Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  But the historical assignment of guilt to Roxelana contains a serious flaw: the assumption that the sultan could so easily be duped. At work here is the Ottoman habit of blaming subordinates so as to avoid holding the powerful accountable for unsavory acts. Suleyman was no fool, however. He routinely sought opinions and views other than Rustem’s—indeed, he was said to keep his grand vizier at arm’s length, allowing him into the palace for formal consultation only. By contrast, the eunuch vizier Ibrahim had free access to the palace and to Suleyman, who played chess with this experienced eighty-year-old statesman and constantly praised his actions.38

  It is difficult not to conclude that the decision to sacrifice Mustafa was ultimately Suleyman’s. It was a question of preserving the empire. Sometime between Rustem’s accusatory report and his own arrival in central Anatolia, Suleyman came to believe that Mustafa represented a threat that was too great to tolerate, regardless of whether he was guilty of plotting for the throne or not. He had ample reason for concern over Mustafa’s popularity. Soldiers’ restlessness with eastern campaigns, long and relatively unrewarding, had erupted in 1515 and again in 1535. A Janissary defection to the prince’s side would be especially threatening now that the empire was on the eve of a new war with Iran. The security of Anatolia was paramount, and it was there that Mustafa’s greatest support was located.

  It was not that Suleyman necessarily distrusted Mustafa. Twice when he himself was fighting in Europe, he put his eldest son in charge of Anatolian defense. Moreover, in fall 1549, when his second eastern campaign was going badly, Suleyman had even summoned Mustafa to Diyarbakır to rally the troops.39 But now a coup in the prince’s name, even if Mustafa opposed it, would be a godsend to the Safavids. The eastern half of the great peninsula, as yet tenuously integrated into Ottoman systems of control, harbored populations who might well defect to Tahmasp. “The Sufi,” as Europeans referred to him, commanded not only an army but also a charismatic religious appeal that penetrated the frontier into Anatolia, where his adherents could conceivably turn into active partisans.

  Historians who have judged Roxelana guilty have largely failed to consider Mustafa’s part in the affair.40 People had already been hailing the prince as “sultan.” Venetian ambassadors reported in 1550 and again in 1552 that Mustafa was universally desired to follow his father to the throne.41 He had become so popular, it seems, that Suleyman could not be certain that his troops would remain loyal to him in the event of a showdown. Later, in 1555, the Hapsburg envoy Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq would write, “There was nothing that the Sultan so much dreaded, as that there might be some secret disaffection among the Janissaries, which might break out when it was impossible to apply any remedy.”42

  It was probably no secret that Mustafa was building support for himself. He had requested and received formal assurance from the governor of Erzurum, Ottoman bastion in northeastern Anatolia, that he would side with the prince at the moment of Suleyman’s death, when the brothers would openly vie for the succession.43 Mustafa had also exchanged correspondence with the Venetian government (and perhaps other powers), probably to the same effect.44 On the other hand, a prince worthy of the throne might be expected to line up backers, and both Mahidevran and Roxelana were justifiably making it their business to rally support for their sons. Mustafa was clearly taking action, but there was no evidence of a planned insurrection.

  If not guilty of direct action, neither prince nor queen was necessarily innocent of intent. Roxelana need not actively plot harm against Mustafa in order to influence Suleyman against him. She had had some thirty years of proximity to the sultan to plead on behalf of her own sons, to whom Mahidevran’s Mustafa was by definition the greatest political danger. Both mothers, innocent young slave concubines with no security until they gave birth to a male child, came to understand the contract that would define their career: absolute fidelity to the son. Roxelana’s devotion to that charge did not waver when her career took the exceptional turn toward queenhood and motherhood of multiple sons. She must have been a perpetual lobby for her princes and, implicitly if not explicitly, an ardent opponent of Suleyman’s eldest son. Mahidevran operated by the same political calculation, but it was obvious to everyone that she enjoyed far fewer opportunities to draw Suleyman to Mustafa’s side. Like Mustafa, Roxelana was guilty of the capacity to wield disproportionate power.

