Afife Kadın

Afife Kadın (Ottoman Turkish: عفیفہ قادین‎) was Empress consort of Sultan Mustafa II of the Ottoman Sultan.

Life

Ebu Bekir Efendi, a minister of state affairs presented her, at the age of ten, as a gift in the harem of Sultan Mustafa. It was probably Mustafa'a mother who gave Hafise to Mustafa as a concubine. She was a woman who was proud of having been elected to accompany the sultan on all his three campaigns. She had given birth to four sons and a daughter of the sultan. She was also visited by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in early March 1718. Lady Mary called her the favourite of Sultan Mustafa.

After Mustafa's death in 1703, she was immediately saluted with an absolute order to leave the seraglio and choose herself a husband from the great men at the Porte. She looked upon this liberty as the greatest disgrace and affront that could happen to her. She threw herself at the Sultan Ahmed III's feet and begged him to poniard her rather than use her brother's widow with that contempt. She represented to him, in agonies of sorrow, that she was privileged from this misfortune by having brought five princes to the Ottoman family. But all the boys being dead and only one girl surviving, this excuse was not received, and she was compelled to make her choice.

She chose Bekir Efendi, then secretary of state, and above, fourscore year old, to convince the world that she firmly intended to keep the vow she had made of never suffering a second husband to approach her bed, and since she must honour some subject so far as to be called his wife, she would choose him as a mark of her gratitude, since it was he that had presented her at the age of ten year to her lost lord. But she never permitted him to pay her one visit. She died in 1723.

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