Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  Regardless of whether or not this particular legend—a story of migration—is true, large numbers of Turks did move westward, from the late eleventh century onward, rendering Anatolia increasingly Turkish and Muslim. The tale of Ertuğrul and the four hundred families is suggestive of the surge of many thousands who fled from the onslaught of the Mongols into the Middle East in the mid-thirteenth century.

  One aspect of the Ottomans’ heritage, however, probably owed more to these newcomers from the east than to the Seljuks, who over time had assimilated to the sedate social habits of the Middle East. This was the public prominence of women. When the famous Moroccan world traveler Ibn Battuta visited the several new Turkish principalities springing up in western Anatolia, he remarked that women as well as men came out to hail him as he entered their towns and cities. This was clearly a habit he had not observed as he traveled in the old Muslim lands, from Morocco across North Africa to Egypt and then northward through the Levant.

  Ibn Battuta provides us with a touchstone for the long and shifting history of Ottoman royal consorts and Roxelana’s pivotal place within it. He would learn firsthand in his northern travels that high-ranking women among the Turks and the Tatars might command public authority. When in 1331 he reached Nicea, a formerly Byzantine city recently conquered by Osman’s son Orhan, it was one of the latter’s wives, Nilufer, who welcomed the distinguished traveler. She was in charge of the soldiers stationed in Nicea while Orhan, whom Ibn Battuta called the richest of the Turkish leaders, was away on a tour of his fortresses. Of his audience with Nilufer, whom Ibn Battuta describes as “a pious and excellent woman,” he says, “she treated me honorably, gave me hospitality, and sent gifts.”9 Likewise, when the traveler continued on across the Black Sea to the lands of the Golden Horde Mongols, royal women, some of whom commanded their own encampments, entertained him lavishly.

  Over time, however, the Ottomans, like the Seljuks, adopted more conservative social habits. Females of notable families began to mark their status by restricting their movements in public and employing servants to do their bidding. Men too practiced a studied aloofness, albeit to a lesser degree than their wives, with the prominent and the wealthy dispatching underlings to manage their affairs and receiving petitioners in their residences. First among Ottoman householders, the dynasty took the lead in this practice, with the effect that the sultan’s select appearances—attending Friday prayers, marching out of the capital on campaign—drew crowds of onlookers. The Ottomans were becoming expert at exploiting the politics of spatial manipulation.

  These developments had consequences when it came to choosing ideal mothers of princes. During the first century, when the nascent Ottoman enterprise needed allies, princesses of neighboring dynasties, some of them Christian, made good wives and mothers. But when the sultans began to send their sons, and with them their mothers, to train in the provinces, foreign princesses were unlikely to relish leaving the Ottoman capital for distant and less cosmopolitan towns. It was also becoming clear, as the Ottomans became more of a threat to their neighbors, that a foreign princess’s loyalty might rest more with her natal family than with her Ottoman son. So by 1400 or thereabouts, the sultans began to look to slave concubines to assume the risky job of political motherhood.

  It took the Ottoman populace a long while to discard the assumption that the mothers of princes and princesses were all royally born. This reluctance, present even today, helps to explain why legend has long claimed Suleyman’s mother Hafsa to be a Giray Tatar princess. Hafsa may well have hailed from the northern Black Sea region or even been a gift of the Tatar khan to the Ottoman court, but she was in fact a captive convert of modest origins, like virtually every woman in the imperial harem at the time when she entered it, probably the early 1490s.10

  The tenacious story of Hafsa’s royal Tatar pedigree probably has something at least to do with a different sort of association she enjoyed with the Crimean Khanate. Hafsa accompanied Suleyman on his first political assignment as prince when in 1509 he was appointed, at the age of fifteen, to serve as governor of Caffa. The city was capital of a ribbon of territory running along the southeastern shores of the Crimean peninsula that constituted a province under direct Ottoman rule. In Caffa, Suleyman and his mother doubtless had contact with the Tatar authorities, perhaps with the khan himself.

