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Providing charity: the early Ottoman period and the legacies of pre-Ottoman times Ottoman records on charity only rarely concern almsgiving not connected to vakıfs; and where such records exist, they do not refer to charities instituted by women. Most of the discussion in this entry therefore deals with pious foundations or vakıfs. Among the oldest surviving Ottoman docu- ments (1323), produced even before the death of the eponymous Sultan Osman, there is a text establishing the foundation of Aspurca Hatun, one of the wives of Sultan Orhan (r. 13…

This entry concentrates on the – as yet – quite limited categories of women who have formed the focus of historical research. Partly because sources survive in greater or lesser numbers, but for the most part because of the vagaries of topic selection on the part of present-day scholars, we can point to certain “islands” about which something is known, but that are tiny compared to the wide uncharted seas of our ignorance. This has to do with the fact that Ottoman historians have largely approac…