Alas, sorrow tinged the joy of Mehmed’s birth. In mid-October, during the army’s victory march back to Istanbul, Suleyman’s small son Murad died. The tragedy was horribly compounded when Murad’s sister, Suleyman’s only daughter, died two days before her father’s entry into the capital. On October 29, ten days after the sultan’s return, his oldest son, the nine-year-old Mahmud, succumbed to the epidemic, perhaps plague.2 The waves of devastating news surely called out large throngs of mourners to honor the funeral cortege as it wended its way on foot over Istanbul’s hills. Led by the empire’s viziers, the procession arrived at the cemetery where the children’s grandfather Selim lay in his tomb. If Mehmed’s was the city’s first royal birth in decades, the spectacle of three small coffins provided unaccustomed evidence of the all-too-human vulnerability of the royal family, the pivot of the empire’s existence.
As it mourned, the Old Palace was no doubt on medical alert. Any contagious disease could spread rapidly in its confined quarters. Roxelana had presumably been living in the Old Palace since the early stages of her pregnancy, since its team of female doctors could better care for her than could the skeletal staff in the Hall of the Maidens. Now, precautionary medical measures may have required that a demonstrably healthy wet nurse and governess temporarily care for the infant.
Everything we know about Roxelana suggests she was a person of determination and self-control, but she could certainly be forgiven any turbulent emotions in the aftermath of Mehmed’s birth. Relief and happiness that she and the child had emerged from the epidemic healthy were natural. Moreover, Roxelana had rapidly accomplished her purpose—producing a child for the dynasty. In turn, Mehmed garnered for her what she presumably desired—a secure position within the royal household. The slave girl who had lost her natal family now had a new one: through her son she now had blood ties to his father and grandmother.
Mehmed’s birth introduced a legal shift in Roxelana’s status. Islamic law recognized and protected the concubine’s role as mother: unlike an ordinary slave, she could not be sold or given away, and she would automatically be freed upon the death of her master. Her new status under the law as umm al-walad (mother of a child) signaled these rights and her identity. The Ottoman dynasty was not always faithful to the letter of the law, but in this case it capitalized on the legal category by charging royal concubines with dedicating themselves to their children’s welfare and upbringing.
There were limits to Roxelana’s prerogatives as mother, however. Mehmed was her son, but he was primarily a child of the dynasty. The House of Osman, as historians of the time called it, was a venerable lineage, now entering its third century of rule. As son of the reigning sultan and a potential ruler of the empire, Mehmed carried with him the investment of the entire imperial family. Now the alarming death of two princes within a matter of weeks raised both Mehmed’s and his mother’s value, something Roxelana was bound to appreciate. The heightened health measures that would be instituted may have kept mother and child isolated from one another.
The tragic deaths of Mahmud and Murad within a matter of weeks sharpened awareness of the hazards of an empire based on hereditary rule. Were the House of Osman to die out, the empire would dissolve, and a new state under the aegis of a new dynasty would inevitably come into being. If the new mother’s emotions were mixed, Suleyman carried the heavy weight of political as well as personal distress. His biographers have paid scant if any attention to the wrenching loss of three children and the grief that inevitably ensued. They focus instead on the affairs of state into which the sultan was plunged on his return from Belgrade. To be sure, Suleyman was probably fortunate to have the distraction of envoys who arrived one after the other from Venice, the merchant state of Ragusa, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow. They came to convey congratulations on his recent victory and to request favors of his government. But the security of the royal family was also a political matter.
As if the loss of three children was not devastating enough, the young father would feel concern over the well-being of the living ones—of Mustafa, now the oldest at six, and the newborn Mehmed, the only other Ottoman prince. Suleyman clearly needed more sons. For her part, Roxelana had presumably mastered something of the politics of concubinage during her training and understood the future that was in store for her. Her career as mother of a son was laid out carefully, including the rule that she was no longer eligible for the sultan’s bed. She was mother of a prince now; her work as concubine was complete. If Roxelana had come to depend on the father of her son or learned to care for him in the months they were together, she would need to rein in those feelings.
