{"id":2166,"date":"2018-11-02T11:49:54","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T16:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.issendai.com\/16thcenturyistanbul\/?page_id=2166"},"modified":"2024-08-29T20:54:29","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T01:54:29","slug":"the-ladies-of-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.issendai.com\/16thcenturyistanbul\/turkish-names\/muslim-names\/the-ladies-of-istanbul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ladies of Istanbul"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I entered the original version of this paper in the novice division in 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<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The pool of Muslim female names was further divided into names borne by free women and names borne by current or former slaves.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 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 court records. These volumes are the richest primary sources available for the lives of ordinary people in the Ottoman empire. They contain everything: debt collections, real estate sales, inventories of deceased people\u2019s households, records of the manumission of faithful slaves and the hunt for escaped slaves, accusations of drunkenness, petty theft, and immoral hijinks, ugly divorces, and even the occasional murder mystery. And all of it is awash in names.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/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 (Appendix 1<\/a>). Then, by supplementing cues in the records with frequency analysis (Appendix 2), 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<\/h3>\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, bin<\/em> (son of, abbreviated b<\/em>.) or bint<\/em> (daughter of, abbreviated bt<\/em>.) Abdullah <\/em>in place of his or her birth father\u2019s name.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 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. Most male slaves and a few female slaves received the same type of plain names.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The rest of the slaves, well\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canhabib, soul\u2019s beloved<\/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\n\n\n

\u2026Their owners got fancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slave names are exotic and unquestionably Middle Eastern, without the 20th<\/sup>-century familiarity of common 16th<\/sup>-century names like Ay\u015fe (Ar. Aisha<\/em>), F\u00e2t\u0131ma, and Hatice (Ar. Khadija<\/em>). They\u2019re catnip to SCAdians. Many people don\u2019t care about the details, and will happily pick a pretty name regardless of the period connotations; but for the purists, and for the completist in my soul, I worked to divide the results of my data collection into slave and free names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, picking slave-specific names out of the list wasn\u2019t as easy as tagging every name of a lyrical bent. \u015eeyh Mehmed \u00c7elebi, an eminent late 15th<\/sup>-century dervish, named his three daughters \u015eehribanu, Cihanbaht, and Ruzbaht, all Persian confections worthy of a poet: Lady of the Sun, The World\u2019s Fortune, The Day\u2019s Fortune.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 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 freeborn 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 compared\nthe number of freeborn, slave, and ambiguous women who bore each name. The\nresult was a list of names divided into clearly free, clearly slave, and likely\nslave names, as well as a handful of ambiguous names that need further\nresearch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Types of Names<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The name pool was heavily Arabic and Persian, with a handful of Turkish names and name elements mixed in, but no other perceptible influences.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Although the variety of name types defy easy categorization, several groups stand out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arabic Religious Names<\/h4>\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\ninclude:<\/p>\n\n\n\n