  DURING THEIR FOUR years in Caffa, both Suleyman and Hafsa would become familiar with the slave trade. Tatar slave trains were generally marched to the Crimean peninsula, and slaves were loaded mainly at Caffa onto vessels that would transport them to Istanbul. Caffa generated handsome tax revenues for the Ottoman sultanate, and it would be Suleyman’s duty as governor to make sure that revenue was safely channeled into the imperial treasury in the capital. The sums were staggering: in 1520, the year of Suleyman’s accession, Caffa’s slave tax amounted to roughly 10,000 gold ducats; combined with Caffa’s customs duties, this constituted the largest source of the treasury’s income (21,000 ducats).11 By 1527, when Suleyman and Roxelana had been together for six years, the slave taxes from Caffa and Kilia, another Black Sea center of the trade in captives, totaled 50,000 ducats.12

  The captive Roxelana may well have followed the route from Ruthenia to Caffa. The first major Tatar raid into what is now western Ukraine occurred in 1468, when some 18,000 men, women, and children were taken prisoner. After that date, Tatar forays into either Polish or Muscovite territory continued on a near-annual basis, some reaping enormous numbers of captives.13 In 1498, thirty years after the first expedition, the region allegedly lost an unimaginable (and likely exaggerated) 100,000 to the raiders.

  It is possible that Roxelana fell victim to an expedition mounted in 1516. Estimates of its captives range from 5,000 to 40,000 to an even larger, undetermined number.14 While the girl may very well have been abducted on a smaller raid in a different year (a Polish historian has suggested 1509, when her supposed birthplace Rohatyn was the target of Tatar raids15), the date 1516 is not implausible. Roxelana was probably no younger than seventeen when she became Suleyman’s concubine in the winter of 1520–1521 and thus around thirteen at the time of this raid. She would have been just old enough to manage survival on her own should she lose any relatives or neighbors captured with her.

  The tactics of the Tatar slavers were described in 1578 by the Polish ambassador to the Crimean court, Marcin Broniewski. The raiding season was typically winter, when the freezing over of rivers and otherwise soggy terrain facilitated swifter advance. The Tatars moved quickly, noted Broniewski, laying waste to what they didn’t plunder. Prisoners were typically poorly fed and marched on foot, in chains. They risked physical abuse by their captors, while relatives who tried to ransom them along the way risked extortion.

  To make it all the way to the Ottoman capital from Ruthenia was no small accomplishment for a young girl like Roxelana. Even surviving the long trek to Caffa was a hard-won trial. Evliya Çelebi, an Ottoman courtier famous for his extensive travelogue, witnessed a train of captives on their way to the city in the mid-seventeenth century. It was a wonder, he wrote, that any of them survived the march to the slave markets, so badly were they treated along the way.16

  The trauma of the raids and of the multiple stages of captivity became enshrined in folklore. A Ukrainian folk song spoke of the devastation of the countryside:

  The fires are burning behind the river

  The Tatars are dividing their captives

  Our village is burnt and our property plundered

  Old mother is sabred and my dear is taken into captivity.17

  A Kazakh proverb records the different fates that awaited young males and young females—“the son went as hostage, the daughter to the Crimea”—she to certain slavery, he to an uncertain future.18 And the physical journey from captivity to slavery is remembered despairingly in a Polish proverb: “O how much better to lie on one’s bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tatary.”19

  The immediate destination for captives varied. Thos
e taken from Polish lands might be marched to Ochakiv, a fortified city on the western Black Sea coast, from where most were shipped to Caffa. Many would be sold at the city’s slave markets, while others might be kept by their captors or sold directly, without the aid of dealers. The calculation probably took into account the fluctuating price of slaves—low, ironically, when a successful foray glutted the market with its harvest. Not all captives of the Tatars were for sale, for the khan was owed one captive in ten.

  Once in Caffa, captives destined for sale would likely find themselves in the large complex that constituted the slave market. Some parts of the market dated from the era of the Italian traders (the thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries), while new facilities were added as the slave trade grew over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The slave dealers were primarily Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and some Italians—in other words, non-Muslims (the Tatars saw themselves as warriors and captors, not middlemen). Dealers typically purchased their merchandise in large lots and then separated the slaves by age, sex, and aptitude for resale, either locally or to other dealers for transport elsewhere.

