Ottoman Harem Concubines Had Rules More Brutal Than China’s

Sometime after dark on the 28th of January 1595, a boy walked into a small chamber inside the palace of Topkapi, believing he was there to be honored. He was a prince. He had been told there would be a circumcision feast, a ceremony, a blessing. The room he entered held four men who did not speak. They could not speak. Their tongues had been cut so that they could carry no rumor out of the rooms where they worked. They did their work with a length of silk cord rather than a blade because the law of the House of Osman forbade the spilling of royal blood. The boy was the eldest of 19 brothers and half-brothers. The youngest of them was 11 years old. By the time the sun rose, all 19 were dead, laid out in a row, and their father’s reign had been cleared of every rival in a single night.

The Venetian ambassador Marco Venier wrote home that the eldest had kissed the hand of the brother who was killing him and begged, “Let not my days be ended thus in this my tender age.” These were the rules, not an aberration, not the cruelty of one mad sultan, but the written law of the longest-ruling dynasty in the history of Islam, the family that held three continents for more than 600 years. And the women who bore those 19 boys, every one of them had entered the palace as slaves.

The question this story begins with is whether the rules that governed those women were more brutal than the ones China imposed on the concubines of its own emperors. We are going to measure that honestly. And the answer is not the simple one the comparison invites. But the deeper story is the one that waits at the end of these rules. Because the institution that strangled princes with silk and gathered slave girls for six centuries did not fade gently into history. It was abolished in an afternoon by five paragraphs of law with a single vote against. And the people it was built around—the princes, the daughters, the last of the slave women themselves—ended their lives in a rented apartment above a restaurant in Manhattan, in a hospital in a city torn by civil war, and in the mortuary of a Paris mosque, waiting 10 years for a grave.

To understand the rules, you have to understand how a girl arrived inside them, because almost none of them came willingly, and almost none of them were Turkish. The imperial harem ran on enslaved women, and for most of its history, those women were brought from the edges of the empire and beyond it. They came from the Caucasus above all—Circassians, Georgians, Abkhazians—alongside Slavs taken in raids across the Black Sea and Africans carried up through Egypt. In the 1860s, after the Russian Empire drove hundreds of thousands of Circassians from their mountains in a campaign of expulsion that killed a vast number of them, the slave markets of the Ottoman world filled with the daughters of refugee families. Some were sold by parents who could not feed them; some believed, not entirely without reason, that a palace was a better fate than a refugee camp. The trade in Circassian and Georgian slaves was formally banned by an imperial edict in 1854, issued under British and French pressure during the Crimean War. The ban lasted four years. In 1858, the Ottoman government quietly let it lapse. And after that, almost every girl who entered the Imperial Harem was Circassian.

A girl who passed through the slave gate of the palace did not remain who she had been. She was converted to Islam. She was given a new name, usually a Persian compound chosen for its beauty, a name meaning rosebud, or morning light, or the one who scatters flowers. She was taught Turkish and Arabic and the recitation of the Quran. She was taught embroidery and music and the elaborate etiquette of the court. And she was forbidden any contact with the family she had come from. She entered at the bottom of a ranked order as an acemi, a novice, and rose if she could to şakir, an apprentice, and then to gedikli, a personal attendant who served the Sultan’s own rooms, and then perhaps to the mistress of a department. This was not what European travelers imagined, a place of idleness and silk cushions. It was a salaried institution with a payroll. The women drew wages recorded in the palace registers, robust by merit and seniority, and ran the domestic machinery of the most powerful household on earth. And after roughly nine years of service, a woman who had not been chosen by the Sultan was customarily freed, given a dowry and a trousseau, and married to an official of the state, which meant the harem was not only a cage, but a pipeline, threading freed slave women into the families of the men who governed the empire.

