Historic fiction is always most effective when some of the events or figures in a novel are based on facts, even if these are only sketchy and have to be filled in by the author. This is the case with The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman, better known for her history and travel books. In Aviary Gate she used her experience in these fields to write a fascinating tale about the lives of the hidden women in the harem of Sultan Mehmet III.

The story weaves back and forth between modern day Oxford and 1599 Constantinople, now Istanbul. It begins with researcher Elizabeth Staveley, who finds a fragment of a parchment in the Bodleian Library in Oxford that makes her want to know what happened to the author of this document. Part of the narrative written on the parchment tells of Celia Lamprey, daughter of a sea captain, who is captured by Turkish corsairs. Presumably, Celia is the writer of this document.

No one outside the confines of the harems of any of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire can really say for sure how these women, and the eunuchs who watched over them, lived in the confined quarters of the palace in Constantinople. We know the quarters were confined because it is now possible to visit the place known as Topkapi. It is only known for certain that none of the sultans ever married, they only took concubines. In this way they avoided having to make political alliances that might become undesirable in later years.

Instead, they found companions from among the prettiest in their empire who were taken as slaves—sometimes sold by their own parents, other times the girls came willingly in hope of a better life at court—from among their Christian subjects, intermingled with the occasional Jewess. Of course, these girls were expected to convert to Islam. What is seldom known in the non-Islamic world is that no Muslim can make a slave of another Muslim. Hence, slaves—even today where they still exist in some Arabic countries, Sudan for one—have to come from non-Muslim societies.

It is also certain that during the Ottomans rule some girls, or young women, were taken as booty by Turkish pirates and sold to the highest bidder on the slave markets. If they attracted the attention of the sultan's agents, these girls or women could easily end up behind the harem walls. In Aviary Gate, the premise is that young Celia Lamprey ends up in Mehmet III's harem after her father's ship is captured and sunk.

Hickman has Celia engaged to Paul Pindar, a merchant of the Levant Company and secretary to the English ambassador to Mehmett's court, Sir Henry Lello. Both men are real characters and the author uses what knowledge she has of them to good account. She also presents the reader with Safiye Sultan, the real mother of Mehmet III, who had been the daughter of the Venician governor of Corfu before she ended up in the harem of Mehmett's father, Sultan Murad III. Mama is quite a schemer, who used her kira (an agent free to move out of the harem confines into the outside world), the Jewess Esperanza Malchi, to ensure her hold on power. The real Malchi, though this is not mentioned in the novel, came to a horrific end a year after the events of the novel. Finally, and to some extend most importantly, there is James Dallam, an organ builder, whom Queen Elizabeth I commissioned to sail to Turkey to present a clockwork organ to Sultan Mehmet III.

Dallam wrote a diary and in it he describes what he saw at the palace, including getting a brief look of the interior of the harem occupants through a small, barred opening set in the thick harem wall. He is the only Westerner, as far as we know, to ever get a view of these women.

Hickman has woven these characters and a few more into a lush oriental carpet in The Aviary Gate. While romance hangs heavy in the air in this novel, and the intrigues come fast and furious, the novel unfolds as a most satisfying tale of a bygone era that has about it the scent of The Arabian Nights. Even the modern part of the story is intriguing, giving us a tour of Istanbul that can only have been written by an experienced travel writer. But, alas, it is also the one part where the writer lets the reader down. The modern affair in which Hickman's character Elizabeth Staveley is involved is just a hair's breadth removed from Harlequin romance. This is too bad because otherwise this is a wonderful tale that lets come alive the past in vivid strokes and never asks the reader to set aside disbelief.

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