Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  However modest their stipends as trainees, the cream of the inner-palace slaves could rise with startling rapidity. The 1521 epidemic would suddenly make Mahidevran, now mother of Suleyman’s eldest son, the top-ranking royal female after Hafsa. Fate could also take the form of the sultan’s will. The fifth Enderun slave in the stipend list, one “Ibrahim, Albanian, 3 aspers,” was almost certainly the Ibrahim who would become grand vizier in less than a decade, jumping rank at Suleyman’s command. Ibrahim was from Parga, a seaside town in Epirus that had passed from Venetian rule into Ottoman-controlled Albania during the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror.

  The Manisa harem was smaller and more intimate than the imperial establishment Roxelana would enter in Istanbul. But did it enjoy a greater sense of community? Until Mustafa’s birth, Mahidevran spent most of her days in the company of other young women, and perhaps the nights as well if sleeping quarters had a dormitory configuration. Companionship and perhaps even camaraderie were available. In unsupervised moments, the women likely discussed the Lady Steward who monitored their conduct and training, and maybe, when occasion warranted, the skills of the Lady Doctor. Perhaps they even dared to talk about Suleyman. Jealousy, if not outright competition, doubtless flared up from time to time. It was Hafsa’s job to tamp down any disruption her charges might provoke in the surface calm of the harem.

  While the account book suggests the contours of Mahidevran’s life in the Manisa harem, it does not help us fathom her state of mind. It surely shifted as she passed through the successive stages of apprenticeship, “in the prince’s eye” (his bed), pregnancy, the birth of a son, and, finally, sexual retirement as Suleyman moved on to the next gözde and the next royal child. It is entirely possible that there were concubines who regarded the whole project of bearing a child for the dynasty that had enslaved them as a repugnant obligation. (Even Roxelana cannot be assumed to have initially embraced her fate as a concubine with no say in the matter.) For such women, the construction of their essential identity as mothers was a saving grace. So were the rewards they could expect if they mothered well. If, on the other hand, Mahidevran was a willing partner to Suleyman, their emotional relationship was bound to be asymmetrical: if they developed a strong bond, he would of necessity move on, and she would channel celibacy into maternal devotion. This may all have been harder since Suleyman was apparently a prince easy to love.

  Whatever the women’s attitude toward Ottoman politics of reproduction, there were compensations that Mahidevran and her cohort must at least have weighed in the balance. An emotionally and sexually fulfilling marriage had not necessarily been in store for them in their hometowns and villages. The common practice of arranged marriage could saddle them with husbands who were unattractive, considerably older, or even brutal. Mostly peasants, they were more likely than not destined for a life of daily toil and perhaps poverty and early death. The dynastic family to which they now belonged at least kept them in luxurious comfort and good health.

  Thankfully for all, the city of Manisa provided diversion, perhaps a particular boon to females whose lives were guardedly private. The province’s fertile plain supplied ample playground for the children and opportunities for their mothers to make excursions. Manisa had its own gardens that provided easy access for leisurely enjoyment. Perhaps Mustafa and Mahidevran were also fond of the large park named for its patron, Ali Beg, which encompassed running waters, flower gardens, and an arboretum-like area with fruit-bearing trees. We can imagine royal outings organized for the women and children, with the team of tent masters providing shelter and harem-like privacy and the kitchen staff a suitably elaborate picnic. When Hafsa purchased a section of the Ali Beg park for her mosque complex, the children could watch builders at work, perhaps meet the architect, and indirectly receive a lesson in dynastic beneficence.11

  Such occasions were useful opportunities for building family solidarity. The recent war for the throne, which ended only two years before Mustafa’s birth, was a stark reminder that the little prince and his older brother Mahmud might one day challenge each other as their grandfather Selim had his older brother Korkud, right there in Manisa. The children were surely protected from the unsavory details of the face-off—that Selim, with a force of some 10,000, had surrounded the palace in an attempt to force Korkud into surrender. The doomed prince escaped in disguise, his beard dyed white, and hid for three weeks in a cave until a farmer gave him away.12

  If the mothers of Suleyman’s children were visibly anxious about the future, it was up to Hafsa to encourage them to put trepidation aside. Hafsa was also the individual best equipped to foster ties of affection among the half siblings. She was the grandmother who could love them all—the two boys, the sister whose name is lost to history, and the baby Murad who arrived in 1519. One of Suleyman’s sisters, likely an unmarried daughter of Hafsa, had joined the Manisa household around 1513; she too possessed the stature to smooth over any tensions that might erupt.

