Zeyneb Effendi was a royal poetess in the days of Mohammed the Conqueror. She recounted in glowing lines her hero's achievements. So also Mirhi Hanum was a poetess of talent. She was born of a wealthy father, a grand vizir. She was so unfortunate as to have had as a lover one who did not reciprocate her passion. She, therefore, sung her young life out in avowed virginity, wearing an amber necklace, symbolizing her eternal choice of celibacy. Among other poetesses of note may be mentioned Sidi, who died in the year 1707, the authoress of _Pleasures of Sight_ and _The Divan_. Mirhi, who has been styled "the Ottoman Sappho," was a poetess of Amasiya, full of the passion of love. She sang boldly concerning the object of her devotion, but her virtue was never questioned, nor her talent deprecated. But the women of Turkey have been affected less by the literary influence of Persia than by the religious inheritance from the Arabs. Before Mohammed polygamy flourished among the various Arabian tribes. The prophet brought some order out of the chaos, and the harem became a more or less well-defined system, with its definite laws and regulations. Therein woman was somewhat advanced from the state in which she earlier found herself. And yet, Mohammed manifestly wavered in his treatment of women and in the ideals which underlay it. A certain equality between man and woman is at one time taught in the Koran, as when it said: "The women ought to behave to their husbands in like manner as their husbands should behave towards them, according to what is just." And again the prophet said: "Ye men have right over your wives and your wives have right over you." This truly is reciprocity. And yet he asserted that "woman is a field--a sort of property which her husband may use or abuse as he thinks fit;" and again, that "a woman's happiness in Paradise is beneath the sole of her husband's feet." Commercially, the girl was of more value than the boy, because she could be sold and made a wife, and perhaps she might be converted to the Mohammedan faith. It is, in truth, the Turkish slave woman's physical beauty, as she was captured and came into the possession of Arab sheiks, which first brought the Turkish woman into notice. But these superbly attractive, dark-eyed slaves at length captured their captors, and the Turk became master of the Arab and the most virile exponent of the Arabian faith and civilization.