How Circassian Families Sold Their Own Daughters Into Ottoman Harems

In the spring of 1854, a Circassian girl named Shem Seagull stood in a slave dealer’s house in Istanbul, waiting to be sold for the second time in her life. She was perhaps seventeen. She had been taken from the Caucasus, carried south across the water, and handed to a dealer named Delhi Memed. By the time her story reached an Ottoman court, she had been assaulted by the man who owned her, made pregnant, secretly resold to hide the evidence, and forced to swallow medicine meant to end the pregnancy. We know her name today only because she testified. Her words were written down, filed, and forgotten in an archive in Cairo for over a hundred years.

And here is the part nobody tells you. While Shem Seagull was being passed from dealer to dealer like a piece of property, another Circassian girl, taken the same way from the same mountains, was about to become the most powerful woman in an empire of forty million people. Same trade, same coastline, same word in the ledger: slave. Two completely different fates.

To understand how a family could send a daughter into that, and how some of those daughters ended up ruling from behind the throne, you have to go back to a mountain range most people have never heard of: Circassia, the northwestern Caucasus on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Today, it is part of southern Russia near Sochi. For most of recorded history, it was something else entirely. It was the homeland of the Adyghe people, whom the rest of the world called Circassians. And we need to be honest about what their society looked like, because the comfortable version of this story does not survive contact with the facts.

Circassian society was built in layers. At the top sat the princes, a class of warrior nobles. Below them were free commoners who farmed and fought, and at the bottom were the unfree—serfs who owed labor to a lord—and below even them, household slaves, mostly women who owned nothing and could be given away. This was not something the Russians invented, and it was not something the Ottomans invented. The Circassians had their own slave system governed by their own ancient customary law centuries before any of the outside powers arrived. That detail matters, and it is the hinge on which the whole story turns.

For at least four hundred years, a thin stream of slaves had flowed out of these mountains across the Black Sea toward the great markets of the south. Circassian princes paid tribute in human beings to the Crimean Khanate, and through Crimea to the Ottoman Sultan himself. When Sultan Ahmed III took the throne in 1703, he is said to have received a gift of one hundred Circassian girls.

Now, here is where you have to hold two ideas at once, because the audience that gets this wrong gets the whole story wrong. For a poor family, sending a daughter south could be a death sentence dressed up as a transaction. But for a noble family, it could be something closer to ambition. Circassians had an old custom called atalik, where elite children were sent away to be raised in another household entirely to be educated, polished, and connected. To some of these families, placing a daughter in a wealthy Ottoman household—even the Sultan’s—was not abandonment. It was an investment, a bet that she would rise and that her rise would lift the whole family with her. Because the unspoken truth of the Ottoman court was this: the most powerful women in the empire had almost all started as slaves.

That was not an accident. That was the system working exactly as intended. And to see why, you have to step inside the one place in the empire that almost no man was ever allowed to enter. The word “harem” has been so mangled by movies and cheap paintings that most people picture something that never existed. So, forget all of it. Strip it back. The imperial harem was, first and last, an institution, a training academy, a household, a power center, and yes, a place of enslavement all at once. It was the private domestic world of the Sultan, run almost entirely by women, sealed off from the outside, and guarded by eunuchs who were themselves enslaved.

A girl arriving here from the Caucasus did not walk into luxury. She walked into a hierarchy as rigid as any army. She arrived as a novice. She was converted to Islam. She was given a new name—almost always something delicate and Persian: Behzad, which means “feast of the world”; Perestu, the “swallow”; Tir-i-Mujgan, “fresh as morning eyelashes.” Her old name, her old self, the mountains she came from—all of it was meant to dissolve.

Then the training began: Turkish court etiquette, music, embroidery, how to move, how to speak, how to serve. Most of these women would spend years in this system and then be married off to officials and officers loyal to the palace, leaving with a dowry and their freedom. That was the ordinary path, and it was still a life that had been taken and rebuilt without her consent. But a few, a very few, were noticed. There was a ladder, and every rung had a name. A slave was a cariye. If the Sultan noticed her, she became gözde, “the one in his gaze.” If he favored her, ikbal. If she bore him a child, she could become kadın, a consort.