THE BIRTH OF Mehmed introduced changes into Roxelana’s life. As her status and value rose within the imperial household, so did her material circumstances. “When one of the maidens becomes pregnant by the Monarch, her salary is increased and she is honored and elevated above the others, and is served as a Lady,” observed the Venetian Giovanni Maria Angiolello, usually our best informant on the career of the concubine.3 In the detailed palace account books that recorded the stipends of imperial household members, Roxelana would now be listed not by name but by the honorific title “the mother of Prince Mehmed.” Her son had catapulted her into the handsomely rewarded elite of palace women, the mothers of royal offspring.
Roxelana could now begin to spend—indeed her position demanded that she do so, generously but prudently. (All palace women of status received a daily stipend and a separate “kitchen” budget.)4 Apart from seeing to the sundry daily needs of her suite, protocol required that she reward with tips and gifts those who served her or the baby. As the health crisis passed and Roxelana emerged from the rituals of postpartum confinement, she would embark on the privilege of receiving visitors and the duty of providing refreshments to palace women who came to call on the little prince and his mother. Suleyman now also had a reason to visit, rather than to summon.
A new mother’s spatial location within the palace served as a public announcement of her elevated rank. Once she returned to the Old Palace from her interlude with Suleyman, Roxelana graduated from the dormitory quarters of the trainees to private chambers befitting a full-fledged concubine carrying the sultan’s child. Mehmed’s birth perhaps earned her an even larger and more lavishly appointed suite. Additional attendants would be assigned to serve Roxelana, organizing meals, supervising her visits to the bath, looking after her wardrobe, and conveying messages. Mehmed too would acquire a small retinue. Foremost among the women assigned to care of the infant was his daye, the governess assigned to him for life. Unfortunately, her identity is unknown, since she too was recognized by her title.
While the interior of Roxelana’s rooms was visible only to her mentors, guests, and servants, she herself was an ambulatory messenger of her rank to all who might encounter her during the day. Her person required more elegant adornment, and so her wardrobe expanded. Roxelana’s new income would enable her to select fabrics for her gowns from the array of rare and expensive textiles produced around the empire and imported from abroad.
Headband and handkerchief belonging to Roxelana, preserved in her tomb.
Jewels came to Roxelana as congratulatory childbirth gifts. The most treasured of her ornaments almost certainly came from Suleyman. Every sultan cultivated a manual skill, and his was the art of goldsmithing. He had allegedly learned his craft from a Greek master in Trabzon, the city where he was born and educated. Known as Trebizond among the Byzantines, it was the last outpost of Greek civilization to fall to the Ottomans, in 1461. By 1526, the Venetian ambassador Pietro Bragadin could report that Suleyman had bestowed 100,000 ducats’ worth of jewels on his favorite.5 Even if rumor aggrandized the sum, the jewels were apparently a news item worthy of international note.
The daily routine of the young mother was now a busy one. Although much of Mehmed’s care was in the hands of his daye and his wet nurse, Roxelana was not deprived of opportunity for intimacy with her infant. A prince’s mother was to be his
lifelong mentor. His father by contrast was frequently absent, either on military campaign or deep in council deliberations. Even when present in Istanbul, the sultan lived apart from his children. Angiolello underlined the parental responsibility of the concubine mother: “If she gives birth to a son, the boy is raised by his mother until the age of ten or eleven; then the Grand Turk gives him a province and sends his mother with him.… And if a girl is born, she is raised by her mother until the time she is married.”6 By Suleyman’s day, the age at which princes and their mothers took up provincial service was rising—he himself had been fifteen when sent with Hafsa to Caffa. Mustafa would graduate to public life at eighteen and Mehmed at twenty.
