Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Suleyman made it his business to secure Selim’s future. The hastily arranged weddings of three princesses accorded with two time-honored Ottoman techniques of rule: mounting a celebration to distract from bad news and binding the loyalty of leading statesmen to the dynasty by marrying them to Ottoman princesses. Selim’s daughter Ismihan was wedded to Sokollu Mehmed, Gevherhan to the admiral Piyale, and Shah to the head falconer Hasan Agha; all three men were or would become viziers. Suleyman engineered the occasion to consolidate a circle of trustworthy talent around Selim as well as to introduce Istanbulites to their next sultan and his family.

  In the same fashion, the sultan prepared for his own last years. When Rustem’s death in 1561 ended Mihrumah’s own political marriage, passage to the next grand vizier, Semiz Ali, was smooth because he had already become the husband of their only daughter Aisha. When Ali died in 1565, Suleyman appointed Sokollu Mehmed, now Selim’s son-in-law, to take his place. Sokollu continued as the sole grand vizier of Selim’s eight-year reign and the first five years of Murad’s. Roxelana would probably have approved his tenure, for although Sokollu had been pitted against Bayezid, she would have recognized a superior vizier, who could ease the transition from the titanic reign of Suleyman toward a more modest form of rulership appropriate for the changing times.

  If Suleyman suffered from Roxelana’s absence, his lifelong companionship with his only daughter Mihrumah helped to fill the void. After Rustem’s death, the princess moved into the Old Palace and became her father’s close companion. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Mihrumah acted as Suleyman’s intimate counselor and sent him news and forwarded letters when he was away from the capital. She was instrumental in the decision to undertake the siege of the Mediterranean island of Malta in 1565, for which she offered to outfit four hundred galleys. It was in these years that Mihrumah worked with the royal architect Sinan on two of Istanbul’s most exquisite mosques, one in Rustem’s memory in a busy market neighborhood near the Golden Horn and the other in her own name at the Adrianople gate in the old Byzantine city wall.

  Suleyman’s life ended on the western frontier of his empire. On September 7, 1566, he died in southern Hungary near the walls of the Szigetvar fortress. It fell to the Ottomans two days later, giving the sultan his last victory. Sokollu Mehmed masterminded the delicate task of returning the army to Istanbul while keeping Suleyman’s death hidden. The soldiers were loyal to the reigning sultan, not the state, rendering interregnums potentially fraught with disorder.9 The historian Mustafa Selaniki, participant in the campaign, described Sokollu’s illusionist stratagems, which involved a page made up to impersonate the sultan and wave from the imperial carriage.10 Selim hastily made his way from Kütahya to Belgrade, where the army awaited his arrival. By this point, everyone understood that the sultan was dead. The transfer of sovereignty was formalized, and Selim distributed sufficient accession bonuses to keep the soldiers marching home.

  Selim’s journey through Istanbul on the way to Belgrade, however, had hit an obstacle when local Janissaries and palace personnel refused to recognize him as the new sultan. Mihrumah resolved the standoff by rushing to her brother’s side and providing him with 50,000 gold coins, whose distribution as a kind of pre-accession bonus finally garnered Selim entry to the palace. Even when Selim returned with his father’s cortege, the Janissaries twice balked as the procession crossed the city, until more gold coins were distributed to them.11 Selim II was robbed of a dignified accession, no doubt in part because he was the least favored of Suleyman’s sons among the army.

  If the royal siblings had not already reconciled during their father’s lifetime, they did now. Mihrumah lived into the reign of her nephew Murad, at whose court this last surviving of Roxelana and Suleyman’s children was a respected elder. When she died in 1578, she was buried beside her father, her mother not far away in her own tomb. There Roxelana was joined by Mehmed, a grandson who died during his father Selim’s reign.12

  It was Selim’s duty to order the construction of his father’s tomb, but he also built another monument that Suleyman had apparently refused to sanction: one in Bursa, for his half brother Mustafa. Following the prince’s execution, his mother Mahidevran had fallen on hard times, unable to pay her rent, her servants cheated in the market. In other words, her lot was banishment. Finally, in the 1560s, Mahidevran’s circumstances improved, almost certainly at Selim’s behest, once he was the obvious heir to the throne.

