Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  What was Suleyman thinking when he shared his bed again with Roxelana? Was he heedlessly following his heart, as his critics would later claim? Was it simply easier for him, in the midst of personal grief and the relentless press of politics, to turn to a woman now familiar to him than to initiate a barely known and inexperienced virgin? Ottoman politics of reproduction exacted a price from a male dynast, who by convention had to relinquish a concubine he might have come to care for. Whatever the case, the pressure for more sons was certainly a factor in Suleyman’s decision to bend the rules for a woman who had conceived quickly and produced a healthy boy.

  Still, as the young sultan well knew, to flout imperial custom was a hazardous move. Abandoning the practice of rotating concubines would disrupt delicate power balances worked out over two centuries. The Old Palace prided itself on providing sultans with multiple partners worthy of companionship and motherhood, and resentment of Suleyman’s return to Roxelana would naturally arise in some quarters. His pashas and viziers must have worried that the unprecedented devotion to a single woman—especially a young and politically inexperienced one—would interfere with his political judgment. Even more consequential, compelling Roxelana’s sons to share the political asset that was their mother threatened to give the competitive advantage to Mustafa. As ambassadors noted, his mother Mahidevran was wholly focused on his success. On the other hand, a son of Suleyman’s favorite might be unfairly favored in the game of rivalry for the throne.

  It matters why Suleyman ignored long-established custom when he returned to Roxelana after Mehmed’s birth, for this decision would turn out to be the first in a chain of events that ultimately altered the manner of succession to the throne and the very nature of the Ottoman sultanate. Even before becoming sultan, Suleyman had legitimate reason for thinking that his ancestors’ methods of perpetuating the dynasty called for reconsideration. During the eight years of his princely apprenticeship, he had had a good deal of time to both experience the vagaries of imperial politics and reflect on them. His father’s path to the Ottoman throne had been a whirlwind of violence and victory.

  Selim I’s tenure as sultan began in 1512 with the forcible overthrow of his father Bayezid II. The allegation that Selim had the sultan poisoned—Bayezid perished on his way to forced retirement—has been neither proved nor disproved. Selim then proceeded to battle his two older brothers, both of whom, like himself, had connived for the throne. After defeating and executing both, Selim had his agents hunt down and kill their sons. He then ordered the execution of the male offspring of other brothers previously deceased. There were many, since Bayezid had numerous children, eight of whom were male. Moreover, Bayezid had lived long enough to give his own sons plenty of time to reproduce—he was sixty-eight by the Islamic calendar when he died. By the spring of 1513, Selim had eliminated all branches of the dynastic family except his own. As for Suleyman, he was indirectly his father’s accomplice in the bloodbath, as Selim appointed him deputy ruler in the capital while he pursued his rival relatives.

  Selim was no monster, however. It was his grandfather Mehmed the Conqueror who had sanctioned internecine violence with his so-called law of fratricide, approved by religious authorities (possibly under duress). Sovereignty must be indivisible and the sovereign unchallenged. As history had cautioned, empires that embraced the principle that all male dynasts had a right to rule—the Seljuks, the Mongols—could fragment into feuding factions, fatally weakened by incessant combat among royal brothers, cousins, and uncles. The House of Osman itself had struggled from the beginning with the ill-matched principles of unitary sovereignty and competitive succession. It took Mehmed’s authority to push through a legislated solution. Still, if legitimate by law and tradition, Selim’s contest with his brothers was the most violent on record since the long civil war of 1402 to 1412 had threatened partition of the state among Ottoman princes.

