Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Roxelana was not the only one who anticipated letters from Suleyman. As his army marched toward Buda in early September 1526, he wrote to his mother (a fact noted by the Venetian statesman and historian Marino Sanuto).14 The letter doubtless informed Hafsa of the August 29 victory at Mohacs. She would share this news with others in the Old Palace, perhaps in a celebratory gathering to offer thanks to God and prayers for the continued safety of the sultan and his men.

  It was the queen mother’s prerogative and duty to initiate and preside over such occasions in the Old Palace. At them, Roxelana was bound to encounter the other royal consort, Mahidevran. Otherwise, the structure of the Old Palace and its daily habits would not thrust them together on a regular basis. But the future would cast them as rivals, and rumor would depict Roxelana as the confirmed enemy of her concubine predecessor. There is little evidence, however, to suggest an overt tension between the two, at least at this point in their lives. They could, however, be expected to keep a close eye on one another, given the presumption that both were dedicated to the ultimate success of their sons. It fell to Hafsa to enforce a discreet balance among Suleyman’s two families.

  In 1526, Roxelana had been Suleyman’s concubine for six years. They were the parents of four children. Her maverick stature as his favorite was becoming recognized in Europe. If Mahidevran could take pride as the mother of the sultan’s eldest son, Roxelana was developing a different claim to eminence.

  CHALLENGES

  6

  ROXELANA’S RIVAL

  AT THE END of a letter Roxelana wrote to Suleyman during the Hungarian campaign, she added a postscript: “If you send greetings to Sultan Mustafa, send him my note too.” Apparently she had included a separate letter to Suleyman’s eldest son in the scroll cylinder that carried her own to the sultan. The future would cloud Roxelana’s relations with Mustafa and his mother Mahidevran, but in 1526 there appeared to be harmony, or at least an effort on Roxelana’s part to keep up communication.

  Mustafa was twelve years old when his father captured Buda, capital city of Hungary. He had spent his early years among his siblings in the western Anatolian city of Manisa, traditionally a seat of prince-governors like his father. But it was in the imperial capital, under the tutelage of a father who was now the monarch of a vast empire, that Mustafa began his formal education. The little prince probably tagged along with his half brother Mahmud, two years his senior, at least to some of their tutors. But less than a year after their arrival in Istanbul, the epidemic of 1521 took all three of Mustafa’s siblings by Suleyman’s previous concubines, including Mahmud. Now he would presumably be the model for Roxelana’s children, who were joining the royal family in rapid succession.

  In the year that Roxelana dispatched her note, Mustafa was lavishly praised in the pages of Pietro Bragadin’s report to the Venetian Senate. “He has extraordinary talent, he will be a warrior, is much loved by the Janissaries, and performs great feats,” the ambassador wrote.1 That the prince managed, at such a tender age, to garner such a reputation, even if exaggerated, suggests that some of his training was already taking place outside the Old Palace, among his father’s men. Suleyman may well have engaged leading Janissary officers to introduce his son to the arts of war. The Janissaries, infantry legions who formed the core of the Ottoman standing army, were prone to strong partisan loyalties (and disloyalties).

  The child Mustafa was clearly demonstrating aptitude for the job his ancestors had worked at with such diligence. The bravura performance of Suleyman’s first years on the throne no doubt rubbed off on the prince, and one can imagine his father proudly showing him off on public occasions. Roxelana’s note suggests that Mustafa was not in Istanbul during the Hungarian campaign, or at least not in his usual quarters in the Old Palace. Perhaps he was assigned during his father’s absence to Adrianople, the Thracian second capital of the empire. Twelve was a young age to charge a prince with acting as deputy to a sultan at war, but then Mehmed the Conqueror had only been twelve when his father attempted to abdicate in his favor.

  Wherever he was, Mustafa was accompanied by his mother Mahidevran. Like Roxelana and countless others, Mahidevran had begun her career in enslavement and conversion to Islam. Her Ottoman name meant “moon of good fortune.” But unlike Roxelana, whose Ruthenian origins were a matter of consensus, Mahidevran’s roots were less certain. She was variously said to be from Albania, Montenegro, Circassia, or the Crimea. Perhaps opportunistically, Venetian ambassadors in the 1520s asserted her Albanian and Montenegrin identities, with the implication that she had been abducted from Venetian-controlled territory on the eastern Adriatic coast (it could be useful if an ex-national rose to the top ranks of power). But in the 1550s, consensus on Mahidevran’s origins would shift to the Black Sea region. The Hapsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq reported that she was Crimean and the Venetian Bernardo Navagero that she was Circassian.

