Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Roxelana was hardly unreasonable in fearing that Suleyman might consider a new partner. In the years when the drama took place (well before Bragadin reported it in 1526), Roxelana was more often than not pregnant or in confinement with an infant, unavailable to share Suleyman’s bed. A new partner for the sultan could lead to a new son or daughter—and even a new favorite. Perhaps the fact that the two beauties had origins like her own aroused a particular jealousy.

  The most remarkable feature of Bragadin’s account, however, was Suleyman and Hafsa’s willingness to accommodate Roxelana’s sentiments. It seems the concubine’s bold presumption of rank did not offend the sultan and queen mother. Indeed, Hafsa appears to have been remorseful. Suleyman and especially his mother, herself a former slave consort, would understand the young concubine’s determination to protect herself and her son at all costs. If Roxelana acted out of pure jealousy, hers was likely not the first such display to occur in the harem. It would not be surprising if she had developed a deepening attachment to Suleyman. Her bond with him was the only intimate adult relationship she would experience in her captivity among the Ottomans.

  IF A GENUINE passion had indeed taken root, it is not entirely obvious how often or where Suleyman and Roxelana found time alone together. He was literally one of the busiest men in the world. And they lived apart, he in the New Palace, she and the children in the Old Palace, an arrangement not conducive to daily interaction. Perhaps Suleyman organized interludes for them from time to time in the New Palace. But after two long stretches when he was at war, the couple could finally enjoy something of a honeymoon.

  The three years from winter 1523 to spring 1526 were one of Suleyman’s rare breaks from campaigning—a period of “military inaction,” as one historian has called it.2 The sultan had plenty of reason to remain in the capital. His victories in Belgrade and Rhodes required a reorganization of diplomatic and military strategy, and he needed to better integrate the defunct kingdom of Serbia into Ottoman provincial administration. Internal problems like the Ferhad Pasha affair called for attention. More troublesome was a revolt in Egypt in 1524. Suleyman sent Ibrahim, his old friend and grand vizier, to impose order and reorganize this strategic and economic bastion, incorporated into the empire by Selim only seven years earlier. At home, the capital needed attention, what with the rapidly expanding population and the ongoing project of Ottomanizing the city. From a war-wasted population of roughly 30,000 at the Byzantine collapse in 1453, Istanbul would grow to some 100,000 by 1535 and triple that by the 1570s.3

  But Suleyman was clearly preoccupied in these years with his favorite and her children. If Mehmed and Mihrumah were conceived in the interstices between campaigns, Selim and Abdullah, their next children, were honeymoon babies. Selim was born in May 1524 and Abdullah probably sometime in 1525 or early 1526 (his precise birth date is not known). Roxelana had given Suleyman four children in five years. Upon his return in November 1526 from fighting in Europe, she conceived another son, Bayezid, giving birth probably in 1527. A final boy, Cihangir, would arrive in 1531. Roxelana and Suleyman were carving out space for a traditional family—father, mother, children—within an imperial structure that did not prize the nuclear domestic unit. Together they were living in uncharted emotional territory.

  As parents, Roxelana and Suleyman began to experience the trials as well as the joys of raising children. Abdullah died as a toddler, Roxelana’s first loss and yet another grief for Suleyman, the third of his sons to perish in childhood.4 The couple was tested again when Cihangir was born with what appears to have been a deformity of his shoulder. This accumulated wealth of shared experience doubtless led over the years to a certain familiarity and comfort between Suleyman and Roxelana. Time allowed the couple a deepening acquaintance. As Roxelana’s Turkish improved, she most likely learned more about Suleyman’s childhood, and he about hers. It is tempting to wonder if he inquired about the circumstances of her abduction, an intimate aspect of the slave trade he could only know if his slave servants dared to tell him. Much later in her life, the ambassador Bernardo Navagero would comment, in accounting for Roxelana’s hold over the sultan, that “she understands his nature very well.”5

  Honeymoons come to an end, but the foundations of a lifelong partnership were laid down during these three years of relative domesticity. In the spring of 1526, Suleyman departed Istanbul with the aim of taking Buda, capital of the kingdom of Hungary. On September 11, the victorious sultan entered the city at the head of his army. The battle of Mohacs—alleged to have lasted a mere two hours—had been fought in the marshes of southern Hungary, where King Louis II drowned while fleeing. It was the end of the historic kingdom of Hungary.

