveled to Istanbul, this genre
must be understood as wholly Western European and largely fabricated.
Printed portraits of Roxelana from the 1530s and 1540s mark the
emergence of this group. Woodcut portraits by the Nuremberg artist
Sebald Beham (ca.1530) and an anonymous Venetian work published by
Matteo Pagani (dated to 1540–1550) are representative (see figs. 3 and
4). Both images were accompanied by a pendant portrait of Süleyman.
The print medium would have allowed these images to be disseminated
widely, and the use of woodcut, as opposed to engraving or etching, suggests a more popular audience. Beham’s image served as a model for several later portraits of Roxelana, including a nearly identical woodcut by
Erhard Schoen (ca. 1532), a full-length image by Michael Ostendorfer
(1548), and a painted portrait in the influential portrait series commissioned by the Italian historian Paolo Giovio. The range of copies indicates
the wide dissemination of this image and its importance in establishing a
visual representation of Roxelana.47 A somewhat well-known mid-century
Nuremberg artist is upon first glance a surprising place to locate the beginning of a visual tradition of Ottoman sultanas. In the wake of the 1529
siege of Vienna, however, Nuremberg publishers produced a large quantity
of printed material related to the Ottomans. Both Beham and Schoen were
extensively involved in image production for this material.48
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Fig. 3. Sebald Beham, Portrait of the Wife of Sultan Süleyman, ca. 1530,
Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.
The portraits by Beham and Pagani differ in some compositional
details, in the depiction of Roxelana’s features, and in details of her dress.
Her youth and beauty is stressed particularly in Pagani’s image, where she
is shown with full lips, arched eyebrows, and delicate bone structure. The
image’s inscription, describing her as the most beautiful of the sultan’s
women, further underscores her beauty. Yet the images also share numerous similarities. Dress is clearly a primary source of interest in both images,
as her elaborate costume, in particular her large headdress, dominates both
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Fig. 4. Anon., published by Matteo Pagani, Portrait of Roxelana, 1540–50,
© Trustees of the British Museum.
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portraits. As is true of the sultana images generally, her costume is largely
imaginary, although it has some connections to actual Ottoman women’s
dress from this period.
Records for Ottoman women’s costume are not complete for this
period; however, a general sense can be gained through the remaining
visual and material record. Ottoman women’s dress was based around layers of garments worn one on top of another, typically cut in such a way
that the individual layers were partially revealed. It included a foundation
garment made from a filmy material, typically with a round neck, loose
trousers gathered at the ankle, and one or more over-garments, commonly
made of colorful patterned silks, velvets, or brocades. A headdress, usually
shown as a tall pointed hat or as a pillbox hat with an attached veil, covered
the head. Veils draped over the headdress concealed the face when going
out of doors.49
In the Beham portrait, the cap in the center of the headdress suggests
the pillbox shape of hats worn by Ottoman women. The rich, all-over patterning of her garment is reminiscent of Turkish textiles, although what
is visible of the dress itself is more suggestive of European styles. Pagani’s
Roxelana wears a richly patterned underdress and overcoat, reminiscent
of the layers of clothing worn by Ottoman women, and the presence of
a veil is also rooted in accuracy.50 The repeated crescent moon pattern on
the dress of Pagani’s figure may be intended to signify Islam, as the crescent was already recognized in Europe as a symbol of Islam. If this is the
intended meaning, it would be the only place in the sultana images where
religious identity is referenced. The crescent shape is also reminiscent of a
variant of the çintemani motif found on contemporary Ottoman textiles.51
The headdresses are more fantastic, however, and suggest imaginative, if
inaccurate, attempts to denote Roxelana’s status and nationality. Beham’s
turban is likely an attempt to feminize Ottoman male headgear.52 Pagani’s
volutes and cords are presumably intended to suggest a crown, and the
jewels and decoration on both representations indicate status.
A second set of sultana portraits are the mid-century Italian painted
portraits stemming primarily from Titian, who was well known for his
portrayals of the European elite. Vasari reported that Titian executed a
portrait of Süleyman and portraits of Roxelana and Mihrimah, specifi-
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cally noting the beauty of their clothing and hairstyles.53 Although Titian’s
originals are presumed lost, a number of copies dating to the 1550s exist.
The various copies bear strong similarities, allowing a clear sense of the
original images to emerge. The portrait of Roxelana called the Sultana
Rossa and the portrait of Cameria as St. Catherine are representative of
this type (see figs. 5 and 6). Both are variously attributed to Titian or his
followers.54 Although the portrait of Cameria shows her with Catherine’s
spiked wheel, scholars agree that the image was not originally intended to
represent St. Catherine, and this detail is not present in other portraits of
Mihrimah from this group.55 Titian never visited Istanbul, and his images
are certainly fictitious.56 Based on the number of surviving copies and
variants, his images of Roxelana and, in particular, of Mihrimah clearly
enjoyed widespread popularity, and played an important role in shaping
the European image of elite Ottoman women.
The Titian workshop sultana portraits feature richly dressed, stately
women who gaze calmly out at the viewer. Although Venetian reports
tended not to stress Roxelana’s physical beauty,57 the women’s idealized
faces correspond to contemporary ideals of beauty, with pale white skin,
rosy cheeks, full red lips, and thin, arched eyebrows. Vasari’s brief comment underlines the central interest held by dress in these images. The
costume shown appears more accurate than in the earlier woodcuts yet
is still largely a construction by the artist. The women wear tall, pointed
cloth headdresses with long attached veils. These suggest shapes found in
Ottoman women’s headdresses, while the elaborate jewel at the front of
Mihrimah’s headdress is perhaps an aigrette, a type of ornament worn by
women of the harem that could be put on headgear. Both images indicate
the presence of layered clothing, the Sultana Rossa showing more clearly an
underdress and a heavier, more decorative overdress. The pink flower on
her chest, presumably a rose, is surely intended as a play on her name. The
small animal perched on her arm, a marten, suggests her status.
Yet the facial features and dress are not only similar to one another,
but also to two similarly dated portraits from Titian’s workshop: the
Washington Portrait of a Lady (1555) and Girl with a Crown of Roses (mid
sixteenth century) (see fig. 7).58 The figures are all placed in a ¾ length
pose with hands near the waist, holding some kind of object. Roxelana’s
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Fig. 5. Studio of Titian, La Sultana Rossa, 1550s, Bequest of John
Ringling, 1936, Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of
Art, the State Art Museum of Florida.
