Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Had Bassano become a partisan of the prince and thus a natural critic of Roxelana and the advantage her sons might be assumed to enjoy? Had the force of the public opinion he reported perhaps swayed his thoughts? If Bassano was the chronicler of Roxelana’s emergence as queen, he was also the purveyor of her portrait as witch. Self-interest was perhaps operating here: stories of harem intrigue could help sales of his book to an audience already curious about the Great Turk’s women. On the other hand, Bassano’s commentary may have offered a dispassionate reading of prevailing sentiment.

  Whatever the case, Bassano’s European readers would correctly presume that some antagonism was building toward Roxelana in the years following the revelation of her marriage. The seeds of the Ottoman queen’s notoriety in Europe had been planted.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER Suleyman and Ibrahim’s victorious return to the capital, a shocking event occurred in Istanbul: the sudden execution of the grand vizier. Sometime during the night of March 14–15, 1536, Ibrahim was strangled by order of the sultan as he lay sleeping in his room in the inner palace. There had been some controversy over Ibrahim’s leadership of the Iranian campaign, but there was no warning, no observable clue, that his monarch and the friend of his youth was displeased enough to do away with him—indeed, Ibrahim had that very evening gone to the palace to break the Ramadan fast with Suleyman. Returning to Istanbul after the eastern victory he masterminded, Ibrahim had resumed his role as director of the empire’s affairs. Only a month before his death, he concluded negotiations with French diplomats that yielded a historic agreement on reciprocal trading privileges; the agreement marked the beginning of a long diplomatic and military alliance between the two kingdoms.

  Was Ibrahim a martyr to political partisanship that allegedly drove Roxelana to lobby for his murder? In the last century or so, the grand vizier’s fall has typically been viewed as one of her schemes to eliminate her rivals. As the standard story goes, Roxelana took control after Hafsa’s death in 1534 and used her powers to turn Suleyman against anyone who might oppose her. Having banished Mahidevran to the provinces, she next convinced the impressionable sultan that Ibrahim was a danger to his reign.

  The story has deep roots. Şemseddin Sami, an Albanian Ottoman writer and thinker and early proponent of women’s rights, had this to say about Roxelana in the encyclopedia he published in 1891 (the first in Turkish): “A Russian slave who, because of her beauty and grace, and intelligence and shrewdness, acquired extraordinary influence and power. However she did not always use that influence and power toward good ends and was the cause of the execution of the grand vizier Ibrahim.”17 A prominent Turkish historian of the mid-twentieth century was more direct: in order to protect her sons, Roxelana’s “first act was to do away with the grand vizier.”18 Recently, the “ruthless queen” motif acquired new life in a Turkish television series on the reign of Suleyman, which portrays both favorites as drunk with power: Ibrahim guilty of “mad arrogance,” Roxelana of engineering his fall.19

  The problem with this judgment is that there is no contemporary evidence of Roxelana’s guilt. Venetians, the keenest and most vocal observers of the two favorites, had nothing to say on the matter of Roxelana’s involvement. Their ambassadors, fascinated with Ibrahim, paid close attention to the ups and downs of the grand vizier’s career. At the same time, like Bassano, they made a point of publicizing news of the sultan’s new wife, so one might well expect to hear about any role she played in his downfall. Bassano had nothing to say on the subject beyond repeating the story that it was Ibrahim who originally presented Roxelana to Suleyman. Ottoman pundits and historians were likewise silent on the matter, although they analyzed at length the reasons for Ibrahim’s fall from favor. Even the late sixteenth-century bureaucrat and historian Mustafa `Ali, who did not hesitate to accuse the queen of malevolent scheming in her later career, made no mention of a connection between Roxelana and the grand vizier’s execution.

  We can safely conclude that the contemporary public did not hold Roxelana guilty for Ibrahim’s death. But perhaps it was inevitable that these two individuals, who rose simultaneously, at the very outset of Suleyman’s reign, as his favorites, were assumed, at least by later historians, to be rivals who would do anything to impede the other’s influence on the sultan. The absence of a smoking gun, however, does not mean that Roxelana had no opinions regarding the man who occupied much of Suleyman’s attention for the first thirteen years of her life with him or that she kept those opinions to herself. No one could be silent on the subject of Ibrahim, it seemed. He became controversial well before she did.

