by Des Ekin
Generally, however, the baths were similar to a modern health club, where women could relax and enjoy lively conversation.
Otherwise, Anna would have found the hours and days dragging by. The women would drink endless cups of tea, coffee or chocolate. Some took relief from the boredom in opium. Others would sit smoking tobacco, telling complex stories, or playing elaborate parlour games.
Then in 1640, nine years after the Baltimore raid, Sultan Murad died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight, to be succeeded by his insane brother Ibrahim. And from that point on, life in the harem could never be described as boring.
No-one could have blamed Ibrahim for being as crazy as a barrelful of monkeys. He was by nature a man of gentle and easy temper, but he had already endured enough to send the sanest man screaming up the walls. Along with his elder brother Murad, he had narrowly survived execution as a child. When Murad became Sultan in 1623, the eight-year-old Ibrahim had been locked away in The Golden Cage, a tiny room with only one window for light and air.
In this unreal environment the young Ibrahim had gone completely insane: it was said that his deranged cries echoed around the entire palace. Every time the key turned, he was convinced it was the official strangler.
On February 8, 1640, Murad went on a massive bender of wine and aqua vita. When an eclipse darkened the sky, he was so terrified that he suffered a fatal seizure.
It was only through the intervention of his iron-willed mother that Ibrahim survived the dying emperor’s final hours. One of Murad’s last acts was to command the execution of his brother and to grant the succession to a foreign ally.
Kiosem moved fast. She summoned a council of state and ‘with gentle words, desired them to remember that Ibrahim was the lawful heir and their true Emperor’. In the cold light of her challenging eye, the courtiers backed down and cried: ‘Long live Sultan Ibrahim!’
But when Ibraham was informed that Murad had died, he was convinced this was a cruel ruse and refused to come out. In a macabre scene, the icy-veined Kiosem ordered that her eldest son’s body be laid outside the Golden Cage. Only then did the whimpering new Sultan leave his cell.
And so began one of the most disastrous reigns in Ottoman history. The twenty-five-year-old sultan was totally unfit to rule an empire. His subjects reacted to his first public appearances with mockery. Kiosem moved rapidly to limit the damage. She decked her son out in the most majestic apparel and, determined that he should be feared as well as respected, she personally strangled two potentially disloyal courtiers.
By making a secret pact with the Grand Vizier, Kiosem was able to consolidate her power as the de facto empress. Ibrahim was a mere puppet as the Iron Lady negotiated peace with Persia and Austria. Never had the Reign Of Women been so powerful.
Other problems were not so easily repaired. Ibrahim’s ordeal in the Golden Cage had left him impotent, and for almost a year ‘the warm embraces of the most inflaming ladies in his Seraglio could not thaw his coldness’ until he finally came through and fathered a son.
Ibrahim reacted to freedom by going demob-happy, indulging in every form of excess his inflamed imagination could invent. When someone told him that every strand of his beard should be decorated with jewels, he ordered it done.
He also developed a fetish for sable fur – he wanted it all over the walls and ceiling, even on the floor.
Surrounded by the most beautiful and exotic women in the known world, the Sultan was still not content. His demands became increasingly bizarre. On a whim, he decided he wanted to have sex with a giantess and sent his emissaries in search of the nation’s biggest female – not disproportionately wide or tall, but a perfectly shaped Amazon. A nationwide search yielded an enormous Armenian who delighted the Sultan so much that he offered her anything she desired. Revelling in her new status, the newcomer demanded and received the governorship of Damascus. Ibraham cheerfully ordered all his wives and princesses to serve her in court.
Needless to say, the Queen Mother did not take kindly to this. She sweetly invited the new arrival to a private dinner where, between courses, an expert strangler sneaked up to slip a garrotte around the guest’s neck. Kiosem sadly informed her son that his giantess had succumbed to a mysterious illness.
