Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  “Dance of the Mevlevi dervishes.” Seventeenth-century European drawing.

  The spiritual biography of Rumi emphasized his many female patrons, among them donors and builders.33 So when Roxelana visited the sanctuary, its custodians were perhaps eager to inform their sultan’s beloved queen that a foreign princess, Tamar of Georgia, had built Rumi’s original mausoleum.34 Daughter and granddaughter of queens, better known to history as Gurji Khatun (the Georgian lady), Tamar was the wife of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw II. His love for her was so great, it was said, that he insisted she be represented on Seljuk coins as the sun shining above the lion that stood for himself. Allowed to retain her Christian faith as well as her priests and her icons, Gurji nevertheless became one of Rumi’s most fervent followers and, partly through his influence, a convert to Islam.35

  Gurji’s Christian predisposition persisted however, at least in a legend according to which she commissioned a portrait of the mystic, a very un-Islamic act. But the artist could not capture a likeness of Rumi, who had said of himself, “How devoid of color and sign I am!” Gurji allegedly carried the twenty images that resulted wherever she went.36 Whether this story was still told in Roxelana’s day is not certain, but it is tempting to imagine the affinity the Ottoman queen might have felt, despite her lack of noble pedigree, with this Christian-born consort and beloved of a Muslim monarch who became a convert to, and patron of, Islam.

  Perhaps Roxelana also discussed with the shrine keepers her own plans to channel more of her philanthropic work toward the support of sufi piety. Across the years, she would provide support to several sufi shaykhs by endowing mosques and/or dervish lodges in Istanbul and Anatolia where they could preach and train disciples.37 Shah Sultan, Suleyman’s sister and a patron of sufis, doubtless provided inspiration to Roxelana. Shah’s career as a sufi devotee began early, in Ioannina in western Greece, where she accompanied her husband Lutfi to his post as governor. There the princess became a lifelong follower of the popular sufi order of the Halvetis. Returning to Istanbul when Lutfi was promoted to vizier, Shah built the first of three mosques with an attached dervish lodge, this one for her Ioannina shaykh.38 The next lodge-mosque was dedicated in 1537 to the Halveti shaykh Merkez Efendi, who had recently become Shah’s new spiritual guide; the last was a memorial foundation erected after his death in 1552.

  Merkez Efendi was already known to Roxelana, at least by reputation. His affiliation with the royal family had begun when his own sufi master sent him to Manisa in response to Hafsa’s request for a shaykh to serve the dervish lodge she endowed as part of her foundation.39 There the prince Suleyman first met Merkez Efendi. Later the sultan would appoint him “army shaykh” to the 1537 campaign, during which Mehmed and Selim would become acquainted with him. Shah Sultan was also present on this campaign, traveling in her husband’s suite, and it was during the couple’s return to Istanbul that she allegedly attached herself to the shaykh—his miraculous appearance on the road rescued wife and husband from bandits.40 As for Roxelana, she would later do her part to honor the mystic by endowing a lodge-mosque in the Anatolian village of his birth.

  DEPARTING FROM KONYA with Mihrumah and Cihangir, Roxelana made her way northwest toward Bozdağ, where Mehmed presumably met her and her traveling court. She was already familiar with the Ottoman passion for summer upland retreats, having accompanied Suleyman and the children on hunting trips to Bursa. First capital of the nascent empire, Bursa lay on the slope of the famous Uludağ (great mountain), to the ancient Greeks one of the several peaks called Olympus. As for the ash-brown mountain, its highlands offered a restful setting for recovery from the second leg of the family’s overland travels. The first stage of their journey from Konya permitted lakeshore halts, but the last segment was an arduous trek across foothills and mountains.

  Whether Selim escorted his mother and siblings to Bozdağ is not known; he may have needed to get back to the business of governing in Konya. Perhaps, however, he relished the opportunity to meet up as fellow governor with the brother to whom he had been junior partner for so long. If the princes did in fact reunite, they doubtless conferred with each other and their mother. Suleyman and Roxelana may in fact have organized her trip with a family conclave in mind.