For the small number of women who were chosen by the Sultan, a second ladder opened, and it climbed much higher. A woman who caught his eye became a gözde, literally “in the eye.” A woman he took to his bed became an “fortunate one.” A woman who bore him a child became a kadın, and a sultan was permitted four. Above all of these stood the haseki sultan, the chief consort, a rank that did not exist until one woman invented it for herself. Her name in the palace was Hürrem. Europe called her Roxelana. She was born around 1505, the daughter by the most credible account of an Orthodox priest in a town in what is now western Ukraine. And she was carried into slavery by Tatar raiders as a girl. By the older custom of the dynasty, a concubine could bear the Sultan only one son, and when that son came of age, she went with him to govern a distant province, never to return to the capital. Hürrem broke the rule and then broke it again. She bore Suleiman the Magnificent six children. She did not leave for the provinces, and in an act without precedent in living memory, the sultan freed her and married her—the first time in centuries that a ruling Ottoman had taken a former slave as his lawful wife. She died in her bed on the 15th of April 1558 of an illness no one named, and the sultan who had conquered from Belgrade to Baghdad was said to have aged a decade in his grief.

What Hürrem began, other women extended into something the historians would later call the “Sultanate of Women,” though that phrase flattens what was a more complicated reality. For roughly a century and a half, the mothers and chief consorts of the sultans wielded enormous power. Nurbanu, Safiye, Kösem, Turhan—the valide sultan, the mother of the reigning Sultan, sat at the head of the entire harem and often at the center of the empire’s politics, controlling appointments, brokering marriages, and directing the treasury of the imperial household. Beside her stood the kızlar ağası, the chief black eunuch, an enslaved African man who guarded the harem and who was frequently, by virtue of his nearness to power, among the most influential people in the empire.

The power in the harem was real. So was the violence that came with it. The violence had been written into law by the conqueror of Constantinople himself. In his code of governance, Mehmed II set down a clause that historians still translate with care: that whichever of his descendants came to the throne should be permitted, for the order of the world, to put his brothers to death, and that the majority of the religious scholars permitted it. This was not philosophy. Selim I killed his brothers when he took power in 1512, and it reached its full and terrible expression on that night in 1595 when Mehmed III cleared away 19 of them at once. The logic was the logic of a state that had no fixed law of succession. Any son of any sultan could inherit, which meant every brother was a rival and every rival a future civil war, and the dynasty chose to drown its wars in the cradle rather than on the battlefield.

After Mehmed III, the dynasty recoiled from what it had become. The mass executions stopped. They were replaced by something that the British historian who studied the palace most closely called more cruel in its way than the cord: confinement. They called it the kafes, the cage. Beginning in 1603, the brothers and sons who might once have been strangled were instead locked away in a suite of rooms within the harem, kept from the world, kept from women who could bear them heirs, kept from any education in how to govern, and kept there for as long as they lived or until the throne happened to fall to them. Men disappeared into the cage as boys and emerged as strangers to daylight. Suleiman II spent 39 years inside it before he was summoned to rule. And when the men came to bring him to the throne, he thought they had come to kill him. “If my death has been commanded,” he told them, “say so. Since my childhood, I have suffered 40 years of imprisonment.” The cage produced sultans who could not rule, and the empire that had once frightened Vienna began from the inside to hollow.

As for the women who fell out of favor, the palace had an old and quiet method of disposal. They were sewn into weighted sacks and dropped into the Bosphorus at the point below the Seraglio walls at night where the current was strong. The most famous death in the harem’s history was not a drowning but a strangling, and it was the death of one of the most powerful women the empire ever produced. Kösem Sultan had been valide three times over—mother to two sultans, grandmother to a third, and by the autumn of 1651, she had ruled in the name of others for the better part of a generation. Her rival was Turhan, the mother of the boy Sultan Mehmed IV, and the contest between the two women came to its end on the night of the 2nd of September. The Grand Vizier told the boy on the throne that the will of God required him to deliver his grandmother into the hands of justice, that a little mischief was better than a great one, and the child signed the warrant with a shaking hand. The chronicler Na’ima recorded what followed: Kösem fled through the harem and hid herself in a cupboard. They found her. They dragged her out, and a man cut down a curtain cord and strangled her with it—some say with the cord, some say with her own braided hair. The city of Istanbul mourned her for three days. She lies beside her husband to this day.