Fuelled by aphrodisiacs, Ibrahim demanded full-scale orgies on a Roman scale. His debauches became so grotesque that they shocked his courtiers and alienated the Janissaries, who were eventually to depose him. Worst affected of all were, of course, the concubines themselves. In one notorious orgy, they were required to crawl around neighing like mares while the naked Ibrahim mounted them like a stallion at stud.
Nothing excited him more than a challenge: a woman he could not obtain. For some reason, he wanted to have sex with Murad’s widow, who was so horrified by the prospect that she tried to stab him. Noise of the fracas alerted Kiosem, who rushed to the scene and begged her son to back off. This show of disloyalty enraged the Sultan, who had meanwhile learned the truth about his giantess’s death. He threw Kiosem in prison and agreed to release her only when she ‘submitted herself with all humility to her son, begging his favour and pardon’.
Ibrahim recruited a sweet but poisonous female spy named Shecher Para (Sugar Candy) to trawl the municipal baths looking for the city’s most beautiful women. Sugar would find a suitable candidate and return with descriptions so enticing that Ibrahim would soon be head over heels in love. If the woman did not agree to become his bedmate, he would have her arrested. There was outrage when he kidnapped the daughter of a religious leader and had her dragged to his bed.
Then one day, the mad sultan decided on a whim to clear out his entire harem. Hundreds of live women were stuffed into weighted sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus. Only one woman managed to burst free from her grisly shroud and was picked up by a ship. The rest – including, presumably, any of the Baltimore women who had arrived from Algiers in the early 1630s – were drowned.
Years later, according to an unverified folk tale, a salvage diver swam down to the river bed in search of a wrecked ship and was astonished to find the surface covered in vertical body-bags, each held to the ground by a heavy weight and swaying eerily in the current.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Through The Silk Tunnel: Love And Marriage in Barbary
Even in the stony soil of enslavement, genuine love could take root and grow. It would be a mistake to think that all the slave women from Baltimore ended up as reluctant concubines or grudging servants. Many would have been chosen as wives, and in some cases they were willing partners.
Remember that these women were prize catches. There are several documented cases of enslaved Englishwomen or Irishwomen marrying the actual rulers of their new countries.
The historian Sir Lambert Playfair refers to an Englishwoman who willingly married the ruler of Algiers in the late 1600s – although he suspected her motives were mercenary.
And from a biographical list of famous Scotswomen there is an intriguing reference to one Helen Glogg, born a blacksmith’s daughter in Perthshire in the mid-1700s. Helen was only eighteen when she was captured by corsairs and sold as a slave in Algiers. According to this source, a Moroccan emperor became so besotted by her beauty that he took her as his principal wife and empress.
Another historian, Godfrey Fisher, points out that at one stage in the late 1600s, the rulers of Algiers and Morocco each married an English slave.
According to one history of the Moroccan royal line, the eighteenth-century emperor Muhammad III chose as his second wife an ‘English or Irish woman’ who took the name of Lalla Sargetta. Their son Mulay al-Yazid became an emperor.
In the late 1600s – as we have seen – an Irish woman named Mrs Shaw agreed to turn Muslim in order to become the fourth wife of the Moroccan emperor Muley Ismael. When the relationship turned sour she claimed to have been forced into it, but Muley was a charismatic figure and it is quite that possible that she married him voluntarily.
Some of these references undoub
tedly overlap and point to the same cases. Still, these brief glimpses of extraordinary marriages give some indication of the high regard in which slave women from the British-Irish Isles were held in Barbary.
However, for the best example of a genuine romance between ruler and slave we have to go back three hundred years to an Englishwoman who took the name of Chams ed Douha – ‘Dawn Light’. We don’t know her original name or how she was captured, but every year thousands of visitors still file respectfully past her royal grave near Sallee.
Abou El Hassan, Sultan of Morocco from 1331 to 1349, was a cultured ruler who created a renowned centre of learning at Chellah. Today his college lies in ruins, but we can still visit the necropolis where he lies at rest beside his adored wife and former slave Dawn Light – her prestigious burial site testifying to the genuine love he held for her.