  Mustafa must have been Mahidevran’s first (and only) child, for she appears to have had no daughters. “Her whole pleasure is this [child],” commented Bragadin in his brief mention of her.2 When Mustafa, having come of age, took up his apprenticeship in the provinces in 1533, Mahidevran would continue to win praise, now as a wise counselor to her son. Roxelana’s precedent-shattering parenthood to five boys stood in stark contrast to the classical Ottoman unit—the team, really—of the prince and his mother, so neatly exemplified by Mustafa and Mahidevran. From this perspective, the great privilege that Suleyman bestowed on Roxelana robbed her of the protective garb of customary protocol. Mahidevran was well versed in what she needed to do, but Roxelana had to cut a new path through the dense thicket of dynastic politics.

  IF ROXELANA WAS a creature of the imperial capital, Mahidevran learned her trade in the world of the provinces. Royal concubine mothers of sons had traditionally made their careers in one of the Anatolian capitals that served as princely governing posts, among them Amasya, Manisa, and Konya. As former capitals of states and principalities conquered by the Ottomans, these cities carried a prestigious pedigree. In them mothers came of age along with their sons. The prince was the charismatic focus of the entire provincial enterprise and obviously its political raison d’être, but his mother outranked him as the head of his domestic household.

  The hierarchy of the princely household is mapped for us in imperial account books from Suleyman’s years in Manisa. Essentially salary registers, they list palace residents and their daily or monthly stipends, from the prince and his mother on down to the laundry staff. Stipends were a symbolic as well as a practical measure of status. In the earliest such account book, from 1511, Hafsa received a monthly 1,000 silver aspers to Suleyman’s 600; a few years later, Suleyman’s stipend had grown to 2,000 aspers, but his mother’s to 6,000.3 Hafsa’s greater proportional increase was probably a recognition of her status as the empire’s top-ranking female once Selim became sultan in 1512 (his own mother had predeceased him).

  A prince-governor’s mother was not his only counselor. To instruct him in policy matters, the sultan assigned a trusted official to his son’s suite. Addressed as lala (tutor) by his royal pupil, the official was charged with overseeing the prince’s management of the provincial sultanate-in-miniature. The lala was the sultan’s man as well as the prince’s, acting as the father’s check on the son’s conduct. Often a leading statesman, he had his own career to look out for. Lalas in the past had been known to desert their pupil if the latter’s prospects faded. The prince’s mother too was her master’s rein on their son, but as his most loyal partisan—for the obvious reason that her political survival was linked to his—her eye had also to be on the tutor, lest he lead the prince into ruin.

  Suleyman’s unfortunate uncle Alemshah was one such unhappy prince. An apparent alcoholic, Alemshah had been the cause—or perhaps the victim—of sharp tensions in his princely household at Manisa. His mother Gulruh blamed Alemshah’s deficiencies on seven members of his suite, especially his tutor, who allegedly lured the prin
ce into excessive drink so that he would endorse proposals “against the law of Islam and the law of the sultan,” as she put it. In a plaintive letter detailing twisted plots against the prince and herself, Gulruh urged Alemshah’s father Bayezid II to dismiss the pernicious cabal: “My fortune-favored sultan, heed my cry for help.… Rid us of [my son’s] tutor, teacher and doctor. They are masters of corruption.… [O]ur situation has been pitiful since these persons arrived. They have deprived me of my mother’s rights. If these seven do not go, they will utterly destroy the household of my son, your servant.” Gulruh’s final letter to the sultan informed him of Alemshah’s death in 1510.4