  FOR ROXELANA’S PART, we can only imagine the concern she felt as Mustafa became ever more popular while her sons seemed to enjoy little enthusiasm from the public. Upon his return to Venice in late 1554, Venetian ambassador Domenico Trevisano described the sons of Suleyman: “Sultan Selim is of portly build and is devoted to wine and women. Sultan Bayezid is of a more delicate build and is devoted to the literary arts. But neither the one nor the other has fame as a captain or has acquired the love and favor of the people and the Janissaries that Sultan Mustafa acquired.”45 Of Roxelana’s sons, only Mehmed, the eldest, appeared to manifest qualities that made him readily popular, but he had died tragically a year after assuming his governorship.

  Roxelana’s anxiety must have grown exponentially when Suleyman made the decision to go to war himself in 1553. As in 1548, this time too he drafted all three of her sons into the war effort. Bayezid would take his turn as lieutenant in Adrianople, but Selim and Cihangir accompanied their father into Anatolia. The worst nightmare of Roxelana’s life was becoming plausible: that her husband and sons could perish if internal dissent erupted into violence and Mustafa’s partisans prevailed. The specter of Suleyman’s natural death and the ensuing combat for succession was always present, of course, but the immediate possibility was catastrophic—that only she and Mihrumah would remain alive, widowed and doubtless facing some form of punitive exile. The pragmatist in Roxelana appears to have taken precautionary measures—Trevisano noted that Selim’s sons had come from Manisa to stay with their grandmother.46 Bayezid’s sons were presumably with him in Adrianople.

  But how far would Roxelana go to influence Suleyman against his oldest son? She was too astute to jeopardize her own sons’ future by overplaying her hand and alienating Suleyman. There is also the important question of the degree to which Suleyman tolerated Roxelana’s importuning. The sultan was well named, for he had a Solomonic obligation to balance his two families—the traditional one he had created as prince with Mahidevran and the revolutionary one he built as sultan with Roxelana. There were very possibly moments when husband and wife clashed over the vexing issue of the succession.

  There is little compelling evidence that Suleyman exhibited a sustained desire for a particular one of his sons to succeed him. According to Navagero, he even acknowledged the probability of Mustafa’s success, for when Cihangir suggested that his physical deformity would allow him to escape the fate of execution, Suleyman allegedly replied, “My son, Mustafa will become the sultan and will deprive you all of your lives.”47 Accurate or not, the ambassador’s sources apparently found the sultan’s comment plausible. On the other hand, Suleyman cannot have entirely suppressed the awful prospect of the demise of the family he had created with Roxelana.

  In the end, the most probable explanation for Mustafa’s execution was his very success. Any reservations Suleyman held about his son’s intentions were increasingly compounded by the sheer danger of a prince, however innocent, whose extreme popularity constituted a threat to his own sovereignty and thus the stability of the whole empire. On Suleyman’s mind were certainly the events of his own youth, which now threatened to repeat themselves. His father Selim had overthrown his own father, Bayezid II, allegedly to retire him to Dimetoka—precisely what the discontented soldiers supposedly suggested to Mustafa. Bayezid had died on the way, allegedly poisoned by his son. His death unleashed a civil war among princes second only to that of the early fifteenth century, when the nascent state nearly dissolved in fragmentation.

  Not to counter the challenge to Suleyman’s sovereignty that Mustafa represented, even if unintentionally, was to risk invas
ion from the west as well as east while the empire went to war with itself. By mid-century, the Ottomans faced formidable powers on both fronts. Archduke Ferdinand had already exploited Ottoman distraction in the east by occupying Transylvania, while the threat from Iran was ideological as well as military. In this light, Suleyman knowingly made the painful and costly but politically prudent decision.

  Venetian comments on the affair provide perspective. Navagero spoke extensively on the matter of the succession in his report of February 1553, eight months before Mustafa’s execution.48 Astute and well informed, he predicted that Mustafa would become sultan when Suleyman died. At present, he was in such great favor that there was no suspicion he might attempt a coup against his father. There was, however, universal dread among the populace that the prince’s path to the throne would be a bloody affair. (Reporting after Mustafa’s death, Trevisano noted, “Every Turk and every Christian was left in great sorrow.”)49

  Navagero did not need to spell out for the Senate that Suleyman’s death (or dethronement) was expected to precipitate a civil war among the brothers. It did not matter that Bayezid was rumored to prefer Mustafa to Selim, his full brother, or that some believed the younger siblings would not challenge their half brother.50 Even if Mustafa, the presumed victor in a showdown, were to spare the empire yet another deadly war among princes—by imposing strictly enforced exile or imprisonment on his half brothers or even by introducing a whole new system whereby junior siblings maintained their governorships (the practice of the Safavids)—his advisers would stress the necessity of their deaths. The factions backing Selim and Bayezid would take action.

