Homosexuality in The Ottoman Empire

Berghahn Books
Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire

Author(s): Stephen O. Murray
Source: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 33, No. 1, Eighteenth-Century
Homosexuality in Global Perspective (Spring 2007), pp. 101-116
Published by: Berghahn Books
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Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire1
Stephen O. Murray
Prelude: The Ottoman Empire in Relation to

Other Eighteenth-Century European Powers
Othman/Osman, for whom the dynasty was named, acceded to the

throne of a small state around Sogiit in northwestern Anatolia around 1 281
and ruled until about 1 326. The dynasty was overthrown by The Young
Turks led by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), founder and first president of the
Turkish Republic, who abolished the caliphate in 1 924. In the longue duree
with its vast expansion in size and slow contraction, the empire's apogee
was during the reign of Suleiman (Sulayman the First, known in the West
as "the Magnificent" and within the Ottoman Empire as "the Law-Giver")
between 1520 and 1566. During the eighteenth century, well into the long
decline after Suleiman's reign, the Ottoman Empire still contained the
whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, both north and south.
In the summer of 1 683 an Ottoman army was besieging Vienna. For my
purposes, Turkey's somewhat extended eighteenth century began with a
Polish army relieving the siege in September. (No Ottoman army ever again
reached so far into central Europe.) It ended in 1807 with the forced
abdication and murder of the would-be reformer, sultan Selim 111. It was a
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the "Homosexuality in the

Eighteenth Century" conference at the Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, March 2000.
The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and encouragement of Deborah
Amory, Terry Castle, Emma Donoghue, Gary Leupp, Lisa Moore, Candis Snoddy, Kristina
Straub, Randy Trumbach, Theo van der Meer, Walter Williams, and especially organizers
Lynn Hunt and Tip Ragan.
Stephen O. Murray is a comparativist sociologist at El Instituto Obregon, San Francisco. His

most recent book is Looking Through Taiwan.
©2007 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol . 33, no. 1
1 02 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
century in which the Ottomans had three major ongoing enemies: the
Venetian Republic, which was obliterated as a power in the Eastern
Mediterranean over the course of the eighteenth century, partly by Ottoman
military successes; the Hapsburg Empire, which increased its southeastern
extension under the leadership of Prince Eugen of Saxony, only to lose
Serbia in the treaty of Belgrade in 1 737 and be soon thereafter preoccupied
with the War of the Austrian Succession; and the Romanov Empire, which
posed the most sustained significant threat to the Ottoman Empire's
borders.2
Given these conflicts, opposition between Islam and Christianity was
less salient for those on the wobbling borders of the Ottoman Empire with
its shifting alliances than one might suppose. Firstly, as Lord Kinross wrote,
the Ottoman Empire was "in no sense a national[ist], but [rather] a
dynastic and multiracial empire, whose varied populations, whetherTurkic
or otherwise, Moslem or Christian or Jewish, were above all else Ottomans,
members of a single body politic which transcended such conceptions as
nationhood, religion, and race. Alone in its time, it thus gave recognition to
all three monotheistic faiths."3 It also provided significant opportunities to
talented individuals regardless of national or religious background, as will
be discussed below. Orthodox Christians in southeastern Europe
considered Roman Catholic Austrians, Venetians, and Jesuits more
threatening to the practice of their faith than Muslim Turks. In particular,
they feared forcible Roman Catholic conversion, as had occurred in
fourteenth-century Bulgaria. From the mid-sixteenth century through most
of the eighteenth, the Ottomans were in tacit and, beginning in 1 740, overt
alliance with the Roman Catholic kings of France against the Roman
Catholic Hapsburgs and the Eastern Orthodox Romanovs. At various points
during the eighteenth century, there was also common interest and
cooperation with Protestant Sweden, Prussia, Holland, and England.
Napoleon's 1 798 invasion of Egypt, though purportedly aimed at subduing
Mamluk rebels who had seized power in Egypt and Syria, provoked Turkey
to join England and the Ottomans' long-term enemies, the Hapsburgs and
Romanovs, in declaring war against France. By 1802 Egypt and Syria had
been restored to Ottoman governors by an anti-French alliance rather than
the force of Ottoman arms.
2. Persia, if not a continuous Persian dynasty, was also a significant Ottoman enemy.
In particular, reverses there stimulated the overthrow of the Tulip Period sultan/patron Ahmet
III. See Robert W. Olson, "The Patrona Halil Rebellion and Ottoman-Persian Wars and
Eighteenth Century Ottomans," Indiana University Turkish Studies 6 (1987): 75-82.
3. Patrick Balfour, Baron Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the
Turkish Empire (New York, 1979), p. 614.
Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire 1 03
Introduction
As a comparativist sociologist who has culled records describing same-

