Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  It is not hard to imagine Roxelana making exploratory trips with the daye to Kağıthane or consulting with her on the endowment, finished in 1545. She would visit the completed mosque, perhaps more than once. The then-pastoral setting of Kağıthane and its stream, one of the so-called sweet waters of European Istanbul, was an inviting, albeit bittersweet, location for a family excursion. The daye apparently anticipated the visits of Mehmed’s relatives, for her mosque featured a screened gallery for members of the royal household. This small mosque was an intimate alternative to the lofty shrine to Mehmed’s memory in the center of the city.

  While Suleyman was still away in the east, Roxelana occupied herself with the first of the charities she would sponsor in places sacred to Islam. Turning her attention to Mecca and Medina, the two great Muslim shrine cities, she endowed each with a hostel for pilgrims. Work began in 1549 when the chief eunuch of the Old Palace was dispatched to supervise construction. With these lodgings in Islam’s two holiest cities, Suleyman’s queen was achieving maturity as a patron of religious well-being.

  Tile depicting the Ka`aba in Mecca, ca. 1720–1730. The Ka`aba is situated within Islam’s holiest mosque and establishes the direction to which all Muslims pray. Labels for other structures in the mosque’s vicinity may aid viewers unable to make the pilgrimage.

  The completion of these two structures overlapped with the renovation of the Ka`aba in Mecca, a project Suleyman undertook in 1551.20 Once again, the royal couple appeared to be coordinating their philanthropic efforts. Roxelana was the initiator and funder of the hostels, her interest in assisting travelers and pilgrims by now a signature feature of her patronage. Suleyman helped to pave the way for these far-away institutions by instructing local governors to facilitate the work of Roxelana’s agents. He presumably issued his orders somewhere along the eastern campaign route.

  Once Suleyman returned from his long absence, Roxelana finally focused her attention on the Haseki hospital. She may have entertained the idea of sponsoring a hospital ever since Suleyman added one in 1538 to his mother Hafsa’s large complex in Manisa; she had had opportunities to explore it during her visits to the city. It seems Roxelana and Suleyman discussed the need for more medical services in Istanbul, as his own complex included a medical school in addition to a hospital. There was definitely demand in the rapidly growing capital. Mehmed the Conqueror had built a hospital as part of the city’s first imperial foundation, but nothing had followed. His son Bayezid II included one in his large complex in Adrianople but not in his Istanbul foundation. The near-simultaneous arrival of hospitals in Roxelana’s and Suleyman’s names constituted a milestone in the history of Ottoman medical practice.

  Aware that she was breaking new ground for Ottoman female builders in the capital, Roxelana perhaps imagined herself now joining a longer imperial tradition—that of queens of the city who enacted their charity in partnership with their husbands. Roxelana could hardly fail to recognize the parallel with Eirene, one of her Byzantine predecessors as benefactress of the city, if she knew anything of the twelfth-century queen. Eirene and her husband, the emperor John II Komnenos, endowed a monastery-church on the slope of the city’s fourth hill, still one of the most visible monuments on Istanbul’s skyline. Dedicated to St. Savior Pantocrator (Christ the Almighty), the large complex included two churches, the monastery, a hospice that cared for twenty-four old men, and a fifty-bed hospital with separate wards for men and women.21 Soon after the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II converted the Pantocrator monastery-church into the first Ottoman madrasa in the city, thereby preserving it.22

  John and Eirene can be seen today among the mosaics in Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine cathedral that Mehmed turned into a mosque upon the fall of the city. Flanking the Virgin Mary, the empress offers a scroll and the emperor a purse of gold, symbolizing their religious donations. Eirene’s story bears a striking resemblance to Roxelana’s, except that she was a princess given in marriage to John while Roxelana was a country girl who came to Suleyman as a slave.

  Born Piroska, daughter of the Catholic king of Hungary, Eirene converted to the Orthodox Church and gained her new name when she married. After giving the emperor eight children, she was impelled by her piety, according to hagiographic legend, to urge her husband to help her make this pious endowment an exceptional one.23 Likewise, as mother of several children and then married queen, Roxelana had begun the work on her Haseki foundation, some of it with Suleyman’s financial support.

