Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Sultans had made marriages before—more commonly, they had arranged marriages for their sons and daughters—but these had been diplomatic gestures between the Ottomans and Christian as well as Muslim regional powers. Through such unions, the early Ottoman rulers sought to gain allies or, as their power and territory expanded, to seal the allegiance of vassals. By the early fifteenth century, however, they had learned the danger posed by foreign uncles who could intervene militarily on behalf of an Ottoman nephew. Although marital accords with foreign princesses continued for a couple more generations, they became childless unions, while slave concubines became the favored vehicle for propagating the dynasty.

  By 1534, it seems that even the memory of royal marriage had faded, or so Menavino’s comment that the sultans never took wives would suggest. Suleyman’s audacity in breaking with tradition made it imperative that he move judiciously. He must accomplish each of the three steps that made Roxelana a married woman of high status—the grant of freedom, the contract of marriage, and the settlement of a dower—in concordance with members of the Ottoman religious establishment. Since this was the sultan’s marriage, the presiding officiant was most likely one of its three highest-ranking jurist-scholars, the chief mufti and the two military judges of Anatolia (Asia) and Rumelia (Europe). All this demanded imperial gravity and adherence to the requisite religious propriety.

  Matrimony in Islamic practice was a legal matter, a contractual agreement that conformed to Sharia law. It is probable, in fact, that Roxelana and Suleyman were not even present at the signing of their contract but rather represented by proxies. This was a typical procedure, with distinguished figures standing in for both groom and bride—in this case, most likely viziers or high-ranked palace personnel. This is not to say that the royal marriage was clandestine but rather that it was a private legal transaction, not a public affair. It was a momentous occasion, to be sure, and one that Suleyman may well have wanted to oversee personally, even if he did not participate in the official proceedings.

  Among ordinary Muslims, a wedding celebration often followed the contractual marriage, although it might not take place for a while, usually to allow time for establishing the conjugal household in preparation for the marriage’s consummation. Suleyman and Roxelana had long since consummated their relationship. But in their case too, the wedding festivities waited—for almost two years. The gap was probably not intentional but rather necessitated by Suleyman’s sudden departure from Istanbul on June 13, when he set out to join the great campaign against the Safavids of Iran. It was already in progress under the command of the grand vizier Ibrahim.

  PLANS FOR THE sultan’s first campaign to the east had been afoot for some time. Challenging the Safavid armies on the long frontier separating Ottoman and Iranian territory, from Iraq to Azerbaijan, called for a far longer campaign season than did the march into Europe and back. Appointed serasker (commander in chief), Ibrahim had left Istanbul in late October 1533. It was an unusual summons from Ibrahim that precipitated Suleyman’s departure for the east. Apparently the soldiers, “dispirited and tense,” were protesting his absence. Without their sultan’s leadership, they refused to push further into the territory of the Safavid shah, Tahmasp, who was advancing from eastern Iran toward Tabriz. “A king requires a king,” they rumbled. “If the shah comes, who will stand up to him, what will be the fate of the soldiers of Islam?”19

  Like his father, Suleyman had marched out of Istanbul with his army in every campaign of his reign. His lag in heading out to join this one perhaps stemmed from an obvious decline in Hafsa’s health and then, after her death, the requisite obsequies and arrangements for her tomb—to say nothing of his personal bereavement. But Suleyman may also have delayed in order to arrange the marriage. The conjunction of these two events in the spring of 1534—Hafsa’s demise and Suleyman’s urgent need to go east—is the most likely explanation for the timing of the marriage.

  Several factors were apparently at play, the most obvious being that Hafsa’s death made wedding Roxelana feasible. Elevating a concubine through marriage would have dishonored the queen mother by diminishing her well-deserved and hard-earned status as the ranking female of the Ottoman dynasty. Hafsa was the family elder, the only person in whose presence her son was said to rise to his feet. Nor was the marriage likely to happen while Mahidevran still lived in the Old Palace, but that issue had resolved itself a year earlier.