sex sexual relations from many times and places, I thought it would not be
too hard to write something about the eighteenth-century Turkish empire.
After all, the view of the Ottomans as addicted to the "filthy pleasures" of
pederasty is, if not constant, at least a leitmotif in Western discourse from
the time of the Crusades through the sodomization scene in the Seven
Pillars of Wisdom.
Even those who extolled the classic Ottoman organization as rational
and meritocratic (prototypically Albert Lybyer; more grudgingly O. G. de
Busbecq, Paul Ricaut, and others)4 acknowledged that sexual relations
occurred among pages training to become state officials and between
pages and their masters. With some of the skepticism I have often given
claims about the absence of homosexuality in various times and places, I
started to turn the "How did they know this?" question on the assertions
about widespread pederasty involving Ottoman officials from the sultans
down to local pashas,5 and also on assertions of female-female sexual
relations in the seraglios. Further complicating my task was the realization
that most of what I had used to write the chapters about Ottoman courts
in Islamic Homosexualities6 was from the fifteenth, sixteenth, or nineteenth
centuries. The institutions that had most interested me and other
comparativists had begun to devolve even during the reign of Suleim
The meritocratic system had all but disappeared by the beginning of
eighteenth century. By the middle of it, there were even offices for
The last devshirme, the roundup of promising boys from Christian famil
for the palace schools, occurred in 1805 (in Greece), though by the
4. Albert H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Sule
the Magnificent (Cambridge, MA, 1913); Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish L
(1554-62; Oxford, 1927); Paul Ricaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (Lo
1668; facsimile edition, New York, 1971).
5. E.g., one might wonder whether Lord Charlemont correctly understood th
"handsome boys attendant on the Captain" on more than one Turkish naval vessel w
he was assured, "kept solely for this infamous purpose." James C. Charlemont, The T
in Greece & Turkey , ed. W.B. Stanford and E.J. Finopoulos (1749; London, 1984), p
emphasis added. Given that nothing was stolen, I doubt that he misunderstood the aim of
hot pursuit of the eighteen-year-old in his entourage.
6. Stephen O. Murray, "Corporealizing Medieval Persian and Turkish Tropes," pp.
41; "Homosexuality among Slave Elites in Ottoman Turkey," pp. 174-86; and "Ma
Homosexuality in Ottoman Albania," pp. 187-96 in Islamic Homosexualities , ed. Steph
Murray and Will Roscoe (New York, 1997).
7. Andrew Wheatcroft, The Ottomans (New York, 1993), p. 94.
/ 04 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
it had already largely ceased.8 The yenicheri - the appellation garbled by

Europeans as janissaries, the "new troops" whose ranks had been filled by
the devshirme - had become increasingly rapacious inside the empire and
increasingly unwilling to go into battle on its peripheries. As with rapid
promotion based on personal favoritism, yenicheri resistance to "foreign
wars" dates back to Suleiman, and is probably what kept Vienna from
being added to the Ottoman Empire in 1529.
During the eighteenth century, two-way traffic of observers between
Turkey and Western Europe began. Early in the next century (on a stay
between 1 803 and 1 806) the admittedly very reactionary Mehmet "Efendi"
was discomfited to leam of Turkey's European reputation for pederasty. His
hosts thought that, being Turkish, he would be interested in seeing what
Paris had to offer in the way of rentable boys. After being shown around the
Palais Royal marketplace at night, he challenged the image of Turkey as
being especially notable for pederasty, arguing that with "1500 boys
exclusively occupied in sodomy" and, especially shockingly, their
availability and prices advertised on printed cards, it was far more blatant
in Paris than anywhere in the Ottoman realm.9
The most famous eighteenth-century reports from any Western
embassy to the Ottoman sultans, the letters from Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, do not mention same-sex sexual relations except to deny that
they occurred in the women's hamams (bathhouses). This assertion,
seemingly based on a single visit - or, at least on her first visit, before she
spoke any Turkish - comes from someone who had access both to the
women's hamams and to seraglios of the highest rank, as male writers did
not.10
8. Ricaut wrote that it had been "forgotten." Paul Ricaut, The Present State of the
Ottoman Empire , pp. 80, 197.
9. Quoted by Bernard B. Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1 982), p.
290.
1 0. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Malcolm Jack (Athens, GA,
1 993). Earlier, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq asserted that some Turkish men refused to let their
wives go to the women's baths because of their reputation as sites for lesbian activity. See
his The Turkish Letters , p. 146. Many foreigners surmised that women in large harems
engaged in lesbian behavior, one of the rare instances I have encountered (for any society)
suggesting "situational" female homosexuality based on "deprivation" of heterosexual
contact. My favorite claim from this discourse is the report of Ottaviano Boy, a Venetian
envoy, that for the "lustie and lascivious wenches" in the sultan's harem "it is not lawfull for
any one to bring ought in unto them, with which they may commit deeds of beastly
uncleannesse; so that if they have a will to eate Cucumbers, they are sent in unto them sliced
to deprive them of the meanes of playing the wantons." Cited in Noel Barber, The Sultans
(New York, 1 973), p. 35. Paul Ricaut, for five years secretary to Charles H's envoy to the court
of Mahmet IV, after a lengthy passage on the love of sultans and grandees for male pages,
Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire 105
Ottoman Lyric Poetry
The learned are all enamored of boys,

