Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition

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Kösem Wālide or Kösem Sulṭān

(1,316 words)

Author(s): Baysun, M. Cavid
, called Māhpaykar ( ca. 1589-1651), wife of the Ottoman sultan Aḥmad I and mother of the sultans Murād IV and Ibrāhīm I [ q.vv.]. She was Greek by birth, and achieved power in the first place through the harem, exercising a decisive influence in the state during the reigns of her two sons and of her grandson Meḥemmed IV. The views put forward concerning her origin and her first name—Nasya being derived from Anastasia (Aḥmed Refīḳ, Ḳadi̊nlar salṭanati̊ , Istanbul 1332, 47-8, deriving information from Guer, Mœurs et usages des Turcs , Paris 1747, ii, 474, see also Pétis de la Croix, Abrégé chronol…

Māhpaykar

(5 words)

[see kösem ].

Ṭurk̲h̲ān Sulṭān

(337 words)

Author(s): Woodhead, Christine
, Ṭurk̲h̲ān K̲h̲ādid̲j̲e Sulṭān ( ca. 1626-83), mother of the Ottoman sultan Meḥemmed IV [ q.v.]. Ṭurk̲h̲ān Sulṭān entered the Ottoman imperial harem as a slave of the wālide sulṭān Kösem Sulṭān [ q.v.], mother of Murād IV (1623-40) and Ibrāhīm (1640-8) [ q.vv.]. Nothing is known of her background, except that she had a brother, Yūsuf Ag̲h̲a, who died in Istanbul in 1100/1689. She gave birth to sultan Ibrāhīm’s eldest son Meḥemmed in 1641; there may also have been a daughter, Fāṭima Sulṭān, 1642-57. On Ibrāhīm’s deposition in 1648 and he…

Wālide Sulṭān

(1,719 words)

Author(s): Aksan, Virginia H.
(a.), Turkish pronunciation vālide or valde sulṭān , a term meaning “mother sultana”, or “queen mother”. It was used in the Ottoman Empire to refer to the mother of the reigning sultan, and only for the duration of the son’s reign. The history of the position and its occupants, like a great deal of the history of the ḥarīm [ q.v.] and its ¶ influence on the dynastic politics of the Ottomans, is couched in myth and exoticism, and much of its early development is completely obscured. The interference of the royal women in politics, a fact which most Ottoman c…

Ḳāsim Ag̲h̲a

(486 words)

Author(s): Parmaksizoǧlu, İsmet
, b.? 978/1570 architect-in-chief at the Ottoman court. His proper name was Meḥmed Ḳāsim but he was known as Ḳod̲j̲a. He was born in a village between Awlonya (Valona) and Berat (Byelograd) in Albania (Ewliyā Čelebi, Seyāḥatnāme , viii, 695). Collected through the devs̲h̲irme and brought to the Imperial Palace, he was accepted in the courts of gardeners of the Imperial Household ( k̲h̲āṣṣ-bāg̲h̲če g̲h̲ulāmi̊ ) where he grew up. During the great promotion ( Či̊ḳma ) which took place at Meḥemmed III’s accession to the throne, he was made an apprentice with the court architects (Zarif Orgun, Ha…

Ḳāsim

(490 words)

Author(s): Mantran, R.
, the name of several Ottoman princes. 1. ḳāsim , son of the second ruler of the Ottoman dynasty, Ork̲h̲ān. All that is known of him is that he died in 748/1347. 2. ḳāsim čelebi or Ḳāsim Yūsuf, one of the seven sons of Bāyezīd I, b. 792/1390. Since he was too young to take part in the battle of Ankara (1402), he remained at Bursa. After the defeat and capture of his father there began a struggle for power amongst his elder sons, Sulaymān, ʿĪsā, Muḥammad and then Mūsā. When Sulaymān retreated towards the Ott…

Meḥemmed IV

(1,147 words)

Author(s): Kramers, J.H.
, nineteenth sultan of the Ottoman dynasty in Turkey, known as awd̲j̲i̊ "the hunter" from his excessive passion for the chase, reigned 1058-99/1648-87. Born on 30 Ramadan 1051/2 January 1642, he was the son of Sultan Ibrāhīm [ q.v.] and Ḵh̲adīd̲j̲a Turk̲h̲ān Sulṭān. He was placed on the throne in Istanbul at the age of seven after the deposition in 18 Rad̲j̲ab 1058/8 August 1648 of the sensualist and possibly mentally deranged “Deli” Ibrāhīm, at a moment when Ibrāhīm was the sole surviving adult male of the house of ʿOt̲h̲mān, but i…