And then there is the sultan whose name became a byword for the harem’s horror, Ibrahim, whom history calls “the Mad.” He had spent his own years in the cage, and he came to the throne in a state of paranoia and appetite that the contemporary chronicler Dimitrie Cantemir described in language too vivid to repeat plainly. The single most repeated atrocity attributed to him is that he ordered 280 of the women of his harem sewn into sacks and drowned in the sea all at once after a rumor reached him that one of them had been intimate with a man from outside the palace. It is the kind of story that travels, and it should be flagged for what it is. Several serious historians reject the number as an invention, a tale that grew in the telling. What is documented is that the dynasty did drown disgraced women, that Ibrahim’s reign ended in his own deposition, and that on the 8th of August 1648, the sultan who had drowned women was himself strangled on the order of a religious ruling by the same silent method his ancestors had used on their brothers.

So, were these rules more brutal than China’s? The honest answer requires looking at what China actually did. And what it did was, in its worst single moments, arguably worse. The early emperors of the Ming dynasty practiced what was called shunzang, the killing of a dead emperor’s concubines so that they might follow him into death and serve him in the next world. When the founding Hongwu emperor died in 1398, at least 38 women were killed to accompany him into the tomb. When the Yongle emperor died in 1424, roughly 16 of his consorts hanged themselves with white silk. And there is a darker story still: that in 1421, after a scandal in his harem, the Yongle emperor ordered the execution by slow slicing of some 2,800 women. Though this account survives only in the testimony of a Korean concubine who lived through it and appears nowhere in the official Ming records, it too must be marked as contested rather than proven. Across five early Ming reigns, historians estimate that around 100 imperial concubines were put to death as grave companions. The practice was finally abolished by the Tianshun Emperor, who in his deathbed will of 1464 forbade it as uncivilized.

The later Qing emperors built a gentler and stranger machinery. Consorts were selected only from the families of the Eight Banners, ranked in eight grades from Empress down to second-class attendant, summoned to the emperor’s bed by the turning of a name tablet that a eunuch carried on a tray. Even the Qing had its drowning: in 1900, as foreign armies marched on Beijing, the Empress Dowager Cixi is said to have ordered a consort she despised thrown down a well in the Forbidden City.

Here is the fair verdict: Measured by the worst single act, China’s mass killings were larger than anything the Ottoman record can confirm. But measured by the system itself—by how long the cruelty was law, by how completely it was woven into the institution—the Ottoman harem has no real equal. China abolished its human sacrifices in 1464. The Ottoman Empire never abolished its harem at all. The slave women, the rankings, the eunuchs, the cage—in living memory, all of it survived intact into the 20th century. It did not end through reform or conscience. It ended only when the entire dynasty that owned it was destroyed root and branch in a single law.

The destruction did not arrive all at once. It began in 1909 when the paranoid old Sultan Abdulhamid II was deposed by the very officers who had once served him, and the great harem of his Yıldız Palace was emptied. An Irish war correspondent named Francis McCullagh watched it happen and wrote it down. He counted 31 carriages carrying the women, some between 15 and 50 years old, away from Yıldız. The new government then did something extraordinary. It sent telegrams to the Circassian villages of Anatolia, inviting families to come and reclaim the daughters they had sold or surrendered to the palace years before. They came down from the mountains in their old dress, and in a long hall in the Palace of Topkapı, the women were unveiled before a commission, and McCullagh recorded that daughters fell into the arms of fathers they had not seen in years. 213 women were freed that way and sent home to milk cows and work farms in the villages they had been taken from. Others, the older ones, learned that no one was coming for them and wept.