Marriage in Barbary was a democratic business. While they may not all have married into royalty, it’s probable that many of the Baltimore women and girls made good marriages with local men and (dare I say it) lived happily ever after.
There were also romances between the slaves themselves. Slaves were permitted to marry each other, but any children would themselves be slaves. In rare cases, enslaved couples made it out of Algiers and returned home to marry, one waiting faithfully for the other to be ransomed.
Of course, love can strike when you least expect it … as the Icelandic captive Gudrid Simonardottir could testify.
The Baltimore women in Algiers would have been familiar with Gudrid’s story, because she was their contemporary. Married with a three-year-old child, she had been torn away from her husband in Morat’s Icelandic raid.
This Nordic beauty caught the eye of the Pasha’s son, who decided he wanted Gudrid as his wife. She was placed in the royal harem, but for some reason the marriage never took place.
When her ransom arrived nine years later, Gudrid was forced to leave her child (then twelve) behind her on the quayside.
Stopping off at Copenhagen on the way home, she fell in love with a young pastor who offered her spiritual counselling. There was public scandal when she became pregnant. However, it emerged that Gudrid’s husband in Iceland had already died and the couple were free to marry.
The pastor became an eminent poet, but Gudrid remains a shadowy figure. One source says that she remained steadfast in her Christian faith in Algiers: she wrote letters in which she said she ‘suffered daily’ and believed that the captives’ ordeal was a direct punishment for their sins. She is said to have left the Algiers quayside instructing her child to remember verses of Scripture.
Another source claims that ‘Turk Gudda’ – as she became known in Iceland – had converted to Islam in Algiers, and later caused great embarrassment to her clergyman husband by continuing to practise her Islamic prayer rituals for the rest of her life.
Most of the female Baltimore captives – women like Joane Broadbrook, Bessie Flood, Mrs Corent Croffine and her daughter – would probably have begun their slave lives as servant-companions to wealthy women. They weren’t asked to do heavy work, and according to Haedo, they were highly prized for their embroidery, spinning and weaving skills.
D’Aranda tells of one young woman who was on her way to the Algiers palace to be sold as a slave when the Pasha’s wife spotted her from a window and requested her as a personal handmaid. As she began service ‘the Pasha’s wife noticed [she] was an excellent needlewoman and could do embroidery … so that she was much in her mistress’s favour.’
In most cases, however, the women slaves quietly adapted to their new lives. According to d’Arvieux, there was little difference between the routine of a typical domestic servant here and at home. ‘They live very commodiously for their state in life,’ he reported.
After a few months or years of sewing, Miss Croffine (for example) might be picked out as a potential bride.
To accept, she needed to change religion and become ‘purified’.
The weddings themselves were elaborate affairs. The groom would arrive at the bride’s home and host an elaborate feast with musical entertainment.
‘He is then conducted into the presence of his wife by four women who are veiled,’ wrote the slave John Foss. ‘He then retires and goes to his own house, and the bride is set on horseback and led to his house.’
An elaborate tunnel of silk would guide the bride into her new home.
Her female friends would then ‘walk through the streets … shouting out together, as loud as they can, with such strong shrill voices that they may be heard two miles.’
Most middle-class brides found themselves in a two-storey house with the women’s quarters on the first floor. Furnishings were basic sofas, rugs and roll-up mattresses. Light filtered through stained glass and through latticed windows. These lent their own exotic charm, for the women would wake to find the morning sun scattering handfuls of colour around their white walls like a child flinging brushfuls of paint. As the morning progressed, the coloured light would move around their bedroom like carnival floats.
In wealthier homes, there could be up to four wives, with each spouse entitled to conjugal rights. The French traveller Gerard Nerval once met a sheikh who explained the practicalities of everyday life in a small-scale harem:
‘Where do they sleep,’ I asked the Sheikh, ‘these women and their slaves?’
‘On the sofas.’
‘But don’t they have covers?’
‘They sleep fully dressed. However, there are silk or woollen blankets for the winter.’