And at the very top of that ladder stood a title that made a former slave the single most powerful woman in the Ottoman Empire: Valide Sultan, the mother of the reigning Sultan. Think about what that actually meant. A girl could be bought in a dealer’s house in Istanbul, stripped of her name, and twenty years later be issuing orders that governors obeyed, controlling the imperial treasury’s charitable foundations, and deciding who got close to the throne.

Under Islamic law, the moment she bore the Sultan a son, she could never be sold again, and she would be freed upon her master’s death. The child of a slave could become a Sultan, and the slave who bore him could rule beside him. This is the thing that made the whole system so difficult for outsiders to attack. When a British diplomat in the 1850s wanted to condemn the Circassian slave trade, he ran into an awkward fact. The wives of the Pashas he was negotiating with, and the mother of the Sultan he was petitioning, had all entered the empire exactly this way. You cannot easily call a system “pure barbarism” when the Empress Dowager is a product of it.

But—and this is the part the romantics always skip—that golden ladder was real for almost no one. For every Circassian girl who became a Valide Sultan, there were tens of thousands who never saw the inside of a palace. They ended up as domestic servants in ordinary households, as field laborers on Circassian-owned farms in Anatolia, or as concubines to men who were not Sultans and answered to no one. The famous ones are famous precisely because they were the exception. And the trade did not run on exceptions; it ran on volume.

There is one more thing we have to clear away before we go on, because it sits underneath this entire trade like a rotten foundation. You have probably heard somewhere that Circassian women were considered the most beautiful in the world. That idea was everywhere in 19th-century Europe. It filled paintings, travel books, and even the marketing of circus sideshows in America. But that reputation was not a fact about a people. It was a sales pitch. Slave dealers needed to justify the highest market price, and western audiences wanted an exotic fantasy to consume. Together, they manufactured a myth, and that myth put a target on the back of every Circassian girl alive. The “Circassian beauty” was not an honor paid to these women; it was the advertising copy written by the men who sold them.

Meanwhile, far to the north in the mountains those girls came from, something was about to happen that would turn a thin stream of human beings into a flood. And it would change the entire character of this story from one of ambition to one of pure desperation.

For most of the 1800s, the Russian Empire had been grinding its way into the Caucasus, year after year, war after war. The Circassians fought them in the mountains for decades. And then, in the early 1860s, the Russian command made a decision that went beyond conquest: they decided the Circassians would not be ruled; they would be removed. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II signed off on a policy of clearing the Western Caucasus of its native people—not defeating them, but emptying the land of them.

The campaign was carried out by a general named Yevdokimov, and it was brutal in a way that is hard to put into a single sentence. Villages were burned, crops destroyed before winter, and populations driven down out of the highlands toward the coast where ships were waiting. On the 21st of May, 1864, at a place called Kbaada in the mountains above what is now the resort city of Sochi, the Russian army held a victory parade to mark the end of Circassian resistance. Today, that date is mourned every year by Circassians around the world as the day their nation was destroyed.

The numbers are contested, and we should be honest about that, because they carry political weight to this day. Russian officials of the time recorded more than 400,000 killed, nearly half a million expelled, and only 80,000 left in the homeland. Independent historians put the total dead from war, massacre, starvation, and the diseases that swept the refugee camps somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million. By the highest estimates, 90 to 97 percent of an entire people were wiped from their own land. Let that sit for a second, because we do not say words like that lightly.

The survivors were funneled onto boats and dumped at Ottoman ports: Trabzon, Samsun, Sinop. They arrived sick, starving, and stripped of everything. The Ottoman authorities tried to manage the disaster through a refugee commission, scattering the new arrivals across Anatolia, the Balkans, and later the deserts of the Levant, in towns like Amman that Circassians helped rebuild from ruins. And it was here in these camps, on these docks, that the old story curdled into something far darker.

Because now you had hundreds of thousands of destitute families with no land, no money, no future, and in many cases, no food. And the same trade routes that had once carried a noble’s daughter toward ambition were still open. Russian officers recorded Circassian refugees being forced to sell their cattle, their belongings, and—in the cruellest accounts—one in thirty of their own people, just to pay for the passage that was killing them.