  Although unable to hold Buda—disturbances in central Anatolia demanded his return—Suleyman had made the Ottomans a player in the politics of central Europe. His empire now came face to face with the House of Hapsburg, the only other European power that could match Ottoman military resources. Competition and confrontation on land and on sea with the Hapsburg brothers—King Charles V of Spain and his designated successor, Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria—persisted throughout Suleyman’s reign. He would die at the age of seventy-four (by the Islamic calendar) defending his empire on the Ottoman-Hungarian frontier.

  The victory at Mohacs triggered a century and a half of rivalry and conflict between Hapsburgs and Ottomans. Buda did not come under direct Ottoman control for another fifteen years, and Ferdinand never abandoned a tenacious duel for Hungary. The struggle for tactical superiority would be matched by a contest for ideological supremacy when Charles resuscitated the notion of the Holy Roman Empire as a universal monarchy—with himself at its head.6 Suleyman would counter with the Ottomans’ own claim to the Roman legacy. With the stronghold of Buda in central Europe and the gradual advance of Ottoman naval forces in the Mediterranean, Suleyman, like his father Selim, was reviving the eastern Roman empire with its capital at Constantinople.

  WHILE SULEYMAN WAS occupied in 1526 with one of the most momentous campaigns of his long reign, the anxieties that Roxelana had been spared for the previous three years must have taken hold. He could be injured or even killed and her life thrust into uncertainty, even chaos. If disaster struck, Suleyman’s eldest son Mustafa, now twelve and already popular with the Janissaries, would be a safer choice to succeed his father than her Mehmed, seven years younger. It was a nightmare worse, perhaps, than the loss of her natal family. The one thing Roxelana could do to reassure herself, besides keeping abreast of news from the front and praying, was to write to Suleyman.

  Roxelana composed the first of her surviving letters during the Hungarian campaign. The emotion-filled missive was designed to arouse reciprocal feelings of longing in Suleyman and to keep him mindful of his family. “My sultan, there is no limit to the burning anguish of separation,” she wrote in conclusion. “Now spare this miserable one and do not withhold your noble letters. Let my soul gain at least some comfort.” The letter’s constant stress on the pain of being apart probably owed something to Suleyman. He had apparently chided Roxelana gently for not reading his letters thoroughly enough. Otherwise, he pointed out, “you would have written more of your longing to see me.”7

  Roxelana replied with spirit that it was too painful to do so because both she and his two elder children missed him excessively: “Now my sultan, this is enough, my soul is too affected [to write more]—especially as your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrumah weep and wail from missing you when your noble letters are read. Their weeping has driven me mad, it is as if we were in mourning. My sultan, your son Mir Mehmed and your daughter Mihrumah and Selim Khan and Abdullah send you many greetings.” The pain of separation was a familiar Ottoman trope, especially among the mystics, who filled their poetry with yearning for union with the divine. Roxelana’s letter reworked the theme vividly.

  Roxelana probably did not pen the long letter herself. Nor did she likely dictate it, perhaps even the more informal fragment a
bove, for her Turkish was not yet up to the task. The letter’s exquisite penmanship confirms that it was composed by a harem scribe. The scribe’s professional training would make her adept at employing the elaborate locutions characteristic of formal chancery style, likewise the intricate metaphors of the suffering lover and the references to the Qur`an, which were a familiar feature of Ottoman correspondence. But it is not hard to imagine Roxelana instructing the scribe on what to emphasize in the letter and to say it with feeling. Her personal note to Suleyman at the letter’s end reveals a certain playfulness, no doubt intentional. It also suggests that she was learning to speak the poetic language of love.

