Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Leslie Peirce

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  First edition: September 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Print Book Interior Design by Amy Quinn

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Names: Peirce, Leslie P., author.

  Title: Empress of the east : how a European slave girl became queen of the Ottoman Empire / Leslie Peirce.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003912 (print) | LCCN 2017006112 (e-book) | ISBN 9780465032518 (hardback) | ISBN 9780465093090 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hurrem, consort of Sèuleyman I, Sultan of the Turks, approximately 1504–1558? | Queens—Turkey—Biography. | Turkey—Kings and rulers—Biography. | Sèuleyman I, Sultan of the Turks, 1494 or 1495–1566—Marriage. | Slaves—Turkey—Biography. |Mistresses—Turkey—Biography. | Ukrainians—Turkey—Biography. |Turkey—History—Sèuleyman I, 1520–1566. | BISAC: HISTORY / Modern / 16th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Royalty. | BIOGRAPHY &A UTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | HISTORY / Middle East / Turkey & Ottoman Empire. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.

  Classification: LCC DR509.H87 P47 2017 (print) | LCC DR509.H87 (e-book) | DDC 956/.015092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003912

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-03251-8 (hardcover); 978-0-465-09309-0 (e-book)

  E3-20170816-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  BEGINNINGS 1 The Russian Concubine

  2 Abduction

  3 In the Old Palace

  4 The Politics of Motherhood

  5 Lovers and Parents

  CHALLENGES 6 Roxelana’s Rival

  7 Coming of Age

  8 A Queen for the New Palace

  9 The Two Favorites

  10 Building a Reputation

  POLITICS 11 Family Matters

  12 Home and Abroad

  13 Recovery

  14 Showdown

  15 Last Years

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More advance praise for Empress of the East

  Who’s Who and What’s What

  List of Illustrations and Credits

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  For Joanne, Lynda, Nancy, Linda,

  and the memory of Jude

  This woman, of late a slave, but now become the greatest empresse of the East, flowing in all worldly felicitie, attended upon with all the pleasures that her heart could desire, wanted nothing she could wish but how to find means that the Turkish empire might after the death of Solyman be brought to some one of her owne sons.

  —Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603)

  The Ottoman empire in the reign of Suleyman I.

  BEGINNINGS

  1

  THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE

  This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans. The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia.… There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.

  —Dispatch from the Genoese Bank of Saint George, Istanbul representative1

  THE RUSSIAN SLAVE had been the concubine of Suleyman I, “the Magnificent,” for fifteen years when the royal wedding celebration took place in 1536. Like all concubines of the Ottoman sultans, she was neither Turkish nor Muslim by birth. Abducted from her homeland, the young girl proved herself adaptable and quick-witted, mastering the rules, the graces, and the politics that propelled her from obscurity to the sultan’s bed. She rapidly became Suleyman’s favorite, astounding both his court and his public. Sultans of the Ottoman empire did not make demonstrable favorites of their consorts, however much they came to care for them. But Suleyman and Roxelana became the parents of six children in quick succession, five of them sons. Some thought Roxelana used seductive powers, even potions, to induce the love Suleyman appeared to bear her. They called her witch.

  Together the royal couple overturned one assumption after another. Roxelana was the first Ottoman concubine ever to marry the sultan who was her master. She was also the first to cut an overtly conspicuous figure. It was Roxelana who transformed the imperial harem from a residence for women of the dynasty into an institution that wielded political influence. Royal women following in her footsteps crafted powerful roles in Ottoman politics while serving as advisers to their sons and, in the seventeenth century, ruling as regents. When Roxelana died in 1558, she also left as a tangible part of her legacy numerous charitable foundations in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and across the empire—another break with tradition.

  While there was no formal office of queen among the Ottomans, Roxelana filled this role in all but title, a formidable match for the great female rulers and consorts of Europe who shared the sixteenth century with her. But the radical nature of what can only be called the reign of Suleyman and Roxelana—a ruling partnership never repeated by the Ottomans—made her a controversial figure in her own time. The debate over her place in Ottoman history persists today.

  Roxelana’s given name is not known. Nor are we certain of her exact birthplace, the date of her birth, or the names of her parents. But historical hearsay is plausible in her case because of the fascination she held for watchers of the Ottomans like the Genoese banker. Contemporary consensus held that she came from Ruthenia, “old Russia”—today a broad region in Ukraine—then governed by the Polish king. Europeans interested in her origins called her Roxelana, “the maiden from Ruthenia.”