Kenʿān Pas̲h̲a

(718 words)

Author(s): Babinger, Fr. | Göyünç, Nejat
, also nicknamed Ṣari̊ (“pale-faced”) and Ṭopal (“Lame”), High Admiral ( Ḳapudān Pas̲h̲a , [ q.v.]) under the Ottoman Sultan Meḥemmed IV, d. 1069/1659. He originated from the northeastern shores of the Black Sea (Russian or Circassian?) and came as a slave into the service of Baḳi̊rd̲j̲i Aḥmad Pas̲h̲a, Ottoman governor of Egypt. On the latter’s execution he was taken by Sulṭān Murād IV into the Palace and educated there. He was promoted to be Ag̲h̲a of the stirrup-holders ( Rikāb-dār ag̲h̲asi̊ ) (Chronicle of Wed̲j̲īhī, f. 91b of the Vienna MS.), became …

Ḥusayn Efendi, known as Ḏj̲ind̲j̲i K̲h̲od̲j̲a

(609 words)

Author(s): Orhonlu, Cengiz
, preceptor and favourite of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrāhīm [ q.v.], was born at Zaʿfarānborli̊si̊ (Safranbolu, now a kaza of the vilâyet of Zonguldak), the son of a certain S̲h̲eyk̲h̲ Meḥmed, son of S̲h̲eyk̲h̲ Ibrāhīm; he claimed to be descended from Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Ḳonewī [ q.v.]. He came to Istanbul and entered one of the medrese s of the Süleymāniyye, supporting himself by practising sorcery, which he had learned from his father at Safranbolu; this gained him the nickname Ḏj̲ind̲j̲i (“sorcerer”). He was not an able student, but h…

Murād IV

(1,900 words)

Author(s): Groot, A.H. de
, seventeenth Ottoman sultan (1021-49/1612-40, reigned 1032-49/1623-40). Born in Istanbul in a palace on the Bosphorus on 28 D̲j̲umādā I 1021/27 July 1612, son of the reigning sultan Aḥmed I [ q.v.] and his principal consort, k̲h̲aṣṣekī , Kösem [ q.v.] Māhpeyker, a woman of Greek origin (Anastasia, 1585-1651). He grew up in the palace together with his brother İbrāhīm, confined in the ḳafes apartments, since he was five years old. The princes Süleymān, Ḳāsi̊m and İbrāhīm were his full brothers, and he had two full sisters ʿAʾis̲h̲e Sul…

Üsküdār

(1,167 words)

Author(s): St. Yerasimos
, known in Western Europe as Scutari , the most important of the Asian shore suburbs of Istanbul, situated at the southern end of the Bosphorus. We are ignorant of both the origin of the name and the exact date of its conquest by the Turks. Since Antiquity it was called Chrysopolis (Xenophon, Anabasis , vi. 6) and seems to have been a suburb of the Greek colony of Chalcedon. The first person to give the place its present name, as Escutaire, is Villehardouin in 1203 ( Conquête de Constantinople , Paris 1961, i, 136-9), whilst Nicholas Choniates (ed. Bonn, 268, 33…

Ibrāhīm

(921 words)

Author(s): Gökbilgin, M. Tayyib
, eighteenth Ottoman Sultan, was born on 12 S̲h̲awwāl 1024/4 November 1615, the youngest son of Aḥmad I [ q.v.]. He spent all his early life in close confinement, in constant fear of being put to death (as four of his elder brothers were); so that when Murād IV [ q.v.] died and Ibrāhīm, the sole surviving prince of the dynasty, was called to ascend the throne, only the combined persuasions of his mother Kösem and the Grand Vizier Ḳara Muṣṭafā Pas̲h̲a [ qq.v.] induced him to emerge (16 S̲h̲awwāl 1049/8 February 1640). The capable Ḳara Muṣṭafā remained in power for the first four years of…

Pirlepe

(2,352 words)

Author(s): Kiel, M.
, Prilep , a town of more than 40,000 inhabitants situated on the northern edge of the fertile Pelagonian Plain at the foot of the Babuna Mountains in the southern part of the former Yugoslav Macedonia. In the Middle Ages, Prilep was the capital of a Slav principality. In Ottoman times (1395-1912) it was the centre of an extensive ḳāḍīli̊k stretching from the modern Greek border in the south (Nidže and Kajmakčalan Mountains, 2521 m/8,268 ft) and the Solunska Glava (the highest mountain of Macedonia, 2540 m/8,331 ft) in the north, a…