This is the moment the phrase “Circassian families sold their daughters” stops being a slur and becomes, for too many families, a literal description of a choice made at the absolute bottom of human desperation. Not ambition, not custom: a father looking at a daughter he could not feed, and a dealer offering money that might keep the rest of the children alive through the winter.

After 1854, historians tell us, almost every concubine in the Ottoman harem was Circassian—not because Circassians were somehow chosen, but because a genocide had just flooded the market with Circassian children who had no one left to protect them. The public slave market in Istanbul had already been shut down in 1847, mostly to keep the trade out of sight of Western diplomats. So the sales moved indoors into the private houses of dealers in districts like Tophane. A top-tier girl, young, trained, and considered beautiful, could be sold for the equivalent of several hundred pounds sterling—an enormous sum—while the system that produced her ran on the bodies of the poor.

And the Ottoman state, the supposed protector of these refugees, knew all of it. We know they knew because they kept the receipts. If the idea of a great empire keeping paperwork on the trafficking of children sounds familiar, it should. That records reveal is that the law against this trade and the practice of this trade ran side by side for fifty years, and the people signing the bans were often the same people buying the girls.

On paper, the Ottoman Empire tried to stop this. In October of 1854, under heavy pressure from Britain and France during the Crimean War, Sultan Abdulmecid I issued a formal ban on the Circassian and Georgian slave trade. Governors were ordered to free Caucasian children found in dealers’ hands. It looked like progress. It was theater. Within two years, the empire’s own chief religious authority issued a ruling that the ban did not actually violate religious law because—and follow this carefully—it banned only the trade, not slavery itself. The institution stayed perfectly legal.

By the end of 1858, the governor of Trabzon was telling the British consul that the whole thing had only ever been a wartime measure, and new tax rules were quietly putting the Circassian trade back in business. So the trade did not stop; it modernized. By the 1870s, British observers were reporting Circassian girls being shipped from Trabzon and Samsun to the capital on regular passenger steamships, some of them owned by European companies. The genocide had created the supply; the market simply industrialized the delivery.

And here is the document that should end any argument about whether the Ottoman elite knew what they were doing. On the 15th of March, 1908, more than half a century after the so-called ban, an Ottoman officer named Çerkes Osman Nuri formally presented fourteen Circassian girls to Sultan Abdul Hamid II. And the paperwork survives. The girls’ fathers and guardians signed statements confirming the girls had never served in any other palace. Consent forms for the delivery of fourteen girls to the Sultan in the 20th century. Read that again. The trade everyone insists ended in some misty Ottoman past was still operating with state paperwork when the Wright brothers were already flying.

So why didn’t they stop it? They had the power. They had the pressure from Europe. They had fifty years. The answer is the most uncomfortable part of this entire story: they didn’t stop it because the people who would have had to vote to end it were, in many cases, the people who owned the slaves.

When the Ottoman Parliament finally got the chance in 1909 to abolish slavery outright after a revolution had supposedly swept reformers into power, they looked at it and they refused. They passed a few narrow measures aimed at the African trade. The harem and the elite households built on Caucasian slavery were left untouched. The reformers reformed everything except the thing closest to their own homes. Slavery would not actually be outlawed in this land until 1933, by a Turkish Republic that the Ottoman dynasty no longer ruled. The empire that built its court on enslaved women never once passed a law abolishing slavery. It simply ran out of time.

But before it ran out of time, that same brutal system lifted a handful of those women to the very top. And their stories are where the tragedy becomes almost unbearable, because they are proof of everything that was possible and everything that was stolen.

Start with Bezmiâlem. She entered the system as a slave girl of Circassian or Georgian origin—the sources disagree. She began at the very bottom, reportedly as a bath attendant in a noblewoman’s household. She was noticed. She was given to Sultan Mahmud II, and she bore him a son who would become Sultan Abdulmecid, which made Bezmiâlem the Valide Sultan, the mother of the empire. What she did with that power is the part that lasts. She built a hospital in Istanbul for the poor, regardless of their faith, that still treats patients today under a version of her name. She funded a mosque on the Bosphorus that tourists photograph every single day, most of them with no idea it was paid for by a woman who arrived in the city as somebody’s property—a girl who was bought, who ended up healing a city.

