One of Roxelana’s first tasks as a novice in the Old Palace was to sort out the who’s who of its hierarchy. Mehmed’s division of the Ottoman royal household into two palaces, males in the New and females in the Old, opened up new opportunities for women to develop positions of influence. At the top of the Old Palace hierarchy was the mother of the reigning sultan, female elder of the Ottoman dynastic house. Second in command was the Lady Steward, mistress of palace operations and monitor of etiquette and ceremony. Experienced staff ran the day-to-day life of the palace, enforcing its rules of conduct and managing its finances. Some participated in the instruction and disciplining of new slaves. Trainees who showed aptitude were assigned to dress, coif, and sometimes entertain their royal mistresses. Those of lesser talent, grace, or good looks became domestic servants who fetched trays of food, stoked the fires that heated water for the hamams, tended wardrobes, and did the laundry and cleaning.
“Byzantium or Constantinople.” Giovanni Andreas di Vavassore, ca. 1530. The Old Palace is located in the center, surrounded by angled walls; the New Palace is in the lower right. European communities resided principally in Galata (Pera), to the right, separated from Istanbul proper by the Golden Horn.
Because men were not permitted in this establishment of women, eunuchs acted as its residents’ guardians as well as their intermediaries with the outside world. Eunuchs had a long history as special servants to imperial regimes, from the Chinese to the Byzantine empires. The Old Palace eunuchs supervised the female teachers who came daily to provide instruction. The eunuchs were also enforcers, monitoring the female denizens of the palace, escorting them when they ventured beyond its walls, and helping to discipline those who stepped out of line. Senior eunuchs were repositories of imperial protocol, versed in the history of the women’s domain that they helped to govern. The all-male New Palace had its own substantial eunuch corps, similarly tasked with guarding as well as supervising its residents.
The Old Palace was home to all who lived within it and school to the lucky ones marked for advancement. In this world Roxelana acquired the polish she needed to attract the sultan’s attention. Catch his eye she must, for Suleyman came to the Old Palace only on occasional visits. He lived in and governed from the New Palace.
Surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens and fortified walls, the sprawling pastoral complex of the sultan’s palace occupied the old Byzantine acropolis. The promontory was a majestic setting for the seat of an expanding empire. It commanded the confluence of the city’s three great waters: the Bosphorus, gateway to the Black Sea; the Golden Horn, an estuary whose natural harbor sheltered the imperial shipyards; and the Sea of Marmara, which led through the Aegean to the Mediterranean. From the very edge of Europe, the sultan could gaze upon the shores of Asia.
The New Palace was resolutely a world of men. This royal capital in miniature housed not only the sultan and his large personal suite but also the various offices of government. These included two treasuries (public and royal), bureaucratic offices, and the Divan, the council hall where the most important matters of state were deliberated. The sultan’s own private chambers occupied one corner of the innermost of the palace’s three courtyards. An academy for training the most promising of young male recruits to Ottoman service took up much of the rest. Their quarters formed a perimeter around the tree-and flower-studded lawn that blanketed the courtyard’s interior space. Like the most promising Old Palace trainees, these youths were instructed and disciplined by both resident eunuchs and teachers brought in from outside. The most advanced served the sultan personally and, if fortunate, might subsequently rise to high office, even to become grand vizier.
When sultans visited the Old Palace, they did so to enjoy the company of their senior concubines, to pay their respects to their mothers, and to monitor the progress of their children. Sometimes they neglected their filial duties, or so thought Gulbahar, Suleyman’s great-grandmother. She wrote plaintively to her son Bayezid II, “My fortune, I miss you. Even if you don’t miss me, I miss you.… Come and let me see you. It’s been forty days since I last saw you.”2
Suleyman, by contrast, was a more frequent visitor, at least in the very first years of his reign. No doubt he sought the counsel of his mother Hafsa, whom he had come to rely on during the years of his princely apprenticeship. But at the Old Palace he also sought new women to bed. The Venetian ambassador Marco Minio reported in 1522, two years after Suleyman’s succession, that the young sultan was “very lustful” and went frequently to “the palace of the women.”3 The Venetians avidly tracked the sultan’s love life because knowledge of who was who in royal politics—who was the mother of which prince, for instance—was vital intelligence.