  Once in Manisa, Roxelana would feel the weight of recent Ottoman history far more than she had in Konya. She now found herself in the city where her beloved Suleyman had grown from a prince into the man who became sultan, just months before she first encountered him. The Manisa palace now belonged to their firstborn, but it was also where her rival Mahidevran had become her husband’s lover. Mustafa, Suleyman’s senior son, may well have been born in the harem quarters that housed the queen during her visit.

  Manisa offered much to distract Roxelana from uneasy thoughts about the past. It was another city laden with sights to see, these erected closer to her times than Konya’s. The two newest and largest monuments were the work of her female predecessors—Christian captives turned Muslim royal mothers. Husnushah, mother to one of Suleyman’s uncles, had built the first of these, “the Hatuniye” (the honorable lady’s [foundation]), in 1490. Her seal, “Mother of Sultan Shehinshah,” signed the letter she would send in 1511 to the prince’s father Bayezid II informing him of his son’s death.41

  Husnushah’s endowment was geographically innovative: it moved the zone of royal patronage northward into the rich Manisa plain, away from the slope of Mount Spil, where the old Byzantine fortress and the Great Mosque, built in 1366 by a Saruhan prince, looked down on the ancient city.42 Given the location of the complex on the outskirts of Manisa, near intercity roads, Husnushah’s decision in 1497 to add a caravanserai to bring in revenue to support her foundation (rather than, say, a public bath) made sense. Income was generated from renting space in the expansive two-storied structure (thirty-six rooms downstairs, thirty-eight upstairs) to traveling merchants and local businessmen. The caravanserai’s amenities included a large stable and a courtyard graced with a pool.

  One of the earliest Ottoman mosques in Manisa (1427) had been the work of one Ali Beg, a notable man of property. His estate included a large park that featured gardens, streams, and an arboretum with fruit-bearing trees. A section of the park, purchased by Suleyman’s mother, became the site for her own foundation. The Sultaniye (the imperial), as Hafsa’s complex was known, certainly warranted a family outing arranged by Mehmed for his visiting relatives. No doubt each family member felt a sincere obligation to honor the late queen mother, who had died nine years earlier. Hafsa had been mentor to Roxelana in her progress as favorite concubine, and she was the only grandparent that Mehmed, Mihrumah, and Cihangir had ever known.

  Among the Sultaniye’s services to the community was the dervish lodge where Merkez Efendi had served at Hafsa’s invitation. So affecting were his spiritual assemblies and his preaching that they allegedly brought Prince Suleyman to tears.43 Also trained in the medical sciences, the mystic was said to have developed a homeopathic paste made up of some forty herbs and spices; the medicament allegedly relieved an illness Hafsa suffered. The annual spring equinox festival, whose main event is still today the casting of bits of this tasty remedy from the Sultaniye’s two minarets to crowds below, had already begun to take shape by Mehmed’s tenure in Manisa.

  Perhaps inspired by Merkez Efendi, Suleyman had recently given Manisa a medical center by adding a hospital to his mother’s complex. Roxelana no doubt made a point of inspecting it if she was already planning a hospital for her Avrat Pazar foundation—the layout of the Manisa hospital and the procedures it followed could offer ideas. Mihrumah too could store up thoughts for the future; her first philanthropic venture was just breaking ground in Istanbul.

  The most captivating of all Roxelana’s preoccupations in Manisa, however, had nothing to do with the city’s delights. It was Mehmed’s impending fatherhood. A granddaughter named Huma Shah would be born to Roxelana and Suleyman sometime before the late fall. The little girl’s exact birth da
te is not known, so it is possible she became a babe in arms during her grandmother’s visit.

  Making their way home from Manisa, Roxelana and her party may have traveled directly to Istanbul. Or they may have chosen to return by way of Adrianople in order to meet up with Suleyman and Rustem on their march back from several new conquests in Europe. But what should have been a joyful and triumphant reunion turned into a ghastly tragedy. As the Ottoman army neared Adrianople, the sultan received the devastating news of Mehmed’s death.44 Couriers may have reached Roxelana first. In any event, the couple apparently learned separately of the shocking loss of their firstborn, unable to console each other for a matter of days.

