How Circassian Families Sold Their Own Daughters Into Ottoman Harems

Before 1864, a small number of Circassian noble families sent daughters into elite Ottoman households as a path to status and patronage. After Russia's conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Caucasus in 1864, that trade became something far darker: destitute refugee families, stripped of everything, sold children to survive. This is the true history of how Circassian girls entered the Ottoman imperial harem, the slave-concubines who rose to rule as Valide Sultan, and what happened to all of them when the empire fell. Covered in this video: The real structure of the Ottoman harem, from cariye to Valide Sultan The 1864 Circassian genocide and how it flooded the slave trade Bezmiâlem, Pertevniyal, Tirimüjgan, and Rahime Perestu, slaves who became the mothers of sultans Why the Ottoman "bans" on the slave trade never worked Where the Circassian diaspora is today, and how this history is remembered Chapters and timestamps in the comments. 🔔 New royal history every week. The crown has fallen, but the story hasn't ended. — SOURCES Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (1982) Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (1998) Ehud R. Toledano, "Slave Dealers, Women, Pregnancy and Abortion: The Story of a Circassian Slave Girl in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo," Slavery & Abolition (1981) Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (1993) Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire (2010) Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem (2020) Ceyda Karamursel, "Transplanted Slavery, Contested Freedom," Comparative Studies in Society and History (2017) Ceyda Karamursel, "Relics of an Unwanted Past: Slavery, Polygamy and the Harem at the End of the Ottoman Empire," Gender & History (2025) Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (2013) Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees (Stanford University Press, 2024) Christine Isom-Verhaaren, "Royal French Women in the Ottoman Sultans' Harem" (on the debunked Aimée du Buc de Rivéry / Nakşidil myth) Çağatay Uluçay, Padişahların Kadınları ve Kızları; Necdet Sakaoğlu, Bu Mülkün Kadın Sultanları