  Decrees ordered payment of Mahidevran’s debts and punishment of those who had mistreated her. Finally a large house with a garden was purchased for her.13 Mahidevran now had the financial wherewithal to endow the upkeep of the prince’s tomb, which Selim had sponsored after becoming sultan. A bereaved mother for twenty-seven years, Mahidevran would come to rest near her son in 1580. The street where the house stood, in the citadel district of Bursa, is named for this steadfast concubine.

  HOWEVER SHORT SELIM fell of the formidable standards set by his ancestors, he advanced the process of dynastic transformation begun by his parents. The Ottomans were not abrupt reformers but rather cautious modifiers of their political practices. They preferred, when they could, to accustom both governing cadres and public opinion to change, with the goal of preserving loyalty and continuity. Roxelana and Suleyman’s alliance had been an exception in that regard. What Selim did was to develop certain features of his parents’ relationship while discarding others.

  Selim left behind the onetime experience of a politically active queen working alongside a monogamous king and its perhaps unintended corollary, a mother dividing her loyalty among several princes. Selim did, however, establish a favorite: Nurbanu, mother of his first son, Murad. He was far from monogamous; nor was she celebrated as his queen, although he allegedly married and dowered her. Nurbanu’s prestige would come as queen mother to Murad, a new twist to an old formula. It is fair to say that Nurbanu’s career brought Roxelana’s accomplishments into closer compatibility with the ingrained political habits of the Ottomans.

  A view of the queen mother’s apartments as they appeared in the eighteenth century. The photo shows the “Tower of Justice” in the background and to the right the dormitories of harem servants and women in training.

  Key to Nurbanu’s success was Roxelana’s establishment of a queenly domain in the New Palace. When, after an eight-year reign, Selim died in 1574 following a fall in the bath, Nurbanu became queen mother to their son Murad. Her presence at the political center made her own passage to her new role a natural succession and Murad’s passage to the throne far easier than his father’s had been. Nurbanu’s first act was to have her dead husband’s body preserved in ice until her son was safely in the capital, while Sokollu Mehmed, now grand vizier, once again concealed the demise of a sultan. This was the first of similar stratagems employed by queen mothers to head off trouble during interregnums, when Janissaries might loot or even attempt to put a different prince on the throne. Over time, this role as avatar of sultanic authority enabled queen mothers to assume the regency of minor or disabled sons, a frequent occurrence in the seventeenth century.

  Possibly tutored by Roxelana, Nurbanu admirably executed the responsibilities that Suleyman’s queen had taught the Ottoman public to expect. As queen mother, she took the epistolary practice of diplomacy developed by Roxelana to a new level. She not only intervened to protect Ottoman subjects, rescuing captives and protecting Jewish merchants, but also undertook her own relations with Venice and France. As the dynastic elder of Murad’s reign, she enjoyed a freedom of diplomatic authority that Roxelana could not assert as consort to the powerful sultan—or at least not publicly.

  “She has done me many favors,” noted a Venetian ambassador of Nurbanu, but his French counterpart complained of her “lack of goodwill.” (One story of Nurbanu’s origins held that she was born Cecelia Baffo-Venier, illegitimate daughter of two Venetian noble families captured at age twelve by the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa.) The Frenchman was perha
ps unaware that Nurbanu corresponded directly with the regent mother of his king, Catherine de Medici. At one point, she invited Catherine to send an embassy to Istanbul to strengthen mutual relations. Catherine addressed a letter requesting Nurbanu’s help in renewing French trading privileges with the empire “from the Queen Mother of the King to the Sultana Queen Mother of the Grand Seigneur.”14

