Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  THE RUTHENIAN MAIDEN began her career as a hapless young girl forcibly drafted into the complex politics of the Ottoman dynastic house. Having lost her natal family, she spent the rest of her life in a perpetual quest to preserve and protect her new Ottoman family. But making a haven of domestic life was not easy when royal motherhood demanded partisan involvement in the treacherous politics of the throne. Protecting her sons was bound to pit her against Mustafa and his mother Mahidevran. Six years older than Mehmed, Mustafa had a head start. By the age of twelve, he was already popular among soldiers. The Ottoman army, especially the famous Janissary infantry corps, sometimes threatened to exert its will on politics.

  When Roxelana came into Suleyman’s life, he had just inherited an empire that commanded the eastern Mediterranean seas, the Black Sea and its shores, southeastern Europe, and much of today’s Middle East. His great-grandfather Mehmed II stamped his coins with the phrase “Sultan of the two seas, Khan of the two lands.” Known among the Turks as “the Conqueror,” Mehmed had put an end to the millennium-old Christian empire of the Byzantines and made ancient Constantinople his capital. While Suleyman’s grandfather Bayezid II was more a statesman than a warrior, his father Selim I threatened east and west. In two long wars, Selim pushed back the rising new power in Iran and demolished the venerable Mamluk sultanate in Cairo. From the latter he took Egypt and the Levant, as well as the prestigious title of “servitor of the two Noble Sanctuaries,” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Selim was preparing to invade Europe when he died suddenly in 1520. The pope and several kings were said to be relieved when Suleyman ascended the Ottoman throne, for they considered him a novice at fighting wars. He would soon prove them wrong.

  Starting with the wresting of Belgrade from Hungarian control in 1521 and the island of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John in 1522, Suleyman pushed the empire further into Europe and Asia and, within a decade, laid claim to the mantle of the Roman empire. Of the thirty-seven years Suleyman lived with Roxelana, he spent a total of ten apart from her on twelve different military campaigns. She missed him terribly, as her letters demonstrate, but there was much to keep her busy in his absence. The raising of their several children was an enormous responsibility. When her sons left home to embark on their public careers, she worried about them, and so she went long distances to visit them. In Istanbul, she had the company of her only daughter Mihrumah, who was famously devoted to her parents and equally treasured by them. Tutored by her mother in the dynastic responsibilities of royal females, Mihrumah would become the greatest of Ottoman princess philanthropists. She would also learn from her mother that corresponding with foreign royalty could sometimes benefit the empire in ways that diplomacy among men did not.

  As queen, Roxelana kept herself occupied as mistress of the female court, receiving visitors and organizing celebrations to mark religious and social holidays. She had the palace harem household and its cadres of attendants and servants to oversee, though the principal responsibility for order and discipline lay with the palace staff of female administrators and eunuchs. It was Roxelana who ensured that talented harem women graduated from palace service to marriage with a deserving partner, generally an esteemed member of Suleyman’s government. She also managed the staff of male agents who worked for her outside the palace. The business of her far-flung charitable endowments in particular took up an increasing amount of her and their time. And as she acquired political acuity, she became Suleyman’s eyes and ears in the capital when he was away. Developing networks of contact and gathering intelligence became critical, including information that could be gleaned from female agents and female visitors to the palace. Following the death in 1534 of Suleyman’s mother Hafsa, Roxelana became Suleyman’s most loyal informant.

  It was the demise of Hafsa, beloved by her son and a venerable figure, that made possible Roxelana’s marriage to Suleyman. Not that Hafsa necessarily opposed the union (there is, unfortunately, little to tell us what she thought of her son’s extraordinary relationship), but the politics of the court would not permit a concubine to rise above the status of the queen mother. Then Roxelana’s nuptials in 1536 literally opened the door to the New Palace, Suleyman’s own domicile, which welcomed her with an elegant suite of rooms adjacent to his. A cadre of attendants and servants accompanied her from the Old Palace, longtime home of the royal harem. Roxelana retained chambers in the Old Palace, however, for Hafsa’s death meant that she, as the top-ranking female of the dynastic family, was now responsible for the harem’s welfare.

