Sultanate of Women

This was the age of Ottoman expansion where most sultans elected to "lead from the horse", moving around with a court of advisors, viziers, and religious leaders as the army conquered new lands.

[3][page needed] Ottoman policy from the fifteenth century onwards was to send young princes and their mothers to provincial governorships in Trabzon, Manisa and Amasya in Anatolia.

During the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, it became clear that the expansion of the empire had reached its limit, with borders stretching thousands of miles in nearly every direction.

[1] The most prominent of these was the Haseki Sultan Complex in Istanbul, built in the 1530s, which included a women's medical centre, a school, a mosque, and a soup kitchen for feeding the poor.

As the daughter of Murad III was about to be married to a prominent admiral, she gave newly minted coins to all the onlookers, some making off with a whole skirt-full of wealth.

[3][page needed] The most enduring accomplishments of many of the wives and mothers of the sultans were their large public works projects, usually in the form of mosques, schools and monuments.

While the creation of public works was always an obligation of the sultanate, sultanas such as Süleyman's mother and consort undertook projects that were larger and more lavish than any woman before them - and most men as well.

Historians credit her with persuading him to spare the life of his younger half-brother (who eventually became Mustafa I), thus putting an end to the centuries-old practice of fratricide in the Ottoman Empire.

When her son Mehmed IV returned from a successful military campaign, Turhan arranged a royal procession to retrace his warpath, and share in the glory of his victory.

In 1640, a Venetian ambassador tried to send a letter to the valide through the grand vizier who refused to transmit it, claiming that she was a mere slave without power of her own.

Many contemporary foreign ambassadors reported that those wanting to do business with the Ottoman Empire needed to approach the sultan's mother before anyone else.