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By Root 994 0

mutes were his favorite companions. At table he was surrounded with them, and he conversed with them in sign language, threw them scraps from the table, kicked them, and tossed them gold pieces. He sat at a low revolving table resembling a Lazy Susan and covered with Bulgar leather. According to Ottaviano Bon, who was reporting secondhand but had his information from a Chief White Eunuch, he had a “very rich wrought towel cast before him upon his knees to save his clothes,” as he ate with his fingers. “He useth no salt at his Table, neither hath he any Antepaste; but immediately falls aboard the flesh, and having well fed, closeth up his stomach with Bocklava, or some such like thing.”

Serving the royal dinner required two hundred waiters. These arranged themselves in a long line, which extended through courtyards and corridors a hundred yards or so from the kitchen to the table. The dishes were passed from hand to hand, rapidly and without the smallest clatter. The royal service was always celadon, because this porcelain was supposed to have the property of rendering poisoned food harmless. Dropping a dish was punishable by death, not because of the value of the dish but because of the inexcusable racket, which may explain why the present-day museum has a vast collection of intact celadon.

After dinner the Grand Seigneur might go for a row in his seventy-eight-foot caïque. This was propelled at high speed by twenty-four specially assigned palace pages, who wore loose white garments and blue caps with red tassels. The Sultan sat in the stern under a gold-fringed crimson canopy, the only canopy allowed on the Bosporus. An eighteenth-century French ambassador who tried having one too received word from the Seraglio that diplomatic relations with France would be null and void until he got rid of it. Each foreign ambassador was allowed a ten-oar caïque and might fly his national flag, but he was not allowed to open an umbrella over his head. He might, if he wished, fan himself with a swan-feather fan.

Six caïques attended the large one bearing the Sultan. In the second was the Turban Bearer, who held up a turban and inclined it right and left to save the Sultan the effort of bowing. The oarsmen rowed standing, but the helmsman, who was also the Head Gardener and Chief Executioner and a very influential pasha, was allowed to sit in order to handle the rudder. Only he was permitted to converse with the Sultan as they skimmed along, and while they spoke, slaves rolled on the bottom of the boat and howled like dogs so that no one might hear what was being said.

The inner and residential part of the Seraglio was called the House of Happiness. It is hard to imagine who was happy there—certainly not the fifteen hundred women of the harem. For most of them life was like that in a strict boarding school from which there was never any graduation. Unless they were royal favorites they slept in dormitories accommodating ten or fifteen pallets on the floor, under the supervision of an old Moorish woman. Their education was limited to such matters as embroidery and dancing, the proper manner of bowing before the Sultan, or the playing of the saz, a long-necked, four-stringed affair that produced a plunking sound like a banjo. They could read the Koran and could write a little, although they had nobody to write to, having forever severed connection with their families. Each woman had one particular duty in the housekeeping arrangements: the First Mistress of the Coffee, for instance, took care of handing the Sultan his coffee when he visited the harem, and wore on her headdress a diamond pin in the shape of a coffeepot. They never went out of the palace except for occasional rides in a closed carriage or caïque. Any manservants who entered the harem—wood carriers, for example—walked between closed ranks of black eunuchs, and wore long woolen curls hanging down on each side of their faces to act as blinders. A doctor was sometimes allowed in the harem in case of serious illness, but he might examine only his patient’s hand and pulse, the