The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire - Leslie P. Peirce - Google Books

https://books.google.de/books?id=L6-VRgVzRcUC

The unprecedented political power of the Ottoman imperial harem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is widely viewed as illegitimate and corrupting. This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries,…