‘But I don’t see a place for the husband?’
‘Ah! The husband sleeps in his room, the women in theirs, and the slaves on the sofas of the communal rooms. If the sofas and cushions are not comfortable to sleep on, they can set up mattresses in the middle of the room, and sleep there.’
‘Fully dressed?’
‘Invariably, but they keep on only the most basic clothes: trousers, a jacket, a dress. Both men and women are prohibited by law from revealing their bodies to each other from the neck downwards; if they yield to curiosity, their eyes are accursed: that’s a formal text.’
‘I understand,’ I said, ‘that the husband does not particularly want to spend the night in a roomful of fully dressed women, and that he’s quite happy to sleep in his own room, taking with him two or three of these ladies …’
‘Two or three!’ the Sheikh exclaimed indignantly. ‘What sort of dogs do you think we are, that we should act like this? By the living God! Is there any woman, even an infidel, who would agree to share with another the honour of sleeping with her husband? Is this how they behave in Europe?’
‘In Europe!’ I answered. ‘Certainly not! But Christian men have only one wife, and they suppose that the Turks, having several, live with them as they would with one.’
‘If it were the case,’ said the Sheikh, ‘that Muslims were so depraved as to act as Christians suppose they do, their lawful wives would immediately demand a divorce.’
The Sheikh continues:
‘In reality, almost all of them live with only one woman. Young women from good homes nearly always make this a condition of their marriage. A man who is rich enough to feed and maintain several women … can, admittedly, take up to four wives; but he is obliged by law to devote one day a week to each one, which is not always a pleasant task. You also have to consider that the constant intrigues of four women, roughly equal in rights, would generate a very unhappy life for him, unless he were very rich and highly placed. For these people, the number of women in the home is a luxury, like horses.’
Once married, the former Miss Croffine would have found her life reasonably pleasant. The women’s quarters were not as isolated as they seemed. They had protruding balconies that almost touched over the street: in fact, they could actually be linked by enclosed ladders, allowing the wives to visit each other. It was said that a determined woman could cross the entire city this way.
But the rooftop gardens, with their cooling
sea breezes and ocean views, were among the favourite spots to socialise. Surrounded by screens of plants, the women could work, relax and chat freely.
As long as they were properly attired, they could take numerous trips out – to the shrines for religious duties, to the baths for steam sessions, or to the suburban vineyards for picnics. In the evenings, there might be dinner gatherings, make-up parties or exhibitions of dancing.
All in all, a typical female captive who’d spent her previous life squelching through boggy fields or labouring at the stinking fish palace, might have considered her new situation in sunny Algiers and concluded that life was at the very least … not intolerable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Children
LET’S not forget that fifty of the captives taken from Baltimore were children. The Gunter boys, Joane Broadbrook’s children, John Ryder’s youngsters – they would have been destined for many fates, not all of them unpleasant.
The boys’ ordeal would also have begun in the Badistan, where their heads were shaved except for a long lock of hair that was allowed to fall from under their caps to signify that they were unconverted Christians. If their experience was like that of the teenage Joseph Pitts, the Gunter lads would have been forced to stand for six solid hours under the blazing sun with ‘not the least bit of bread allowed us’.
As the sale began, the auctioneer began a well-rehearsed routine. ‘See what a pretty boy this is!’ he would cry out. ‘No doubt his parents are very rich and able to redeem him with a great ransom.’
After returning to the Pasha’s palace for a second viewing, they were separated and taken to their new homes.
Poet Thomas Davis speculated that some would have become page boys and spear carriers: ‘This boy will bear a Scheik’s chibouk, and that a Bey’s jereed.’ This was quite likely, because Christian boys were highly prized as servants in wealthy households once they converted to Islam and endured the ritual of circumcision. After that they would be accepted as family. They would often grow up in opulent surroundings. Years later, the English envoy who arrived to rescue the Baltimore captives would look at such children and admit: ‘They keep [them] very gallant.’
