Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Freedom was not absolute, however. For one thing, the master or mistress retained certain inheritance claims over the estate of a former slave at his or her death. This was a rule stretched by the sultans to justify government seizure of the rich estates of deceased pashas. On the positive side, Muslim masters and mistresses were enjoined to ease the passage of manumitted slaves into free adult society, most immediately by helping them establish a marital household. Mutual ties of patronage and clientage could continue to connect the two families, and freed persons frequently worked for their former owners, with the result that their households tended to move in tandem with the social status of their former owners.

  The ruling regime exemplified this phenomenon. Former imperial slaves would raise their own slaves, inculcating in them the culture of loyalty and service that they themselves had absorbed during their training. The domestic establishment of the lady Shahhuban and the statesman Pilak Mustafa was only one of countless satellites propagated by the sultanate. Having gradually dispossessed the Turkish and Christian-convert lords who fought beside them in their early conquests, the sultans created a kind of proxy nobility to take their place. Roxelana’s job was to ensure the availability of Old Palace graduates as talented as she herself.

  ON JANUARY 27, 1541, the Old Palace was struck by a disaster about which we know surprisingly little: a devastating fire nearly burned it to the ground. A week earlier, the same fire had consumed some houses in Pera, the Istanbul district where most Europeans lived. It also destroyed the Pera arsenal, presumably in an explosion, taking with it forty men working there.24 Pellicier, the French ambassador in Venice, informed King Francis that restoring the women’s palace would require no less than 400,000 scudos. (According to current exchange rates that Bassano claimed Jewish bankers and Christians employed, this sum equaled 20 million aspers.)25 Apparently, the Old Palace had its own treasury, for Pellicier added that the riches guarded in its stronghold were gone: 1 million gold pieces and half that value in jewels and other items. Roxelana lost “the best and most beautiful of what she possessed,” noted the ambassador. Strongila, the Jewish agent who served Hafsa and then Roxelana, lost a large cache of gold coins.26

  Pellicier commented that the fire was so fierce that the women of the palace had survived only by “throwing themselves into the public square,” where they had to remain for some time. For most of them, their flight would be their first exposure to the public without the protection of a carriage or a phalanx of eunuchs since entering palace service. They must have suffered enormously, doubly wounded by the loss of both their home and the seclusion that defined them. Perhaps they were rescued, or at least sheltered, by local Janissary troops, the primary firefighting corps of the capital, whose barracks were luckily not far from the Old Palace.

  At the time of the fire Roxelana was safely in Adrianople with Suleyman. If any of their children were home in the Old Palace, the first response of their caregivers was undoubtedly to shepherd them to safety. In any event, Roxelana most likely returned to Istanbul immediately, perhaps for the sake of the children but certainly to assist with the daunting task of housing the hundreds of displaced palace residents. For his part, Suleyman declared the hunting season shortened and came back to Istanbul, although he made this decision in part to organize the dispatch of his navy into the Mediterranean.27 The Old Palace was eventually restored, though at what actual cost is unknown. In an ironic twist of fate, it was as if the fire symbolically finalized Roxelana’s departure for a larger stage in her queenhood.

  12

  HOME AND ABROAD

  IN NOVEMBER 1542, the judge of Manisa instructed one of his scribes to make an entry in the city’s official register, an “annal” that marked a significant date in the provincial capital’s history: “Sultan Mehmed son of Sultan Suleyman arrived in Manisa and acceded to the throne. Recorded on 3 Sha`ban 949 [12 November 1542]. In the same year Sultan Selim acceded to the throne in Karaman [at Konya].” A year and a half before Mehmed and Selim arrived in Anatolia, the Manisa register had noted the transfer of Suleyman’s eldest son to his new post in Amasya: “Sultan Mustafa set out from Manisa for Amasya. Recorded on 17 C.E. 21 Safer 948 [June 16, 1541].”1