  Roxelana’s change in residence ushered in what was to be her greatest legacy: the transformation of the royal harem into a political force. Known today as the Topkapı Palace, the New Palace was a vast complex of structures built by Mehmed the Conqueror when his first royal residence in Istanbul (now the Old Palace) proved too small to house both his royal presence and the major offices of his government. Under Roxelana’s tutelage, the New Palace harem would expand rapidly and become, by the end of the century, a regularized institution in Ottoman government. The upper echelon of royal women now lived and labored at the political heart of the empire, while the Old Palace retained its stature as a training institution and home for retired harem women. Working from the New Palace, senior women developed networks that connected them with political allies on the outside, including foreign emissaries. Despite periodic outbursts of antipathy to female “meddling,” the harem’s practice of politics had become normalized, and so it remained throughout the life of the empire.

  Roxelana died in 1558, leaving Suleyman without her for eight years until his death in 1566. She died with the comfort of knowing that one of her sons would succeed his father but also with the fear that the contest between them would be bloody. She would not live to know that the idea of a reigning couple—a sultan and his queen—proved too controversial for the Ottomans to repeat. After her, the New Palace harem whose rise she sparked would be headed by the queen mother. Nor did Roxelana know that she would gain both fame and notoriety in the centuries after her death through her depiction in European literature and opera and even through a modern Turkish television drama with an avid worldwide following.

  Roxelana may have anticipated correctly, however, that the nature of politics at the heart of the empire would change. In fact, her career was proof that change had already begun. Even if there never was another queen, she and Suleyman set precedents that were still at work in their children’s and grandchildren’s generations. A more peaceable system of identifying the next sultan began to emerge from transformations in the practice of succession-by-combat that began with her. Roxelana helped to move the Ottoman empire into modern times, where treaty negotiations became as challenging and significant as victory in battle and domestic well-being occupied as much of the government’s attention as conquest. Bolstered by the reforms she introduced, the Ottoman sultanate would sustain itself for another three and a half centuries. All this was generated along with the Ottoman empire’s greatest love story.

  2

  ABDUCTION

  ROXELANA’S CACHET WAS such that more than one nation would lay claim to her. It was said, for instance, that she was Italian by origin, from Siena. Or perhaps she was abducted from Castel Collecchio in Parma in 1525 (when she was already the mother of three Ottoman children).1 The French never called Roxelana their own, but a popular belief held that the kings of France enjoyed a blood relationship with the Ottoman sultans. A French princess of the fifteenth century had allegedly given birth to Mehmed II, the conqueror of Byzantine Constantinople—or perhaps it was to his father Murad II.

  The notion that a French princess was mother to an Ottoman son may have been far-fetched, but it was not entirely implausible in the fifteenth century. Ottoman princes were still making marriage alliances with foreign dynasties into the reign of Murad II (who died in 1451). The assertion of a blood tie perhaps looked quite appealing in the sixteenth century, when Suleyman and the French king Francis I began to cultivate a po
litical alliance against their mutual rivals, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. But the suggestion that the Ottoman harem once housed a princess from France seems to have run its course by the late eighteenth century, when the French ambassador to Istanbul blamed Roxelana for propagating it.2 He found the idea that a princess could go missing absurd. It is surely a measure of Roxelana’s posthumous fame that she bore the blame for deeds that may never have crossed her mind.

  More plausible assertions of Roxelana’s own origin came—and still come—from Ukraine and Poland. Neither claim negates the other, for she is widely thought to have been abducted into the slave trade from Ruthenia, a broad area that today encompasses western Ukraine but was then under the rule of the Polish king.3 Recently, with Ukraine’s achievement of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the new nation has embraced heroic figures from the past. In 1999, the town of Rohatyn, popularly alleged to be Roxelana’s birthplace, erected a lofty bronze statue of her atop a pedestal.4 (Rohatyn today is a town of close to 9,000 located some forty-five miles southeast of the historic city of Lviv.) Until more concrete proof surfaces, however, the assumption that Roxelana was taken from Rohatyn remains uncertain. But she is perhaps fortunate to have her memory localized and enshrined. Other well-known Ottoman concubine mothers seem fated to lack communities that might celebrate them.

