Aimée du Buc de Rivéry

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Aimée du Buc de Rivéry

Aimée du Buc de Rivéry (born December 19, 1768 in Trois-Îlets near Fort-de-France in Martinique ; lost around 1788) was a French noblewoman . According to legends, she was mistress of Sultan Abdülhamid I , mother of Mahmud II and Valide Sultan from 1808 to 1817 under the name of Nakşidil , but this is without historical basis.

Life

Aimée du Buc de Rivéry was the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner on the island of Martinique. After Aimée was educated in a convent school near Nantes , she was supposed to go back home by ship. The ship was lost on the way there.

There was a distant family relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763-1814) due to her marriage to Alexandre de Beauharnais . Aimée is therefore considered to be a cousin by marriage (second degree) of the later Empress of the French, which, in connection with her unexplained disappearance, contributed to the creation of a legend.

Legend

Basis of the legend is the assumption Aimée du Buc de Rivéry might by suspected Berber - pirates who had sunk their ship, have been enslaved. As a slave could it as a gift from the Bey of Algiers to the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid I. have been sent (1725-1789) to Istanbul. The mother of the future sultan Mahmud II (1785-1839), Nakşidil (1768-1817), would possibly be identical to the missing Aimée under these assumptions.

According to legend, Aimée came to the harem of Abdülhamid I and, as usual, was given a new Turkish name, Nakşidil ( Nakshidil , Nakş-î Dil ). To remind them of their homeland, the sultan is said to have furnished some rooms in the Topkapı Palace in an elegant French Rococo style. While she superficially followed Islamic rites, she still kept the Christian faith and was even allowed to practice it openly towards the end of her life. Aimée also placed variants of the legend in the harem of Abdülhamid's successor Selim III.

She is said to have taught the sultan's son French, directly or indirectly, for the social and military reforms under Selim III. and Mahmud II, as well as the fact that the Ottoman Empire set up a permanent embassy in Paris. The internal reforms were also the reason for a palace revolt by the Janissaries , from which she and her allied men at court only narrowly escaped.

After all, she is even credited with dictating the peace treaty between Russia and the Ottoman Empire to her son in 1812 in order to avenge Joséphine, from whom Napoleon had separated in favor of Marie-Luise . The Russian tsar was able to use all his strength to fight Napoleon, and Aimée caused the downfall of the man who left her cousin.

Background to the legend

The story shows clear parallels to stories that were already circulating in the early 16th century, long before Aimée's alleged capture. Names and dates of the allegedly captured French princesses did not yet exist in these stories; they were inventions by Ottoman court officials that were not denied by the French. The connections suggested in this way between the Ottoman and French ruling houses appeared superficially plausible and were also used politically at an early stage, mostly to justify political alliances between France and the Ottoman Empire. This was also the case with Aimée du Buc de Rivery: Napoleon III. and Abdülaziz are said to have made social and political capital out of the supposed extensive relationship.

Mahmud's military reforms in the Ottoman Empire and the peace treaty with Russia in 1812 cannot be traced back to the historical Nakşidil, it is only (uncertainly) that it is said to have made French fashion and furniture popular in Istanbul. However, the legend served in Europe to consolidate a retrograde image of the Orient - Ottoman rulers only received a modern view of the world through the upbringing of their western slave mother. After the Second World War, the material was used in numerous novels, which further contributed to the spread of this legend and other harem myths.

It is historically certain that Aimée was still in France in 1788, while Mahmud II was born in 1785. Numerous variants of the legend circumvent this fact in such a way that Aimée was not captured until 1788 and acted in Istanbul as a substitute for Mahmud's biological mother, who died early. But there is no evidence for this either.

According to an equally unreliable contemporary report from the Ottoman court in 1817 on the occasion of her death, Nakşidil, the foster mother of Mahmud II, was captured on a French ship at the age of two and then raised in a harem. Again, it could not have been Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, who is said to have been kidnapped at the age of 20.

However, various Turkish historians now assume that Nakşidil was of Caucasian (presumably Georgian ) descent.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 395.
  2. ↑ a b c Christine Isom-Verhaaren: Journal of World History - Royal French Women in the Ottoman Sultans' Harem ( Memento from October 25, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Engl.)
  3. ↑ Necdet Sakaoğlu: Bu mülkün kadın sultanları: Vâlide sultanlar, hâtunlar, hasekiler, kadınefendiler, sultanefendiler. Oğlak Publications, Istanbul 2008, ISBN 978-9-753-29623-6 , pp. 358-360.

Literary utilization

Web links

personal data
SURNAME You Buc de Rivéry, Aimée
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nakşidil, Nakshidil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French noblewoman, alleged harem slave and mother of Mahmud II.
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1768
PLACE OF BIRTH Trois-Îlets near Fort-de-France in Martinique
DATE OF DEATH after 1788