  As for Suleyman’s own preference, Navagero reported, it was hard to tell, for all the princes were his sons. “But he always has near him his wife, who seeks to place her own [sons] in favor and Mustafa in disfavor.”51 Still, Navagero commented, she recognized that she could do little about Mustafa’s eminence. Nor, in his opinion, could Suleyman, and this was one reason that he preferred to avoid war and pursue peace (as war would mobilize the troops and stoke their appetite for rallying around Mustafa).

  Navagero’s report vividly depicted an atmosphere of troubled speculation and widespread dread of the consequences of a war for the throne. Suleyman’s longevity was apparently a constant topic of debate. But a very different story, that of an empire secure and strong, would be told by Navagero’s successor Trevisano when he presented his report to the Senate on the last day of 1554, fourteen months after Mustafa’s execution. He went on to describe Suleyman as a tall man with a melancholy mien that made him appear grave. The sultan had once been thought to possess a humane and kindly nature, remarked Trevisano, but now many believed the contrary because of the deaths he meted out to his own son and grandson.52

  You allowed the words of a Russian witch into your ears

  Deluded by tricks and deceit, you did the bidding of that spiteful hag

  You slaughtered that swaying cypress, fruit of life’s orchard

  What has the merciless Monarch of the World done to Sultan Mustafa?53

  So the poet Nisayi accused Suleyman and Roxelana in the second verse of an elegy she composed for Mustafa. Most likely a member of the circle of literati at the prince’s court in Amasya, Nisayi apparently knew Suleyman when he was young and later joined Mahidevran’s retinue. The poem’s first verse denounced the sultan for tyranny and abandonment of the compassion integral to Islam.54

  The most famous of all elegies for Mustafa was that of the Albanian-born soldier Taşlıcalı Yahya. He blamed the tragedy on the “deceit of Rustem” (the phrase, a chronogram for the year of the execution, was memorable).55 The poem spread quickly among Mustafa’s followers and sympathizers. Unsurprisingly, it cost Yahya the favor of Rustem, who had earlier been his patron. But the harshest words were reserved for the sultan. I wonder who has ever seen or heard of such a thing, asked the soldier-poet—that a great prince of just temperament should slay his son?56 The emphasis on injustice in both elegies targeted the epithet that Suleyman was beginning to enjoy: Kanuni (the just), or giustissimo, as the Venetian Renier recorded it a few years earlier.57

  Suleyman appears to have borne in stoic acceptance the burden of sacrificing his son for the integrity of the empire. The elegies pronounced the sultan guilty, and Trevisano confirmed the raw anger directed at him. Yet Suleyman is widely remembered as an exemplar of the good sovereign and his reign as the high point of Ottoman achievement. That he ruled creditably for another thirteen years after Mustafa’s demise clearly helped to cement his abiding reputation, but more significant is the fact that Roxelana came to serve as the lightning rod for responsibility in the affair of Mustafa.

  Later generations and centuries represented the prince’s execution as the culmination of a career that, in the view of Roxelana’s critics, was inexorably geared toward realizing her selfish ends—namely, the triumph of her sons over Mustafa. But this characterization overlooks the fact that Roxelana’s sons were also Suleyman’s. Roxelana was justifiably a strong advocate for them, and Mustafa may have done nothing more calculating than strive to be a great prince and worthy heir to his father. The tragic irony of Suleyman’s generous regard for those closest to him is that their goals and their influence were at counterpurposes. It was the awful conundrum at the heart of the empire.

  15

  LAST YEARS

  SULEYMAN REMAINED ON campaign following Mustafa’s demise, for no retreat was possible. A month later, he arrived in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo together with Cihangir. There the sultan would pass a long winter season before confronting the Safavids in the spring. Selim was stationed with his troops a few days’ march to the north in the provincial capital of Maraş. Part of the army was camped in northern Anatolia, but Suleyman’s viziers, other officials, and the bulk of the armed forces remained with him.