  The rhythm of the seasons probably also helped to foster an esprit de corps among the members of Suleyman’s household. Manisa’s hot summers were offset by the presence of temperate mountain pastures near enough to permit family sojourns at royal camps. Mustafa apparently had a special love for these visits, for local legend would later claim that he built a summer palace on Mount Manisa when he took up his own post in the city in 1533. During these summer idylls, palace protocol that enforced rank and separated females from males was perhaps relaxed a bit.

  Did the two singers in Suleyman’s musical ensemble entertain the whole family? Was Ibrahim (if the Enderun slave was indeed he) called upon by his master to play the violin, a talent he famously cultivated? Especially in Suleyman’s last two years in Manisa, uninterrupted by summons to act as Selim’s deputy, the seasonal retreats were occasion to instruct his sons in the leisurely arts of sovereignty, especially perhaps the hunt. Suleyman’s exemplary corps of huntsmen could develop the young boys’ skill with the bow and stage small-scale forays for them. With the Ottomans, as with royalty from China to England, the hunt was both the sport of kings and a school for war.

  These two years may have prompted Suleyman to recall his own childhood in Trabzon, at the side of his father. Twenty-four when Suleyman was born, Selim was a steady presence in the boy’s childhood due to the tight rein Bayezid II kept on his sons’ mobility. In fact it was Suleyman who first departed the city when his grandfather appointed him governor of Caffa in 1509. For the prince, fifteen when he parted from his father, continuity with his Trabzon years did not rest in his mother Hafsa’s hands alone. Suleyman’s preceptor, Hayreddin, was at his side throughout the eight years of his apprenticeship. In Manisa, Hayreddin was rewarded with a stipend of 1,800 aspers a month, the highest remuneration after Hafsa’s 6,000 and Suleyman’s own 2,000 and more than Suleyman’s sister’s 1,200 aspers. The venerable teacher was likely charged with the next generation’s introduction to study of the Qur`an. Mustafa was just old enough to begin his lessons.

  WHEN SULEYMAN RECEIVED the news that his father had died suddenly, he left Manisa at top speed and arrived in Istanbul on September 30, 1520, just two weeks after Selim’s demise. Haste was imperative, since custom dictated that news of a sultan’s death be concealed until his heir reached the capital. The purpose of this enforced secrecy was to forestall any outbreak of disorder. But the new sultan’s extended family was under no such pressure to move as quickly. The Venetian ambassador in Corfu reported on December 18 that “the mother, who was previously in Gallipoli, has arrived in Constantinople.”13 Even at this late date, Hafsa may well have come ahead of the rest of the family to resume her role as counselor to Suleyman in those first critical months and to oversee the preparation of the Old Palace quarters for the arrival of his family.

  When Mahidevran finally arrived in Istanbul, she may not have taken immediate note of Roxelana. Her priority was to settle herself into the Old Palace so that she could help Mustafa adjust to the new and unfamiliar environment. There w
ere of course many familiar faces from Manisa, but the Old Palace presented them with new routines as well as a maze of rooms and corridors to master. No doubt there were also many questions about the configuration of the city and how to keep the children entertained so they would not miss Manisa. There they might see their father daily, but now he was engrossed in matters of state and moreover living in another palace that required planning and arrangements to visit.

  By the time Mustafa found his footing in Istanbul, preparations for Suleyman’s first military campaign were under way. What the little boy knew of war likely came from stories of his ancestors’ victories, a thrilling history lesson graphically illustrated in the empire’s capital: the mammoth Byzantine walls breached by his great-grandfather Mehmed, for instance, or the great Christian basilica-turned-mosque of Hagia Sophia, in which Mustafa perhaps attended communal prayer alongside his father. Fortunately there were few stories of military defeat to conceal from the children, although Mahmud, eight years old when the army paraded out of Istanbul some months after their arrival, probably understood better than his younger brother that not all the soldiers would return.

  During the quiet months of the summer of 1521, with Suleyman gone, Mahidevran had time to take stock of Roxelana. It was probably no surprise to the women of the Manisa harem that the young sultan had not slept alone during the gap between his and their arrival in the capital. The presence of a pregnant concubine was probably not wholly unexpected, especially since Suleyman’s reproductive output had been relatively modest for someone entrusted with repopulating the dynasty. But then in the fall came the sudden death of all the Manisa siblings save Mustafa and the near simultaneous birth of Mehmed. If tempted to dwell on the latter event, Mahidevran was surely distracted by the need to comfort the bereaved mothers as well as her son. The loss of his sister and brothers must have terrified Mustafa and rendered him understandably fearful of his own death. Mehmed was perhaps a godsend in this regard, a tiny boy whom his big brother could be encouraged to love and to protect.

  What turned the future into a tale of two concubines was not the birth of Mehmed but rather of that of Mihrumah and then Selim, very real proof of Suleyman’s astonishing relationship with Roxelana. Breaking all tradition, she had remained in Suleyman’s bed rather than retiring from it to raise her precious son as Mahidevran had done. Roxelana’s rise in status now threatened Mahidevran’s newfound precedence in the harem. If Mahidevran turned to Hafsa for answers, she was likely told to remember who she was, a very high-ranking member of the imperial family who must maintain a standard of conduct for other women to emulate. Hafsa herself now faced a shifting constellation of favor and hierarchy in the harem, even though it was perhaps she who had introduced the new star to her son. If Mahidevran needed distraction, her circle of supporters presumably urged her to concentrate on the obvious, Mustafa’s education. If her son was not already her “whole pleasure,” as Bragadin put it, he necessarily became so in those first years when she and Roxelana were living under the same roof.

  We see and hear Mustafa for the first time in Bragadin’s 1526 oral report to the Venetian Senate, when the ambassador related two stories that reveal the maturing prince’s keen sense of his stature. Mustafa had apparently also acquired sensitivity to the complicated dynamics of a royal court that intermingled slaves and princes. The first incident concerned the boy’s jealousy of Suleyman’s intimacy with Ibrahim, his longtime protégé who became grand vizier in 1523. One day, when Ibrahim had gone to dine with Suleyman, Mustafa entered the room. “His father rose to show him respect and seated him at the table, bringing three wooden spoons as customary,” related Bragadin’s virtual eyewitness narrative. Suleyman gave one spoon to Ibrahim, and the two began to eat, but Mustafa did not. So his father held out a spoon to him and said, “Now, Mustafa, eat,” whereupon the boy broke the spoon in pieces and threw it aside. “Signor Mustafa,” said Ibrahim, “you did that because the sultan gave a spoon to me first. Do you not know that I am the sultan’s slave, and yours too?” “I don’t know what a slave is,” retorted Mustafa. “You eat every day at my father’s palace and have your spoon before I do.”14

  Bragadin’s second story also underlined Ibrahim’s sympathetic patience with the proud child, whose sense of entitlement was apparently both acute and insecure. “The sultan sent Ibrahim a beautiful saddle for his horse with jewels and other ornaments; and Mustafa, aware of this, sent word to Ibrahim to have one like it made for him. [Ibrahim] understood this and sent him the saddle, and said to him, ‘Hide it! If the sultan learns of this, he will make you send it back.’”15 These two incidents may simply reflect a jealousy on Mustafa’s part of anyone close to his father. But perhaps the prince had a sense that his father’s generosity to Ibrahim was excessive, demonstrating a degree of indulgence of his male favorite that far surpassed a grand vizier’s rightful expectations from his master.

  By the time Bragadin deemed Mustafa worthy of the Senate’s attention, the boy had been exposed to the world of politics. He had recently lived through the Janissary rampage of March 1525 and may well have picked up on currents of discontent among the troops. Suleyman had not taken his soldiers to war for three years, depriving them of both the opportunity to exercise their skills and the plunder that they regarded as their due. The spark that ignited their mounting discontent was the sultan’s extended hunting sojourn in Adrianople during the winter months. Mustafa experienced the incident in one of two ways: either he had accompanied his father to Adrianople and witnessed the hasty royal return to the capital, or he waited out the violence in Istanbul, no doubt aware of his elders’ fears that the rebels would attack. They had already sacked the elaborate palace Suleyman had given Ibrahim as a wedding gift (the grand vizier was absent in Cairo, putting down the revolt of its governor).

  The Janissary revolt was quelled, Ibrahim was recalled from Egypt, and planning for the Hungarian campaign of 1526 soon began. Strategic factors were uppermost in the preparations for war, but rallying the troops with the promise of booty was an obvious consideration. If Mustafa longed to march beside his father, who was once again master of his army, the boy’s consolation was apparently a safe defensive assignment, or so Roxelana’s forwarded letter suggested.

  ACUTE OBSERVER OF the Ottoman court though he was, Bragadin still got some facts wrong in his report. For example, he gave an incorrect birth order for Roxelana’s sons (he ignored her daughter Mihrumah): “The first son by her is named Selim, five years old; the second Morat, three years old; the third Mamet is about one, born after the arrival of the pasha Embraim from Cairo.”16 (Mehmed was nearly five at the time, Mihrumah three, Selim one, and Abdullah either a newborn or imminently expected; Murad [not Roxelana’s son] had perished in 1521.) Details about small children were probably not the kind of information that regularly leaked from the harem to the curious public (the eunuchs being the most obvious but not the only interlocutors). News of Roxelana, on the other hand, was obviously in demand. Bragadin informed the outside world that the Ruthenian was small and graceful though not beautiful and that Suleyman now concentrated all his affection on her and had given her jewels worth 100,000 ducats. Herein lay a potential problem for Roxelana’s sons: she was the story, not her little princes. Mahidevran’s Mustafa, by contrast, was the protagonist of their story.

  It took nearly three decades for a rare beam of light to fall directly onto the relationship between Mahidevran and Roxelana. Bernardo Navagero, Venice’s ambassador in the first years of the 1550s, recounted at considerable length an apparent showdown between the two royal mothers, at least from Mahidevran’s perspective. The incident certainly occurred before 1533, when Mahidevran left Istanbul to accompany Mustafa back to Manisa as governor; it probably happened sometime in the 1520s. Here is Navagero’s account:

  The sultan has two highly cherished women, one a Circassian, the mother of Mustafa the firstborn, the other… a Russian, so loved by his majesty that there has never been in the Ottoman house a wo
man who has enjoyed greater authority. The way in which she entered into the favor of the sultan I understand to have been the following. The Circassian, naturally proud and beautiful, and who already had a son, Mustafa, understood that [the other] had pleased the sultan, wherefore she insulted her with injurious words, and, words escalating to deeds, scratched her all over her face and mussed her clothing, saying,… “Traitor, sold meat! You want to compete with me?”

  It happened that a few days later the sultan had this Russian summoned for his pleasure. She did not let this opportunity pass, and angrily told the eunuch agha who had come to fetch her that she was not worthy to come into the presence of the sultan because, being sold meat and having her face completely spoiled and being almost bald, she recognized that she would offend the majesty of such a sultan by coming before him. These words were related to the sultan and induced in him an even greater desire to have her come to him, and he commanded again that she come. He wanted to understand why she would not come and why she had sent him such a message. The woman related to him what had happened with Mustafa’s mother, accompanying her words with tears and showing the sultan her face, which still bore the scratches, and how her hair had been pulled out.

  The angry sultan sent for the Circassian and asked her if what the other woman had said was true. She responded that it was, and that she had done no less to her than she deserved. She believed that all the women should yield to her and recognize her as mistress since she had been in the service of his majesty first. These words inflamed the sultan even more, for the reason that he no longer wanted her, and he gave all his love to this other.17