[370] Hadji Khalfa, Djihannuma, fol. 1852; Evliya effendi, ii. 229.
[371] The testimony of Ibn Batutah, who travelled extensively among the Turks in Anatolia, southern Russia, and elsewhere between 1325 and 1340, is conclusive on this point. ‘Whenever we stopped in a house of this country (Anatolia), our neighbours of both sexes took care of us: the women were not veiled ...’: ii. 256. ‘I was witness of a remarkable thing, that is, of the consideration which the women enjoy among the Turks: they hold, in fact, a rank more elevated than that of the men.... As for the women of the lower classes, I have seen them also. One of them will be, for example, in a cart drawn by horses. Near her will be three or four young girls.... The windows of the cart will be open and you can see the women’s faces: for the women of the Turks are not veiled.... Often the woman is accompanied by her husband, whom whoever sees him takes for one of her servants’: ii. 377-9. No student can have any doubt whatever upon the position of Turkish women during the fourteenth century. As among all vigorous peoples, the women of the Osmanlis held a high place, and were never secluded. It was not until Murad II that even the sovereign had a harem. The Moslem conception of the inferiority of women was not prevalent among the Osmanlis until after the reign of Soleiman the Magnificent. Immediately it became prevalent, the race began its decline.
So universal did veiling become in the seventeenth century that it was adopted by Christian and Jewish women in Turkey as well. See Père Febre, Théâtre de la Turquie (1682), pp. 164-5. Père Febre spoke from personal experience ‘dans la plupart des lieux de la Turquie’.
[372] Hadji Khalfa, Rumeli, p. 96.
[373] Historia epirotica, Bonn ed., p. 228.
[374] Ibid., pp. 230-1.
[375] Ducange, viii. 292.
[376] Jireček, op. cit., 340.
[377] Misti, XL. 154.
[378] See below, p. 203.