As I was browsing Wikipedia (which I'm pretty sure is already disqualified as a credible source), I had stumbled upon a period in Ottoman history referred to as the "Sultanate of Women", and as I continued reading, I found a list containing the stipends the mothers and favorites of the Sultan had during this period, some earning thousands of aspers a day.
As I asked above, how did the Ottoman Sultan manage to give these large salaries to the imperial family without emptying their treasury?
I'm not well versed on Ottoman administration or how they filled up the treasury in the first place, but I really can't fathom how they managed to give such large salaries daily.
Essentially, the reason is that while certain individuals earned massive sums of money from their rank in the harem, they were never very numerous. I've mentioned in a previous post that in the early sixteenth century Süleyman the Magnificent's wife Hurrem (d. 1558) received 2,000 akçe a day, and later in the century century the Valide Sultan (Queen Mother) Nurbanu (d. 1583) had a stipend of 1,000 akçe a day. This is of course a huge amount of cash, but it's not outrageous in comparison to other high-ranking figures in the empire. Provincial governors at times had access to a million or more akçe a year in order to fulfill their obligations. Supporting the empire's dozens of active and retired governors and other public officials like judges was far more costly than one or two imperial women, however rich they may have been. After all, there was never more than a single Valide Sultan at any given time (except briefly, 1648-51) and concubines received much more moderate stipends than them, in the range of dozens rather than hundreds of akçe.
Or to put it in more concrete terms: the total annual revenue of the empire in the late 1520s is estimated to have been approximately 9.7 million ducats, or 537 million akçe. Hurrem's stipend of 2,000 akçe per day or 730,000 per year would have been a tiny, if not quite insignificant, fraction of this.