Bust of Hafsa Sultan, the mother of Suleiman the Magnificent and the first woman to hold the title of Valide Sultan. Valide, in Ottoman Turkish, means “mother.” The Valide Sultan was the Sultan’s mother and the unofficial matriarch of the imperial family.
For reference, see (List of mothers of the Ottoman sultans).
There’s much that could be said about ethnic stereotypes, but I’ll start by the legal and necessary obvious — Ottoman sultans, from very early on, did not marry. The very point of having an extensive household was to stop the women from being equal partners of the sovereign, and hence from interfering in politics (it did not quite work out, but long after they started interfering, the system continued on its own inertia).
Ottoman concubines of the royal household were, legally, slaves: the important consequence of this being that they could only come from populations it was seen as permissible to enslave.
This is why every Greek valide is from the maritime possessions of the Republic of Venice (Paros, Tinos, Crete, etc.) much like the most famous Greek vezir, Pargali Ibrahim Pasha. These were Christian dominions it was permissible to take captives from, not Ottoman lands.
And (despite them being listed as “Georgian”) the Georgian mothers were, actually, Circassians - from the free Moslem nomads of the north Caucasus, not the Ottoman tributary Christians in Transcaucasia (aka modern Georgia). The feuding Circassians were themselves open to slavery, often selling their own.
An imaginative portrait of Mihrimah Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent’s daughter. There was no chance that Suleiman would marry off his daughter to a Christian.
An overview of the ethnicities of the sultan-mothers is in direct parallel to the expanding and contracting frontier of Ottoman power, reflecting available populations - e.g. the Ruthenians/Ukrainians, Russians, and Polish Jews are there so long as the Crimean Tartars had access to the Wild Fields in Ukraine, disappearing after Russian seizure of the khanate’s lands.
The Circassians/Georgians are so prominent in the 18th-19th century, because they were the last vulnerable, fair-skinned population which remained after the loss of the Crimea. The purchase of girls for harems was the last form of slavery to remain until the proclamation of the Republic - even after the official abolition of slavery - because it was simply not considered as such. (Eunuchs were also slaves, and the last generation was technically free and “saved” from the slave trade, although not given much of a choice about serving the palace).
The only actually Turkish (or, indeed, free Slavic or Greek) queens came in the first centuries of the empire’s existence, when it still contracted marriages with independent princely houses.
In the early years of Ottoman state, Ottoman Sultans married with daughters of Turkish and Balkan aristocratic houses. After Yildirim Bayezid’s defeat against Timur, his Serbian (aristocratic) wife said to be imprisoned by Timur (he had also Turkish wives but interestingly only Serbian one and her daughters mentioned as taken hostage by Timur). Some sources claimed his wife and daughters forced to serve as cup bearers to Timur. It’s controversial though, sources differ on Timur’s actions towards Bayezid, some claiming he was very demeaning while others claiming he shown good deal of respect. Anyway, it’s said that because of that incident, Ottoman Sultans forbidden to marry and only had children from slaves thereafter thus protecting their honor.
I am a little sceptic about this explanation. It could be thought that, Ottomans becoming an empire and no longer need support of neither Turkish nor Balkan royal houses thus in order to underline their uniqueness and prevent any possible claimant to the throne, they refrained from mariage alliances with other royal houses.
However also this explanation doesn’t completely satisfies me. I think, there was already an established “slave” (kul) bureaucracy in the Ottoman Palace. Those people were nobody until becoming a part of bureaucracy (well, not always, there were aristocrats among them but even they were exiled or “careerist” aristocrats).
Sultans making marriage alliances with other royal houses means, royal houses would provide bureaucrats, especially diplomats and commanders, thus sharing slaves’ “quotas”. Despite marriage ban, Circassian aristocracy and relatives of Circassian Sultans gained important positions inside the Palace. Before marriage ban, Serbian Ottoman alliance depended on Bayezid’s marriage with Despina Sultan (Olivera Despina, daughter of Serbian king Lazar) and Serbian Knights fought faithfully against Timur during Battle of Ankara. An aristocratic empress could rule with support of her family while a slave girl would need imperial “slave” bureaucracy to get things done. For example think about a Habsburg Valide Sultan (Queen mother) regent during Sultanate of women.