A story repeatedly told by Europeans described the method by which a sultan chose a new concubine: he would stroll down a lineup of females and drop his handkerchief in front of the one he found desirable. This may have happened on occasion, but the tale seems a poor fit with imperial etiquette and the well-crafted dignity of the sultan. It missed the point that a potential concubine needed opportunity to display the fruits of her training as well as her allure. The Old Palace devised suitable opportunities accordingly.
During a sultan’s visit, his mother or a resident sister would organize refreshment and entertainment. These receptions offered him opportunity to survey attractive young women who served fruit-flavored sherbets or offered a music-and-dance interlude. For her part, an aspiring concubine was ready and eager to display grace and accomplishment. The bolder among them perhaps engaged in guarded flirtation. Did Roxelana beguile Suleyman with the laugh or the smile for which she presumably earned her Ottoman name, Hurrem?
ROXELANA WAS NO raw recruit when she and Suleyman first cast eyes upon one another. Somewhere along the line, between her abduction from Ruthenia and her arrival at the Old Palace, the slave girl must have demonstrated to discerning observers her fitness for more than menial employment. If not directly acquired in Caffa either by a palace agent or a dealer who appraised her as promising material for private resale, she was most likely sold in one of Istanbul’s slave markets.
The principal slave market was located in the commercial heart of the city adjacent to the great Covered Market, which in turn was not very far from the Old Palace. In Roxelana’s day, when the sale of slaves was less centrally controlled, smaller markets could be found in other city districts like the town of Üsküdar on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. Auctions could be loud affairs as dealers touted their wares. In fact, residents of one Üsküdar village found the din created by brokers and bidders so objectionable that they took court action.4
For slaves, memory of the market could be indelible, especially as they were liable to physical examination to establish value, with potential concubines subject to a virginity check. The lot of slaves, especially those with aptitude, varied with the socioeconomic status of their male or female buyers. Since slavery among the Ottomans consisted predominantly of household (rather than agricultural) service, slaves’ duties tended to match their owners’ lifestyles. Wealthier households trained slaves in a range of positions—cook, groom, scribe, even entertainer. A slave’s appearance varied accordingly, to the point that a runaway male might go unnoticed because he wore his master’s cast-off clothing.5 “They treated their servants better than we do,” noted Theodore Spandouginos, a Greek of noble descent who knew both Istanbul and Turkish. The reason was that “Mahomet [the Prophet Muhammad] decreed that no one should keep a slave for more than seven years.”6 In fact, emancipation after a term of service was common, at least among the wealthier Ottomans. It was one factor in their unceasing demand for slave labor.7
Perhaps a speculator in female slaves, most likely a woman, perceived promise in Roxelana and bought her at market. She would wager on turning a smart profit by training and then reselling the girl at a price commensurate with her enhanced value. Perhaps a prominent Istanbul household acquired the Russian girl and soon discovered her to be talente
d and adaptable. Especially if Roxelana was purchased at some point by a high-ranking government official—or his wife, for rich women had their own money and their own slaves—the opportunity to curry favor by grooming and presenting her to a member of the dynasty would be obvious.
Claims that Roxelana was a gift to Suleyman circulated among both Ottomans and foreign envoys. If that was the case, she likely came to him as a congratulatory offering on the occasion of his accession in September 1520. One account held that a married sister of the new monarch secretly trained the girl and gave her as a present to her mother Hafsa, who in turn introduced the slave to her son.8 More than one account, however, held that it was Ibrahim, Suleyman’s male favorite, who gave Roxelana to him.9 Originally a fisherman’s son captured from the Adriatic coast, Ibrahim would be raised by Suleyman in 1523 to the highest state office, the grand vizierate. In any event, the young sultan certainly lost no time in bedding his new concubine, for their first child, Mehmed, was born within at most thirteen months of his enthronement.