  Roxelana’s philanthropic accomplishments were another inspiration for Nurbanu. The queen mother’s charitable foundation, located in Asian Üsküdar, was more expansive than Roxelana’s. It added to the formula of the Haseki complex a school for the study of prophetic tradition, a school to teach the illiterate to read, a sufi lodge, a public bath, and a large multistructure complex for travelers and the homeless. The choice of site, the New District, followed the pattern of Suleyman’s reign when females made endowments in less developed areas of Istanbul. However, Nurbanu’s had the distinction of being the only royal foundation endowed in the capital during Selim and Murad’s reigns. They built in lesser cities graced by the dynasty—Selim in Adrianople, Murad in Manisa—allegedly because they had not earned the privilege through leading their armies to victory in battle as their ancestors had.

  It was the now famous “Blue Mosque,” commissioned by Ahmed I and completed in 1616, that revived the sultanic prerogative of building in the capital, regardless of the fact that sultans now rarely went to war. Selim and Nurbanu’s great-grandson, Ahmed chose the old Byzantine Hippodrome for his foundation, his mosque rivaling Hagia Sophia in grandeur. The two stately structures were linked visually by a double bath built by Roxelana and located between them. The bath opened shortly before her death and, unusually, provided facilities for women as well as men. Royal mothers continued to endow major foundations in Istanbul (three in the seventeenth century and two in the nineteenth), seemingly alternating with sultans (two in the eighteenth century, plus another who built in his mother’s name).15

  This aggrandizement of the queen mother appeared to be conceived in tandem with Selim’s second significant dynastic innovation: he dispatched only Murad to a provincial governorship, in Manisa, a move designed to solve the perennial problem of princely rivalry for the throne by designating the eldest prince as heir apparent. Selim’s own battle with Bayezid would be the last of the fratricidal contests that characterized the heyday of Ottoman expansion. The reform—for this move to primogeniture should be recognized as such—had the added utility of fitting the evolving mode of sultanic administration. Like sovereigns elsewhere, the Ottoman sultans were becoming palace rulers. Neither Selim nor Murad led the Ottoman army to war; nor did their successors for the most part. Murad’s eldest son Mehmed was the last prince dispatched to the provinces to learn his craft.

  Although Suleyman commanded thirteen military campaigns over the course of his reign, he also demonstrated that honor was not lost in appointing viziers and pashas as commanders. Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II provided a durable model of the sultan who governed effectively without establishing legitimacy primarily through martial valor. Suleyman himself fashioned an imposing palace persona, employing a ritual silence and immobile posture on his throne in the sumptuously refitted throne room, leaving communication with petitioning dignitaries to his viziers.

  The palace sultanate called for additional adjustments. Interregnums acquired a new threat now that they unfolded in the capital. The populace could tolerate neither licensed looting by soldiers nor an emerging mode of fratricide that would dampen popular enthusiasm at the accessions of Murad and his son Mehmed. The enthronement of each was followed by the execution of all his younger brothers. A report prepared for the English ambassador in 1595 noted that the crowd of mourners for Murad’s funeral was half the size of the following day’s, when the long line of the slain princes’ coffins wended its way from the palace “amidst the tears of all the people.”16 Not surprisingly, a new pattern emerged—automatic succession of the oldest living male dynast regardless of his relationship to the deceased sultan. Henceforth a prince would live out his life in the New Palace precincts.

  This new mode, evolved by the early seventeenth century, preserved the fundamental Ottoman tenet that eligibility for the sultanate was a right belonging to all royal males—a principle that Selim II’s solution had bypassed by excluding his other sons from the opportunity to rule. Not all who came to the throne in this new manner were stellar sultans or even fit to rule, but a rocky start—a regicide in 1622—gave way to an evolving formula for deposing incompetent or dangerously unpopular rulers. One might plausibly call it an Ottoman version of quasi-constitutional sovereignty.