Then came the war that ended everything. The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in 1914 and lost it utterly. In 1918, with the empire defeated and Istanbul under Allied occupation, the throne passed to a man of 57 named Mehmed VI, called Vahideddin, who had spent most of his life in the shadow of confinement and who described his inheritance with bleak precision: “I did not sit on a feathered throne,” he said, “but upon the ashes of fire.” He signed the Treaty of Sèvres that would have carved his country into pieces. And in doing so, he handed the future to the general who refused to accept it: Mustafa Kemal, the man the world would come to know as Ataturk. By the autumn of 1922, Kemal had won his War of Independence, and the new national assembly in Ankara turned to deal with the sultan in occupied Istanbul. On the 1st of November 1922, it abolished the Sultanate. One of Kemal’s lieutenants, Ismet, put the warning plainly: if at any time a caliph took it into his head to interfere with the destiny of the country, they would not fail to cut his head off.

Vahideddin understood that the sentence had been passed. On the morning of the 17th of November 1922, the last sultan of the House of Osman gathered a retinue of 10, including his 10-year-old son, and did not announce his departure to anyone. He left through a small gate in the garden of the harem—the part of the palace where the women had lived—and stepped into a British military ambulance that carried him down to the pier. A launch took him out to a British battleship, the Malaya, riding at anchor in the strait. He refused to take the sacred relics of the Prophet with him, and he refused the great jewels of the treasury. The British admiral asked him where he wished to go. “The Sultan had no answer.” “Malta,” the admiral suggested. “Yes,” the Sultan said, “Malta.”

For the rest of his life, he insisted that this had not been a flight, but a hijra, a sacred migration, an imitation of the Prophet’s own escape from his enemies. He carried a revolver in his pocket for the four years that remained to him, afraid less of his enemies than of his own grieving supporters. The dynasty itself was abolished on the 3rd of March 1924. On that day, the Grand National Assembly passed Law Number 431, and its language was without mercy and without ambiguity. The first article declared the caliph deposed and the office of the caliphate abolished forever. The second article banished every male and female member of the Ottoman dynasty and their husbands from the territory of the Republic of Turkey for all time, extending the ban to any child who would ever be born to the women of the line. The third article gave them 10 days to be gone. The fourth article stripped them of their citizenship. The fifth ordered their property liquidated within a year. Only one deputy in the entire assembly voted against it.

The last caliph, Abdulmejid II, a painter and a cellist who had wanted nothing more than to be left alone with his art, protested when they came for him. “I am not a traitor,” he said. “How can they forcibly remove me from these lands that my ancestor, the Conqueror, conquered?” It changed nothing. Within hours, he was placed aboard the Orient Express, not at the main station, but at a small station outside the city to avoid any demonstration, with roughly £2,000 in his pocket and a one-way passport in his hand.

156 members of the family were expelled in those days. The princes were given as little as 24 hours. Britain refused to let them into Egypt. The king of Egypt refused them. Syria was closed to them by Ankara’s order. They scattered to Beirut and Nice and Paris and Alexandria. The wealthiest family of the Islamic world turned, in the space of a law, into stateless refugees. What happened to them in exile is the true subject of this story, and it is a catalog of slow endings. The last sultan went first. Vahideddin settled at last on the Italian Riviera at San Remo, and there he discovered that the fortune he had carried out of Istanbul was gone. Much of it was gambled away by an aide who turned out to have been on Ankara’s payroll all along, reporting on the Sultan’s every move. He sold his medals. He fell into debt to the doctors and tradesmen of the town. He died on the 16th of May 1926 at 65 years old of a blocked artery in his heart. And when they went to bury him, they could not. The local creditors had placed a legal lien on his coffin to recover the 60,000 lira he owed them. And the body of the last sultan of a 600-year empire lay seized the way a piece of furniture is seized against an unpaid bill. His daughter scraped together money. The king of Iraq, Faisal I, paid the remainder. Only then could the coffin travel: by train to Trieste, where a station master laid a black wreath on it that the family removed because it was not the custom of their faith; and then by ship to Beirut; and at last to Damascus, where he was buried on the 3rd of July 1926 in the middle of a city in armed revolt against its French occupiers. An Italian who watched the funeral party leave San Remo said it was a procession unworthy of a king.

