Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Gritti was one of four sons born in Istanbul to Andrea Gritti, doge of the Venetian Republic from 1523 to 1538. The father had previously been a merchant cum diplomat in Istanbul for several years; his 1503 report to the Senate following his mission to negotiate peace was a model of the genre.37 The four sons were the offspring of one or more concubines, presumably acquired locally by their father (he also had a legitimate son, whose mother was the niece of a doge). Receiving an education worthy of his father’s station, Alvise studied in Venice and Padua, whose university was one of the great centers for the Renaissance revival of classical studies. Apparently his father’s favorite, Alvise nevertheless settled in Istanbul, where he cut a resplendent figure and eventually lent his nickname—Beyoğlu (son of the lord)—to the large district in Istanbul where his palace once stood. A prime example of the culturally composite citizen of the sixteenth century, Gritti held court for merchants and humanists and provided entertainment for Christians and Muslims alike.38

  Like his father, Gritti was a merchant who dealt in jewels, among other commodities, and Ibrahim introduced him to Suleyman in this capacity. Roxelana was conceivably also one of his clients, dealing through her Jewish agent, the woman Strongila. Gritti’s real contribution, however, was in diplomatic and military service to the Ottoman empire. In his 1534 report to the Venetian Senate, Daniello de’Ludovici noted that Gritti had won Ibrahim’s favor by educating him on “the world and the government of states,” experience of which the grand vizier lacked at the time of his appointment.39 Gritti participated in three campaigns and, more significantly, became the architect of the empire’s policy in Hungary, an unending arena of contention with the Austrian Hapsburgs.40 This fascinating man was killed in 1534 by Transylvanian rebels while fighting for the sultan.

  Gritti was a collaborator in the most explicitly competitive project in Ibrahim’s program for displaying Suleyman’s splendor. From Venetian artisans (including Pietro Zen’s sons), the grand vizier commissioned and purchased an enormous four-tiered crown for the sultan, intended to visually challenge the claim of Suleyman’s greatest rival, the Hapsburg monarch Charles V, to the mantle of the Roman empire. When in 1530 Pope Clement VII placed the crown of the Holy Roman Empire on Charles’s head, he himself wore the iconic three-tiered papal crown. The new emperor entered Bologna, the city of his coronation, to cries of “Cesare, Cesare, Carlo, Carlo, Imperio, Imperio!”—Caesar, Charles, Empire!41

  Suleyman wearing the four-tiered jeweled crown. Woodcut, anonymous Venetian.

  Mehmed II, however, had made his own claim to Roman successorship with his conquest of Constantinople, center of the Roman empire from 330 onward. Selim I’s greatness as a conqueror rested on his reassembly of the eastern Roman empire through his annexation of former Mamluk territories in the Levant and Egypt. Now Suleyman would visibly challenge Charles on the basis of those claims as well as his further victories in former Roman domains in southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

  In 1532, the Ottomans countered the elaborate processions in Bologna with a display of Suleyman’s crown along the long route of his army’s march to Austria, where he hoped (futilely, as it turned out) to engage the emperor in battle. In the southern Serbian city of Nish, Hapsburg envoys were compelled to watch the military parade from the minaret of a mosque, and in Belgrade the procession passed under Roman-style triumphal arches. Adding to the extreme opulence of the occasion was a whole ensemble of precious items acquired from Venice that accompanied the crown: a jewel-studded saddle, the rich head armor worn by Suleyman’s horse, a scepter, and a bejeweled gold throne. So lavish was the parade that a prominent treasury official objected to the enormous cost on the grounds that the campaign itself was already a burdensome expense.42

  IBRAHIM WAS THE public face of the sultanate: commander in chief of Suleyman’s army as of 1529, master of diplomacy, and impresario of the sultan’s image. Why was he so suddenly eliminated? In attempting to provide a single answer, commentators of the time pointed to the grand vizier’s overweening pride. Ibrahim, they said, failed to remember that however much authority Suleyman delegated to him, the sultan was still the absolute master of the empire.