Not one remains who female love enjoys.
- Nedim11
When the rose [anus] holds carnival,

The tulip's [vagina] smartly shown the door.12
- Necat!'3
[The reign of Ahmed III during the early eighteenth century] was a
careless, pleasure-loving age when the great world of
Constantinople had no thought but to enjoy life to the uttermost,
when morals were naturally far from rigid and many things were
done openly which in former times would have been discreetly
veiled.14
1 was beginning to wonder whether, aside from stereotyped European

assumptions, there was any solid evidence of homosexuality in the
eighteenth-century Turkish empire. I then delved into the recent collection
of Ottoman lyric poetry, compiled by the most eminent American scholar
on Ottoman literature and two Turkish colleagues, and read their policy for
specifying the gender of beloveds in their translations:
wrote: "This passion likewise reigns in the Society of Women; they die with amorous
affections one to the other; especially the old Women court the young, present them with
rich Garments, Jewels, Money, even to their own impoverishment and ruine, and these darts
of Cupid are shot through all the Empire, especially Constantinople, the Seraglio of the Grand
Signior [Sultan], and the apartments of the Sultans." Ricaut, The Present State, p. 34. Most
assertions about Sapphic passions in the seraglios date from before or after the eighteenth
century. They do not seem to be based on observation or systematic inquiry, and they focus
on the largest harems, those of sultans and important viziers. For a overview of the
overheated imaginings in European fiction of what was going on in the seraglios see Alain
Grosrichard, La Structure du serail: La Fiction du despotisme asiatique dans V Occident
classique (Paris, 1979). On (mostly nineteenth-century) fantasies of "the lustful Turk" see
Wheatcroft, The Ottomans.
1 1 . Trans. E.J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry , (London, 1905), 4:56.
12. In Persian and Turkish poetry the tulip is a frequent metaphor for the vagina, the rose
for the anus (with the nightingale for the lover of either flower of the beloved, but often torn
by the thorns on the rose's stem).
13. Trans. John R. Walsh, "Divan Poetry" in The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, ed.
Nermin Menemencioglu and Fahir Iz (Middlesex, 1978), p. 72.
14. Gibb, Ottoman Poetry , p. 12.
The fact that the Turkish language does not distinguish gender either
in [case] endings or by pronouns allows Turks an honest avoidance
of the issue that is not permitted to English translation. We were
required to assign gender to the beloveds. And what we have
chosen to do, where we cannot leave gender ambiguous, is to
represent the beloved as a woman.15
Nevertheless, these authors were fully aware that "the beloved is often, if
not most often, by convention and in a tradition antedating the Ottomans,
a young man." Furthermore, "there existed an often-expressed notion that
true and open intellectual, spiritual, and erotic relationships were far more
possible with a male partner," and "several poets wrote love poems about
specific shop boys and other famous youthful male beauties and there are
quite a number of poems ( shehrengiz ) consisting of brief, clever
descriptions of the most attractive boys in some city [whereas] there are
only a few such poems we know of that describe young women (always
young women of the lower classes)."16
These translators are certainly not the first to heterosexualize Muslim
poetry,17 but I found its perpetuation particularly disturbing in a book
published in 1997, especially since Andrews had written about the
intertextuality of male-for-male lust in sixteenth-century Turkish
poetry - where he recognized that "the pattern for lyric poetry as a whole
is based on a genderless or, more likely, male beloved."18 Looking at this
anthology was a turning point for me, a turning back to my more familiar
understanding that the record has been effaced, because - even with my
casual familiarity with the poetry of medieval Arabic and Persian, and later
Turkish poetry - 1 recognized that some of the metaphors in these poems
15. Walter Andrews, "Ottoman Lyrics" in Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology , ed. Walter
Andrews, Najaat Black and Mehmet Kalpaklu (Austin, 1 997), p. 1 4. Such an argument would
run up against the valuing of the masculinity of beloveds in some of the work of the greatest
eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, Nedlm. Moreover, in that the choice is generally between
boys and girls, "woman" is a particularly misleading assumption/resolution for Englishing
Ottoman poetry.
16. Ibid, pp. 14, 15.
1 7. The Egyptian Sheikh Rif&'a, who led a mission to Paris in the 1 820s, was struck that
"in France homosexuality is regarded with horror and disgust to such a degree that when
French scholars translate homosexual love poems from the Arabic they change the
masculine to the feminine form." (Lewis, The Muslim Discovery, p. 291). The proper Victorian
scholar E. J. W. Gibb heterosexualized Ottoman poetry, especially in the fourth and final
(1905) volume of his history of Ottoman poetry.
18. Walter Andrews, "The Sexual Intertext of Ottoman Literature: The Story of Me'afl ,
Magistrate of Mihalich," Edebiyat 3 (1989): 56.
are not ambiguous in gender, and that the settings for many of the sightings
and meetings were those which would have been single-sexed.19
It is necessary to examine poetry because individual feelings about
loved ones (of any age or sex) were not recorded in fiction or nonfiction
prose. For Ottoman as for Arabic literature before the mid-twentieth
century, as G.E. von Grunebaum once remarked, "Private experience is
neither objectivized in action through novel or drama nor presented
indirectly through the personification of virtues and ideas or through the
casting of figures of history and legend to represent and express personal
attitudes."20 In particular, there is a lack of confessional prose writing.
Andrews rightly cautioned that "if we wish to find out how people actually
behaved, we must turn to the histories, archival documents, and the like;
however, if we are interested in the psychological reality, how people
interpreted their behavior, then the poetry is a more valuable resource."21
But the histories and archives for the Ottoman Empire (as surely he knows)
contain little about everyday conduct.
Poetry was the literature of Ottoman society, and the patrons of its
greatest eighteenth-century poet, Ahmed Nedim,22 were the sultan Ahmed
III and his grand vizier, the most able of the eighteenth century, (Damad)
Newsherhirli Ibrahim Pasha, and the Lord High Admiral Mustafa Pasha. The
handsome and hedonist sultan, himself a poet and calligrapher, endowed
a library building (the Enderun-u Hiimayun Kiitub-khanesi) inside the
Topkapi Palace in 1719, and appointed Ahmed Nedim as its curator.
As Silay notes, it is significant that Nedim dedicated to Ibrahim Pasha
one of his most clearly homoerotic poems, one about being smitten by an
19. Sustaining my recovery from doubts was finding a 1994 book by a Turkish scholar,
Kemal Silay, Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court , Indiana University Turkish Studies
1 3 (Bloomington, 1 994). Silay is now a colleague of Andrews at the University of Washington,
and whom Andrews acknowledged in Ottoman Lyric Poetry for help with the Ottoman texts.
I find it unfortunate that Andrews does not cite Silay's book since, among other things, it
shows that the gender that is grammatically inexplicit in the texts can be resolved.
20. Gustave E. von Grunebaum, "The Aesthetic Foundation of Arabic Literature,"
Comparative Literature 4 (1952): 332.
21. Walter G. Andrews, Poetry's Voice, Society's Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry (Seattle,
1985), p. 91.
22. "Nedim" means "party companion," and the motto of the poet (who was bom in the
capital, in a distinguished line of legal scholars and officials) was "Let us laugh, let us play,
let us enjoy the delights of the world to the full." Quoted by Bernard Lewis, Istanbul and the
Civilization of the Ottoman Empire (Norman, 1963), p. 260. The poet perished in the chaos
of the Halil Patrona rebellion of 1 830 which also ended the life of the grand vizier and the
reign of Sultan Ahmet. Both the date of Nedim's birth and the circumstances of his death are
variously reported.
attractive bathhouse attendant.23 Unlike other classical Muslim poets,