The deaths went on, scattered across the world and across the decades. A grandson of Abdulhamid, a prince named Mehmed Abdulkerim, who had once been approached by Japanese agents to be installed as a puppet caliph in the deserts of western China, was found dead in a hotel room off Times Square on the 3rd of August 1935 in what was reported as a suicide. The last caliph, Abdulmejid, the painter, died in Paris on the 23rd of August 1944, the very day the Allied liberation reached the city, and then could not be buried at all. Turkey would not take his body. The war made other arrangements impossible. And so, the remains of the last caliph of Islam were kept in the mortuary of the Grand Mosque of Paris for 10 years until, at last, the king of Saudi Arabia gave permission. And in 1954, he was laid to rest in the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi in Medina, among the companions of the Prophet. His chief consort had died in Paris in 1945 and was buried in a Muslim cemetery in the suburbs. Vahideddin’s senior wife, Nazikeda, died in Cairo in 1941. His daughter, Dürrişehvar, who had married into the fabulously rich house of the Nizam of Hyderabad and become one of the most admired royal women in India, died in London in 2006 at the age of 92 and refused to be buried in the country that had exiled her family. She was laid to rest in England instead.

But the image that holds the whole story in a single frame belongs to a man who lived almost his entire life in the city of New York. His name was Ertuğrul Osman, and he was a grandson of Abdulhamid II. He had been sent to Vienna for his schooling at the age of 10 in 1922, and he was still a schoolboy there when the law of 1924 expelled his family and erased his citizenship in a country he could now never enter. He came to New York in 1939 and he stayed, and for 64 years he lived in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a walk-up building above a restaurant on Lexington Avenue on the East Side of Manhattan. He ran a small mining business. He paid his rent on time for 64 years. He kept at one point 12 dogs in that apartment and paid neighborhood children to walk them. He traveled for decades on a passport he had made for himself in the name of an Ottoman Empire that no longer existed, until the attacks of 2001 made such documents impossible, and he finally, reluctantly, accepted a Turkish passport in 2004.

When a Turkish official tracked him down in Vienna back in 1974 to tell him the exile was over and that he could apply for amnesty and come home, he had refused the word itself. “We do not need amnesty,” he said, “since we have not done anything wrong.” Late in his life, he told an American newspaper without bitterness, “I’m a very practical person. Democracy works well in Turkey.” He had become, by the time he died, the 43rd head of the House of Osman—the man who in another world would have been Sultan and Caliph, master of an empire spanning three continents. He died of kidney failure in Istanbul on the 23rd of September 2009 at the age of 97. They buried him in the city of his ancestors, his coffin draped in the imperial standard, in the tomb of his grandfather Abdulhamid. And the prime minister and the president of the republic that had exiled him both sent their condolences.

And there was Neslişah. She had been born in Istanbul on the 4th of February 1921, while the empire still technically stood and cannon were fired across the city to announce the birth of a princess of the blood. Her name was entered in the palace register; commemorative coins were struck in her honor. She was three years old when the law put her family on a train and out of the country forever. She grew up in Nice, married an Egyptian prince, and when her husband was made regent of Egypt in 1952, she became for a single year the first lady of that country until a revolution swept the Egyptian monarchy away too, as if the women of this family were fated to watch every throne they touched collapse beneath them. She was arrested, exiled again, and at last returned quietly to Istanbul, where she died at her villa on the Bosphorus on the 2nd of April 2012 at the age of 91. She was the last living human being who had been born inside the Ottoman dynasty while it still ruled. When she went, that world went with her.

