The Sultanate of Women lasted over 130 years filled with blood, gold, ambition, and women powerful enough to shape empires from behind palace walls. And when that era finally came to an end, it ended with Turhan Sultan, the last of the great Valide Sultans and the woman who made sure she was the last thing Kosem Sultan ever saw coming.
She was believed to be originally from Russia or Ukraine. Historians have never fully settled the question. Some accounts say her name before all of this was Nadia. When she was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped during a Crimean Tatar raid and sold into the Ottoman slave trade. Passed through the slave markets of Crimea, she eventually arrived in Constantinople in the household of Atike Sultan, daughter of Sultan Ahmed I, and sister of Sultan Ibrahim.
Atike oversaw her education, palace customs, music, court rituals, the careful discipline expected inside the Imperial Harem. And when the time came, she presented the girl to Kosem Sultan. Kosem personally raised her for a purpose, to one day become the mother of a future Sultan. She taught her not just the workings of the Harem, but the politics of the empire itself.
How power moved, who held it, how to keep it. Most historians agree it was Kosem who gave her a new name. She called her Turhan, meaning noble or heroic. Kosem taught her how to survive the Ottoman court. Turhan learned well enough to survive Kosem herself. Kosem Sultan gave Turhan an education, not just music and poetry and the rituals of court life.
What Kösem gave her was a front-row education and how power actually worked inside the Ottoman palace. Who controlled appointments, how the soldiers were managed, why certain officials stayed loyal, and what it cost when they didn’t. Turhan watched it all for years. Historians later described her as Kösem’s shadow, that people in the harem were as afraid of Turhan as they were of Kösem herself.
She was sent to Sultan Ibrahim I, a man who had spent most of his youth locked inside the palace under what the Ottomans called the kafes, the cage, a set of rooms where princes were confined to stop them from seizing power before their time. Ibrahim had been in there for years. The isolation had left marks on him that never went away.
He was now the Sultan and Turhan was one of his concubines. In January 1642, she gave birth to a son. His name was Mehmed. The birth was celebrated across Constantinople, not because of Turhan, because the Ottoman dynasty had been on the edge of dying out. Mehmed was the first healthy male heir in a long time.
The city lit up for him. Turhan was ahead of another concubine, Saliha Dilaşub, who gave birth to a son of her own 3 months later. The race to produce an heir was exactly that, a race. Kösem had pushed all of the concubines into it, apparently going as far as ordering amulets written and potions prepared. Turhan won.
And because she won, she became Baş Haseki, chief consort, on paper. The title meant almost nothing in practice. Ibrahim was not a man who loved one woman. He was a man who, by most accounts, loved any woman who was new. Ibrahim ignored Turhan for most of his reign. He had favorites, he had obsessions, he had moments that made the senior officials of the empire quietly consider what the alternative might look like.
One of those moments involved a wet nurse. A woman had come into the harem to nurse baby Mehmed. Ibrahim became deeply captivated by her. He favored her and her child, a boy who was not even his, over his own concubine and his own son, while Mehmed, his actual heir, the one the empire had celebrated, was pushed aside.
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Turhan confronted him about it. Ibrahim’s response was to grab Mehmed out of her arms and throw the baby into a marble pool. Servants pulled the child out. He survived, but carried a scar on his forehead for the rest of his life. That scar was Ibrahim’s legacy as a father. The following years were not easier.
Ibrahim’s behavior became more and more erratic. He issued orders that made no sense. He surrounded himself with people who flattered him rather than advised him. Even Kösem, who had fought to keep him on the throne, eventually lost patience. By 1648, the Janissaries and senior statesmen had agreed Ibrahim had to go.
He was removed from power on August 8th, 1648. A few days later, he was strangled. Mehmed IV was 6 years old. He was now the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Turhan, who had spent years ignored and humiliated, she was supposed to be next. The title was hers by every law the empire had. By every Ottoman tradition and every legal precedent, the position of Valide Sultan, the Sultan’s mother, belonged to Turhan.
Kösem argued that she was too young, too inexperienced, that a child on the throne needed a regent who had actually done this before. Kösem had governed this empire twice already. She knew every official, every debt, every name in the Janissary Corps. She was not wrong about her own qualifications. The court agreed with her.
Kösem was reinstated as regent. She took the title Büyük Valide, the great grandmother, and she ran the empire. Turhan was set aside. She was 21 years old. Her son was Sultan, and another woman was governing in his name. She did not make a scene. She did not fight it in the open. She started building.
The chief black eunuch of the harem, known as Uzun Süleyman Ağa, aligned himself with her. Certain officials in the Grand Vizier’s circle did the same, quietly, patiently. She had learned from Kösem what patience looked like as a political strategy. Now she used it. By 1651, the court had split. Officials chose sides.
Janissary officers read the room and placed their bets. And then a piece of information reached Turhan that changed everything. Kösem, her people said, was planning to remove Mehmed from the throne, to replace him with another prince, one with a less ambitious mother, one who could be controlled. One of Kösem’s own slaves, a woman named Meleki Hatun, was the one who told Turhan.