Nedim did not write poetry in a mystical vein for which arguments can be
made that the beloved is God rather than a human male.24 Silay also
stresses that the metaphor of "the walking cypress" ( serv-I revari) that
recurs often in Nedim - and in many of the poems that Andrews et al.
heterosexualize - invokes tall males. Silay further explains that knowledge
of the single-sex context of hamams and drinking parties disambiguates
gender for poems with encounters in what were homosocial settings in
Ottoman Turkey. And, following Nairn, he draws on the poetry with similar
Persian roots in a language in which gender is grammatically marked,
Urdu, to reinforce the gender of some recurrent tropes, particularly those
of hyacinth and cypress.25
Nedim also wrote poetry in Persian. Silay quotes several such poems
that value the beards of beloveds: e.g., "compared to a beard, the
eyelashes and waist of the beloved, as thin as a hair, have no value" and
"only his beard has captured me."26 Sprouting a beard has typically been
the point at which young males cease to be attractive in Muslim as in other
pederastic poetic traditions.27 The beard is a sex-linked attribute. Similarly,
given the total depilation practiced by Turkish women, Nedtm's ardent
exclamation in another poem "from hair to hair, 1 consider every part of
your body kissable" can only be directed at an adult male.
As obscure (especially to those unaware of the gendering of cypresses,
roses, moths and nightingales in the Turkish schema of metaphors) as
Ottoman poetry may seem, and even resisting the temptation to regard all
poetiy as self-representation in regard to desires, "what we can very easily
leam from poetry and other arts is how the society as a whole interpreted
what it did and ultimately why it behaved as it did."28 Whatever the actual
23. Silay, Nedim and the Poetics , pp. 101-2.