  Drawing on one another, Ottoman historians listed a set of errors made by Ibrahim on the eastern front that justified his execution.43 The vizier’s tactical misjudgments overextended the war against the Safavids, causing harsh winter conditions to weaken and, perhaps worse, alienate the soldiers. Possibly more harmful in its consequences was Ibrahim’s execution of the powerful royal treasurer Iskender, whose war counsel Suleyman had instructed Ibrahim to seek. On the night of Iskender’s hanging, Suleyman allegedly suffered a dreadful dream that revealed the error of his trust in his longtime grand vizier. Surrounded by a nimbus, Iskender accused Suleyman of forgetting his own many services to the sultanate and allowing his execution on the word of a troublemaker. Suleyman awoke in distress when Iskender began to unwind his turban to strangle the unjust sultan.44

  In writing of Ibrahim’s death, these same historians also gave equal space to the many virtues displayed by the vizier over the course of his career. They commended his scrupulous respect for the law (both Islamic Sharia and ottoman dynastic law) and his veneration of the Qur`an. His downfall, they asserted, resulted from Ibrahim’s gullibility—he was seduced on the frontier by the flattery of riff-raff (sometimes represented as Safavid sympathizers). These sycophants had corrupted his integrity, inciting him to refer to himself as “sultan” in his military commands and to blaspheme by treating the holy book of Islam with disrespect. (The sunni Ottomans were ever ready to accuse the shi`i Safavids of corruption and blasphemy.)

  This “official” account of Ibrahim’s rise and fall originated in large part with Celalzade Mustafa, son of a Muslim judge and Suleyman’s private secretary, who rose to chief secretary of the Divan and then, during the eastern campaign, to royal chancellor. Celalzade’s detailed history of Suleyman’s reign was rarely critical of the sultan, its purpose largely to glorify his reign.45 In like manner, he was generous in his judgment of Ibrahim, whom he had served as private secretary and principal collaborator in repairing the damage wrought in Egypt by “the traitor” Ahmed. Citing Celalzade in his own history, Solakzade Mehmed noted that the secretary had been the “confidant of Ibrahim’s secrets.”46

  In their treatment of Ibrahim’s fall, Celalzade and the early seventeenth-century historians such as Peçevi and Solakzade who drew on his history were displaying a common Ottoman habit: rather than directly criticizing powerful or popular individuals for their unpopular actions or breaches of conduct, they deflected blame onto their associates. If the sultan looked bad, it was because Ibrahim had committed errors, while in turn it was the riff-raff who lured Ibrahim from the right path. At worst, vizier and sultan were guilty of succumbing to self-seeking and treacherous intimates. The sultan, however, could only be chastised in a dream.

  Providers of intelligence to the outside world, however, told a story that challenged this canonical view of a grand vizier who served well until the end. De’Ludovici, reporting to the Venetian Senate in 1534, was as critical of Ibrahim—and of Suleyman—as his predecessors had been admiring. The sultan lacked the virtues of a monarch, commented the envoy, leaving everything in the hands of Ibrahim, whose rise was the product of his wiles. Despite the empire’s strength on land, its soldiers were wretched due to Ibrahim’s neglect, and the navy was underdeveloped. The grand vizier sidelined capable men or ruined their careers; therefore talented men hid from him out of distaste or fear. De’Ludovici believed Ibrahim had known of the empire’s weakening. He had simply loved himself more than he loved Suleyman.47

  Like foreign observers, the Istanbul public did not hesitate to express its views of Ibrahim. Ever since the Janissaries targeted his palace in their 1525 uprising, the sultan’s favorite had accrued unpopularity among some circles in the capital. Ibrahim’s palace was again the object of discontent when he placed in front of it three bronze statu
es of Hercules, Diana, and Apollo he had seized in 1526 as spoils from the royal palace in Budapest. The poet Figani gave voice to popular reaction in a couplet: “Two Abrahams came into the world, one a destroyer of idols, one an idol-worshipper.” The righteous Abraham was the biblical patriarch, for Muslims the prophet Ibrahim, whose holiness included the purification of sacred spaces; the idol worshipper was of course the grand vizier. For this offence, Figani was tortured and hanged in 1532.48 According to the German Hans Dernschwam, the public believed the statues proved that Ibrahim was still a clandestine Christian.49

  Doubt over the sincerity of Ibrahim’s embrace of Islam was again provoked in 1533 when Suleyman and Ibrahim paid a three-hour visit to the palace of Alvise Gritti.50 The context was difficult treaty negotiations with the Austrian Hapsburgs, whose Archduke Ferdinand, brother of Charles V, challenged Suleyman’s claim to Hungary (Ferdinand’s claim derived from his marriage to the sister of King Louis II, who was killed at Mohacs in 1526). Gritti’s views were essential, as he probably understood Hungarian politics better than anyone in Ottoman government. But Ibrahim’s critics saw a pseudo-Muslim vizier in cahoots with a bastard infidel to induce the sultan to forget that his august station required all to come to him. Suleyman, no fool, no doubt had his reasons for making such a risqué move—perhaps he was sending a warning to Ferdinand.