  Perhaps it was Roxelana’s idea to include mention in the letter of Yusuf, the Joseph of biblical tradition and a prophet in Islam (the only one to have a chapter of the Qur`an devoted to his history). Over time Muslims came also to think of Yusuf as a paragon of beauty, and some, perhaps including Roxelana, would know the allegorical tale of Zeliha (the wife of Potiphar in the biblical account), whose carnal love for Yusuf was transformed into the mystic’s love for God. Roxelana’s letter hails Suleyman—“O you with the face of Yusuf and words sweet as candy.” Later she comments that one has to read the chapter on Yusuf to fully understand the state of someone (like her) in the throes of separation. (The disappearance of his son caused Yakub—Jacob, the biblical patriarch and father of Joseph—to go blind with weeping.)8

  Talismanic shirt made for Prince Selim in 1564–1565.

  Another letter that Roxelana dispatched to Suleyman during the 1526 campaign suggests that she was already acting as conduit for messages and gifts from well-wishers. In this case, she was forwarding to Suleyman a talismanic shirt that had been brought to Istanbul by “one of God’s holy men, from Mecca.”9 Such garments were intended to protect the wearer, especially in battle. The shirts were typically covered with minutely inscribed verses from the Qur`an, prayers, magic numbers, and, as with the Meccan’s gift, the “beautiful names of God.”10 The donor had apparently searched the city for the right channel to Suleyman. “He investigated the city and finally he brought it to Emre Koja [presumably an individual known to or working in the palace], and Emre Koja sent it to me, so now I’m sending it to you,” wrote Roxelana. The Meccan wanted Suleyman to wear it in battle, and so did she. “For the love of God and reverence for the Prophet, don’t do anything unless you have put it on!”11

  This same letter reveals something of Roxelana’s life in the harem. We hear these details not in her own words, however, but from a postscript added by Gulfem, a fellow resident of the Old Palace. Despite her obvious prominence during Suleyman’s reign, Gulfem’s identity remains frustratingly uncertain. She is usually assumed to have been one of Suleyman’s earlier concubines and the mother of a son who did not survive childhood; however, palace documents suggest that she was a high-level harem administrator, most likely the Lady Steward.12 The two roles are not strictly incompatible if Gulfem requested a change of position from consort to supervisor after the death of her child. Such a shift would give her continued status within the Old Palace and perhaps new meaning to her life.

  In Roxelana’s letters to Suleyman during his future absences from Istanbul, Gulfem was the one person whose greetings she relayed in addition to her own and the children’s. The two women seemingly developed a close and trusting relationship. Roxelana could certainly use a friend and mentor, one she might look to as an older sister. (If Gulfem was indeed a former concubine mother, she was at most in her early thirties in 1526.) In addition to providing advice on managing the household, Gulfem might share with Roxelana many other kinds of beneficial experience and intelligence—how to navigate Old Palace politics and protocol, how to attract support for herself and the children, how to be a gracious hostess of harem entertainments, and maybe how to write a letter to Suleyman.

  Whatever her relationship with the sultan, Gulfem knew him well enough to speak openly and candidly in her postscript to Roxelana’s letter. It seems he had extracted from her a promise to keep an eye on his favorite. He apparently had some concern about Roxelana’s ability to manage the finances of her growing household. As Gulfem explained, when she approached Roxelana directly for an account of her monies, keeping her vow to the sultan, she met with silence. She then consulted a certain Enver (possibly an Old Palace eunuch) and learned that the concubine had “five hundred gold pieces remaining,” presumably from funds Suleyman had allocated to her before setting off for Hungary. Gulfem also wanted him to be aware that Roxelana knew nothing of her conversation with Enver.13

  Gulfem’s chatty tone lets us see that while protocols of status governed the personal lives of members of the dynasty, they could at the same time enjoy the familiar banter of an ordinary family. Perhaps that is exactly what Suleyman wanted to hear while he endured the rigors of military life. Gulfem’s postscript begins with a story of drunkenness. Among the souvenir gifts Suleyman sent from the road was some cologne for her. She apparently mistook it for a beverage, and regaled Suleyman with an account of the results: “I drank the cologne right away, you should have seen the state I was in. There were guests, I have no idea what I said, I dozed the whole long day.… You made a complete buffoon out of me! God-willing, when we see each other again, we can talk about it.”

