The Statute, the Harem and the Regent Mother

Who was John Knox?

In 1558, the Scottish reformer John Knox published a tract: The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. His argument was that a woman ruling over men violated natural and divine order. Knox was not a crank shouting into the void. He was articulating a real strand of Reformation political theology, and he was writing when a run of women had ended up holding or wielding power across Europe: Mary I of England, Mary of Guise as regent of Scotland, Mary Stuart on the Scottish throne, Margaret of Parma governing the Netherlands, Jeanne d’Albret in Navarre and Isabella of Castile.

How did England legislate for the accession of Queen Mary?

Before Mary I took the English throne in 1553, there was no settled precedent for a reigning queen — the Empress Matilda’s twelfth-century claim had collapsed into civil war rather than a functioning queenship. Mary’s accession was enough of a constitutional novelty that Parliament had to pass an act called the Queen Regent’s Prerogative Act in 1554 declaring that a queen regnant held the same authority as a king. In full:

An Acte declaring that the Regall Power of this Realme is in the Quenes Majestie as fully and absolutely as ever it was in any of her moste noble Progenitours Kinges of this Realme.

That such a statement needed to be legislated shows how unresolved the question was. It was finally repealed in 1969 since there had been so many queens and it was no longer contested.

Elizabeth, Mary’s successor, only reached the throne at all because her half-brother, Edward, and half-sister, Mary, had died childless. Every single instance of female rule came from an accident of birth, and every instance enraged men like Knox.

How did sultanas Nurbanu and Safiye achieve power in the Ottoman Empire?

Seventeen hundred miles east, the Ottoman Empire was solving the same problem — how can women take power when the top job is closed to them — in a completely different way and without anyone writing a tract about it.

A woman could never become sultan. But by the second half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court had a fully institutionalized alternative route to power for women based on the harem.

Nurbanu, consort of Selim II, and later Safiye, consort of Murad III, both became haseki sultan — the mother of the sultan’s heir. They ranked above every other concubine and even above the sultan’s own sisters. As such, they wielded enormous power. This period, in which royal Ottoman women had so much influence over politics and succession, is what historians call the Sultanate of Women. The women had a route to power separate from the sultanate. It was a parallel structure with its own hierarchy and real authority.

Safiye’s route to that position was through the harem, not through birth into a noble family and marriage. She entered the court as a cariye — a harem slave-concubine, the standard entry point for women in the Ottoman system, since sultans by this point generally did not take formal wives. She was given to Murad while he was still a prince, and it was only the birth of a healthy son, the future Mehmed III, that elevated her to haseki once Murad became sultan in 1574. She held that position for his entire twenty-year reign, making her the most powerful woman at court but she gained it in the same way Elizabeth inherited the throne: chance, biology, and the line of survivors running out in her favor. See Peirce’s The Imperial Harem.

The difference is that in England, female power was legally normalized by necessity (the 1554 Act) but remained a point of contention. Knox was the loudest voice, not the only one. However, in the Ottoman system, since the haseki sultan had no formal office of power, Knox would not have objected. Female power flowing through the harem was part of the system.

How did Catherine de’ Medici achieve power and how did she use it?

Catherine de’ Medici in France was a different case: Salic law barred her from ever ruling in her own name, so she wielded enormous actual power for decades entirely through her sons, never through a title. She was married to Henry II of France but her power did not begin until his death in 1559 from a jousting wound. She was regent or the power behind the throne for three of her sons in succession: Francis II (very briefly), Charles IX where she held real regency power since he was only ten years old at succession, and Henry III (1574-1589) where she remained the dominant political power despite him being an adult.

Her informal power could be just as lethal as formal power. She was capable of extreme violence as demonstrated by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 even though her role is not completely clear. There are contested contemporary accounts and a certain amount of propagandizing to discredit her. She also had a group of female courtiers, sometimes called the ‘escadron volant’, who she used for intelligence-gathering and influence over powerful men at court. This was another example of unseen power-broking not unlike that of Nurbanu’s and Safiye’s harem-based influence network or the go-between role of Esperanza Malchi, who we will meet later in this essay.

She corresponded with Nurbanu, the predecessor of Safiye, so diplomacy between the harem and European courts was not confined to Elizabeth.

Summarize three approaches to female power in the Early Modern period

These were three different approaches to handling female power — English statute, Ottoman harem hierarchy and circumventing French Salic exclusion by wielding power from behind the scenes.

What was the connection between Elizabeth and Safiye?

Elizabeth and Safiye corresponded directly, and the record of that correspondence is remarkable.

Elizabeth sent Safiye a miniature portrait of herself, set in jewels. Safiye was delighted enough to have it hung on a wall in the harem. Muslim tradition prevented Safiye from sending a portrait of herself in return, so instead she sent a suit of princely attire in Turkish fashion — which means an Ottoman royal garment ended up on display at the English court.

