{"id":2165,"date":"2024-01-25T19:32:13","date_gmt":"2024-01-26T00:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.issendai.com\/16thcenturyistanbul\/?page_id=2165"},"modified":"2024-01-25T19:32:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T00:32:13","slug":"the-ladies-of-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.issendai.com\/16thcenturyistanbul\/the-ladies-of-istanbul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ladies of Istanbul"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I submitted this paper in the novice category at the 2018 St. Eligius Arts & Sciences Competition.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 16th<\/sup>-century Istanbul, names followed religion. Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, and Jews each had their own name pools, with very little crossover even between branches of Christianity.[1]<\/a> The pool of Muslim female names was further divided into names borne by free women and names borne by current or former slaves.[2]<\/a> However, women\u2019s near-total absence from public life makes female names difficult to gather, let alone to collect in numbers great enough to allow any sort of meaningful analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pleasant exception is shari\u2019a\ncourt records. These volumes are the richest primary sources available for the\nlives of ordinary people in the Ottoman empire. They contain everything: debt\ncollections, real estate sales, inventories of deceased people\u2019s households,\nrecords of the manumission of faithful slaves and the hunt for escaped slaves,\naccusations of drunkenness, petty theft, and immoral hijinks, ugly divorces,\nand even the occasional murder mystery. And all of it is awash in names.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From five 16th<\/sup>-century volumes of court records from the greater Istanbul area, I extracted the names of 872 individual women, including 538 freeborn women, 166 female slaves, and 168 female converts whose legal status could not be determined. Then, by supplementing cues in the records with frequency analysis, I separated the names into freeborn and slave names. My goal was to add to the body of names available for women who want to play late-period Ottoman Turkish personas, and to increase our appreciation of the richness of the Ottoman Turkish name pool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeborn, Convert, Slave<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Upon conversion to Islam every convert, free or slave, received a new name: a suitably Muslim personal name, plus, to symbolize the convert\u2019s break with his or her infidel past,\u00a0bin<\/em>\u00a0(son of, abbreviated\u00a0b<\/em>.) or\u00a0bint<\/em>\u00a0(daughter of, abbreviated\u00a0bt<\/em>.)\u00a0Abdullah\u00a0<\/em>in place of his or her birth father\u2019s name.[4]<\/a> Freeborn converts were given names like Mehmed, Ali, Ay\u015fe, and F\u00e2t\u0131ma, plain, solid names that evoked important Islamic figures and let their new bearers blend into the crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most male slaves and some female slaves received the same type of plain names. (Sobers-Khan 225-233) However, many female slaves received names that marked them as slaves. Yasmin <\/em>or Yasemin<\/em>, “jasmine,” was the archetypal female slave name, dating back to the beginning of the Islamic tradition of slavery, if not before. Other common slave names were similarly frivolous: Benef\u015fe, “violet”; Dudu, “parrot,” referring to pleasant chatter; Z\u00fcleyha, the Quranic name of Potiphar’s wife, who was considered a romantic heroine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the upper classes, intricate Persian and Arabic confections made an appearance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Canhabib, friend of the soul<\/em>
Zam\u00e2ne, thirsting, longing<\/em>
Mah\u0131devran, moon of fortune<\/em>
G\u00fclendam, whose body is as beautiful as a rose<\/em>
\u00c2b\u0131kevser, the waters of the river of Paradise<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

However, telling apart slave and freeborn women in aristocratic households is more complicated than picking out the women with lyrical names. These names appealed to the aristocracy, whose education turned them away from low, common Turkish and toward Arabic and Persian, the languages of religion, poetry, and learning. \u015eeyh Mehmed \u00c7elebi, an eminent late 15th<\/sup>-century dervish, named his three daughters \u015eehribanu, Cihanbaht, and Ruzbaht, all Persian creations worthy of a poet: Lady of the Sun, The World\u2019s Fortune, The Day\u2019s Fortune. (Yazar 2007) Among the daughters of the sultans are princesses with the Persian names Nil\u00fcfer, “water lily,” Mihrimah, “sun and moon,” and Mihriban, “kindly friend.” When such impeccably respectable women bore lyrical names, the question becomes, which<\/em> lyrical names were given to slaves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To resolve this question I went\nwoman by woman, tagging each as slave or free. Women with a patronymic other\nthan Abdullah were free by definition. So were women whose circumstances\nindicated that they were freeborn\u2014for example, a convert whose father and adult\nson were both local Greek Christians. Documents like manumissions and bills of\nsale clearly marked women as slaves. Freed slaves could also be detected in\nentries establishing charitable foundations (vakf<\/em>) for a person\u2019s heirs; a clump of b. and bt. Abdullahs among\nthe recipients indicated former slaves who were provided for alongside the\nfamily members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was left over was a collection\nof women who were clearly converts, but whose circumstances didn\u2019t indicate\nwhether they were freeborn or freed. I tagged these women as ambiguous, and\ncompared the number of freeborn, slave, and ambiguous women who bore each name.\n(My methods are explained in depth in Appendix 2.) The result was a list of\nnames divided into clearly free, clearly slave, and likely slave names, as well\nof a handful of ambiguous names that need further research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Types of Names<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The name pool was heavily Arabic\nand Persian, with a handful of Turkish names and name elements mixed in, but no\nother perceptible influences. Although the variety of name types defy easy\ncategorization, several groups stand out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arabic Religious Names<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A parent\u2019s first go-to was the name of a woman in Muhammad\u2019s family: F\u00e2t\u0131ma, his youngest and most beloved daughter; Ay\u015fe (Arabic Aisha<\/em>), his favorite wife; Emine (Ar. Amina<\/em>), his mother; Hatice (Ar. Khadija<\/em>), his first wife and the mother of his children. Those four names alone accounted for a quarter of the sample. F\u00e2t\u0131ma and Ay\u015fe vastly outstrip the third-place name, Emine, with 80, 79, and 48 instances, respectively. Other members of Muhammad\u2019s family are also represented, including his daughters \u00dcmm\u00fcgulsum (Ar. Umm Kulthum<\/em>) and Rukiye (Ar. Ruqayyah<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other types of religious names include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n