done just that: caught the eye of the sultan. In some cases, they were also concubines. They, too, were ranked among one another by the sultan in order of preference. Cariye: These were the slave women who served the , 's, 's and the sultan's children. They could be promoted to s which meant they earned wages, otherwise they were the property of the sultan and would reside in the harem. Newly arrived slave girls were called Acemi (novice) and Acemilik (novicitiate), and then Sakird (apprentice). Gedikli were the personal maidservants of the sultan. Cariye-women were manumitted to go after nine years of service, after which a marriage was arranged for them. The number of women in the harem is contested and only possible to estimate during some periods. Contemporaries claimed that in 1573, there were 150 women in the New palace and 1,500 in the Old Palace, and that there were 1,100 - 1,200 in 1604-1607, but these numbers are likely overestimated. The actual number of women are estimated to have been 49 in 1574 and 433 in 1633. In the 18th- and 19th-century, the official mevacib register is sometimes preserved, and notes that the harem contained 446 slave women during the reign of sultan Mahmud I (r.1730-1754), 720 during sultan Selim III (r. 1789-1808), and 473 during sultan Mahmud II (r.1808-1839). Western perceptions of the harem The Ottoman Imperial Harem, like other aspects of Ottoman and Middle Eastern culture, was depicted by European artists, French artists, writers, and travelers. As Leslie Peirce writes, Europe found that all the power that the Ottoman Empire had was established in the Harem. Through their depictions of the Harem, members of European imperial powers imposed their constructions of social organization onto other cultures, assuming their social hierarchies as “part of the natural or divine order,” that all other societies must work towards achieving. In particular, European notions of race, sexuality, and gender heavily influenced their perception and depictions of life and politics in the Ottoman empire. The West’s assumed social organization was that of “public/commonwealth/male and private/domestic/female.” Conversely, in Ottoman society, politics and imperial activity occurred in private. Seclusion was not as actively gendered in a strict binary, because the privacy of both male and female members of the imperial family symbolized their power over the rest of society. Western depictions of the imperial harem also worked to gender the meaning of