Then there is Pertevniyal, a Circassian woman of the Shapsug branch, originally named Besime. She, too, became a consort of Mahmud II and the mother of Sultan Abdulaziz. As Valide Sultan, she was a political force, and she left her own mosque standing in the Aksaray district of Istanbul—another monument hiding another life that began in captivity.

But the story that ties this whole thing into a single, devastating knot belongs to two women connected to one Sultan: Abdul Hamid II, the last Sultan to truly rule the empire with absolute power. His birth mother was a Circassian woman named Tirimüjgan. She was of the Shapsug tribe. The palace records even name her parents, Bekhan Bey and Almaş Hanım—a small detail that quietly insists she was a real person from a real family, not a fantasy. She became a consort of Sultan Abdulmecid, and she gave birth to the boy who would one day rule. And then tuberculosis took her when her son was only ten years old. A Circassian girl carried out of the mountains who lived just long enough to give the empire its last great Sultan, and then was gone before he was old enough to remember her face.

The boy was not abandoned. He was raised by another of his father’s wives, and she is the one who closes this circle. Her name was Rahime Perestu, “the swallow,” and she was Circassian of the Ubykh tribe. Now, that one word—Ubykh—carries the entire weight of this video, because the Ubykh were the tribe hit hardest by the 1864 expulsion. Almost the entire Ubykh nation was driven out of the Caucasus. Their language is now extinct; the last fluent speaker on Earth died in 1992. The Ubykh, as a people in their homeland, effectively ceased to exist. And it was a daughter of that vanishing people who raised the most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire, and who became, in 1876, the last Valide Sultan in Ottoman history.

She had no children of her own. Abdul Hamid gave her the title anyway, out of love for the woman who had mothered him. His own daughter later described her with aching specificity: translucent white skin, blue eyes, golden hair, a voice like music. When Perestu died in 1904, the office of Valide Sultan—an institution that had crowned former slaves as the mothers of emperors for centuries—died with her. The last woman to hold it came from a people who were themselves being erased from the earth. Power and annihilation sitting in the same person. That is the Circassian story in the Ottoman court. And there has never been a cleaner symbol of it than a swallow with no homeland left to fly back to.

So what happened to all of them in the end? Not just the famous few, but the thousands. When the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the Caliphate on the 3rd of March, 1924, and expelled the entire Ottoman dynasty from the country, the Imperial Harem simply ceased to exist. Overnight, the institution that had defined these women’s lives was gone. For the royal women, exile. For the enslaved women who had served them, something more complicated.

Recent research into this exact question has uncovered the answer, and it is quietly heartbreaking. Many of these former harem women had no family left to return to. Their families had been scattered or killed in 1864. They had been taken as children. They had no village, no parents, no marriage prospects, and now, no palace. So the new republic placed some of them where it placed the destitute and the forgotten: in the Darülaceze, the state poorhouse in Istanbul. Women who had spent their lives inside the most rarified household on Earth ended it in an almshouse because the world that had taken them had also taken away every other place they might have belonged.

Government records even note enslaved servants being expelled from the palaces in 1925 and reassigned as workers in government offices. Two eunuchs thrown out of Yildiz Palace were reportedly still living in a shack on the edge of Istanbul as late as 1952, decades after the empire that enslaved them had vanished. That is the real ending for most of them. Not a throne, not a mosque with their name on it, but a quiet, displaced old age in a country that had moved on.

But the people they came from did not vanish entirely. Today, there are roughly five million Circassians in the world. Only around three-quarters of a million still live in the historical homeland in southern Russia. The rest—four and a half million people—are the descendants of the deported, scattered across the globe. The largest community by far is in Turkey, the very country the Ottoman Empire became, where estimates run to two or three million people of Circassian descent. There are well over one hundred thousand in Jordan, where Circassians have served in the Royal Guard for generations, the descendants of refugees who guard a king to this day. There are communities in Syria, scattered again by a newer war. There are a few thousand in Israel in two villages where the Adyghe language is still taught to children. And there are Circassians in Germany and in the United States. If you have a Circassian surname or a grandmother who spoke a language no one around her understood, there is a real chance this story runs through your own family.