Whether Roxelana was a high-value gift or merely a promising slave matters to our appreciation of her unprecedented success. A gift slave came ready with sophisticated training. Her donor’s best hope was that she would become an intimate of the sultan. If Suleyman chose not to make her a concubine or even to take her to his bed for one night, her value would at least protect her from menial status. If, however, Roxelana was merely one among the many purchased at market who were working their way up the Old Palace ranks, she had only her wits and guts and whatever innate physical appeal she possessed to propel her.
What had Roxelana’s sellers, buyers, mistresses, and masters seen in the Russian slave girl that motivated them to take her so far? Pietro Bragadin, Venetian ambassador during the early years of Suleyman’s reign, reported that the sultan’s new favorite was “young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite.”10 Physical attractiveness combined with a certain sexual guile was necessary in a royal concubine, but beauty was not the sole requisite. A healthy body was critical in someone whose mandate was to propagate the dynasty. Virginity, an essential condition, meant that Roxelana had remained unmolested during her passage from Ruthenia to the royal palace. But these physical attributes were worth little without intelligence. The real job of royal concubines, once they had aroused their master’s sexual interest, was to bear and then to raise royal children. A sharp mind along with a savvy instinct for political survival was a sine qua non in a culture that trusted the mother of a potential heir to prepare him for the sultanate. Roxelana had to demonstrate that she was a quick learner.
Like most slaves who entered Muslim households, Roxelana was converted to Islam at some point in her training. Along with her new religion, she received a new name, her former identity symbolically erased. As a new Muslim, she was taught to repeat the core Islamic creed—“There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”—and to perform her daily prayers. She probably also learned to recite the Fatiha, the short opening chapter of the Qur`an, considered by many Muslims to express its essence. But Roxelana could not have made much, if any, headway with Islamic scriptures because their language was Arabic. Her first linguistic challenge was to acquire facility with Turkish, the tongue of the Ottoman dynasty and the lingua franca of cosmopolitan Istanbul. Turkish, written in the Arabic script, may also have been her first written language, although, if truly the daughter of a priest, she could perhaps recognize and even write her Cyrillic letters.
Roxelana would also need to master the body language and courtly poise appropriate to the Ottoman palace. The would-be concubine must learn how to carry herself and how to dress. She must know when to lower her gaze, when to bow, and whose hand to kiss and then touch to her forehead as a sign of respect. She must glean the etiquette of palace discourse: to whom she might speak, on what occasions, in what words—and, perhaps most important, when to remain silent.
Roxelana needed to demonstrate that she was not only astute but also loyal. Advancing to the threshold of the royal concubine’s career—presentation to the sultan—required the backing of patrons as well as personal skill. If Roxelana was the gift of a high-ranking individual, she already had a patron, but if she came to the Old Palace as a slave-market purchase, her own initiative in attracting support from her superiors was crucial. Because a successful concubine had the sultan’s ear, various individuals in the royal household would acquire a stake in her progress, helping her along the way in exchange for future favors. Roxelana’s advocates could point out how to balance deference with displays of intelligence and how to recognize the moment when a spark of flair could catch the notice of a key superior—or perhaps of the sultan himself.
WHEN ROXELANA ARRIVED in the Old Palace, she encountered an array of imposing women. First and foremost among them was Suleyman’s beloved mother Hafsa, apparently a favorite concubine of his father Selim. In his 1526 report to the Venetian Senate, Bragadin noted that she was “a very beautiful woman of forty-eight, for whom he bears great reverence and love.”11 During Suleyman’s European military campaign in the same year, he wrote personally to tell his mother the momentous news of his army’s rout of the Hungarian forces on the plain of Mohacs.