  When compared to other couples in history for the surpassing nature of their patronage, Suleyman and Roxelana were likened to Muslim rulers and their wives, not to Byzantine Christians. But the very stones of Constantinople might suggest models that were more immediately inspiring.

  THE COMPLETION OF Roxelana’s hospital in 1551 required the drawing up of a new charter. It would incorporate both the hospital and the other religious and charitable institutions she had founded since the charter of 1540. In this deed, as in the earlier document, Roxelana’s concern for the qualities and qualifications of her foundation’s staff stood out.

  The hospital’s two doctors had to observe an elaborate moral and social etiquette in addition to possessing a thorough medical education. In fact, the two charges, expertise in the practice of medicine and an exemplary bedside manner, were inseparable in Roxelana’s deed. As they ministered to in-as well as outpatients, the doctors were to treat psyche as well as soma. Their character was critical. They must be “stouthearted, of noble and generous disposition, good-natured, and untroubled. They must demonstrate with every patient the kindness that they would toward an intimate friend.” The doctors should not utter even the smallest of brutal or hateful words, for, as the charter noted, “one harsh word can weigh more heavily on a sick person than the worst of maladies.” Comforting speech was not difficult to come by, for there were many words that were “purer than the river of paradise and sweeter than its springs” to the sick.24 Roxelana’s sensitivity to the patient’s morale may have stemmed, in part at least, from the many painful hours Cihangir had spent in the hands of doctors.

  This emphasis in the queen’s charter on the health of the spirit as well as the body contrasts with the goals of the hospital constructed for Suleyman’s foundation. In laying out the numerous qualifications of the hospital’s three doctors, the charter for the Suleymaniye focused on knowledge of the various sciences and practices of healing (among them “expertise in the nature of the [four] humors”). Only in concluding did it prescribe that the doctors undertake their duties with care and consideration for their patients: “They shall approach medical matters and accomplish [their work] by attending with kindness and gentleness to the objectives and the needs of people of want and persons with urgent conditions.”25

  Might Roxelana have urged Suleyman to include this final note? Given that the Haseki hospital went up in tandem with the Suleymaniye, the couple may have consciously tailored their “houses of healing” (as hospitals were called in Turkish) to answer to different needs. Suleyman’s could function as a teaching hospital alongside the medical school (a “madrasa for medicine”). We might think of the Suleymaniye as offering the latest in medical technology, while the Haseki provided a holistic approach to healing.26 As its charter declared, Roxelana aimed for her hospital to be “the antidote to every affliction.”

  The Haseki hospital managed to provide a variety of medical services in a relatively compact space. It was structured around a courtyard that opened into two large circular halls, presumably the doctors’ receiving rooms. These in turn gave onto nine rooms of varying sizes (or twenty-two domed spaces, as the Ottomans counted). In addition to the two doctors, the medical staff included two eye specialists, two surgeons, and two pharmacists. The latter had two assistants who prepared (literally, pounded) raw materials for medical use. Four nurses rotated day and night rounds, and two individuals monitored urine samples.27

  Adding to the daily routine was a kind of outpatient servi
ce on Mondays and Thursdays, when the doctors were permitted to perform examinations and dispense medicines, mainly syrups and pastes, to petitioners. The charter firmly forbade the doctors from selling medicines or their own services outside the confines of the hospital. The deed does not make clear whether females were accepted as inpatients, but perhaps they could avail themselves of the outpatient resources.

  By the time the hospital was added to the Haseki foundation, the green spaces that faced the hospice and surrounded the mosque had matured (they were now tended by a staff gardener). Fruits and flowers grown in these fertile areas were sold at the Avrat Pazar market and the profit returned to the foundation. The Haseki was far from poor, but it was clearly frugal—the garden products yielded only five hundred aspers. Frugality was perhaps the influence of Mihrumah’s husband Rustem Pasha, an asper-pinching vizier who ordered the sale of flowers and vegetables grown on the extensive grounds of the New Palace. Some thought Rustem corrupt; others (including Suleyman) were grateful that he kept the imperial budget balanced.

