u/azor__ahai

Sooo I recently started watching Mehmed: Fetihler Sultanı, and one thing that immediately annoyed me was hearing Hüma Hatun referred to as Başhaseki, and it got me thinking about how often Ottoman dramas seem to use Haseki as though it were simply the Ottoman equivalent of “the sultan’s favorite woman.”

The Haseki position that developed around Hürrem was something genuinely exceptional. Before Hürrem, the structure of the imperial harem was specifically designed to prevent one concubine from becoming the kind of permanent, exclusive partner she became. The one-concubine/one-son pattern, the departure of a prince and his mother to the provinces, and the absence of a formalized chief-consort position all meant that even a sultan’s favorite wasn’t necessarily going to become the central woman of his household.

Then Süleyman elevates Hürrem in a way that breaks with that structure on multiple levels. She remains with him after bearing a son, has multiple children with him, remains in Istanbul instead of following a prince to a sanjak, is eventually married to him, and acquires an unprecedented degree of wealth and political influence.

And that’s what I find particularly irritating about the way historical dramas use Haseki. It’s not just that calling Hüma a Başhaseki is anachronistic. It’s that by treating Haseki as a generic title for “the sultan’s favorite consort,” they completely flatten the historical development of the position and, in the process, make Hürrem’s elevation seem much less unusual than it actually was.

Of course, earlier sultans could have had women they personally favored. But personal favoritism is very different from creating a position in which one woman was singled out and elevated within the structure of the imperial household.

The interesting part about Hürrem’s position is that it represented a departure from the existing structure of the imperial household. Haseki wasn’t simply a fancy Ottoman word for “favorite.” Its significance came precisely from the fact that this woman was being singled out and elevated in a way that hadn’t previously been institutionalized in the same manner.

And then, much later, when multiple women could simultaneously be Haseki and you start getting distinctions like Başhaseki, the meaning of the title had changed again. So applying that later hierarchy to a woman living under Murad II isn’t just a small terminology issue, it makes the whole evolution of the institution disappear.

What I find particularly frustrating is that this is something that could be avoided so easily. If the writers simply wanted to establish Hüma as Murad’s most favored or politically influential consort, they could have conveyed that without retroactively applying a title whose meaning and institutional significance developed much later.

More broadly, I wonder why Ottoman dramas so often present titles and institutions as though they were static throughout the history of the empire, rather than acknowledging how their meanings and functions evolved over time. Haseki is perhaps one of the clearest examples of this, because treating it as a generic, transhistorical rank ultimately obscures precisely what made Hürrem’s position historically significant and unusual in the first place.