  Suleyman was fortunate not to face the same lethal rivalry upon his father’s death, for he was the only son of Selim to reach adulthood. But we should not content ourselves, as almost all historians have done, with the assumption that Selim had only a single son, as he and his concubines produced at least six daughters. Rather, the man whose epithet Yavuz meant both resolute and ferocious appears to have “disappeared” his other male offspring in order to render Suleyman his unchallenged successor.13 (Whether he ordered them eliminated or hidden in the strictest anonymity is a matter of speculation.)14

  With the stock of male dynasts now reduced to two, Selim relied on Suleyman, the only Ottoman prince left standing, to replenish it. As a consequence, however, Suleyman’s sons and their mothers could not escape reenacting the pattern that Selim had spared his own son: rivalry among the brothers and their mothers. Then the deaths of Mahmud and Murad reduced the number of Suleyman’s heirs to two—a six-year-old and a newborn—and reminded people of the fragility of childhood. Suleyman had to father more males, but in doing so, must he honor the tradition that a concubine mother should have only one? Selim had broken a cardinal rule on the grounds that the empire was at risk. Burdened with the same challenge, might Suleyman now break another? Though he may have strongly desired to return to Roxelana, he almost certainly came to the decision to do so after serious deliberation.

  The only person with the moral and political right to dissuade—or encourage—Suleyman was his mother Hafsa. Frustratingly, because it was a private discussion, we cannot know what they said to one another. Hafsa’s responsibilities and concerns differed from Suleyman’s. As the family elder, she would consider the welfare of the whole dynastic enterprise in wider scope than her son sometimes could, charged as he was with the immediate exigencies of rule. Hafsa may have approved the idea of redefining the role of the concubine mother, an inevitable outcome if Roxelana should produce another son. Having spent most of her life tied to Selim’s fortunes, she might welcome an end to the violence that appeared unavoidable in the Ottoman system of succession. But she would doubtless pose the question just how introducing a new family configuration with Roxelana would effectively get around the problem of fratricide. Suleyman already had two sons who were half brothers, but calling Roxelana back to his bed could ultimately pit two full brothers against each other. Suleyman himself may not yet have had an answer, but he was clearly ready to set change in motion.

  OVER TIME ROXELANA would come to know Suleyman’s history more fully and to grasp the degree to which his father’s experiences determined his own choices as sultan. In fact, she had a compelling interest in that history since it intertwined with her own and her sons’ fates.

  Selim had had a long and difficult career as prince. Frustrated with his post in distant Trabzon on the eastern Black Sea coast, he complained to his father Bayezid II of its wretched state: “Poverty and shortages are ever present, any governor would be weak and helpless [here].… I don’t even have the wherewithal to build my own boat.”15 The closer a prince’s assignment to Istanbul, it was thought, the faster he could race to the capital at his father’s death to literally occupy the throne. But Selim’s petition for a nearer site foundered when his older brother Ahmed objected. He did manage, however, to persuade Bayezid to assign Suleyman to Caffa in 1509 (but only after Ahmed had opposed two proposed sites in central Anatolia, claiming them as his sphere of influence).

  Selim’s backwater assignment in eastern Anatolia gave him additional reason to angle for the empire’s throne. From his post he could observe at close quarters the mounting threat posed by the newly established and rapidly expanding Safavid state in Iran. Its charismatic young shah, Ismail, was winning the hearts of many Anatolians, nominal subjects of the sultan. Safavid propagandizing contained a mix of messianism and political promise. To Selim, Bayezid and his other sons seemed insufficiently concerned with the menace on their eastern frontier.

  Selim proceeded to use Suleyman and Hafsa’s presence in Caffa as a springboard to the throne. He took refuge there in 1510 as he made his way toward the capital and
the confrontation that culminated in his unseating of his father.16 Selim then enlisted the help of the Crimean khan Mengli Giray to transport Hafsa and Suleyman to Istanbul, where he could better protect them. Selim then left Suleyman to guard the capital as his deputy when he set off to fight his brothers. Suleyman was nineteen when he got his first taste of what it meant to hold an empire together. Only when his throne was secured did Selim in 1513 permit his son to take up a new provincial assignment in Anatolia, the theater of the brothers’ brief but vicious civil war.