  This sorting process in Caffa probably resembled practices at the Tatars’ own large slave emporium in Karasubazar (black water market), located near the border between the khanate and Ottoman Caffa. Describing it, Evliya Çelebi wrote, “A man who has not seen this market has seen nothing in this world. There a mother is severed from her son and daughter, a son from his father and brother, and they are sold among lamentations, cries of help, weeping, and sorrow.”20 Of the Caffa slave market a European observer remarked in the mid-sixteenth century, “Herds of these unfortunate folks sold into slavery are driven onto the boats in Kaffa. Because of this practice the city of Kaffa may well be classed a heathen giant who feeds on our blood.”21

  Roxelana was likely one of those unfortunates traveling across the Black Sea to Istanbul. If so, we cannot know if she made the arduous journey alone or had the good fortune to be accompanied by others taken from her community. Nor do we know if she was purchased directly by imperial agents in Caffa for palace service or merely shipped to the Istanbul slave market as a common commodity. If the former, she was no doubt protected during the approximately ten-day journey to the Ottoman capital, for other royal agents would likely have been on board in addition to palace slave recruiters. Merchants were frequently dispatched by the imperial treasury to the northern Black Sea region to acquire luxury items purveyed by Muscovy. These included high-quality leather and especially furs, with sable taking pride of place among the Ottomans. In 1529, for example, Suleyman allotted some 6,000 ducats for the purchase of furs.22 Goods for the sultan, material and human alike, were precious commodities.

  EUROPEANS RAILED AGAINST the Tatar slavers. Their place was hell—the Tartarus of Greek mythology, the abyss below Hades where the wicked were imprisoned. The play with Tatar was obvious. But these critics were typically less concerned with the horrors of servitude than with the prospect of Christian captives converting to the “infidel” faith.23 Slavery was no stranger to them, for they had not hesitated to purchase human wares from the Black Sea purveyed by the Genoese and others. Only those Christians bound for Muslim lands seemed to give them pause.

  Tirades against the Tatars were sometimes merely recited by rote, as is apparent in a treatise titled On the Customs of Tatars, Lithuanians and Muscovites, composed for the Polish king Sigismund I. Its author, writing under the name Michalon Lituanus (Michael the Lithuanian), repeatedly detailed the abuse of Christian slaves by their Tatar owners.24 Of slaves working Tatar estates, he wrote, “The best of these unfortunates, if they are not castrated, are branded on the forehead and on the cheeks and are tormented by day at work and by night in dungeons. Their life is worse than a dog’s.”25 Elsewhere, however, Lituanus noted that the Tatars treated their captives with consideration and freed them after seven years.

  The author of the treatise is worth remembering, for this same Lituanus figures in Roxelana’s story. He was one of the first to publicize the belief that she was a captive from Polish-ruled territory. “The beloved wife of the Turkish emperor, mother of his eldest son and heir,” he reported, “was some time ago kidnapped from our land.”26 (The king of Poland was also the grand duke of Lithuania, hence the Lithuanian’s claim to “our” land.) The man behind the pen name Michael the Lithuanian is uncertain, but he may have been Vaclav Mykolaevyć, who served Sigismund as ambassador to both the Crimean and Ottoman courts.27 If so, “Lituanus” probably encountered this information regarding Roxelana when he traveled to Istanbul in 1538 with gifts for Suleyman.

  The Venetian ambassador had already asserted Roxelana’s Ruthenian roots twelve years earlier. By the Lithuanian’s time, however, she was acquiring recognition as an influential figure in the capital, adding stature to her reputation as the concubine who had seduced the mighty sultan. Moreover, she was now married to him, her influence at court secured. With affirmation by their own envoy of this rising star’s origins, Polish authorities could envision scenarios in which Roxelana might be useful in keeping peace between Sigismund and Suleyman. For Sigismund had a delicate diplomatic balance to maintain.

  On the one hand, the Tatars ravaged his lands. Adding insult to injury, they also demanded payment of an annual tribute, as they did from Muscovy. Not to pay was to risk the loss of greater numbers of countrymen and women to the slavers (Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” ruler of Muscovy, was so strapped for funds to ransom captives that in 1535 he asked monasteries to donate their silver to the cause).28 On the other hand, peace on the Polish-Ottoman frontier was a sine qua non for Sigismund. Even though the Ottomans regarded the Crimean Khanate as their ally, it was ultimately less risky for Poland to channel moral outrage at the Tatars. After all, the Ottomans merely consumed slaves—the Tatars manufactured them.