  The Ottoman name given to the young captive was Hurrem, a Persian word meaning “joyful” or “laughing.” Though she lived with this name for the rest of her life, she was rarely called it, except by Suleyman. Powerful people were known by their titles. To his subjects, Suleyman was “the Padishah,” the sovereign. As the monarch’s exclusive consort, Roxelana acquired the title “Haseki,” the favorite. When Suleyman made her a free woman and married her, she became the “Haseki Sultan” (the addition of “sultan” to a woman’s name or title indicated her membership in the dynastic family). This book calls her Roxelana, the name by which those outside the Ottoman world knew her and many still remember her.

  Some Ottomans later came to believe that Roxelana was the daughter of an Orthodox priest—or so they told a Polish ambassador who came to Istanbul in the 1620s. But the only absolute certainty about the young captive is that her natal family was Christian
. From the early fifteenth century onward, the sultans fathered all their children with Christian-born females taken from the empire’s borderlands or beyond. These captive females were converted to Islam and assimilated into Ottoman culture before they were chosen as royal mothers. Concubines offered the advantage of having no ties to Ottoman families who might challenge the dynasty’s dominance.

  Roxelana had the good fortune to be chosen within a few months of Suleyman’s enthronement in September 1520 as the empire’s tenth sultan. He was twenty-six; she was seventeen or so. Suleyman had had other concubines before his accession, but Roxelana was the first partner of his long reign, and she succeeded in keeping herself the only one.

  ROXELANA WAS A survivor. It was no small achievement that the young girl overcame the violence of her capture. She persevered through the perilous trek from her homeland to the distant Ottoman capital, where she embarked on the bewildering next phase of her life. The Ottoman name chosen for her suggests that she managed to put a congenial face on her fate. Roxelana’s aptitude for survival would soon lift her above the common servitude that was the destiny of most female slaves. She rapidly became adept at reading the political and sexual dynamics of the imperial harem—that private world of the sultan’s female relatives, concubines, children, and their many attendants. It was Roxelana’s charm combined with her savvy that enabled her to best the competition within the harem and to achieve the hitherto unknown roles of favorite and then wife and queen.

  Portrait of the young Roxelana, titled “Roxelana, wife of Suleyman.” Venetian School, sixteenth–seventeenth century.

  Roxelana and Suleyman shattered tradition by creating a nuclear family in a polygynous world. Until then, royal concubines had a single, well-defined responsibility. Once a concubine bore a male child to an Ottoman prince or sultan, her sole duty was to work toward the boy’s future political success. No conflict would arise here because the birth of a son terminated his mother’s sexual connection with her master. It did not matter if their relationship was one of passion, for tradition dictated that she bear him no more children. He would move on to a fresh concubine, while she remained with her son, her duty to raise him and accompany him to whatever provincial post he was assigned as prince.

  These reproductive practices made uninhibited or prolonged relationships nearly impossible. Only if a concubine first gave birth to one or more daughters could her master continue to indulge any affection for her, at least until she bore a son. Hollywood stereotypes of lascivious sultans and their bevies of languid, sex-obsessed slaves only rarely held true for the Ottomans. Sex for males of the dynasty was a political duty as much as it was a pleasure. As with all hereditary dynasties, survival depended on the production of talented princes eligible to rule. As for the concubine, she was a sexual being for only a phase of her career but a mother for the rest of her life. Roxelana was both.

  A royal concubine had to be physically appealing, for the arousal of desire was critical. (At one point in the seventeenth century, the newly enthroned sultan’s aversion to females temporarily imperiled the survival of the Ottoman state.) But the concubine also had to possess a keen mind and a capacity for political intelligence in order to successfully promote her son in a dangerously competitive world. Daughters also needed astute mothers who could raise them to be princesses worthy of the dynasty and loyal allies of their brother. The Ottomans believed that all princes, except those who were physically or mentally disabled, were born with the right to succeed their father. Here they differed from their European rivals, who practiced primogeniture, assigning only the eldest the right to rule. In the Ottoman view, competition among princes identified the successor best able to govern, defend the empire, and conquer new lands.

  The birth of her first child, Mehmed, in the fall of 1521 thrust Roxelana into this sometimes fierce world. The contest for the throne demanded that the sultan’s sons be prepared to compete to the death, and so princes were bred to the honor of sacrificing themselves to the future glory of an empire painstakingly assembled by their ancestors. In theory, this intradynastic violence was institutionalized and limited to interregnums. Conflict was to be confined within the royal family, sparing the populace at large chronic civil strife such as the Wars of the Roses among claimants for the English throne. The formula worked, for fraternal rivalry had produced a chain of exceptionally talented sovereigns. But the violence sometimes spilled over into the public.