  While Roxelana’s Ruthenian origins seem reasonably certain, rumors about her birthplace gained traction because the precise origins of royal concubines were largely uncertain. The reason was that they were irrelevant. Natal loyalties had to be erased so that Christian captives could be turned into devoted servants of the Ottoman sultanate. And so slaves recruited to the service of the dynasty underwent a regime of intense instruction. Its goal was to render them speakers of Turkish, followers of Islam, and exemplars of Ottoman ritual and duty. Palace staff and teachers brought in from outside drilled Roxelana and her fellow recruits. Female slaves who would attend high-ranking women received more advanced instruction in dynastic etiquette. Especially well educated were candidates deemed eligible for the role of concubine, for their principal responsibility as future mothers would be to school their children to lead the empire.

  The assertion of Roxelana’s Ruthenian roots came early in her career. In 1526, six years after she first became Suleyman’s concubine but before she was a widely recognized figure, diplomatic circles were informed that Suleyman now preferred a woman from Ruthenia. Pietro Bragadin, the Venetian Republic’s resident ambassador in Istanbul, described her as di nazion russa—of Russian origin—the word Rus then connoting Ruthenia.5 Bragadin was unlikely to report this fact without reliable confirmation by either someone serving in the imperial palace (perhaps a slave of Venetian origin?) or a trusted member of the embassy compound.

  Because Venetian ambassadorial reports were consumed in Europe as models of diplomatic prose, the news of the sultan’s favorite would spread.6 When other Europeans in Istanbul began to notice and write home about her, they remarked on her “Russian” roots. The name Roxelana caught on when Austrian ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq called her Roxolana, “the maiden from Ruthenia.”7 His Turkish Letters, published in Latin in 1589, were widely read across Europe.

  THE FATE OF the maiden from Ruthenia was entangled in the histories of several nations. Not only did the Ottoman sultanate figure in Roxelana’s destiny but so did the kingdom of Poland (from whose territory she was captured) and the Crimean Khanate (which did the capturing). More distantly, the ways of the Mongols and even the medieval empire of the Seljuk Turks before them echoed in Ottoman royal culture and a concubine’s place within it. Roxelana was only one of an enormous number of captives who passed through multiple hands in multiple lands, but her very journey seems to have catalyzed an innate sense of survival. The harsh conditions of the slave trade would teach her to fasten onto whatever element in the political repertoires of the region came to hand.

  The line between raiding as an economic staple and the common practice of taking prisoners in warfare had always been a thin one among peoples of the Eurasian steppe. From the late fifteenth century onward, Ruthenia was among the regions ravaged by slave raids. The chief perpetrators of these sometimes massive expeditions were the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate. They were hardly the first to profit from the slave trade, a feature of the Black Sea region from ancient times. Rome and the Byzantine heirs to its eastern domains were major consumers, as was the famed Abbasid caliphate centered in Baghdad. The preponderance of Slavic-speaking peoples among the victims has given us the word “slave.”

  In late medieval times, much of the Black Sea slave trade had been controlled by the colonies of two Italian maritime states, Venice and especially Genoa. Their near monopoly came to an end when Mehmed the Conqueror pushed them out around 1475 in his drive to establish control over maritime trade. The sultan also made a vassal of the khan of the Giray Tatars, who had recently established themselves in the Crimean peninsula, long an international crossroads, and its northern reaches. It was no coincidence that the seizure and marketing of captives became a staple of the khanate’s economy only a short time after the Ottomans imposed their semi-suzerainty. Istanbul was the single-largest market for the lucrative commodity, and its appetite for slave labor only grew over the course of the sixteenth century. In all likelihood, it was Tatar slave raiders who seized Roxelana from her home and family and cast her into an unknown future.

