page_title: Miscegenation
section_title: Turkey
hierarchical_section_title: Miscegenation / History of ethnoracial admixture and attitudes towards miscegenation / Europe / Turkey
context_page_description: Miscegenation is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be of different racial types. This racial mixing requires sexual activity between members of different races, thus producing mixed-race offspring. Opposition to miscegenation, thereby preserving their race's purity and nature, is a typical theme of racial supremacist movements.
  Though the notion that racial mixing is undesirable has arisen at different points in history, it gained particular prominence in Europe during the era of colonialism. Anonymous authors invented the word in an 1863 fraudulent political pamphlet, indicating that miscegenation meant interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations, particularly between "... the American White Man and Negro". The term came to be associated with laws which banned interracial marriage and sex, these laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws.
  Although the term "miscegenation" was formed from the Latin miscere "to mix" plus genus "race" or "kind", and it could therefore be perceived as value-neutral, it is almost always a pejorative term used by people who believe in white racial superiority and purity.
context_section_description: In the 11th century, the Byzantine territory of Anatolia was conquered by the Seljuq Turks, who came from Turkestan in Central Asia. Their Ottoman Turkish descendants went on to annex the Balkans and much of Eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Due to Islamic marital law allowing a Muslim male to marry Christian and Jewish females, it was common in the Ottoman Empire for Turkish males to intermarry with European females. For example, various sultans of the Ottoman Dynasty often had Greek (Rûm), Slavic (Saqaliba), Venetian, Northcaucasian and French wives.
  In the Ottoman Empire, in addition to the Ottoman elites often taking large numbers of European wives and concubines (see Southeastern and Eastern Europe section), there were also opportunities for the reverse, when the empire recruited young Christian boys (Europeans and Christian Arabs) to become the elite troops of the Turkish Empire, the Janissaries. These Janissaries were stationed throughout the Turkish empire including the Middle-East and North Africa leading to inter-ethnic relationships between European men and women from the Middle East and North Africa.
  The concubines of the Ottoman Sultan consisted chiefly of purchased slaves. Because Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, the Sultan's concubines were generally of Christian origin. The mother of a Sultan, though technically a slave, received the extremely powerful title of Valide Sultan, and at times became effective ruler of the Empire (see Sultanate of women). One notable example was Kösem Sultan, daughter of a Greek Christian priest, who dominated the Ottoman Empire during the early decades of the 17th century. Another notable example was Roxelana, the favourite wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.
  Some of these European wives exerted great influence upon the empire as Valide Sultan ("Mother-Sultan"), some famous examples including Roxelana, a Ukrainian harem slave who later became Suleiman the Magnificent's favourite wife, and Nakşidil Sultan, wife of Abdul Hamid I, who according to the legend may have been Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, cousin of French Empress Josephine. Due to the common occurrence of such intermarriages in the Ottoman Empire, they have had a significant impact on the ethnic makeup of the modern Turkish population in Turkey, which now differs from that of the Turkic population in Central Asia. In addition to intermarriage, the large harems of Ottoman sultans often consisted almost entirely of female concubines who were of Christian European origin. Sultan Ibrahim the Mad, Ottoman ruler from 1640 to 1648, is said to have drowned 280 concubines of his harem in the Bosphorus. At least one of his concubines, Turhan Hatice, Ukrainian girl captured during one of the raids by Tatars and sold into slavery, survived his reign.
caption: An artistic depiction of Ruthenian slave girl Roxelana with Suleiman the Magnificent, by German painter Anton Hickel (1780).
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