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Fig. 6. Titian, Cameria, Daughter of Suleiman the Magnificent as St.
Catherine, ca. 1555, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld
Gallery.
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Fig. 7. Titian, Portrait of a Lady, 1555. Samuel Kress Collection, Image
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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garb, which initially appears to be a plausible European interpretation
of Ottoman dress, is in fact extremely similar to the clothing worn by
European women. Roxelana has a pearl necklace and jeweled bracelet similar to those worn by the Girl with a Crown of Roses, and both women wear
an outer robe fastened with horizontal clasps. Roxelana and the Lady both
wear a dark green and bronze robe with an elaborately jeweled border and
triangular points on the sleeves over a low-cut white underdress with loose
sleeves. The three women also wear similar pearl drop earrings. The only
thing, in fact, which distinguishes Roxelana from the European women is
her headdress.
Although this portrait tradition appears to be a phenomenon of the
mid-sixteenth century focusing on Roxelana and Mihrimah, Nur Banu was
also featured in a similar image, today in a private collection in Istanbul.
Nur Banu was the favorite of Selim II, a son of Süleyman and Roxelana,
and the mother of Sultan Murad III, which put her in the powerful position of valide sultan. The portrait of Nur Banu by an unknown artist is
stylistically similar to the Venetian group. She is shown in a three-quarter
pose with a tall white headdress adorned with a jeweled ornament and
long, trailing veils. She wears a costume of rich, brightly colored textiles
with several visible layers, and her features again correspond to contemporary European notions of female beauty.
A portrait of Roxelana also appears in Lorich’s Wolgerissene und
Geschnittene Figuren alongside six other images of women labeled “Soltane,”
all shown half-length and placed behind a parapet (see fig. 8). Roxelana,
identified as Ruziae Soldane, holds a flower, presumably a rose. Her pillbox-shaped headdress, adorned with pearls and other jewels, corresponds
to a shape seen in Ottoman women’s headgear, yet her dress, with its tight
bodice and full sleeves, looks more European. Uncharacteristically, she also
appears older, with her face showing deep nasolabial folds. It is tempting to
read negativity into her stern and rather drawn countenance and the overall dark tonality of the image. Yet all of the sultanas are shown similarly,
and indeed many of the images in Lorich’s series feature high contrast and
strong dark tones, suggesting that these visual characteristics should not
be read as a commentary on her person.59 Since Lorich’s images were not
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Fig. 8. Melchior Lorich, Ruziae Soldane, from Wolgerissene und
Geschnittene Figuren, published 1626. © Trustees of the British Museum.
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published until the seventeenth century, they had no immediate effect on
the sultana genre.
The later sixteenth century saw a proliferation of costume books,
many featuring images of Turkish costume.60 A number included images
of sultanas, often identified by name. An image of a youthful Camilla
appears in Boissard’s 1581 Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium [Costume of
the Various Peoples of the World] and also in Jost Amman’s 1586 Gynaeceum
sive Theatrum Mulierum [Theater of Women], although Mihrimah died
in 1578 (see fig. 9). She is described in both as the daughter of Sultan
Süleyman. The image in Amman also focuses on her person, albeit in a
generic way. The accompanying text identifies her as Camilla, the Turkish
sultan’s daughter, and notes that her manner is arrogant and cruel. Her
clothing is described as beautiful and adorned with jewels, pearls, and
gold.61 Although a description of dress is to be expected in a costume book,
the stress on its ornateness and beauty matches the interest in dress seen
in the sultana portraits, while the mention of cruelty invokes the contemporary stereotype of the cruel Turks.
In other instances, costume book images of the sultana or sultan’s favorite are less clearly depictions of specific individuals. Nicolay’s
Nauigations into Turkie, for example, includes an image of “The great
ladie and wife unto the great Turk.”62 Vecellio’s 1590 De gli Habiti Antichi
et Moderni [Of Ancient and Modern Dress] depicts the Favorita del Turco
followed by text (largely taken from Nicolay) that mentions her clothing
and beauty and provides a detailed discussion of the harem (fig. 10). The
intended identification of the women in both images is unclear. Roxelana,
who died in 1558, predated both images, and Süleyman’s reign ended
in 1566. Nicolay’s image is nevertheless likely a posthumous image of
Roxelana because she would have been alive during his 1549 trip, although
Nur Banu was the favorite by 1567.63 Vecellio’s Favorita could be Safiye, the
favorite of Murad III, sultan until 1594. Yet the image is visually very similar to the Titian-circle portraits of Roxelana and Mihrimah. As a relative of
Titian and member of his studio, Vecellio presumably knew these images
directly and in all likelihood was also aware of their identity. Thompson
nevertheless suggests that this image was intended to show the “splendor
of dress characteristic of Ottoman women closest to the sultan” rather than
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Fig. 9. Camilla, from Boissard, Jean Jacques, Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium, 1581, ©
2009 Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource NY.
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Fig. 10. Cesare Vecellio, The Favorite of the Turkish Sultan, from De
gli habiti antichi et moderni di diversi parti del mondo, 1590, © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.
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representing any specific woman.64 While the generic labeling should probably be taken at face value, the clear similarity to previous imagery indicates
that Roxelana and Mihrimah provided the visual template for European
conceptions of the sultan’s favorite or an Ottoman princess. As a result,
their (fictitious) images persisted well after they themselves had died.
There is a clear visual relationship between the various costume book
images and the sultana portraits. Similarities are particularly apparent
in their depiction of dress. The tall headdress with veil worn by Pagani’s
Roxelana, for example, has strong similarities to the headdresses shown in
the Titian-circle portraits, Boissard’s Camilla, and Vecellio’s Favorite. The
Vecellio and Boissard costumes are nearly identical, and the long veil, flowing from the tip of the headdress and pulled up under the elbow, also corresponds to the veiling on the Titian-circle Cameria portraits. At the same
time, Cameria’s patterned, long-sleeved, v-neck dress with buttons down
the length of the bodice has parallels to the costume worn by Nicolay’s
Turkish Gentlewoman.65 Yet the images as a group do not present a unified
consensus on the dress worn by elite Ottoman women. Nicolay’s Great
Ladie, for example, wears a fantastic veiled crown and low-cut dress with
sash, while Amman’s Camilla lacks any type of headdress.66
The accuracy, or lack thereof, in the depiction of dress is an important
issue in these images. While dress may seem a specialized topic, it provides
a window onto the larger issue of authenticity central to early modern
European depictions of Ottoman women. Of all the artists responsible for
images of sultanas, only Lorich and Nicolay visited the Ottoman Empire.
