#all 3 were disappointed in quali therefore i am sad

[princelancey]

Fuck baku all my homies hate baku

[ottomanladies]

Review: Kösem Sultan (İktidar Hırs ve Entrika) by Özlem Kumrular

my Goodreads rating: ★★☆☆☆ Positive parts: the extensive bibliography which made me discover more books that I now want to read Negative parts: her way of presenting information, the almost total absence of historiography reasoning and if present its weakness, the lack of more information in the notes section.

I am often asked what I think about this book, so I have finally picked it up. I'll admit I have not read it all: I have skipped paragraphs or even whole pages. I did not read chapter 3, “Valide Sultan in the Old Palace: Mustafa I, Osman II and again the reign of Mustafa I”, because I have read in a review that it is not really about Kösem... and I was not interested.

I must say I am very disappointed. I don’t know if I had high standards or what, but it really wasn’t what I expected. I thought it was academia but it may have actually been popular history. I hope it’s popular history at this point, because it doesn’t seem like academia at all. Information is just presented like that, there are no explanations about how the author reached her conclusions-- which is something that I love reading about in historiography books, as someone who wants to do this job.

On the other hand, I deeply appreciated the research she did for this book: she drew from Spanish, Turkish and Italian archives, and books in english are listed in the bibliography as well. I particularly liked that she used Pedani as one of her sources in harem matters, it made me very happy as an Italian. Unfortunately, she did not transcribe the quotes she got from ambassadorial reports; this doesn’t allow you to check her translation, which is something that is very dear to me. 

[very long rambling ahead-- I am so sorry]

As for her more unconventional claims: that Ahmed I had married Kösem and that şehzades Selim and Orhan were two of Kösem’s children, I was not satisfied with her reasoning. Her claims rest on a letter that - apparently - was sent to Venice on Kösem’s orders when Murad IV ascended the throne; it was found in the archives of Venice and it was in Ottoman Turkish. Kumrular included a translation in Latin Alphabet in her book of the important passages. [you can look at it here: x]:

“His generous mother Kösem, for the dead Sultan Ahmed, whom Allah took with him, was a very important person and the Sultan loved her so much that he honoured her by marrying her. In addition to the ruling sultan, she has two younger sons named Sultan Selim and Sultan Orhan.”

Now, Kumrular claims that the prince Selim who was born in 1611 to Ahmed was the son of another concubine, and that this is another Prince Selim. She explains the absence of Kasim and Ibrahim (who were clearly very much alive) saying that Venice probably already knew that they existed... it’s a little weird. Historian Erhan Afyoncu says that Selim and Orhan may have been Kasim and Ibrahim’s other names, but Kumrular answers this by saying that no source mentions that they had more than one name. Which is true but I remembered when I read some Venetian ambassadorial reports back in November, and Giovanni Cappello in 1634 clearly calls Murad IV’s younger brother “Orcan”:

“Tiene Sua Maestà due figliuoli nell'infanzia, d'incerta riuscita. Ha due fratelli, li quali, non ostante l'uso contrario della morte nell'assunzione degli Imperatori, vivono tuttavia; il maggiore di nome Orcan è in età di anni 19 con concetto di buon talento. Il Re sovente seco tratta con umanità, permettendogli la barba, privilegio riserbato alla sola persona del Re in serraglio...”  “His Majesty has two sons in infancy, uncertain in survival. He has two brothers who - contrary to the tradition of putting them to death on the emperors’ ascension - nevertheless live; the eldest named Orcan is 19 years old with a good intellect. The King often treats him with kindness, allowing him to grow a beard, a privilege reserved to the only person of the King in the Serraglio...”

At the time I thought that it was a simple mistake of Cappello’s, who misunderstood “Kasim” (I mean, Mihrimah was called Cameria in Italy so everything is possible at this point), but maybe he did not and he was right? Maybe Kasim was truly called Orhan Kasim or Kasim Orhan? Cappello says that in 1634 he was 19 years old, which means that he was born in 1615-- a date often attributed to Kasim’s birth. 

While he mistakes Orcan for the eldest of Murad IV’s brothers (Bayezid was in fact the eldest, being born only a couple of months after Murad IV), we cannot simply distrust his whole testimony. 

It is sad that Kumrular did not read this relazione (or did not find it useful to her book) because I would have liked to see her conclusions. 

About Kösem’s marriage, her reasoning is... pretty weak, in my opinion: she first says that the letter must have been written on Kösem’s orders, who knew that official wives had a great importance in Europe so she could have said that just to enhance her status.... but then says that it is unlikely that she outright lied in a state document:

“It is obvious that Kösem, in front of a country as important as Venice, wanted to mark the legality of her position. Emphasizing that she is the wife of the deceased ruler and the praises directed at her were aimed at raising her relationship with the Venetian state, gaining respect for her and therefore listening to her words.” 

To be honest, the claim that Venetians would have looked down a non-married consort is out of the world; they had entertained relations with the Ottomans for two centuries at that point and they very much knew that Ottoman sultans did not frequently get married. 

Moreover, there is no proof that this letter was sanctioned by Kösem herself. It was written by one Mustafa çavuş in 1624 (dated by Pedani), who says that it is the second time he is sent to Venice as an Ottoman emissary. It is certainly strange that in it he claims that Murad IV is fifteen years old, which he definitely was not. At the end of the letter he says that the rest will be included in the letters penned by the Sultan and the Grand Vizier. Unfortunately, either these letters did not surive or Kumrular did not read them... she did not explain it in the book. 

In any case, she attributes mistakes to the person who actually wrote the letter (high-ranking women dictated their letters) which is... rather convenient, I guess.

The rest of the book is just a narration of Kösem’s life. There is so much she doesn’t look at in depth and at the end of every section I was not satisfied with the amount of information given. There was always something lacking, I felt like there was more she could have said but for some reason didn’t. 

The book is 336 pages long and at the end you’re left with only the surface of Kösem’s life. It was more like reading an - admittedly long - Wikipedia article than a biography. 

Unfortunately this book was not very reviewed by her peers, which is a shame. I could only find one review, by Hüseyin Çalış (who is apparently a member of the Izmir Katip Celebi University), who says that the book sometimes seems like a novel and that there are deficiencies in it but that all in all is a good contribution to Ottoman historiography, considered that it was written in just one year.

I am not sure I agree with his positive view of this book. I didn’t feel satisfied when each topic was over, it felt like she was just listing events happening - most of them not about Kösem - with no reasoning behind. I am also disappointed that the notes section is very poor of information; she did not add anything in it except the titles of the books she had drawn her info from-- often they were books which contradicted her own claims but she did not explain that. 

The bibliography part was very rich, though, and this is what I most appreciated about this book. I have written down a couple of books I want to read, among them: Murat Kocaaslan - Kösem Sultan. Hayatı, vakıfları, hayır işleri ve Üsküdar’daki külliyesi, which I think may be better than this book altogether. I had the chance of reading a chapter of his book about Mehmed IV and it’s more academia than Kumrular’s: better written, better researched, better noted as well. 

In conclusion (I am so sorry this got way too long, I was supposed to write just a couple of things about this book), maybe it’s my fault but it truly was not what I thought it would be and I am not sure I will buy her book about Nurbanu and Safiye after all. I personally prefer pure academia compared to... whatever this was (half and half? who knows)

If you can’t stand academia, though, and want something... lighter? maybe this book will be for you. It certainly looked like popular history sometimes.