Secrets of the sultan’s palace where concubines and eunuchs lived

Istanbul (CNN) — Some nations and empires declare their magnificence with monumental public displays: mighty castles and fortresses which ring across the skyline in loud exclamations of stone or brick.

Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, seat of the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries, is a little different.

Despite the opulence of the 15th-century Imperial Gate that marks its entrance, the palace is, in fact, a little hard to find.

This is in no small part due to the sheer number of UNESCO World Heritage sites spread across the wide public squares of Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s power nucleus since the Byzantine era.

Tourists line the cobblestone streets, dwarfed by the neighborhood’s grand scale as they make their way in and out of big-hitter landmarks such as the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern.

However, all these resplendent sites occupy just a fraction of the footprint of Topkapi Palace’s sprawling 700,000-square-meter labyrinth, hidden on all sides by a five-kilometer walled perimeter up to 12 meters in height.

This was imperial power asserting itself through an architectural display of hierarchy and inaccessibility.

At its 17th-century peak, the Ottoman empire stretched across three continents, from Vienna to Algiers to Mecca.

Today, Topkapi is considered one of the world’s greatest surviving palaces, alongside other regal estates such as France’s Palace of Versailles and China’s Forbidden City.

The palace was its “beating heart,” says Caroline Finkel, author of “Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923.” “All the intrigue” and “a lot of the action” took place within these walls.

At the edge of Europe

Seraglio Point, a commanding promontory overlooking the waters where the Bosphorus Strait, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara converge, is, by any measure, a prime piece of real estate.

Strategically positioned on a peninsula at the every edge of Europe, in the seventh century BCE, when the city was known as Byzantium, it was the site of the acropolis.

Those ancient walls were incorporated in the new defences when Sultan Mehmed II, who led the Siege on Constantinople which ended the Byzantine Empire, ordered the palace’s construction in 1459.

Today, there are so many dozens of buildings, pavilions, kiosks and interconnected structures in the Topkapi Palace complex, and hundreds and hundreds of rooms, that it can be rightly termed as “countless”: There is no official number.

However, as Gülru Necipoglu notes in “Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” the original layout and its main buildings remain remarkably intact.

By the 16th century and the empire’s Golden Age under Süleyman the Magnificent, the palace had reached its definitive configuration: “Thereafter, for hundreds of years its basic structure remained astonishingly intact, despite continuous restoration and rebuilding, almost as if it were forbidden to tamper with its essential form.”

The palace is made up of four courtyards and the 400-room harem where the Sultan and his family lived, and which no unrelated male could enter unless he was a eunuch.

Back when Topkapi was a bustling mini-city of some 4,000 people, each courtyard was increasingly restricted in access to the unauthorizsed.

The Sultan’s private realm

The first is the largest and, in Ottoman times, was open to any unarmed member of the public.

Stepping in after the long entrance lines outside, it’s a blessed relief to step into the calming world of this beautiful tree-lined forecourt. The centuries-old plane and cypress trees are all the more remarkable because many of them are completely hollow, attacked by a fungus which destroyed the insides but left the trees still standing.

The Imperial Mint is here, the sixth-century Hagia Irene Church and the palace bakeries. Among the many picturesque fountains that adorn the space is one with a grisly legend attached: The Fountain of the Executioner is reputed to have been where the chief swordsman would have cleaned up after a beheading.

The Gate of Salutation, with its facade reminiscent of a European medieval castle, is where things get serious. This marked the transition into the Sultan’s private realm and only the reigning Sultan and the Queen Mother were allowed to enter on horseback; all lesser souls had to dismount and walk.

“At this point silence was imposed,” writes Necipoglu, drawing upon a depiction of an ambassadorial procession compiled for the Habsburg ambassador Johannes Lewenklau around 1586. “Those who broke it were beaten with a stick.”

Breathtaking ornamentation

The Second Courtyard is where the Grand Vizier, the Empire’s chief minister, led meetings in the Imperial Council building. The Sultan himself would observe proceedings from behind a gilded lattice screen, in an extra layer of seclusion.