Yet it is very unlikely that they would have been able to actually see many
Ottoman women, particularly women within the sultan’s harem, much less
have had the opportunity to sketch them. Ottoman women in general, and
women of the sultan’s harem in particular, were kept in seclusion. No men,
apart from their husbands and close family members, were permitted to
see them with their faces uncovered. This simple fact casts the authenticity of virtually all early modern depictions of Ottoman women into question. Despite claims by some artists to have found inventive ways to view
Ottoman women, most European artists, even those who traveled to the
Ottoman Empire, likely created images of Ottoman women that were a
mix of fabrication and improvisation based on individual items of clothing
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and perhaps verbal descriptions.67 Nicolay, for example, claimed in his text
that he hired a prostitute to model local fashions, which were acquired
for him at the bazaar.68 European images of elite Ottoman women must
therefore be understood as a blend of fantasy and received information of
perhaps questionable provenance rather than observational accuracy.
Despite their lack of authenticity, the emergence of these images as
a type testifies to a new interest in these women on the part of European
viewers, which is presumably related to a more general increase in Ottoman
imagery in Europe during the mid-sixteenth century. This was largely in
response to the ongoing Ottoman advance into central Europe under
Süleyman.69 Süleyman, recognized as a powerful military force and as a
major threat to Europe, himself became a figure of great interest. Images
of his wife and daughter are surely connected to a growing appetite for
information about the sultan.
The increasing demand for portraits of famous men and women in
both painted and printed form during the sixteenth century also helps
explain the rise of the sultana portrait type. These images were often collected and displayed in portrait galleries, such as the collection of over
400 portraits of notable individuals owned by the historian Paolo Giovio,
and also circulated as printed series. Numerous portraits of the Ottoman
sultans were executed in the sixteenth century by European artists for
European audiences, many intended for inclusion in such galleries.70
Portraits of sultanas were also placed in these galleries: Mihrimah and
Roxelana were included in Cristofano dell’Altissimo’s series of famous
individuals for the Medici copied from the Giovio series,71 and Mihrimah
appeared in a printed series of nineteen ruler portraits by Pieter van der
Heyden (1556).72 Lorich was commissioned to do a similar set of portraits
by Duke Hans the Elder, a Danish noble, for his palace in Hadersleu. The
initial commission for portraits of Charles V, Ferdinand, and Süleyman,
plus portraits of their consorts was never completed, but Fischer suggests
they were intended for a portrait gallery.73 The Venetian sultana portraits
should also be connected to the particular interest in Venice for Ottoman
imagery. According to Wilson, “portraits of foreigners . . . were commonplace in sixteenth-century Venetian houses,” and “by the middle of the
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[sixteenth] century, images identified as Turks . . . were also familiar sights
on the walls of Venetian houses.”74
Roxelana herself must also be seen as a key factor in the appearance
of sultana imagery because she was the first Ottoman woman to be widely
known in Western Europe. Roxelana likely entered Süleyman’s harem
around 1520. Within several years, the sultan had reputedly chosen her
as his sexual partner, freed her from slavery, and married her. She would
remain his consort until her death, giving birth to six children.75 Her
relationship with the sultan was unusual and broke several established
Ottoman customs.76 The unconventional nature of this relationship and
Roxelana’s status as a trusted confidante of the sultan were well known
and much commented on by both Ottomans and Europeans. European
ambassadors, in particular, made note of her status, and she figures in a
number of their reports.77
Yet Roxelana became a figure of ill-repute to Western audiences.78 Her
influence over the sultan was seen as the result of both female wiles and
magic. The Ottoman public saw her as a witch, an opinion confirmed by
various European writers including Busbecq, who commented on rumors
of her use of magical potions to ensure the sultan’s love,79 and Bassano,
who noted Süleyman’s reputed great love for Roxelana, and described how
“all his subjects marvel and say that she has bewitched him, and they call
her [a] witch.”80 A number of reports describe her use of tears, sexuality,
and cleverness to manipulate the sultan. The Venetian ambassador Pietro
Bragadino described how she was able to have a new concubine sent away
after she wept and demonstrated her extreme unhappiness.81 Bernardo
Navagero, another ambassador, similarly related how she bested her rival
in the harem to win Süleyman’s affections through manipulation.82
The principal cause of Roxelana’s notoriety, however, was her reputed
involvement in the murder of Mustafa, Süleyman’s son by the concubine
Gülbahar (or Mahidevran). Mustafa was regarded as the favorite to succeed
his father until his execution in 1553 by order of Süleyman.83 It was widely
believed that his execution occurred as a result of a plot between Roxelana,
Mihrimah, and Rüstem Pasha, Mihrimah’s husband and Süleyman’s
Grand Vizier from 1544–1553 and 1555–1561.84 The events surrounding Mustafa’s execution were reported in a number of European sources.
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Busbecq described Mustafa’s execution in some detail and discussed the
alleged plot.85 A political pamphlet by Nicolas de Moffan, “A Cruell Facte
of Soltan Solyman,” published in 1555, was translated into multiple languages and circulated widely.86 The pamphlet helped to popularize the
story of Mustafa’s execution and Roxelana’s involvement, solidifying her
reputation in the West. Roxelana, who is described variously as “crafty” and
as a “wicked” and “devilish” woman, is said to have “corrupt[ed] the Kyng’s
mynde” and “used certayne Sorceries . . . to wyn the love of the King.”87 The
text describes how she attempted to kill Mustafa herself by sending him a
poisoned set of armor and, when that failed, convinced Süleyman to have
him killed. The conspiracy and execution even became the subject of several dramas, such as Gabriel Bounin’s La Soltane, performed around 1560
and published in 1561.88
Roxelana was the first Ottoman woman to truly penetrate European
consciousness, and she appeared as an almost wholly negative figure. Given
this level of awareness, particularly when combined with the contemporary interest in the Ottomans and images of famous individuals, it is not
surprising to find her depicted in European art. Despite her bad press in
written sources, visual depictions nevertheless present a largely neutral
image. An interesting exception may be found in two images from the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century, which are clearly related to the
earlier sixteenth-century visual tradition. Richard Knolles’s The Generall
Historie of the Turkes until this present Yeare 1603 includes a printed portrait of Roxelana. The image, which is derived from Theodore de Bry’s
portrait of Roxelana, an illustration found in Jacques Boissard’s 1596 Vitae
et icons Sultanorum Turcicorum [Lives and Portraits of the Turkish Sultans]
has clear similarities to Pagani’s portrait of Roxelana (see fig. 11). Both
portraits are accompanied by a verse, which stresses the gap between her
appearance and character. The inscription in Knolles also makes a clear
reference to the Mustapha story:
To fairest lookes truth not too farre, nor yet to beautie braue: For
hateful thoughts so finely maskt, their deadly poisons haue. Loues
charmed cups, the subtile dame doth to her husband fill: And causeth
him with cruell hand, his childrens bloud to spill.89
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Fig. 11. Theodore de Bry, Portrait of Roxelana from Vitae et icons
Sultanorum Turcicorum, 1596, © Trustees of the British Museum.