  There were other pressing reasons for securing Roxelana’s status. As always, when grand vizier and sultan were both absent, a loyal and dependable deputy governor was assigned to administer and supervise Istanbul. But with his mother gone, his confidant Ibrahim on the frontier, and his only adult son assigned to monitor all Anatolia, Suleyman was in want of a trusted intimate in the capital. Given the duration of an Iranian campaign, the need was especially urgent (Suleyman in fact did not return to Istanbul until December 1535). The only person who could act as the sultan’s eyes and ears was Roxelana, by now a seasoned denizen of imperial Istanbul.

  For her part, Roxelana had every reason to urge Suleyman toward an immediate marriage. Paramount no doubt was security for herself and her children. The Iranian campaign would bring renewed fears for the sultan’s safety and therefore for her own and her children’s futures. In contrast to the European frontier, the borderlands with Iran were relatively unknown. The Ottomans had fought only a single war with the Safavids. Though Selim had been victorious in 1514, the east still evoked unsettling memories. In 1402, the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur had swept into Anatolia from Iran, provoked by Bayezid I’s expansion eastward. Taken prisoner by Timur, Bayezid died in captivity, according to legend by suicide, while his Serbian princess-wife was humiliatingly reduced to servitude.

  It was, moreover, almost in spite of his army that Selim had won a resounding victory over Tahmasp’s father Ismail at Chaldiran in eastern Anatolia. Selim’s soldiers were exhausted by the long march across Anatolia, coping with a shortfall in provisions, and doubtful that it was right to fight against other Muslims. Before the battle was engaged, the Janissaries even fired at the sultan’s tent and afterward refused to pursue the retreating shah, forcing Selim to end the campaign and withdraw to Amasya, an Anatolian provincial capital, for the winter.20 Suleyman’s Janissaries were criticizing him before he even left home.

  Passion and politics inevitably intertwined Roxelana and Suleyman’s lives. While strategic considerations certainly played a role in their decision to marry, personal feelings were undoubtedly at work as well. It had long been obvious that Roxelana was more than an ordinary childbearing slave of the dynasty. Her career as the sultan’s favorite was unique in the history of the Ottoman dynasty, or at least in contemporary memory. Suleyman had broken several precedents for his favorite, and he had certainly not hidden his devotion to her. What the marriage accomplished was to legitimate this concubine’s maverick position as the mother of all the children of Suleyman’s sultanate and to imbue her stature with an aura of majesty.

  It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the initiative in instigating the marriage was all Suleyman’s. Roxelana may well have deemed it just reward for her extraordinary responsibilities. By 1534, she had some fourteen years of service at the very heart of Ottoman politics. She had the children and the jewels to prove Suleyman’s esteem. So it was wholly reasonable that her pride and ambition might demand official validation of her station through elevation as Suleyman’s wife—which she already was in all but name. Roxelana had not hesitated to display audacity in the defense of her privilege before, when she dramatically resisted Suleyman’s acceptance of the two newly gifted slave women or Mahidevran’s aggressive assertion of superior status. If Roxelana refrained during Hafsa’s lifetime from pressing for public recognition of her exceptional status, she could now hope for its realization.

  In fact, it is entirely possible that Roxelana actively fought for her freedom, or so stories circulating in Istanbul suggested. Norms of propriety did not
permit Ottoman writers to speculate about the royal marriage publicly, but European observers were freer to do so. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of the Hapsburg emperor in the mid-1550s, was one diplomat who repeated the story that Roxelana had refused to sleep with Suleyman unless he married her. “[Concubines] earn their freedom… if they bear children,” he wrote (in error). “Advantage was taken of this privilege by Roxolana, Soleiman’s wife, when she had borne him a son while she was still a slave. Having thus obtained her freedom and become her own mistress, she refused to have anything more to do with Soleiman, who was deeply in love with her, unless he made her his lawful wife.”21