“Unfaithfullness” of Turkish royal houses in Anatolia, many of whom sided with Timur, should have been constituted a good excuse for bureaucracy to ban marriages of Sultans. They could not be trusted anymore. On the other hand, marriage with christian princesses could also be seen or presented as dangerous by bureaucrats. Some Ottoman palace historians “accused” Olivera with seducing Bayezid, imagine that, wife seduces her husband. Those palace bureaucrats should have interesting expectations from wives.
Timur’s imprisonment of Olivera Despina also suggests some resentment about that marriage. Maybe that marriage wasn’t a popular move among Turks and Timur further exploited that for propaganda purposes by taking her hostage but not the other two aristocratic Turkish wives of Bayezid (After Battle of Chaldiran, some Turkish sources also claimed that they captured and released Ismail Safevi’s wife Taçlı Begüm, sources of the time also differs on that, it may be a popular propaganda claim). Maybe claims about she served as cup bearer for Timur was part of this propaganda. Timur could have act civilized against his captives including Sultan and Sultana, thus impressing the aristocracy while with these kind of demeaning gossips impressing commoners at the same time.
After Istanbul was captured and Ottomans became an European empire, Ottoman Sultans preferred to marry women whose family ties were weak or non existent. This prevented potential power struggles in the palace in favor of various nationalities.
However, all had to be a Muslim; so all those who became powerful palace women were Muslim. Nationalities, ethnicity etc. did not matter.
Ottomans were not racists. In fact, places Ottomans went and ruled, local religions and nationalities, languages survived to this day. No one was forced to become a Muslim either; this would be against the Islamic law.
Islamic rules they lived by included all of the human rights listed in the 1960 UN declaration of Human Rights. These put limits on the actions of even the Sultans; in fact, a religious leader was always there watching if any actions of the Sultans was contrary to the Islamic rules.
Sultans had to get permission from that religious leader (Sheyh-ul Islam) to wage a battle campaign, for example. This is because Islam banned attacking a nation if they didn’t attack your nation first. This had to be determined and approved only by the Sheyh-ul Islam. The sultan could not treat defenseless civilians like a tyrant either; for example. Minorities had the right to live by their own religious laws (no democracies have such a liberal understanding of human rights even today).
Prior to Ottomans entering European Continent, Sultans typically married locally prominent family girls, whose nationalities were sometimes not known. Arabs and Turks all being Muslim, there were nothing seemingly separating them. So, some of the early wives of the sultans could have been Arab.
Additionally, most Sultan wives had Christian (and one or two Jewish) backgrounds; because, Muslims could not be concubines in the palace. Sultans chose their wives from among these girls, as their ties to their earlier childhood nations would have been nil.
Such rules assured the Ottoman dynasty to continue for 623 years. Longer than any other Turkish Empire (there were 16) or any Turkish state (there were 118). None of them were racists by the way.
Intermarriage even among the population was not an exception, rather it was the rule, as it seems from the genetic make-up of the Anatolian Peninsula.
Most common genetic sharing seems to have occurred with the prior inhabitants of the peninsula: outside of the original motherland genes, Turks & Cacausians mainly, including Turks and Armenians share 99%, Greeks-Armenians-Turks share 60%, Cypriot Greeks and Turks share 60%, Arabs-Turks 10%, Persians-Turks 20–30%.
This picture doesn't support racism; it supports just the opposite. Minority gene pools are a result of not racism but of percent availability of those populations in the mixture.
This is not unique among the Ottomans. Within an Islamic context, claiming a wife from within the community brought lots of problems with it. The first dynasty of Islam, the Ummayyad dynasty, experienced that first. Up until the last few caliphs, all the Umayyad caliphs had either taken an Arabian Muslim or a Syrian Christian wife. The last three caliphs took a wife from from far away Central Asia, which was populated by a mixture of Iranic-speaking peoples. The Ummayyads had experienced that taking a local wife caused friction and political tensions, with tribes competing to demand one of their own become the next wife to the caliph. This explains why the Ottomans rarely had Turkish or Arab wives. Taking a local wife is bound to become an entirely political adventure.
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