24. Ibid, pp. 94-95. 1 have pressed the argument that Allah cannot be the beloved of some
classical Persian and Turkish poetry elsewhere. Murray, "Corporealizing." See also
Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, 1975) and As Through a
Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York, 1982); and Walter Andrews, "The Sexual Intertext,"
pp. 35,41.
25. C.M. Nairn, "The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modem Urdu
Poetry" in Studies in Urdu Gazal and Prose Fiction , ed. Umar Memon (Madison, 1979).
26. Silay, Nedim and the Poetics , p. 100.
27. Some poets have, nevertheless, extolled continuing love for those whose smooth
cheeks and legs are darkened by hair sprouting. See Stephen O. Murray, "The Will Not to
Know" 'n Islamic Homosexualities , p. 23; and Stephen O. Murray, Homosexualities (Chicago,
2000), pp. 108, 120, 373-75.
28. Andrews, Poetry's Voice , p. 198.
desires of the poet, those expressed in his poetry were comprehensible

within the society.
Some Oddly Unsuspected Sites
Given the suspicions that Northern European Protestants, especially

English ones, harbored of monasteries as breeding-grounds of sodomy, it
is remarkable that the tekke, the dervish cloisters where a sheyh resides
with a number of celibate followers, were not similarly perceived as sites
of "situational" homosexuality. This is even more surprising given the
palpable homoeroticism of Sufi mysticism, particularly in the ecstatic
poetry of the Jalalu'd-Din Rumi, founder of the Mevlevis ("whirling
dervishes") centered in the middle of Anatolia in Konya.29 Moreover, the
batint or esoteric view identified with the Ismailis and several extreme Sufi
sects held that outward reference of all religious, and hence social tenets,
was meaningless and to be ignored in favor of the hidden, inner
reference.30 The keepers of Islamic orthodoxy were suspicious of the
licentiousness of mystic sects (especially their music and dancing), but I
have not found anything focusing on sex between dervishes. Although
there were married dervishes, who lived outside and attended celebrations
at the tekke, this hardly seems enough to deflect suspicion from those who
chose to live in an all-male cloister.
Similarly, the coffeehouses, the first of which opened in Kostantiniyya
(Constantinople) in 1 555, "became meeting places of pleasure-seekers and
idlers, and also of some wits from among the men of letters and
literati . . . [Soon] the Imams and muezzins and pious hypocrites
complained 'People have become addicts of the coffeehouse; nobody
comes to the mosques'" any more.31 The government made periodic
attempts to extirpate the enormously popular institution, the most dramatic
being Murad IV's 1 622 prohibition and execution of coffee-drinkers (and
smokers); but by the eighteenth century the battle against such stimulants
29. Dervishes' "submissive/seductive stance is consistently interpreted [by those within

the Sufi tradition] as directed toward the Divine, even though a beloved master/adept may
serve temporarily as an intermediary [object of devotion]." Walter Andrews, "The Sexual
Intertext," p. 55 n. 39. Although the Greek, Arabic, Persian and Turkish poetic tradition stylizes
the suffering of frustrated lovers, the desire is to penetrate the beloved, not to be penetrated,
though penetrating the beloved's heedlessness rather than engaging in specific bodily
ravishments is the explicit aim.
30. Andrews, Poetry's Voice , p. 68. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of
Islam , pp. 19-20.
31. Lewis, Istanbul , pp. 132-33.
110 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
had been abandoned by the sultans. Potshots from clerics did not coalesce
into any new campaign to suppress such pleasures, even after the success
of the antihedonist Patrona Haiti rebellion ended the Tulip Period ( lale
dewri) in 1 730. The homosocial coffeehouses, which particularly prospered
during that era, are noticeably absent in European discussion about sexual
liaisons between males in Kostantiniyya and elsewhere. However, the
gazes and touches of bearded or mustachioed men and smooth-faced
youths in various Turkish paintings of coffeehouses suggest that such
contacts were made.
Prostituted Entertainers
In contrast to these surprising gaps in looking for places where

connections took place, there is a consensus about dancing boys being
objects of "the lustful Turks" - mostly as foreign objects, since it was
unsuitable for a Muslim boy to be femininely displayed and basely used.32
Though the "obscene gestures" of public dancers "prohibit the glance of a
chaste eye," according to Porter,33 most Europeans who wrote about
sojourns in the East felt duty-bound to watch and then bear witness to the
"foulness" they had forced themselves to observe. Various Europeans saw
not only the "licentious" dances, but some of the passionate rivalry for the
boys' favors, including a "war" between soldiers and sailors for dancers in
their early teens recorded by Baron de Tott.34 Most such boys across the
empire seem to have been prostituted. I have reviewed a number of
nineteenth-century reports that exemplify this pattern, beginning with
Byron's, in Islamic Homosexualities?* As Raphaela Lewis summarized the
literature,
Both boy and girl dancers were called by the same