  When princes died, it fell to the reigning sultan and his mother to care for the females they left behind. The Venetian Giovanni Maria Angiolello, who served in the household of Mehmed II’s second son Mustafa, described the aftermath of the prince’s death in 1474 from natural causes. Having accompanied the funeral cortege to Mustafa’s burial site in Bursa, the first Ottoman capital, Angiolello recorded Mehmed’s disposition of his son’s female survivors: “The Grand Turk sent word that the Most Esteemed Lady—that is, the mother of Mustafa—should remain in Bursa… and he had good provision made for her that she might live there honorably.” Mustafa’s daughter and her mother, however, were to come to Istanbul, along with the women of his harem. “The women were lodged in the palace where the Grand Turk’s other women and maidens stay,” reported Angiolello, “and after several days the maidens were married to courtiers and others.”5 The princess was married to her cousin, Bayezid’s son Abdullah.6

  During Suleyman’s reign, Hafsa would attend to members of the royal family who had fallen upon hard times. When she heard news of the death of Alemshah’s mother Gulruh from the young women who had been in her care, she petitioned her son to make provision for them. Such protective largesse could extend to nonblood members of the greater dynastic household: when the widow of the faithful pasha whom Selim had appointed to govern Egypt wrote to Hafsa to say she was all alone in Cairo, the queen mother thereupon requested funds to bring the woman to Istanbul, where she intended to look after her.7

  Seven of Bayezid II’s sons would die in the field, some like Alemshah of illness, two—Ahmed and Korkud—victims of the bloody contest for the throne. But their mothers’ work did not cease with their demise. For one thing, the bereaved parent continued to protect her son’s household by acting as an intermediary with Istanbul. Husnushah, mother of Bayezid’s son Shehinshah, wrote to the victorious sibling Selim to request a post for one Pir Ahmed “the gentleman,” a scholar at her son’s court who had been overlooked when new jobs were found for its male staff. The principal responsibility of a deceased prince’s mother, however, was to recoup her son’s honor by constructing a tomb to memorialize him and endowing a fund for its upkeep. Bulbul (nightingale), mother of Selim’s fiercest rival brother Ahmed, built a tomb for him in the beautiful royal cemetery in Bursa, the city where she and her fellow concubine mothers settled in retirement. There Bulbul might hope to find her own final rest, beside the son to whom Ottoman politics had inextricably bound her destiny.

  The burial site in Bursa of Murad II, father of Mehmed the Conqueror, was fast becoming the principal cemetery for the royal dead. By 1520, nearly a century after Murad ordered the construction of his own tomb, the cemetery had grown to contain the tombs of five princes, five royal mothers, the midwife who delivered Mehmed II, and the women of Murad’s harem. Rare was the tomb that did not also house numerous caskets belonging to relatives who, for whatever reason, had not acquired a resting place of their own. Several denizens of the Muradiye cemetery were Suleyman’s uncles and their mothers, members of Bayezid’s large family. Here they were reconciled in death as they had been divided in life. It was said that when the Qur’an was recited at the grave of Mehmed II’s son Mustafa, it could be heard at the gravesides of Bayezid’s sons.

  Bayezid’s reproductive plenitude undeniably caused a larger than usual number of individual tragedies. At the same time, however, this sultan made a point of elevating the profile of his sons’ mothers. Even today, their status is visibly evident in their philanthropy—the schools, mosques, soup kitchens, hospitals, and the like that they commissioned and funded. Until Bayezid’s reign, the most conspicuous female patrons had been princesses, and he certainly had plenty of daughters to carry out the dynasty’s altruistic mission, but it was his consorts who took the lead.

  Granting concubine mothers the financial means to take a leading philanthropic role was probably related to another policy pursued by Bayezid—restoring status and jobs to the religious establishment. Its members had lost both when Mehmed the Conqueror expropriated their properties to finance his expansionist military program. In the communities that were chosen for their locations, imperial foundations also brought employment to many besides men of religion, from ground breaking for construction to daily maintenance of the finished premises. Bayezid located his own foundations in “royal” cities—Amasya, where he was stationed for twenty-seven years as prince-governor, Adrianople, and Istanbul.