Turhan moved. The mufti issued a legal ruling. A death warrant was signed, September 2nd, 1651. Kösem Sultan was murdered 3 years after becoming regent for Mehmed. Turhan was now the Valide Sultan. She was 24 years old, and she had just become the regent of the Ottoman Empire. What she inherited was not a stable throne.
The war with Venice over the island of Crete had been going since 1645 and had drained the treasury steadily for years. The empire cycled through grand viziers at a pace that made real administration nearly impossible. Seven men in eight years. She governed anyway. She wrote letters. 164 of them survive today in the Topkapi Palace archives.
Letters to grand viziers about troop salaries, about shipyard operations, about the pace of the Cretan campaign. She checked whether soldiers had been paid. She checked whether the navy was ready. She ran an intelligence network that tracked events across the empire. She was young and she knew it, so she consulted the ministers rather than overriding them, which Kosem had rarely done.
The style was different. The results were real. But in 1656, it caught up with her. The Janissaries and the cavalry hadn’t received their full pay. What they had received came in debased coins worth less than the face value suggested. It was not the first time this had happened. It was the time when patience ran out.
The revolt that followed was not random. It targeted Turhan specifically. Her allies in the government, the harem officials close to her. They displayed the bodies of those they killed on the plane trees in Sultanahmet Square. That’s why the event is remembered as the Chinar incident, the plane tree event. When it ended, her absolute regency was over.
She was still Mehmed’s mother. Nobody could change that, but the terms had shifted. She needed a grand vizier who could actually fix things. The empire was unstable, the treasury was damaged, and the Cretan War needed a military mind, not a palace politician. She found Köprülü Mehmed Pasha. He was in his 70s.
He was blunt in a way that was almost unusual for the Ottoman court. He told Turhan before he would accept the appointment that he needed something none of his predecessors had been given, complete authority. No palace interference, no reversed decisions, no appointments made without him. She said yes. Kösem had governed by keeping the grand vizier weak, by making sure no single official ever became powerful enough to challenge her.
Turhan did the opposite. She handed a man real authority and stepped back. What she gave away in day-to-day control, she kept in something harder to measure, stability. Her son stayed on the throne, the empire stopped falling apart. The Köprülü era, as historians now call it, produced the most effective Ottoman administration of the entire 17th century.
Military campaigns worked again, the finances stabilized. After the Köprülü appointment, Turhan turned to something else. There was a mosque in Eminönü, the Yeni Cami, the New Mosque, that had been started by Safiye Sultan, another Valide Sultan, back in 1597. Safiye had fallen from power when her son died, and the construction had simply stopped.
Abandoned, an unfinished skeleton sitting on the Istanbul waterfront for over 50 years. Turhan completed it. In 1665, after a fire in 1660 had devastated the surrounding area and given her the reason to restart construction, the mosque opened. She attended the first prayer herself. To finish what a fallen woman had left behind was not just a charitable act, it was a statement.
The complex she built around the mosque included a market, a school, public fountains, and a mausoleum. That mausoleum is where she is buried. The Spice Bazaar that Istanbul tourists walk through today, that was part of her complex. In 1658, she commissioned two fortresses at the entrance to the Dardanelles, Seddülbahir on the European shore, Kumkale on the Asian side.
The Cretan War made the defense of those straits urgent. The fortresses answered the threat. They are still standing. She built fountains, schools, wells in Hijaz, a library in Çanakkale. Architecture for an Ottoman woman who could not appear in public was visibility. It was the only way to write your name somewhere people could actually see it. She understood that.
She wrote her name everywhere she could. In 1672, Mehmed the Fourth led his army toward Poland. Turhan went with him. The Ottoman army marched through the borderlands of what is now Ukraine, through the same territories where about 45 years earlier Crimean Tatar raiders had swept through a village and taken a 12-year-old girl away from her family.
The historian Halime Doğru wrote that Turhan, during this campaign, visited the lands where she was born, that she breathed the air of her homeland, that she perhaps met with her family. Perhaps. The record is gentle with that word. She had a brother. His name was Yusuf Ağa.
He died in 1689, six years after she did. That much the record confirms. She had someone left from before. What it meant to return to the place she had been taken from as the most powerful woman in the empire that had once claimed her was never recorded. But she was there, traveling beside a sultan who would never have existed without her.
She died on August 4th, 1683. She was 55 or 56 years old. She was in Edirne when it happened, and her body was brought back to Constantinople and placed in the mausoleum she had built for herself beside the Yeni Cami. She had been Valide Sultan for 32 years, the longest of any woman in the Sultanate of Women.
After her, no woman ever held the title of regent of the Ottoman Empire again. The Köprülü reforms had already moved power away from the palace. The era she represented was finished. Taken into the Ottoman palace as a child, Turhan Sultan rose to become the final great regent of the empire. She governed during one of the most unstable periods in Ottoman history, helped restore stability to the state, and left behind monuments that still define Istanbul centuries later.
Today, she remains one of the most influential women of the Ottoman world. If this held your attention, please consider subscribing.