  The Giray Tatars’ role in Ottoman history was disproportionate to their numbers. It was less their mastery of the slave trade, however, that gave them prestige in Ottoman eyes than their claim to descent from Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. This Mongol pedigree endowed the House of Giray with a lineage distinguished across the lands once ruled by the great khan and his progeny. Indeed, the prestige enjoyed by the Giray Tatars, who were Muslim, was such that it was believed they would inherit sovereignty over the Ottoman domain if its dynastic house ever died out.

  Like the Tatars, the Ottoman sultans also looked to Central Asia as a source for political legitimation. They traced their genealogy not to Chinggis Khan, however, but to the quasi-legendary Oghuz, great khan of a large Turkic tribal confederacy. The Ottomans were not the first Turkish-speaking sovereigns to claim descent from Oghuz. So did the family of one Seljuk, who migrated in the late tenth century from Oghuz Khan’s home territory (in today’s Uzbekistan) to the Caspian shore in northeastern Iran. It was the Seljuks who introduced Turkish rule to the Middle East.

  Moving westward into Iran and Iraq, the descendants of Seljuk carved out a domain that at its zenith in the late eleventh century stretched from today’s Uzbekistan to eastern Anatolia, from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf to (off and on) the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Although the Seljuk empire broke apart within 150 years, its several successor states perpetuated the formula that had helped to make Turkish rule acceptable in the heart of the Middle East. This was a region that had only known Arab sovereigns claiming descent from the clan of the Prophet Muhammad or Persian sovereigns who could draw on an ancient and glorified tradition of Iranian kingship. The Seljuks, like the Ottomans after them, had neither resource to validate their rule. As Turks, the Seljuks were outsiders, and while Muslim, they came from later converts to the religion.

  And so the Seljuks adjusted the playbook. Their rulership would derive legitimacy from defense of the land and the religion. Military and governing authority would be theirs. They called themselves “sultan,” a title that connoted power, not heritage. For guidance and expertise in administration, they looked to the sophisticated cadres of native Persian political advisers, religious authorities, and treasury and chancery specialists. They also learned to be great patrons of the arts, religious learning, and the welfare of their subjects.

  All this enabled the Seljuks to blend Turkish ideals of sovereignty with the classic kingly virtues of heroism, justice, and magnanimity celebrated in the region since antiquity. When, two centuries later, the Mongols entered Iran (one of th
e four sectors of Chinggis Khan’s empire), they too eventually made the same accommodation between sovereign authority and indigenous heritage. The Ottomans would do the same, cherry-picking elements of the Roman and Byzantine imperial pasts to add to the playbook they inherited from the east. As for Roxelana, she would manage her career with a quintessentially Ottoman approach, utilizing now this, now that tradition.

  THE OTTOMAN STYLE of governing owed a particular debt to Seljuk history. Popular tales of the dynasty’s beginnings recounted the arrival in northeastern Anatolia of one Ertuğrul, a Turkish nomad chieftain who had come from the east along with “four hundred tents” under his command.8 Ertuğrul would go on to be remembered as the progenitor of the long-lived Ottoman ruling house. His son Osman, a local warlord who died in 1324, is counted as the first of thirty-seven sultans, the last of whose career ended with the demise of the empire in 1922.

  Ertuğrul’s mythic journey took him all the way to northwestern Anatolia, not far from either the Aegean Sea or Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire. This meant passing through the lands of the Seljuks of Anatolia, a branch of the original Seljuk dynasty who had moved westward into the extensive Anatolian peninsula and there established a kingdom that outlived its parent state. A popular variant of the story recounting Ertuğrul’s arrival in what would become the Ottoman homeland features a direct tie between the Anatolian Seljuks and the birth of the empire: Ertuğrul joins the service of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan and receives as a reward the small domain from which his descendants would build a world empire.