  Ibrahim’s execution did not entail the usual public beheading of a disgraced pasha. In the inner sanctum of the palace’s third court, he was garroted with a bowstring, the mode of death usually reserved for Ottoman royalty. Mehmed II’s favorite Mahmud Pasha, another lauded grand vizier struck down by his master, had also been strangled, but his murder took place in the Seven Towers prison fortress, a grim quasi-public affair. Was it symbolic that Ibrahim’s illustrious career ended in the very place where it had begun when Suleyman appointed his best friend head page in his personal service? We will probably never know if it was a last honor bestowed on this servant of the sultanate or an expedient way to eliminate him without the encumbrance of protocol. Ibrahim’s corpse was removed from the palace in secret.

  We find a partial answer to these questions in the lack of a grave commensurate with the grand vizier’s service to the empire. Devoid of the usual memorial tomb, his burial place was deliberately obscure—clear evidence of dishonor. Ibrahim’s corpse was allegedly interred in the garden of a dervish hostel behind the imperial dockyard. It was later said that a single tree marked the site of his grave.20 In other words, the man who was arguably the most powerful grand vizier the Ottomans had known was symbolically obliterated. Ibrahim’s fall was as sudden and unexpected as his astoundingly rapid rise to the pinnacle of power. The alteration of a single letter in his nickname marked the overnight change of his status: once Makbul (the favorite), he would now also be known as Maktul (the slain). Only Ibrahim’s wife Muhsine paid tribute to him by building a mosque in his memory in the Kumkapı district of Istanbul.21

  Both the unprecedented ascent and precipitous descent of this illustrious statesman and commander affirmed the singular power of the sultan to make and unmake the careers of his highest officials. Four years after Ibrahim’s fall, Henry VIII would similarly eliminate his powerful henchman Thomas Cromwell, as he had cut down his earlier political favorite (and Cromwell’s mentor) Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1530. Both men, however, had at least been tried for their crimes. While an Ottoman sultan could not in principle execute a subject of the empire without a judicial trial, he held the power of summary punishment over the slave servants to whom he had delegated power.

  Suleyman may have deliberately chosen March 15 for Ibrahim’s murder. The anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination was a telling choice for the elimination of a brilliant politician whose power had apparently grown excessive in the eyes of his executioner. By the Ottoman calendar Ibrahim perished on the twenty-second day of Ramadan in 942, but Suleyman could easily have ascertained when the Ides of March fell that year. Ibrahim had shared his love of ancient history with Suleyman, and the two may well have ruminated on Caesar’s career. According to Pietro Bragadin, reporting in 1526, Ibrahim derived pleasure from having books about war and history read to him, especially the lives of Hannibal and Alexander the Great.22

  Suleyman and Ibrahim shared more than an interest in the past. Each was the tutor of the other, perhaps a natural outcome of the fact that they grew together into sovereignty. One had the sultan as his father, the other a fisherman from Parga, a town on the Ionian Sea, but their lives came together when both were young men. Stories of Ibrahim’s origins were various: He was captured in a raid by the Ottoman governor of Bosnia, Iskender Pasha, and presented to Suleyman during his princely service at Caffa; alternatively, he was abducted by pir
ates who sold him to a widow living near Manisa, the prince’s second post.23 Pietro Zen reported a more plausible account in 1523: captured by corsairs, the boy, called Pietro, was sold to the widowed daughter of Iskender Pasha. When Suleyman visited her home in Adrianople, she presented him with her slave Ibrahim, “who played [the violin], sang, and was of the same age.”24 Ibrahim’s ties with the family were later solidified when he married Muhsine, the granddaughter of Iskender Pasha.25

  IBRAHIM MOVED WITH the new sultan to Istanbul in 1520, having served as a page in Suleyman’s princely household in Manisa. Their closeness was formalized with Suleyman’s award to his male favorite of the top post in the New Palace’s inner courtyard: head page of the Privy Chamber. More shocking was Ibrahim’s elevation in June 1523 from personal service in the inner court directly to the grand vizierate, the highest office in public service. Suleyman’s other viziers had worked their way up the ranks, gaining years of experience in government. They had earned their status; Ibrahim was given his. Suleyman’s decision so alienated Ahmed Pasha, who believed himself next in line for the office, that he used the consolation prize of the Cairo governorship to stage a rebellion, thereby entering historical memory as “Traitor Ahmed.”