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While none of the earlier images were accompanied by a similar text, the
Knolles verse underlines the primary cause of Roxelana’s European notoriety and suggests that her image may well have been understood as similarly
disjunctive in other contexts.
There is one instance in the sultana portrait tradition where the depiction of Roxelana has clear political overtones, notably the Beham portrait
(fig. 3). Yet the political dimension relates to European politics rather than
to the persona of Roxelana or to intrigues at the Ottoman court. Roxelana’s
portrait is here paired with a portrait of Süleyman, and both flank a central
portrait of François I. Labeled “Rex Francie” and marked with a coat of
arms with fleur de lis, François faces Süleyman. He had made overtures to
Süleyman as early as 1525 and signed an alliance with him in 1536. This
move was, unsurprisingly, controversial within Europe. The image, created
in Germany in the wake of the Siege of Vienna, was certainly intended
as propaganda linking the Ottoman foe to the French king, traditional
enemy of the Habsburgs. Roxelana thus features here as an accessory to
contemporary geo-political maneuverings. As one of the earliest images of
this type, it furthermore underscores that the impetus for her appearance
in the European visual record was as an accessory to her husband.
Mihrimah’s frequent appearance within the sultana genre is surely
related to interest in her parents and also to a growing awareness of the
significance of what Peirce terms the “princess-statesman marital alliance.”90 Mihrimah was married to Rüstem Pasha in 1539. This made her a
strategic figure and of interest to European ambassadors.91 Contemporary
sources also indicate that she wielded political power and influence and
became her father’s confidant after her mother’s death. Inscriptions on
portraits of Mihrimah naming her as both the daughter of Süleyman and
the wife of Rüstem Pasha confirm European awareness of her marriage
and indicate that this was seen as significant.92 Goughe also notes this connection. In his list of Süleyman’s children by Roxelana, he states that “the
virgine was married to one Rustanus a paschan” who “obtained the dignitye
of a Visier, whiche we may call one of the chiefe councellers.”93 The reputed
role of both Rüstem Pasha and Mihrimah in the execution of her brother
Mustapha presumably also added to her interest, although she did not
share her mother’s notoriety.
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Nur Banu, whose portrait also appears within this tradition, was
similarly a figure of some interest to Western audiences because she was
reputed to have been born a Venetian patrician. According to contemporary reports, Nur Banu, born Cecelia Venier-Baffo, was the illegitimate
daughter of Nicolò Venier and Violante Baffo. Captured as a child, she
entered the harem, eventually becoming the favorite of sultan Selim II, the
son and successor of Süleyman. She also had considerable influence as the
valide sultan during the reign of Murad III. While the legitimacy of this
genealogy has recently been questioned, it was believed by contemporary
Venetians, endorsed by the Senate, and promulgated by Nur Banu herself,
who described herself as the daughter of an unspecified patrician Venetian
family with a palace on the Grand Canal.94 Nur Banu also corresponded
and exchanged gifts with the Venetian senate.95 Western European powers,
moreover, show a clear awareness of the significance of the valide sultan in
the later sixteenth century as well as her potential role in diplomacy.96
The repeated depiction and clear interest in these elite Ottoman
women belies the usual understanding of the Western perception of harem
women as lacking in identity or individuality. Roxelana and Mihrimah were
undoubtedly figures of interest to sixteenth-century Europe and existed as
distinct, named individuals in the collective awareness. Indeed, they feature
far more in the early modern European record (both written and visual)
than they do in Ottoman sources. Yet their images are remarkably devoid
of personality despite the lurid depictions of Roxelana in contemporary
texts.97 Indeed, these images provide little information about the women
themselves, who appear primarily as beautiful, even interchangeable mannequins modeling exotic dress. The contextualizing information that is
given through inscriptions and supporting text is furthermore limited to
a description of their beauty, their expensive dress, and their relationship
to masculine power, whether as wife, favorite, or daughter. Although these
women are given distinct identities in the sense that they are named and
labeled, their characterizations are both minimal and repetitive.
The sultana images are part of a much larger set of sixteenth-century
representations, which presented the Ottoman Empire, its rulers, and its
inhabitants to Western viewers. Dress, then as now, was used to categorize
and define. Speaking of Renaissance costume books, Wilson notes that
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dress served as a “locus of alterity . . . making foreigners appear strange.”98
The exotic dress worn by these women marks them visually as Other, and
the repeated association of their dress with their identity in turn made this
dress into a marker of Ottoman identity. Yet while costume denotes difference here, it is clearly also a primary source of visual interest and even
desire.99 These images, moreover, do not frame these women as an absolute
Other. While their dress categorizes them as non-European, it also categorizes them as women of status. The image compositions, identical in the
painted portraits to portrait conventions used for European sitters, further
serve to lessen their distance and strangeness. Indeed, as seen clearly in
the Titian examples, with only minor alterations these very same women
become European. Their status as famous, noble, beautiful, and powerful
overrides — to a degree — their otherness.
The sultana portraits showcase famous women within the sultan’s
harem, yet are clearly distinct from later harem imagery, both visually and
conceptually. The Lorich drawings and the harem scenes from the Historia
Turcorum, by contrast, are isolated anticipations of a much later genre, a
genre that would be developed only at the turn of the eighteenth century,
when artists like Jean-Baptiste Vanmour created the first detailed images
of life within the sultan’s harem.100 There are several likely reasons why only
a few isolated examples of Renaissance harem imagery exist, despite ample
textual promptings, and why the widespread production and popularization of harem imagery was delayed.
