Ayşe Sultan (daughter of Mustafa II)


Ayşe Sultan, also called Büyük Ayşe Sultan, was an Ottoman princess, daughter of Sultan Mustafa II and half-sister of Sultans Mahmud I and Osman III of the Ottoman Empire.

Life

Birth

Ayşe Sultan was born on 30 April 1696 at the Edirne Palace. She was the eldest daughter and child of Sultan Mustafa II, and was born during Mustafa's march to Belgrade.

Marriages

In May 1708, Ayşe Sultan was married to Fazıl Mustafa Pasha’s son Köprülüzade Numan Pasha, then the governor of Belgrade, to whom she had remained betrothed since she was seven. Her dowry was 20,000 ducats. A month later, after sending on her trousseau, Ayşe and her equally magnificent procession left for the Zeyrek Palace that had been allocated to her. But instead of accompanying Ayşe Sultan all the way to Zeyrek, a neighbourhood to the northwest of the Valens Aqueduct, the dignitaries went only as far as the grand vezir’s palace. From this point onwards, the more functional core of the procession, comprising the princess and her trousseau, was taken to the Zeyrek palace in a relatively quiet and unostentatious way.
Numan Pasha became the grand vizier in 1710, and in 1719 the governor of Crete, where he died the same year. After Numan Pasha's death, Ayşe on 6 February 1720 was married secondly to Silahdar Ibrahim Pasha, previously a sword-bearer of Sultan Ahmed II. The marriage was consummated on 20 August 1720. Following Ibrahim Pasha's death, she married Koca Mustafa Pasha on 18 August 1725. Mustafa Pasha died in 1728.

Death

Ayşe Sultan died on 26 September 1752 and was buried in her great-grandmother Turhan Sultan's mausoleum, located at New Mosque at Eminönü in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ancestry