The Briefly Noted feature in the Oct. 30, 2017 issue of The New Yorker noted Leslie Peirce's Empress of the East, which is a biography of Ottoman empress Roxelana.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, before Roxelana became the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire:
She was captured as a young girl by Crimean Tatar raiders and taken to Constantinople (now Istanbul), the Ottoman capital, where she was sold in a slave market to someone connected to Süleyman, who became sultan in 1520. She [...] entered the harem, the royal household in which hundreds of women were held in sexual servitude to the sultan.
Roxelana was a fifteen-year-old nymphet when she entered the Sultan's harem, and she was not the only nymphet "held in sexual servitude".
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