  Bayezid’s consorts on the other hand covered a broad swath of Anatolia with their works. Gulruh, mother of the wayward Alemshah, commissioned mosques in two provincial cities and a village. In four additional cities, she either bought or built shops, hamams, caravanserais, and large commercial centers known as hans. The revenues from these enterprises would go to upkeep of the mosques. When Hafsa undertook her principal philanthropic endeavor—a substantial foundation for Manisa, begun during Suleyman’s apprenticeship—the city already boasted a remarkably large complex built and endowed by Husnushah, mother of Shehinshah. Begun in 1490, it consisted of a mosque, a madrasa, a soup kitchen, and a hospital. A few years later, Husnushah constructed a hamam and a caravanserai to provide income to her foundation. Her work may have inspired Hafsa, mother of the heir apparent, to fund an even more elaborate foundation in Manisa.

  It was Bayezid’s consorts who broke ground for Roxelana’s extraordinary career as endower of charitable foundations. Suleyman’s consort would stand out in this long tradition of public works by constructing her first foundation in the imperial capital, where no royal concubine before her had been permitted to build.

  IN MANISA, MAHIDEVRAN would trace the progress of Hafsa’s mosque as it began to go up. She had joined Suleyman’s household sometime before 1515, the year her son was born. Nothing is known of Mahidevran’s relationship with Suleyman or her status within his harem, except that she was the mother of his second son. Where she began her palace service is also uncertain—perhaps in Manisa or in Istanbul, where Suleyman served eighteen months as his father’s deputy during Selim’s long campaign against the Iranians.

  This anonymity is typical of virtually all slave concubines. They entered history only when their sons began to make names for themselves or they themselves acquired reputations as philanthropists. Even Roxelana, who became Suleyman’s consort at a moment when international attention was riveted on the dynamic new sultan, was a relatively obscure figure until 1526 or so, by which time she was already the mother of four children. Fortunately, we can imagine something of Mahidevran’s place in Suleyman’s harem thanks to an account book detailing the members of his princely household. If Ottoman culture maintained a strict taboo on gazing at royal females or even mentioning them by name, its obsession with bookkeeping threw open the gates of royal palaces. These records guide us from the well-guarded inner quarters to the workshops and stables on the palace periphery.

  In this undated list of names and stipends, Mahidevran appears among seventeen females in the document’s initial section, labeled “the Ladies of the Imperial Palace, may Allah, whose name is exalted, preserve them.”8 One of four women with a daily wage of four silver aspers, Mahidevran was outranked by Yasemin, Hubeh, and Server, who received five aspers a day. What separated her from these three may be that she was not yet a mother when the list was drawn up; that she figured in the second of five har
em wage ranks may indicate that Suleyman had taken her as concubine. Among the less well remunerated of the harem personnel were two unnamed laundresses and a servant.

  What is striking about the stipends of harem women is how low they were, given that they presumably included at least one mother of a royal child. Even the lowest-paid male scribe in the Manisa palace received six aspers a day. The range of harem stipends more closely paralleled that of the staff of craftsmen—the bow maker at three aspers a day, the halberd and boot makers at five, and the maker of the conical caps worn by the Janissaries at six. The women’s stipends also matched those of the rank and file of various military divisions, the tent masters for example, who had charge of the elaborate structures in which the prince and his chief officers worked and slept on campaign—their stipends ranged from two to five aspers. The one group with stipends consistently lower than the women’s (averaging slightly more than two aspers a day) was the division of fifty-six pages in Suleyman’s inner household, those select Christian converts who were being trained to aspire to the highest offices of the empire. In the everyday world, two aspers was the standard daily allowance for the upkeep of an orphan child, a runaway slave in detention, or a stray animal waiting to be claimed by its owner.9

  Why the two pools of potential power brokers, female and male, were compensated so modestly is suggested by the name of the pages’ division—Gulam-i Enderun (male slaves of the interior). The rationale would seem to be that the members of the two “interior” divisions, female and male, were not yet public figures. Although they enjoyed the privilege of physical proximity to the prince, they were creatures of the inner palace who had not yet “graduated out,” to approximate the Ottoman term, to an official appointment in state service. In this, they somewhat resembled Suleyman’s status in relation to his mother. In Manisa, Hafsa was fully graduated, so to speak, with a commensurate stipend, while Suleyman was only partly so, still in training but now in the field with his lala, Kasim, a distinguished statesman with experience in the imperial treasury office.10