  Just as Ibrahim’s elevation to grand vizier was unprecedented, so was the autonomy he enjoyed in the office. Already in June 1524, at the completion of Zen’s first mission to Istanbul, the envoy informed the Venetian Senate that the new grand vizier “does everything, and whatever he wants is done.”26 Zen emphasized that Suleyman loved Ibrahim greatly and that they were always together. The sumptuous palace Suleyman built for his favorite on the Hippodrome not only impressed observers with Ibrahim’s extraordinary status but had the additional advantage of inspiring wonder at how much more splendid the sultan’s own palace must be.

  The first full account of Ibrahim came two years later from Bragadin. Perhaps not coincidentally, this same report to the Venetian Senate also introduced Suleyman’s other favorite, “the Russian” woman. Followers of the ambassadorial reports learned that both were small: Roxelana was not beautiful but graceful and petite; Ibrahim was a thin man, with a small face, pale, not very tall, and graceful.27 (Suleyman, on the other hand, was tall.) The sultan’s affection for both was intense, wrote Bragadin: Suleyman focused all his love on Roxelana, ignoring Mustafa’s mother, and people said that he would have perished from sorrow had Ibrahim stayed any longer on his mission in 1525 to restore order in Egypt. As usual, the Venetians knew a good story when they saw one, especially when it came to Ibrahim, to whom they enjoyed more than the usual access.

  Bragadin was doubtless not the first to recognize the parallels in the precedent-shattering rise of the two favorites. Ibrahim’s career, however, peaked first. News of Roxelana was just emerging in 1526, and she would attract open criticism only after she became a public figure in the mid-1530s. Ibrahim, on the other hand, was already controversial by 1526. In words strikingly similar to Bassano’s later comment about popular dislike of Roxelana, Bragadin reported that “at first everyone hated the pasha, but now that they have seen how much the sultan loves him, they try to become friendly with him.”28 This included the mother and “the wife” of the sultan.

  Some at least sought to get close to Ibrahim for good reason: he had considerable political patronage to dispense. As head of the Imperial Council, he made policy as well as routine appointments to office. Every day, noted Bragadin, the sultan wrote him about political matters, dispatching notes via one of the mutes who served in the inner palace. Ibrahim in turn wrote to Suleyman of everything he was doing. For high-level petitioners, particularly foreign ambassadors, Ibrahim was an indispensable channel to the sultan, especially since the process of royal removal from the quotidian business of administration that had begun with Mehmed the Conqueror was picking up. Reporting on his audience with Suleyman in 1527, Marco Minio commented on what seems to have been a recent convention: “They have imposed this rule, that the envoy neither speaks nor does the Signor answer, but [the envoy] only kisses his hand, and then the pashas dismiss him.”29

  Ibrahim had a great deal of personal patronage to dispense as well. According to Bragadin’s report, the vizier’s yearly income was an extraordinary 150,000 gold ducats: 100,000 for the grand vizierate and 50,000 for the governorship of Rumelia, the enormous Ottoman province in southeastern Europe.30 The sultan would increase these sums over the years. Ibrahim’s architectural largesse, which provided services to local communities and jobs for builders and workers, included mosques large and small, schools, dervish lodges, and hamams in places ranging from Mecca to cities in the Ottoman Balkans. Ibrahim was also a devoted patron of poets and writers. A work dedicated to him on the distinctions between apparent synonyms in Persian illustrates the extent of his erudition.

