“Researching history… changes our perspective, makes connections.” Historical novelist Merryn Allingham tells Susanna Bavin what she found by delving into the story of the Ottoman Empire.
When several members of my book group announced recently they didn’t like historical fiction, I was disappointed. But stunned when one went on to say she couldn’t see the point of history. For me, discovering the past doesn’t just illuminate quirky corners of a bygone age but helps understand the world of today. When I set out to research the background for A Tale of Two Sisters, a novel set in Constantinople 1905 – 1907, it was the nationalism of President Erdogan that I heard in my head, declaiming that Turkey had once been a great power and would be again.
So began my burrowing into the Ottoman Empire, a regime that lasted over five hundred years. The Ottoman Turks were indeed a great power, wielding influence over territories stretching from the Balkan States to the Horn of Africa. A multinational, multilingual empire, that ended only after the Great War, when it was partitioned and its Arab region divided between Britain and France – helping to explain something of the Middle East today.
My research wasn’t all political. I had my characters travel on the Orient Express – I’d been fortunate to journey on the train myself, to Venice rather than Constantinople. Cocooned in gleaming blue and gold carriages, art deco compartments and mosaic-tiled bathrooms, I stepped back a century. Today the long journey to Istanbul is a once a year event, but in the early twentieth century it was part of the regular timetable and I gave my heroine the chance of travelling alone for the first time time in her life and to an unfamiliar, exotic destination.
I enjoyed researching old timetables, calculating how many days, how many hours, between one beautiful capital and the next – Paris, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest – locomotives changing at every frontier, as one national railway system handed over to another. In all, the train covered a route of more than 1,700 miles before reaching Sirkeci station in Constantinople.
Topkapi Palace was my heroine’s destination and I still retain a vivid memory of my visit there. It was one of many Ottoman palaces in the city, sultans moving their court from palace to palace, often in response to external threat. Even though I saw only a small portion of Topkapi, I was overwhelmed by its opulence and beauty.
For this book, I wanted to dig deeper, wanted to know what life was like for the women who lived there around the turn of the century. I’d read accounts by a number of intrepid female travellers to the Orient – Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Mabel Sharman Crawford, Mary Lee Settle – and been struck that, almost to the woman, their experience ran counter to the prevailing European stereotype of Turkish women as either decadent concubines or slaves.
Women spent most of their lives within the home, it was true, but within those four walls, they had absolute sovereignty. The harem was a sacrosanct space, not just a place where women were guarded, but a place of retreat to be respected. And if they ventured outside, always with a female companion, they were treated with courtesy. It was considered a sin to stare at women in public, for instance, and if a man behaved badly towards a woman, regardless of his position or religion, he would not escape punishment.
The truth, as always, is mixed. The Ottoman Empire was both civilising and brutal. Slavery continued until the last days of the empire, yet it was time limited for the individual and could be a means of social mobility. The children of the court were much loved, but in the early days of the empire, fratricide was frequent – the Ottomans did not practice primogeniture and male relatives seen as a threat to the potential sultan could be executed or imprisoned.
Researching history complicates that first simple ‘take’ on a culture and a period, changes our perspective, makes connections. And, crucially, illuminates our own troubled present. Worth paying attention then!
