Even Armenian and Greek women

A few years ago one of these dervishes discovered a new method of wider influence in making his wife a member of the dervish order and advancing her to as high a rank as himself. From that moment his fortune was made. The man in a room full of men, and the wife in a room full of women, exercised the gift of healing by reciting intricate formulas over the heads of patients, and by blowing in their faces. A single breath from one of these workers of magic was held to be worth a whole drug store full of mere medicine, and the pair received two or three hundred dollars at a sitting. Even Armenian and Greek women came in numbers to partake of the benefits of this combination, and swell its revenues.

It is the women of the country who hold to such remedies for the nervous fears of childhood as this: The cause of the fear is that a demon has secretly shown himself to the child. The remedy is to take a bullet which has been fifed from a gun, to melt it, and to pour the melted lead into a basin of water in which the child has been washed after being prepared by reciting over it appropriate verses of Scripture. The lead must be poured out in three portions, and then the remnant poured into the water will assume the form and appearance of the offending demon. If the lead last poured into the water is carefully preserved and hung about the neck of the child, the demon will recognize his likeness and fearing to be interfered with now that he is found out, lie will show himself no more in the neighbourhood of the child. It is the women, too, who insist at the time of a conflagration, that after the fire is extinguished a sheep must be killed and its blood mixed with the water of the fire-engine so that it may be thrown for good luck ” over the house at which the fire was stayed. The men may or may not believe in these follies, but they are as wax in the hands of the wives, who always find means to bring them to assist in the most heathenish incantations private tours istanbul.

Another element of this Woman Question is this. The women, notwithstanding all this ignorance and unfitness to guide others, hold ultimate sway over the conduct of the men. The tangled intrigues for place and power which centre in the harem form the key to many vicissitudes of Turkish history.

 Poland as a result of a war of the Harem

In the reign of Sultan Mohammed IV., Turkey became involved in war with Poland as a result of a war of the Harem. One of the Sultan’s wives was jealous of the influence of the Sultan’s mother. To secure the downfall of that lady, the wife thought it a small thing to invite the King of Poland to invade Turkey which seemed unprepared for war, to stain vast regions with blood, and to hope that the army upon the first defeat would depose the Sultan, her own husband. In order to carry out this precious scheme the woman had first made the Grand Vezir her devoted slave. But the Sultan unexpectedly defeated the Polish army in battle, captured the treasonable correspondence of his wife and unearthed the whole plot. So the Sultan’s mother had the grim pleasure of seeing the head of her rival carried out of the palace in the same basket with those of the Grand Vezir and the other conspirators.

Sultan Ahmed 1. picked up a Greek girl some-where, named Kiusen. She was not beautiful, but she ruled the Sultan by her bright and pleasing wit. Kiusen, after securing the aid of a man whom she caused to be appointed Grand Vezir in reward for his services, devoted her life to the advancement of her sons to the throne of Turkey in place of older princes, the children of less keen-witted wives.

She succeeded in making and unmaking Sultans as well as Prime Ministers, and at last, when in the seventieth year of her age she was strangled in order to end her jealous intrigues, she had ruled the Empire through the reign of four successive Sultans— her husband, her two sons, and her grandson— while her quarrels with the mother of the last of these four had brought the Turkish Empire to the verge of disruption and had destroyed several of its ablest statesmen. One cannot but feel sympathy with the feeling that gives to such women their power on reading the reply of Sultan Abd ul Mejid, the father of the present Sultan Abd ul Hamid, to Lord Stratfoid de Redcliffe when that great Ambassador hinted that a little less subservience on the part of the Sovereign to the wishes of the Sultan’s mother would be advantageous to Turkey. Said the Sultan: “ I have a thousand servants and wives and dependents and grovelling courtiers in my palace, but I have only one true friend; and that is my mother.”