  It is undeniable, though, that the sultans were wholly complicit in the slave trade. They openly backed the Tatar khanate of the Crimean, whose trade in captive bodies brought them revenue, and they routinely indulged their insatiable appetite for slave labor. Those same Europeans who castigated the Tatars for the suffering of Christian captives were also complicit, at least when it came to the Ottomans. What fascinated them, what they publicized, was not the dubious fate of Christian slave converts working for the sultans but rather the careers of those who rose to the top echelons of power. And so the legend of Roxelana would grow. The more famous she became, it seemed, the richer a backstory she warranted.

  Almost immediately, Roxelana’s life became embroidered with fiction, for the simple reason that there was little fact to go on. In regions north of the empire, for example, the notion circulated that she was the key to the long peace that prevailed between Suleyman and Poland-Lithuania, as it was assumed to be her natal land. Ivan Novosiltsov, ambassador of Ivan the Terrible to Istanbul, claimed in 1570 that when her son Selim was born, Roxelana pleaded with Suleyman not to go to war with Lithuania because she had been born there (the story favors Selim because he was sultan during Novosiltsov’s visit).29

  Roxelana was even more consequential in the telling of Samuel Twardowski, who composed a long poem describing the Polish embassy to Istanbul of 1622, of which he was a member. Published in Latin in 1633, the poem depicts Suleyman defending himself against the accusation of succumbing to Roxelana’s charms in maintaining his warm relations with the Polish king. Suleyman declares that his cordial dealings with the Polish king are not due to Roxelana’s allure but rather because she was herself of that royal lineage.30

  Twardowski was also instrumental in propagating the story that Roxelana came from the town of Rohatyn and that her father was an Orthodox priest. Turks allegedly told him as much during his stay in Istanbul. Twardowski appears to have added on his own, however, that the priest was wicked,31 perhaps a reflection of his Polish and Catholic prejudice toward Orthodox Ruthenians.32 The notion that Roxelana’s original name was Anastasia Lisowska, another fixture in the lore surrounding her, appears to h
ave originated in Ukrainian legend and folk song. (The name Aleksandra, also attributed to her, allegedly belonged to Anastasia’s mother Leksandra.)33

  The most recent incarnation of Roxelana, in the Turkish historical television series Muhteem Yüzyıl [Magnificent Century], originally broadcast from 2011 to 2014, casts her as Aleksandra, daughter of a good priest, all of whose family is slain by her Tatar captors. And so she is likely to be remembered for now, for an estimated 150 million viewers worldwide have followed the series in dozens of languages. That Roxelana was and remains an object of such fascination is a testament to her extraordinary life.

  3

  IN THE OLD PALACE

  ROXELANA’S RISE TO prominence and power began in the grand residence that housed the women and children of the Ottoman dynasty. The Old Palace was a world of females and eunuchs. It was there that Roxelana began to learn the ways of the Ottomans. She would live in the Old Palace for some fifteen years, until she married Suleyman and began to occupy elegant chambers in the New Palace. Even then, she kept close ties with her original Ottoman home and continued to maintain quarters there.

  Located in the bustling center of the imperial city, the Old Palace served as home for the sultan’s family—his mother, his concubines, and his children. Widowed or unmarried princesses of the dynasty might also live there. In much larger numbers, the Old Palace housed select female slaves in training, a sizeable administrative staff, and the legions of female servants who ministered to the women of privilege. As a new arrival, Roxelana would encounter a bewildering array of women of different ages, statuses, and origins.

  The Old Palace was a well-protected bastion. A Venetian map published ca. 1530 shows a large parklike expanse in the middle of the city surrounded by a strong circular wall.1 Within it lay the “seraglio vecchio,” the Old Palace, its own enclosing wall reinforced with a double watchtower. Gardens and lawns filled unoccupied spaces, relieving the fortresslike feel of the whole complex—it had originally been designed as a well-defended residence for Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople.