The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gulnus Sultan

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire remained the grandest and most powerful of Middle Eastern empires. One hitherto overlooked aspect of the Empire's remarkable cultural legacy was the role of powerful women - often the head of the harem, or wives or mothers of sultans. These educated and discerning patrons left a great array of buildings across the Ottoman lands: opulent, lavish and powerful palaces and mausoleums, but also essential works for ordinary citizens, such as bridges and waterworks. Muzaffer OEzgule here uses new primary scholarship and archaeological evidence to reveal the stories of these Imperial builders. Gulnu Sultan for example, the favourite of the imperial harem under Mehmed IV and mother to his sons, was exceptionally pictured on horseback, travelled widely across the Middle East and Balkans, and commissioned architectural projects around the Empire. Her buildings were personal projects designed to showcase Ottoman power and they were built from Constantinople to Mecca, from modern-day Ukraine to Algeria. OEzgule seeks to re-establish the importance of some of these buildings, since lost, and traces the history of those that remain. The Women Who Built the Ottoman World is a valuable contribution to the architectural history of the Ottoman Empire, and to the growing history of the women within it.

Reviews

"The Women Who Built the Ottoman World is a welcome addition to scholarly literature on gender and royal patronage in the Ottoman sphere, 17th- and 18th-century Ottoman architecture, and, above all, the complex interactions between the imperial harem and a nacent, architecturally determined Ottoman public sphere. In addition to telling the fascinating story of the hitherto overlooked Gln Sultan (1642-1715)--royal favorite of the Sultan Mehmet IV (1648-87) and mother of the Sultans Mustafa II (1695-1703) and Amhed III (1703-30)--the book also convincingly proposes an alternative back story to the hugely important, 18th-century shift in Ottoman architectural taste... This book is an absorbing read as well as an important addition to scholarship on this transformative period of Ottoman history. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."

Author Bio

Muzaffer OEzgule is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at Gaziantep University, Turkey, and was the Barakat Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford from 2014 to 2015. He gained his PhD in Architectural History at Istanbul Technical University in 2013.