The bans were lifted in stages long after they had done their work. The women of the dynasty were allowed to return to Turkey in 1952. The men were not permitted back until 1974. Half a century of exile—a ban that was finally relaxed, as one observer dryly noted, only after most of the people who remembered how the Ottoman court had actually worked were safely dead. By then, the younger generations had been born and raised abroad, and most did not come back. The headship of the house passed down a chain of old men dying far from home: to a prince who spent 34 years working in the foreign languages department of the New York Public Library and died in New York at 92; to a prince who refused to leave Damascus even after the ban was lifted and had to be evacuated from the Syrian civil war by order of the Turkish president in 2017, dying in a Damascus hospital at 90.

Today, the head of the House of Osman is a man named Şehzade Harun Osman Osmanoğlu. He was born in Damascus on the 22nd of January 1932, which makes him 94 years old, and he is the son of that prince who was found dead in the hotel room near Times Square. He has lived in Istanbul since the ban was lifted. He has nine grandchildren. Roughly two dozen princes of the line survive, and a similar number of princesses, scattered between Istanbul and London and New York and the cities of the Middle East. Not one of them claims the throne.

As for the women, the whole machine had been built around—the slave girls gathered from the Caucasus and the steppe and the markets of Egypt for 600 years—they walked into the modern Turkish Republic and became invisible. Some had gone home to their villages in 1909. Some, like the last consorts of the last sultans, were allowed to stay in Istanbul when the dynasty was expelled because the law of 1924 banished the family of Osman, but said nothing about the slaves who had served it. And so, a mother could remain even as her royal children were forced onto the trains. They lived out long, quiet, ordinary lives in a country that had no place left for what they had been. Two of them—two of the last women ever to have entered the bed of a reigning Ottoman sultan—lived on into the modern world almost to its end. They both died in June of 1992, the year after the Soviet Union dissolved, the year the world was busy being born into its present shape. The last woman ever to have lain with a sultan of the House of Osman died on the 23rd of June 1992. The dynasty had not ended on the 3rd of March 1924. Whatever the law said, it had ended slowly, one funeral at a time, across the whole of the 20th century.

And on the 17th of July 2024, 100 years almost to the season after the law that was meant to erase them forever, a child was born in Istanbul and given the old imperial names of his fathers, a great-grandson of the current head of the house, carrying into a new century the name of a family the republic had tried and failed to make disappear. This is the weight of history—a lingering echo of a world that existed not in the dim mists of antiquity, but in the lifetimes of our grandparents and parents. It is a story of how empires rise on the backs of the unseen, and how they fall, leaving behind not just grand narratives, but individual lives scattered like seeds in the wind, trying to take root in the soil of a world that no longer remembers their names, yet still feels the tremors of their collapse.

The Ottoman harem was more than a collection of rooms; it was a microcosm of a social and political order that prioritized the survival of a singular lineage above all else. When we scrutinize the brutal mechanisms of power—the silk cords, the cages, the drownings—we must also look at the resilience of the human beings who were caught within these gears. Some found ways to wield influence that altered the course of history, while others were merely victims of the relentless demands of a system that viewed them as property. The transition from such an absolute, exclusionary power to the anonymity of the modern era is perhaps the most profound part of their collective story.

Consider the contrast: a princess born to cannon fire, commemorative coins, and royal registers in 1921, who would eventually see the entire architecture of her existence dismantled. She spent her life in exile, navigating the shifting tides of politics in Egypt and Europe, only to return to the Bosphorus as a witness to a world that was gone. She was the final bridge between the absolute monarchy and the modern republic, carrying in her own life the memory of the “Harem” not as a place of exotic fantasy, but as the lived reality of a family that was, in its own way, as trapped as the people it ruled.

