Afife Kadin
Ottoman concubine
Afife Kadın (Ottoman Turkish: عفیفہ قادین; "chaste, virtuous"; c. 1682 - 12 June 1723) was a consort of the Ottoman Sultan Mustafa II.
Biography
Her origin is not confirmed, but she is believed to have fallen victim to the Crimean-Nogai raids and came to Constantinople via the Crimean slave trade, where she was purchased by minister Ebu Bekir Efendi for the Ottoman Imperial Harem, and given as a gift to the sultan around 1692, when she was ten years old.
In 1695, she became a consort (Kadin) of new Sultan Mustafa II. She was Mustafa's most loved consort, and the sentiment was reciprocated, even if they were never legally married, and the only concubine the sultan brought along with him on all three of his campaigns. She is documented several times when she received gifts from the sultan. She was the mother of five sons and one daughter with the sultan. All her five sons died in infancy. In 1699, after the death of the first consort Alicenab Kadin, Afife became the new First consort, or Başkadin.
When Mustafa II died in 1703, she was legally manumitted as an umm walad, since she had children with her master, and Mustafa II's successor Ahmed III ordered her to leave the Imperial harem by marriage, and choose her husband among the officials of the Porte. She reportedly asked Ahmed III not to force her to marry, but to kill her instead, with the argument that she had given birth to five sons with the former sultan and a living daughter. Ahmed III replied that while she had indeed given birth to six children with Mustafa II, all her sons were dead and only a daughter were alive, and repeated his demand for her to choose a husband. She finally chose the 80 years old minister Ebu Bekir Efendi.
The public source identifies “Afife Kadin” as ottoman concubine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Afife, Kadin and Ottoman.
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This entry incorporates text from “Afife Kadin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.