Review: The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century, by Shirine Hamadeh and Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, by Lucienne Thys-Şenocak

Abstract

Shirine Hamadeh ; The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century ; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007, 368 pp., 105 illus., 8 in color, 3 maps. $60, ISBN 0295986670 Lucienne Thys-SSenocak ; Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan ; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2007, 346 pp., 104 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 0754633101 A major world capital since the fourth century, Istanbul has an enormously rich and complex history. Understanding its story is complicated by a modern historiography and periodization that are heavily inflected by modern political perspectives. Architectural historians of the early- to mid-Turkish Republican period, for example, glorified the apogee of Ottoman power, the fifteenth century, as the classical moment of Ottoman architecture, celebrating an era that could nourish the pride of the nascent nation-state. Initially designed to denigrate post-seventeenth-century Ottoman rule as the decline out of which the Republic of Turkey would emerge, phoenix-like, in 1923, this perspective has been since revised by scholars of history and architectural history, who have revealed the nineteenth century to be an era of dynamic modernization. Still, this second emphasis left the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries somewhat overlooked, perceived as a continuation of the classical legacy and as the reflection of the creeping onslaught of Westernization. Lucienne Thys-Senocak's Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan and Shirine Hamadeh's The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century examine the architectural legacy of the Ottoman imperial family, adding nuance and critical awareness to the study of the subtle shifts that took place in Ottoman society and their reflection in the urban forms created between the often dichotomized classical and the modern periods. Ottoman Women Builders focuses on the patronage of the Hadice Turhan Sultan (1628?––1687), who was given the opportunity——unprecedented for a woman——to rule the Ottoman state when her son, Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648––87), ascended to the throne at the age of six. As Thys-Senocak astutely points out, while unique within the empire, her rise took place at an auspicious moment for female monarchs across Europe. Using the comparative framework provided by this historical conjuncture, Thys-Senocak examines how architecture was used for …