Inside the Seraglio
Author: John Freely
Publisher: Tauris Parke Paperbacks
Published: 2016-12-30
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781784535353
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOriginally published: London: Viking, 1999.
Posts
Inside the Seraglio
Author: John Freely
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 396
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume takes us behind the doors of Topkapi Sarayi and the other palaces of the Ottoman sultans who for more than six centuries ruled one of the world's most powerful empires. The heart of the palace was the Harem, the women's quarters, ruled by the Valide, or Queen Mother. Here the Sultan took his ease surrounded by his wives and concubines with their guardian black eunuchs, amused by his favourite pages, dwarfs and mutes, his younger brothers either slaughtered upon his accession or confined to the prison of the Cage. Earlier sultans like Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent lied in Topkapi Sarayi only between their campaigns of conquest, but their weak and dissolute successors such as Selim the Sot and Ibrahim the Mad spent their reigns entirely in the Harem, where some of them died of over-indulgence or were brutally murdered. such were the private lives of the Ottoman sultans in the pleasure dome known as the House of Felicity.
The Steel Seraglio
Author: Mike Carey
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2021-03-02
Total Pages: 482
ISBN-13: 1504065484
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“A confident One Thousand and One Nights for our present . . . Furious pop entertainment—full of sex, passion, violence, and magic.” —Slant magazine This is the story of the legendary City of Women, told through the tales of those who founded it, championed it, and made it flourish. When the city of Bessa undergoes a violent coup, its lazy, laissez-faire ruler, Bokhari Al-Bokhari, is replaced by the religious zealot Hakkim Mehdad. With little use for the pleasures of the flesh, Hakkim sends his predecessor’s 365 concubines to a neighboring sultan as a gift. But when the new sultan discovers the concubines are harboring Al-Bokhari’s youngest son—a child who might grow up to challenge his rule—he repents of his mercy and sends his soldiers to slaughter the seraglio down to the last woman and child. What he doesn’t count on is a concubine trained in the art of murder—or the courage and fortitude of the women who will rise up with her to forge their own city out of the unforgiving desert. It’s an undertaking beset with challenges: hunger and thirst, Hakkim’s relentless hate, and the struggle to make a place for themselves in a world determined to underestimate and undermine them. Through a mosaic of voices and tales, we learn of the women’s miraculous rise, their time of prosperity—and how they carried with them the seed of their own destruction. “A thrilling tale.” —Publishers Weekly “A masterful, engaging and utterly fascinating story by three wonderful writers.” —SFRevu.com “The Steel Seraglio brings its alternate world of struggle, politics and magic very much to life.” —Locus
Seraglio
Author: Janet Wallach
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9780385490467
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTransporting readers to the menacing yet majestic world of eighteenth-century Turkey, biographer and Middle East expert Janet Wallach brilliantly re-imagines the life of Aimee Dubucq, cousin of Empress Josephine, in her first novel "Seraglio. At the age of thirteen, when en route from France to her home in Martinique, Aimee Dubucq is kidnapped by Algerian pirates. Blonde and blue-eyed, the genteel young girl is a valuable commodity, and she is soon placed in service in the Seraglio - the Ottoman Sultan's private world - in Topkapi Palace. As Dubucq, renamed Nakshidil ("embroidered on the heart") discovers the erotic secrets that win favor of kings and deftly learns the affairs of the empire, she struggles to retain her former identity, including her Catholic faith. Overtime Nakshidil becomes the intimate of several powerful sultans: wife to one, lover and confidante to another, and adoptive mother to a third. Her life often treads the tenuous line between sumptuous pleasures and mere survival until her final years when she is awarded control of the harem as the valide, mother of the Sultan. With phenomenal research and a mesmerizing voice, Janet Wallach provides a powerful and passionate glimpse of East-West history through one woman's distinctly European eyes.
The Singing Turk
Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-08-30
Total Pages: 505
ISBN-13: 0804799652
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhile European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.
Sultan's Court
Author: Alain Grosrichard
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1998-08-17
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9781859841228
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA survey of Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot's court - the seraglio - with its viziers, dwarfs, mutes, eunuchs and countless wives.
Pawn in Frankincense
Author: Dorothy Dunnett
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-08-11
Total Pages: 679
ISBN-13: 030776236X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this fourth book in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Francis Crawford of Lymond desperately searches the Ottoman empire for his kidnapped child. Somewhere within the bejeweled labyrinth of the Ottoman empire, a child is hidden. Now his father, Francis Crawford of Lymond, soldier of fortune and the exiled heir of Scottish nobility, is searching for him while ostensibly engaged on a mission to the Turkish Sultan. At stake is the political order of three continents, for Lymond's child is a pawn in a cutthroat game whose gambits include treason, enslavement, and murder. In that game's final move, which is played inside the harem of the Topkapi palace, Lymond will come face to face with his most implacable enemy and the dreadful ambiguities of his own nature. With a Foreword by the author.
The Sultan's Seraglio
Author: Ottaviano Bon
Publisher:
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"From 1604 to 1607, Ottaviano Bon was the Venetian representative to Istanbul where he recorded every aspect of life at the Topkapi Palace. The result was published under the title, "The Sultan's Seraglio", and it provides an account of the period of Ahmet I. It covers such topics as: life in the harem; the exchange of gifts between Turkish and Western dignitaries; the menu at official state banquets; the buying of slaves in the weekly slave market; and the great religious festivals and circumcision ceremonies. All the various Ottoman hierarchy are described in great detail, including the viziers, the aghas and the "itchoglans", as also are the mutes and the clowns who were the Sultan's constant companions and accompanied him on boat trips down the Bosphorus to his palaces and gardens."--bookdepository.
Topkapi Palace
Author: Godfrey Goodwin
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA guide to the palace of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul, it takes the reader through all the rooms and gardens which are open to the public - and some that are not. It talks about the thousands who lived in the saray. It gives an understanding of this core of Ottoman life.
Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul
Author: John Freely
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-11-16
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780521179058
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is about the Byzantine monuments of Istanbul, most notably, Haghia Sophia. The remains of the land and sea walls, the Hippodrome, imperial palaces, commemorative columns, reservoirs and cisterns, an aqueduct, a triumphal archway, a fortified port, and twenty churches are also described in chronological order in the context of their times. These "monuments" are viewed in relationship to the political, religious, social, economic, intellectual and artistic developments of the Byzantine dynasties.
