The Ladies of Istanbul

I entered the original version of this paper in the novice division in the 2018 St. Eligius Arts & Sciences Competition.

In 16^th-century Istanbul, names followed religion. Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, and Jews each had their own name pools, with very little crossover even between branches of Christianity¹ The pool of Muslim female names was further divided into names borne by free women and names borne by current or former slaves.² However, women’s near-total absence from public life makes female names difficult to gather, let alone to collect in numbers great enough to allow any sort of meaningful analysis.

The pleasant exception is shari’a court records. These volumes are the richest primary sources available for the lives of ordinary people in the Ottoman empire. They contain everything: debt collections, real estate sales, inventories of deceased people’s households, records of the manumission of faithful slaves and the hunt for escaped slaves, accusations of drunkenness, petty theft, and immoral hijinks, ugly divorces, and even the occasional murder mystery. And all of it is awash in names.³

From five 16^th-century volumes of court records from the greater Istanbul area, I extracted the names of 872 individual women, including 538 freeborn women, 166 female slaves, and 168 female converts whose legal status could not be determined (Appendix 1). Then, by supplementing cues in the records with frequency analysis (Appendix 2), I separated the names into freeborn and slave names. My goal was to add to the body of names available for women who want to play late-period Ottoman Turkish personas, and to increase our appreciation of the richness of the Ottoman Turkish name pool.

Freeborn, Convert, Slave

Upon conversion to Islam every convert, free or slave, received a new name: a suitably Muslim personal name, plus, to symbolize the convert’s break with his or her infidel past, bin (son of, abbreviated b.) or bint (daughter of, abbreviated bt.) Abdullah in place of his or her birth father’s name.⁴ Freeborn converts were given names like Mehmed, Ali, Ayşe, and Fâtıma, plain, solid names that evoked important Islamic figures and let their new bearers blend into the crowd. Most male slaves and a few female slaves received the same type of plain names.⁵ The rest of the slaves, well…

Canhabib, soul’s beloved
Zamâne, thirsting, longing
Mahıdevran, moon of fortune
Gülendam, whose body is as beautiful as a rose
Âbıkevser, the waters of the river of Paradise

…Their owners got fancy.

Slave names are exotic and unquestionably Middle Eastern, without the 20^th-century familiarity of common 16^th-century names like Ayşe (Ar. Aisha), Fâtıma, and Hatice (Ar. Khadija). They’re catnip to SCAdians. Many people don’t care about the details, and will happily pick a pretty name regardless of the period connotations; but for the purists, and for the completist in my soul, I worked to divide the results of my data collection into slave and free names.

However, picking slave-specific names out of the list wasn’t as easy as tagging every name of a lyrical bent. Şeyh Mehmed Çelebi, an eminent late 15^th-century dervish, named his three daughters Şehribanu, Cihanbaht, and Ruzbaht, all Persian confections worthy of a poet: Lady of the Sun, The World’s Fortune, The Day’s Fortune.⁶ When such impeccably respectable women bore lyrical names, the question becomes, which lyrical names were given to slaves?

To resolve this question I went woman by woman, tagging each as slave or free. Women with a patronymic other than Abdullah were freeborn by definition. So were women whose circumstances indicated that they were freeborn—for example, a convert whose father and adult son were both local Greek Christians. Documents like manumissions and bills of sale clearly marked women as slaves. Freed slaves could also be detected in entries establishing charitable foundations (vakf) for a person’s heirs; a clump of b. and bt. Abdullahs among the recipients indicated former slaves who were provided for alongside the family members.

What was left over was a collection of women who were clearly converts, but whose circumstances didn’t indicate whether they were freeborn or freed. I tagged these women as ambiguous, and compared the number of freeborn, slave, and ambiguous women who bore each name. The result was a list of names divided into clearly free, clearly slave, and likely slave names, as well as a handful of ambiguous names that need further research.

Types of Names

The name pool was heavily Arabic and Persian, with a handful of Turkish names and name elements mixed in, but no other perceptible influences.⁷ Although the variety of name types defy easy categorization, several groups stand out.