On the one hand, apart from printed imagery, which tended to have
a wider range of permissible subject matter, there was not really a category
of secular painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which harem
scenes could appear. Painted reclining nudes and other erotic images were
generally confined to scenes from classical mythology. Nude bathhouse
scenes do appear in printed imagery in Dürer’s Women’s Bath (1496), for
example, suggesting that a Turkish bath scene could have been possible.
Yet while Ottoman-themed scenes are plentiful in mid-sixteenth-century
print culture, printed genre scenes showing Ottoman women in the bath or
the harem simply do not appear. In the early eighteenth century, with the
emergence of the Rococo and the fashion for turquerie, harem scenes had a
more obvious genre niche.
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Indeed, harem discourse itself is seen as a dominant Orientalist
motif only from the late seventeenth century on. The reasons for this
ideological shift have been widely posited. The year 1683 saw the second siege of Vienna, widely understood as a watershed moment in the
Ottoman relationship to Western Europe. One result of the decisive tilting
of the balance of power that followed was a shift in the European image
of the Ottomans from formidable foe to weakened and degenerate.101 It
is precisely at this period that harem imagery comes into the forefront.
Numerous other factors are also seen to play a part in the rising dominance of the harem fantasy in this period. These include developments in
political philosophy, colonialism, changes in gender roles, a new stress on
sexual morality and monogamy, high profile Ottoman visitors to Europe
in the early eighteenth century, a new vogue for all things Turkish, and the
translation and subsequent popularization of the Arabian Nights in the
early eighteenth century.102 Harem discourse was buttressed by multiple
events and ideologies.
The conceptual structures that encouraged later harem discourse
were not yet in place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Furthermore,
competing ideological frameworks and historical realities made the harem
fantasy an inadequate model for this period. The Renaissance did not
embrace the harem as its overarching representational system for the
Ottoman Empire because harem imagery was ill-suited to the period of the
“invincible Turk,” the “terror of the world.”103 Sultana imagery, by contrast,
spurred by the emergence of several prominent women within the harem,
found an obvious niche within the broader sixteenth-century interest in
the Ottomans and the focus on individual sultans, which are both in turn
related to the specific dynamics of the sixteenth-century Euro-Ottoman
relationship. The appearance of Roxelana and Mihrimah in the visual
record of the sixteenth century, while limited, marks a distinct moment of
interest in individual, identified Ottoman women. Their images are a key
type of Renaissance Ottoman-themed imagery and reflect an important
instance of European imaginings of the Muslim woman. They furthermore serve as a useful reminder that Western myths of “the Orient” were
neither monolithic nor unchanging.
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Notes
1. “Orientalist” is used here both in the sense of art, literature, or other cultural
productions that took as their subject matter the peoples, cultures, or settings of the Near
and Middle East and in reference to Edward Said’s monumentally influential Orientalism
(New York: Random House, 1978). While the present study will not engage directly with
Said, any contemporary study of Western constructions of the Muslim world implicitly, if
not explicitly, engages with his formulations.
2. In art, the nineteenth-century works of Ingres and Gerôme are the most wellknown examples of harem imagery. There is a large bibliography on nineteenth-century
Orientalist art. See, for example, John MacKenzie, Orientalism and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995); Nicholas Tromans, The Lure of the East: British
Orientalist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Linda Nochlin, “The
Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society
(New York: Harper and Row, 1989). In written texts, the harem features in works ranging from Racine’s Bajazet, to Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, to the Letters of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu. See Ruth Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and
Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
3. The term “sultana” is found in sixteenth-century European sources, for example,
in Luigi Bassano’s discussion of Süleyman’s wife in I Costumi et I Modi Particolari de la
Vita de Turchi (1545). The term “sultan” (originally from Arabic) was given not only to the
Ottoman ruler, but also to his children, with princesses having the title placed after their
name, such as Süleyman’s daughter, Mihrimah Sultan. The sultan’s mother also bore the
sultan title, as did the sultan’s favorite concubine, e.g., Hurrem Sultan. See Leslie Peirce,
The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 18. On the terms haseki and valide sultan, see Peirce, 58 and 91.
4. See Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the
Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York: Garland, 1998); Juliann Vitullo,
“Masculinity, Sexuality, and Orientalism in the Medieval Italian Epic,” in The Chivalric
Epic in Medieval Italy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 74–90; and Mohja
Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). While visual representations of Muslim
women in the Middle Ages are not numerous, John Williams sees a depiction of Hagar
as intimating lascivious sexuality; see “Generationes Abrahae: Reconquest Iconography in
Leon,” Gesta 16, no. 2 (1977): 3–14.
5. Silke Falkner discusses Western imaginings of sexual deviance in the Ottoman
Empire, in “ ‘Having it Off ’ with Fish, Camels, and Lads: Sodomitic Pleasures in GermanLanguage Turcica,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13:4 (2004): 401–27.
6. Yeazell notes that “strictly speaking, in fact, there is no such place as ‘the’ harem.”
The term is from Arabic, meaning forbidden or sacred. “Seraglio” is from the word for
palace (saray). A mistaken linking with the Italian word to lock up (serrare) produced the
notion of the seraglio as the sultan’s harem; see Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 1–2.
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7. European harem imagery has been analyzed by numerous scholars, including
Yeazell, Harems of the Mind; Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of
the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998); Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple
Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875 (Cranbury: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2002); and Kahf, Western Representations. For a discussion of English women’s conception of the harem, see Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Michael Harrigan, Veiled
Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature (Amsterdam:
Rodopoi, 2008) includes a discussion of seventeenth-century reports of the harem.
8. Yeazell’s time frame for the dominance of harem discourse is between the defeat
of the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683 and the establishment of the Turkish republic in
1923; see Harems of the Mind, 3. Other writers largely concur.
9. Kahf, Western Representations, 98.
10. Numerous European women, however, visited harems by the nineteenth
century. See Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–
1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
11. Grosrichard, Sultan’s Court, 125.
12. It is important to note the depth of error in Western perceptions of the harem.
The view of the harem as a libidinous zone focused around male sexual pleasure versus
the part of the house reserved for women and for children is a fundamental, but not sole
misconception. See Peirce, The Imperial Harem, particularly the introduction.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Nina Berman notes that “translations, often word for word, were common
and document the high degree to which Europeans shared this textual archive across
linguistic boundaries”; see German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices,
1000–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2011), 78. Asli Çirakman, “From the
Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and
Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), also
provides a useful overview of this genre.
