Description
In 1599, the English organ builder Thomas Dallam prepared an instrument for voyage to the Ottoman Empire. The instrument, a 12.5-foot-high clockwork organ with the ability to tell time and play automatically, was to be a gift for Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) from Queen Elizabeth I, a diplomatic gesture on behalf of the English crown. Funded by the merchants of the Levant Company, the instrument was carried overseas on the ship Hector, under the personal stewardship of Dallam, himself, along with diplomats, ambassadors, and a host of other travelers, and ultimately installed in Constantinople in the Sultan’s seraglio, or harem—the female-centered space of the Ottoman court. The negotiations for this musical gesture of diplomacy, and the discourse it engendered, were entrusted to two women who navigated the space between the Sultan and the world outside the court: the Sultana, Ṣāfiye Sultan (d. 1619), and her kira, or chief female attendant, a Jewish woman by the name of Esperanza Malchi (d. 1600). A letter from Malchi containing gifts to Queen Elizabeth I survives, as do three letters to the Queen from Ṣāfiye, all testifying to the fact that the women of the harem—and not the Sultan—negotiated this musical-diplomatic relationship between England and the Ottoman world at a time when England was fiercely pursuing trade with the East. Malchi’s story, however, is absent from the musicological literature. Contemporary scholarship by Ruth Lamdan, Eric Dursteler, and others have examined early modern Constantinople with respect to musical diplomacy and knowledge circulation, yet no one source has directly examined the role of music as a means of navigation within the particularly female-centered space of the harem. This paper will reconsider the harem alongside Dallam’s organ gift as a consequential feature of musical diplomacy, and as a business space in which knowledge sharing begets female agency. By centering an otherwise marginalized individual whose actions were enabled by the trust and knowledge shared between women, I thus complicate the notion that the harem was an environment in which sexual transactions were the only economy of power.
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