Every year on the 21st of May, they gather. The date of that victory parade in 1864 is now a global day of mourning. And slowly, the world has started to listen. Georgia recognized the events of 1864 as genocide in 2011. And in January of 2025, the Ukrainian Parliament did the same, voting 232 to nothing.

There is one more thing this audience should sit with before we close. That hospital Bezmiâlem founded is still open. Those mosques still stand. The buildings that the enslaved Circassian Valides left behind are some of the most photographed monuments in modern Istanbul. Millions of people walk past them every year, and almost none of them know that they were built by women who arrived in that city as merchandise, taken from a homeland that was being wiped off the map at the very moment they were rising to the top of the empire that bought them. History remembered the monuments. It forgot the women.

This story exists to put the women back. We started this story with a girl named Shem Seagull standing in a dealer’s house, sold for the second time. Her words were destined to sit unread in an archive for a century. She never rose. She never got a mosque or a hospital or a title. She got a court transcript, filed and forgotten. But because one clerk wrote her testimony down, we know her name today, and the names of the dealers who hurt her, when we do not know the names of the kings who let it happen. The Valide Sultans got the monuments. Shem Seagull got the truth. And in the end, the truth is the only thing that outlived the empire. The Ottoman dynasty that presided over all of this was eventually exiled and scattered to the four corners of the earth, stripped of everything they owned in a single morning. If you want to know what happened to the men who sat on that throne, where their descendants ended up, and how a family that ruled for 623 years was reduced to ordinary citizens in foreign countries, the history of those who claimed to be masters of the world remains a testament to the fragility of power and the endurance of those who were trampled beneath it.

The fall of the Ottoman dynasty serves as a stark reminder that time eventually claims all empires, regardless of how much treasure they hoard or how many lives they command. The palaces that once hummed with the whispers of concubines and the intrigue of powerful mothers are now cold, silent museums or empty shells. The systems of slavery, which were defended as eternal, vanished into the dust of the 20th century, replaced by the modern state—a state built upon the very people who had once been categorized as property.

When we look at the history of the Caucasus, we are not just looking at a regional conflict; we are looking at the destruction of a culture that had existed in those mountains since time immemorial. The Ubykh language, mentioned earlier, is a haunting example of what was lost. When a language dies, it takes with it a unique way of understanding the world, a specific set of metaphors, stories, and connections to the divine that cannot be replicated. The fact that a daughter of the Ubykh people, Rahime Perestu, became the last Valide Sultan provides a sharp, ironic contrast: she was the pinnacle of an imperial system that was, in part, fueled by the destruction of her own people.

It is vital to reflect on why these histories remain so buried. For decades, the narrative of the Ottoman Empire was controlled by those who wished to emphasize its grandeur, its architecture, and its military prowess. The domestic reality—the human cost paid by the millions of people who fed the machine of the imperial household—was pushed to the periphery. By bringing these stories to the forefront, we begin to dismantle the veneer of “glory” and replace it with a more honest, if more painful, depiction of the past.

The descendants of these displaced Circassians continue to preserve their identity despite centuries of distance from their ancestral peaks. This survival is an act of resistance. Whether in the Jordanian Royal Guard, the villages in the Levant, or the diaspora communities across the West, the memory of 1864 lives on. It is a memory that refuses to be erased, even when the power that caused the pain has long since fallen.

As we conclude this reflection, let us remember that the history of any nation is not just written in the decrees of Sultans or the maps of generals, but in the lives of the millions of individuals whose names were never recorded in a golden ledger, but whose experiences defined the reality of their time. From the bath attendants to the mothers of Emperors, from the soldiers to the refugees, these were all real people who lived, breathed, suffered, and hoped.

The story of the Circassian women in the Ottoman court is not just a tale of the past; it is a lens through which we can view the mechanisms of power in our own world today. When we see buildings and monuments, we should ask: who built them? When we look at history books, we should ask: whose story is being told, and whose has been discarded? In answering these questions, we gain a clearer understanding of the humanity that binds us all—the same humanity that was tested, broken, and ultimately resurrected in the testimonies of those who refused to be forgotten. The truth is indeed the only thing that outlives the empire, and it is our collective duty to ensure that the truth continues to be told, for as long as there is someone left to listen.