  Busbecq was wrong about the emancipation of concubine mothers. Motherhood brought them a protected status—they could not be sold or given away—but they were not released into freedom until their master’s death. Perhaps the ambassador confused this fact with the legal rule that to free a slave and sleep with her without marrying her was to commit the grave crime of adultery. As for the story of Roxelana’s resistance, it may have been pure rumor. But it has a certain plausible logic—the holdout of an unusually powerful concubine—that apparently allowed it to persist throughout Roxelana’s lifetime. Busbecq was correct, however, that she received the dower that the law required a bride be given as part of matrimonial negotiations. Roxelana’s was reputed to equal 100,000 gold ducats, or so later Venetian reports would allege.22

  How widely known the marriage was when it took place is hard to say, but the Venetian de’Ludovici was certainly aware of it and its significance. Key individuals in both the Old and New Palaces would be apprised of Roxelana’s new status, as perhaps would the governor placed in charge of the capital city when the sultan was at war. Where Roxelana spent the nineteen months of Suleyman’s absence is not clear, but she may have stayed at the New Palace for at least some of the time. The old Hall of the Maidens had been refurbished and expanded in the mid-1520s, rendering it appropriate lodgings for the new queen. Mehmed too most likely spent time at the New Palace, for at thirteen he was old enough to serve as his father’s titular deputy. He would write Suleyman at least one letter during the campaign with news of Istanbul.

  We can only imagine what went on between Roxelana and Suleyman as they made ready for his departure. She had watched him leave on five campaigns, but this one would be the longest and had the least predictable outcome, presumably increasing her trepidation. War had not always proven healthy for Suleyman’s forbearers. His father Selim and his great-grandfather Mehmed the Conqueror had died of sickness shortly after setting out on campaign. More ominous, his grandfather Bayezid II was overthrown and possibly murdered by Selim, who was impatient to take up arms against the Safavid advance into Anatolia. Roxelana had to reconcile herself to Suleyman’s duty to his empire; indeed she may have been in favor of the Iranian campaign in principle. But it is not hard to imagine her arguing that Ibrahim could manage, that it would hardly be the first time a sultan had delegated command to his grand vizier (Mehmed the Conqueror had done so).

  If Roxelana feared losing the man she had come to depend on and apparently to love, her political mind must also have been at work. It was her duty, as the mother of three potential heirs to the Ottoman throne, to anticipate the worst-case scenario. Suleyman might never return to Istanbul, taken prisoner like Bayezid I; he might not return alive; or he might return incapacitated and unable to govern. A struggle for the succession would inevitably ensue. Mahidevran would be entertaining similar thoughts and, moreover, taking proactive measures on her son’s behalf. Mustafa had troops already at his disposal in Manisa. The prince might conceivably be called upon to take command of his father’s army (he had been popular with the Janissaries since his childhood, and the soldiers had already demonstrated their hesitation to follow Ibrahim). In the heat of war, so far from the capital, might not the army even proclaim Mustafa the new sultan?

  Roxelana’s advantage as Suleyman’s favorite, and any edge it could gain her sons, might count for little in the eastern reaches of the empire; her security in the capital would depend on the loyalty of its commanders and their troops. In this regard, the loss of Hafsa may have genuinely alarmed Roxelana. Who would take her place as mistress of the Old Palace? Presumably not the slave Roxelana, even if she were the most politically informed and adept of its residents. Rather, it could well be the most senior princess, perhaps a sister of Suleyman, who might favor Mustafa and Mahidevran. To Roxelana, and to Suleyman as well, marriage presented itself as the best way to shore up both her stature and her competence as his ally in Istanbul.

  8

  A QUEEN FOR THE NEW PALACE

  LUIGI BASSANO TITLED Chapter 13 of his book on the customs of the Turks “Of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and of the Sultana his wife.” Writing in the late 1530s, the Venetian informed his audience that “the palace of the Sultana is within that of the Grand Turk, and one can go through secret rooms from the one to the other.”1 Some fifteen years later, the ambassador Bernardo Navagero supplied further details: “In the middle [of the magnificent garden] are the rooms of the Grand Signor and of the Signora Sultana, whose room is separate; to go from one to the other, one must pass through a small walled garden belonging to the Grand Signor, and thence to another garden belonging to the Sultana, which is also walled.”2 Sultan and sultana, signor and signora—Suleyman and Roxelana were a king and queen united in the imagination by a garden gate.