  In the end, Ibrahim’s errors clearly accumulated to the point that Suleyman found it necessary or expedient to get rid of him. But he had obviously had sufficient trust in his grand vizier and respect for his military leadership to put him in sole command at the outset of the campaign against the Safavids. Suleyman had certainly tolerated, and presumably authorized, lavish expenditures such as the four-tiered crown and its retinue of precious objects. On the other hand, Ibrahim had made mistakes—the army under his command was turned back from Vienna in 1529, and the German campaign of 1532 fell short of its anticipated success. On the home front, Suleyman was undoubtedly sensitive to the opinion of his public and especially to the mood of his other pashas and governors.

  The sultan did not lack for talented statesmen. In other words, Ibrahim was dispensable. Ultimately, it appears that Suleyman kept his grand vizier for as long as he needed him—that is, through his reign’s first military venture across Anatolia (where Ibrahim had put down serious tribal disturbances in 1527) and the confrontation with Iran. But no matter how alienated by Ibrahim’s misconduct, Suleyman could hardly have found easy the sacrifice of his friend of nearly twenty years and partner in government for thirteen. His resolve would have to be firm. Perhaps that resolve did not come quickly.

  Hindsight enables us to see that in 1536 Suleyman was approaching a turning point in his reign, of which the grand vizier’s removal was a signpost. Ibrahim was a visionary with talents supremely suited to the competition awakened by the extraordinary empire Charles V inherited and the Ottomans’ extraordinary expansion. Both Suleyman and Charles could now lay claim to the old ideal of universal sovereignty, and Ibrahim could take a good deal of credit for placing his monarch on a par with Europe’s most powerful ruler. The French political philosopher Jean Bodin, born in the year Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, believed “the Turks” had the better claim to the mantle of Rome because they ruled over a far greater expanse of formerly Roman territories.51 But the times were changing, and it was beginning to appear that the decisive clash of the two titans would not materialize.

  The resounding victory over the Safavids, together with a truce granted to Ferdinand in 1533, freed Suleyman to devote more attention to matters of state building within the empire. His grandfather Bayezid II had labored to integrate the territories conquered by his own father, Mehmed II, but Bayezid’s son Selim had devoted his short reign to yet more conquest. Suleyman and his government had work to do to solidify the empire. The modernization of imperial law and the consolidation of provincial administration marked the late 1530s and the 1540s. The sultan would be back in the saddle by 1537, but it was during this era in Suleyman’s long reign that he would acquire the regnal nickname he would come to be known by—Kanuni, the lawgiver, the just administrator. Other minds than Ibrahim’s were better suited to the challenges of this period.

  The Safavids posed one of those challenges. The sixteenth century was one of sectarian antagonism. Just as Catholic and Protestant monarchs racked Europe with conflict, the most powerful Muslim rulers—the sunni Ottoman sultan and the shi`i Safavid shah—now attempted to divide the western Asian world. Each drove the other to a firmer embrace of doctrinal orthodoxy and a campaign to promote religious conformity among his Muslim subjects. Suleyman issued an imperial order in 1537 that every Muslim village must have a mosque.52 The sultan, moreover, competed for another prophesied role: in addition to the long-awaited universal sovereign, the “renewer of religion” was expected at the start of each new Islamic century. The tenth sultan of the Ottoman ruling house, Suleyman had been born in 900 by the Islamic calendar, the beginning of the tenth century. But he had to earn that destiny.53

  It was no coincidence that the year of Ibrahim’s execution was the year Suleyman turned his attention to the old lands of Islam. In 1536, he ordered the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, third holiest city for Muslims after Mecca and Medina and holy also to his Jewish and Christian subjects. In this same year Roxelana, having made her debut as Suleyman’s lawful wife, began to plan the mosque that would become the centerpiece of her religious complex in Istanbul. Later in the queen’s career, her magnificent hospice in Jerusalem would win her the accolade “the Zubaida of her times,” after the venerated woman who, as the wife of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, had sponsored numerous public works for the benefit of the Muslim community. In other words, Suleyman was now attending to the Islamic face of the empire, and it was Roxelana who would be his partner in this enterprise.