As a new mother, possibly as young as seventeen, Roxelana needed guidance in the Ottoman approach to raising royal children. She could learn from Mehmed’s caregivers, who were available and also accountable if anything went wrong with the little boy’s development. If she had the opportunity to observe Mustafa and Mahidevran together, the senior concubine’s conduct could serve as a useful referent for the future—to emulate, improve upon, or perhaps disregard. Hafsa surely kept a grandmother’s eye on Mehmed and presumably asked her staff to monitor Roxelana’s well-being. At the same time, the culture of child raising in the Old Palace allowed a modicum of freedom for new mothers to follow the ways of their ancestors. After all, one reason for perpetuating the dynasty with slave concubines of varied origin was to exploit their very foreignness.
The nursery was not the only locus of Roxelana’s days. Her education continued and in fact accelerated. Her Turkish skills would advance, most likely with the help of a tutor, and her knowledge of Islam would deepen, perhaps with the guidance of a spiritually inclined palace elder. Improving her penmanship would free her from reliance on a harem scribe if she wanted to communicate privately. All of this activity, with its focus on the new little prince and the preparation of his mother as his future counselor, had another effect: it helped the concubine leave behind the intense interlude with the sultan who had gotten her pregnant. Her transformation required that she adjust her expectations and desires to her new destiny. Her gratification would now derive from her child and his successes.
UNEXPECTED THEN WAS Suleyman’s call for Roxelana to return to his bed. She conceived again sometime within four months of his return from Belgrade in October 1521. Suleyman was again away at war for most of Roxelana’s second pregnancy and also for the birth of their daughter Mihrumah in the fall of 1522. The following February, he returned to his capital with a stunning new victory: the capture of the Mediterranean island of Rhodes from the formidable crusader order of the Knights Hospitaller. Once again a conquest was paired with a new addition to the dynastic family. And once again, victory was followed by a return to the bedchamber with the concubine who had clearly become his favorite.
Over the next few years, Roxelana and Suleyman produced three more boys: Selim, Abdullah, and Bayezid. All were presumably planned, or at least welcome. Islamic law sanctioned forms of birth control, and the Old Palace had ways of dealing with unwanted conceptions.7 No children were born to Suleyman with any other concubine during his entire reign. If he slept with any during his long absences from Istanbul or during Roxelana’s pregnancies, care was taken that no child issued from these encounters. Five children with one concubine in seven years and none with any other was a revolutionary break with tradition. An Ottoman sultan had become monogamous. What the consequences might be, no one could yet say.
Roxelana’s rise to favorite did not go unremarked. Public announcements of the royal births conveyed news of the couple’s fecundity and, by implication, the lovers’ presumed pleasures. Istanbulites may not have known the favorite’s name at first, but they could not escape a dawning awareness of the sultan’s maverick sexual habits. Venetian ambassadors, Europe’s keenest eyes and ears in Istanbul, tracked Suleyman’s growing attachment to Roxelana. In the space of a few years, the sultan’s amorous profile shifted in their reports from keen interest in his harem to constancy to one woman. Marco Minio had noted in 1522 that Suleyman was “very lustful,” but Pietro Zen, a longtime intimate of the Ottoman court, wrote to the Venetian Senate in 1524 that “the Seigneur is not lustful” and was devoted to a single woman.8 By 1526, Pietro Bragadin could assert that the sultan no longer paid attention to the mother of his eldest son Mustafa, “a woman from Montenegro,” but gave all his affection to “another woman, of the Russian nation.”9
Although both Europeans and the Istanbul public were beginning to recognize Roxelana’s monopoly in the royal bedchamber, the old ways died hard in people’s minds. Even foreign observers appeared flummoxed by the idea of a monogamous sultan. Some fifteen years after Roxelana’s emergence as sole consort, Luigi Bassano was still relaying the standard story that sultans traded one concubine for another.10 The rumors that would later plague Roxelana—of her sorcery and Suleyman’s lovesickness—may well have germinated around this time, as people became aware of her seemingly permanent place in his life. The force of public opinion in the Ottoman capital was considerable, and Istanbulites had been known to censure their monarch when provoked.
For one thing, the public disapproved if the sultan appeared to overindulge in pleasure. His duty, they believed, was the defense of the empire from the several enemies threatening its borders. Even Mehmed the Conqueror had faced a challenge from his soldiers when he sent his grand vizier to command the army while he stayed home. When, in 1525, Janissaries in Istanbul rose up in protest against Suleyman’s prolonged absence—he had taken a long winter sojourn in Thrace to hunt—the rebels would pillage the customs house, the Jewish quarter where it was located, and the palaces of two viziers and the head treasurer.11 One was the sumptuous residence of Ibrahim, Suleyman’s boon companion who was now grand vizier.
Subjects of the Ottoman empire understood and honored the political logic of serial concubinage—rotation out of the sultan’s bed of each new mother of a son. They grasped the point that a prince should not share his mother with another prince, that his mother was both his ally and the sultan’s check on his son’s loyalty. The contest among princes was expected to be even, and each needed and deserved his mother’s exclusive devotion and counsel. Heir to political traditions shared by Mongols and Central Asian Turks, the Ottomans believed that all physically sound sons of the sovereign had an equally legitimate claim to power. The widespread European practice of primogeniture—the automatic succession of the king’s eldest son—no doubt seemed to them both unjust and unwise. First there was the spiritual belief that sovereignty was god given and man should not interfere, and then there was the mundane rationale that casting sons of the reigning monarch as rivals would demonstrate who was best able to rally a loyal following and win the backing of the military, thus the best candidate to succeed his father. To the public, it must have seemed dangerous to tamper with a formula that had yielded a stellar succession of strong monarchs.
But the times were dangerous. It was immediately after he threw down the gauntlet to Europe at Belgrade that Suleyman lost three children. In 1522, the ambassador Minio commented that the empire would be in great confusion should the sultan happen to die leaving only infant heirs.12 A crisis in the life of the dynastic family was a crisis in the state, and Europe had used such moments in the past to assemble crusading coalitions against the Ottomans. The famous Battle of Varna in 1444 was a case in point. When Murad II gave up the throne for a life of contemplation, turning it over to his twelve-year-old son Mehmed (the future “Conqueror”), a coalition of several kings and princes blessed by the pope saw an opportunity to advance. Fortunately for the Ottomans, Murad returned at the grand vizier’s summons and vanquished the crusaders.
Although Suleyman could do nothing about the tender age of his offspring, he clearly had to father more as insurance against the myriad hazards of childhood in the sixteenth century. His viziers would have impressed this upon him in guarded, respectful terms, his mother more emphaticall
y. Suleyman was not alone in his dilemma, for the quest for heirs bedeviled other monarchs in these years. In 1525, Basil III, grand prince of Moscow, confined his wife to a convent after twenty years of a childless marriage; four years later, in a second union, he finally got his son, the future Ivan IV. The Tudor kings of England were stymied in their efforts to establish a new dynasty in the aftermath of the internecine slaughter that had been the Wars of the Roses. The first Tudor ruler, Henry VII, lost his eldest son, Crown Prince Arthur, when the boy was fifteen. Henry VIII, Arthur’s younger brother and successor, waited twenty-eight years for his own male heir.
Henry VIII was notorious for the lengths he went to get a son—a divorce that precipitated a rupture with the pope in Rome in 1533, the execution in 1536 of an alleged adulteress who had only produced a girl. If Basil and Henry knew of the Ottoman monarch’s plight, he must have looked lucky to them: he did not have to rid himself of his consorts to obtain the sons who brought dynastic security.
WHAT PERSUADED SULEYMAN to answer his own reproductive crisis by reuniting with Roxelana? Of all our uncertainties about Suleyman and Roxelana’s relationship, this is the most vexing. Returning the mother of a prince to the role of concubine violated his ancestors’ long-standing practice. It was an act that would reset the course of Roxelana’s life and forever change the face of Ottoman politics.
What part, if any, Roxelana played in stimulating her reunion with Suleyman is also unclear. She may well have been loath to see another woman in Suleyman’s bed now that she had a son whose future she must protect. A new concubine could mean a new son for the sultan and a competitor for her Mehmed. And if Roxelana had become emotionally attached to Suleyman, she had all the more reason to resist a rival. On the other hand, perhaps she was content simply to focus on Mehmed and their future together.
Empress of the East Page 7
