Fatima Hatun née Beatrice Michiel

Abstract

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Beatrice Michiel fled an unhappy marriage in Venice for Constantinople. She converted to Islam, taking the name of Fatima, remarried, and because of her access to the imperial harem, played a significant role in Veneto-Ottoman relations in this troubled period. Beatrice/Fatima’s experience provides a suggestive window into the often ignored experience of renegade women on the Mediterranean frontier. While women’s religiosity is usually viewed as more unwavering than men’s, this case study suggests that while their motivations may have differed from those of men, women too might convert without compulsion. This story also provides a window onto ways in which women were able to subordinate societal and cultural mentalities and structures through utilising the political, religious and cultural frontiers of the Mediterranean as a means to prise themselves free from familial and economic circumstances in which they normally had limited power to act.