15. Berman, German Literature, 79.
16. Thomas Dallam, Dallam’s Travels, in Early Voyages and Travels to the Levant,
ed. Theodore Dent (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 74.
17. The text was first published in 1567; the quotation is taken from the 1585
English translation, Nicolas de Nicolay, The Nauigations into Turkie (Amsterdam: Da
Capo Press, 1968), 53.
18. Because of laws forbidding the enslavement of Muslims, women in the Sultan’s
harem were non-Muslim, although many did convert to Islam. Schick comments further:
“It is not that this fiction was ‘inaccurate’ and happened to represent ‘the wrong women’;
rather, it pointedly represented the women occupying the Turkish space as non-Turkish”;
see Peirce, Imperial Harem, 200.
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19. Hugh Goughe, The Ofspring of the House of Ottomanno (London, 1569), 73.
Goughe’s work is largely an English translation of Bartolomej Georgijevic’s 1560 De
Origine Imperii Turcorum. Georgijevic had escaped from Ottoman captivity.
20. Text from the 1592 English translation, Historie of the Damnable Life and
Death of Doctor John Faustus, in The English Faust-book of 1592, ed. H. Logeman (Gand:
Université de Gand, 1900), 69.
21. Ibid, 70.
22. Theodore Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors (1538), trans.
Donald M. Nicol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129.
23. “ [S]i lauano domesticamente l’un l’altra, e una vicina con l’altra, o una sorella
con l’altra: Onde si fa che tra donne è amore grandissimo, per la familiarità del lauarsi,
e strappiccarsi,” from I Costumi et I Modi Particolari de la Vita de Turchi (Munich: Pera
Druck, 1967), 17; translation from Irvin Cemil Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and
Spatiality in Alterist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999), 212.
24. Nicolay, Nauigations, 60.
25. Dallam, Travels, 74–75.
26. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters, trans. Edward Seymour
Forster (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 117–18.
27. The source of this information is Gian-Maria Angiolello, a Venetian at
Mehmed’s court. Patricia Fortini Brown suggests that these images were not necessarily
erotica but may have been banquet or festival scenes; see Venetian Narrative Painting in the
Age of Carpaccio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 55. Alan Chong notes that
lussuria could also mean opulence or abundance, in “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul,” Bellini
and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong (London: National Gallery, 2005),
110. See also Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, ed. William Hickman
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 378–79.
28. A single drawing of a seated Turkish woman (ca. 1480) is attributed to Bellini,
yet neither he nor subsequent artists made use of this figure. See Campell and Chong,
Bellini, particularly 99–105.
29. Ulrike Bauer-Eberhardt attributes the images to Francesco da Castello, a
Lombard artist who worked at the Buda court, in “Unknown Renaissance Miniatures
from Lombardy and the Veneto in Bavarian Collections,” Arte Christiana 84, no. 772
(1996): 10–29. The images have also been attributed to Nicolao Sagundino, by Julian
Raby, in The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000), 79.
30. Raby mentions this manuscript briefly; ibid., 79, 93. Bauer-Eberhard discusses
the manuscript, but focuses largely on attribution issues.
31. Raby, Sultan’s Portrait, 79; Bauer-Eberhard, “Renaissance Miniatures,” 21.
32. The linking of male sexuality and war is also found in early modern European
imagery, for example, in the work of Swiss artist Urs Graf.
33. On Lorich, see Erik Fischer, Melchior Lorck, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: Vankunsten
Publishers, 2009).
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36 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6
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34. The drawings, held at the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloss
Gottorf, are reproduced in Erik Fischer, Melchior Lorck: Drawings from the Evelyn
Collection at Stonor Park England (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 1962), 107
and also in the forthcoming vol. 5 of Fischer, Melchior Lorck.
35. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle
East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 147.
36. One example is the figure of a dancer, labeled Tschinguis, who appears in
Vanmour’s engravings for De Ferriol’s Recueil de Cent Estampes [Collection of One Hundred
Prints] from 1714. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu mentions female harem dancers in several descriptions of meals with elite Ottoman women in her famous letters; see The Letters
and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: George Bell and Sons, 1887).
37. See Arzu Öztürkmen, “Modern Dance ‘Alla Turca’: Transforming Ottoman
Dance in Early Republican Turkey,” Dance Research Journal 35, no. 1 (2003): 38–60; and
Metin And, A Pictorial History of Turkish Dancing (Ankara: Dost Yayinlari, 1976).
38. Guillaume Postel, who traveled to Istanbul as part of the embassy of François I
during the 1530s, described female entertainers in his De la Republique des Turcs (Poitiers,
1560), 18–19. He noted in particular the presence of a harp, singing, the sinuous movements of the women, and a mimed performance of love.
39. See Fischer, Melchior Lorck, vol. 2, 261. “Eine dess Sultans gefangene Christin
unnd Harpffen Spielerin” [One of the sultan’s captured Christians and harp player].
40. Ibid., vol. 1, 98.
41. Walter Denny, “Orientalism in European Art,” The Muslim World 73, nos. 3–4
(1983): 271.
42. Ibid,, 266.
43. Although there are no direct prototypes for these images, there are several
notable images of Muslim women from the late fifteenth century. The Saracen woman
by Erhard Reuwich from Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctum
(1488) was widely copied in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Venetian
artist Carpaccio made repeated use of this figure, as did Gentile Bellini. Carpaccio also
included a group of women dressed in Mamluk dress in his Sermon of St. Stephen. See
Stefano Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World: 826–1797 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007), 306.
44. I am choosing to refer to Hurrem as Roxelana and Mihrimah as Mihrimah,
despite the perhaps awkward mixing of European and Turkish names, because I am focusing here on the Renaissance European image of Roxelana rather than the historical person
known as Hurrem. Roxelana was extensively discussed in sixteenth-century European
sources, and she became an almost legendary figure in later material. The Cameria/
Camilla name for Mihrimah does not have the same resonance as Roxelana, nor is there
a comparable Western image of Cameria/Camilla that developed separate from the historical person Mihrimah. The figure of Cameria is also not one that would continue to
fascinate Western Europeans in later centuries in the way that Roxelana did. On the later
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Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women
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image of Roxelana, see Galiana Yermolenko, ed. Roxolana in European Literature, History,
and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
45. The neglect of these representations presumably results from their emerging
out of several disparate visual traditions, their crossing of North/South divisions, their
execution in many cases by less well-known artists, or their provenance only in print.