  The longest of the Manisa annals records the story of Mehmed’s fatal illness:

  At the start of the month of Sha`ban in the year 950, on the day when the agha who came bringing glad tidings of the conquest of Usturgun-Belgrade and many other fortresses arrived [in Manisa] and a fireworks celebration ensued, the fortune-blessed prince Sultan Mehmed fell ill. He took to his bed for six days. During the night before the seventh he died. Following a brief mourning period, the Lala Pasha, Ibrahim Chelebi the treasurer, and many aghas departed for Istanbul with [the dead prince and] his suite, on the aforesaid month’s ninth day, a Wednesday. By this reckoning, the prince lived one year and two days in Manisa.45

  The record went on to note, “Now it was during the spring of this year that the plague appeared, and many families were consumed by the earth.” The prince, it seems, succumbed to one of the periodic eruptions of the disease that engulfed Ottoman communities.46

  According to contemporary historians, Suleyman ordered the transport of the prince’s corpse to the capital. The Manisa annals, however, suggest that the lala understood the urgency of ushering the royal cortege to Istanbul and acted on his own. On the eighteenth of the month, the procession arrived on the Asian side of the Bosphorus at Üsküdar, where Mehmed’s body was transferred to a casket. Accompanied by sufis proclaiming the unity of God, the prince was carried in state to the mosque of his great-grandfather Bayezid II. Mehmed would be buried in the center of the city, near the Old Barracks belonging to the Janissaries. With shops closed for the three-day mourning period that followed, the city’s soup kitchens furnished sustenance to the crowds offering prayers.47

  Nearly a century later, the historian Peçevi would reflect on the confluence of military triumph and personal tragedy: “In this never-ending world it is certain that every [act of] power carries with it an unrealized goal and that every pleasure is followed by pain.”48 Mehmed’s death was an eerie echo of the ruined victory of Suleyman’s first campaign in 1521, when he learned of the demise of three of his children as he returned to Istanbul in the midst of great jubilation. It was around that time that the young sultan’s new concubine gave birth to the son whose promising life was now so cruelly cut short.

  13

  RECOVERY

  SULEYMAN’S GRIEF OVER the loss of Mehmed was legendary. Utterly distraught during the prince’s burial, the sultan wept for more than two hours, refusing to let the body be interred; he then attended prayers for the dead for forty days instead of the customary three. “They say that the Grand Turk has exhibited his sorrow and appeared in public dressed in black, to signal his pain,” noted Luigi Bassano.1 So perforce did leading Ottoman officials, who were required to remain in black garb for the forty days. To mark the prince’s death, Suleyman composed the chronogram “My Sultan Mehmed, distinguished among princes.”2

  No one could or did chronicle Roxelana’s sorrow. She and Suleyman had already lived through the death of a son, the toddler Abdullah, but this was a loss of a different order. Mehmed was their firstborn, said by some to be their favorite. He was the child who created a new family for his mother after the horrific loss of her own. We cannot know if Roxelana went wild with grief or if she composed herself so she could console those close to her. But if ever there was a moment when she regretted the decision not to accompany the prince to his provincial post, this would be it. Roxelana may now have clung even more tightly to Bayezid, the last of her sons destined to take the field. He would not depart for Anatolia until 1546, when he was twenty.

  Neither Roxelana nor Mihrumah, the sibling closest in age to Mehmed, was present at the funeral prayers. Women did not participate in public funerals, although separate services were doubtless observed in the Old Palace, the prince’s original home. No protocols could keep Mehmed’s mother from visiting his grave, however. Perhaps Roxelana was luckier than Suleyman, for she was soon plunged into the distractions of family responsibilities. Most importantly, she had the arrival of Mehmed’s infant daughter Huma Shah and her mother to prepare for. Roxelana may have been too distracted with mourning to pay heed to all her son’s female attendants, some of whom she had gotten to know only months earlier, but she would certainly look after any woman who might be pregnant. The coming months made clear, however, that Huma Shah would be Mehmed’s only progeny.

  Suleyman mourning the death of Mehmed. Seyyid Lokman, Hünernâme.

  The unpleasant duty of interrogating the newly arrived Manisa contingent on the circumstances of Mehmed’s death fell to both Suleyman and Roxelana and their staffs. Two concerns would be uppermost: determining that the prince had not been poisoned and ascertaining whether the plague had spread to others in the palace. Like most monarchs of the time, the Ottomans were always on guard against political sabotage from whatever discontented corner of the empire—or beyond. Roxelana would address her questions to Mehmed’s former governess and whoever else had headed his female staff. Suleyman would turn to his son’s lala and to the officers of the prince’s domestic and military services, not only to assure himself of the cause of death but also to ensure that measures had been taken to guard the health of those who remained behind in Manisa.

  THE SUDDEN BLOW of Mehmed’s death appears to have dampened Suleyman’s ardor for war. For four and a half years, from late 1543 on, Roxelana would have the comfort of her husband’s steady presence and companionship. While combat continued on the empire’s frontiers, the sultan remained at home, allowing his generals to take command. In May 1543, he turned fifty by the Islamic calendar. With ten victorious campaigns to his credit, he could delegate military authority with no threat to his reputation as a formidable commander. There was, however, a political rationale behind Suleyman’s holiday from fighting: yet another set of negotiations over a peace treaty with Austria, this time a drawn-out process. The treaty was finally signed in 1547 when Ferdinand agreed to an annual payment to Suleyman of 30,000 gold ducats (the Ottomans called it tribute; the Hapsburgs did not). Until the western frontier stabilized, Suleyman would not take on the Safavids in Iran again.

  The royal family were not wholly creatures of the capital in these years. Winter sojourns in Adrianople and seasonal hunts in Anatolia punctuated their life in the Istanbul palaces. In the summer of 1544, Bursa was the site of a gathering that brought the prince Selim together with Suleyman, Roxelana, Mihrumah, and her husband Rustem, now second vizier in the Imperial Council. (Bayezid and Cihangir presumably stayed behind to represent their father in Istanbul.) An annal entered into the Manisa city register noted, “The fortune-favored prince Selim was invited to Bursa for the purpose of a family reunion. After an audience was held, they remained there for forty days.”3 Selim had been appointed in March to succeed Mehmed in Manisa, but his move from the governorship of Konya was postponed due to the lingering plague.4 Bursa was famous for the fresh and healthful air of Mount Olympus.

  Suleyman undoubtedly took advantage of the season to hunt with his son and the “very many” soldiers who accompanied him. (Bassano claimed that the sultan never hunted with fewer than 300 soldiers and that a massive hunt in Thrace had numbered 50,000, including Christians and Jews.)5 The Bursa reunion was not merely a convivial occasion, although it was surely that as well—a welcome distraction from the trials of the previous fall. Both Roxelana and Suleyman may have longed to
see Selim, now alone among their children in Anatolia, but the formal language of the annal—the audience, the “performance” of a reunion—suggests that there was business to discuss. Selim may have been debriefed on affairs in Konya and in turn briefed on what his father expected him to accomplish in Manisa. The annal went on to note that Selim arrived in his new post on August 7.

  Roxelana continued her habit of making journeys in Anatolia. When Bayezid finally graduated to provincial service in 1546, the fourth and last of Suleyman’s sons to take up his public career in Anatolia, Roxelana had fresh reason to travel south from Istanbul. In the early spring, she journeyed to Konya, Bayezid’s assigned governorate. It is entirely possible that she traveled with him to his post. It was perhaps her last chance to behave like the classic mother of a prince, if only briefly.

  Having lost Selim to Manisa, the city must have been pleased to welcome a new prince and now his mother. As during her 1543 journey to Anatolia, Roxelana was accompanied by Cihangir. This youngest son, it was beginning to seem, would not graduate to provincial service. Suleyman now had three sons stationed in the field, evenly spaced across Anatolia. Two were Roxelana’s and one Mahidevran’s. Only one of the three could follow their father to the sultanate.

  Having blessed Bayezid’s political adulthood, seen to his welfare, and settled his female household, Roxelana then went on to spend the month of April with Selim in Manisa.6 Both she and Cihangir were doubtless delighted to meet the three daughters who had been born to the prince in his first year as governor in Anatolia.7 The mother of one, Nurbanu, would go on to become Selim’s favorite consort and mother of his first son, Murad. Roxelana did not linger for the birth of this grandson, who arrived in July, but she surely established a relationship with Nurbanu, as she would with other mothers of her grandchildren.