  At first, Manisa was not an easy post for Suleyman. The third of the three rival brothers, Korkud, had been stationed in this western Anatolian provincial capital, and Selim had personally hunted him down with a large army. Now Suleyman confronted a province whose public order had been shattered. He appealed to his father for instructions, and Selim responded with a compilation of regulations. It detailed the penalties Suleyman should mete out to curb rampant theft and banditry, and it advised him to publicize his disciplinary measures in the towns and villages of the region before judges began implementing them.17 Suleyman was in the midst of guiding Manisa’s recovery, applying tax and property reforms Selim had devised, when he was summoned to Istanbul in 1514 to serve again as his deputy. There he would remain for two years during Selim’s extended campaign against Shah Ismail, the brilliant young ruler who had reunited a fragmented Iran under the banner of the Safavid dynasty.

  Selim was a great warrior, and his son would inherit a much-enlarged empire from him. The juggernaut that was his army doubled the extent of the Ottoman domains. After pushing back the Iranians and annexing eastern Anatolia, Selim led another long offensive, this one aimed at the famed Mamluk sultanate. (Suleyman was again his father’s stand-in, stationed this time in Adrianople in Thrace, to face down any opportunistic European advance.) Selim first subdued Greater Syria (today’s Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel) and then, in January 1517, took Cairo, seat of the Mamluk sultans, and Egypt with it.

  This two-year campaign won for the Ottomans the coveted title “servitor of the two Noble Sanctuaries,” signifying the right and privilege of protecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. With the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt, united for the first time since the seventh century, Selim had resurrected the eastern Roman empire. But it was at great cost that he won his dazzling reputation as sahib qıran (master of the celestial conjunction)—in other words, a man destined to world conquest.

  Suleyman is often said to have come to the throne with no experience. Because he had not fought in his father’s campaigns, as previous Ottomans princes often had, his European and Iranian competitors could assume he lacked Selim’s brilliance as a military strategist. It was partly for this reason that he undertook two major offensives in the first two years of his reign. But Suleyman did not lack an education under fire in the politics of dynastic rule. In the space of two years, he had lost his grandfather, two uncles, and many cousins so that his father could clinch his hold on power. Suleyman’s first son was born in 1513, in the midst of the violence. His delight with Mahmud’s mother perhaps drew his thoughts to all the other mothers, daughters, and sisters left stranded by his father’s triumph.

  On the other hand, Selim had identified Suleyman as his successor, saving him and his sons from the very fate he visited on his brothers and their sons. He had carefully tutored Suleyman in the delicate balance between governing justly and enforcing order. Selim had also provided his heir with three opportunities as deputy ruler to hone his skills. And he left an impressive record of conquest and expansion. Some Ottoman pundits would later call Selim’s reign a golden age. Upon his death in 1520, his legacy presented Suleyman with much to live up to and much to live down.

  Suleyman’s initial acts as sultan suggest that he had used his apprenticeship to consider the kind of a ruler he wanted to be. His first deeds were obligatory. On his second day in the capital, he was formally invested as sultan with the traditional oath of allegiance pledged by religious and political leaders. He then left the palace and crossed the city to receive his father’s funeral train, just arrived from Thrace. Once the late sultan’s burial was accomplished, Suleyman ordered the construction of a mosque, a madrasa, and a tomb to honor his resting place. On the third day, Suleyman opened the seals of the imperial treasury (locked at his father’s death) and distributed the customary accession bonus awarded to the empire’s soldiers. He filled top government offices, confirming his father’s appointees in some, including the grand vizierate, and placing his own men in others.

  Official duties behind him, Suleyman began to impose his own imprint on the sultanate. Selim’s son would be merciful and munificent. He freed six hundred Egyptians whom his father had taken prisoner in 1517. Then he ordered the payment of 1 million silver aspers as compensation to Persian silk merchants whose goods Selim had confiscated when he banned trade with Iran (much to the chagrin of his advisers, some of whom argued that hostilities should not stand in the way of lucrative international commerce). The new sultan then turned to domestic affairs, demonstrating that he would not tolerate misgovernment. After calling for an investigation into accusations against the royal admiral Cafer Beg, Suleyman condemned him to hang when judges delivered a guilty verdict. He dismissed one of his leading military officials, the agha of armaments, because his troops had violated protocol, and then he executed the five responsible parties.