  WHILE SULEYMAN WAS occupied with his foundation and Roxelana with her hospital, the Safavid shah Tahmasp and his forces had been making devastating inroads into Ottoman territories. According to a Venetian report, the area lost to the Persians measured a thirty-day march north to south and eight days east to west.28 The sultan was compelled to respond. Though not his last campaign, it was the most fateful.

  Suleyman had not originally intended to lead this offensive. He had lately been delegating military leadership to his top viziers and governors, a policy that proved successful when two of his generals, the second vizier Kara Ahmed and the rising star Sokollu Mehmed, foiled yet another attempt by the Hapsburg Ferdinand I to dominate Transylvania.29 The sultan assigned the grand vizier Rustem Pasha to act as commander in chief of the army that headed east in 1552. But alarming news from Rustem’s camp at Aksaray in central Anatolia made clear that Suleyman could not afford to sit out this war.

  According to Rustem, the Janissaries were exhibiting a dangerous tilt toward Mustafa, still governor of Amasya. Ottoman historians would later note that some soldiers could even be heard muttering that the sultan was too old and unwell to go against the enemy himself.30 What needed to be done, they said, was to kill the grand vizier, who opposed Mustafa, and send the sultan into retirement in the palace at Dimetoka near Adrianople. They emphasized that that Mustafa was now forty years old, an age that balanced full maturity with the bravery and gallantry of youth he had long been admired for. Some partisans were even attempting to persuade the prince to take action to dethrone his father, but the honorable Mustafa refused, wrote the historians, despite accepting their reading of the political situation. “A strange spectacle,” commented the seventeenth-century historian Solakzade Mehmed.31

  The officer who delivered Rustem’s dispatch provided an eyewitness account of Suleyman’s reactions. The first was to vehemently discount the grand vizier’s virtual charge of treason against Mustafa. Instead, the sultan placed the blame on partisan agitation—in the words attributed to him by the historian Ibrahim Peçevi, “God forbid that my Mustafa Khan should dare such insolence and should commit such an unwise move during my lifetime! It is troublemakers trying to obtain the rule for the prince they support who are responsible for such slander.”32 Suleyman’s second reaction was to join the campaign. Setting out in late August 1553, he would lead the largest Ottoman army yet to confront the Safavids.

  Suleyman receiving Mustafa during the 1548 campaign against Iran. The prince’s striking resemblance to his father, bearded and clothed in identical colors, may suggest his rumored intention to usurp the throne or perhaps his qualifications to succeed his father. Arifi, Süleymanname.

  What happened next made a martyr of the prince and unleashed an outbreak of intense emotion across the empire. If the stated objective of the campaign was to contain the Safavid menace, Suleyman’s own target had in the meanwhile become his eldest son. Mustafa was summoned to rendezvous with his father in the Eğreli valley, southeast of Konya. There was nothing unusual in this; Suleyman had already greeted Bayezid and Selim en route. Nevertheless, all Mustafa’s advisers pled with him not to comply. Foremost among them was his mother Mahidevran.

  Bernardo Navagero, Venetian ambassador from 1550 through 1552, had previously reported that the prince’s mother “exercises great diligence to guard him from poisoning and reminds him every day that he has nothing else but this to avoid.”33 (Renier had reported several years earlier that Mahidevran prepared Mustafa’s meals herself as a precaution.) Now the threat was palpable. But though his counselors anticipated the worst, the prince allegedly refused to believe his father would do him harm and pointed out that failure to go was construable as an act of defiance. Mustafa sent gifts ahead to the sultan and arrived in the imperial camp on October 5.