name - chengi - and the boys were generally more in demand than
the girls. They wore their hair in long ringlets and they dressed like
girls and performed suggestive dances . . . The admiring audience
would spit on coins and stick them to the dancers' faces, especially
their foreheads, as they moved around among them. Some of these
32. James Porter, Turkey: Its History and Progress (London, 1854), 1:331-33.
33. Ibid., p. 332.
34. Baron de Tott, Memoirs (1 785; New York, 1 973), 2: 1 30.
35. Stephen O. Murray, "The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male
Homosexuality," pp. 24-25 and Murray, "Some Nineteenth-Century Reports of Islamic
Homosexualities," pp. 204-5 in Islamic Homosexualities, ed. Murray and Roscoe.
dancing boys became extremely famous and were the cause of

many jealous fights, especially among Janissaries in the taverns.
When they boys lost their looks and their beards began to grow they
abandoned their dancing and became drummers and trainers to the
dancing boys ... A group of these dancing boys was attached to the
Serai.36
In typological terms some have considered dancing boys to be an

occupational type. In my typology of forms of homosexuality,37 the male
chengi is an instance of not permanently feminizing pederastic roles, even
though while young and attractive the boys were clearly effeminized. In
Homosexualities , I discuss similar patterns of prostituted young male
entertainers from a number of societies.38
In discussing Nedim's paeans to facia] and body hair, I have already
hinted that there was male love that crossed the conventional age-line of
demarcation to include some adult male love objects. Hat , the word for
"cheek-down," can also mean "writing," and double entendres of this sort
are frequent in Ottoman poetry. Puberty inscribed the conventional end of
attractiveness, or at least the ideal of that attractiveness. As Andrews noted,
"the moment a boy is far enough along in adolescence to grow a beard he
is considered a man and is disqualified as a potential beloved." He
nevertheless immediately added, "This does not mean that adult
homosexual and homoerotic relationships were unheard-of or even that
they were universally condemned. However, they were part of the private
36. Raphaela Lewis, Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey (New York, 1971), p. 129.
37. The typology in which same-sex sexual relations are structured by age roles,
gendered roles, or are not stratified by differences in age or in gender presentation, derived
in my case from Barry D. Adam, "Reply," Sociologists Gay Caucus Newsletter 18 (1979): 8;
idem, "Age, Structure and Sexuality," Journal of Homosexuality 1 1 (1986): 19-33, is the basis
for organizing the material in Murray, Homosexualities. Therein, I stress the simultaneity of
different organizations in large polities, going back to the ancient world. Murray and Roscoe,
eds., Islamic Homosexualities , stresses that all three formal organizations (the two status-
structuring differences in age and gender, and nonstatus-structured relationships) have
existed in Muslim societies (see, especially "The Will Not to Know," pp. 32-41 and Badruddin
Khan, "Not-So-Gay Life in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s," pp. 275-96). Heretofore, I have
resisted Adam's deployment of the great/small tradition contrast, because in the original
meaning this contrasted (elite) written religious traditions with folk practices. There now
seems to me to be a parallel in that one tradition (age-stratified for Muslim societies,
egalitarian in the contemporary USA) is being written about while other forms of relations are
less written about.
38. Murray, Homosexualities, pp. 168-96.
life of individuals and, like sexual relations with one's spouse, were not
appropriate subjects for art or polite public conversation."39
Pages, and Yenicheri
The primary idiom of same-sex love for both males and females
involved age differences between lover and beloved. To an extent, youth
was gendered as unmasculine.40 Also, at least some of the relationships
involved masters and slaves. Homoerotic relationships within the sultan's
"slave family" (and pashas with theirs) are the kind discussed in my
contributions to Islamic Homosexualities, so here I will only briefly consider
their state of decay from the more formally rational institutions of the
ascendant Ottoman Empire of the early sixteenth century.
By the eighteenth century the yenicheri institution had ceased to be
staffed by levies from distant provinces and included many who had been
bom Muslim, especially sons of earlier yenicheri. Drake, Miller, and Hidden
all stressed that parents groomed sons for sexual service to the rulers and,
when successful, sold them.41 Despite the religious ban on enslaving fellow
believers, Muslim Georgians and especially Muslim Kurds provided male
slaves, according to Davey.42 Miller noted in a similar fashion: "The
Georgians and Circassians, whose physical types were especially admired
by the Turks, found the slave trade with Constantinople so profitable that
they maintained slave farms to meet the demand. They not only regularly
captured children for the purpose of selling them in the Turkish slave
markets, but even reared their own children with this end in view."43
Further, upon the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia and mass conversion to
39. Andrews, "Ottoman Lyrics," p. 1 07. The fleetingness of young beauty is a prominent
leitmotif of Ottoman and other Muslim poetic traditions (along with the evanescence of
earthly fame and glory). Even without an anachronistic sense of "gay," I particularly enjoy Sir
William Jones's 1 774 translation of a line from Mesihi - two centuries before the Tulip
Era - as "Be gay, too soon the flowers of Spring will fade. " Quoted in Lewis, Istanbul, p. 1 63.
40. Alternatively, one could say that women were treated as unadult; both boys and
females of all ages were subordinate to adult males.
4 1 . Norman Itzkowitz, "Eighteenth-century Ottoman Realities," Studio Islamica 1 6 (1 962);
Jonathan Drake lParkerRossman],"'Le Vice' inlurkey," International Journal of Greek Love
1 (1 966): 13-27; reprinted in Asian Homosexuality, ed. Wayne Dynes and S. Donaldson (New
York, 1992), pp. 27-41; Bamette Miller, The Palace School of Muhammad the Conqueror
(Cambridge, MA, 1941), pp. 78-79; Alexander Hidden, The Ottoman Dynasty (New York,
1916).
42. Richard Davey, The Sultan and His Subjects (London, 1897), p. 247 n.
43. Miller, The Palace School, p. 78.
Islam in 1 463, Bosnians "requested that their children should nevertheless