K̲h̲alīl Pas̲h̲a Ḳayṣariyyeli

(2,821 words)

Author(s): Groot, A.H. de
, Ottoman Grand Vizier and admiral, born probably ca. 1570, in the village of Zeytun (now Süleymanh) in the province of Maraş on the way to Ḳayseri, near Furnuz, at that time an Armenian village with a rich population (iron mines nearby, Andreasyan, 1964). It suffered heavily from destructions done by Ḏj̲elālī rebels. As a young boy, K̲h̲alīl was recruited by the Devs̲h̲irme [ q.v.], (Uzunçarşih, Kapikulu , i, 27, n. 4) and received the full education of the palace-school as an ič og̲h̲lān . His career may have been promoted by the fact that he had an elde…

Istanbul

(5,312 words)

Author(s): Yerasimos, S.
VIII. Monuments The first and most important of the Ottoman monuments of Istanbul is Saint Sophia. The only church to be transformed into a mosque immediately after the conquest of the city (others followed later, mostly in the reign of Bāyezīd II), it remained symbolically the model of imperial religious architecture. From the reign of Selīm II onwards, it became a place of burial reserved exclusively for the Ottoman royal family and was restored on numerous occasions between 1572-3 and 1847-9. Ottoman building activity dates from 1458, when Meḥemmed II built the mosque of …

K̲h̲ān

(6,030 words)

Author(s): Elisséeff, N.
, a word of Persian origin designating on the one hand a staging-post and lodging [see also manzil ] on the main communication routes, on the other a warehouse, later a hostelry [see also funḍuḳ ] in the more important urban centres. I. The highway k̲h̲ān. The economic functions served by this institution have changed little from the Middle Ages to the present day. It had its roots in the beginnings of organised highway trade in the earliest times, but it flourished with particular vigour in the Islamic world. The K̲h̲ān was born of the need to ensure safe lodgi…

Yeñi Čeri

(9,638 words)

Author(s): Murphey, R.
(t.), lit. “new troop”, a body of professional infantrymen of the Ottoman empire in its heyday. 1. Origins. The “new troop”, so-called not so much because of the novelty of the idea as because at the time of its introduction by the vizier K̲h̲ayr al-Dīn Pas̲h̲a [see d̲j̲andarli̊ ] in the 760s/1360s it opposed then-prevailing military traditions cherished by the frontier warriors. The predecessors of Murād I [ q.v.], rather than maintaining a standing army funded by the central fisc, had relied almost exclusively on the military services provided, on a voluntary …

Wazīr

(14,750 words)

Author(s): Zaman, Muhammad Qasim | Bianquis;, Th. | Eddé, Anne-Marie | Carmona, A. | Lambton, Ann K.S | Et al.
(a.), vizier or chief minister. I. In the Arab World 1. The ʿAbbāsids. Etymology The term wazīr occurs in the Ḳurʾān (XXV, 35: “We gave Moses the book and made his brother Aaron a wazīr with him”), where it has the sense of “helper”, a meaning well attested in early Islamic poetry (for examples, see Goitein, The origin of the vizierate, 170-1). Though several scholars have proposed Persian origins for the term and for the institution, there is no compelling reason to doubt the Arabic provenance of the term or an Arab-Islamic origin and evolution of the institution of the wazīr (cf. Goitein, op. ci…

Istanbul

(26,864 words)

Author(s): İnalcık, Halil
, the capital of the Ottoman Empire from 20 Ḏj̲umādā I 857/29 May 1453 to 3 Rabīʿ II 1342/13 October 1923. In strict Ottoman usage the name is confined to the area bounded by the Golden Horn, the Marmara coast and the Wall of Theodosius, the districts of G̲h̲alaṭa, Üsküdār and Eyyūb being separate townships, each with its own ḳāḍī ; occasionally however the name is applied to this whole area. NAME. In the period of the Sald̲j̲ūḳ sultanate of Anatolia (see Kamāl al-Dīn Aḳsarāyī, Musāmarat al- ak̲h̲bār , ed. O. Turan, Ankara 1944, index at p. 344) and under the early Ottomans ( Die altosm. anon. Chroni…