On a separate occasion, Safiye received another portrait of Elizabeth in exchange for two garments of cloth of silver, a silver girdle, and two handkerchiefs worked in heavy gold thread. See “Three Letters from the Ottoman ‘Sultana’ Safiye to Queen Elizabeth I,” in Samuel M. Stern (ed.), Documents from Islamic Chanceries (Bruno Cassirer, Oxford (part of the Oriental Studies series), 1965).

This correspondence had to run through an intermediary, since Safiye could not write directly to a foreign man. Elizabeth’s court and the Ottomans lived in two completely different worlds. The go-between was Esperanza Malchi, a Jewish-Italian woman serving as Safiye’s kira, who liaised directly with the English ambassador. She was not senior but she could cross the boundary between the two worlds. Her name was better known to the English than the name of the chief eunuch in the Ottoman court. She was the conduit between two heads of state.

Ambassador Edward Barton advised Elizabeth that courting Safiye’s favor was the fastest route to the Sultan’s support. He was right. Better to find who is actually reachable but still close to the decision-making, rather than trying vainly to reach the person at the top. Symbolic gestures such as the gifts and correspondence helped to open and maintain a line of communication which otherwise might not have been there. The relationship-building gestures that cost little were effective in helping later negotiations.

The Ottoman women were more accessible than Murad or Mehmed, and Elizabeth’s government, already courting the Ottomans through male ambassadors, had a second channel running in parallel through the harem. Where Knox saw a woman’s proximity to power as something to be condemned, Barton saw it as a fact to be used.

How did England and the Ottomans work together?

The portraits, gifts and the go-between would not have mattered if there had not been a larger issue at stake. England and the Ottoman Empire had a common interest apart from womanhood and power. They had a shared adversary and a shared incentive to keep Habsburg Spain occupied and weakened. England was locked in an existential struggle with Spain, and the Ottomans were the one power positioned to threaten the Habsburgs from an entirely different direction. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, actively lobbied for direct Ottoman military involvement, and Elizabeth seriously discussed joint operations with Murad III once war broke out in 1585.

A formal military alliance never materialized — but even the possibility of an Ottoman front tied down Habsburg attention and resources the Spanish would otherwise have thrown at England directly.

Meanwhile the Ottomans were fighting their own expensive wars against the Safavids and, intermittently, Habsburg territories in the Mediterranean. An England that kept Spain distracted in the Atlantic cost the Ottomans nothing and helped them anyway.

The economic relationship was also mutually beneficial. England exported tin and lead — raw material for casting cannon — plus ammunition to the Ottomans, a trade that scandalized Catholic Europe because it meant arming a Muslim power against fellow Christians. It was also profitable, and it kept the Ottomans supplied. In exchange, the 1581 charter of the Levant Company gave English merchants formal access to Ottoman silk and spice markets that had previously run through Venetian and French middlemen.

And Constantinople was not a diplomatic backwater for Walsingham — it was one of his established intelligence hubs, on the same footing as his networks in Catholic Europe. By 1580 he not only had agents across French, German, Italian and Spanish cities but also posts in Algiers, Tripoli, and Constantinople, mixing authorized diplomats with ordinary citizens quietly embedded in foreign legations. See Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master (2007).

And the Levant Company’s commercial presence gave England a self-funding cover story for maintaining a permanent embassy that also happened to be an excellent listening post on Spanish, Venetian, and Habsburg movements in the Mediterranean. The English embassy did not only engage in diplomacy and intelligence gathering; it also directly advocated for action.

William Harborne, England’s first ambassador to the Ottoman court, acted on Walsingham’s instructions to try to push the Sultan toward attacking Spanish Mediterranean holdings — an attempt to pull Spanish attention away from the Atlantic ahead of the Armada. It did not work.

England and the Ottomans had little cultural or religious affinity but the alignment of interest brought them together.

What assessment can we make of the Elizabeth and Safiye connection?

It is tempting to close this on a note of triumph: two women, shut out of formal legitimacy by the men around them, built a channel of their own and helped tip a geopolitical struggle in their countries’ favor. There is some truth to this.

But the alliance never became a formal military partnership, and we should not overclaim causation between two women’s correspondence and the eventual outcome of the Anglo-Spanish conflict. The Ottoman Empire’s calculus toward Spain and the Habsburgs had its own independent logic — the Safavid wars, Mediterranean strategy, decades of multipolar maneuvering against Venice and France — that would have existed with or without a jeweled miniature hanging in the harem. It is better not to confuse a good narrative with cause and effect when ascribing success or failure to a venture.

The Elizabeth-Safiye relationship demonstrates that two political systems where men were traditionally predominant generated real channels of female influence, that those channels were legible enough to each other to be used diplomatically, and that at least one ambassador on the ground recognized this and exploited it deliberately. Knox thought female rule was an offense against nature. Barton just thought it was useful.