Individual studies exist in some cases, but there has been no holistic exploration of these
images as a group.
46. Nicolay’s image of The Great Ladie and Wife Unto the Great Turk precedes his
chapter on “The great Sarail,” while Vecellio’s Favorita del Turco precedes a discussion of
how women are chosen for the harem, the clothing of harem women, and harem administration. See Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Moderni, translated in Margaret Rosenthal
and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Clothing of the Renaissance World (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2008), 392–93.
47. Giovio was particularly concerned with accuracy and sought prototype images.
The re-use of Beham’s image of Roxelana indicates that it was seen as an authoritative
image. See Julian Raby, The Sultan’s Portrait, for more on the Giovio series.
48. See Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the
Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 67–100.
49. See Jennifer Scarce, Women’s Costume of the Near and Middle East (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1987), particularly ch. 4. There is a brief discussion of Ottoman women’s
costume and an extensive discussion of Ottoman textiles in the time of Süleyman in Esin
Atil, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (Washington DC: National Gallery of
Art, 1987), 177–233.
50. Although they see the Pagani portrait of Roxelana as apocryphal, J. M. Rogers
and R. M. Ward note that the headdress worn in this portrait has parallels to headdresses worn by some peri figures in Ottoman and Safavid manuscript painting. See their
Suleyman the Magnificent (Secaucus: Wellfleet, 1988), 51.
51. The çintemani motif usually appears as three circles arranged in a triangle. The
circles can have a smaller, different-colored circle placed at the edge, forming a crescent
shape, however. While the crescents here are not placed in groups of three, and do not
form the distinctive triangular pattern, the shape of the individual motifs is somewhat
similar.
52. Dürer, Beham’s teacher, also (inaccurately) placed a turban on an Ottoman
woman in his Turkish Family (1496).
53. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter
Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 506.
54. Related paintings include a portrait of Roxelana in a private collection
in Istanbul and portraits of Mihrimah in the Mazovian Museum, the Staatsgalerie
Achaffenburg, and in Bergamo. A similar image in Montpellier is attributed by the
museum to Sofonisba Anguissola. See Janina Ruszczycówna, “O Niektórych Portretach
Sulejmana II I Jego Rodziny,” in Ars Auro Prior: Studia Ioanni Bialostocki Sexagenario
Dicata (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn Nauk, 1981), 279–85; and Johannes Wilde, “St.
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Catherine,” in Antoine Seilern, Italian Paintings and Drawings at 56 Princes Gate, London
SW7 Addenda (London: Shenval Press, 1969), 4–6.
55. Harold Wethey sees the wheel as a copyist’s addition, in The Paintings of Titian,
vol. 2 (London: Phaidon, 1971), 191. Wilde describes the image as originally intended
only as a portrait of Cameria; see “St. Catherine,” 4.
56. While it might be argued that Titian, as a Venetian, could have had access to
an authoritative tradition of imagery due to the frequent contact between Venice and the
Ottoman world, as discussed below, even artists who traveled to Istanbul did not produce
authentic images of elite Ottoman women. A letter written by Garciá Hernandez to
Philip II of Spain in 1559 states that he would send Philip a small picture by Titian of a
Turkish or Persian woman made from his imagination – “una Turca o Persiana hecho a
sua fantasia” This description of the image indicates clearly that, at least in this case, the
imaginary nature of the depiction was clear to all involved. Wethey, 205.
57. Galiana Yermolenko, “Roxolana: ‘The Greatest Empresse of the East,’” The
Muslim World 95, no. 2 (2005): 234. The ambassador Bragadino described Roxelana as
“giovane, ma non bella” (Yermolenko, 245).
58. Wethey, Paintings of Titans, 191.
59. Erik Fischer sees a tendency towards stylization and austerity as characteristic
of Lorich’s style, in “Melchior Lorck: A Dane as Imperial Draughtsman in Constantinople
in the 1550s,” in The Arabian Journey: Danish Connections with the Islamic World over a
Thousand Years (Århus: Prehistoric Museum Moesgård, 1996), 37.
60. See Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern
Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), ch. 2.
61. At the head and the bottom of the page of the image are printed the words:
“Camilla des Türckischen Sultans Tochter. Camilla von Türckischem Stam / Von Art
hoffertig und grausam / Von Leib einer guten Gestalt / Und sonst gezieret manigfalt
/ Gekleidet auch gar hübsch und sein / In Golt/Perlen/Edelgestein / In Schmuck und
Pracht ihr gar nichts felt.” [Camilla, the Turkish sultan’s daughter. Camilla of the Turkish
dynasty / Her nature is cruel and arrogant / Of body a good shape / And otherwise
adorned with variety / She is finely dressed / In gold / Pearls / Gems / In jewelry and finery she lacks nothing. ] Jean-Jacques Boissard, Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium (Mechlin,
1581), Jost Amman, Gynaeceum sive Theatrum Mulierum (Frankfurt, 1586).
62. Nicholas, Navigations, p. 52. The illustrations were executed by Louis Daret,
although Nicolay states that he made the original sketches; Leslie Luebbers,“Documenting
the Invisible: European Images of Ottoman Women, 1567–1867,” The Print Collector’s
Newsletter 24, no. 1 (1993): 1–3, provides a brief discussion of the illustrations.
63. The designation of “wife” at this date also suggests Roxelana. According to the
Venetian ambassador Jacopo Ragazzoni, Nur Banu became the legal wife of Selim II. He
states that this only took place six months prior to his 1571 report, however. See Peirce,
Imperial Harem, 93.
64. Wendy Thompson, in Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 318.
65. Wethey, Paintings, 190.
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66. Nicolay’s images are commonly seen as the primary source for sixteenthcentury depictions of Ottoman costume; see Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 318.
It is clear that in the case of sultana images the visual sources were considerably more
complex.
67. The artist Reinhold Lubenau, in Turkey from 1587 to 1589, for example,
described how he secretly observed the wife of a well-to-do neighbor from a window and
was thereby able to describe her clothing; see Otto Kurz and Hilde Schueller Kurz, “The
Turkish Dress in the Costume-Book of Rubens,” The Decorative Arts of Europe and the
Islamic East: Selected Studies (London: Dorian, 1977), 276. Caroline Campbell and Alan
Chong suggest that Gentile Bellini used a non-Muslim woman dressed up in a made-up
costume that was intended to appear Turkish for his drawing of A Turkish Woman: see
Bellini and the East, 101.