  GULFEM’S CHECK ON Roxelana’s finances provides a rare insight into the domestic world that dominated the favorite’s life for some fifteen years. Not until the mid-1530s would she emerge as a public figure and object of widespread scrutiny. (The Venetians were ahead of the game in the 1520s.) This does not mean that Roxelana lacked political awareness or had no influence during these years. Among the Ottoman ruling class, the domestic was inherently political. The New Palace, with the sultan’s personal quarters at its heart, was at the same time the seat of Ottoman government. Among the numerous structures of the vast compound were the imperial treasury, the hall of the Imperial Council, the royal audience chamber, and the training school for future statesmen, generals, and viziers. The royal harem housed in the Old Palace was likewise inherently political. One developed one’s career by keeping abreast of events, important actors, and potential trouble spots. Old Palace networks, both internal and external, kept leading figures up to date.

  Suleyman’s expectation that Roxelana learn to manage her monies for herself underlines the degree of responsibility invested in a concubine mother. The goal of her training was mastery of the skills she would need when she graduated to provincial service with her son. There she would act as mistress of the domestic wing of the newly established princely household. If royal consorts around the world were often domiciled separately from their monarch spouses, the Ottomans had inherited particular twists to this practice from the past.

  The sultans’ concubines benefited from Turkish and Mongol imperial precedents. When the khans took their families to war, senior women might command their own encampments. Among the Ottomans, whose women did not typically go on campaign, this practice translated into senior women “commanding” a tutelary authority in the provinces. The mother of the prince who won the contest for succession would then move on to command the Old Palace hierarchy. Islamic law provided additional support for women’s own management of their households. The Muslim male’s right to polygyny (up to four wives) entailed the concomitant right of each wife to her own “door,” that is, to a separate residence or suite of rooms equal to those of her fellow consorts. Although a royal concubine was not married to her sultan master (Roxelana was the famous exception), her equal status with his other concubines conformed in spirit to this legal precept. (Perhaps the infrequency of polygynous marriage among Ottoman upper classes stemmed in part at least from this mandated financial outlay.)

  When Bragadin first brought Roxelana to attention in 1526, her quotidian responsibilities revolved around her four children. While an experienced staff provided hands-on care, she was answerable for the health, welfare, and education of her daughter and sons. At five the eldest, Mehme
d was beginning instruction with a tutor, possibly Suleyman’s own childhood preceptor Hayreddin. Later, the boys would receive a portion of their training together with Suleyman’s pages in the New Palace. As for their mother, she too was continuing her education. Although Roxelana presumably had a tutor of her own in these early years, to advance her Turkish if nothing else, she no doubt progressed along with her older children as they studied their first lessons in Islamic scripture and in the glorious history of their ancestors.

  What private education Roxelana imparted to her children herself is impossible to know, but there was apparently no ban on teaching them something of what she had learned as a child. The real question is what she remembered. In this Ottoman Tower of Babel, where virtually everyone came with a childhood culture and language different from that purveyed by the Old Palace, there must have been room for songs and folk tales and the vocabulary they taught. How much of her childhood faith Roxelana might have imparted is difficult to gauge, but in any event Christianity and Islam shared numerous patriarchs and matriarchs whose stories could be told.

  Among the skills Roxelana was perfecting were the arts of the needle. She was apparently becoming adept at embroidery and sewing and taking pride in her accomplishments, for she would later make gifts of her work to the king of Poland. So would Mihrumah, who followed her mother along several of the paths that Roxelana would forge for royal women. Mihrumah, who spent her whole life in Istanbul, would always be her mother’s pupil and companion. But perhaps the most consuming and private of Roxelana’s preoccupations was her correspondence with Suleyman. We can imagine her unfurling his letters from the cylindrical case in which they arrived, reading and rereading them, and planning what news to impart to him in return.