The palace’s many structures might be modest in scale — few are over two stories — but the Ottoman designs and interior ornamentation are breathtaking in the Council building and elsewhere.

The former palace kitchens, now museum galleries, are also in this section, with one of the world’s largest collections of Chinese and Japanese porcelain.

The level of intricate detail in every gold-leafed arch or wall studded with thousands of delicately painted Iznik tiles could be studied for months, if not years.

At the Gate of Felicity, leading to the more intimately sized third courtyard, tourists pose with guards in the uniform of the Ottoman silahtar, in scenes reminiscent of visitors larking beside the motionless King’s Guard at England’s Buckingham Palace.

The palace museum, as it is today, is like an empty stage set, writes Necipoglu, but in the 15th and 16th century, “the palatial complex was a collection of workshops, armories, hospitals, stables, kitchens, bakeries, baths, audience halls, treasuries, libraries, archives, small mosques, dormitories, pavilions, sports grounds, zoological parks, pools, fountains, and gardens, housing thousands of inhabitants grouped according to the inner (private) and outer (public) services of the royal household.”

The third courtyard was divided into male and female sections. Slave pages resided in the dormitories and in the palace school they were educated, under the close watch of eunuchs, to occupy high positions as government bureaucrats. Male pages and female concubines alike were brought up in a common court culture, writes Necipoglu, and were eventually married off to one another. This created an in-house ruling elite which kept power centralized and out of the hands of the hereditary aristocracy beyond the palace walls.

From concubine to queen

Visitors to the sultan could go to the Audience Chamber and no further, at which point they had to adhere to strict customs.

Süleyman the Magnificent “grew increasingly arrogant in his ceremonial practice, which eventually reached a peak of haughtiness by the last quarter of the sixteenth century,” writes Necipoglu. Ambassadors were flanked by guards like prisoners brought to the bar, and required to stand throughout. Instead of speaking to the sultan “they were only allowed to catch a momentary glimpse of the idollike sultan, who had grown almost too sacred to be seen.”

One of the must-visit spots in the third courtyard is the Treasury, filled with “relics of all sorts that had been given in gift exchanges,” says Finkel, as well as the 86-carat Spoonmakers’ Diamond and emerald-encrusted Topkapi Dagger.

The imperial harem, which runs alongside also in the third courtyard, has historically been the most misunderstood by Westerners, with their exoticized fever dreams of the Ottoman East.

This was where the Sultan lived with his children and the female members of his family.

As well as his wives, there were the concubines, enslaved women brought from across the empire.

In the 16th century, Hürrem Sultan broke tradition by rising from being a concubine slave to being the legal wife of Suleiman the Magnificent and one of the most powerful women in Ottoman history. The famous love letters between the two are testament to a strong and enduring passion.

The final inner sanctum

However, for many women, these sequestered rooms —– with some of the most lavish ornamentation in all the palace —- were a gilded cage.

“In a way, it’s very sad,” says Finkel. It’s very impressive on one hand, but the conditions in which these poor women were living are not what one would want for oneself. In the rooms of the favorites, obviously, there were furnishings to make it a bit cozier,” but the dormitory-style accommodation for the rank and file is considerably more spartan.

The harem was guarded by Black eunuchs, African men who were enslaved and castrated as young boys. While castration was forbidden under Islamic law, the boys had been emasculated by their slave traders and so the practice continued right up until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

The palace hierarchies extended to race as well as gender. The Black eunuchs, with this close proximity to the royal household, were in an elevated position compared to the White eunuchs — typically enslaved Christians from the Balkans and Caucasus — who held sway as administrators, gatekeepers and supervisors of the pages.

The fourth courtyard, on the most elevated part of the promontory, was the sultan’s private retreat. Today, with its pretty pavilions and landscaped gardens, it’s easy to see the appeal.

“There’s a wonderful terrace where you can look out over the city and across the Bosphorus,” says Finkel. The skyline has changed “but you can imagine how it must have been,” standing at the edge of a continent, master of all you survey.

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