When we talk about the “brutality” of these systems, we often focus on the physical violence. But there is another kind of cruelty: the erasure of identity. The women who entered the harem lost their names, their families, their language, and their past. They were reconstructed as tools of the state. Even in their freedom, many struggled to find a place in a world that had moved beyond the structures that defined them. The fact that the last of these women lived until 1992 brings the reality of the harem startlingly close to the present. It forces us to confront the fact that the “medieval” practices of the Ottoman dynasty were part of the same historical fabric that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of our modern, interconnected world.

The exile of the House of Osman was a wholesale transformation of a dynasty into a diaspora of ghosts. They were stripped of titles, property, and citizenship, forced to navigate the world as “stateless” entities. This loss of status was profound. Imagine, for a moment, the shift from being a member of a ruling house that commanded the respect and fear of global powers to living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, or struggling to find a burial place because of unpaid debts. This is the profound irony of power: it is brittle, and when it breaks, those who once held it are often the least equipped to survive the transition to the ordinary.

Yet, there is a stubbornness in history. Despite the comprehensive effort by the Republic of Turkey to sanitize the past and erase the memory of the Ottoman dynasty, the individuals remained. They moved through the world, often in silence, working as librarians, as mining business owners, as painters, and as parents. They integrated into their new societies, sometimes with grace, sometimes with bitterness, but always with the knowledge of what they once were. The birth of a new heir in 2024 is the final irony—a testament to the fact that you can abolish an institution, strip a family of its power, and erase their political footprint, but you cannot entirely erase the bloodline. The name persists, a quiet reminder that the past is never truly dead; it is merely waiting for someone to tell its story.

Ultimately, the story of the Ottoman dynasty and its harem is a cautionary tale about the nature of power. Power that is built on the systematic subjugation of others—whether it be through the confinement of brothers in a cage or the enslavement of women—is power that carries the seeds of its own destruction. The “order of the world” that Mehmed II sought to secure with the law of fratricide was the very thing that eventually hollowed out the empire and made it vulnerable to both internal decay and external change. The harem, as the heart of this system, became the symbol of everything that needed to be dismantled for the new Turkey to be born.

Looking back, we can see that the abolition of the Sultanate and the Caliphate was not just a political act; it was a psychological one. It was a nation’s attempt to sever its ties with a traumatic, exclusionary past and embrace a different future. The tragedy is that this transition was so total, so unforgiving, that it rendered the human beings caught in the middle as collateral damage. The story of their exile, their struggles for survival, and their slow disappearance is the human cost of that great national shift. It is a story that, when told fully, challenges us to see these historical figures not just as symbols of a “barbaric” past, but as people who lived through the ultimate collapse of their world, and who, in their own ways, tried to find meaning in the ashes of their former lives.

We must also reflect on the role of the “unseen.” Throughout the 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, it was the labor and the lives of the enslaved women, the eunuchs, and the servants that kept the palace running. When the history books are written, they often focus on the sultans, the viziers, and the wars. But the true story of the harem lies in the thousands of women who were brought there, who navigated its complex hierarchies, and whose lives were defined by the whims of a system they did not create. Their story is a crucial, often neglected part of this history. When we ask which rules were more brutal, we aren’t just comparing two imperial systems; we are asking for an account of the suffering that sustained them. And in the final analysis, it is the silent, quiet, and often erased lives of the individuals within the harem that leave the most haunting impression.

The journey from the peak of absolute power to the streets of Manhattan or the hospitals of Damascus is a path that few, if any, dynasties have traveled in such a compressed timeframe. It is a story that spans centuries and yet feels remarkably immediate. It reminds us that history is not a static set of dates and battles, but a living, breathing continuity of human experience that is always being shaped by the decisions of those in power, and the endurance of those who are not. The final descendant of the House of Osman, now living in Istanbul, is a living relic of this history—a reminder that we are all, in some way, the product of the worlds that came before us, and that the echoes of the past will continue to resonate long after the institutions that birthed them have crumbled into dust.