  It has often been assumed that Roxelana and her entourage moved to the New Palace only after a fire in 1541 destroyed much of the Old Palace. However, the Hall of the Maidens, which housed Roxelana in the New Palace during her initial interlude with Suleyman, had been revamped in 1527 and 1528, quite possibly with Suleyman’s favorite in mind. It was these refurbished and expanded quarters that Bassano and Navagero described. The ambiguity regarding Roxelana’s change in residence doubtless stems from the fact that it did not happen in one fell swoop. The more plausible reality is that Roxelana remained a significant figure in both royal palaces, moving back and forth between them but gradually making the New Palace her primary residence following her marriage.

  Suleyman would have special reason to want Roxelana in the New Palace during his absence on the long Iranian campaign, for which he set out in early June 1534. Not only would she be closer to the pulse of politics, but so would Mehmed, who was just turning thirteen. Given the custom of stationing a prince of the blood in Istanbul during a prolonged absence of his father, this was Suleyman’s opportunity to launch the youth’s apprenticeship. Observers who understood the logic of preparing a prince and his mother for their potential roles as sultan and queen mother might wonder if Roxelana and her eldest son were beginning to create in Istanbul a version of Mustafa and Mahidevran’s tenure in Manisa.

  Bassano provided details of Roxelana’s quarters in the New Palace. “Like those of the Gran Signore, the chambers of the Sultana are most splendid,” he wrote, “with chapels, baths, gardens, and other amenities, not only for herself, but for her damsels as well, of which she keeps as many as one hundred.” This was a far cry from the Hall of the Maidens. Bassano’s European readers could now imagine the former concubine in a setting not unlike that of their own queens.

  Account books detailed the work that Suleyman and Ibrahim had ordered.3 Built-in cupboards, storage trunks, seats, and wooden flooring were added to the quarters of “the maidens,” apparently with the aim of accommodating a larger, more permanent female presence. A new kitchen was constructed, and the water supply for the upgraded bath was improved. In addition to this remodeling, the “splendid chambers” described by Bassano appeared—a residence, a small pavilion, a fountain, and a pool. A wall enclosed this elegant ensemble, its purpose presumably to ensure its privacy and set it off from the dormitory quarters. An iron gate in the wall opened onto the private gardens of the sultan.

  With their completion, the renovations of the mid-1520s had turned a female annex to the New Palace into a permanent wing for women
, with Roxelana as its presiding resident. By the end of the century, its population would grow to 275 (including numerous staff and servants).4 What would be called the “imperial harem” also grew in size, as new halls and apartments were built to accommodate its expanding numbers. This important shift in the gender demographics at the very heart of the empire—from all male to male and female—was the physical manifestation of a new model of governance, built step by step by Roxelana, that would give political stature and voice to royal women.

  The improvements to the women’s section were no doubt overdue. Suleyman’s father had not put much energy into enhancing the New Palace beyond remodeling the private quarters he himself had occupied. Selim had spent much of his reign away from Istanbul, limiting his opportunity to attend to the needs of the imperial residence. This warrior-sultan, moreover, was not particularly interested in the Hall of the Maidens. Ambassador Antonio Guistinian commented in 1514, “He does not want to have more sons, so he no longer encumbers himself with women.”5 Forty-three when he seized the throne in 1512, Selim had finished with the reproductive phase of his life. During his reign, the Old Palace world of women was also subdued—his children were grown, and his mother had died in Trabzon during his governorship there. When Hafsa arrived in 1520 following Suleyman’s enthronement, she undoubtedly had work to do.

  As mistress of the Old Palace, Hafsa presumably contributed advice on the upgrading of the New Palace’s female section. It is tempting to wonder if Roxelana voiced her own opinions or even lobbied for the reconstruction project. During the first years of her sexual relationship with Suleyman and the multiple conceptions it yielded, the sultan’s favorite had logged considerable time in the Hall of the Maidens. She would know its routines and its limitations well.