  FRUSTRATINGLY LITTLE IS known of Roxelana’s actual relations with Ibrahim apart from the scant evidence in her letters. One of the several stories of how she came to the sultan—as a gift from his male favorite—is dubious, since at that point Ibrahim was merely a member, if a distinguished one, of the Privy Chamber slave corps.54 The story may preserve a germ of truth, however—a lack of tension between the two at the outset of Suleyman’s reign. We find the only sign that Roxelana may have been less than happy with Ibrahim in a letter to Suleyman in 1526. “An explanation has been requested for why I am angry at the pasha,” she, or more likely a scribe, wrote somewhat stiltedly. “God-willing, if it becomes possible to speak in person, it will be heard. At present, we still send greetings to the pasha, may he accept them.” Twice during the Safavid campaign, Roxelana’s postscripts included a simple “greetings to the pasha.”55 Perhaps she had acquired in the interim a renewed appreciation for the comfortable lodgings in the New Palace that she now occupied, which owed much to the grand vizier’s efforts.

  However, Roxelana did have one thing to fear from Ibrahim: a threat to her own status or that of her children. Mustafa was her sons’ rival, and in the 1530s he was making a name for himself. Roxelana may have had reason to suspect a sympathy on Ibrahim’s part with the oldest prince and his mother Mahidevran, especially as their mutual acquaintance went back to the years in Manisa. Contact between prince and vizier continued in Istanbul, or so Bragadin’s stories of Ibrahim’s kindly patience in soothing Mustafa’s jealousies imply.

  Letters exchanged between Mustafa and Mahidevran in Manisa and Ibrahim and his wife suggest a friendly relationship between the two families. In 1534, Mustafa wrote to Ibrahim, away fighting in the east, to inform him of affairs in the Aegean, and the grand vizier responded with news of Ottoman victories. Referring to himself in his letter as the prince’s “sincere friend,” Ibrahim expressed the wish to see Mustafa soon and to “take profit from and be gladdened by [his] noble and blessed grace.” In a letter to the vizier’s wife asking after her health, Mahidevran wrote effusively of the “sisterhood and brotherhood” that she and Ibrahim had sho
wn and of their “truly sincere kind friendship and tender compassion.”56

  Are these letters evidence of Ibrahim’s partisanship? Maybe, but maybe not. Had Roxelana’s eldest son Mehmed been old enough for a princely post, Ibrahim would probably have written to him in a similar vein. The grand vizier would find it politic to maintain a cordial relationship with all Suleyman’s potential heirs. Selim’s last grand vizier continued as Suleyman’s first until Ibrahim’s appointment to the office unseated him; likewise, Ibrahim could expect to manage the transition from one reign to the next if Suleyman should meet with a fatal accident.

  All this, however, does not mean that Roxelana would be unreasonable to worry about a cabal between the two families. Ibrahim’s death probably allayed her concern over Mustafa’s popularity, at least for the moment. For Mahidevran, however, Ibrahim’s execution could well exacerbate the fear that Suleyman would privilege a son of his favorite over Mustafa. He had broken protocol for Roxelana before and might do so again in the matter of the succession.

  A BIOGRAPHER OF Suleyman has asked whether the sultan displayed “a certain lack of character” in allowing others to influence him excessively. On the other hand, he observes, Suleyman was able to delegate authority, a skill his father lacked.57 In a similar vein, ambassadors to Suleyman’s court admired the sultan’s judicious administration but repeatedly noted his susceptibility. Bernardo Navagero remarked twenty-three years into his reign that Suleyman tended to let himself be “the prey” of almost all his counselors.58

  Perhaps the Venetians’ republican bias made them less than sympathetic to rise of favorites so characteristic of the elaborate courts cultivated by Suleyman and his fellow monarchs of the early sixteenth century. Suleyman clearly displayed a bias throughout his reign toward governing in close association with individuals who enjoyed his personal trust and affection. In other words, he needed favorites, although nothing matched the intense collaboration he fostered with Ibrahim and Roxelana at the outset of his sultanate.