Arabic Religious Names

A parent’s first go-to was the name of a woman in Muhammad’s family: Fâtıma, his youngest and most beloved daughter; Ayşe (Arabic Aisha), his favorite wife; Emine (Ar. Amina), his mother; Hatice (Ar. Khadija), his first wife and the mother of his children. Those four names alone accounted for a quarter of the sample. Fâtıma and Ayşe vastly outstrip the third-place name, Emine, with 80, 79, and 48 instances, respectively. Other members of Muhammad’s family are also represented, including his daughters Ümmügulsum (Ar. Umm Kulthum) and Rukiye (Ar. Ruqayyah).

Other types of religious names include:

• Names of Quranic verses: Kamer (Ar. Qamar, “The Moon”), Nisa (“The Women”)
• Women from the Quran: Belkıs, the Queen of Sheba; Meryem, Jesus’s mother; Züleyha (Ar. Zulaikha), Potiphar’s wife
• Direct references to Islam: Müslime (Muslim), Teslime (surrendered), Medine (Medina)

Traditional Arabic virtue names also make a respectable showing, including such names as Cemile (Ar. Jamila, “beautiful”), Rahime (Ar. rahim, “merciful”), and Habibe (Ar. habib, “beloved”).

Persian Names

As the language of poetry, mysticism, and high culture, Persian had a romantic allure for the Ottoman Turks. They adopted names from Persian literature, like Şirin, the heroine of the 12^th-century epic Khosrow and Shirin. They also adopted Persian words, especially ones from poetry, like Mihri, Hurşid, and Âfitâb, which all mean “sun.” But the height of elegance was compound names: Çeşmisiyâh, “dark eyes”; Lâlezâr, “field of tulips”; Ferahşad, “bringing joy”; Dilşad, “happy heart.” Although both freeborn and slave women bore compound Persian names, the more flowery creations were strongly associated with slaves.

Rulership

The Ottomans combined the titles şah, paşa, han (khan, the period term for the Sultan), banu (lady), and even bey to create names that roughly translate as “She who rules ___” or “Lady of ____”: Durpaşa, lady of pearls; Gulpaşa; lady of roses; Kamerşah, lady of the moon; Cihan Banu, she who rules the heavens. But these are all surpassed by Hatun Paşa, Kadinpaşa, Kadinşah, and Şahnisa, all of which mean “she who rules over all the ladies.”⁸ It makes the common name Sitti, “lady,” look positively humble.

Roses

The Ottomans had fields of rose names: Gülruh (rose-cheeked), Gülbahar (spring rose), Gülaçmaz (the rose that cannot be opened), Gülendam (whose body is as beautiful as a rose), Gülşah (lady of roses), Gülşan and Gülizar and Gülistan (rose garden). Although most flower names were powerfully associated with slaves, the Ottomans loved roses so much, so deeply, that they gave rose names even to freeborn women.

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1. Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Romaniot Jews also had distinctive names, but I cannot say how much interchange there was between groups.
2. The tradition of reserving certain names for female slaves was already well established in the Middle East at the time of the founding of Islam. (Dirbas, p. 4) Although I have not researched far enough afield to establish a direct line of transmission from 7^th-century Mecca to 16^th-century Istanbul, the Ottoman Turkish institution of slavery was thoroughly shaped by Islam, making it extremely likely that the Ottoman slave naming tradition was also Islamic.
3. Male names, mostly. In one sample volume, there are 6,121 instances of b. (bin, “son of”) to 214 instances of bt. (bint, “daughter of”). The imbalance explains why I had to mine five volumes of court records to get a large enough data sample.
4. Why Abdullah? I have yet to discover an explanation. It may be because of the name’s peculiarly apropos meaning—“slave of God”—or because Abdullah was Muhammed’s father’s name.
5. Sobers-Khan, pp. 225-233
6. Yazar, p. 1034
7. The percentage of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish names varied by region. Turkish was seen as a low, common language, so Turkish names were out of favor in wealthy, cosmopolitan Istanbul. (Though not so out of favor that a string of sultans bore the quintessentially Turkish name Murad.) Turkish names were more common in the rest of Anatolia, especially among the common folk. Arabic names were common everywhere because of the influence of Islam.
8. Plus their little sister Kizlarbeyi, “she who rules over the girls.”