Tag Archives: Ottaviano Bon

drinking on the job

Drinking, and fighting in heavy armor, high speed horse chases, bowstring accuracy, and axe-swinging don’t apparently mix well together. The Battle of Nicopolis was the last great battle of the Crusades; and with it also marked the beginning of the … Continue reading

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no naughty bits

The life of a eunuch. Its from a bygone era, but one not form a so-distant past. In Ottoman Turkey, the eunuch, both white and black enjoyed a certain status of the social scale, and those scales seemed to be … Continue reading

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messy antics

Passion unchained. Does absolute power equate with absolute bliss? For the Sultan’s of the Ottoman Empire for the most part; the effort to reconcile two antagonistic ideas seemed to almost take a perverse pleasure. Seraglio life could be characterized as … Continue reading

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caucasian cream of the crop

In selecting a concubine, a Sultan held a regular weekly levee at which the virgins of the harem were brought in for his inspection; he dropped a hankerchief at the feet of the one who pleased him most, indicating she … Continue reading

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dinner is served: lonely at the top in the HMS Sultan

The social life in the Grand Seraglio was not all it had been cracked up to be. The power exercised there by the Sultan was absolute to be sure. But did it bring bliss? … When the Sultan got back … Continue reading

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suspicious minds

Good to walk around with a mirror just to see who may be sneaking up on you. Hard to find a Sultan who wasn’t suspicious and didn’t keep a food tester on the payroll. And lets not talk about the … Continue reading

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who’s the fairest sultan of all

The Grand Seraglio. As opposed to Seraglio Minor. Yes that Grand Seraglio with the violence, the death and the sex fueled only the passion thatsix thousand concubines can command and the wayward restlessness of the Janissary guards. Frontier justice and … Continue reading

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within these walls what secrets…

The Grand Seraglio. Within its walls the Turkist Sultans sought an answer to a an old question: Can absolute power bring absolute bliss? Within the confines of what is today the Topakapi Museum, the Sultan’s residence the answer between the … Continue reading

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vintage violence

Janissaries were uneducated except in violence and were fanatically conservative. In 1763, when Lord Baltimore passed through Constantinople, he observed that the Corps was still carrying bows and arrows, sabers and lances, having never got used to firearms. Sultan Selim … Continue reading

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seraglio: methodical despotism

The Grand Seraglio. The search for absolute bliss backed up by absolute power with all the variations of sex, death, and violence could muster. The price to pay for approaching utopian conditions in a sort of Islamic version of the … Continue reading

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