be eligible for the devshirme."44
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a steady
supply - a surfeit even - of volunteers, called yamak, eager for the
privileges, especially exemption from taxation, enjoyed by yenicheri.45 Many
of the state's highest officials continued to be promoted from the ranks of
the ajemi-oghlan ("foreign-bom youth"), mostly Christian-bom boys from
the Balkans or those captured by North African pirates and sent to the
sultan as tribute. The supply of youths captured in battle and through the
conquest of non-Muslim territories had ceased by the late seventeenth
century. Nevertheless, the antifeudal ideal remained that officials should
lack family connections in the center of the empire. Those sent to the
sultans of any era "must be of admirable features, and pleasing looks, well
shaped in their bodies, and without any defects." Their "chief
recommendation in the first instance is their comeliness."46
Eunuchs guarded the boys of the palace school, just as eunuchs
guarded the female seraglio. White eunuchs (without testicles) supervised
the pages. Black ones (who were entirely castrated) guarded the female
seraglio. A mid-sixteenth-century visitor, Bemadetto Ramberti, wrote that
there are about five hundred youths aged from eight to twenty years,
who reside in the palace and are the delight of the Signor . . . They
never leave the aforesaid palace until they have reached the age
when the Signor thinks them fit for offices . . . Each ten of them is
guarded by a eunuch called Kapu-oghlan [ gate-youth] , and each has
a slave's frock, in which he sleeps rolled up in such a manner that
he does not touch another who may be near him.47
Although the ranks of nominal yenicheri increased considerably, the size of

the palace school remained the same. Ricaut estimated that there were
more than 1 00,000 men with yenicheri privileges (of which at most a fifth
44. V.L. Menage, "Some Notes on the Devshirme," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies of the University of London 29 (1966): 71. Most of the Bosnian slave boys
(called Potur oghullari, defined as "boys who are circumcised but not Turkish-speaking")
appear to have gone into Palace service rather than the military.
45. Thomas Thornton, The Present State of Turkey (London, 1807-09), 2: 230.
46. Ricaut, Ottoman Empire , p. 25; Thornton, Turkey , 2: 180.
47. Bemadetto Ramberti, Libri Tre delle Cose de Turchi (1543), book 2; trans, in Albert
H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire , pp. 244-45.
were effective soldiers).48 There were 112,000 in 1805 and 135,000 by

1826.49
It seems obvious that criteria such as bodily perfection might have an
attraction sexual as well as aesthetic or functional, not least in a culture in
which youthful male pulchritude was much admired and elaborately
detailed. Be that as it may, in addition to their selection for physical
attractiveness, and their prolonged isolation in the single-sex environment
of the palace school - which paralleled the seraglio in many ways,
including supervision by eunuchs - pages were discouraged from having
heterosexual entanglements for reasons of state. Maintaining a force
prepared to do battle far from the home of the capital was one. Preventing
the accumulation of wealth and power by families was another.
In the time of Suleiman marriage was forbidden to the yenicheri. Still, in
the late seventeenth century, according to Ricaut,
the greatest part of the Janizaries consists of Bachelours, or single

men; for though Marriage cannot be denied to any of them, yet it is
that which terminates their Preferments, and renders their Seniority
uncapable of claiming a right to Offices, or Military Advancement, for
being incumbred with a Wife, and other dependencies, they are
judged in a condition not capable to attend the Discipline of War, or
Service of the Grand Signior.50
A few years earlier Francis Osborne, one of the northern savants who
recognized distinct advantages in deploying over vast spaces an army of
unmarried men, noted that for the yenicheri, "quite unshackled from the
magnetical force of an affection to wife and children, by use made natural
(which chains Christians like fond Apes to their own doors), every place is
fancied their proper sphere
cries as are made by the Relicts and Children of s

for the greater part married and settled" was, by th
century, an explanation for the degeneracy of yen
48. Ricaut, Ottoman Empire , p. 191.