Contrary to the popular legend that claims Hafsa to be the daughter of a Crimean Tatar khan, she, like all concubines of the era, was almost surely an enslaved and converted Christian of unknown origin. However, as legends often do, this one may encapsulate a truth within its error, namely, that the girl who became Hafsa may have been abducted from the northern Black Sea region. Whatever Hafsa’s story, it was doubtless whispered to new recruits in Old Palace service. For these young women, she was surely a celebrity, what with her great beauty, her enormous success as a slave convert, and the aura that was beginning to surround her as mother to a “magnificent” son.
When Suleyman was sent out in 1509 to begin his princely apprenticeship, Hafsa was the dynastic elder at her son’s court at Caffa, capital of the Ottoman province that stretched along the northern Black Sea coast. (His father Selim remained in his own princely post on the sea’s southeastern coast at Trabzon.) Suleyman was fifteen when he became governor of Caffa, where the hierarchy of his harem began to take shape. Hafsa presided over her son’s domestic household for four years in Caffa and then, after Selim won the contest for his father’s throne in 1512, in the western Anatolian city of Manisa.
Salary registers dating from Suleyman’s tenure in Manisa signal Hafsa’s esteemed status. Her monthly stipend—6,000 silver aspers—was the highest figure on the princely payroll and triple the personal income of the prince himself.12 Suleyman was still a junior member of the dynasty, despite the fact that he was his father’s only surviving son and heir and was already producing heirs of his own. When Selim died suddenly in 1520 and Suleyman became sultan, Hafsa simply adapted her role to the new scale of imperial life in Istanbul, acquiring greater status as queen mother. She was now a free woman under Islamic law, which provided protections for the concubine mother: she could not be sold or given away during her master’s lifetime, and upon his death she was automatically freed. This regard for the slave who bore a child to a free Muslim man stemmed in part from the fact that the law recognized the child as freeborn.
As Roxelana grew in prominence, she likely also came into direct contact with the Lady Steward, one of whose principal responsibilities was to supervise the select group who served the queen mother and, during his visits, the sultan. While this office was an old one, little is known about it before the late sixteenth century, when prominent members of the New Palace harem established by Roxelana became figures of political interest. The steward during Roxelana’s tenure, or at least part of it, may have been a woman called Gulfem, whom Roxelana mentions often in her letters to Suleyman. Steward or not, Gulfem was clearly helpful and supportive of the young concubine. In one letter, Gulfem appended a note explaining to the sultan how she had solved a budget problem for his favorite. Some have claimed, wit
hout evidence, that Gulfem was a former concubine of Suleyman whose offspring had died; if true, it appears that at some point he rewarded her for her talent and service with the stewardship.
Second in rank only to Hafsa among royal women were the concubine mothers of Suleyman’s children. They were likely the objects of Roxelana’s keenest interest, for she surely hoped to join their number. One of the duties—and pleasures—of a prince was to populate a new dynastic generation. When Suleyman first encountered Roxelana, he already had four children. Mahmud was eight years old at his father’s accession, Mustafa was five, and their brother Murad an infant. They also had a sister, whose birth date and name (perhaps Raziye) are uncertain.13 With the possible exception of Mahmud, they and any others who had not survived infancy were born to Suleyman in Manisa.
Mahmud, Mustafa, and Murad each had a different mother, as the Ottoman politics of reproduction demanded. The rationale was that each heir presumptive deserved his mother’s undivided attention as coach and partisan in his future candidacy for the throne. As for Suleyman’s daughter, she may have shared a mother with one of the boys, since there was no limit to the number of female children a concubine might bear before the birth of a son put an end to her sexual relationship with the sultan.
If princes were the lifeblood of the Ottoman sultanate, princesses were loved specially. Unlike their brothers, they could never rival their father for popularity and prestige. And like their counterparts around the world, they were useful for the political alliances their marriages consolidated. A vigorous producer of sons, Suleyman may well have wished for more daughters, for only one, Mihrumah, would survive to adulthood. Later in life the sultan seemed to compensate by devoting a great deal of attention to his granddaughters’ engagements and weddings.
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