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By Root 905 0

as any foreigner or any Turk who did not belong in the palace was supposed to go. Beyond lay the Grand Seigneur’s private apartments; the harem; the privy gardens; the quarters of pages and eunuchs; a mosque containing a mantle, a tooth, and some of the beard of the Prophet; and the Sultan’s private treasury. All of these regions were so sacrosanct that in 1600 a Venetian who peered at the walls through a spyglass from the other side of the Golden Horn was put to death at once. One of the few outsiders who got this far was an Englishman named Dallam who was sent by Queen Elizabeth to set up the organ she had given the Sultan. He managed to bribe a eunuch to let him peer through a grille into a courtyard full of harem girls. “At the firste sighte of them I thoughte they had bene young men,” he reports, “but when I saw the hare of their heades hange doone on their backes platted together with a tasle of smale pearle … and by other plaine tokens I did know them to be women, and verrie prettie ones in deede. Theie wore … a little capp … faire cheans of pearle … and juels in their ears; their coats weare like a souldier’s mandilyon, som of red sattan and som of blew … britches of … fine clothe made of coton woll, as whyte as snow and as fine as lane … Som of them did weare fine cordovan buskins, and some had their leges naked, with a goulde ringe on the smale of her legg. I stood so longe looking upon them that he which had showed me all this kindnes began to be verrie angrie … and stamped his foote to make me give over looking; the which I was verrie lothe to dow, for that sighte did please me wondrous well.”

The organ he set up was sixteen feet high and had a clock on top of it with a “holly bushe full of blacke birds and thrushis, which … did singe and shake their wynges.” When Dallam demonstrated this to the Sultan, His Majesty asked an attendant “yf it would ever doo the lyke againe.” The attendant answered that “it would doo the lyke again at the next houre.” “I will see that,” said the Grand Seigneur and sat down to wait. As the birds were adjusted to sing every fourth hour, Dallam, feeling dreadfully ill, had just sixty minutes to make intricate changes in the clockwork. He managed to get the birds in line and caught the next boat back to England.

Clocks were greatly prized in Turkey. They were not allowed to be made there or set up in public places for fear of lessening the importance and authority of the muezzins’ five daily calls to prayer. Clockwork toys were coveted even more. Among Mohammed the Conqueror’s favorite booty at the taking of Constantinople was a pair of golden lions that roared and a golden tree, big enough for a man to sit under, full of singing birds. A French merchant in 1685 was able to get a look inside the harem by bribing the Chief Black Eunuch with a mechanical man playing a drum.

The Turks acquired from the Byzantines not only mechanical toys but a good many habits now regarded as typically Turkish: the seclusion of women, the use of eunuchs as palace functionaries, the seclusion and semideification of the Royal Person, strict hierarchy and ceremony at court, and the luxury and fierce intrigue among powerful officials. The early Turkish rulers had been easily accessible to their people; but by the time of Süleiman the Magnificent, in the century after the conquest of Constantinople, the only remnant of the Sultan’s ancient accessibility was in his riding out every Friday to the mosque of Aya Sofia (formerly the great church of Hagia Sophia). At this time any subject of the realm had the right to present a petition. He did so by writing down his grievance, tying the paper to the end of a long stick, and prostrating himself in the street. When the Sultan rode by on a horse whose mane was tied with diamond tassels, the petitioner, face to the ground, agitated the stick in the air and his petition was collected by an attendant.

When he got back to the palace dinner would be served, the monarch eating alone and in silence, as nobody was worthy to eat with him. Because of the ban on noise,