49. Wheatcroft, The Ottomans , p. 90.
50. Ricaut, Ottoman Empire , p. 195.
51. Francis Osborne, Political Reflections upon the Gove
(London, 1656), p. 253. 1 interpret "made natural" to indicat
domesticity natural for men, but it might become habitual. He
of what is "natural" sexual conduct for those not "chained to th
52. Thornton, Turkey , p. 236.
were wives and children to support, and whatever wealth a soldier or

official had accumulated was likely to be seized by the state rather than
posthumously passed to widows and children.53 During the eighteenth
century, soldiers "thought more of their living than of the sword," as Slay
paraphrases a 1 728 Venetian despatch.54
Across the centuries of the Ottoman empire, "frequent fierce wars
carried off many of the sultan's slaves, and the danger of execution and of
confiscation of property put a check on their establishment of families."55
As the imperial treasury became impoverished, especially by the
extravagances of the Tulip Period during the second decade of the
eighteenth century, riches accumulated by the sultan's slaves, yenicheri
and other kinds, reverted to the treasury of the sultan. Without much
likelihood of security for such families as Ottoman functionaries started,
boy favorites were widely indulged.
Decadence
Eighteenth-century Ottoman functionaries were more uxorious than th

world-conquerors of the fifteenth century and the "voluptuousness" o
last centuries of the empire was more heterosexual than it had been for t
more bellicose earlier generations. Thus, any correlation between a
on homoerotic relations and military/political decadence is negative,
was for ancient Rome, with more pederasty among the generations
conquerors than among those of the crumbling empires.
I have to conclude by stressing that the materials I have consider
focus almost exclusively on the elite, the courts of the sultans and
leading viziers. Most of the males and all of the females in the sult
palaces were slaves and first-generation Muslims. Although the patril
the sultans descended from Othman, the matriline was almost entirely no
Turkish slaves. A sultan's mother, his concubines, and son's wives we
alien slaves. Similarly, in the earlier centuries all of the major officials -
still during the eighteenth century many of the major officials - were a
generation elite, recruited from the peripheries of the empire and be
They were not Turkish or Muslim by ancestry. And they were not permi
to pass power or riches to their descendants. Without inheritance and
little likelihood of living to a peaceful old age, the usual motivation
53. Porter, Turkey , p. 395.
54. Mary L. Shay, The Ottoman Empire from 1 720 to 1 734 as Revealed in Despatc
the Venetian Baili (Urbana, 1944), p. 24.
55. Lybyer, Government , p. 70.
building families were lacking - for the yenicheri, in particular, but also for
nominally civilian officials. When the meritocratic system most closely
approximated the ideal norms of the system, the Ottoman empire was
triumphant. As family aggrandizement corrupted the meritocratic ideal, the
empire declined in power. In the eighteenth century, rather than
threatening to extend further into Europe, the empire was propped up by
northwestern European powers, especially France and eventually England
as well - states more concerned about Romanov and Hapsburg expansion
than about whether territories were governed by Muslims or Christians - or
by pederastic potentates.

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Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire

Prelude: The Ottoman Empire in Relation to

Othman/Osman, for whom the dynasty was named, acceded to the

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the "Homosexuality in the

Stephen O. Murray is a comparativist sociologist at El Instituto Obregon, San Francisco. His

©2007 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol . 33, no. 1

As a comparativist sociologist who has culled records describing same-

it had already largely ceased.8 The yenicheri - the appellation garbled by

Ottoman Lyric Poetry

The learned are all enamored of boys,

When the rose [anus] holds carnival,

1 was beginning to wonder whether, aside from stereotyped European

attractive bathhouse attendant.23 Unlike other classical Muslim poets,

23. Silay, Nedim and the Poetics , pp. 101-2.

desires of the poet, those expressed in his poetry were comprehensible

Some Oddly Unsuspected Sites

Given the suspicions that Northern European Protestants, especially

29. Dervishes' "submissive/seductive stance is consistently interpreted [by those within

In contrast to these surprising gaps in looking for places where

Both boy and girl dancers were called by the same

dancing boys became extremely famous and were the cause of

In typological terms some have considered dancing boys to be an

38. Murray, Homosexualities, pp. 168-96.

Pages, and Yenicheri

Islam in 1 463, Bosnians "requested that their children should nevertheless

Although the ranks of nominal yenicheri increased considerably, the size of

were effective soldiers).48 There were 112,000 in 1805 and 135,000 by

the greatest part of the Janizaries consists of Bachelours, or single

cries as are made by the Relicts and Children of s

48. Ricaut, Ottoman Empire , p. 191.

52. Thornton, Turkey , p. 236.

were wives and children to support, and whatever wealth a soldier or

Eighteenth-century Ottoman functionaries were more uxorious than th

53. Porter, Turkey , p. 395.

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