  While the story of the prince’s execution the following day has been told varyingly, nuanced by time or the narrator’s view of the matter, most accounts concur on the following sequence of events. Despite a final warning of his probable fate, contained in a note delivered to his camp by an arrow, Mustafa made his way on horseback, accompanied by a train of officials, to the tent where his father awaited him. He entered alone, leaving his bodyguards outside—once again ignoring cautions that had been pressed upon him. The execution was a gruesome affair, with more than one botched attempt to strangle the prince. The executioners allegedly succeeded only when he tripped on his long robe trying to flee.

  The prince’s corpse was thrown outside Suleyman’s tent as proof of the deed. Other commands of the sultan were carried out in rapid succession—all of them acts that symbolized the erasure of the dead prince’s household. Two of Mustafa’s men, stationed at the threshold of his tent, were executed; the horse he had ridden was transferred to the sultan’s stables; the goods in his tent were confiscated for the imperial treasury; and, according to some, his effacement was symbolized by the ritual collapsing of his tent. Local religious dignitaries were summoned to participate in funeral prayers, and by the end of the day, the prince’s body, now ready for burial, had departed. The cortege would make its way to Bursa, for Mustafa was denied the interment in Istanbul granted to his younger half brother Mehmed. At least he had the honor of resting among other Ottoman royalty in the imperial funerary complex that had grown up around the mosque of Murad II.

  Grief and rage broke out in the camp the moment Mustafa’s death was made public. There were clamorous cries for Rustem’s head—he was blamed for persuading Suleyman of his son’s perfidy. But the sultan disappointed his soldiers, for rather than execute Rustem, he dismissed him from the grand vizierate and sent him into a semiexile in a palace belonging to his wife Mihrumah on the outskirts of Istanbul. The vacated office was given to Kara Ahmed, who had recently triumphed in Europe. If it was a natural promotion for the second vizier, it was also a recognition that only someone who had been amicable toward Mustafa could calm the troops, many of whom had been devoted to the prince since his childhood. Some believed that Kara Ahmed himself had shot the warning arrow.

  Suleyman sought to rekindle loyalty through reward: Janissaries received raises in their salaries, and he provided Mustafa’s soldiers with grants of office in the imperial cavalry.34 Hearts were not easily won, however. A further blow to Mustafa’s partisans, as well as to sympathetic subjects around the empire, occurred several months later. Mustafa’s only son Mehmed was hunted down and strangled. The little prince had taken protective flight with his mother. He was killed for fear that disaffected soldiers and possibly civilians would rally around him to form a threatening new faction. It is impossible to imagine the grief and perhaps the rage of Mustafa’s mother Mahidevran, whose whole life’s purpose had been obliterated.

  WHAT WAS IT that convinced Suleyman to execute Mustafa after first protesting his innocence? However challenging to pin down, the answer is critical because the prince’s killing became the fount of Roxelana’s notoriety and the principal
reason history has vilified her. Even unfounded accusations leveled earlier against the queen—the exile of Mahidevran from the harem, Mustafa’s distant post in Anatolia—acquired an ex post facto plausibility for her critics, given that she had dared to eliminate what in their eyes was the Ottomans’ best hope for the future.

  Over the centuries, more scholars have found Roxelana guilty of deadly intrigue than innocent, with her reputation for scheming only increasing. So tenacious has the story of her domination of Suleyman become that distinguished historians of the twentieth century could censure her in uncompromising and unreflective terms: “After the success of [Roxelana], to whom Suleyman was extremely bound, in having her rival, the mother of Prince Mustafa, banished from the palace, she resorted to every kind of trick in her inordinate ambition to secure the Ottoman throne for her son.”35

  But only the rare Ottoman historian of the century following Mustafa’s execution directly accused Suleyman’s favorite of instigating the prince’s death.36 Some were silent; others found sufficient cause for Mustafa’s demise in the competition for power among men. The explanation most frequently proffered was that the scheming grand vizier had duped the sultan. However, one could read this view, if so inclined, as an implicit accusation against Roxelana, for some believed both Rustem and his wife Mihrumah to be partisans of her full brothers Selim and Bayezid and thus allies of Roxelana.37