For over seven centuries painters and writers have been fascinated by the non-Christian otherness of the Ottoman Empire and in particular it’s most notorious institution, the harem.In her carefully researched book, Anna Buxton cuts through the stereotypes and reveals how in an Empire, easily characterized as patriarchal, former Christian women came to exert significant power in day to day government.At the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, dynastic marriages to Balkan princesses aimed to show that the Sultans were their fitting husbands, so Mara Brankovich, Tamara Maria Shishman, Olivera Despina Chlebyanovich came as dynastic brides, prior to the lands of their fathers being appropriated by the Sultans, their husbands.And when there were no more kingdoms to take over, procreation was achieved through slaves. This resulted in a vast variety of different genes in the sultans’ veins. These concubines came from outside the Empire (at least in theory). The Sultan’s female subjects, whether Turkish, Jewish or Christian could not enter the Harem. They were protected as tax-payers and could not be enslaved. If the sultan was attracted by a free woman, he had to marry her – this was exactly what happened, when Suleiman the Magnificent gave former concubine, Hürrem Sultan, her freedom and then married her. Rising through the ranks of concubines, under constant threats of strangulation and poisoning of themselves and their children, these women came to dictate foreign and domestic policy from behind the throne of their often inadequate consorts and sonsThe Sultanas, whose stories are told in this book, include several Italian women, two Bulgarians, two Ukrainians, several French women, two Serbian and some Georgian and Byzantine/Greek women.The reader will be fascinated by the many stories, woven into the lives of the sultanas. They used networks of agents, including carefully managed Vizier sons-in-law, Jewish money lenders and powerful Eunuchs. Fascinating examples of contacts include Tamerlane (Timur), the nomadic conqueror, who managed to all but destroy the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the14th century, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, who fought the Turks and the Bulgarians to liberate his cousin the Byzantine Emperor John Paleologus; Dona Grazia Mendez Nasi, the head of the Jewish Mendez Bank – the first woman to want to create a Jewish state on the former Jewish lands; her nephew Joseph de Nasi – a European and Ottoman playboy and spy-master; King Charles XII of Sweden, who was a guest of the Ottoman Empire for a number of years and Catherine de Medici, who corresponded with several Sultanas. Emissaries of “the Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I came to understand the importance of the Harem in gaining significant trading rights.But throughout, the Sultanas rightly hold centre stage, tightrope walkers over a snake pit.