  There were now three princes in the field, two of them Roxelana’s sons. All three were stationed in Anatolian cities with distinguished historical pedigrees. Each was a post worthy of a prince, since each had formerly been the capital of a royal domain conquered by one of Suleyman’s ancestors. Indeed, many cities of Anatolia reached far back into time, for the peninsula had been a veritable cradle of civilization and a stage upon which empires had displaced one another. The imperial lineage of the region included the Hittites, the Greeks, the Persians, the Armenians, the Romans (who called the three cities Magnesia, Amaseia, and Iconium), and finally the Byzantines. Then the Turkish invasion from the east that began in the later eleventh century opened the way to waves of migration from Central Asia and Iran that gradually rendered Anatolia predominantly Muslim and Turkish. Once Mehmed and Selim were settled, Roxelana would set out to visit her sons, traveling for the first time across this antique land.

  Located on the south-central Anatolian plain, Konya was arguably the most prestigious of the three cities, at least in terms of its recent history. It had been the capital of the Anatolian Seljuks, who dominated the twelfth and much of the thirteenth centuries as sultans of the first major Turkish-ruled state in the region. The Seljuk polity was sophisticated and wealthy, more interested in trade and connoisseurship than conquest. “What a miracle is this Seljuk architecture!” wrote the art historian Bernard Berenson in 1958. “It has an elegance, a distinction of design and a subtle delicacy of ornament surpassing any other known to me since French Gothic at its best.”2

  After an interlude of domination by the Mongol khans of Iran, Konya passed under the rule of the Karaman dynasty, one of the most formidable of the dozen or so Turkish princely houses that competed in post-Seljuk Anatolia (the House of Osman was originally one of the smallest). The chronic and vicious Karaman-Ottoman wars finally came to an end when Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” took Konya in 1467 and his son Bayezid annexed the entire principality twenty years later. Among the several prominent Islamic monuments of the city was the tomb of the great thirteenth-century sufi master Jalal al-Din Rumi. Over time the venerated shrine expanded, reaching its present configuration with endowments by Bayezid II and Suleyman, but it was under Karamanid patronage that it gained its iconic green-tiled dome. In both its political and religious legacy, Konya was a distinguished post for Selim.

  Amasya, Mustafa’s new post in north-central Anatolia, sat in the valley cut by the River Iris (Green River in Turkish). Its rock hills still contain tombs of the Pontic kings who ruled over the southern shores of the Black Sea; Strabo, geographer of the ancient world, was born in the city in 64 B.C.E. under one of the last of these kings. Like Konya, Amasya had been governed by the Seljuks and then the Mongols (the city’s museum features eight mummified Mongols, testimony to the far-flung presence of Chinggis Khan’s successors). When Amasya fell to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1461, he appointed Bayezid, at fifteen his eldest son, its governor. During his twenty-year tenure there, the prince upheld the city’s long-standing reputation for learning; poets and sufi dervishes were particular beneficiaries of his largesse. Partly with Bayezid’s generous patronage, the Amasya poet Mihri Hatun became the first Ottoman female whose work is known to have been compiled in a divan, or collection.3

  Manisa, Mehmed’s post, had an equally venerable and colorful history, passing through the hands of the Greeks, the Persians, and the Romans. Alexander the Great settled a Macedonian colony in this western Anatolian city, and the Roman emperor Tiberius rebuilt it when a massive earthquake in 17 C.E. ravaged much of Anatolia. Latin Christian Crusaders from the west encountered resistance in Manisa, first from the Orthodox Christian Byzantines and then from the Muslim Seljuks. During the era of Turkish principalities, the House of Saruhan, another rival
of the House of Osman, governed Manisa for almost a century. Saruhan too ultimately gave way to the Ottomans, in 1410.

  Everywhere that Ottoman princes went in Anatolia, remnants of past eras were a tangible reminder that their empire was only the most recent in a long succession of illustrious but vanished kingdoms. Mehmed the Conqueror allegedly gave voice to this inevitability as he surveyed the ruins of Constantinople following his army’s sacking of the city. According to legend the young sultan recited a Persian couplet that mused on the transience of victory by imagining the deserted palaces of an ancient Iranian king and his principal adversary: “The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes, the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.”4

  THE ARRIVAL OF Roxelana and Suleyman’s sons must have delighted the citizens of Manisa and Konya. The presence of princes and their households not only conferred distinction but also stimulated local economies. Their mothers might add philanthropic foundations, to the benefit of both the city’s infrastructure and its skyline. The downside, potentially ruinous but less frequent, was the risk of collateral damage if combat were to break out among royal sons. In 1513, for example, Suleyman’s father Selim had besieged his brother Korkud in Manisa. Once he had concluded his bloody march to the throne, neither Konya nor Amasya saw a resident prince for three decades. Manisa’s palace, on the other hand, had recently housed two—Suleyman for eight years and then, after a gap of thirteen years, Mustafa also for eight years.

  When Mustafa moved to Amasya in 1541, he was twenty-six. The Amasya palace would find itself accommodating a princely household that had grown larger since Mustafa left Istanbul for Manisa in 1533. Mahidevran, who traveled with her son as head of his domestic court, would acquire more attendants, and Mustafa’s harem had doubtless expanded, adding more concubines and staff. This prince was not a prolific reproducer, however, at least in comparison to his half brother Selim, who would have three concubines pregnant not long after his arrival in Konya.

  Mehmed was twenty-one when he became governor of Manisa, older than the age at which Ottoman princes had typically embarked on their public careers. Selim was probably nineteen by the time he arrived in Konya. Neither had his mother with him. Unlike Mustafa, the brothers lacked one of the two most important counselors who traditionally accompanied prince-governors into the field (the other was the lala, the tutor-guardian appointed by their father). Of these two, only the loyalty of a prince’s mother was undivided, for lalas had been known to desert charges whose fortunes looked bleak.

  But Roxelana’s loyalty could never be undivided. This novel dilemma emerged the moment the sultan’s favorite gave birth to a second son, breaking the rule that a concubine could have only one male child, the better to devote herself to his career. Repeated debate between Suleyman and Roxelana must have ensued over the years before they came to the decision that the queen would remain in Istanbul with her husband while her sons took up their provincial duties. It is impossible to know the content of their deliberations—possibly that the role designed for her could not survive isolation in the provinces or that her large family made it infeasible. Cihangir was only twelve or so when Mehmed and Selim left Istanbul, still growing and coping with his handicapped body; Mihrumah might become a new mother at any minute; and Bayezid, fifteen, still needed polish. This was to say nothing of the royal couple’s need and desire for each other.

  The second-level consideration—which son should have his mother with him—had perhaps also been broached: Should Roxelana go with her eldest, the option closest to Ottoman tradition, or was it wiser to accompany Selim, less mature, farther away from the capital, and in a palace that would need to be started up again? In the end, she went with neither. The decision to abandon the traditional career of the concubine mother was the last of several ruptures in the politics of dynastic reproduction that Roxelana and Suleyman had brought about.

  Mehmed’s relatively late graduation to provincial service may have stemmed in part from the wait for Selim to mature. The princes had been paired in their preparation for public service, apparently so that they might depart simultaneously for the provinces. It is not inconceivable that this plan was intended to deflect attention from their mother’s failure to go with one or the other. Parental affection cannot be ruled out, however—a desire to prolong the time when the whole family could be together. Roxelana and Suleyman had created that rare thing: a nuclear family. Both knew that its innocence would be irretrievably lost once the two princes entered the contest for the succession, to be pitted against Mustafa and each other. If this period in Roxelana’s life appears relatively serene on the surface, the politicization of her children’s lives could only undermine the illusion of security.

  THE DYNASTIC FAMILY’S personal arrangements were never free from the shifting constellations of military competition and international diplomacy that dominated the era. In the late 1530s and early 1540s, these complexities were no doubt also a factor in Mehmed’s postponed graduation to his public career. Given the increasing intricacies of great power rivalries, Suleyman may have intentionally prolonged his sons’ training. This was not time wasted, however, for Mehmed and Selim were gaining an education in keeping peace as well as making war. The two princes would graduate to governorships at a point in their father’s reign when conquest was not as feasible as it had been in the past. For her part, their mother was getting used to the princes’ transition from her tutelage to their father’s profession.

  Suleyman and his commanders had been scoring victories ever since the failed siege of Vienna in 1529. In 1532, the Ottomans rallied with the so-called German campaign, which succeeded tactically in inducing Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, to sue for a truce and accept payment of a hefty annual tribute to the sultanate. The campaign’s larger political agenda, however, was to demonstrate to Ferdinand’s older brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, that Suleyman was as great a world conqueror as he, if not greater (the sultan liked to deny Charles his empire by referring to him merely as “the king of Spain”). It was during this campaign that Suleyman asserted his claim to the mantle of ancient Rome by famously parading under Roman-style ceremonial arches with the elaborate four-tiered crown. The diadem conveyed the message that only the combined forces represented by the three tiers of the pope’s crown and the single one of Charles’s could match Suleyman’s prestige and power.

  In the east, the long campaign of 1534–1535 against the Safavids in Iran had ended in victory, with immense gains both territorially and ideologically. The Ottomans were now free, temporarily at least, to concentrate once again on their European front. Mehmed and probably Selim had participated in the inconclusive Italian offensive of 1537, but 1538 was a banner year. The princes again accompanied their father, this time on a successful foray into Moldavia that subdued a restless vassal and led to the annexation of the northwestern Black Sea coast. The brothers would be instructed in the long-range value of this accomplishment: the Ottoman military system north of the Black Sea was now rounded out and linked more closely to another vassal, the powerful khan of the Crimean Tatars.

  In September of the same year, the Ottoman navy scored a resounding victory over a “Holy League” comprising the pope (who issued the call to arms), Venice, Genoa, and the forces of Charles V. The battle was a clash of two great soldiers of fortune: the Genoese condottiero Andrea Doria, Charles’s commander, versus the Mediterranean corsair-turned-admiral of the Ottomans, Hayreddin Barbarossa. The latter’s momentous triumph secured Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean for almost thirty years. The trifecta of 1538 was completed when the governor-general of Egypt, Hadım (the eunuch) Suleyman, sailed into the Indian Ocean with a fleet of seventy-two ships, seizing Aden on the way, besieging a Portuguese fortress on the Indian coast (unsuccessfully), and organizing Yemen as an Ottoman province on the way home.5

  Then, while apparently at the top of his game, Suleyman took a break from fighting for two and a half years. The hiatus was due in part to
military exhaustion and the financial drain of combat on three fronts. As for Roxelana, she probably uttered aloud her usual “thousands and thousands of prayers” for Suleyman to stay home and rest. And to an extent, he did—the palaces of Adrianople and Bursa bustled with extended hunting seasons. Perhaps Roxelana also pointed out that she had been holding down the fort for too many years. It was a time for attention to family—Mihrumah’s marriage and the circumcision festival for Bayezid and Cihangir. Mehmed and Selim, on the other hand, might reasonably be showing impatience to move on to their public careers. Not until June 1541 would the older princes set out to war again when their father left Istanbul to deal with trouble in Hungary. They would return victorious.

  The Austrian historian Joseph von Hammer thought that the years from 1540 to 1547 were the apogee of Suleyman’s power.6 His evaluation was based primarily on the military successes that the Ottomans enjoyed in Europe and on the seas. Other historians looking at other geographies and using other measures—Anatolia, the restless mood of Ottoman subjects—have spoken of a spreading malaise and discontent in the first years of the decade.7 The Safavid challenge figured prominently in the disposition of the times.

  Although Suleyman’s reign saw the occasional trial and execution of a schismatic or messianic figure who challenged his legitimacy, the persecution of Safavid partisans and suspected sympathizers was systematic, taking a particular toll on communities, especially in central and eastern Anatolia. There was little overt violence, as Safavid sympathizers were typically prosecuted through the courts and often punished or exiled on trumped-up charges.8 It was something of a witch hunt.