68. Nicolay, Nauigations, 54.
69. Wilson describes how “the demand for portraits of the Ottomans grew during
periods of conflict,” in World in Venice, 224.
70. See Raby, “From Europe to Istanbul,” in The Sultan’s Portrait, 136–63; and
Rosamond Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 166.
71. Cristofano dell’Altissimo’s copy of the Giovio portrait of Roxelana is the version of Beham’s discussed above. Altissimo’s portrait of Mihrimah is clearly related to the
Titian group, and Wilde suggests that the prototype must have been Titian’s original; see
Wilde, “St. Catherine,” 4.
72. F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Engravings, vol. IX, Pieter van der
Heyden (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1949-), 32. Süleyman also appeared in this series,
although Roxelana is absent.
73. Fischer, Melchior Lorck, vol. 1, 106–7. Lorich did inform the duke in 1560
that he had completed portraits of the Persian king, the Turkish emperor, and the Duke
of Bavaria.
74. Wilson, World in Venice, 188 and 190.
75. For additional details of her history see Yermolenko, “Roxolana”; Yermolenko,
“Introduction” to Roxolana in European Literature; Michel Sokolniki, “La Sultane
Ruthene,” Belleten 23 (1959): 229–39; and Peirce, Imperial Harem, 58–65.
76. Most notable of the customs broken were their legal marriage and Süleyman’s
near-monogamy with Roxelana, rather than multiple slave concubines and sexual partners
of the sultan; see Peirce, Imperial Harem, 60–61.
77. Peirce, 58–65, cites a number of ambassadorial reports.
78. See Yermolenko, “Roxolana in Europe,” in Roxolana in European Literature;
and Yermolenko, “Reading the Other: Roxolana in European History and Literature,”
National Social Science Journal, 32, no. 1 (2009): 202–10.
79. Busbecq, Turkish Letters, 49.
80. Bassano, I Costumi, 44. “Le porta tal’amore che fa marauigliare tutti i suoi
sudditi in tanto che dicono ch’ella l’ha ammaliato, perche la chiamano Ziardi, che vuol dir
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Strega”; translation from Yermolenko, Roxolana in European Literature, 8. The heading to
this chapter — “Of the love that the grand Turk has for the Sultana, his wife” [De l’amore
che il gran Turco porta alla Sultana sua moglie] — also underscores Süleyman’s love of
Roxelana.
81. Peirce, Imperial Harem, 59.
82. Ibid., 59.
83. Ibid., 21, 85. Ottoman succession was a fraught process, often involving fratricide.
84. Ibid., 79, 81. Peirce notes that there is no actual evidence for their involvement,
although she suggests that the “efforts of Rüstem Pasha were undoubtedly instrumental
in Mustafa’s downfall.”
85. Busbecq, 28–33.
86. French and German translations were published in 1556. An English translation was published in 1567.
87. Quotations taken from the 1567 English translation by Moffan, in William
Painter’s The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David
Nutt, 1890), 401, 403, and 404.
88. Gabriel Bounin, La Soltane, ed. Michael Heath (Exeter: University of Exeter,
1977).
89. Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London: A. Islip, 1603), 759.
Quoted in Yermolenko “Roxolana in Europe,” 28.
90. Peirce, Imperial Harem, 86.
91. Ibid. Wilde, “St. Catherine,” 5, also suggests that Western interest in Mihrimah
heightened with her marriage because it made her politically significant.
92. The inscription on her portrait in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier reads,
“Cameria Soliman / Imperatoris Filia/Rostanis Bassae / Uxor.” [Cameria, daughter of
Emperor Soliman, wife of Rostanis Bassae]. Her portrait in the Mazovian Museum has
a similar inscription.
93. Goughe, On the Ofspring, 71.
94. Benjamin Arbel convincingly problematizes this account of Nur Banu’s origins and explains why both the Venetian senate and Nur Banu would have found value
in this story even as the Venetians apparently questioned it; see Arbel, “Nur Banu (c.
1530–1583); A Venetian Sultana?” Turcica 24 (1992): 241–59.
95. S. A. Skilliter, “The Letters of the Venetian ‘Sultana’ Nur Banu and her Kira
to Venice,” in Studia Turcologica Memoriae Alexii Bombacu Dicata, ed. Aldo Gallotta
(Naples: Ugo Marazzi, 1982).
96. See Andrea, Women and Islam.
97. European portraits of Ottoman sultans tended to be similarly restrained
despite extensive written discussions of their cruelty and tyranny.
98. Wilson, World in Venice, 76. See, also, Ulrike Ilg, “The Cultural Sign of
Costume Books in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in Clothing Culture: 1350–1650, ed.
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Catherine Richardson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 29–47; and Ulinka Rublack, Dressing
Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
99. The fascination with Ottoman women’s dress appears to have been widespread.
Dallam’s description of his forbidden view into the harem in Dallam’s Travels includes a
detailed description of the dress worn by the women, and Postel’s République des Turcs
also includes passages on women’s dress.
100. See Olga Nefedova, A Journey into the World of the Ottomans: The Art of
Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (Milan: Skira, 2009). There are some instances of harem imagery
from the seventeenth century, such as the overtly sexual title page from Michael Baudier,
Histoire Genéralle du Serrail (Paris: C. Craimoisy, 1631).
101. See Denny, “Orientalism”; and Yeazell, Harems of the Mind.
102. Grosrichard, Sultan’s Court, 125–26; Ali Behdad, “The Eroticized Orient:
Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and his Precursors,” Stanford French Review 13
(1989): 123; Kahf, Western Representations, 7, 97, 103–16; Ze’evi, Producing Desire, 152,
164; Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 3–5; and Nabil Matar, “The Representations of Muslim
Women in Renaissance England,” The Muslim World 86, no. 1 (1996): 50–51.
103. The invincible Turk formulation is from Mustafa Soykut, The Image of the
Turk in Italy: A History of the “Other” in Early Modern Europe, 1454–1683 (Berlin: K.
Schwarz, 2001). On the Turks as “the terror of the world” in the early modern period, see
Çirakman, Terror of the World.
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