  A good deal of the vizier’s wealth went to maintaining his large palace and substantial household. He outfitted the 1,500 slaves he already possessed by 1526 in red silk embroidered with gold thread. For the time, this was a large pasha household, although it was not unique—that of the famously wealthy royal treasurer Iskender was allegedly grander. Ibrahim’s patronage included his own family. He placed two of his brothers in palace service, his mother lived in a house adjoining his own palace, and for his father the vizier obtained a modest governorship in Parga, with an income of 2,000 ducats annually. All four converted to Islam, the father taking the name Yunus (the biblical Jonah, a prophet in Islam).

  THE COMPANION OF Suleyman’s youth was also the architect of the sultan’s magnificence. Ibrahim was apparently gifted with an eye for visual sensation, be it architectural, ceremonial, or sartorial. For his part, Suleyman gave his favorite both the means and the opportunities to realize his talents. The 1520s renovations to the New Palace directed by the grand vizier greatly enriched the settings in which select observers viewed the Ottoman government at work. Venetian ambassadors referred to Suleyman as il signor, the king, but Ibrahim was il magnifico. They remarked that his dress was fancier than the sultan’s and that his fingers were lavishly bejeweled. Ibrahim’s wedding in June 1524 was the first gala event of Suleyman’s reign, establishing the blueprint and the tone for future celebrations.

  The wedding is worth dwelling on for an erroneous supposition that accompanies it. The panoply of the event has been attributed to the assumption that Ibrahim was betrothed to Suleyman’s sister Hadice. A century later, the historian Ibrahim Peçevi wrote, “Spread before the eyes was such abundance and merriment as had never been observed at the wedding of a princess.”31 However, this assumption has been challenged more than once, and Muhsine, granddaughter of an illustrious statesman, is now largely accepted as Ibrahim’s wife.32 The older belief made sense because the custom of marrying Ottoman princesses to top statesmen had taken firm hold once Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II made it policy, and all of Suleyman’s other sisters married high-ranking officials.33 In any event, the fanfare of Ibrahim’s wedding was all the more remarkable if it was not for a princess.

  An interesting question then arises: Why was Ibrahim, holder of high office, not honored with the hand of a princess? Perhaps it was considered improper, scandalous even, to ask a sister to tolerate her husband’s continued intimacy with her brother. Perhaps Hafsa, the dynastic elder, questioned the propriety of an alliance between her son’s sister and his intimate friend. According to Bragadin, a bed head to head with Suleyman’s was kept for Ibrahim in the inner palace. It seems more likely that Ibrahim retained his old room in the Privy Chamber suite, but even that violated the custom that the only fully adult male present in the inner palace was the sultan. At the very least, the ambassador’s comment reflected their uncustomary closeness.34

  During Ibrahim’s tenure as grand vizier, the cultivation of Ottoman magnificence was pursued with a competitive eye to Europe and the increasingly glamorous courts and persons of Renaissance kings and queens. Until he departed in 1535 on the eastern campaign, fifteen years into his reign, Suleyman’s mi
litary attention was focused westward. So was the propaganda war, with its heavy dose of lavish display. European powers had been relieved at his accession in 1520, having spent the previous two years in great fear of an attack by the warrior-sultan Selim I.35 Alvise Mocenigo, dispatched by Venice to congratulate Selim on his defeat of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, remarked that the conqueror “hopes to become the ruler of the world, with Africa, Europe, and Asia under him.”36 The common presumption in Europe was that Suleyman was the gentle lamb to his father’s angry lion.

  Ibrahim was the right man for the task of convincing European powers that his master fully intended to realize his father’s ambition. “He delights in knowing the condition of the monarchs of the world, the location of their lands, and all other matters,” noted Bragadin of the vizier. Ibrahim’s linguistic abilities and network of contacts and informers, especially among the Venetians, bolstered this avid interest in world affairs. He was particularly close to Pietro Zen, the elderly envoy (born in the year of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople) who represented his government three times during Ibrahim’s vizierate. More important was Alvise (Luigi) Gritti, intimate collaborator with both Ibrahim and Suleyman.