  An anonymous Venetian living in Aleppo, most likely a member of the resident merchant community, penned a detailed description of the Ottoman entry into the city on November 8, 1553.1 No expense was spared to dazzle the eye. Each of the various companies of soldiers was splendidly outfitted in its own colorful uniform, as were the different divisions of palace officials and attendants who served the sultan wherever he went. By the Venetian’s count, more than 10,000 men marched or rode into the city in utter silence, while the onlookers greeted them noisily. The people of Aleppo were perhaps less torn by Mustafa’s death than the inhabitants of Anatolia, where the prince had been one of them for twenty years. Aleppans were already familiar with Cihangir and Bayezid, the sons of Roxelana; they did not know the dead prince personally.

  Once the column of soldiers reached the spacious square at the foot of Aleppo’s ancient citadel, they divided into two wings. The moment the sultan came into view, riding his horse between them, fifty cannons were fired. Suleyman’s private secretary, Celalzade Mustafa, observed that scholars, dervishes, and the notables of the city hailed their ruler; the Venetian noted that all bowed low.2 Cihangir entered before Suleyman, receiving the same obeisance that would shortly be accorded his father. Riding behind the commander of the Janissaries, the prince “affectionately saluted all who demonstrated reverence toward him.”3

  The lavish parade sent a message to Shah Tahmasp that the Levant was strongly protected (Suleyman’s governor in Erzurum had sent warning that the region could soon be under Safavid threat).4 But the staging of the imperial entry presumably aimed equally to displace pernicious gossip about the recent tragedy. Smaller versions of the spectacle had likely been enacted in other cities along the army’s route. The exposure of Cihangir and Selim made the point that Suleyman had other adult heirs; knowledgeable parties would recognize that a third son, Bayezid, currently represented the dynastic house in Europe.

  How devastated then must all have been when Cihangir died three weeks after the arrival in Aleppo. Felled by a sudden sickness, he perished within four days, despite various remedies applied by the puzzled physicians. A formal procession of the
highest-ranking Ottoman dignitaries accompanied the prince’s casket to the funeral prayers, where leading dignitaries of the city doubtless thronged. For numerous villages and cities across Anatolia, Cihangir’s would be the second royal cortege within a matter of weeks to pass by on its way west.

  Word may have reached Roxelana before the arrival in Istanbul of the coffin and its retinue of soldiers and attendants. Bayezid most likely came from Adrianople to share his mother and sister’s grief. Cihangir was interred in the sumptuous tomb built for his older brother Mehmed. The two princes rest side by side, the oldest and youngest of Roxelana and Suleyman’s five sons. A memorial mosque for Cihangir would be constructed by the royal architect Sinan, set on a pastoral hill overlooking the Bosphorus. It was said that the prince had enjoyed excursions there and that his mother reminded his father of his wish to build a mosque in the area, whereupon Suleyman took action.5 The neighborhood, today a lively bohemian quarter, retains the prince’s name.

  Roxelana’s last years were perhaps the most challenging of her life, paralleled only by the traumatic loss of her childhood home and family. The new family she had built with Suleyman had lost its innocence and its one innocent member, and now her two remaining sons would perforce become rivals and perhaps enemies. Consequently she found herself mediating tensions that emerged among the men in her family. As it turned out, her own health would decline more rapidly than Suleyman’s. Meanwhile, the resilient queen carried on with the occupations that fulfilled her, forging ahead with more philanthropic foundations and corresponding on behalf of peace.

  DURING HER HUSBAND’S prolonged absence, Roxelana had resumed her role as key correspondent from the capital. Suleyman could count on astute intelligence as well as loving words. A letter sent to the Aleppo camp in late 1553, before she had news of Cihangir’s death but after news of Mustafa’s, opens with her usual “thousands and thousands of prayers and praises,” accompanied by “one hundred and one thousand kinds of longing and yearning” to be with him. She asks after his health, especially his gout, and prays to God to protect him from all harm—indeed, may he live to be as old as Noah! If he should ask after her, she is capable of nothing but suffering in his absence. After repeated iterations of her pain, she tells him (in plainer language) that she really misses seeing him. Roxelana closes the letter by kissing Cihangir’s eyes, sending the respects of Suleyman’s two granddaughters Huma Shah and Aisha, and informing him, should he wonder about his capital, that the city is “safe and secure” and that all are praying for and missing him.