  In the words of Joseph von Hammer, author of the first exhaustive history of the Ottomans in a European language, the hallmark of these acts was a combination of “rigorous justice and generous clemency.”18 A young official in the Austrian embassy in Istanbul in the 1790s and a contemporary of the great statesman and diplomat Klemens von Metternich, von Hammer understood the importance of symbolic acts that ensured political continuity but signaled a new era.

  Personality differences between father and son began to reveal themselves. Bartolomeo Contarini, Venetian ambassador dispatched to convey congratulations on the 1517 victory in Egypt, wrote of Selim, “He reflects constantly; no one dares to say anything, not even the pashas who are there with him; he governs alone, on the basis of his own thinking.”19 By contrast, Suleyman would develop numerous collaborative relationships over the course of his reign, the closest and most enduring of them with Roxelana. At his accession, the current ambassador described him as “friendly and in good humor. Rumor has it that Suleyman is aptly named, enjoys reading, is knowledgeable, and shows good judgment.”20 (Suleyman, the Ottoman rendering of Solomon, was, in other words, thought to be wise.) Later in his reign, the epithet Kanuni (the lawgiver or, more loosely, the just) was bestowed on him.

  It was in the midst of establishing his own brand of rule in these initial months that Suleyman took Roxelana as the first and only concubine of his reign. As sultan, Suleyman had the power to change the rules. He had already shown signs that he intended to do some things differently than his father had. For her part, Roxelana was learning about Suleyman’s past, perhaps from Hafsa, who had lived through it alongside him, or possibly from a loyal retainer concerned to apprise the mother of a baby prince of what might lie ahead. She, in other words, understood something of what was at stake in both his life and her own. Then the palace epidemic of 1521 rewrote facts on the ground. If ever there was a time to consider innovation in the politics of reproduction, this was it. Roxelana was the right woman in the right place at the right time.

  5

  LOVERS AND PARENTS

  AS THE YEAR 1521 came to a close, Roxelana found herself safely situated as mother of a new baby prince. Still, she could not yet rest assured of a lasting place in Suleyman’s affections. Following the loss of two sons, the bereaved sultan would likely need to take on a new concubine to replenish the supply of potential heirs—and perhaps to soothe his grief. Roxelana did not make a habit of simply waiting for events to happen, however. A dramatic incident reported in 1526 by Pietro Bragadin, Venetian ambassador to Istanbul
, reveals her instinct for survival in the charged atmosphere of the harem.

  Venice’s ambassadors to the Ottomans occupied the top post in the island republic’s diplomatic service. Envoys sent regular dispatches home, but upon returning from their tenure abroad, they delivered a comprehensive oral assessment of affairs to members of the Venetian government. Bragadin’s report, the first to broadcast the rise of the Russian favorite, was made to the assembled dignitaries in June. Roxelana had by then become significant enough for the Venetian elite to keep tabs on, and we may think of this moment as her international debut.

  Among the ambassador’s various accounts of the sultan’s domains, the dignitaries listened to a story that revealed the young concubine’s determination to advance. As Bragadin reported, “The sultan was given two beautiful Russian maidens by a provincial governor, one for his mother and one for him. When they arrived in the palace, his second wife [sic], whom he esteems at present, became extremely unhappy and flung herself to the ground weeping.” The ambassador then noted the reactions of Hafsa, Suleyman’s mother, and the sultan himself, as they attempted to mollify the distraught Roxelana. “The mother, who had given her maiden to the sultan, was sorry about what she had done, took her back, and sent her to one of the governors as wife, and the sultan agreed to send his to another governor, because his wife would have perished from sorrow if these maidens, or even one of them, had remained in the palace.”1

  “The house and garden of the Venetian ambassadors in Constantinople.” Seventeenth-century European drawing of the Venetian ambassadorial compound.

  Bragadin’s report revealed that Suleyman was still receiving gifts of fresh female slaves, and from his mother no less. No wonder Roxelana could not feel confident of his constancy. She knew by now that not every gift slave turned into a bedmate—some would be employed as attendants and others regifted to high-level servants of the dynasty, like the two Russian women. Apparently, though, she considered it too risky to assume such outcomes. Her histrionics seemed to be a clever ploy to shield her emerging status as favorite.