  THE CHANGES THAT had been set in motion by Roxelana and Suleyman kept the dynasty intact through its second three hundred years, until the dissolution of the sultanate by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1922. Suleyman’s long reign was the hinge between the two halves of Ottoman history. While Roxelana’s career aroused anxiety as well as admiration, the model she constructed of royal female authority provided the empire with new leverage in the creative modification of Ottoman political structures.

  It was not a simple process. Nurbanu’s career did not lack controversy, for, like Roxelana’s, her choices did not sit well with all. Upon her death in 1583, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Francesco Morosini commented, “Some are saddened by this lady’s death and others consoled, each according to his or her own interests, for just as she provided enormous benefits to many as a result of the great authority she enjoyed with her son, so conversely did she deprive others of the hopes of obtaining what they desired. But all universally admit that she was a woman of the utmost goodness, courage, and wisdom.”17

  In 1599, the empire’s chief mufti Sunullah Efendi lamented a number of harmful developments, among them the meddling of women in “matters of government of sovereignty.”18 He also castigated eunuchs, quintessential denizens of palaces, a sign that some people were still reconciling themselves to the transition from warrior to sedentary sultan. Sunullah’s effort was in vain, however. In that regard, it recalls The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women issued by the Scottish clergyman John Knox in the year that both Roxelana and the Tudor queen Mary I died. Knox contended not only that women were unfit to rule but also that a realm so ruled was itself monstrous, a body lacking a head.19

  One measure of the persistent power of female monarchs in Knox’s world was the political rivalry between two queens, Mary Stuart of Scotland and Elizabeth Tudor. The Ottomans would experience their own version of two women competing for political dominance in the mid-seventeenth century when the young queen mother Turhan challenged the powerful dowager queen mother Kosem, who refused to retire from the office when the second of her sultan sons was deposed. Kosem planned to govern as regent to her six-year-old grandson, ignoring his mother Turhan. It was an act of usurpation of what was now legitimate female royal authority. Queens were no strangers to political violence: Turhan ordered Kosem’s execution as Elizabeth did Mary’s.

  A contemporary image of Turhan Sultan’s mosque. The French caption reads, “The Valide, built by the Sultana, mother of the Grand Seigneur.” From G. J. Grelot, Relation nouvelle d’un voyage de Constantinople, Paris 1689.

  Kosem’s partisans mourned, but Turhan used her authority more judiciously by returning government to the grand vizier. While Turhan was the last key figure in the “sultanate of women,” as the transformations initiated with Roxelana have been called, the office of queen mother remained influential through to the end of the empire’s life. This does not mean that Roxelana reformed the institution of slave concubinage or that those who followed her escaped the trauma of captivity. But the fact that this feature of imperial practice persisted after male slave recruitment was abandoned underlines its utility.

  The rationale was the same in the nineteenth century as it had been in the early fifteenth, when the practice originated: if every dynastic male was eligible for the throne, each required and deserved a politic
ally savvy mother whose life was devoted to his cause. Roxelana shouldered the burden of parceling her loyalties among her sons, arguably the most difficult challenge encountered by any Ottoman consort. On the other hand, her princes, like her only daughter, were the bounty of an extraordinary partnership—that of an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary monarch.

  Acknowledgments

  I WAS THINKING about Roxelana long before I began writing her life story. This book came about through a happy confluence of individuals who were also thinking about her. Caroline and Andy Finkel and Günhan Börekçi put me in touch with literary agent Howard Morheim, who skillfully helped me turn Roxelana’s story into a book proposal. I was fortunate that Lara Heimert of Basic Books acquired the book and became my editor; her insights as well as her editorial suggestions not only enriched my writing but also stimulated my thinking. Leah Stecher’s sensitive editing sharpened both prose and ideas, and Melissa Veronesi made the final production process a pleasure. I am also indebted to Jen Kelland, Amy Quinn, and Alia Massoud.