seraglio

Seraglio refers to the part of a large Muslim palace reserved for women and the households of the ruler. In the Ottoman context, it denotes the harem or the women’s apartments within the palace, where wives, concubines, female relatives, and servants lived under the supervision of eunuchs. The term entered English through Italian seraglio, from Turkish saray meaning "palace." More broadly, it can denote the palace complex as a whole or the harem region within it.

In major Ottoman capitals such as Istanbul, seraglios were integral to court life and had distinct architectural layouts. The most famous example is the Topkapi Palace, whose harem housed hundreds of women and children and was governed by eunuchs and the Valide Sultan, the sultan’s mother. Access to the sultan was tightly controlled, and women in the seraglio could wield informal political influence through family networks and patronage.

With modernization and reform efforts in the 19th century, the political centrality of the harem declined and court customs changed. The term seraglio is now largely historical and literary, often used to describe a harem or palace with a harem in works about Ottoman or Middle Eastern societies. In Western culture, it has appeared in novels and opera, such as Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, reinforcing its association with exoticized depictions of life inside royal households.