  It was left to the mothers of slain princes to bear the burden of lifelong grief produced by this fratricidal system. The sultanate could not impose such a fate on a woman of distinguished pedigree. A slave concubine, on the other hand, could be enlisted in the precarious, if ennobling, career of mother to a prince. If Roxelana did not succeed in protecting her princes, she would carry the burden of more than one son’s death. As mother to a princess, she would not be banished from Istanbul in political exile, but she would suffer the disgrace of another woman’s elevation to the lofty position of queen mother of the Ottoman empire. By the time Mehmed arrived, Roxelana was certainly aware of her duty to succeed, but it is unlikely that she anticipated the lengths to which it would take her.

  LIKE FOREIGN DIPLOMATS, the sultan’s subjects were confused by the peculiarities of Roxelana’s maverick career. She not only continued to live intimately with the sultan, but she also had more than one son to tutor for success. The public was used to the old traditions. (Among the Ottomans the vocabularies of tradition and law overlapped.) It was not surprising that many favored Suleyman’s oldest son Mustafa and the boy’s mother Mahidevran. Mustafa had arrived when his father was still a prince abiding by the accepted rules of reproduction. Now, as sultan, Suleyman had broken those rules. People focused their suspicions on Roxelana, for it would not do to doubt the mighty monarch. The slave had no family and no pedigree to protect her.

  Across the globe, the times were ripe for blaming queens. In 1536, the year Roxelana celebrated her wedding, the Tudor king Henry VIII executed his wife Anne Boleyn, whom he accused of bewitching him—tricking him, that is, into falling in love with her.2 Suleyman never accused Roxelana of such trickery; nor did he share Henry’s failure to get a male heir from his favorite. Nevertheless, Roxelana could sympathize with Anne’s dilemma, for the public would compare her unfavorably to Mahidevran, her predecessor as royal consort, as England’s subjects compared Anne to Henry’s first, divorced wife, Catherine of Aragon. The extravagant devotion of powerful men, it seemed, had to be the fault of their female lovers. Even Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, has been popularly remembered for the talent of beguiling great Roman generals.

  History has treated Roxelana cavalierly, for no one has yet told the story of her remarkable life from the perspective of a concubine. No one who wrote about her ever met her, except for Suleyman. He composed copious love poetry for his favorite, but none of his letters to her, written during his long absences at war, survive. Though the sultan’s subjects could be vocal about royal consorts, Ottoman chroniclers and commentators stayed silent on the subject, for social protocol frowned on speaking of the women of another man’s household, most of all the monarch’s. For the same reason, we do not know what Roxelana really looked like, although painters imagined her more than once. On the other hand, European observers of the Ottomans—ambassadors, merchants, travelers, and former captives—wrote extensive descriptions of the sultan, his palaces, his children, and their mothers. Their interest in the females of the dynasty, however, was confined to politics and power (including sexual power). Almost never did they mention the efforts that may have won Roxelana more admirers at home than detractors—her many philanthropic projects across the empire, for example.

  The life of this elusive woman contains many blank spaces. This book cannot hope to fill them all, although it can and does suggest probabilities and imagine possibilities. Fortunately, Roxelana provided something of a record of herself. Although only a small number of the letters she wrote to Suleyma
n survive, they span four decades, from the 1520s, when she had gained enough familiarity with the Turkish language to muster a communication, to the 1550s, by which time she had become a master of politics. Her prose, lively and affectionate, helps us see why she acquired a name meaning “joyful.” Roxelana would prove tough-minded and ambitious, but she never seemed to lose her playful side.

  We can also glimpse Roxelana’s character in the charter deeds she drew up for her charitable foundations. While not as intimate as her letters, they reveal her personal understanding of the Islamic mandate to give. She repeatedly insisted that the staffs of her foundations be just as dedicated to treating the needy with kindness and consideration as they were to dispensing relief to them. Her special benevolence toward slaves suggests that she never forgot her past.

  Elevated to the position of the sultan’s wife, Roxelana recognized that she must give on a conspicuous scale. The Ottoman empire was populated almost exclusively by followers of the three great monotheistic religions originating in the Near East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each of which held charitable giving as a core tenet and obligation. Roxelana appears to have embraced the obligation wholeheartedly. But she was also canny enough to appreciate that displaying generosity toward ordinary people was the most effective strategy for gaining the esteem and gratitude that could offset any negative repercussions of her unconventional career.

  Over the course of her life, Roxelana endowed mosques, schools, soup kitchens, hostels for travelers and pilgrims, sufi lodges, shrines for saintly figures, public baths, and a hospital modern for its day. Mothers of princes and princesses had erected notable philanthropic foundations before her, but Roxelana’s work far surpassed that of any previous Ottoman woman in volume and geographic reach. It set a model for future females of the dynasty that would trickle down through elite circles and out to women in the thousands of Ottoman cities and towns. Several of Roxelana’s monuments still stand today, and so do many of the monuments that her work inspired.